Cheri Scotch - Voodoo Moon 2 - The Werewolf's Touch

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THE WEREWOLF'S TOUCH
The Voodoo Moon Book 2
By
Cheri Scotch
Contents
PART ONE - Acquainted With Grief
Chapter One
Chapter Two
PART TWO - The Mark of the Beast
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART THREE
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
PART FOUR
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
PART FIVE
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
HORROR AND DARK FANTASY
Published by ibooks, inc.:
THE VOODOO MOON TRILOGY
by Cheri Scotch
The Werewolf's Kiss
The Werewolf's Touch
The Werewolf's Sin
[coming January 2004]
The Ultimate Halloween
Marvin Kaye, Editor
The Ultimate Dracula
The Ultimate Frankenstein
The Ultimate Dragon
The Ultimate Alien
Byron Preiss, Editor
THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Book 1: Shades of Night, Falling
by John J. Miller
Book 2: A Gathering of Darkness
by Russell Davis
Psycho • Psycho II
by Robert Bloch
A Publication of ibooks, inc.
Copyright © 1993 by Cheri Scotch
An ibooks, inc. Book
Distributed by Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ibooks, inc.
West 25th Street
New York, NY
The ibooks World Wide Web Site Address is:
http://www.ibooks.net
ISBN 0-7434-7521-6
First ibooks, inc. printing October 2003
Cover design by Mike Thomas
Printed in the U.S.A.
To my worst nightmares and my most treasured dreams: those who transformed me, healed me, forced
me through the fire so that I might be changed, and made me face my most primal fears so that I could be
free of fear. To my two Dark Goddesses.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my mother, both fathers, and my two brothers: one here and one in the Land of Summer.
To Donna Norton Key, Father George Moore Acker, and Ray Garton for teaching me about the loving,
comforting aspects of Christianity (although there's still no written apology from Vatican City for the
Inquisition).
As always, to the Temple of Diana and our patron deities and guardian spirits.
And to the loups-garous of Bayou Goula, still keeping the faith. Laissez les bon temps rouler, and have
a dance for me at the spring reunion.
PART
ONE
Acquainted With Grief
Chapter One
I close my eyes and wait for the pain, not wanting to open them and catch sight of the moon. That's
something I miss terribly: looking at the moon. I used to think it was the most beautiful thing, floating there
placidly, glossed with silver or sometimes tinted with a mystic amber.
I was an imaginative kid with a classical education, and I'd read all about the Moon Goddess before I
was ten. I used to imagine that the color indicated the Goddess's mood.
Yes, well. I know it makes me sound like a weird little boy, but I wasn't. On the contrary, I was a
straight-arrow kid from a conservative family, and those nighttime forays into imagination made my life
more interesting.
The dark never held the terrors for me that it did for other children. Even as a very young child, I loved
the night, loved the magical darkness in which all things were possible and all dreams were made real.
After I had been tucked into bed and the light put out, I'd creep quietly toward the window to look into
the sky and feel that crisp air on my face, air that seemed more invigorating without the sunlight in it.
I was convinced that there were wonderful secrets to be mastered, daring deeds to be done. I was sure
that the world changed under moonlight, the mundane daylight shapes becoming alive and fantastic.
Moonlight made my imagination wander, bewitched me into strange, heroic fancies.
People changed under the moon. They became more mysterious, stronger, more beautiful.
God, how naive I was! Though time has proven me right, I suppose. Still, being right is no comfort.
Now, even on my normal nights, I can't bear to look at the moon, as if a beloved Judas has betrayed me
with a silvery kiss. It seduced me once, and it tortures me now.
But I will concede that not every werewolf feels this way. There are other werewolves in
Louisiana—they're called loups-garous here—but none of them, so far as I can tell, lives under a curse.
They don't see it as a curse at all, but a rare gift, and they've developed a complicated system of ethics
for themselves.
I've never been able to accept that.
Looking at the moon, at the source of his strength, is supposed to be something a werewolf loves, even
craves. But I can't do it. I go out on the bayou, I wait for the pain, and I never look up. I don't need to;
my body tells me what's happening in the sky.
