Eyes Like a Wolf Read online

  “Away. I'll only make things worse if I stay here.” Richard looked at me sadly. “I'm sorry if I hurt you, Rachel. Sorry for everything I did. Sorry that you had to find out what I was.”

  “Richard,” I whispered. “Please, don't go.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Why not? Why should I stay? So you can tell me again how you don't think of me 'that way?' So I can watch you deny the Amon-kai part of yourself and marry Charles?”

  “But…” I started and didn't know how to go on. But Richard was at no loss for words.

  “Look at me, Rachel,” he demanded, leaning down and putting a hand under my chin. “Tell me what you're feeling right now. Can you look at me and see me as a man and not a monster? Can you honestly tell me you can get past our childhood and accept me as your lover and not your brother?”

  “I…” I bit my lip, feeling the wrongness of that old taboo come back to haunt me once more. I knew he was right. I might get over his monthly killings in time, as horrific as they were, but there was still a part of me that looked at him and thought family. Still a part that was horrified at what I had just let my own brother do to me.

  “You can't, can you?” Richard looked sad, but his eyes were hard. “I guess I hoped after seventeen years you could think of me differently. That you could see past our childhood relationship. I guess I was wrong.”

  “Richard…” I began, feeling hot tears well up in my eyes.

  “I love you. I always will,” he told me. “But I'm leaving now. And this time I won't be back.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was worse than before. The sickness, the feelings of desperation and despair. They grew every hour I was apart from him. It was like going through a drug withdrawal that got worse and worse instead of ever getting better.

  At night I paced the floor, unable to sleep. Because every time I laid my head on the pillow, the dream was there, waiting to carry me away to misery and pain and bloodshed. The wolf's howl was piteously mournful now, and the boy looked at me with accusation written plainly in his pale green eyes. I was hurting him as much as I was hurting myself—that was clear to me, even in the dream. I was hurting both of us because of my refusal to break a taboo that really wasn't even there.

  I woke up with reasons on my lips—reasons I couldn't see him, couldn't give him what he asked. He was a murderer—a serial killer, for God's sake. How could I let myself even think of being with him after knowing that? I only kill evil people. Richard's voice echoed in my head on those occasions. Yes, but who was he to judge? It was true that Chulo Martinez was no great loss to society—he had been an abusive, foul-minded pimp and a button man for the mob. But he should have been sent to a court of law and given due process, not summarily slaughtered on a full moon night because Richard needed a sacrifice in order to regain his human form.

  And what about Charles? We were still getting married—I had promised myself that. There was no way I was giving up the normal, sane life I'd worked so hard to build for myself. True, we weren't talking much lately. Every time he called me, I put him off or promised to call back later—promises I always broke. But on the day of our wedding, I fully intended to be there, dressed in the billowing white dress I had picked for the occasion. If anything would carry me through this difficult time it was my stubborn refusal to let go of my ideals. And those ideals did not include leaving my normal if somewhat boorish fiancé to run away with a man who was a shape-changing serial killer who had also been raised as my brother. Or so I told myself on a daily basis.

  Of course the most pressing reason I knew I could never be with Richard was always with me. The fact that he was my brother—at least in my eyes. True, there were no blood ties, but we'd been raised by the same parents, tucked in at night and taken to school each day by the same mother and father. He'd been my older sibling my entire life, and it was hard, too hard, to think of him as anything else now. That was why I was certain that even if I had given in to my unnatural urges and let him make love to me, or breed me as he called it, we could never have a lasting relationship. I might be able to put aside my feelings of breaking a taboo at night when we were naked together in bed and the lust for his body in mine overcame me, but by the light of day the shame of what I was doing and who I was doing it with would maim and cripple me. I wouldn't be able to stand myself—not in the long run.

  But at the end of the first full week without Richard in my life, my reasons began to wear thin. My withdrawal symptoms weren't getting any better—they were getting worse. I forced myself to get up and dragged myself to work every morning, even though I felt like death warmed over and knew I looked even worse. I forgot what I was supposed to say in court, and coworkers began looking at me out of the corners of their eyes and talking in hushed voices that stopped abruptly when I came too near. I knew they thought I was crazy or sick or both—or maybe just on drugs—but there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn't until Friday of the second week, though, that things came to a head.

  I was in court again, prosecuting a routine case that I knew I had prepared for. And yet, as I looked over my notes, it was as though I was looking at them for the first time. The words on the page made no sense to me—as though they were written in a foreign language. I stood up to cross-examine a witness, and I could barely speak. My brain was fogged with pain and need and longing. The dream the night before had been particularly bad, and it insisted on replaying itself behind my eyes as I tried to do my job.

  As I stuttered and stumbled through my cross, I saw the eyes of the other attorneys in court looking at me with pity and contempt. Even the jurors seemed to know that something was wrong. And the judge, an older woman named Caroline DeBerg who had taken the bench back in the seventies, had one skinny eyebrow raised in an expression of severe displeasure. I was doing a horrible job and I knew it, but I couldn't seem to do any better.

  “Mister…Mister Manzetti,” I said, talking to the witness, who looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Name's Maniro,” he interrupted me.

  I nodded quickly, trying to cover my mistake. “Of course, Mister Maniro. Where were you on the night of October seventeenth?”

  “At home in my living room with my wife.” He frowned at me. “But don't you wanna ask me about October twenty-seventh? That's when I saw O'Brian kill that guy.”

  “Objection!” The attorney for the defense, a portly man with an unbearably smug attitude named Joseph Barnes, was on his feet, glaring at me. “Your honor, I don't know what game Ms. Kemet is playing here, instructing her witness to make false statements to the jury, but—”

  “Your honor, it was a simple slip of the tongue,” I interrupted him. “I haven't instructed Mister Mandero to say anything of the kind.”

  “Mister Maniro,” the witness said again. “Get it right, lady.”

  “Your honor, she can't even remember the name of her own witness,” Joseph Barnes said, throwing me a contemptuous look.

  “I resent that, your honor,” I said.

  “What?” Barnes smirked. “You resent me pointing out the truth?”

  “Enough!” Judge DeBerg pounded her gavel until both of us were silent. “Ms. Kemet.” She crooked a long, thin finger at me. “You may approach the bench.”

  I walked slowly forward with the feeling of being called to the principal's office. Disapproval was written in every thin line and sharp angle of Judge DeBerg's black-clad form.

  “Ms. Kemet,” she said in a voice low enough not to carry, but icy enough to cut me to the bone. “I have never seen such a display of incompetence in my courtroom. Truly, it is staggering.”

  “Your Honor,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I have to apologize. I—”

  “This isn't like you,” she continued, cutting me off. “I've seen your work before, counselor, and you're usually as sharp as a tack. In fact, I remember thinking that you'd be sitting here on the bench yourself in another eight or ten years. What happened?”

  “I…I…” I fumbled for an