Hot Blooded

swallowed hard. "What about videotape?"
    He held her gaze steadily. "You think I'm insane? Or just suicidal?"
    "Samuel, I'd protect you. I'd never let anyone—"
    "No. What I go through, what I become—no, it's personal. I can't think of a
moment more private than those three nights a month, when… when it happens. I
can hardly stand the idea that you watched it happen. I couldn't bear to let you
tape it."
    "Samuel, you don't understand. This is my life's work."
    "Jenny,
you
don't understand." He cupped her cheek in one hand,
gently, lovingly. His eyes beamed his feelings into hers. "This is my
life
."
    She lowered her head, drew her knees up to her chest, sitting up in the bed.
"If you don't cooperate with my research, how can you ever hope to find a cure?"
    "Who says I
want
a cure?"
    She looked him, wide-eyed. "Don't you?"
    He was quiet for a moment, his gaze turning inward.
    "Samuel?"
    "I don't know. I don't… I just don't know, all right?"
    "My God, Samuel, how on earth could you even consider wanting to stay like
this if you don't have to?"
    He shook his head slowly. "How could I not? Look at me, Jenny. My senses are
sharper than they've ever been. Sharper than they ever could have been, if the
family curse hadn't found its way to me. Before the changes began, I was… I was
barely alive. Going through life in a kind of a complacent daze. Now, I
experience everything,
I feel
everything."
    His eyes sparkled when he talked about this thing. She couldn't believe it,
hadn't even considered that he might see this affliction as having a positive
side. "Are you in control of what you do, when you… change?"
    He lowered his gaze. "I don't know. Afterward, it's… it's difficult to
remember what I've done. But don't think I'm not watching for signs. There have
been no unexplained injuries, no violent deaths, no one reporting that they were
attacked. I have to believe that, even as the wolf, I'm incapable of causing
harm to another human being."
    "But you don't know that for sure."
    With a heavy sigh, he conceded the point. Then he lifted his eyes to hers. "I
could have hurt you, that night on the road. But I didn't."
    "I guess the scratches across my chest don't count, then."
    "I can't believe I intended to harm you. Not you, Jenny." He made a
halfhearted attempt at a smile. "Maybe I was just trying to get your blouse
off."
    The joke fell flat for her. "I'm sorry, Samuel, but I can't laugh about this.
You came after me in the woods last night. If Mamma Louisa hadn't come along
when she did—I don't know. I don't know what might have happened."
    "Mamma Louisa?" She heard the change in his tone when he repeated the woman's
name. He sounded… angry. "Tell me what happened," he said.
    "I fell. You—the wolf was crouching, poised as if to spring. Its teeth were
bared, hair on its neck bristling up, and it was growling. It did not appear to
be friendly, Samuel. Not like…" She glanced at the floor, where Mojo lay napping
on a braided throw rug. "Not like Mojo. I was sure I was done for."
    "But it didn't hurt you. I didn't hurt you."
    She nodded, admitting that much was true.
    "What happened next?"
    "Mamma Louisa said something—an incantation or something. She waved her
little red gris-gris bag around, and the wolf just ran away."
    He sighed, shaking his head. "Ironic that she should be the one to step in."
    Jenny frowned. "Why?"
    He didn't answer, and she touched his face, turned it toward hers. "What has
she got to do with this, Samuel?"
    "Everything. It was her family who put this curse on mine. Her
great-grandmother started it all, taking out her vengeance against my
great-grandfather with Voodoo magic."
    "Vengeance?"
    He nodded. "God knows he had it coming if he did what… what her family
claimed he did. My greatgrandfather, Beckett Branson La Roque owned the
plantation back then. He inherited it from his mother's family, the Bransons.
Mamma Louisa's family, the DuVal's, worked for him just as they'd worked for his
mother's family. Her great-grandmother, Celeste, was the matriarch of the clan
then, and she was also a Voudon priestess."
    She nodded, listening, rapt.
    "They said my great-grandfather raped a girl, Alana DuVal, Celeste's
daughter. Mamma Louisa's grandmother. She was only sixteen."
    "Do you believe it?"
    He shrugged. "I don't know why she would have made it up. My grandfather
never admitted it, but more