“You’re a bad liar, Alexandra.”
Her skin went pale, and he remembered when he’d said almost those same words last night. “What do you mean when you say you don’t remember?” she demanded.
Despair warred with the need to drive her away. “The day I rescued Tracy,” he said. “I told you I didn’t remember changing. I didn’t remember anything I did until after I’d changed back.”
Comprehension widened her eyes. “And… last night…”
“I dreamed. Some kind of nightmare.” A chill wind skimmed across the sweat that slicked his skin. “Last night I dreamed of Peter. Of hunting him.” He choked on the words. “Of killing, Alexandra. I remember nothing else.”
He saw her absorb his words, knew when she felt the full impact of them and drew the obvious conclusions. She hugged herself hard, rocking.
“No,” she whispered. “No,” Suddenly she burst into motion, striding around the clearing, studying the ground with fervent intensity. Gradually the color came back into her face. She came at last to stand before him, her eyes very bright.
“A dream isn’t reality,” she challenged.
“How do you know?” he countered. “I’ve already proven I can change without realizing it, without control—”
“But you remembered what you’d done afterward.”
“That one time—”
“That one time when you saved a child from drowning!” She shook her head wildly. “I don’t see any paw prints here. Or blood.”
“I could have changed somewhere else, come back here as a man.”
“Do you want to condemn yourself?” she shouted.
They stared at each other in stunned silence.
Kieran pushed his curled fingers into the snow. “Can you say there is no chance I did it?” he whispered.
“You would never—”
“Can you?”
She flinched but didn’t reply.
“Why did you look for me?” he continued relentlessly. “You loved Peter once. If you thought I could have killed him, why would you come?”
Very slowly her expression changed. There was sorrow in it, but no fear. No anger.
“I… grieve for Peter,” she said. “He—” She swallowed heavily. “I came because I knew you weren’t capable of it, Kieran. The things I said yesterday, about your running from your past… I didn’t believe them, either.”
Kieran had to hold himself still to keep from touching her. She had answered her own question and his with a quiet conviction that humbled him, a certainty he could not refute.
But he had to try. “Belief isn’t proof, Alexandra.”
“Sometimes it’s all we have.”
He searched within himself for that same conviction. A man was dead, a man who had not deserved so terrible a fate. But when Kieran looked into Alexandra’s eyes, the force of her belief flowed into him, as powerful as anything he had felt in the brief time of his memory.
It was all he had.
“Will the police believe also?” he asked.
She dropped her eyes, and the weight of sorrow fell over her like a mantle of snow. “No. They think a man did it, in spite of the wounds.”
“Do they have other suspects?”
She shook her head. “They’re going to want to question me further because they know you were staying with me, and I knew Peter.” She lifted her eyes and looked in the direction of the cabin. “If they find you, they’ll take you in for questioning, and—”
“I can’t let them take me, Alexandra.”
Strange how memories came, without rhyme or reason. When Alexandra had spoken of capture collars at the Wakanabos’, he’d seen these same visions. Of walls and darkness and confinement that made death seem a welcome alternative.
That was what the police would do to him, lock him behind walls and bars like an animal. He drove the image from his mind. “I can’t let them,” he repeated.
“I know. I’m going to help you get away.”
She was so near, so near that he could touch her without stretching his hand. “I don’t need your help.”
Her eyes flashed familiar anger. “Like hell you don’t. You’re the one who came to me, remember? You’ve done a damned poor job of taking my advice so far, but this time you’re going to listen to me, Kieran Holt. You’re my responsibility.”