Hunter's Need (25 page)

 

 

E
ARLY the next morning, Duke lay with one arm around Ana’s waist and his face buried in her hair. He’d actually managed to sleep some, and Ana was still dozing. Something had woken him up though, and he wasn’t sure what.

He pushed up on his elbow and cracked his neck. Didn’t help. Still felt something dancing along his spine—

“Shit.”
He managed to keep from shouting it—just barely.

It was Marie.

Again.

She was hovering on the floor just a few inches away. If he reached out his arm, his fingers would probably go right through her. Ana tensed in his arms, coming out of sleep slowly. “What . . . Duke, did you . . . ”

Her voice trailed off. From the corner of his eye, he saw her, knew the second she’d seen Marie. She tensed in his arms and he absently rubbed his hand up and down her hip.

“Marie.”

The ghost glanced at him and then focused her attention on Ana.
“Don’t you feel it?”

Ana sat up, tucking the sheet under her arms and holding it over her naked chest. “Feel what?”

“We’re trying. We’re just not finding anything.”

“Marie, where do we look?” Ana asked.

She sounded so calm. She was handling this ghost deal a lot better than he was, he decided.

Her voice was plaintive and unless it was a trick of the light, Duke thought he saw tears in her eyes. Did ghosts cry? Sure as hell seemed like this one did.

Her bottomless gaze cut his way and Duke managed not to flinch. The air around him went cold and as he blew out a breath, he could see it leaving his mouth, a foggy puff of vapor.

“Do you know who he was?”

Ana’s quiet question drew his attention back to her, that and the fact that she was shivering, her teeth all but chattering from the cold.

It got even colder. Marie’s response was a low, plaintive cry. “
No.
”

Her head fell forward and the illusion of long dark hair drifted down, hiding her face. She whispered it over and over.
“No, no, no, no . . . ”

The temperature was getting cold enough that it was even bothering him, so he imagined it was damn near intolerable for Ana. Grabbing a blanket, he tucked it around her shivering body. “Marie—enough.”

The woman just kept whispering and moaning, the sound raw and tortured. In the bed, Ana was racked with cold and her eyes had a weird glazed look to them that had Duke’s protective instincts rising hard and fast. He narrowed his eyes and climbed out of the bed, crossing to stand in front of Marie. “Stop it—or I’m out of here and I’ll take her with me. How is she going to help you then?”

No change at first. Then slowly, Marie quieted and lifted her head, staring at him with those bottomless black eyes. They were full of misery, rage and pain—he wasn’t any kind of psychic or empath, but he didn’t need to be to feel
that
.

Duke could feel all her emotions hovering in the air around them, the anger burning hot as hell, the misery and pain an icy morass that could freeze the blood. He wondered how much of that Ana was picking up through her shields. He could only hope it wasn’t much.

“No. She doesn’t. She
wants
to, but if you keep making her miserable, I’ll be damned if I let her keep trying.”

“I’ll make her,”
Marie said.

Duke felt—something. He wasn’t sure what. But behind him, Ana cried out. He had to fight the urge to turn and go to her; instead he focused on Marie, watched as her form wavered and flickered. She was doing something to Ana, hurting her somehow. He could scent Ana’s pain as clearly as he scented the fear. But whatever it was, it didn’t come without a cost to Marie.

“Stop,” he said, and he stopped trying to control his anger. He felt it punch through the air, mingle with the ice of Marie’s desperate anger. The heat of his own power cut through the ice and within seconds, the frigid air began to warm. “Stop it now, or we’re both gone.”

“I’ll just keep coming to her.”
Marie’s ghostly body flickered, all but faded and then whatever power she was putting off ceased, cut off like somebody flipped a switch. He heard Ana’s desperate gasp for air, but still, he didn’t take his eyes off Marie. This woman, ghost, victim, whatever else she was, was a threat. A threat to Ana and that wasn’t anything he was going to tolerate.

He bared his teeth in a mocking smile and drawled, “Not if I take her far enough away, I bet.” He’d damn well do it, too. Take her back to Virginia kicking and screaming before he let some illusive, angry spirit cause her any more pain.

Doubt flickered across Marie’s face.
“I need her help—I know she can help.”

“Then maybe you should stop with the threats, stop hurting her and let us do what we can to help.”

Marie’s eyes bored into his. But she said nothing else.

Within a few more seconds, she was gone.

He felt it the moment her presence had completely retreated. That heavy, weighted feel of being watched disappeared and once he knew they were alone, he turned to Ana. She was on the bed, her knees drawn to her chest and her body shaking.

“Ana . . . ”

She lifted a tear-strained face to his.

“What did she do?”

She released a pent-up, unsteady breath and shook her head. “I don’t know. It was like I could . . . ” She stopped and licked her lips. “I don’t know. I could feel her, trying to push inside me.”

“Inside your shields?” He cupped her face in his hands and used his thumbs to wipe away the tears.

“No.” She closed her eyes. “No. Inside of
me
. It was like she was using a knife and just trying to scrape me out and force herself inside.”

A cold chill went down his spine. Shaken, he pulled her into his lap and held her tight.

What in the hell had they gotten into?

 

 

L
OOK
somewhere else
.

Halfway down the steps, Duke stopped.

It had been four hours since he’d come awake and realized he had a ghost watching him, and once more they were heading back into the mountains.

Look somewhere else
.

“Ana.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Yeah?”

“Let’s not do this again.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Marie said look somewhere else. Let’s do just that.”

Ana stopped on the steps and leaned back against the railing. Troubled, she stared at him. “Duke, I don’t know where else to look. There’s something here . . . I feel it.”

