The Moonlight Mistress by Victoria Janssen Read Free Book Online

lack thereof.” He paused. “Length of time to heal injuries. As woman and as wolf, and if the change from one form to the other took place while injured. Clean cuts, ragged cuts, cuts from a silver blade, bruises to soft tissue. Broken bones.”
    “I like Kauz less and less. That’s monstrous.” Electrifying a dead frog was nothing compared to deliberately injuring an intelligent creature. One was science, the other cruelty.
    “His laboratory notebooks read as if he’d held a werewolf captive for months. The records did not appear to have been faked—he’d written them over a long period of time. His results were consistent with physical possibility. However, hecould not produce this werewolf, though he repeatedly hinted that he would do so once he was sure he could trust me. But I do not think that day would ever have come. His werewolf may have existed only in his fevered mind. I am not sure if I am grateful or not, that he could produce nothing to support his statements. Then, I cannot help but worry that his captive was real, and that he might have killed her. As he kills his laboratory animals once they have served his purpose.”
    She glanced away from the road and saw Pascal looking back at her, his expression troubled. “Perhaps she escaped,” Lucilla suggested.
    “Perhaps,” he said. “To survive so long, she must have been— be resilient.”
    Lucilla said, “I don’t think anyone at the Institute knew of this.”
    “No. Perhaps I should have spoken of it to the trustees, but I didn’t think they would take my word, a visitor and a foreigner, over his. I was preparing to visit him again, to see if I could gather more evidence. Then I heard that war had been declared. I am now obligated to return to France.”
    She drove for another kilometer in silence. Neither of them could do anything now about a situation that might be at least partly illusory. Best to distance herself from the troubling implications and concentrate on the most fascinating part of Pascal’s revelations. “Both species are mammals,” she said. “I wonder how different they are? Humans and wolves?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” Pascal said. “Do you think it possible?”
    “Perhaps the wolf form isn’t a true wolf. Perhaps it only looks like one. On the inside, it could be more human. It’s an interesting exercise. Though I wonder how the change wouldinitiate? Would the werewolf trigger a chemical reaction in her own body? It’s a bizarre idea, but possible, I suppose.”
    “Like the duck-billed platypus.”
    Lucilla cast him a glance. He was smiling. She said, “If it could turn into a duck, as well.”
    “Have you ever traveled to the Antipodes?”
    Lucilla considered his change of subject. She didn’t want to talk about Kauz anymore, either. “Alas, no. You?”
    “Once, with my grand-oncle Erard, who worked on a merchant ship. I was eleven. It was the greatest adventure of my life.”
    His tone sounded affectionate in a way she hadn’t heard before. “Tell me about it, and him,” Lucilla said.
    “Perhaps later. First you will tell me how you became interested in chemistry,” Pascal said.
    “Done,” she said.

INTERLUDE
    LIEUTENANT GABRIEL MEYER WAS IN THE MIDST of testing his boy trumpeters on their fingering exercises when his fellow lieutenant and closest friend, Noel Ashby, entered the band room. Ashby, a lean man with cropped red hair and a slender mustache, leaned against a cabinet and crossed his legs at the ankles, outwardly casual, but Gabriel could read the tension in his normally relaxed posture, and he tensed, as well. Kern fumbled a pattern and stopped.
    With a glance, Gabriel silenced the comment about to erupt from Wiley’s mouth. Wiley was inclined to rivalry. “No, keep on with it,” he said to Kern gently. “If you stop, you might stop there the next time, and make a habit of it.”
    “Sir,” Kern squeaked, and lifted his trumpet again, aiming it at the regimental wolf