Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (21 page)

“Do you get this upset about every murder you work?” Scarlett said, ice in her voice. “I’m amazed you have enough energy left to get up in the morning.”

“This is different. You
know
this is different,” he spat.

“Don’t snap at me, Jesse,” she said, eyes narrowing. “I’m not the bad guy here.”

“That’s right, I forgot,” Jesse said angrily. “You’re the bad guy’s cleaning lady.”

Tears spilled down Scarlett’s cheeks, but when she spoke her voice was steady. “I can’t do my job if I let it—”

“Your
job
?” Jesse yelled. “Do you think I give a fuck about your job right now? Or my job, for that matter? Do you think I’m still in this for a
promotion
?”

Scarlett flinched. “You know why we do this. You know why people can’t find out.”

Jesse clenched his fists. He was working so hard to keep his voice below a scream. “Bullshit. We were so
close
. If we’d had the resources, we could have been faster, we could have warned these women. We could have prevented this.”

Scarlett looked skeptical, and he felt a wave of irritation with her. She was keeping her eyes on him, and he suddenly wanted to grab her head and force her eyes downward, like a puppy that’s had an accident. Instead he pointed at Samantha Wheaton. “She couldn’t stand the sight of blood, Scarlett. How do you think the last day has gone for her?” Scarlett trembled, but still kept his gaze, so he pointed down at Ruanna Martinez. “And
she
has three kids at home, and no husband. Two boys and a girl who get to spend the rest of their lives without parents now.” Scarlett stubbornly kept her eyes on his. He could hardly make out the green through her tears, but he kept going. “How’s that working for
you
, Scarlett?”

Her whole body went rigid. “Get away from me,” she whispered.

“Happy to,” he said nastily. He stomped back toward the main road, leaving Scarlett standing over the bodies, alone.

Chapter 32

I kept it together for a while, I really did.

I called Will, told him he needed to get there right away. I was calm as I lied and said Jesse had run off in pursuit of the nova, while Will helped me dispose of the bodies, and while I faked a phone call from Jesse saying he’d lost the guy in the woods. If Will had had his werewolf hearing and scent, I would have been screwed, but if he suspected me of lying, he didn’t say anything.

Then again, maybe he was too preoccupied by the fact that the nova had made a mate. As bad as it had already been, things were going to get worse for the pack. I asked if the nova was going to come after them the next night, but he said, no, Remus would want to build up his own pack first. Which was a nice way of saying that Remus was going to try to infect as many people as possible during the full moon. Unless we found him first.

I dropped Will back at his house, promised to call him in the morning with an update, and cried most of the way back to Molly’s house.

By the time I got there, I felt like one of those ceramic figurines my mother had collected: fragile on the outside, hollow on the inside. I had run out of tears, thoughts, and ideas. I had nothing left but pain in my leg and ashes in my hair from Artie’s furnace.

Molly’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I got home, which was okay by me. I wasn’t in the mood for quality time. I shucked my dirty jacket and left it near the door so I’d remember to get it washed. I wanted nothing more than to collapse in my bed, but I was filthy and sore and needed a shower. Sitting on my butt, I dragged myself up the stairs, letting my cane bump along the stairs next to me. Since I was on my butt anyway, I just kept going on it, scooting my way into the bathroom. I pulled off my boots, slid my knee brace off very carefully, and wriggled out of my clothes, leaving all of it in a messy heap on the bathroom floor.

I showered, shampooing my hair several times, wrapped a towel around myself, and snagged my knee brace on the way out, leaving my clothes where they were and hobbling back to my bedroom. After putting on underwear, an enormous Chicago Bulls jersey from my father, and the knee brace, I stretched out across my bed. The pain in my knee roared even louder by then, so I carefully rolled sideways to the bottle of Vicodin on my bedside table. I swallowed two dry and flopped back onto my pillow, closing my eyes as I waited for them to kick in.

Just as I started to drift, though, I heard a small crash from downstairs.

I opened my eyes. “Molly?” I called, but there was no answer from below. “Molls?”

