Jane Toombs.

MOON RUNNER.

GATHERING DARKNESS.

Chapter 1.

After making certain the door to her tower room was still barred, Liisi lifted her sable pouch from a wooden chest. She crossed to the round blue silk rug positioned in the exact center of the room and sat cross-legged on it.

The old tapestry behind her stirred as Liisi readied the stones for casting, a movement she felt rather than saw. The scene on the tapestry was an old Finnish folk tale, one of those chanted by rune singers--the maiden Aino fleeing from the shaman Vainamoinen, about to cast herself in the lake to avoid becoming his bride.

Aino didn't drown, she became a magic fish and thus escaped. No one died in the old songs, they merely changed. In the past, Liisi had sometimes regretted not having Aino's ability to avoid her fate. From the first moment she'd seen him in that fearful summer of 1850, she'd known Sergei Volek was dangerous. She'd also known they were so irrevocably linked that only death could break the bond. In these thirty years since they'd met, they'd been apart more often than together but the link still held.

Caressing the soft sable fur, she sighed, remembering those early days when Liisi Waisenen had come very close to dying instead of becoming Liisi Volek. Since then Sergei had brushed against death too many times here in the United States and in Russia.

Yet they'd both survived. She'd built her castle in this beautiful California valley and Sergei had made it into a fortress to shelter them and those of their blood.

Volek blood was tainted by darkness--but a darkness that could be controlled, as she'd proven.

Sergei had sworn that, for the safety of the clan, no outsiders would ever live in Volek house. Why would he violate his own vow within a week of making it? Never mind that Guy Kellogg was an old and valued friend. As soon as she'd met the three Kelloggs--husband, wife and daughter--Liisi had felt in her bones that along with the Kelloggs Sergei admitted danger and death.

She hoped the stones would show her the way to rid Volek house of them once and for all.

Removing the quail-egg sized stones from the pouch, Liisi slid the ruby ring onto her left forefinger, then breathed on the other eight stones: Granite, for eliminating errant energy; crystal to focus the summoned energy; agate to stabilize; amethyst to promote foreseeing; coral for wisdom; obsidian for strength of purpose; turquoise to protect; and malachite for strength of will.

She dropped all but the ring into her lap, closed her eyes and chanted each stone's origin. As she finished the last words, the stones flew from her skirt onto the blue carpet. Opening her eyes, she bent over to determine how they'd fallen. Despite the dimness of the round room, illuminated only by the pale light from four high and narrow slits of windows, the ominous pattern was clear.

Malachite lay atop both turquoise and granite. "A strong will overcomes protection," she murmured. Whose will? One of the Kelloggs, she feared. Also the ability of the granite to keep out unwanted energy was blocked--a warning that her own noita spells might be bypassed by another. Amethyst, coral and agate circled crystal, as though in protection but as she passed the ruby over the stones, crystal and amethyst grew opaque, unreadable. Definite outside interference. She was being prevented from seeing ahead.

Liisi stroked the ruby absently. It must be the presence of the Kelloggs. Guy had tracked down Sergei in desperation, claiming that finding him was his last hope for his wife Annette. Though she had little hope of solving Mrs. Kellogg's problem, Liisi knew she must try. Otherwise Sergei would insist on his friend remaining at Volek House.

She muttered under her breath as she gathered the stones back into the pouch. Sergei's devotion to his friends had led him into danger all too often. He was the first to insist the family came first--why couldn't he hold to that? More troubled than she'd been since the time of the night howling, Liisi put the pouch away. It had been years since she'd ventured on that dreadful journey between the worlds. The Maiden knew she'd hoped never to go again. Reluctantly she removed the deerskin drum from the chest and set it reverently on the floor. She stripped to the skin. Bells tinkled and iron charms jangled as she donned the shaman's long deerhide shirt.

As she began to dance in a circle in time to the beat of the drum, she banished the thought that this time she might never return from Tuonela's deadly realm.

