Susan Krinard - Come the Night

The Dragon’s Gorge was one of Luna Park’s primary attractions, and the crowd was considerable. Miniature railroad cars moved one by one along a winding track into the open maw of a vast cave, guarded on either side by snarling winged dragons. Toby walked at a rapid clip to the end of the line, trying to peer over the heads of the people ahead of him.

Gillian joined Toby, and Ross fell in behind them. The top of Gillian’s head was just level with Ross’s mouth; the smell of her skin and her hair, unsullied by the heavy perfumes so many women used, was far more intoxicating than the whiskey to which he’d become so attached since the hearing and its aftermath.

Both the whiskey and the woman were a kind of poison. Both confused his brain and his senses, made it all too easy to deny the hard facts of life. Ross backed away, bumping into the man behind him. He muttered an apology and deliberately closed off his senses until he, Gillian and Toby had reached the head of the line.

He wasn’t sure quite how it happened, but suddenly Toby was sprawled across the last seat of the waiting railroad car, leaving Ross and Gillian to take the first seat in the car behind it. The attendant gestured impatiently; Ross stepped into the car and helped Gillian in after him.

She sat just as stiffly as she had in her hotel room, her gloved hands tucked in her lap and her gaze fixed on the car ahead. Toby twisted in his seat and waved happily as the car lurched into motion.

“Is it quite safe for him to ride alone?” Gillian asked, speaking as if the words had been pried out of her by red-hot pokers.

“He isn’t a baby,” Ross said. “You can’t keep him in high chairs and diapers for the rest of his life.”

She glared at him, her eyes glowing as the shadows of the cave closed in around them. “You think me overprotective,” she said. “You think that Toby is as…worldly as any boy his age. He is not. He has lived all his life—”

“Around people just like him, where he’s safe from anything that could challenge what he’s been taught.”

“You know nothing of how he’s been raised.”

“I can guess.” He leaned back on the hard wooden seat, careful to keep from touching her. “The lessons don’t seem to have taken, though. He’s not a stuck-up little prig.”

Her breath came fast. “No,” she said, “he is not. But you, Mr. Kavanagh, are certainly not lacking in arrogance.”

“Because I’m honest?”

“Are you?” She searched his eyes. “Are you really?”

Ross started to answer and found he couldn’t speak. He was convinced in that moment that she could see right through him, right down to the core of the miserable failure he’d become.

He was saved as the railcar, which had been chugging its way to the top of a steep incline, suddenly plunged from darkness into a brilliant white scene of the North Pole. Ross hardly noticed. The car rolled on to the next exhibit, but he was no longer paying attention. He thought of all the places he’d read about and longed to see when he was a kid at his parents’ ranch in Cold Creek Valley, places with exotic names that seemed a million miles away: Timbuktu, Istanbul, Singapore. When he’d turned seventeen and the Great War was already raging in Europe, he’d seen joining up as a chance to escape Arizona and explore a little of the world. Ma had been against it at first, but Pa had understood Ross’s need to be part of something bigger than himself. They’d added to his own store of carefully saved money to send him on a boat to France.

There hadn’t been many American volunteers at the time; the United States was still years away from officially joining the War. But Ross had found exciting and often dangerous work as a driver for the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. He’d served for about three months when his vehicle hit a mine; somehow he’d gotten mixed in with a bunch of British wounded and been shipped off to recover in a London hospital.

That had been where he’d met Gillian. Of course he hadn’t known her name in the beginning; his injuries had been pretty severe, though not disfiguring, and at first he’d hardly been able to tell the difference between the succession of doctors, nurses and volunteers who passed by his bed.

But then he started to heal—fast, with the help of his werewolf blood—and he’d seen her visiting the men in the ward. He’d become increasingly intrigued by her poise, her grace, her untouchability. If anyone in the place represented his idea of a European aristocrat, loaded to the gills with “good breeding,” she was it.

It soon became obvious that she was very skilled at what she did; ice queen or not, she had a gentle touch and soothing voice for soldiers who needed comfort, and she was more competent than many of the professional nurses. Plenty of guys seemed to find her attractive. But she seldom smiled and never laughed, and no one seemed to be able to breach her air of cool superiority.

Ross had almost dismissed her as a just another arrogant, privileged blue blood. But then his condition had begun to improve, and he’d had set himself a challenge: to find out what made Gillian Maitland tick.

His first few attempts had failed. Maybe she was put off by his American drawl, or his easy manner and informal ways; he treated her as if she were his equal, and that didn’t sit well with her in the beginning. But eventually she began dropping by his bed more often, and he would regale her with the stories of the “Wild West” he’d learned at his father’s knee. She started to smile a little more. Warmth crept into her hazel eyes. He learned that her father was a baronet, and she came from a grand estate in the north of England. He figured that she’d never known a day of want in her life, which made her work at the hospital all the more admirable.

Little by little their relationship had evolved from a cautious friendship to a deeper bond. One night, after Ross was finally allowed to walk again, she’d let him kiss her.

A new Gillian had emerged after that brief incident, a girl of passion and hidden fire. Ross had felt like the peasant boy who’d won the heart of the king’s daughter. He and Gillian had kept their relationship carefully hidden from the hospital staff and patients. They had walked on the grounds after midnight, hand in hand, speaking little and feeling much.

One late night, on his way to meet her, Ross had seen Gillian Change from wolf to human form on the hospital lawn behind a clump of trees. He’d quickly overcome his shock, realizing that he’d already felt the difference in her without knowing it. He’d told her then, with perfect honesty, that he knew about the existence of werewolves, at least in America. She didn’t ask how or why he knew about loups-garous, and he didn’t reveal his own mixed heritage, unsure how she would feel about it.

After that, Gillian had told him all about the werewolves in Europe. They were trying to save the werewolf race from extinction, she’d explained. The number of loups-garous in the world was rapidly shrinking; they had to live secretly among humans, constantly fearing exposure. Ancient European families had been working tirelessly to preserve the pure werewolf bloodlines and unique gifts.

Ross had listened, strangely uncomfortable with the driven, almost mechanical way Gillian spoke of the Europeans’ efforts. She’d recited the information almost like a schoolgirl who’d learned her lessons by rote; the passionate, animated woman Ross had discovered beneath her aristocratic veneer seeming to vanish.

But then she’d self-consciously asked him to make love to her, and he’d forgotten the things that had troubled him. Their joining had been like a miracle, a gift Ross knew he didn’t deserve. He’d finally admitted that he was of werewolf blood. She’d laughed, her eyes filled with happiness and relief. Ross had believed that his dreams were about to come true.