Read Long Shadows: The Lycanthropy Files, Book 2 for Free Online Page B

around, her ears alert.
    “I can smell him, the fuchsia wizard.”
    “Where?” Leo started to rumble, but Joanie knocked into him.
    “Behind us.” I stood and ignored Joanie’s growl to get the hell down and stop being an idiot. I bared my teeth. “It’s one thing to hunt me at my apartment; it’s another to follow me here. How dare he?”
    “Go ahead if you like, but we’re staying here,” Leo said. “I won’t let you endanger Joanie and our cub.”
    I shot a look over my shoulder at him. “Your cub? You mean your child. Remember who and what you are.”
    “You do the same,” he said.
    “I am a human, but I’ll use what I have. He’s after me. I’ll lead him away, and you two get to a safe place.”
    “The boathouse,” Joanie said. “We can get in and defend ourselves if we need to. There are guns hidden in there, and clothes.”
    “Go,” I told them. “Keep yourselves safe. I’m sorry for bringing this on you.”
    “Maybe it will help us with our other puzzles,” Joanie, ever the scientist, said. “But Lonna, be careful!”
    “I will.” I crept away, keeping low to the ground. I knew that humans would be unable to sense half of what I could as a wolf, so I suspected I’d be able to surprise whoever it was. I circled the scent, moving downwind so it would be strong enough for me to pinpoint its exact location. I couldn’t say with certainty, but I suspected it followed me and only me. Finally, it stopped, and I did as well, curious.
    The sounds of the night chorused in my ears, and I panicked, sure I’d lost it. Then I smelled a fire and heard human breathing. I snuck closer until flickering light cast strange shadows in the trees and on me.
    It stopped and made a campfire? This didn’t compute with either the wolf or the human parts of my brain.
    “It did,” an unfamiliar voice said in my brain.
    I growled, then, careful to keep any thoughts of my two companions out of my mind, but I was too late.
    “They’re safe. They’re not after them, only you.”
    “Your pronouns confuse me, sir. Who are they? Who are you?”
    “And who are you?” The mental tone held amusement. “Come here in the circle of my fire and change so you’re out of their reach.”
    “I’ll be naked.”
    “I have clothes for you.”
    I slunk closer until I could see the speaker. It was a man who sat close to a fire. The flames gleamed in the blond highlights in his reddish brown hair, and I recognized him from the doctor’s office. Now he wore slightly tinted lenses, and I could barely see his eyes behind their smoky panes.
    “Doctor Fortuna?”
    He stood and bowed in my direction. “Maximilian Fortuna at your service. Call me Max.”
    “Son of a fucking bitch… Sorry.”
    He laughed, the lines around his sea-blue eyes crinkling. “Not to worry, milady. I’ll forgive your harsh language due to my having surprised you so rudely. Won’t you come have a bite?” He gestured to two rabbits on the ground. “I can roast them if you’d prefer.”
    “No!” my inner wolf cried as my human side said, “Yes.”
    “You seem to have some conflict,” he observed, speaking out loud but quietly. His lilting accent came into his physical voice more than his mental one. “You seem to not know who or what you are.”
    At that point, my nose was twitching from the scent of the blood on the ground. He took one of the rabbits, skinned it with expert motions, and placed it over the fire on a simple spit made of three sticks. The fat sizzled as it hit the coals. He put the other rabbit, skin still on, beside the fire and stepped back. I lunged for it, but I pulled back just before biting it, my jaws snapping at air.
    “Food, food, FOOD!” my inner wolf wailed, then piteously, “I’m hungry.”
    “Down,” I commanded her. Wary of weapons, I watched him. He fanned the smoke from the cooking rabbit toward me, and I inhaled, my mouth watering. Everything smelled more intensely when I was in wolf form. A whine