The Mountain's Shadow (29 page)

“So it wasn’t the phones.” Iain reached for it, but I stayed his hand.

“Think about the explosives,” I said. “What if it’s designed to trigger something if the magnetic seal is broken?”

He looked at me as though he was trying to decide whether I was crazy paranoid or very shrewd, but he didn’t move. “What do we do?”

“Get our stuff, walk around the corner, and rent a car. How much cash do you have?”

“Barely any. I didn’t have time to change much.”

“Leo?”

“Used all mine this morning.”

I checked my bag. Inside, a strange envelope peeked out, and I recognized it as the one Galbraith had left me for expenses. I had stuck it in a drawer in the night table in my bedroom. I opened it, and several hundred dollar bills fell out. I hadn’t packed it, but I didn’t have time to worry about who had.

“This should cover it.”

“No one’s going to rent a car to you without a credit card,” Leo pointed out. “And what do you want to bet that all of ours are being tracked?”

Iain pulled out his wallet and flipped through his cards. “Not this one.”

“What is it?” It looked like a regular Visa card to me.

“This is my university faculty ‘emergency’ card. My chair gave it to me when he heard I was coming in case I needed some cash quick.” He smiled. “I have a tendency to get into sticky situations. It goes back to the university, not to me, so it’s unlikely that it’s being tracked, particularly since the account is overseas.”

“I think this qualifies as an emergency.”

Within half an hour, we were on our way on the back roads to Crystal Pines.

Our trip proceeded without incident, but it occurred to me that they might be watching the roads around Crystal Pines. Whoever “They” were. Minions of Hippocrates Pharmaceuticals, most likely. I had a feeling that Galbraith was in on it, too. I had fixated on Peter Bowman as my enemy, and he may well be, but I had focused on the wrong lawyer.

I pulled the car over and parked it behind some trees about a mile beyond the gatehouse. We hadn’t come across another car for miles, and although I couldn’t see too far back from the road, I didn’t think anyone had spotted us. However, darkness was falling, and I didn’t want to be caught by surprise by another vehicle.

“What now?” asked Iain.

I got out and slung my backpack—manila folder and money envelope safely inside—over my shoulders. He stood up and stretched. It had been a long, twisty ride, and he looked a little green. Leo, exhausted from running the entire night before, had slept on and off.

“Try not to hurl. Gads, Iain, I had no idea you were such a wimp.”

“I had no idea you were such a feared and reviled human being to attract so much trouble.”

“You haven’t talked to my mother lately. For all I know, she might be in on it, too.”

No smile, not even a twitch. “Let me guess, we get to walk now?”

“My grandfather and I used to know every inch of this mountain and the ones near it. The trails were old hunting trails, and I bet they’re still in good shape.” I gazed into the dark woods and tried to appear like it would be a pleasant hike, but my mind turned to the unknown that might lurk around every bend, specifically the creature that made those awful screams.

“I can guide you,” Leo offered. “Just let me change.” He ducked behind a tree and emerged in canine form.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be used to that,” Iain said. “So you don’t think we’ll be targets in a hunter’s scope?”

“Nope, it’s not deer season yet, and Leo will be able to smell anything that might try to surprise us.” We set off through the woods and found a trail that wound down the side of the mountain.

“Shouldn’t we be going up?”

“Will you hush? And no, we’re headed for the river. I want to approach the house from the back side.”

Wolf-Leo bobbed his head and darted on. He stayed a few feet in front of us. A waning moon lit our way, and I found my way to the river. We had to go off trail for the last hundred yards or so because the trail led up the mountain again. Iain didn’t say anything, just watched where he stepped and occasionally shot me a look questioning how much of a madwoman I must be and whether he would be better off on his own. I couldn’t blame him—until a week ago, I had been the same, an industry-employed scientist who, at heart, held on to the attitudes of an academician who expected others to do all the dirty work for her. Trudging through the woods at night wouldn’t have been my idea of fun, either. I would have sent some poor trainee or graduate student to do it. But now the fresh air soothed my lungs and only the sounds of our crunched footsteps on the gravel bank, the whispering breeze, and the murmuring river disturbed the quiet. The thoughts of my old, comfortable lab and even the beautiful, shiny one at Wolfsbane Manor made me feel stifled.

We continued to walk upstream, and the sound of the water took on an echo such that it drowned out other noises. Leo stopped, his nose to the air. I held my hand up to Iain, who moved closer and bent his ear to my mouth.

“Something’s not right,” I told him. “Let’s move back into the brush. Try to be as quiet as you can.”

We stepped off the riverbank and into the woods, where we eschewed the path paralleling the river for the pine needles and undergrowth. We continued to move along and found, as I had heard, a split in the river. The main river continued north toward the edge of Wolfsbane Manor land, and part of it had been diverted toward the west, where formerly only a small canyon with a trickling stream and a few caves had been.

I beckoned for him to come closer again, but as he bent, a scream split the air—the horrible, tormented noise that I had heard before. He straightened up, his eyes wide, and I reached up and clapped a hand over his mouth before he could exclaim anything in the silence that followed. Wolf-Leo took off like a shot, and the shadows swallowed him. If the noise was painful to human ears, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it sounded like to his super-sensitive canine ones. The sound had made my hair stand on end, if for no other reason than it was very close, closer than I had heard it before. And this time, something about it triggered a sense of familiarity and overwhelming sorrow.

“Are we near the mouth of hell?” Iain whispered in my ear.

“We may very well be.” Tales of the Gowrow, who lived in caves and ate anything that wandered too close, came back to me. People had seen strange things in these hills.

I heard something else then, a splash. I beckoned for Iain to follow me, and we crept toward the river, where we could barely see a small head bobbing in the current. It seemed to try to swim toward the bank, but every time it got close, an eddy would sweep it back to the center of the river.