Wolf Volek stood on the tower balcony staring into the cold gray tule fog shrouding the valley. A similar miasma had clouded the interior of Volek House for over two weeks--from the moment his grandfather had unlocked the gates to three night travelers and invited them in as guests.

Guy Kellogg, Grandfather claimed, was an old friend from New Orleans by way of France. The other two guests were women--Guy's wife Annette and his daughter Cecelia. Grandmother Liisi hadn't welcomed the guests. Death, she insisted forbiddingly, stalked Annette. A death that would doom them all.

Once he saw Cecelia, Wolf hadn't paid much attention to the elder Kelloggs. Cecelia was so pretty that the sight of her stole his breath from his chest. Mima had scolded him about how his eyes followed every move Cecelia made but he didn't feel guilty. The bond between him and Mima wasn't in the least weakened by the excitement that thrummed through him on those all-toofew occasions when Cecelia's green eyes chanced to meet his.

A sound warned him the door to the tower was opening and for an instant his heart leaped in hope. Could it possibly be Cecelia?

"Hello, Wolf," Guy Kellogg said as he stepped onto the balcony. "Still foggy, I see."

Wolf, concealing his disappointment, nodded.

"Fog in New Orleans is whiter," Guy said. "Mistier. And it doesn't last for days on end."

After a moment of silence, the reticent Wolf reminded himself that it was polite to speak when spoken to. "I've never been to New Orleans."

"That's where your grandfather and I met."

Wolf nodded again.

Guy smiled. "You remind me of him when he was young--he wasn't much of a talker, either. He was twenty then, as I was. How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"You look older. Seem older." Guy leaned on the iron balcony rail and faced Wolf. "Sherman told me--" He paused and ran a hand through his graying hair. "I have trouble remembering to call your grandfather by his real name. You see, I knew him as Sherman Oso, not Sergei Volek. How long ago that seems-over thirty years. We were both young, Sergei and I. That sense of secret darkness within him fascinated me from the first. But art was my life and so I sailed off to Paris, leaving him with papa."

Wolf's interest was caught. Grandfather had never spoken of his early life in much detail. He did know that Guy's father, a doctor, had uncovered Sergei's dark secret. "My father never wrote me what he knew about Sergei," Guy said. "Until I came back to New Orleans from France after my father's death, I had no notion my friend was any different than myself. Not until Francois, one of our old servants--he'd been a slave before the War Between The States--told me what he'd witnessed under a full moon one fateful night."

When Guy didn't immediately go on, Wolf prompted him. "What did he see?"

Guy lowered his voice, at the same time intensifying its timbre. "Speaking of that night, even all those years later, made Francois tremble. His voice quivered as he told me how Gauthier, the master of the neighboring plantation, a murdering devil of a man, drove his horse at the unmounted Sergei, meaning to kill him. 'Your friend, he change,' Francois told me. 'He is no longer a man, he is a beast.' It was the beast who tore out Gauthier's throat, putting an end to that bastard once and for all. Loup-garous, we Creoles call men who change."

Wolf knew the French word meant wolf-men but it wasn't true grandfather's shifting turned him into a wolf. He changed into something else entirely.

"Which is why your name interests me," Guy went on. "You're called Wolf, yet Sergei insists you don't inherit his problem."

"Grandfather didn't choose my name."

Guy shrugged. "In any case, Sergei fled New Orleans to save himself from exposure as a loup-garou, using the name my father gave him--Nick DePlacer--and set up as a doctor in Michigan. He still suffered from amnesia, as he had ever since he was eighteen when he woke up, naked and injured, on a beach in California. Sherman or Nick, he had no idea who he really was or why he bore the curse of shapeshifting." "Mima went with him to Michigan," Wolf put in.

"Yes, Francois told me that Sergei saved Mima--a slave girl of eight at the time--from that devil Gauthier's lust." Guy sighed. "I missed all the excitement-and here I was so sure Paris would be far more interesting than New Orleans. If only Sergei had trusted me enough to confide in me before I sailed for France. I wish he had. For many reasons."

