Moon Shadows by Nora Roberts Page A

pizza.”
    â€œPizza’s good.”
    â€œAnd we’ll get started on some serious figuring out.”

Chapter 9
    S HE hadn’t known what it would be like to have someone in her life. Someone to share with—the little things, the huge ones. To have someone who made her laugh or think, who shrugged off her bad moods or slapped her back with moods of his own, was all a kind of miracle.
    She’d told him once she hadn’t been happy since she’d stood in the mountains of Italy and watched the sun set. He’d just smiled in that slow, pleased way of his, and told her they’d go back, to that exact spot one day.
    He brought the puppy, a rambunctious bundle of fur and energy he named Butch. Initially Amico was too dignified and territorial to acknowledge the presence of another dog, much less a scrambling puppy. But within a week, he was romping and playing with the pup as if Butch was his personal pet.
    Normal, Simone thought, all so normal with dinner on the stove and dogs in the yard. Nights making lazy love, or desperate love. Conversations over wine with music on the stereo. Candles she’d made herself flickering while theydanced, and a low fire in the hearth while the October wind moaned at the windows like a lonely woman.
    Normal, if you forgot the hours they spent working in the lab, in a room with a cell and the smell of wild animal in the air that nothing could quite disguise.
    If she ignored the dreams that began to chase her as the moon waxed toward full.
    She saw a raven one morning, sleek and black, pecking away at the seeds in her feeder. The sky was painfully blue overhead, and though the trees were long past their peak, some leaves clung stubbornly on, so they flamed in the sun. It was beautiful, the sort of scene that deserved to be captured by lens or canvas. The bold colors of those last dying leaves against the pure and harsh blue of the sky.
    But she watched the raven, glossy black wings, and when she felt what was in her stir, as greedy as the bird, she knew the past weeks of work had made no difference.
    â€œYou change with the moon,” Gabe said as he prepared another sample on a slide. “Which has some logic. Body chemistry, tides, the lunar cycle. But that doesn’t explain why you have these sensations, the heightened senses and so forth outside the three-day cycle.”
    â€œIt’s always there. It’s part of me, in the blood.”
    â€œIn the blood,” he agreed. “An infection, and one that, so far, resists the cell-cell interactions that produce antibodies. We’ve gone—or you had before I came along—a long way toward identifying that infection. A mutant form of rabies.”
    â€œThat’s too simple a term.”
    He could hear the fatigue, the discouragement in her voice. “Sometimes simple is best. This infection has altered your blood chemistry, your DNA. And when you change, that chemistry, that DNA is altered again—slightly, subtly, but when we put the samples side by side, scanning the incredibly cool electron micrograph, the change is apparent.”
    â€œNot that earth-shattering. The DNA is more distinctly canine when I’m in lycan form.”
    â€œThink, Simone, don’t react. Think.” He picked up a mug, taking it for his coffee, and drank down her herbal tea.“Ugh,” was his opinion before he put it down, and grabbed the other mug.
    â€œ Any change in DNA is earth-shattering. It should be frigging impossible. But yours changes every month. And look here.” Sipping his coffee, he went to the computer to bring up an analysis. “Look what happens when we dose the blood with the antidote. The cells mutate again. They’re not just fighting off the antibiotic, they’re morphing, just enough to make it useless. What we have to do is fool them.”
    â€œHow?”
    He reached over to stroke her hair. “Working on it.”
    But she was following