Hunter's Need (7 page)

“It’s Ana.”

Beverly looked back at her husband. “This is Ana. She’s a tourist and she’d taken a break outside, admiring the view. I saw her while I was checking the mail and we got to chatting. She mentioned some of the beadwork she’d seen down at the museum and I ended up inviting her inside to see some of Mom’s beadwork.” She gestured toward the living room as she did so.

Ana glanced that way and saw a beaded belt in a display case on the wall. A baby belt—she knew what it was called because she’d been to the Alaska Native Heritage Center and she’d seen some of the work down there. She’d enjoyed looking at the different types of art enough to do a little bit of research.

Thank God.

Without missing a beat, she smiled and said, “It’s lovely work. I can’t imagine how much time goes into crafting the belts. I think I read somewhere that women here used to work on them for months—it was almost like a trousseau.”

“Oh, yes,” Beverly said, beaming. “My mother spent weeks and weeks working on that one. And they still do make them. In some of the smaller villages, especially. Women use the belts kind of like a papoose.”

“Be careful, Ana. My Beverly could talk for hours about this subject. I’m Kyle, by the way, Beverly’s husband.”

“It’s nice to meet you.”

He nodded, an absent look on his face. “I just came to get some more coffee. I’ve got to get back to work.”

While he poured himself a cup, Beverly chattered on, about the belt her mother had made, about her own attempts. She kept it up until his footsteps faded down the hall and they heard a door shut somewhere in the house. Beverly heaved out a breath and gave Ana a grateful look.

“Thank you. I’m sorry, but I just felt lying seemed best. I was so upset after that book came out. I was depressed for weeks and I didn’t want Kyle . . . well . . . ” She sighed and shook her head, brushing her hair back from her face. “Kyle shouldn’t have to keep picking up the pieces each time I fall apart.”

“But isn’t that what he’s there for?” A sympathetic smile curled Ana’s lips even as a ribbon of envy curled through her. She knew what it was like to fall apart, but she didn’t know what it was like to have somebody there to help hold her together, to help her pick up the pieces. “You’d do the same thing for him, I imagine.”

“Of course I would.” Beverly smiled. “And yes, I imagine that’s one of the benefits of being married, having somebody you love living your life with you—so you can share the burdens. Still, this burden just keeps getting heavier and heavier, not easier. I don’t want him to keep worrying about me so.”

“You didn’t want him to know that I’m here asking about your sister. You don’t want him upset.” She shoved the envy aside.

“No. No, I don’t.” Beverly braced her elbows against the table. Her dark eyes, cool and direct, bored into Ana’s. “Please don’t make me regret talking to you. Please don’t make me regret lying to my husband.”

 

 

S
HE
liked to go hiking up in the Mat-Su Valley. Loved the glacier
.

Everything else that had been said had fallen on mostly deaf ears, and Ana doubted if she could have recalled the conversation with any credibility, because as soon as she’d heard the words
Mat-Su Valley
, that nagging, impatient demand had flared to vibrant, hot life.

The valley. Something had happened in the valley, and Ana was going to have to go there. Which was why she took two personal days, why she shelled out a ridiculous amount of money to rent a car for the weekend and why she was driving north on Thursday morning instead of catching a bus to her job.

Four days. She’d give it four days and see if she figured anything out.

Off in the distance, mountains rose into the sky, tall and green, vibrant against a sky so blue, it hurt to look at it. Along the roadside, the skeletal remains of trees jutted upward, the remnants of an earthquake that had hit Alaska decades earlier.

Somebody had told Ana the stands of dead trees were called ghost forests. When the 1964 earthquake hit, huge areas of land dropped below the sea level, leaving the trees’ roots submersed in saltwater from the ocean, killing them.

They were eerily beautiful but today, for some reason, they took on a more macabre slant and Ana found herself working to
not
look at the trees. She didn’t want to see them. Or the mountains, either.

 

 

D
UKE was going out of his damned mind. Edgy.

Itchy. Edgy.

Restless.

It had gotten worse after the run-in with Brad a few days earlier and all he wanted to do was head out again. Go back on patrol for a few more months. Just climb on his bike and ride out, maybe head north up the coastline this time. Bounce around New England for a while.

A lot of the Hunters without formal territories had a tendency to just roam, looking for trouble in areas where no Master controlled things.

Sometimes, it was damned monotonous, but it kept him busy. Plus, if he was out on patrol, sooner or later, he would come across trouble. Lately, he was strung so tight, trouble was just what he needed.

A good fight just might clear his head a little.

He couldn’t leave, though.

It wasn’t that anybody would stop him. He just
couldn’t
leave. Whatever it was that kept him from leaving was some mess of his own, but he couldn’t figure out what in the hell the problem was.

How he was supposed to handle it.

One thing was sure, he had to figure that answer out. Excelsior was supposed to be where he came when he needed downtime. Not home, really. But the closest thing to home he had.

A safe haven. Quiet. Controlled. A place where none of them had to live behind the normal personas that they projected to the mortal world. Where they could just be who they were and not worry about anything else.

He loved coming back here and didn’t even mind all that much when they started drafting him into helping the regular instructors. For the most part, he felt at peace here, even if he did still find himself looking for Ana Morell, a fucking year after she’d left.

But the peace he’d needed to find, hoped to find, expected to find, had eluded him this trip, and he was about to climb out of his skin just from how fucking edgy he was. It was like the night of the full moon, only worse, and it only affected him.

He stormed out of his rooms with a scowl, his mood downright toxic. A couple of the people he passed by took one look at his face and cut a wide berth around him. He knew it and he didn’t care. He wasn’t on rotation to teach today, and he’d steer clear of the school itself and anyplace where he’d come in contact with the students, but he’d be damned if he stayed inside his room another minute.

