She shrugged. "I've never wanted a man in the way you mean."

"When I have more time, I'll do my best to change your mind."

"I didn't refuse, you know."

Mere accommodation wouldn't satisfy him. Nor did he care that she'd likely had men before him--she'd as good as said she cared for none of them. How else would a woman alone survive in such desperate times? What he needed from her was eager response, a passion that drove her as urgently as it did him. He knew he wouldn't get it. Not now. She'd need to be courted.

"I don't just want you," he told her. "I meant what I said--I love you. As soon as I can, I'll be back for you, Griselda, and we'll go to Paris. Have you ever been there?" "Possibly."

"Possibly you've been to Paris or possibly you'll go there with me?"

She bent and kissed him gently and quickly on the lips. "Ivan Volek, you are a sweet man. I can't think of anyone I'd rather see Paris with."

In early November, near the Cotes-De-Meuse, in an evening hell of whining shells lit by the arcing flight of tracer bullets, Arno and another medic took on a mercy mission to retrieve a wounded poilu lying in the no-man's land between trenches. They were cutting through barbed wire when a burst of machine gun fire sent them diving onto their bellies--too late for Luke, his companion.

Luke, his jugular and carotid severed, fell on top of Arno, drenching him with blood. While the tac-tac-tac of the machine gun persisted, Arno didn't dare to move. Luke's blood spurted over his body and face until he could taste its warm saltiness on his tongue.

Moments later he felt his gut wrench, something that hadn't happened to him in years. But he damn well knew what it meant. The taste of blood had triggered his long-buried urge to shift.

His scalp tightened with dread. As a man he had little enough chance to survive in the front lines but as a beast he'd have no chance. One sight of the beast and both sides would try their damnedest to kill him. He'd never survive the onslaught of bullets.

With Luke's body still covering him for protection, Arno wriggled forward on his stomach, searching desperately for a trench, feeling the dead man jerk as bullets slammed into the body. Just as he thought it was hopeless, he all but fell into a hole. Heaving Luke's body from his back, he slithered into the one-man dugout, thankful the soldier who'd scooped away the dirt had left.

Arno saw with dismay that his fingernails had lengthened and thickened to talons. He tore open his shirt and grabbed the amulet he wore around his neck along with his identification tag, the talons scratching his increasingly hairy chest. Clutching the flattened steel oval with its incised rune, Elhaz, symbolizing a splayed hand, Arno intoned the charm against changing. Over and over he mumbled the powerful words, fighting the beast's fierce urge to be free. Since his uniform was blood-soaked, the feel, taste and scent of blood clogged the dugout, fueling the blood lust Arno had once thought he'd never experience again.

Hold the rune in your mind as well as your hand, his mother had told him when she taught him how to thwart the beast within. Make Elhaz a part of you.

Closing his eyes, Arno evoked the shape of the rune, struggling to etch it into his mind as indelibly as it was incised in the steel. Elhaz, the symbol of protection, enabling the possessor to face temptation without succumbing. In addition to Elhaz, locked within the steel was a fragment of the noita charm that his shifter father had worn.

His mother, his father and Elhaz protected him. He would not change. He refused to change. He was a man, not a beast. A man!

Overhead, gun flashes lit up the sky, above their boom came the throb of the night bombers. War raged around him and within him.

The changing slowed, stopped. But, ominously, did not reverse. His nails were still talons, his teeth fangs. Keeping the runic image bright in his mind, Arno continued to chant. As the hours passed, the beast slowly retreated. But if Arno faltered, the beast advanced until he fancied he breathed in its hot and fetid breath.

As night crawled on, the fear and wonder of his first shifting haunted Arno. He hadn't fought the change then, he'd welcomed it. Gloried in it. Why fight the beast now? Visions of what he'd seen in the past year clotted in his mind--ruined villages, dead animals, gutted fields and blackened, broken trees. And the men, oh God, the broken men. Some in bloody fragments, some dead and bloated, some so maimed--with blood and guts and brains spilling out--that they'd be better off dead. Men did this to men. Why, then, consider the beast evil?

He growled, deep in his throat.

No! He must not change. If this was no-man's-land, it was that much more so for the beast. To shift was to die. Hastily, Arno began the chant again, trying to feel each word as he spoke it, concentrating on the meaning behind the words blotting everything else from his mind: By the heart of my father, whose blood created me, by the breasts of my mother, whose milk nurtured me, by the Holy Three, who know my soul, I belong to the human race. I am a man...

At dawn, in a driving rain, Arno climbed warily from the muddy dugout where he'd spent the worst night of his life. Crouching, he broke into a stumbling run toward the safety of the French lines.

