From the Mists of Wolf Creek Read online

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Brandewyne

  “Like fine wines, some writers seem to get better and better, and Rebecca Brandewyne belongs to this vintage group.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  “Among the Updikes and Bellows of the [romance] genre are…Rebecca Brandewyne.”

  —Newsweek

  “Rebecca Brandewyne is…a…powerhouse of the romantic novel industry.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Brandewyne’s latest is another winning romp.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Crystal Rose

  “Enduring Brandewyne gives her readers what they crave—a well-researched, detail-rich, and gentle historical romance about deserving characters and evildoers who get their comeuppance.”

  —Booklist on The Crystal Rose

  “A lush novel brimming with rich historical details and written in the grand tradition of the Victorian gothic.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Ninefold Key

  Books by Rebecca Brandewyne

  Silhouette Nocturne

  From the Mists of Wolf Creek #65

  MIRA Books

  Dust Devil

  Glory Seekers

  High Stakes

  Destiny’s Daughter

  The Love Knot

  The Ninefold Key

  The Crystal Rose

  REBECCA BRANDEWYNE

  is a bestselling author of historical novels. Her stories consistently place on the bestseller lists, including those of the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. She was inducted into the Romantic Times BOOKreviews Hall of Fame in 1988, and is a recipient of the magazine’s Career Achievement Award (1991). She has also received Affaire de Coeur’s Golden Quill Pen Award for Best Historical Romance, along with a Silver Pen Award.

  REBECCA BRANDEWYNE

  From the MISTS of WOLF CREEK

  Dear Reader,

  “Where do you get your ideas?” That’s invariably the question most asked of writers.

  So, what does inspire a tale? In the case of From the Mists of Wolf Creek, the answer might surprise you—because it was actually my two dogs who gave me the idea for this particular novel. One of my dogs is a beautiful black long-haired German shepherd. He looks and acts very much like the wolf in my story. My other dog is a sassy Australian cattle dog (red heeler) mix. He reminds me of my book’s hero, Trace—someone who drifted around quite a lot before finally finding a good home. My dogs are the best of pals, to the point that each somehow always knows what the other is thinking. They’re both extremely loving and protective, also, offering exactly the kind of care I thought my heroine, Hallie, needed in this novel. So she got a wolf and a man, courtesy of my two dogs—and of her own grandmother, a woman wise in the ways of Magick who casts a powerful spell that enchants more than one heart at Meadowsweet Farm, on the banks of Wolf Creek.

  Happy reading!

  Rebecca Brandewyne

  www.brandewyne.com

  For Wulfie and Buddy,

  who inspired this tale.

  With all my love.

  From the Mists of Wolf Creek

  The wolf padded silently

  From the mists of Wolf Creek

  Into the magic circle

  Where a wise witch did speak.

  With her jeweled pewter wand,

  She touched him on his head,

  Cast a spell of enchantment

  That bound him and so led

  To his role as protector

  At old Meadowsweet Farm.

  There, he would forever stay,

  Keeping all free from harm.

  The man padded silently

  From the mists of Wolf Creek

  Into the magic circle

  Where a wise witch did speak.

  With her jeweled pewter wand,

  She touched him on his chest,

  Cast a spell of enchantment

  That drew forth all his best,

  Eased the pain of the past,

  And bound him to the farm.

  There, he would forever stay,

  A stout heart, a strong arm.

  When the spell was finally done,

  Not the wolf nor the man

  Knew where one of them ended

  And the other began.

  Sharing a deep and special bond,

  They were as one, soul and mind,

  Their dreams and their thoughts

  Now and always entwined.

  Laid upon them was this charge:

  Guard the farm; keep it well;

  And when love comes softly

  To cast its magic spell…

  Like the mists from Wolf Creek,

  Greet it with willing arms

  And with a faithful heart.

  Revel in all its charms.

  Both wolf and man listened hard

  To the wise witch’s song.

  For too many full moons,

  They’d wandered far and long.

  But the mists from Wolf Creek,

  Now sweetly both bespelled,

  And love came as promised,

  At Meadowsweet e’er dwelled.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  A Spell Is Cast

  Meadowsweet Farm, Wolf Creek, The Present

  D eath drew ever closer.

  With her heightened senses, always so keenly attuned to her surroundings and her own being, Henrietta Taylor had discerned its inexorably nearing presence for some time now.

  At first it had only lurked in the shadows and hovered at the edges of her consciousness. She had caught only occasional glimpses of it then—a fluttering of its amorphous cloak, an inscrutable glance from beneath its voluminous hood.

  Sunlight and her sheer strength of will had held it at bay for a while.

  But eventually over the passing months, Death had grown bolder and less patient.