He had some vague idea in mind about the gym. Maybe he could find a sparring partner and work some of this tension off . . .

But his feet led him elsewhere. To the lower levels under the main school, to an area nobody but the teachers and Hunters ever saw. He found himself in Kelsey Hughes’s office, her
real
office, not the one she used on the rare occasion she had to be headmistress for the mortal world.

This room, while definitely an office, had things that just wouldn’t fit into the normal persona Kelsey projected to the mortal world. A sword hung over her chair, clearly old, painstakingly cared for. Other weapons and artifacts adorned the walls. Bookshelves lined the walls, holding ancient, hand-bound books, protected from dust and carelessness by gleaming glass fronts. Those books held a written account of the history of the Hunters, going back for centuries. A great deal of them were written in languages that hadn’t been spoken in centuries.

It was a soothing room, though, or at least it normally seemed that way.

Not so much today.

In the quiet, empty office, he paced back and forth until he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a path worn through the carpet.

“Kelsey’s not in right now. She’s got a class.”

Glancing up, he met Cori Marcum’s gaze. She lingered in the doorway, eying him warily. “I can see she isn’t here, thanks.”

“She . . . ah . . . she may not be back tonight.”

He bit back a pithy remark and just nodded. She frowned at him and then left in silence. Too
much
silence, that deafening silence that weighed down on a man and threatened to drive him nuts. The skin along his spine itched and he could feel his muscles twitching with the urge to shift. Shift and run.

Stopping in his tracks, he pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and swore. “What in the hell is going on?”

Fuck. He could
hear
the damn growl in his throat. Storming across the room, he jerked open the door to the restroom and crossed to the sink. He paused, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

His eyes glowed, swirled, but he didn’t need to see that little sign to know how precarious his control was just then. He could feel it, feel the beast lurking just under the surface of his skin, lurking too close, desperate to be let loose.

Turning the cold water, he bent over the sink and splashed it on his face.

He turned off the water and stood there, head lowered. He reached for focus. He reached for calm. Focus, calm; they weren’t coming too easily for him.

“Get it under control.”

Of course, it would help if he could figure out what
it
was. If he knew what the hell was wrong and why he was so keyed up—

In that second, the phone in Kelsey’s office rang. Slowly, Duke straightened from over the sink. Slowly, he turned his head and stared back into the office.

It was an old-fashioned sort of phone, the kind with a rotary dial, no extra lines. About as simple as a phone could get, and nothing computerized to it. Witches and technology didn’t mix all that well for the most part, and Kelsey was worse than most.

Cori appeared in the door but stopped as Duke started toward the phone. “I can get that . . . ” she offered, but her voice trailed off.

Duke didn’t even hear her speak. For some reason, the damned ringing had him utterly fascinated. All the tension in his body spiked as he reached for the phone. Lifting it, he held it, and simply waited.

“Ahhhh . . . hello?”

He closed his eyes. At the sound of her voice, that caged, restless, edgy anger melted away, replaced by a narrow-minded focus that Duke recognized all too well. “Ana.”

There was a long hesitation before she replied, “Duke?”

“Why are you calling?”

The sound of his voice, harsh and gruff, had the dual effects of making Ana flinch and forcing her to lock her knees just to keep from wilting.
Duke
. . . She closed her eyes and there it was, his image springing to life as though it had been painted on the inside of her eyelids.

Duke—she hadn’t seen him, hadn’t spoken to him in more than a year.

Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes. It didn’t help. Her belly was hot and tight, her nerves scrambling. On the inside, she was a mess. But he didn’t need to know that—he wasn’t here. He couldn’t see how he affected her, couldn’t smell it. As long as she didn’t let it show in her voice, she was fine.

She made herself look out the window of the bed-and-breakfast, out into the mountains. It was a beautiful view—beautiful, and a stark reminder of why she’d called Excelsior.

If Ana could disconnect from the dark chaos rioting through her, she would have probably been struck silent just by the beauty. But she couldn’t disconnect and when she stared out the window at the mountains towering into the clear blue sky, she felt chilled to the bone.

Something was wrong here.

Very
wrong.

Damn it, just tell him that
. Why did it matter that it was Duke that answered the phone and not Kelsey? Logically? It didn’t matter. But logic never had much to do with what happened to her when she heard his voice, when she thought of him, when she saw the sexy shapeshifter.

She swallowed again, her mouth dry. “Is . . . ah . . . is Kelsey there? It’s kind of important.”

“She’s not here. Why are you calling?”

“Is her assistant Cori around?”

“Why are you calling?” he said for the third time and this time, she heard an edge creeping into his voice.

Ana pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.
You can’t back out now . . . you’re already involved and you can’t let this go until you do something—just tell him
. She blew out a harsh breath. “There’s something wrong up here. I don’t know what it is and even if I did, I’m not exactly qualified to deal with it.”

“Up here—you still in Alaska?”

She frowned.
How do you know that?
But instead of asking, she said, “Yes.”

“Going to have a problem getting much help up there. Especially in the summer. Vamps can’t handle the daylight. Most of the witches get their senses scrambled that far north and weres don’t like the poles.”

“We don’t have much summer left.” Ana caught a lock of her hair. Without thinking, she started to twirl it. “Somebody needs to come up here, Duke.”

He grunted. “You’re somebody. You’re up there. The poles won’t mess with psychic talent.”

Her jaw dropped. “Uh . . . Duke, I’m not a Hunter. I just feel like something is off.”

“Then deal with it, princess. Kelsey’s not here to help you figure it out. Hell, if it was
that
bad, somebody would already have felt the need to trot on up there and check things out.”

The condescension in his voice cut, and it cut deep, but she could deal with it. He had every right to dislike her, every right not to want to talk with her, every right to avoid having anything to do with her.