The supervisor at the advanced dressing station goggled at him when he dragged in. "We gave you up for dead." "Luke's dead." Arno could scarcely get the words out. "I found a hole to hide in."

The supervisor looked long and critically at Arno as he stood dripping rainwater mixed with Luke's blood onto the wooden floor. "You've consistently refused leave so I'm not recommending it now," he said. "I'm ordering you to take two weeks. In Paris."

Exhausted, physically and mentally battered, Arno only vaguely experienced the trip west to Paris. It wasn't until he climbed into a Paris cab and found himself unable to give an address that he realized how fatigued he was. "Drive until I make up my mind," he told the man.

He'd been to Paris when he first arrived in France but he didn't recognize anything he saw until he caught a glimpse from the cab window of the statues in the Jardin des Tuileries. He then recalled the garden was near The Ritz Hotel and that triggered the memory of the pact he'd made with Ivan before they left California.

If one of us gets leave, he'll go to Paris and deposit a note at the the Ritz desk for the other.

"Place Vendome, driver, " Arno ordered. "The Ritz."

The hotel was full; no rooms available. When Arno gave his name, though, the clerk handed him an envelope, telling him it had been left for monsieur this very morning.

Tearing open the envelope, Arno pulled out the paper inside, his fingers clumsy with eagerness. It seemed like ten years since he'd last seen his twin. If this damn war ever ended they planned to travel to Russia together, in a search for the Volek past. But for now just being with Ivan was enough, was what he needed.

"I'm in Room 51 until Sunday, November 10," Ivan wrote. Arno smiled for the first time in weeks as he asked the clerk to please ring Room 51.

There was no answer. The clerk, who'd been casting increasingly perplexed glances at Arno, said, "Does monsieur perhaps have a twin?" At Arno's nod, the clerk added, "I believe I observed monsieur's brother entering our dining room." He gestured.

Arno strode into the dining room and almost immediately spotted Ivan leaning across a table. Arno's gaze shifted to his brother's companion and he held. God, what a stunning woman! Her tan skin stood in vivid contrast to the brilliant blue suit she wore and her long dark hair rippled down her back in defiance of fashion.

As if sensing his intent stare, she turned and looked at him with eyes as blue as her dress. A frisson of excitement rippled through him. Whoever she was, he wanted her. Had to have her. Meant to have her no matter who she belonged to. Only then did he remember she was with the person he loved most in the world. His twin.

Chapter 18.

Wolf shifted the knapsack on his back as they threaded through the pines. He'd packed it with no more camping supplies than usual but it felt heavier than it should and, despite the cool December breeze, sweat ran down his face. Leo, directly behind him, said, "Quincy and I can set the pace for awhile, if you like."

They think I'm getting old, Wolf told himself. Damn it, I may be one-eyed but I'm as good a man as ever. "Thanks, but you two set a mean pace. We're not soldiers charging the enemy, you know."

"Too bad the war ended before we had our chance to get into it," Quincy grumbled.

In September, Leo and Quincy, almost twenty, had registered for the draft. Luckily they hadn't been called before the November Armistice. Even though Quincy had never shifted, Wolf dreaded to think what might have happened if he'd been drafted.

"If the war is over, why doesn't Hawk come home?" Leo asked. "And Arno and Ivan?"

"It takes time to ship troops across the Atlantic." "I'll bet Hawk wishes he could fly across," Quincy put in.

Wolf nodded. No doubt Hawk would try something like that if he had the chance. He was proud of his son--a war hero, a flying ace like Rickenbacker.

The uncertainty of whether or not they'd be drafted had kept Leo and Quincy undecided about going to the university. Or, to be exact, the draft coupled with Quincy's disinterest in further schooling. Quincy didn't seem to have much interest in anything except hunting and fishing. And where Quincy led, Leo followed.

This camping trip was long overdue. It was too late in the season to venture into the high mountains but he didn't expect snow in the foothills where they'd be camping. Wolf planned to swing by the Miwok village on the way home. He liked to keep in touch with his Miwok friends and the twins had been there often enough with Hawk and with him so they felt at ease with the Indians.

Not that they were entirely accepted by the villagers, mainly because the Miwoks regarded twins as half-finished, believing they shared one spirit between two bodies. "Sometimes the spirit lives in one, sometimes in the other," old Bear Claw, the medicine man, had explained. "When a man's body is empty, without a spirit, evil seeks to enter. When this happens the man becomes a beast and must be killed."

Shaken by Bear Claw's words, Wolf hadn't agreed or disagreed. He'd said nothing. How could he when he knew Quincy was a shifter?