The moon. Ah, yes, I can feel her. There she is, my deceitful lover, hanging there as virginal as the
Goddess herself, calling me again. And I'll go, damn her, I'll go… I'll do all the things she asks and more
besides, until my bruised body aches with exhaustion and my soul shrivels with guilt.
And when the sun rises, then what? What am I supposed to do? Go back to my church and say a Mass
for the dead? Make my confession and blurt out my own perverted passion as the blood of Christ spills
from my shaking hands?
I was sitting in the pastor's study last night, trying to write my sermon as the choir rehearsed in the
sanctuary, when the poignant strains of Handel distracted me. A contralto, her lush voice wrought with
equal parts of artistry and emotion, sang in the dark tones of a bronze bell,
He was despised,
rejected of men,
a Man of Sorrows
and acquainted with grief.
And, setting aside my pen and prayer book, I gave in to a cleansing purge of self-pity.
If my congregation knew, I wonder what they'd do. Stone me? Burn me at the stake? Blast me with
silver bullets?
But my tragedy is that I can't stop being a priest, it's all that holds me together. And I keep thinking that it
will save me, in the end, that faith will give me a way out of this when everything else has failed.
So when the moon is finished with me for tonight and I stagger home, blinded by blood, I'll begin the
story of the Marley werewolves, a nasty little tale of a good family gone bad. There's just so much of it:
research papers, journals, letters, personal memories—amazing that with all this documentation, so little
about the Marley curse was known. No one wanted to talk about it, you see? It was like some mad aunt
locked in the attic. Only one in every generation of Marleys knew anything about it at all, and they
certainly weren't going to tell. Then there are the things I found out for myself, through the most profound
kind of pain. I want to try and make sense of it, put all the pieces here on the paper and fit them together
so that I can see some kind of pattern, find some common pathway that leads this whole nightmare to an
end.
This is for the next loup-garou to read in case I don't make it, to give him a place to start where I left off.
I want him—or her—to know exactly what's happening to him and why, to know what's been tried and
hasn't worked, perhaps to take a perverse comfort in the fact that he's not the first. Hell, he isn't even
alone. I want him to understand what it is to be a child of God with a broken heart, and I want to give
him the opportunity, in some small manner, to salvage his own soul.
—Andrew Marley New Orleans
Chapter Two
Beauty and the Beast
Georgiana Marley von Eisenbach, 1910
It was often said that Stephen Marley had the face of a suffering medieval saint and the soul of a grasping
black spider. One would have thought that something dreadful had happened to him, some tragedy so
deep that it left a physical mark. Certain devastating events did change him, but those came later. In his
early thirties, however, the sharp planes of his face and his turquoise eyes set in the frame of his
prematurely gray hair and short, silvery beard gave him a look of aesthetic monkishness. But his instincts
in business were unfailingly predatory.
Gentlemen doing business with Stephen for the first time invariably mistook his distracted, unworldly
attitude for weakness. They treated him with condescension right up to the moment he plunged his knife
into their hearts and added their businesses to his own. More experienced men could have told them
some grim tales, but in the presence of Stephen's quiet demeanor, they would never have believed them.
Stephen was an unerring observer. He missed nothing, and he always calculated the exact moment to
strike with a swift ferocity that seemed demonic. He had arrived in New Orleans with nothing. A year
later he had acquired his first ship. Four years later he was master of his own fleet, and the Marley Lines
were famous all up and down the lucrative Mississippi routes.
But if he was ramrod steel in business, he was jelly in the hands of his wife and children. He had waited
late to marry, being occupied with building his fortune, and he missed the comforts of a family. Now that
he had them, he was going to enjoy his four children to the fullest. If they were happy, he was happy.
And now Georgiana, his oldest child, was getting married and there wasn't a young man in New Orleans
who wasn't desolate about it.
