Chapter Two

M egan looked at Kenzie as if he’d just sprouted a second head. He forced himself to remain perfectly still, though he wanted to pull her against his chest and soothe her shock. He just as desperately wanted to run deep into the forest in shame. He realized his grip on her shoulders had grown fierce and stepped back, tucking his hands behind him. He could only imagine how she felt. Until he’d actually said the words out loud, even he had started to believe it had been nothing more than a two-hundred-year-long nightmare.

“Y-you can’t be Gesader,” she whispered, her face as pale as the snow. “I’ve known him since he was a cub.”

“You’ve known me , lass. You only need look at me, Megan, to realize it’s true. Are these not the eyes of your pet?” he asked, touching his face under one eye, then covering his heart with his hand. “I’m the panther cub MacBain brought forward from twelfth-century Scotland.”

She backed up a step, as if trying to distance herself from what he was saying. “But you can’t be Gesader,” she repeated in a barely audible whisper, taking another step back.

His urge to comfort her finally won out, and Kenzie moved with lightning speed to gather her in his arms. She immediately started to struggle, so he simply sat down in the snow with her on his lap. “I lay dying on the battlefield when Matt found me a thousand years ago,” he explained. “And that was the day my brother made his deal with Providence.”

She went still and stared straight ahead at Pine Lake, her curiosity apparently overriding her horror.

“Matt had no way of knowing what his demand would set into motion,” he continued. “I was the only family Matt had left and I was mortally wounded. So my brother accepted his calling as a powerful drùidh, on the condition that my life be spared.”

She remained silent and rigid in his embrace. He took a shuddering breath and continued. “Only I’d already started heading for this incredibly bright light, ye see, that offered me blessed relief.” He leaned in close, his chin brushing her hair. “I so badly wanted to experience what that light promised, but apparently Matt needed me more. Only it was too late for me to continue living as Kenzie Gregor, and I hung in limbo for what seemed like forever before I suddenly became a young colt—born of a mare right there on the battlefield.”

Megan gave a soft gasp.

“I spent the next two hundred years as various animals. I lived, died, and was reborn hundreds of times as both wild and domestic creatures.”

“Then Matt gained nothing,” she said with no emotion. “You weren’t Kenzie, you were an animal.”

“Aye, but we still recognized each other, lass. And four times a year, on the solstices and the equinoxes, I became a man again for twenty-four hours.”

“So your becoming a…an animal upset the continuum?”

He brushed a strand of her hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Matt’s deal with Providence was in blatant disregard for my own free will, Megan. I was never given the chance to decide if I would prefer death or life as an animal.”

She turned her head to look up to him. “What would you have chosen?”

“Death. Which I finally did after two centuries, when I asked Matt to please find a way to allow me to die one last time, preferably as a man. He realized he needed help to undo his wrong, and began devising a way to meet your sister. He lured Robbie MacBain back to twelfth-century Scotland to bring the taproot from his tree of life, and me, forward to this time.”

“Why did he need Winter’s help, if he’s such a powerful drùidh?”

“Besides being a drùidh, Matt is also a guardian, and guardians can’t actually interfere in our lives. They can only guard us from the magic.”

“He interfered in yours!”

“Aye, he did. And he so upset the continuum, we all nearly paid the price for it.” He squeezed her gently. “But thanks to your wise and very stubborn sister, everything has worked out. I am myself again, I shall die a natural death one final time, and together with Providence and a bit of help from Talking Tom, Matt and Winter now have an even more powerful tree of life.”

Megan suddenly scrambled off his lap, her face flushed as she turned on him. “Winter! She’s known all along!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried about Gesader this week, and she couldn’t even tell me you were him!”

Just as quickly as her anger had come, her face paled again. “I…I’ve been crying all over you for the last four months,” she whispered. She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’ve been sleeping in my bed!”

Kenzie stood up, worried she’d back off the edge of the rise. “As a panther, Megan,” he said, moving toward her. “Not as a man.”

“I told you my deepest, darkest secrets.” She took another step back. “I—”

He lunged, reaching for her at the exact moment she realized her peril. But instead of grabbing him for support, Megan used his momentum to knock him off balance. She gave him a surprisingly forceful push in the chest and bolted away.

Kenzie fell over the rise instead, landing in a snowdrift as deep as he was tall. “Megan!” he shouted. “Don’t run, lass!”

She peered over the edge, saw that he hadn’t fallen far but was stuck, then disappeared.

“Megan!”

She didn’t return.

“Goose!” Kenzie called out, throwing his body back and forth to free himself from the snowdrift.

The horse’s head appeared over the edge of the rise, his hooves knocking more snow loose. “I’ll make my own way back. Go catch up with your mistress and take her home.”

The horse disappeared, and Kenzie gave a snort. So Matt had figured right: he really could talk to animals.

Jack surveyed the small kitchen of the Pine Lake Bakery & Bistro. “What’s that smell?” he asked the two people staring at him, apparently waiting for him to say something police-chief-like.

“I noticed it, too, the moment I stepped inside this morning,” Marge Wimple said. The petite, gray-haired bakery owner wrinkled her nose. “It smells sour.”

“Like rotting vegetation or something, only laced with sugar,” Simon Pratt added.

