The Curse of Wolf Crag
Susan Sizemore
Glasgow can be a bit dicey after dark, but possible danger is hardly any excuse to miss out on the excellent night life. Tara had gone out to celebrate the installation of two tapestries in a Trongate shop and a brand new commission. A night out on the town was certainly justified.
It’s a university town, an artsy town, an international town. Tara Thomas loved the place to pieces. But she thought she’d love anywhere that wasn’t the isolated, cold, windswept, raining when it wasn’t snowing, postage-stamp rocky island where she’d grown up.
Oh, and sheep-infested. Had she mentioned that?
Not that she didn’t love wool, she was a weaver, after all. She was an artist with wool as well as every other natural fibre, but she was happy to be away from her family’s sheep farm on Wolf Crag.
Never mind the weather, living there was just too – complicated.
Most of the younger generation left, even those from the most ancient families.
Even though the Crag was as wired to the Internet, mobile phones and the rest of modern technology – weather permitting – as anywhere, the Old Ways lingered, traditions stifled change.
You could believe things on Wolf Crag you wouldn’t anywhere else.
Not that they weren’t true everywhere else, it was just that in the misty, rugged isolation of the island you were forced to believe harder, stronger, fiercer. The Crag demanded a lot of your soul.
In Glasgow, Tara could believe in herself, and in the rational, normal human world.
She didn’t imagine fairies lurking around corners in the whirling hubbub of the city even when fog lent mystery to its streets.
No one told her to be ’ware of water horses in puddles, and pixies in the tiny front gardens.
None of the wild things of Glasgow required any imagination to believe in.
Real thugs with real steel knives didn’t need the energy of belief. They needed to be avoided.
Which Tara feared she hadn’t done tonight.
A justified celebration or not, she wished she hadn’t stayed for one more drink, leaving the pub alone and tipsy at closing time.
She wished the streetlights didn’t seem so far apart.
She wished that the sound of her heels didn’t click so loudly in her ears.
It was not that she expected trouble, but––
Mostly she wished she hadn’t let the woman at the bar read her palm. She didn’t mind hearing that the lines in her hand showed she was destined for fame. She did mind being told that she was in great danger – that the love of her life would save her from it.
But the thing she wished most, was that the knowledge deep in her gut that she was being followed wasn’t true.
Tara began to run through the shadows, towards lights and the sound of traffic. But the way was very dark, and the heavy footsteps behind came on faster.
“Fang, lad? Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, Gran.”
What was the old lady doing up so late? He wouldn’t be out right now if he didn’t have to walk back a half mile to the car park after a meeting that ran far too long.
“Well, Fang, what are you going to do about it?”
Alistair Douglas winced at the nickname.
He knew the old woman had used it just for the purpose of annoying him, reminding him of his place.
He almost wished he’d never given the old lady back on the island the mobile phone.
He was hundreds of miles away, and yet, here she was howling and whining into his ear as he prowled the late night city streets.
“Listen, I’m sorry about the water rising over your back garden,” he told her. “But if you’re going to live so close to the sea––”
“Rising sea levels have nothing to do with it, as you know full well. The Crag’s disappearing, Fang! It’s the curse!”
“Which curse, Gran? The island’s under a dozen curses and plagued by even more prophecies. Some of them even cancel each other out.”
“It’s the Secret Curse, and you know it. You have to stop it!”
“Why me, Gran? How can I––?”
“You’re the laird, the alpha and the summer king rolled in to one, that’s why! What are you doing in Glasgow when your place is here?”
He didn’t think his being on the island would in any way solve the problem. One more Black Douglas wasn’t the sort of resident Wolf Crag needed. He was working on solving the Human Curse. “I think I may have the manor house rented to a Yank couple.”
“How can you give up your own house?”
“It’s not like I’m home that often, Gran. What I’m doing here in Glasgow is necessary. I’m working on attracting tourism to the island,” he told his grandmother. “I’m trying to get estate developers interested in building a resort, summer homes, maybe a golf course.”
“Your sacred ancestral land is fading into the mists and you’re talking about golf courses?! What will the Wild Hunt think about that?”