It wasn't that Georgiana was blindingly beautiful. Although she had inherited her father's startling turquoise
eyes, she was pretty but not extraordinary. In fact, nobody could quite put his finger on what it was that
made people love Georgiana. Her father came closest to it when he remarked, "Geo has spirit." It was
that energy, that unashamed joy of living, that attracted people to her, and in the gathering darkness that
would soon be a devastating world war, they moved closer to Georgiana, as if her levelheaded optimism
could recharge their lagging spirits. To Georgiana, the mere act of day-to-day living was a wonder. She
always seemed to be having a good time, even doing the simplest things.
It was no accident that she was having twelve bridesmaids. She privately told her mother that she thought
twelve was way too showy, but she just couldn't cut the list down: the girls were all close friends of hers.
Georgiana was a prime example of the kind of girl the South turns out so well, the southern princess. So
nobody was really surprised when Geo decided to marry an authentic prince.
She had met him when she and two other girls had taken the grand tour after graduation. The girls had
been strictly chaperoned against just that sort of thing, but Geo, never shy about talking to strangers, had
fallen into conversation with the young man at the opera in Vienna. The prince's father had done quite a
bit of shipping on the Marley Lines over the years and knew Stephen quite well. Stephen took the news
of the engagement as well as could be expected for an overprotective father.
Stephen and Georgiana stood now in the foyer of St. Louis Cathedral, surrounded by a dozen young girls
in floating blue silk, Stephen a fidgeting wreck, and Georgiana still as a clear harbor on a quiet afternoon.
She seemed weightless as air to Stephen, buoyed by clouds of white satin, pearls, and pink roses, trailing
a fountain of lace behind her. She looked as perfect as he had ever seen her, and so young as to break
his heart.
She glanced through the doors, then back at her father, and caught the stricken look in his eyes.
"Papa, don't be so upset!" she said with a laugh. "It's only marriage!"
"And I thought I looked properly happy."
"You look perfectly ghastly. In fact, you look every bit as bad as Kiril." She peeked through the doors to
glance at her prince, just emerging shakily from the side door with his best man, Georgiana's
eighteen-year-old brother, Robert. "You don't think he'll be this nervous tonight, do you? He doesn't
look like he'll survive the wedding night."
Six of the bridesmaids had already started down the aisle. The six remaining gave shocked little giggles.
Trust Georgiana to say something daring at a time like this.
"Good God, Geo!" Stephen said, "I thought I'd raised you with more modesty than that!"
She smiled wickedly. "I'm going to give you all those grandchildren you're forever talking about."
"I don't want to think about it."
The last bridesmaid stepped through the doors.
"Papa!" Geo said in a voice that was suddenly small and fearful. "Kiss me before we go."
Stephen felt his eyes burn as he did.
"I love you, Papa. Try not to miss me."
"Not miss you! You're my firstborn, Geo. I don't even know how to begin to tell you what that means."
"I guess I'll find out for myself. I'm going to be a wife and mother, Papa! It's all I ever wanted. My life is
beginning now."
Stephen knew that was true. Georgiana had never wanted anything other than a husband and children,
unlike her younger sister Melissa, who—God help us all!—was talking about women's suffrage and
making every indication that she was going to help her two brothers run the Marley Lines someday,
instead of getting respectably married. Stephen had no doubt at all that Melissa would do it too, and
embarrassingly well.
"Well, I guess it's our turn, Papa," Geo said. Her sudden nervousness was gone and with it every trace of
her childhood. To Stephen, she looked already married; it was as if he could see his daughter as she
would be, a confident wife, a superb mother; still his child, of course, but someone else as well.
Stephen brought his daughter down the aisle of the cathedral and entrusted her into the care of another
man. Oddly enough, he felt much happier about it than he thought he would.
Georgiana and Kiril were spending their wedding night at the Marley summer house on Lake
Ponchartrain.
At two in the morning, Stephen's wife, Cyrie, was awakened by a single, strangled word spoken in the
darkness. The voice was so eerie that Cyrie clutched her pillow in sudden fright. Then she saw Stephen
sitting up next to her, shaking, his nightclothes soaked with sweat.
"Stephen?" Cyrie asked. "Who is Blanche?"
His head jerked and his eyes widened in terror. "Where did you hear that name?"