“Yeah. I do, too. There’s death here. But there’s something else that’s clouding things for me, maybe even for you. So let’s look elsewhere. If nothing else, it will give us some time to settle down a little, clear our heads.”

“For what purpose? We’ll still have to come back here—”

“Just because you feel something pulling you here doesn’t mean you’ll find the answers you need here, princess,” he said quietly. He took two more steps, closing the distance between them. Bracing a hand on the railing beside her, he dipped his head and brushed his lips across her cheek.

“If those answers aren’t here, then where are they?” she asked, her brow puckering with a scowl.

“I dunno. But there’s always good, old-fashioned detective-type work.” He caught a lock of her hair and tugged on it. “Come on. You can play Nancy Drew, I’ll be one of the Hardy Boys for a few days. We’ll poke around and see what we can find out about the girls that have disappeared and just see where that leads us. If it leads us back here, so be it. If it doesn’t . . . ” He grimaced and glanced toward the Chugach Mountains. One particular area, on the outskirts of the range, the area that felt so heavy and dark with dread. “If it doesn’t lead us here, that’s fine by me. I could happily go the rest of my life without stepping foot on those particular paths again.”

They’d probably have to at some point, he knew. Death waited there. He knew it as well as he knew his own name. But for now, he’d focus on something a little more concrete.

 

 

 

 

D
UKE was pretty sure he’d seen smaller towns. This one at least had two stoplights, a small cluster of shops—leaning toward the artsy and glitzy type of stuff, a hotel, a café and a bar. But damn. He bet he could walk at a normal pace and get from one end of town to the other in less than twenty minutes.

Bentley was even smaller than Palmer. They’d left Palmer earlier that morning after checking out of the bed-and-breakfast where they’d spent the past four days. Once they’d packed up the car, he turned the keys over to Ana and settled down in the passenger seat to read through Ana’s neatly written notes. Those notes were the reason they were there.

One of the missing girls had come from Bentley. Leah Parrish had been twenty-two, a pretty girl who had dropped out of college in 1983 to work at a restaurant in Anchorage. She’d been heading home for Christmas the weekend she disappeared.

Her coworkers had seen her the night before when they all went out for dinner, and that was the last time anybody could remember seeing her.

No body had ever been found, just her car on the side of the road, found empty the day she disappeared. There was no proof linking Parrish to any of the other disappearances in the state, but the hair on the back of Duke’s neck had stood on end when he saw her name and that was the only connection
he
needed.

The car came to a stop in the parking lot of the town’s lone hotel, the Put Your Feet Up Hotel. It didn’t look like much, but they didn’t have a whole lot of other choices. Ana leaned back in her seat, eying the hotel. The look on her face was inscrutable, but Duke could feel the tension inside her.

“You okay?”

She shot him a sidelong glance and shrugged. “Yeah. I just don’t care for hotels.”

“Don’t care for them as in . . . you don’t like them, or as in they can cause you problems?”

She grimaced. “Problems. Sometimes they just have too much going on—presses in on me a bit.”

“Well, I think it’s safe to say that this particular hotel doesn’t see a lot of action,” he said, grinning wryly. There were all of three cars in the parking lot, including theirs.

“There is that.”

They climbed out of the car, but didn’t bother grabbing anything from the back. The hotel consisted of a series of small, separate units, more like cottages than a real hotel, so they’d just have to move the car anyway. Side by side, they headed up to the office and already, Duke could feel eyes on them. Through the window, he could see three people, two of them sitting around a checkerboard, the other standing behind the counter.

“I get the feeling that tourist traffic doesn’t come through here a lot,” Ana muttered.

“Yeah, I was thinking that, too. Going to make it real easy to ask around about the girl who disappeared from here, huh?”

Her voice grim, Ana said, “I don’t see much point in asking anything. We’re not going to find anything here.”

Duke didn’t know if she was being pessimistic, or if she just knew it somehow. He didn’t have time to ask, either, unless they wanted to draw more attention to themselves by loitering in front of the office. The guys playing checkers weren’t even pretending to play anymore.

Blowing out a breath, he rested a hand on the base of her spine and said, “We’ll talk about all of that after we get a room.”

 

 

A
NA lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. The mattress was rock hard, thin and probably a good twenty years old.

The room was clean, though, and well cared for. The small unit they’d paid for was probably only a couple of hundred square feet max, but it had a kitchenette, a TV and the bathroom, thank God, was very, very clean. Plus, all the rooms came equipped with wireless Internet access.

Apparently the small town had more tourism traffic than they’d thought. All the rooms but this one were booked and the owner had proudly told them all about the small town. If they were in the mood to hunt, hike, fish or go for a horseback ride—just be sure to let him know because he could hook them right up.

Still, they were wasting their time here.

She wasn’t sure how she knew. She just did. Duke was sitting at the desk, already surfing the web and looking for more information about Leah Parrish. Leah . . . the name meant less than nothing to Ana. She’d jotted the name down in her notes, because Leah, like a number of other teenaged girls and young women, had gone missing within the past three decades.

But she got no buzz from the name, and when she closed her eyes, she didn’t see the image of the girl being slaughtered. Unlike what happened every time she thought of Marie. Unlike what happened when she remembered the girl who’d died a few days earlier.

There was nothing here.

“You’d make a lousy detective.”

Ana rolled her head on the mattress, looking at Duke. He had shifted in the chair, sprawling with his legs stretched out in front of him and an amused smile on his lips. “Why is that?”

“You have no patience.”

“And you get that idea because . . . ?”

“Because you’re so ready to hop off that bed and head back to Palmer, I can all but hear the wheels in your head turning,” he replied.

“It’s not Palmer,” she said, shrugging. “It just that I
feel
something there. I don’t feel anything here.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. I guess I expected to feel . . . something. But there’s nothing here.”