  Now, sometimes late at night when she lay sleeping, it slipped into her old Victorian farmhouse, into her bedroom, and sat upon her shallowly rising and falling chest, peering down impenetrably into her slumbering face, as though to steal away her last breath finally and forever.

  No doubt, with these tactics, Death hoped to frighten her, as it did so many others.

  But unlike them, Henrietta was not afraid. She had lived too long and seen too much for that. She knew Death was but the guide to another dimension, another plane of existence not yet fully understood by those who dwelled in the physical realm.

  When she passed beyond the door through which Death would lead her, she would see her parents and Jotham and Rowan again, and she would be glad of that.

  But before then, she must do everything in her power to protect those she would be leaving behind—especially her namesake and granddaughter, Hallie.

  That was the reason for the ritual Henrietta was undertaking tonight and why she had gone to such great lengths to prepare for it.

  For months, she had befriended the huge wild black wolf around which her ceremony would center, gradually gaining its trust and confidence. For weeks, she had gathered the herbs and other plants she intended to employ, neatly cutting them with
her bone-handled boline, then drying and preparing them for grinding with her mortar and pestle. For days, she had consulted her almanacs and correspondence tables to ensure that her timing would prove auspicious and her tools appropriate to her spellwork. Earlier this evening she had bathed in the nearby creek in order to cleanse and purify herself, then carefully dressed in her best witching clothes and flowing cloak.

  Now Henrietta was ready.

  Above the sweet meadow in which she stood—and for which her farm had been named—the moon shone bright and full, a gleaming silver orb in the black-velvet night sky. From the creek that wound through the woods encompassing the meadow, wisps of mist drifted ghostily, enshrouding the gnarled old trees and blanketing the gentle hollows of the land.

  With her black-handled, double-edged, singing arthame and the carefully knotted cingulum she took from around her waist, Henrietta began the casting of the magic circle she required for this night’s work, marking the perimeter with small stones she had collected some days before and set to one side for just this purpose.

  When she had finished, she approached the round wooden table she had set up as her altar. There, she took up a little bowl of finely ground sea salt and, walking deiseil or clockwise, scattered it along the circle’s boundary, chanting as she did so. Next she lit a cone of incense in her thurible and waved the smoke from the ornate brass burner around the circumference, continuing to chant softly. Then she set a candle aflame, anointed it with oil and bore it clockwise along the ring’s edge. Last but not least, she uncorked a small bottle of holy water and sprinkled that around the periphery, so the magic circle had been cleansed and consecrated with all four elements: earth, wind, fire and water.

  After that, Henrietta ignited the bonfire she had laid earlier beneath the large iron cauldron that hung from a tripod she had placed at the heart of the meadow, inside the circle she had cast. Then she called the Quarters and welcomed the God and Goddess she had worshiped for many long years now.

  Finally, taking a deep breath, she beckoned to the great wolf, which had been watching her curiously, intently, from the bank of the misted creek. As he loped toward her, she used her arthame to cut a metaphysical door into the circle for him to pass through, then closed it securely behind him.

  No more than she feared Death did Henrietta fear the wolf. He was a creature of nature, and she had always shared a special affinity with those, frequently finding them far preferable to people. Indeed, the older she had grown, the less tolerant she had become of the latter, until, now, with the exception of a chosen few, she was virtually a recluse.

  Still, Henrietta never felt a lack. Her life at the farm was rich and full in all the ways that mattered to her. She knew what was important—and what was not. It seemed to her that the world was an increasingly cruel, vicious place, of which she no longer wanted any part. For her, life began and ended at Meadowsweet—which was why it must be protected.

  As the massive wolf prowled restlessly around the magic circle, Henrietta determinedly set to work, lighting several more candles and, with her mortar and pestle, grinding the herbs and other plants she needed for her powerful spell. She knew what she hoped to achieve this night would take every ounce of her strength, will and faith.

  Still, in the end—the God and Goddess willing—she would succeed.

  Once she had all the necessary ingredients together, Henrietta put them into the cauldron over the blazing bonfire. As the big kettle began to bubble and smoke, she rang the pewter bell that sat upon the altar. Then, with her left hand, she took up her bejeweled pewter wand and, with her right hand, drew her arthame from the cingulum now wrapped around her waist.

  With the wand, she struck the arthame just so, making it sing—pure, sweet notes that echoed melodiously across the meadow into the swirling mist and caused the wolf’s ears to prick forward attentively.

  Then, starting once more to chant and summoning her vast power born of the blessed Earth Mother, Henrietta began to work her elaborate spell of enchantment, calling the immense wolf to her side and touching him lightly with her wand….

  Chapter 1

  The Storm and the Wolf

  A Two-Lane Highway, The Present

  T here was a storm coming on.