Wolf said nothing, well aware shapeshifting was not a secret a man willingly shared. He still carried the memory of that terrible moonlit night three years ago when the posse of ranchers roamed the hills beyond the valley hunting the mysterious beast who'd abducted Mima. The beast had been a shifter, though the men who shot him never discovered that. The posse had almost killed Grandfather, too.

"I'm glad Sergei found a woman like Liisi to help him," Guy said. "When I knew him he vowed never to marry or father children."

Friend he might be, but it was none of Guy's business that having the twins was Liisi's idea and Grandfather had known nothing of them until he returned to California from Russia. Unexpectedly coming face to face with his twin sons had driven Sergei into a dangerous state of uncontrolled shifting. It had been days before he returned to himself and was reconciled to the twins and Liisi.

"I know Ivan and Arno are Sergei and Liisi's twin sons," Guy went on, "but I'm not quite clear on how the other children at Volek House are related to Sergei. You're his grandson, the son of a child he fathered on a Kamchadal woman before he fled Russia in 1848--am I right?"

Wolf nodded.

"Remarkable how Sergei recovered his memory on that Russian-bound ship so many years later," Guy added. "He told me he befriended me in the first place because I reminded him of someone--and it turned out to be his dead twin, killed in Kamchatka when he and Sergei fled for their lives."

Wolf shivered. Not from the chill of the November fog but from the memory of himself as a child among his people, the Kamchadals, caged and treated as an animal. Grandfather's rescue had come just in time--Wolf knew he couldn't have survived naked through a Siberian winter.

"Did your mother have unusual abilities?" Guy asked. Wolf hardly remembered his mother but he knew that the fact she was a shaman's daughter had enabled her to protect him from the rest of the tribe until she died. He didn't care to discuss her with Guy so he merely shook his head again.

"And you?" Guy persisted.

Wolf shrugged. "None." He wasn't a shifter like Grandfather nor a noita like Grandmother Liisi. He had no talent for seeing what was to come like Mima. He and Cousin Natasha were ordinary and he was just as glad.

"This second set of twins--the boy and girl--Sergei told me they were also his grandchildren," Guy said.

"Yes." Samara and Stefan had been sired by the dead shifter; their Miwok mother had delivered them the same night the posse shot their father. Grandfather had decided the shifter had been a son he fathered before he left California for New Orleans, a son he hadn't known existed.

Wolf said none of this.

"And then there's his grandniece, little Tanya," Guy went on. "The small baby, I understand, is your daughter?" "Druse is mine. Mine and Mima's."

Guy didn't comment, though Wolf thought he raised his left eyebrow slightly.

Why? Because I'm sixteen and Mima's thirty-nine? Wolf scowled.

"I suppose it's too early to tell about abilities the little ones might inherit," Guy said.

It was and it wasn't. In the Volek line, shapeshifters were limited to one of identical twin sons, the shifting first occurring when the boy became a man. Though he couldn't explain how he could tell, Wolf knew the shifter, in the years to come, would be Arno. So maybe he did have a sort of talent, after all--though his had yet to be proven since Ivan and Arno were only six.

The rest of the Volek children weren't identical twins so they wouldn't be shifters. Time would tell about other talents.

Guy shifted position to stare, as Wolf was, into the shifting grayness of the fog. "I feel we're safe here," he said, so softly he might have been talking to himself. "Safe. For the first time in years."

Volek House, even though built of stone to resemble a castle, was by no means a fortress like some castles Wolf had seen in Russia. Still, high adobe walls topped with iron spikes enclosed the grounds and locked iron gates shut out trespassers.

"This California valley is a perfect place," Guy went on. "Beautiful, isolated, fertile. Endless fogs seem to be its only drawback."

"They always lift."

"Unlike mine." Guy looked at Wolf. "Did Sergei tell you why I brought my family here?"

As a small child Wolf had been taught by his mother that it was impolite to look others in the eye. After she'd died and he'd been seized and penned by the men of the tribe, he'd been afraid to. But once Grandfather rescued him and took him away from Siberia, he'd noticed other people didn't behave like the Kamchadals. Still, he found it difficult to gaze directly at anyone when he spoke and so he stared over Guy's head. "I know your wife has an illness you hope my grandfather can cure."