Gran didn’t think in twenty-first-century concepts – or twentieth. She’d barely come to terms with the nineteenth, for that matter. “I’m in talks with Oberon about keeping his folk away from the resort.”
“Oh, really? As if the fae will go along with anything for very long.”
“They will when there’s more than fairy gold involved. The king of fairy has some concept of surviving in the modern world. Besides, I’ll do anything to get people to the island,” he answered.
He tilted his head, excellent hearing catching a faint noise in the distance. People running, maybe.
“The children of the old families need to return,” Gran insisted.
“Why don’t you find them, persuade them?
What about that nice girl you used to be with, Tara Thomas?
” Since there was a great deal of complex history between the Douglas and Thomas families, Gran’s effort at sounding casual was an utter failure.
“I don’t want to talk about Tara any more than you want to talk about her grandfather.”
“Oh, I’m happy to talk about that lying, foresworn son of Adam.”
“Just not right now, all right, Gran?”
Not that Alistair’s plea did any good. He held the mobile away from his ear to let her curse out the old man without having to listen.
Andrew Thomas had always been a crusty but kindly neighbour as far as Alistair was concerned, but he knew Gran had good reasons for her loathing of the old man.
The loathing was returned by Thomas. The couple had brought grudges and bickering to such an art form over the last sixty years that their feud had become the main source of entertainment for the inhabitants of Wolf Crag.
But his granddaughter Tara wasn’t part of their battle. No one had tried to destroy his relationship with her but Alistair himself. Tara’s absence from his life still ripped at Alistair’s heart.
Tara was––
He heard the scream the same moment he caught the scent – the unmistakeable, undeniable fragrance that was her.
The hair on the back of Alistair’s neck stood up.
He ran. The transformation proceeded with every step.
Even if darkness and shadow hadn’t shielded him, he wouldn’t have bothered checking for witnesses.
Within moments he was running on four legs instead of two.
His eyes glowed red in the night. His teeth were sharp, white razors. His claws were steel-hard daggers.
Someone was attacking Tara, and that someone was going to die.
There were two of them, Alistair discovered.
He found them at the end of a nearby dark alley.
A broken streetlight didn’t give them the protection of darkness from his red night vision.
He saw them bending over a prone figure on the ground.
They didn’t notice him, not until two hundred pounds of hard muscle and deadly natural weapons barrelled into them.
Their hot blood was delicious on Alistair’s tongue. Tearing flesh from bone was a delightful exercise. He didn’t toy or play with his prey – he was a werewolf, not a werecat, after all. But the pleasure of the kill was intoxicating after so much time spent living a human life.
Once the attackers were dead he rushed to Tara.
She sat up at his approach. He was aware of the scent of her blood, and the shift in body heat that indicated bruising.
She looked shaken. But she didn’t look surprised to see a large wolf with blood on his mouth leaning his muzzle close to breathe her in.
She put her hand on his head, fingers sinking deep into thick fur. “You are not the love of my life,” she said firmly.
Just before she fainted.
Tara woke knowing she was naked, which didn’t surprise her – because she recalled who’d come to her rescue in the filthy, stinking alley.
“You had better be laundering my clothes, Alistair Douglas,” she said, from beneath the cover of a duvet on a lovely, soft bed.
“You could use a shower,” his deep voice rumbled from nearby.
Tara’s toes curled in response to that voice. It always sent a thrill through her. She remembered when it had cracked when they were growing up, then changed, deepened. Suddenly, she’d felt closer to being a woman every time he spoke to her.
“I have been rolling around in muck.”
“Nonsense, you haven’t been to bed with me in years.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. But she bit her tongue on saying anything. The past was very far away when she found herself lying naked in a bed that held Alistair’s scent, faint and spicy, in the bedclothes.
She reminded herself that one of her first projects had been spinning his werewolf fur, then weaving it into a lovely, soft scarf.
She’d worn it to a fibre arts show on a rainy day and ended up smelling like a wet dog among people she was trying to impress.
Black Fang Douglas had always brought her trouble.
Of course, this time, he’d saved her life.
Shouldn’t have got herself in trouble to begin with.