Silence. Then a soft creak, somewhere in the house.

Panic raced to life along my body, fighting the stupefying medication and urging me to take action. I tried to focus, to sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed, but the pills were kicking in and that was suddenly too complicated. I realized with sickening fear that the vertigo had returned. I settled for rolling onto my stomach and sliding into a heap on the floor, on the opposite side of the bed from the door. The skin on my bare legs goose-pimpled where it touched the cool carpet. I peered over the side of the bed, staring at my open doorway. The hallway was dim, lit only by the light trickling up from the stairs to the right of my door. I could see Molly’s bedroom door and a light switch, nothing else. I squinted my eyes, focusing hard. A dark shadow passed through the light, and I ducked my head below the top of my bed. There was a long, heavy moment of silence. I shivered with fear and cold, my head clearing despite the drugs.

I was being stalked. And my Taser was still in my coat pocket, downstairs.

When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I slowly raised my head again. As soon as my eyes rose above the mattress, a wolf sprang at me from the hallway.

At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. Before she made it through my door, however, the werewolf hit my radius and changed instantly into a snarling, tumbling naked woman. Momentum carried her through the doorway and a few steps into the room, where only the bed stood between me and her. Anastasia stood up and squared her shoulders, unaffected by her own nudity. Her short afro was matted to her head in places, and her black eyes were reddened and furious.

“You,” she spat at me. “You worthless
cow
.”

I felt silly all of a sudden, hiding behind a bed while a crazy naked lady calls me a cow. I mean, who talks like that? But then she took a step closer to me, and I saw her eyes. There was more than just fury in them now. They were mad with rage. Emphasis on the
mad
.

Ana wasn’t home anymore.

My own eyes widened, and I was glad she couldn’t smell my fear. “Hang on,” I said very gently, holding my hands up. “Ana, look, about Lydi
a . . .
”

She howled with rage, a wolf reaction but a human sound.
“Don’t say her name!”
she screamed at me. And she lunged.

Social norms are funny. Anastasia was willing to break into my house, attack, and probably even kill me, but there’s something about someone’s unmade bed that you just instinctively avoid, because it’s not polite. So instead of the shortest route to me, over the bed, she launched herself around it. By memory and instinct I threw myself over the bed, scrambling for the hallway.

I’d forgotten about my knee. I blamed the drugs.

Pills or no pills, searing pain drove through my leg as I landed on it, and I screamed. The pain helped me focus, though, and I managed to scoot backward on my butt. Ana had recovered quickly and was on my heels, diving at me as I made it to the doorway. She expected me to turn right, toward the stairs, so I dodged left instead, and her grasping arms hit the wall with a loud crack that could have been either her finger bones or the plaster of the old house. She bellowed with rage and pain, and in the dim light I could just see her clutching at her right hand. I continued my useless backward escape, keeping my eyes on the werewolf. The stairs were behind Anastasia, and there was nothing down at this end of the hall but the bathroom and the little laundry area.

With no other options, I dragged myself backward toward the bathroom, hoping I could lock myself in and scream for help. If I stayed right on the other side of the door, Ana wouldn’t be able to change into a werewolf; she’d have to break it down as a human, and if her fingers were broken—

The half-assed plan turned out to be futile anyway, because the damned hallway was too long. I felt, rather than saw, when I scooted too far and Anastasia left my radius. Her howls of pain cut off abruptly, and I could see her backlit figure straighten up, flexing fingers as they healed, bones knitting together almost instantaneously. I froze with indecision: move forward toward Ana and keep her wounded, try to extend my radius again, or race for the bathroom door as best I could?

I went for the bathroom. There were still at least five feet between me and the doorway, and I felt like the tendons and ligaments holding the parts of my body together were dissolving. I scrambled hopelessly for the door, dragging my leg behind me, even as Anastasia’s silhouette took a long, deliberate step in my direction. Stalking.