"You said it in your sleep. It was the strangest sound I ever heard. You said 'Blanche' in this eerie voice."
Stephen tried to remember if he had been having another nightmare: nothing else had ever produced this
kind of terror. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead and rested his head on his knees. Blanche, he
thought, after all these years, she still comes after me. Just when I think I've forgotten, she sends another
nightmare.
Cyrie turned up the bedside lamp and pulled on her robe. "I'm going to get you a wet cloth for your
head," she said, "and a nice cup of tea. I think you may be starting a cold."
His fear started to congeal into something real, and he knew that the center of it lay in the summer house
on the lake.
He tried to be quiet as he pulled on his clothes but he was shaking so badly that he kept dropping things
and bumping into furniture. He knocked over a small table just as Cyrie came back.
"Stephen, you shouldn't be up," Cyrie said, "you're white as a sheet!" She touched his arm. "And you're
freezing! Get back into bed immediately and I'll call—"
"There's something wrong at the lake house," he said tightly, pulling on his shoes. "I've got to get out
there."
"Are you insane? It's their wedding night!"
"I tell you, there's something awful happening there. I can't tell you how I know, Cyrie, but I do know!"
She took his arm. "Don't do this. You'll hate yourself forever for it. You're just upset at losing your baby,
you had a bad dream, and you're probably still a little drunk from the reception. Really, Stephen,
Georgiana's fine."
He kissed her quickly. "If she isn't, you'll hate me for not doing anything. I promise you I'll use discretion.
Geo and Kiril will think of me as simply a doddering old fool; on their anniversary they'll laugh about this
and I'll become a family anecdote."
"Stephen!"
He was already gone.
As he got closer to the lake house the sense of a cataclysmic horror grew stronger. It was so bad that by
the time he knocked on the front door a blanket of weakness smothered him. He leaned against the door
to keep from falling, and it swung wide open against his hands.
Suddenly he was confused. It struck him that he had created an indelicate situation, and most probably
for nothing. Cyrie was right; his panic was simply nothing more than a middle-aged man's refusal to admit
that his children were growing away from him. He hesitated to go in, standing immobile in the doorway
trying to decide what to do.
He had just decided to turn around and salvage his dignity when an ugly sound distracted him.
It was a savage, repulsive noise, a ripping and sucking sound, as if an enormous starving animal were
feeding.
A faint light showed down the hall, through the half-open bedroom door upstairs. Stephen pulled himself
up stair by stair, having to overcome a fresh fear with each one, as the sound became louder, more
greedy, mixed with soft animal grunts and the thud of a heavy body shifting position.
Stephen couldn't help it: a half-muffled scream came rolling uncontrollably out of him.
The sound from the bedroom stopped instantly.
He pushed open the bedroom door, and the smell of blood in the room was so overpowering that, at
first, he didn't see the body.
Kiril had most likely been trying to get out of the opened window, as if his way to the door had been
blocked and the window was his only escape. He had been caught by the window, then dragged back
across the room, leaving a huge, smeared track of blood across the floor. His throat was torn out and his
body mutilated, a red gorge ripped through the left side, broken white ribs pushing through the torn
tissues. Two of the ribs lay beside the body, as if whoever had killed him had discarded them like useless
paper packing in a box.
Stephen would have fainted right there if it weren't for his panic about Georgiana. She was nowhere in
sight. The need to get out of that room, away from the sight and stench of violent death, overwhelmed
him. He made a quick, frantic search of the house, terrified of what he might see if he found her, but she
was gone.
The beach was a long blank stretch lit by moonlight. Was she there? In the water? Had she been carried
off by the murderer or had she wandered away in shock? Stephen could see nothing there, and the only
sound was the lapping water breaking on the shore.
Something hit him hard from behind, pushing into him so powerfully that it almost knocked him off his feet
With his old instincts, he jabbed backward with his elbows, catching the attacker just below the ribs.
There was an explosion of foul, carrion breath behind him as he spun around.
He couldn't believe what had attacked him.
