Kieran was about to change.
Chapter 6
“Kieran.”
His name reached him through the pounding of blood behind his ears, through the rage that boiled in his blood and sizzled at the ends of his nerves.
Her voice stilled the primal need to attack, the preparation his body made for the shifting, every cell poised to take another shape, another identity.
Her touch, her voice held him back.
“Kieran, it’s all right.”
Her hand tightened on his arm, and part of him became her ally. I am a man. A man…
“Kieran!”
His blurred vision focused on her. So beautiful, all light amid the shadows. The wolf remembered, and the man.
Kieran shivered violently. Between one moment and the next the shifting stopped. The rage fled to the place where it hid and waited for another chance. And he could see—see clearly, first Alexandra and then the men who watched him with open mouths and white faces.
“Jee-zus,” one of them croaked. “He’s crazy!”
“Did you see the way he growled?”
Sound resolved itself around him, voices raised in excited conversation. He turned his head. Faces, everywhere faces, staring. The walls were too close, the heat stifling.
“Alexandra,” he rasped.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” she said, grabbing Kieran’s hand. He went with her blindly, shaking and weak with reaction. When they burst into clean air and sunlight, it was all he could do to keep his feet. Alexandra pulled him around the corner, to some quiet protected place where no one could see.
The nausea came, and he doubled over, hands across his stomach. A cool hand stroked across his forehead, pushing back the hair that hung limp in his face.
“Are you all right, Kieran?”
He looked up. Her eyes were so blue, like endless sky and running water. Clean things he knew and understood and needed to live. His hand trembled as he wiped his mouth.
“All right,” he echoed. But a second assault came on him then—memory, a vivid comprehension that made his knees give way. He crouched down against the brick wall of the building.
Alexandra knelt beside him. “It’s okay. We’re alone.”
Alone. Safe. He opened his eyes and caught Alexandra’s hands in his, taking care not to crush her delicate bones. She made no effort to pull away.
“What happened in there, Kieran?”
Wild laughter seared his chest. He drove it back. “I almost… changed,” he said.
“Yes.” Her mouth was taut with strain. “But it’s all right. You didn’t get far. You… stopped in time.”
Kieran remembered the faces, the voices. “Did I?”
She gave him a stiff smile. “At worst they’ll think you’re odd, just like me. And I doubt Howie Walsh will come anywhere near me again.”
Walsh. Kieran growled before he could stop himself. “He called you ugly.”
Alexandra looked away. “You… don’t remember Howie from anywhere else, do you?”
“No. I only knew that he was your enemy,” Letting go her hand, Kieran touched her cheek with his fingertips. “But I didn’t intend to change. I didn’t think I could, until now.” He hesitated, trying to put the new knowledge into words. “Now I remember that there was a reason I changed each time before.”
“Of course,” she said slowly. “You were angry. I turned the rifle on you, and you were angry.”
“Emotion.” Kieran looked away. “Anger. That is what makes me change. I couldn’t control it.” He bared his teeth. “I didn’t want to.”
Alexandra rose, her expression grim with concentration. “Can you remember other times when this happened? In the past, before you came to me?”
Kieran tried to fix in his mind how he knew so surely the source of his affliction. Pressing his hands flat against the wall, he pushed himself to his feet.
“Nothing. I only know it’s true—I don’t change unless I feel… strongly.”
She looked at him, the blue of her eyes muddied like troubled water. “I knew it wasn’t a case of waiting for a full moon,” she said with a wan smile. It faded all too quickly. “We’d better get home.”
* * *
Joseph Arnoux moved silently along the wall, keeping himself hidden as the woman and Kieran Holt crossed the street.