She tackled me just as I reached the threshold of the bathroom. There was no time to even drag myself in before she was on top of me, her fingers clawing for my throat, her legs smashing down on my bad knee. I cried out with pain, but she cut off my air, hands around my throat. The tackle had pivoted me onto my back in the doorway, and my right arm flailed out, as I tried to punch her in the eye, the nose. But her reach was longer than mine and she dodged easily. I was panicking, every cell in my body screaming at me as I reached out, fingers scrabbling on the bathroom floor for
anything
that could help me—and they brushed against soft leather. A boot.

Terrible hope erupted in my brain.
Please be the right one
, I begged silently. A fifty-fifty chance. Ana pressed down harder, trying to crush my throat as she strangled me. Haze started to darken my vision as I laboriously worked my fingers around to the opening of the boo
t . . .

I pulled out the knife and thrust it between her ribs in one smooth movement, like I’d practiced it every day of my life.

I gasped as her fingers finally loosened and sweet, glorious air rushed into my lungs. And then I let out a pathetic, wheezing scream, because blood was
everywhere
. On television, people never really bleed until you pull the knife out. But I had stabbed Anastasia in the heart, and her blood spurted immediately, pouring down onto my stomach, drenching my arms, my clothes, and finally soaking into the hallway carpet beneath us. It was so hot that it seemed like its own living thing, like her life was deserting her for me, and for the first time I understood what the word
lifeblood
truly meant. I managed to tilt my body enough to get her mostly off me, but after that the last remnants of my strength disappeared, and my head slapped down against the linoleum of the bathroom like it had been pushed there. For the first time since my fingers had touched boot leather, I looked at her face.

It was slack and staring, no traces of surprise or hurt or pain left. She was dead.

I closed my eyes and welcomed the darkness.

Chapter 33

When I was nine, there was a whole week in the summer where my mother just stayed in bed.

My father, a history teacher who taught driver’s ed during the summer, was the one who called my mom’s boss at the veterinary clinic and said that she was sick. She didn’t sound sick when I heard the two of them talking in their room, so I kept trying to get to her, to show her my crayon drawings or beg her to play
Crazy Eights
. My father was usually the pushover of the two, but he kept intercepting me at the bedroom door. First he tried to calmly redirect me toward the backyard or my room, but I was stubborn and prone to running headfirst toward anything I was supposed to leave alone. Finally he came right out and ordered me not to bother Mom unless there was a fire. I momentarily considered starting a small controlled fire, but even I wasn’t willing to go that far. Plus they’d hidden the matches.

By the third day I was sick of all of it: being alone, not understanding. After Dad had left for work, I stomped up the stairs and to my mom’s door, opening it just a bit before bumping it all the way open with my hip. “Momma,” I announced, with as much righteousness as my nine-year-old self could muster, “you have to get up now.”

She didn’t move, so I sighed dramatically, like she did when I didn’t want to get out of bed to go to school. There was still no response, so I marched across the room and circled around the bed. There, I saw that she looke
d . . .
like a ghost. Her face was pale and wrinkly, and her eyes were rimmed in red like she’d opened them underwater in the city pool. When she saw me, the line of her mouth trembled and she flipped back the corner of the sheet as an invitation. Temporarily shocked into compliance, I climbed into the bed and snuggled my back against her belly as she wrapped her arms around me. “I don’t get it,” I complained after a moment.

“Scarbo,” she sighed into my hair, creating a circle of warmth on the back of my head. “I hope you never ever do.”

Years later, I would learn that our long-estranged grandmother had died that week, and my mother had been torn up with grief and guilt and regret. And it was years after that, when I lay on the floor in Molly’s hallway, staring at Anastasia’s corpse, that I could finally understand why she had stayed in bed. Unmoving.

I’d seen so much death. More in the last week alone than anyone should see in a lifetime. Ana wasn’t even the first person I’d killed, but while I hadn’t
enjoyed
killing Olivia, I hadn’t felt one moment of remorse about pulling the trigger. Olivia had been truly evil.

Ana, thoug
h . . .
Ana was never evil. She was just lost. And I’d killed her for it.