It was half-beast, half-human, easily seven or eight feet tall, crouched on the ground like a cowed dog,
curled up and whimpering in pain. It wasn't his backward blow that had stopped it; nothing that he could
have done would have made a dent in a monster that big. Something was happening to it.
It let out a nerve-shattering howl of pain, raising its arms to cover its head as it shook from side to side in
a fear that it couldn't express in words. It raised its head briefly, extending an arm to Stephen as if to
plead for help, and he caught a glimpse of its eyes, not the eyes of a dumb beast as he had expected, but
the eyes of a soul overwhelmed by sorrow.
The pity in him was so unexpected that it was a moment before he recognized those eyes.
Stephen was unable to move, watching the monster in its metamorphosis. Its pain must have been
excruciating: he could see the muscles stretch beneath the skin, pulling and knotting under the shaggy,
blood-matted coat, the body bending into fantastic shapes as if it were paper being crumpled and
smoothed out again. There was no more howling—the agony must have been too intense for that—but
the panting and the long intervals between breath and silence were more unnerving than the cries had
been.
And when the transformation was over, and his daughter lay shuddering and vomiting in the summer
night, Stephen knew that not even God would save him.
"What have you done?" Georgiana said. Her voice, rasping and rough, hurt him. Her words ripped him
like a knife through silk.
He put out his hand to her, but she sliced at it reflexively with her claws. "Don't touch me," she said. "It's
not finished."
They both watched in repelled fascination as the claws shortened, changed color, and became human
fingernails.
He took off his jacket, intending to wrap it around her, but she flinched as he came near and he stopped,
frozen in humiliation. She put out her hand and took the jacket, not looking at him as she covered herself,
still shivering with exhaustion.
"I killed Kiril." She spoke slowly and precisely, as if she were trying to retain control over at least this
much of her own body. "I became this monster and I murdered him. Every night of every full moon, for
as long as I live, someone will die exactly like that."
Stephen moaned. Blanche, he thought again. And he knew as clearly as he had ever known anything that
she would never leave him. She was his most constant lover, the fixed, dark star that would eclipse his
life.
But Georgiana had to tell it, and he had to listen. "I was in the bedroom, undressing. Kiril had gone out
for a walk on the beach. Then something was wrong, a pain so terrible that I couldn't stand up. I was
afraid I was dying! I felt someone touch me, very lightly, and there was a woman, just about my age, with
the most fantastic hair. There were yards of it, clouds of it, catching the moonlight, just like silver. It was
so fascinating that even the pain seemed to stop for a minute.
"I kept looking at that hair and my eyes couldn't focus. It was so strange—as if her hair had become a
mirror. I was looking into it, where I could see movement, madness; I could hear a distant, insane
laughter. She told me that I was about to make a payment on an old debt. Yours. That because of what
you did to her, the firstborn of every Marley generation will suffer, and always on the most wonderful
night of our lives, when we've gotten what we've always wanted. I asked her—I begged her—to tell me
what you had done, why this was happening, but she only laughed.
"And then she said, 'Tell your father that Blanche has not forgotten him.' "
"I remember fainting—I remember that clearly. And when I woke up, I was changed."
Georgiana's voice broke off and her eyes looked blank. The silence of the night seemed to be speaking
to her in sounds that only she could hear.
"What was it?" she pleaded with Stephen. "Who is Blanche and what did you do to her that she had to
destroy me?"
Stephen was struck dumb.
"Every night," she whispered, "every night of every full moon."
As Georgiana rocked back and forth on the ground, nestling in despair, Stephen's screams echoed
across the water.
A single name, repeated under the full moon, that had now become an instrument of revenge.
After what they had been through that night, the next few days were not as difficult for Stephen and
摘要：

 Color---1--2--3--4--5--6--7--8--9-TextSize--10--11--12--13--14--15--16--17--18--19--20--21--22--23--24THEWEREWOLF'STOUCHTheVoodooMoonBook2ByCheriScotchContentsPARTONE-AcquaintedWithGriefChapterOneChapterTwoPARTTWO-TheMarkoftheBeastChapterThreeChapterFourChapterFiveChapterSixPARTTHREEChapterSevenCha...

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