She swore she could almost hear the woman shaking her head. “He won’t be in until later this morning. Around nine. You’ll have to call back then. Why don’t you just phone Jacob and give him a chance to explain? He told me to tell you it’s a big misunderstanding and that you should come back right away.”
“He told you?”
“Of course.” The woman sounded smug. “Everyone around these parts is on very good terms with Jacob Gideon. Go back. Talk to him.”
Go back? Give Jacob a call... This was surreal. Blythe looked up and saw from Lucas’s glum expression that this was exactly as he’d expected. Which meant...what? That he was in on it? Or that he was a really good judge of what Jacob Gideon would do.
Gripping the cell phone, her hand sweaty, she said the only thing she could think of. “I don’t have his phone number.”
“Let me give it to you.” Suddenly solicitous, the dispatcher rattled it off, which Blythe repeated out loud so Lucas could write it down on a small pad of paper beside the hotel phone.
Once she was certain he’d gotten it, stunned and feeling as if she’d been run over by a semitruck, Blythe ended the call.
She stared at the cell phone, suppressing the urge to fling it against the wall. “Hailey is dangerously ill.” Biting down on her fury, she spun to face him.
“I’m not sure what just happened,” she began, seething.
“I told you he has them all in his pocket,” Lucas said, his voice sounding both resigned and angry. “You’ll have to get help from far away from this area to find someone he hasn’t corrupted.”
As she continued to eye him, she couldn’t find even the slightest resemblance between this man and the preacher. Where Jacob was slender and average height, Lucas stood well over six feet with a muscular build. Even their facial structures were different. Jacob had meaty features, with a bulbous nose. Lucas’s were patrician, as if they’d been carved from marble.
“You say you’re his son,” she said, in a tone that was not quite believing. “Yet not only do you not resemble him in the slightest, but you sound like you don’t like him, either.”
He shook his head, his ruggedly handsome features impassive. “As I said, I’m not his son any longer. As far as I’m concerned, that part of me died fifteen years ago, when I escaped Sanctuary roughly the same way you did.”
Crud. Suddenly dizzy, Blythe sat on the edge of the bed. “I don’t give a damn about you or your father, but you’d better tell me anything that will help me find a way to rescue my daughter.”
Chapter 4
Lucas began to talk. He told her an abbreviated version of the truth, though he said nothing about Lilly and how Jacob had killed her right in front of him. That part of his past was his own private shame, which he would always bear alone. As he spoke, choosing his words with care, he watched her closely. While he didn’t want to send her into shock, she needed to know what she faced.
“My mother must have been a Shifter, because Jacob is human. I don’t actually know what happened to her, because I remember absolutely nothing about her. Long story short, Jacob caught me changing into a wolf. He viewed this as a sign from his God that I was a demon, and he set about trying to purge my body and—as he said—make me holy again.”
Swallowing, he pushed away the image of his vibrant sister, beaten and lifeless. “His methods were horrific. I believe he would eventually have killed me. I managed to escape, and I ran. I haven’t seen him since. It’s been fifteen years now.”
Watching him, her eyes, a shocking shade of green, went soft with sympathy. “You must have been very young.”
“Fifteen.” While he tried to factually relay his horrific past without growing emotional, his wolf reacted with hers on another, more primal level. Though he knew she had to be aware of this, externally she showed no reaction.
Was this how it was normally between Shifters, he wondered? At the thought, a wild sense of longing possessed him, something unwanted and unwarranted, and which he promptly pushed away.
“That’s it. When I saw you and your little girl on the news, with him promising he could heal her, I knew I had to come and stop him. I drove from Seattle.”
She nodded.
Watching the emotions trace across her beautiful face—shock and horror and revulsion—he stopped talking. There were no more words he could say without revealing the most important part of all. His sister’s death.
Silence. He waited, almost defiantly, for her reaction. Half of him expected condemnation, as if all of what had happened had been his fault, as if he’d somehow deserved the actions of the so-called pious man of God.
He also feared she would panic, because in revealing his past, he’d also revealed what Jacob had in mind for her little girl.
* * *
As Lucas talked, Blythe found herself listening in a sort of horrified fugue state. Disbelief, shock and terror for Hailey mingled with revulsion that a so-called man of God could do such things to his own son.
And what about her daughter? If Lucas was right, she’d delivered her baby girl into the clutches of a madman.
When he finally finished, the silence rang with a thousand questions, none of which she expected him to be able to answer.
“Why?” she finally asked. “Even if you being able to shift was—is—out of the ordinary, you’re his son. Throughout history, other parents have learned to deal with that. What would drive him to...recoil from you like that? Why would any father do such a thing to his own child?”
“I’ve asked myself that very same question a hundred times. I don’t know that I can explain the unexplainable. But as far as I can tell, it’s because of his belief system. In his narrow-minded view, such a thing as a Shape-shifter cannot exist. I’m a werewolf, he said. He honestly believed—believes—that I have a demon inside me.”
“That you come from hell,” she said, still unable to entirely wrap her mind around the idea.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“But since he’s human, that means your mother...”
“She must have been a full-blood. But she died when I was born and he destroyed everything of hers. I’ve never even seen a picture.”
“Seriously?” Again, such a thing was beyond her comprehension.
He shrugged once more, as if it didn’t matter. “Yes. I know nothing about her.”
“Then you had no one to teach you to...”
A shadow crossed his face. She got a sense that there was more, that he hadn’t told her everything. But she didn’t press him, not now. Hellhounds, he’d already revealed so much horror, the thought that there might be more was staggering.
“The first time I felt the urge to shift, I freaked out.” He sounded rueful, speaking of something that broke every Pack law she could think of regarding children. The first change should be a special thing, guided with a loving hand. Like Hailey’s would be, if she lived that long.
Blythe clenched her fists. Though she felt sorry for this man, listening to him talk about the past wasn’t going to help save Hailey.
He cocked his head. “You must be wondering how all this relates to your daughter,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.
Masking her inner turmoil with what she hoped passed for calmness, she nodded. “Yes. Yes, I am. Tell me. What do you think your father—”
“Jacob.”
She acknowledged the difference