“It’s a child,” Iain said.

“Quick!” I grabbed a branch, and we ran to the edge of the river. Iain held on to my left arm above the wrist as I reached the other one out with the branch and steadied myself in the cold water. I braced myself but didn’t expect the tug at the branch as the child caught on to it. I stumbled, regained my footing, and held on with all my strength as Iain pulled us both to shore.

The child, a boy of about twelve, looked at us as though he thought we might be ghosts. His eyes widened in fear, and his lips worked as he decided whether to say something or to scream. I placed my hand over his mouth and held a finger to my lips. He glanced over his shoulder, and we crept into the bush again as two figures emerged from the woods on the other side of the bank. One of them wore a white lab coat, the other one a dark suit. Both men scanned the river.

“Simon,” the lab-coated one called out. “Simon, there’s no use running. If you don’t have your treatment, you may die!”

I held the boy tight, my arms wrapped around his shivering frame. I couldn’t tell whether he shivered from the cold water or trembled with fear. The other man talked into a radio, and with a nod, he and the one in the lab coat headed down the opposite bank calling and looking at the river.

Simon… A child in early adolescence who appeared in the middle of the woods on a dark night chased by a man in a lab coat. Could this be one of the lost children of Piney Mountain?

“Simon Van Doren?” I whispered in his ear. The boy nodded but didn’t take his eyes off the two men until they disappeared around a bend in the river.

“Iain,” I said in as low a voice as I could and still be heard above the water, “this is one of the missing boys.”

Simon turned to me. “You’re not one of them?”

“No, I’m here to help you.”

“Then you have to help the rest.”

“The rest of who?”

“The other boys. And the grown-ups. They hurt us. They put things in needles, and it makes us scream.” Indeed, his voice sounded hoarse, and it wasn’t because he was whispering. The scream we’d just heard still lingered in my ears, and I could imagine that such a horrible noise being forced out of a small throat would cause some damage.

“Which grown-ups?” I asked. Could we have found Lonna and Gabriel?

“They brought a man and a woman today. The man has an accent. And the old man was already there.”

“What old man?”

“The one in the big house.”

My eyes filled with tears of sorrow and relief. “Iain, my grandfather—he’s alive.”

“Alive or not, I don’t think that sitting here waiting for them to come back is going to do us any good.” Iain held out his hand to the boy, who took it.

He looked up at Iain with wide black eyes. “You talk like the new guy.”

“Aye.” He thickened his accent a little. “We’re both from Scotland.” The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he smiled. “We’ve got some good werewolf legends in Europe, you know.”

The boy shook his head. “Mister, this is one.”

I stifled a laugh and gestured that we should keep moving. We walked as quickly as we could without making too much noise. I imagined, if there were any cooperative werewolves in the rogue lab, they would soon send them after Simon, and it wouldn’t take long for them to sniff up the other bank of the river.

The trail forked to the right, but we stayed on the river path. I strained my eyes ahead to see if I could make out the bulk of the boathouse and wished I had the wolves’ night vision. To me the forest was all shadows and slivers of silvery light with moonlit outlines of trees and plants. We didn’t see the boathouse until we were almost right on it.

“There’s someone in there,” Simon whispered as his nose twitched. “A wolf-man. But I don’t know him.”

We skirted around the edge of the place, and then it occurred to me.
Leo.
He must have ducked in there after the scream.

“Leo,” I hissed. I heard something moving around inside.

“Joanie, are you sure?” Iain asked.

“No.” I wasn’t sure about anything. But I needed somewhere to put Simon, and fast. It was past eleven, and we still had a good forty-five minutes of hiking straight uphill. The boy might be hardy, but I felt bad about dragging him along with us. He needed a good meal, medical attention and lots of rest.

The door opened, and Leo came out. He had dark circles under his eyes.

“What the hell have you been doing?” he asked. “I was about to go back and look for you. I had to get out of there—that scream, it tore up the inside of my head.” Then his eyes fell on the boy.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Simon Van Doren. He’s one of the boys that went missing from Crystal Pines.”

“How did you escape?” asked Leo.

“The black wolf drove me out. When the doctor and the guards were busy with the new people, he showed me a crack in the wall I could fit through.”

“The black wolf?” My head spun. What—or who—was the black wolf? Why was it following me? Why had it given me this child?

“They got Gabriel and Lonna,” Iain said.

“Wait a second.” I fixed Leo with my best “no bullshit” look. “How did you know Simon had ‘escaped’?”

He ran his hands through his tangled hair, and leaves and pine needles fell out. “We knew that the place was there, the cave of the Gowrow. We couldn’t get close because we didn’t want to be caught. He smells like that place, like chemicals and fear.”

“Can you keep an eye on him?” I asked. “They’re looking for him. Iain and I have to meet someone at Wolfsbane Manor at midnight.”

“I guess.” I thought at first he was just being rude, but he just gazed at Simon with searching dark eyes. “Was there a little boy there? About two, with curly blond hair?”

“Yes, but they don’t do anything to him. He just cries.”

Leo held out his hand and Simon took it. “Go ahead. I’ll take care of the boy.”

I should have been happy to have Simon’s care out of my hands, but the way Leo looked at him made me wonder if maybe the boy would be safer with us, particularly with Leo not being so psychologically adept at the animal-human transition. I didn’t have time to worry. Iain gave my arm a tug, and we hiked up the trail. I heard the murmur of voices behind us, Leo’s bass and Simon’s rasping tenor and wondered what they could be plotting. I only hoped they wouldn’t act rashly and give us away before we could figure out who was ultimately responsible for creating that hell in my childhood playground.