"Looks like rain later," Leo said, bringing Wolf back to the present. "We may have to build a brush shelter."

Wolf remembered the night he and Muir and Teddy Roosevelt had camped in Yosemite and how snow had covered their blankets during the night, delighting Roosevelt. Teddy had died in January, Muir four years before, on Christmas Eve. Wolf shook his head. It was hard to believe men as full of life as Muir and Roosevelt were gone.

"We can make a brush lean-to," he told the twins, "or we can change our plans, push on to the Miwok village, stay there tonight and head into the hills tomorrow."

"I vote for the lean-to," Quincy said. Wolf nodded even even before Leo chimed in to agree.

The clouds lowered until in mid-afternoon the sky grew dark and heavy with moisture. Wolf had begun to scout for a good campsite when Quincy said, "Look!" and pointed.

Wolf stared in dismay at the ancient, rotting, plank cabin in a small clearing overgrown with brush and saplings. A chill ran along his spine. For years he'd avoided taking the boys past this place but lately he'd all but forgotten about Stefan's hidey-hole.

"There's no door but the roof doesn't look too bad," Quincy said. "Why don't we spend the night here?"

Before Wolf could say a word, Quincy trotted off to examine the cabin.

Wolf hurried after him. "Wait!" he called. Quincy paid no attention.

"Something wrong with the place?" Leo asked, loping alongside Wolf.

"Yes." Wolf wanted no part of that cabin.

"Hey, Quince! Wait for me," Leo shouted, speeding up. Before either of them reached him, Quincy ducked inside the cabin. A moment later he yelled something incoherent and rushed back out, brushing furiously at the sides of his head. "It bit me!" he cried. "A goddamn bat bit my ear."

Leo noticed Wolf's shudder and shot him a puzzled glance before he turned his attention to his twin's injured ear.

I should have kept Quincy out of that damned place, Wolf told himself. He remembered Muir telling him that he suspected bats, like mad dogs, could carry hydrophobia and infect humans with a bite.

"He got bit, all right," Leo said. "I can see the fang marks.""You're sure it was a bat?" Wolf asked."Hell, there must've been a dozen of the ugly little buggers hanging upside down off a rafter," Quincy said. "A couple of them flew at me and one got me. Hurts like the devil."

As Wolf painted the bite with tincture of iodine from the first aid kit, a sense of foreboding as dark as the clouds overhead settled onto him. From bitter experience he knew better than to dismiss the feeling. Thank God he'd ignored his sons' pleas to come along on this trip, promising them a later camp-out. At least Nicholas and Reynolds were safe at Volek House with their mother.

"We'll go on to the Miwok village," he said. When neither twin objected, he wondered if they, too, felt uneasy. The rain began before they reached the village.

Sporadic at first, it soon settled into a steady downpour that soaked them through by the time they saw the first of the round bark and brush dwellings of the Miwoks.

Bear Claw welcomed them into his lodge. "I dreamed you would visit," he told Wolf as the three peeled off their outer garments and wrapped themselves in blankets provided by Bear Claw's aged wife.

Wolf wasn't surprised for he knew Bear Claw was a true dreamer, as Indian medicine men often were. He emptied his pack and offered the old man the gifts he'd brought--canned fish, tobacco, and coffee.

Later that night, after they'd eaten and the twins had fallen asleep, Bear Claw expanded on his dream.

"I saw suffering in your stone dwelling," he said. "I saw these half-souls who lie sleeping in my lodge. I saw the disease of one become the disease of the other until they were both afflicted. I saw the elder will never be cured. I saw other twins of your blood riven apart. And you, my friend--" Bear Claw paused, his dark eyes sad. "You I saw with your head bowed in mourning for one who was not there." Wolf sat in silence, pondering Bear Claw's gloomy foreseeing. "Can you tell me the name of the one who wasn't there?" he asked at last.

"I cannot."Or would not."Let us smoke and then we'll speak of other matters," Bear Claw said.After the pipe had been used and put away, Wolf told the old man about the bats in the deserted cabin and how one had bitten Quincy. He'd barely finished when Bear Claw's wife shuffled over to stand beside her husband. "That one--" she pointed, "he burns with fever." Quincy. Wolf rose and edged around the fire to kneel beside him and found Quincy's forehead was hot, confirming the old woman's words. Quincy half-opened his eyes. "Hurts to breathe," he muttered.

The bat bite? Wolf asked himself. Did hydrophobia develop this quickly? He glanced at Bear Claw and the wise dark eyes met his gravely.

