Authors: Unknown
Again he nodded.
“And when that man tried to burn down the lodge, you chased him away.”
Once more he acknowledged the truth of her words.
She started speaking again in a voice so low that he had to strain to catch the words.
“Now I know your secret. And you don’t know mine.”
When she hitched a little sob, he raised his head so that he could meet her gaze.
He could see tears glistening in her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
He felt as though he were poised on the edge of a sharp blade.
“I want to tell you, so much. I tried to tell you. I can’t say it, but I tried to write it down,” she whispered.
He nodded, thinking about the sheets of paper on her dresser. She had written some words. But he had no way of connecting them. Not unless she gave him some clues.
She continued to stroke him, and now he felt her hand shaking.
“Vandar won’t let me,” she said, her voice thick with the tears.
Vandar.
She had said that name before.
He saw the track of moisture slipping down her cheeks.
Delicately, he stretched out his tongue and wiped them away.
“Oh, Talon. Oh. You’re so strong, and yet you can be so gentle.”
He stood before her, wishing he could ask the question that burned in his throat. Vandar? Was he the leader of the group where she lived? Or the head of a secret project? He wanted to tell her she was his life mate, and they would get through this together, but speech was denied him.
“He . . .”
Every cell of his body strained to catch the rest of what she was poised to say.
But before she could utter another syllable, her whole body began to shake.
Kenna, what is it? Kenna,
he shouted inside his head, the words emerging from his mouth as a series of strangled growls.
She grabbed her head with both hands and screamed, “Gods!”
As he watched in horror, she fell off the rock and lay shaking on the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A THICK, CHOKING fear engulfed Talon as he crouched beside Kenna.
Oh God, it’s happening again.
The same thing that he’d seen before. She’d said she was having a migraine to cover the truth—that an attack seized her whenever she tried to talk to him about herself.
Kenna, I’m so sorry,
he silently shouted, then moaned in frustration. This time he was getting her to the hospital. But he couldn’t do it as a wolf.
He had to change, then get her into the car.
Or would she die while he was making the transformation?
Whatever happened, he couldn’t stay a wolf. He was about to say the chant when he heard footsteps pounding down the trail he’d just taken.
Christ!
Was the guy with the gas back? This time with his gun? He’d thought he’d scared the bastard away for a while.
Stopping in his tracks, he turned to face the enemy and blinked as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing: a dark-haired man, a wolf, and a petite woman running toward him.
He’d seen the man a long time ago. It was his cousin Ross Marshall, who had come to tell him that the Marshalls had started getting together—and would he like to join them for a family gathering? He hadn’t wanted to hear about it then. He didn’t want to hear it now.
The wolf must be another Marshall.
If he could have spoken he would have shouted at them. Ross must have understood the look on his face because he stopped to catch his breath. “Sorry. When I phoned you, I wasn’t far away,” he called out. “Logan changed and tracked you. I can’t let this go. I have to talk to you about Kenna.”
The woman gasped when she saw Kenna lying on the ground. “She’s hurt.” Sprinting around him, she knelt beside the crumpled figure.
“What happened to her?”
I don’t fucking know!
Talon shouted inside his head.
Ross kept his voice even. “I’ve brought your cousin Logan and his wife, Rinna. Rinna is from the same place as Kenna. I think she can help you.”
Talon goggled at the man.
When Ross pulled a knapsack off his shoulder, Talon growled and bared his teeth.
Ross held up his free hand, palm out. “Okay, I know we invaded your territory. I know that’s a breach of werewolf protocol as far as you’re concerned. But I’m hoping you won’t attack us. This is urgent. You need to hear me out. Rinna and Kenna are from an alternate universe, and we need to know the reason why she’s here. It’s not an accident. Something’s going on.”
He felt as though the ground had tipped under him, and he had to fight to stay on his feet.
He wanted to shout that Ross was talking garbage, yet too many strange things had happened with Kenna for him to simply dismiss his cousin’s words.
“There’s a world that runs parallel to this one. It’s similar but different. Rinna came through a portal to this universe a couple of years ago.”
The word “portal” stopped him. It was one of the words Kenna had written on the pieces of paper.
“She’s having some kind of attack,” Rinna called out. “She needs help.”
Talon swung toward his life mate, pawing the ground in frustration. What the hell could he do in wolf form?
“I carry clothes with me,” Ross said, leaning over so that he could toss the pack gently on the ground. “Go change and put them on, so you can help her.”
Talon hesitated, then snatched up the pack in his teeth and dashed into the underbrush, where he silently pushed through the chant of transformation. As soon as he had hands to do it, he pulled out a pair of sweatpants and dragged them on along with a T-shirt, then ran barefoot back to the stream. While he’d changed, the other wolf had, too.
They eyed each other with barely checked hostility.
Talon pushed through the crowd and knelt beside his life mate. Her eyes were open and fixed on him.
“Thank God. Are you all right?”
“Yes, now,” she whispered.
Rinna was holding her hand. “It’s okay,” she said in a steady voice. “My name is Rinna. I’m from your world.”
Kenna’s eyes widened in shock. “How?”
“It’s a long story. I was running away from a man who was a strong adept, a man who wanted to control me. He’d come through the portal and set a trap that would catch a shape-shifter. It caught Logan. That’s how I met him. He’s my life mate and my husband now.”