“You go arrest that brat Tommy Cleary this minute,” Marge said. “Everyone knows he’s their ringleader, and the Cleary place sits right next to a bog. That’s where this smell comes from.” She pointed to a brown spot on the floor. “Where else you gonna find mud in the middle of the winter?” She then pointed her finger at Jack. “You put the fear of God in Tommy, and make him tell you who his accomplices are. Just look at what they did to my shop!” Her tearful gaze moved over the mess. “It’ll take me a week to clean this place, and another week to restock all my supplies. That’s two weeks right out of the middle of my busiest season.”

Jack bent down and touched one of the brown spots. “I need a bit more than the fact that Tommy Cleary lives next to a bog to bring him in for questioning.” He sniffed the mud. “This is definitely out of a swamp, but that’s not the smell lingering in the air.” He spotted a slimy substance on the edge of the smashed doughnut display case and walked over to sniff it. “It’s coming from here,” he said, moving aside and motioning for Simon to take a whiff.

“Whew!” Simon said, jerking upright. “That’s rank. What is it?”

“The lab will have to tell us that.”

“What lab?” Simon asked.

Jack frowned at his deputy. “The state has a forensics lab we can use, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Simon rushed over to his evidence kit. “I’ll have Ethel give them a call to find out how we send them stuff.”

“It’s that Cleary boy and his brothers, I tell you,” Marge said. “Joan Cleary lets those boys run loose like a bunch of heathens. Everyone knows it was them who stole my sign last month, and took Rose Brewer’s moose antlers off the front of her store. We didn’t get our stuff back for a entire week. A fisherman found them hanging on his ice shanty two miles out on the lake.”

Marge stalked up to Jack. “We hired you to stop this foolishness, but it’s only getting worse.” She raised her finger again, clearly intending to poke him in the chest, but when her eyes met his she changed her mind. “What are you going to do about this, Chief Stone?”

“Deputy Pratt and I are going to fully investigate your break-in, Mrs. Wimple. We’ll gather fingerprints and evidence, take a look around outside, and talk to people in the hopes that somebody saw something. You can start cleaning up once we give you the okay, which should be sometime tomorrow morning.” He gave her what he hoped was a police-chief-like smile. “We’ll keep you apprised of what’s happening. Thank you for being so cooperative, Mrs. Wimple,” he finished, turning toward the back door of the bakery.

He stopped beside Simon, who was scraping some of the mud into a plastic bag. “Take some pictures with that fancy new digital camera.” He nodded toward the large evidence kit that would make one heck of a fishing tackle box. “Get some shots in here, then take some pictures of the grounds outside and the front and back of the store.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

“My name is Jack,” he told Simon for the umpteenth time. “White men stopped calling us chief several decades ago.”

Simon’s eyes widened. “Y-you’re an Indian?” he sputtered, his face turning a dull red.

“Half Canadian Cree,” Jack said. “So stop with the chief thing, will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack gave a snort and walked outside, ducking under the crime scene tape before putting on his sunglasses. He stopped in the middle of the lane that ran between the stores and Pine Lake, and scanned the downtown business district. A lot of money had gone into the storefronts on the street side, but the backs of the buildings were even more impressive. No alley full of dumpsters and recycling bins here. The stores came within fifty yards of the shoreline, and the town had capitalized on that, building a park with benches, landscape trees, and strategically placed logging artifacts. The Pine Lake Bakery & Bistro was sided by a craft supply store, an art gallery, then an outfitter store, and finally a restaurant with huge windows facing the lake.

“Find out if that railing was already busted or if that break is new,” Jack told Simon when the deputy came outside with his camera. “Is the discoloring on the doorjamb more of that slime?”

Simon leaned in close to look, then immediately jerked back. “It’s the same stuff, all right.”

“Take a photo of it,” Jack instructed, turning to scan the snow. “What do you make of this?”

Simon walked up beside him and squinted at where Jack was pointing. “Those are tracks.”

“But what kind of tracks?” Jack asked, carefully stepping over the snowbank beside them, then following the tracks into the otherwise pristine layer of snow as he scanned the ground in a fifty-foot circle. “They simply begin here all of a sudden,” he said, pointing. “They come out of nowhere, like something flew in, landed here, and then walked to the bakery. Get a shot of this, too,” he said, hunching down over one of the holes. “I can’t make out the shape because something was dragged over the print.”

Simon snapped several pictures, then continued photographing the path the tracks made. “They’re too large to be from a bird. One of those para-skiing kites maybe?” he asked as he worked. “Or an ultralight airplane? A bunch of home-built ultralights fly around the lake on the weekends.”

“Any in the Cleary family?” Jack asked, walking toward the frozen shoreline.

“Nope. The Clearys can barely manage to buy food. A small plane would have made a noise. Maybe someone heard something.”

Jack shook his head. “There’s no tracks where it took off again. Whoever came in here walked away.”

“Or used Main Street as a runway.”

Jack thought about that. “A hang glider or large kite makes more sense than a plane, even a small one. And dragging a glider might have made those tracks.” He shook his head again. “But that’s a pretty unusual way to arrive to a burglary. Maybe the tracks don’t have anything to do with our break-in.”

“But they head directly to the bakery,” Simon pointed out.

“None of the other stores were broken into?”

“Nope. I checked the shops on both sides of the street. Everything is just as the owners left it last night.”

Jack looked out at the busy lake dotted with tiny islands, zooming snowmobiles, ice shanties, and even a few pickups with plows on them. Hell, it was busier than Main Street out there. He looked back at the bakery. So, what had caused a bunch of bored teenagers to go from pulling a few harmless pranks to breaking and entering?

And what in hell had made those tracks?