It was Mima who'd told him. "Me," Mima had added, "I think the Kellogg woman's got something no one's going to heal. You watch yourself around that girl of theirs--like mother, like daughter."

"You might call it an illness," Guy said to Wolf, "but it's not the kind doctors can treat. Sergei is the only one in the world who can possibly find a way for Annette to control her affliction."

Control. The word echoed in Wolf's mind. Was Mrs. Kellogg a shapeshifter? Surely not, or Grandfather would have told him. Wouldn't he? Unlike Grandfather, Wolf couldn't see auras so he had no ability to identify adult shifters.

As if reading Wolf's thoughts, Guy said, "Sergei's learned to control his shifting, hasn't he? I'm happy he's survived against the odds, that he's thrived and prospered. I'm glad he's built a safe haven for himself and his family. Because of my wife's problem, the three of us aren't safe. Without his help we will never be safe. Is help too much to ask of him?"

Wolf shuffled his feet uneasily. What could he say? "Grandmother Liisi fears you bring danger," he blurted finally, immediately unhappy with what he'd revealed.

Guy shook his head. "I pray we don't. I'm sorry to distress her. Is that why she's shut herself in her tower room?"

"Not exactly. In her own way, she's trying to help." Grandmother Liisi was a noita, a Finnish wizard, a spell-maker. She was the one who'd taught Grandfather how to control his shifting. While she couldn't see into the future as well as Mima, Liisi could sense trouble before it happened. With her silver eyes seeming to probe his very thoughts, Wolf was never entirely at ease around her.

Aware that Guy had been silent for a long time, he glanced sideways and found him making bold black strokes on a white pad of paper. Moments later Guy tore off a sheet and handed it to Wolf.

Wolf stared in fascination at the sketch of himself standing at the rail. Is that really how he looked--dark and glowering? He glanced again at Guy and met his gaze by accident.

"I can see my drawing's unsettled you," Guy said. "Perhaps you don't think of yourself as dour. But do you know I've never seen you smile? You should learn how. All our lives we--you, me, everyone--teeter precariously on the brink of a dark void. What can we do about it? Nothing. Except smile because the darkness hasn't swallowed us yet. "Sketching you reminds me of when Sergei and I were young in New Orleans and how I upset him with my drawings. Though at the time I knew nothing about his shifting, I once painted him crossing the grounds at Lac Belle at night under a full moon. To my surprise and his consternation, he emerged as a sinister monster. That painting, believe it or not, turned out to be my masterpiece. Today it hangs in a Paris museum. You Californians may never have never heard of me but I confess that my name is not unknown on the Continent, even though I haven't painted in years."

He smiled sadly at Sergei. "Ah, but the young care little for museums or for the ramblings of an aging artist, n'est ce pas?"

Seeing a chance to learn more about Cecelia, Wolf gathered his courage. "How old is your daughter, sir?"

"Ah yes, Cecelia. Though she's not quite eighteen, my little girl fancies herself a woman of the world. You must try to excuse her if she snubs you, as I'm afraid she will. At present she insists that any male under the age of twenty-five is a mere boy. I fear we've spoiled her, Annette and I. We've certainly protected her, perhaps too much. Cecelia has no notion how serious her mother's affliction really is."

Guy held his hands out as though caressing the fog. "In truth I welcome la belle brume, the beautiful fog, because tonight its gray cloak will cover the valley and hide us from the full moon's silver rays. It's hard to recall how I once loved to walk in the moonlight."

Grandfather, too, avoided the full moon. "Though I control it," he'd once told Wolf, "the temptation is always there--the pulsing of blood lust, the urge to shift and run free."

"Wolf?" Natasha called from the doorway. Her voice, like everything else about her, was hesitant. She'd never fully recovered from what the soldiers had done to her in the czar's palace in St. Petersburg.