Talon was still struggling with the concept of another universe. He wanted to demand proof, but for the time being he’d just have to accept this crazy situation.
Kenna’s gaze darted from Rinna to Talon and back again. “I saw Talon as a wolf. You are, too?”
“Yes. And Logan and Ross. They’re Talon’s cousins. All the men in the Marshall family are werewolves.”
“I thought that here—” She stopped abruptly and winced.
“I can sense that you have your own talent. What is it?” Rinna asked Kenna.
Fear and pain clouded Kenna’s eyes.
“But you can’t talk about it,” Rinna said.
“I want to,” Kenna answered, then cried out as her face contorted.
“Someone’s preventing it?”
“Y-yes,” Kenna gasped.
“It hurts her,” Talon shouted. “Leave her alone.”
He scooped her up in his arms and started back toward the lodge. Without looking over his shoulder, he knew the others were following.
He could send them away. That was his right, but he knew he was facing something that he couldn’t deal with on his own. Questions swirled in his mind. Questions and things that Kenna had said and done. He’d already started thinking something pretty strange was going on with her. It sounded like it was worse than he could have imagined. So he let the others follow him up the trail.
They stopped outside the lodge, and he bent to open the door, then stepped inside with Kenna in his arms, leaving them standing in the driveway.
Quickly, he strode down the hall, where he laid Kenna on her bed, then eased down so he was sitting beside her.
“How are you?” he whispered.
“Okay.”
He knew it was a lie. Taking her in his arms, he held her as tightly as he dared and whispered, “Sweetheart, I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not trusting you.”
She moved her head against his shoulder. “You . . . shouldn’t.”
“We can talk about it . . .”
“No.” She reached to press her fingers against his mouth. “Finally, there’s a way out of this for me.” Her gaze shot to the pile of papers. “I couldn’t tell you . . .” She stopped and started again. “But I figured out that maybe I could write it down. One word at a time. Then I could fill in the little words and put the whole thing in order.”
“That was clever of you.”
“We’ll see,” she said in a thin voice. “Take them to . . . to Rinna.”
“What?”
“Take them to her,” she repeated. “Please. Talk to her. I think she might understand. But you can’t do it here.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said in a thin voice. “But you have to go. I . . . I can’t do it.”
As she spoke, she gave him a look that twisted his heart, and he understood that if they tried to discuss this with her, he’d only trigger the pain in her head again. With a low sound, he swept the papers into a pile, picked them up, and went back down the hall. Outside, he found his visitors still standing awkwardly in the driveway.
ALONE in the bedroom, Kenna tried to calm the jumble of emotions surging through her. In the space of a few minutes, everything had changed.
Talon was a werewolf!
His cousins were werewolves. One was married to a werewolf—from Kenna’s world.
She wanted to leap up and run back to the group of people who had come here without Talon’s asking.
Would he send them away? Or would he let them help? And what could they do?
Hardly daring to hope, she turned on her side and hugged her knees, waiting to learn the outcome of the discussion they would be having.
Talon had been so tender with her. She’d wanted to stay in his arms. But she knew they had to settle this. And she knew that when he understood the full extent of her lies, he might end up hating her.
TALON studied the three people standing awkwardly outside. Ross seemed pretty calm. Logan, the other cousin, folded his arms across his chest.
Talon sensed that he was a hothead. Could he send him away? Maybe, but then the woman would leave, too. And Kenna needed her.
After a long moment, he muttered, “I guess you can come in.” He probably didn’t sound like a gracious host. But that had never been the way with the men in the Marshall family. They were each the alpha male of their own pack, and that created problems with werewolf social relations.
When they followed him inside, he led them to the living room, then turned to Rinna. “Kenna sent me to you,” he said, “because it hurts her to talk about it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“Yes.”
“You might as well sit down,” Talon said.
They sat, and he continued to study them as he rolled up the papers Kenna had given him into a tube and twisted them in his hand. None of his visitors looked exactly comfortable.
Good.
He swung back toward the hall, wishing that Kenna were part of this conversation because it felt like they were going to talk behind her back, but he understood that she couldn’t be here. With a low sound, he took a seat facing the three people who had invaded his property without being invited.
“Okay, I want some answers,” he growled.
Ross nodded. “Of course.”
“How do you know that Kenna was from an . . . uh . . . alternate universe?” he asked.
“You were trying to figure out who she was, and you gave me genetic material,” Ross replied.
“Yes, I mailed it to you week before last when I was in town getting supplies.”
“My wife, Megan, is a physician who owns a bio lab in the D.C. area. When she tested it, she recognized a marker that she had seen in Rinna’s DNA.”
“What kind of marker?”
“It’s a long story. But the short version is that their universe was like ours until the World’s Fair of 1893, when a man named Eric Carfoli set up an exhibit. He claimed he could give people psychic powers.”
“And?”
“And over there, it worked. A lot of people can tell the future, read minds, change to an animal shape, do remote viewing, speak to the dead, move objects with their minds.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Talon snapped.
“It’s true,” Rinna answered. “In our world, we cultivate those talents. We send children to special schools to increase their powers.” As she spoke, she reached for her husband’s hand and gripped it tightly, then closed her eyes. Over on the side of the room, a circle began to waver in the air, shimmering with a light that came from within.