He was pacing the room in short bursts, all the smooth grace gone, a clumsy marionette with broken strings. When he stopped to fix her with his hard, familiar stare, she stammered out the first inadequate thought that came into her mind “What did you say?”
His gaze never wavered “It was no dream.” He drew the statement out so there could be no misunderstanding, word by deliberate word. “What you saw, Joey, was real.”
The breath caught in her throat, between laughter and protest. If there had ever been a time wrong for laughing, it was now, and she was not prepared to chance it again. But what he said made no sense. Surely it made no sense at all.
“Are you saying,” she said at last, with a deliberation equal to his, “that you turned into a wolf?”
For the first time he looked away, jerking to a halt. If it were possible for a man to look more dangerous, Joey did not want to know about it.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he growled.
Joey closed her eyes, trying to reconcile his utter sincerity and what she knew of him with the insanity of his words. There had been wolves—several times, with him, there had been the strange proximity of the animals, and she had come to accept that with remarkable ease. That he had somehow been accepted by them, as part of the wild land he loved. A mutual respect she had not found the need to question. And he had freely admitted the relationship.
But this…
“I know about the wolves, Luke,” she said carefully, opening her eyes but not quite meeting his. “It never seemed as strange to me as it should have, your relationship with them—the times we saw and heard them.”
Luke was suddenly there before her. “Yes,” he murmured, his pale eyes glittering. “Some of those were real wolves.”
She heard the words without comprehension. “And the rest are werewolves?” She flung it at him without thought, finally giving a name to the thing he implied. And he answered with the same grim sobriety.
“We call ourselves loups-garous. It means essentially the same thing.”
Joey realized then that her muscles were as clenched as Luke’s, but she could not make them relax. “You are saying,” she said very calmly, “that you are a werewolf.”
“Precisely,” He bit off the word “And the bed you’re lying in belongs to another.”
A sudden and inexplicable rage gripped Joey, strong enough to make her gasp with it “What kind of game are you playing with me?” She snorted, almost bitter. “I see. All of this was some kind of elaborate amusement for you, wasn’t it? All that back-and-forth, agreeing to guide me, the cave—I’ll grant that you couldn’t have been responsible for the bear, although if you can talk to wolves, I suppose…”
“Joey.” The growl of his voice wasn’t even human. It paralyzed her in the midst of the tirade. “Be quiet.”
The words might as well have been bonds of steel. It was as if her mouth were muffled, her eyes clouded, her senses suspended, so that she could do nothing but stare at him in impotent helplessness. His eyes seemed so cold that there was nothing so recognizable as mere anger in them. All at once she understood the source of his power, the same power that made the people of Lovell avoid him, that made him so capable of fascinating and repelling at the same time. The power of a predator over its vanquished prey.
“If you won’t believe, I’ll have to make you understand, Joey,” he said from a great distance “Everything you see and hear will be real. I didn’t want to do it this way.”
In a few quick motions he had discarded his clothing and stood naked before her; before her eyes he began to change. She had no choice but to watch in powerless fascination as the familiar planes and subtle curves of his body began to shift, blurring, making her blink when suddenly there was nothing there to focus on but a haze like the shimmering illusion of water on hot pavement. And then Luke’s eyes were staring up at her, unchanged except in shape, from the face of a magnificent gray wolf.