Shadows Over Collinsport 2
The Moon will Tell Its Secrets to Your Blood
The revenants of autumns past crunched under Quentin Collins' boots as he navigated the familiar path through the woods. Moonlight filtered through the branches, the bright glow a reminder that the full moon was only days away.
Not so long ago (and yet more than a lifetime, for most men), the full moon meant a very personal kind of horror for him. Under the light of the bloated moon, Magda's curse had turned him into a ravening beast who murdered without pity or remorse. Thanks to Charles Delaware Tate, a man with magic in his paint brush, Quentin was free of the wolf, though he had, in a very real sense, traded one curse for another.
His descendants were not so fortunate. Dear Lenore had never known of the taint carried in her blood, passed down to her children and her grandchildren.
Tom Jennings had escaped only because he had died of different curse, doomed by a vampire's bite and burned to ashes in the sun. Chris had borne the burden of the wolf on his young shoulders, fighting the curse but just as doomed as his brother. And little Amy... Her sex spared her the horror of becoming a werewolf, but it would not spare her own children, should any of them have been male.
At last, Quentin's footsteps brought him to his destination: Eagle Hill Cemetery. Solemnly, he approached the graves of his great-grandchildren.
Tom. Chris.
Amy.
Kneeling, Quentin ran his fingers over the deep groves of her name carved into the headstone. He had never seen her again, after she had left Collinsport. He hadn't even known that she had married until he saw the "Bakura" engraved after her maiden name along with the epitaph, "beloved wife and mother."
Amy Jennings-Bakura had been a mother. Somewhere there was another child of his direct lineage.
Once again, Quentin found his gaze drawn unwillingly to the moon, and suppressed a shudder. Amy had had at least one child. A child that either carried the curse or would suffer from it.
A grim expression settled over his features as he turned away from the graves and back toward the woods.
In her quest to avenge the wrongs he had done to her sister, Magda had doomed all the males of Quentin's line. On reaching their majority, they became victims of the curse, doomed to hunt and kill in mindless savagery until they themselves were killed. A neverending cycle of death and terror that Magda herself had recanted when she realized that her beloved sister had borne a child, and that the child would bear the curse she had placed on its father. To her sorrow, and Quentin's shame, Magda had been unable to free his line of the curse she had placed upon it.
Without realizing he was doing it, Quentin hastened his steps along the uneven path back to Collinwood. He should have come home sooner. Then he would have known that Amy had died, and that she had been a mother. He would have known that he needed to search for her children. But he was here now, and he knew. He knew about Amy and he knew what he had to do.
He would hire a detective to trace her life outside of Collinsport. He would find out if she had left a son behind when she died, a son who might already be a werewolf.
And, if she had, Quentin would do what had to be done.