"I don't mean to interrupt." Natasha spoke in Russian--she understood some English but rarely tried to speak it. She'd also been taught the French tongue as a child but she avoided that, too.

Guy greeted her in French and she smiled nervously at him. Natasha remained afraid of all men. Except Grandfather.

"Would you come and try to quiet Samara?" Natasha asked Wolf. "She's screaming again and Uncle Sergei is nowhere to be found."

Though the twin's widowed mother, Morning Quail, lived at Volek House, she left much of the care of three-year-old Samara and Stefan to Natasha or Mima. Stefan was no more trouble than any little boy but Samara had inexplicable crying spells that disturbed everyone. At those times, Morning Quail fled, seemingly afraid of her little daughter. "I'll come," Wolf told Natasha, remembering only when he reached the door to excuse his departure to Guy.

Samara huddled in a corner of the second floor nursery, her eyes tightly shut, sobbing piteously. Tears squeezed past her closed lids, dribbling down her cheeks, and her nose ran. She was a picture of misery.

Wolf strode to the corner and hunched down beside her. He didn't gather her into his arms as his grandfather would have. Instead, without speaking, he laid his right hand gently on her head, feeling the softness of her dark hair under his palm.

After a moment the intensity of Samara's crying diminished. Without opening her eyes, she reached up with both hands and grasped Wolf's wrist, clutching hard. With the child clinging to his arm, he eased to his feet, bringing Samara to hers. Only then did he lift her into his arms.

He sensed her fear ebb as her sobs gave way to sniffles, sensed it not in his mind, more with his entire body. If he'd had to explain the feeling he wouldn't know where to start. Though not the same, the feeling reminded him of the bond between himself and Mima. Something connected him and this child who shared the Volek blood. And, young as she was, Samara understood this.

Unexpectedly, an image flashed into his mind. Huge trees. Under them, a dark and menacing figure. Waiting. Before he could make sense of it, the image faded and was gone.

Though this had never happened between them before, he knew the mind picture came from Samara, knew that she'd shown him what frightened her. But he had no idea what the image meant. It had been nightmarish, the trees more gigantic than real trees, the dark figure a monster. As he dried her tears and wiped her nose, he wondered what he should do. Questioning her wouldn't help. Once the spell was over, Samara never remembered what set off her terrified weeping. He'd share the nightmare image with Mima. He shared everything with her. Except a confession of the strange allure Cecelia had cast over him. How could he share that? After all, Mima was the mother of his child.

He cuddled Samara in his arms, murmuring soothing words. Stefan, who'd run out of the room as he always did when his twin began screaming, peeked in the nursery door, then raced inside and flung himself at Wolf, holding onto his leg. Wolf reached down with his free hand and patted the boy's head.

An instant later his hand jerked back. Shifter! his special sense warned. He'd touched a shifter!

Startled, he stared down at Stefan, who scowled up at him. "My turn," the little boy said. "You always pick her up. It's my turn!"

He'd touched the boy before. Why did he only now see what Stefan was to become? He glanced at Samara. Could she be providing a linkage? He didn't know. The only thing he was sure of was that he was right about Stefan and he had to warn Grandfather there wasn't only one Volek boy but two who'd shift when they reached manhood. Arno and Stefan. Morning Quail came and took the protesting Stefan away but Samara refused to leave the sanctuary of Wolf's arms so he carried her with him while he went in search of Mima. If Natasha hadn't been able to find Grandfather, chances were he was outside. Wolf would look for him later.

Descending the stairs, he heard music and, curious, detoured to see who was playing the piano. Pausing at the open door of the music room, he caught his breath. In time to the pulsating rhythm of her mother's playing, Cecelia, dressed in a gauzy, floating gown, twirled past him, the bright red of the dress accenting her dark beauty.

The passion of her dancing transfixed Wolf. He'd never seen anyone move so gracefully, yet with a fire that sizzled through the space between them, heating his blood. He was conscious of nothing but Cecelia. Her arms reached out in an invitation that drew him toward her.

Come to me, her dancing urged. Come to the flame and burn!