By morning Quincy was delirious, thrashing and moaning, with a hacking cough. Eyes glazed with fever, he recognized no one, fighting off Wolf when he tried to coax him to drink Bear Claw's fever potion.

"Let me try," Leo insisted, taking the metal cup from Wolf.

He bent over his brother. "It's me, Quince," he said softly, putting one hand behind his twin's head and holding the cup to his lips with the other. "It's Leo. Come on, drink up."

Quincy flung out his arm, knocking the cup from Leo's hand. At the same time, he turned his head and sunk his teeth into his brother's forearm.

Leo yelled in pain, jerked away, and sprang to his feet, cursing. Blood ran down his arm and dripped onto the earthen floor of the lodge. "What's the matter with him?" Leo demanded, tears in his eyes.

Wolf, horrified, couldn't answer. Mad dogs bit as Quincy had done.

Bear Claw, who'd been sitting across the fire from Quincy, rose slowly. "With no spirit inside him," he said, "a man behaves like an animal. Sick animals turn on those who try to help them. You--" he pointed at Leo--"lie beside your twin but do not touch him in any way."

Leo glanced at Wolf who nodded, aware Bear Claw planned to coax what he believed was the one spirit the twins shared from Leo's body into Quincy's. He didn't hold to this Miwok belief but said nothing, well aware he didn't know everything. If Bear Claw's medicine-making didn't help, it could do no harm.

Fetching his blanket, Leo stretched out on the floor next to his brother. Bear Claw hobbled to the far end of the lodge and took down a fur and feather headdress, a deerskin pouch and a small drum. He donned the headdress and seated himself beside Leo.

"Close your eyes and don't move," he ordered as he opened the pouch.

Wolf watched as the chanting Bear Claw sprinkled dried leaves onto Leo's chest, then threw others into the fire. As a blinding, pungent smoke arose, the medicine man began beating the drum. His eyes stinging from the smoke, Wolf felt the rhythmic beats throb through him, reminding him of shadow-holes that led to other worlds and he wondered if Bear Claw, in his way, traveled elsewhere.

When at last the smoke dispersed, the drum beats slowed and stopped. Leo and Quincy both lay motionless. With a bone spoon, Bear Claw stirred a liquid in the metal cup. He rose and crouched at Quincy's head. With his thumb, he pushed down on the sick man's chin, forcing his mouth open. Little by little, he drizzled the potion into Quincy's mouth until the cup was empty.

Neither Leo nor Quincy roused for some time. Leo woke first, yawning. He sat up, glanced at Quincy, then got to his feet and walked to where Wolf sat.

"Is Quince better?" Leo asked.

Wolf replied cautiously, "He's no worse. Let's see your arm--I'll put some iodine on that bite."

When Quincy finally opened his eyes, he gazed blearily around the lodge. "I feel like hell," he said hoarsely. "All my bones ache, my throat's sore, my chest hurts." "Sounds like what I had three weeks ago," Leo said, relief in his voice. "Druse said it was influenza."

Flu? Not hydrophobia? There'd been an epidemic of influenza in the country. Wolf decided Leo might well be right. Thank God.

Four days later Quincy was well enough to begin the hike back home, the bat's bite on his ear no longer visible. But Leo's arm, though the bite hadn't become purulent, still bore the circular imprint of Quincy's teeth. Though the mark wasn't the same, Wolf was unpleasantly reminded of the pentagram a shifter saw on his victim's palm.

As Ivan stopped his Mercer Runabout at the gates of Volek House, he saw his mother standing just inside the iron bars, the setting sun touching her silver hair with crimson. Despite his bitterness, he couldn't help being glad she'd come to meet him. She--and possibly Wolf, whose emotions were difficult to probe--was the only living person who didn't favor Arno. Liisi treated him exactly the same as she did his twin.

The gates swung open and Ivan drove the car through, stopped and jumped out to hug his mother.

"I knew you'd be here today," she said. "Just you." Ivan smiled wryly. If she was ever wrong, he'd never found her out. He closed and locked the gates, then helped her into the car to drive with him to the house.

"I still prefer horses," she said tartly. Almost immediately she reached over and laid a hand on his. "We'll talk later, when there'll be no interruptions."

Ivan didn't reply, his heart sinking. She already knew something was wrong and she wouldn't rest until she had the truth from him.

He managed to get through the ritual of greeting everyone--thank God the twins and Wolf were on a camping trip, cutting the number down--and made a pretense of eating dinner. As the coffee was served, he thought longingly of escape--but his escape had been to come home and now there was no place else to go.

When his mother rose from the table, he gritted his teeth and got up, too.

"Ivan and I will be in the study," Liisi said to the others.