  Hallie Muldoon could see it ahead in the distance, where leaden thunderclouds seethed and roiled on the horizon, blotting out the westering sun. At the sight, the strange, nebulous sense of anxiety and urgency she had felt ever since learning of her grandmother’s unexpected death last month heightened within her, and she pressed her foot even harder against the accelerator of the car she drove.

  In response, the sporty red Mini Cooper S shot down the narrow two-lane highway that was a patchwork of macadam bounded on either side by long, sweeping green verges abloom with a profusion of wildflowers, beyond which lay checkerboard fields of ripening grain.

  Under other circumstances, it would have been a picturesque scene. But at the moment, beneath the lowering sky, it was somehow reminiscent of Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night, and Hallie suffered the disturbing sensation that she was journeying into the distorted realm of an unquiet mind instead of toward the small town of Wolf Creek, her childhood home.

  She had not been there since her mother, Rowan Muldoon, had passed away and Gram had sent her back East to live with her two great-aunts, Gram’s spinster sisters, Agatha and Edith. That had been many years ago now, and the beginning of an entirely new life for Hallie, the old one—the one she would have lived had her mother survived—having died along with the only parent she had ever known.

  Hallie thought that in some respects, nothing had gone right in her life since that moment.

  In sharp contrast to Meadowsweet, the quiet, relatively isolated farm where Gram had lived, Great-Aunts Agatha and Edith had resided in a crowded, noisy big city, in a dark old gloomy town house wherein the sunshine, freedom and laughter to which the then seven-year-old Hallie had been accustomed had been painfully taboo. In the great-aunts’ town house, the long heavy curtains were always drawn against the sun that would otherwise have faded the furniture and carpets, and little girls were to obey the rules, the primary of which had been to be seen and not heard. Natural childhood curiosity and chatter had brought severe frowns and censure.

  As a result, back East, Hallie had quickly learned to keep her mouth shut and her thoughts to herself, to slip like a wraith through the shadowy halls of the town house, and to apply herself diligently to her studies at the private school in which the great-aunts had enrolled her, rather than wasting her time with such frivolous pursuits as idle daydreaming and rowdy playing.

  In adulthood and retrospect, Hallie had realized the great-aunts had no doubt loved her dearly and meant well. It was just that having no experience with children of their own, they had reared her in the same fashion that their austere, Bible-thumping father, the Reverend Bernard Dewhurst, had reared them, knowing no other way. In the end, they had done their best for her, and Hallie could not find it in her heart to blame them for proving unable to change their own lifelong beliefs and behavior, and to move ahead with the times.

  But, oh, how different things would have been if only her grandmother had never sent her away from Wolf Creek and Meadowsweet farm! A middle daughter, Gram had been the black sheep of the five Dewhurst sisters, estranged from her family because in her youth she had brazenly eloped with Jotham Taylor, Great-Aunt Agatha’s fiancé.

  The highly reserved, straitlaced Dewhursts had never forgiven Gram for that, her father remorselessly declaring her dead to them for her unspeakable sin, striking her name from the family Bible and cutting her off without a single penny.

  Eventually Gram and her dashing, wayward husband had moved to faraway Wolf Creek and bought the small farm, Meadowsweet, where Hallie had been born and to which she was now returning.

  She wondered how much both the town and the farm had changed in the intervening years since she had been gone. In her own mind, of course, both had stood still, froz
en in time, just the same as when she had last seen them during her childhood. Still, she knew that in reality, that would not be the case, that both would no longer be as she remembered them.

  Perhaps Wolf Creek had grown in size and population, become more than just a tiny dot on a road map, of little or no interest to passersby. Unlike some small towns, it had no claim to fame to attract tourists, to entice them off the beaten path to the single grassy square bounded on its four sides by the only main streets in Wolf Creek. In another time and place, the square would have been referred to as the village green. But Hallie recalled it only as the park where, on market days, she had romped with the other children, in the shadow of the town hall and the courthouse.

  Not for the first time, it occurred to her how strange it was that her memories of Wolf Creek were so much clearer than those of Meadowsweet, her birthplace and the farm that had been her childhood home until her mother had died and Gram had sent her away.

  Hallie remembered that the farmhouse itself dated from the 1800s and boasted Victorian architecture, and she had a vague impression of cupolas and towers rising from a large house whose lightning rods were silhouetted like needles against a boundless azure sky. But try as she might, she did not recall more than that, not even the color of the house’s traditional wood scallops, siding and ornate trim, although she thought there had been at least three shades of paint.

  More easily brought to mind was the sweet expanse of meadow whence the farm had taken its name. It had boasted a gay riot of grasses, toadstools and wildflowers, as well as butterflies, dragonflies and honeybees, the latter of which her grandmother had raised on the farm. All year long, when the weather had permitted, Hallie had played in the meadow, creating a vivid, imaginary world there, in which the insects were faeries and the toadstools and blossoms, their homes.