The first thing I heard was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. My eyes opened, but a murky haze had settled over me like a lead apron, pressing me into the floor. I was curled on my side, still drenched in blood, and now staring at Ana’s forehead. Her eyes were still open, but I had stopped looking at them. The haze encouraged me to keep my eyes higher, to just focus on the smooth brown oval of her forehead and keep it in my sight line. And I listened. Because the haze was my friend.

There was some more noise, but I was untouched. I ignored it with easy detachment, letting the haze keep me pinned and deaf. Then there was nothing else for a long time, and I ignored that too. Then there were more footsteps, and more noise. To my irritation, some of it was filtering through the haze.

“Holy
shit
. Is sh
e . . .
”

“Dead? No. I thought so too, but she’s breathing, and I don’t think any of that blood is hers. She’s in shock, I think, but then there’s the body. You’re her assistant, right? You can take care of the body?”

“
I . . .
I mean, yeah, but I’d like to stay with Scarlett.”

“I’ll stay with her.”

“But
in the room
, right?”

“Yeah. I have t
o . . .
eat. Tonight. But I can wait until you get back from wherever.”

“Okay.”

Ana’s forehead disappeared suddenly, dragged out of my view. I could feel a vampire in my radius, but now it was quiet again, so I didn’t care. I preferred the quiet. I unfocused my brain, staying curled under the haze. Some more time passed, and then I grew annoyed because there were more fucking footsteps.

“Scarlett? Scarlett!”

“Oh, yeah, saying her name. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Not helping, Molly.”

A pause. Then—“You’re right. Sorry.”

Suddenly, there was warm breath on the back of my neck, and I felt hands underneath me, a little awkward, but so careful. Eli picked me up very gently, cuddling me into his chest like you’d hold a small child or a broken doll. His T-shirt was soft and smelled like ocean air and hamburger grease. The blood had dried tackily on my father’s jersey, and crusts of it broke apart in protest as we moved. I didn’t care, personally. It made no difference to me where I
was
.

Then warm liquid exploded against my face, and for just a moment I thought it was more blood, and I almost screamed. But no, he had carried me into the big shower/tub stall in Molly’s bathroom. The shock began to wash away, down the drain with the tacky blood. Eli put my legs down and helped me stand, balancing me against his chest so I could keep most of my weight off my bad leg
.
I sputtered in the water, gasping for air with panicked breaths, my fingers knotting into his shirt. He made comforting shushing sounds. “You’re okay,” he murmured over the sound of the spray. “You’re going to be okay.”

My haze had washed away too, and I screamed, a raw howl that may have started out as a word but I couldn’t tell you which one. “I can’t, I can’t,” I sobbed into Eli’s chest, smearing tears into his shirt. “It’s all over me, I
can’t
.”

“I’ve gott
a . . .
I’m going to go get something to eat,” said Molly, from the doorway. Her voice was shaking, but I didn’t think it was from the blood. It was from the sight of me.

Eli didn’t bother even looking at her as she left. He shushed me again, a sound of comfort, and gently pulled my bloody shirt over my head, then bent to pull my underwear down. The blood had soaked through everything, and I yelped when I saw how it had stained my skin underneath. Eli picked up a bar of soap, my plain everyday Dove bar, and helped me wash it off. Naked, crying, I went up on tiptoes to wrap my arms around his neck so I could bury my face in his neck. “I can’t, I can’
t . . .
”

“Scarlett,” he whispered in my ear, smoothing my hair. “Come back, come back to me.”

We stood like that for a long time, with him murmuring my name. Eventually, he planted gentle kisses on the rim of my ear, distracting me. When he reached my earlobe he kissed his way down my neck, my skin calling for my attention wherever he touched it. Slowly, giving me every chance to pull away, he slid his hands under my butt so my legs could wrap around his waist, which they did before I’d had a chance to even consider doing it. He kept one warm hand cupped gently under my swollen knee, making sure it didn’t dangle. My hands began pulling up his shirt.

This was how it always was with Eli, natural and explosive at the same time. There was such comfort in my body’s reaction to his, something so familiar, so safe. His mouth found mine, and I was home.