Spirit of a Hunter (15 page)

Too far. Too late.

“By the time I got to the hospital,” he said, “she was dead.”

And the Colonel, seeking to hurt him, had slapped a copy of the video taken at the scene by the television crew into his hands and told him Anna’s death was his fault, that he would have to pay.

Sabriel had watched the tape helplessly time and again, watched as the divers had surfaced, watched as bloody foam poured from Anna’s mouth, watched her limp body being whisked away by ambulance.

He’d demanded answers. He’d inspected every frame of video, every piece of her equipment.

That’s when he’d understood the truth. That she’d wanted to die. That she’d waited for the one time he couldn’t save her to escape.

Everything after that was a blur. The funeral, his dishonorable discharge from the Army, the Colonel’s negligence lawsuit. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t work. A hole formed inside him and nothing could sew it back together.

He’d given up on saving the world. Less toll on the heart to attack the situation from the other side—first with the U.S. Marshals, then with Seekers. Find the scum and put them where they wouldn’t hurt anyone.

The one thing he knew for sure was that he couldn’t lie down and die. He couldn’t let the Colonel win.

Not then, not now.

* * *

I
N THE DARK
of this loft, in the warm nest of sleeping bag and hay, with the relaxing waves of Sabriel’s magic hands still humming through her body, talking seemed natural.

“Anna’s death wasn’t your fault.” Tenderness squeezed Nora’s heart at the pain he’d had to endure. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, but sensed he wouldn’t appreciate such a gesture, so she sat up and tucked her arms around her legs over the sleeping bag. “If anyone’s responsible, it’s the Colonel.”

“Dying was the only way she could escape him. I wish—” Sabriel went back to the loft opening and studied the landscape. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does.” The sadness etching his face against the stark light of the farmyard made her want to comfort him as he’d comforted her with his hands. She hugged her knees tighter. “Loving someone, losing them, it’s always hard, no matter what.”

Sabriel’s frankness about Anna was disarming, demanding an equal measure of truth. She couldn’t ease his sorrow, but she could share her failures, the ones she’d never dared speak for fear they would taint her.

“I met Tommy when he called my midnight-to-four-a.m. show.
Nora at Night
—I know, not very original, but it was my boss’s idea. And since I was living in the basement, and he didn’t know it, I wasn’t about to argue.”

Nora picked at the loose hay scattered on her sleeping
bag. “Tommy liked the eclectic mix of my playlists—and had called to offer suggestions of his own.”

Sabriel gave a low chuckle. “Tommy and his music. Sometimes I think he used it to drown out the Colonel’s voice in his head.”

“He sure knew a lot—not just about the music, but about the artists, too. We talked for hours.” In the cocoon of that darkness, broken spirit reached out to broken spirit. Until, months later, she’d had the courage to meet him in public and had fallen for his sweet smile almost immediately.

“I married Tommy because he made me laugh. He made me feel safe.” She brushed away the loose hay in her hair, but she couldn’t as easily brush away the feeling of Tommy’s betrayal. “But that was Tommy on his meds. Tommy off his meds was a nightmare. And when the Colonel forced him—us—to go live at the estate, he was a completely different man.”

“What happened?”

Sabriel focused on her so completely, she could not hold the intensity of his gaze.

She shrugged. “The Colonel wanted an heir, and the Colonel manipulated Tommy to get his way. I wasn’t ready. Not with the way things were. Not when it felt as if we were living on top of a powder keg about to blow. But, like Anna, Tommy wanted so badly to please his father that he tampered with my birth control pills.”

Sabriel swore softly, and knowing someone else was outraged at Tommy’s behavior, propped her courage.

“The trust was gone and it killed our marriage.” Nora
twisted a piece of hay round and round until it snapped. “After Scotty was born, I couldn’t do anything right. The Colonel tried to interfere with my raising of Scotty. My breast milk wasn’t good enough for a Camden. A Camden needed fortified formula. I went to Scotty too quickly when he cried. I held him too much. I played with him too much.”

She’d cried so many tears that first year, enough to flood the Flint River. “I wanted to leave, but the Colonel made it clear that if I did, it was alone. Scotty was his.”

“You’re the mother. The laws are in your favor.”

“But he’s got the influence. He’d line up a dozen character witnesses who’d swear I was a bad mother.” She snorted. “He used Scotty as a bartering tool. Tommy realized there was no way he could ever please his father and, in the end, he left so I could stay with Scotty.”

Which had turned out to be the best thing for Tommy. “Tommy found his niche as an outdoor guide. And I really thought he’d finally found a way to be happy.”

“You couldn’t save him. He was already too far gone.” Sabriel’s words soothed her as his magic hands had earlier.

“I gave up on Tommy.” And paid a price. She wasn’t going to repeat her mistake. “I’m not going to give up on saving Scotty.”

* * *

B
EFORE DAWN
, as he’d programmed himself to, Sabriel awakened. His body lay spooned against a woman’s. Blessedly warm and soft. One hand rested casually on birdlike ribs, his thumb snug against the delicious curve
of a breast, his nose buried in a cloud of silky hair. He burrowed closer, a hum of contentment purring all the way down to his marrow.

For an instant, memories of Anna sprang to mind. A rush of pure need made him rock hard. Until the scent of sweet almonds and hay reached his brain.

Hell, not Anna, but Nora. In old man Wagner’s hay loft. A woman who’d already had a lifetime of betrayals and didn’t need another from a man with no heart.

Cautiously, he pulled his hand from her ribs. She mumbled something in her sleep, folded his hand into both of hers and settled deeper into the
V
of his body, intensifying his hunger for her.

Acutely conscious of the soft texture of her skin, the way her curves fit so nicely to his body, the innocent trust lining her face, he sought to free his hand one more time without waking her up. And almost made it before her eyes sprang open and pure fear widened them until they all but swallowed her face.

“Shh,” he said, ignoring the compromising position of his body. “We have to leave. Before the old man gets up.”

Nodding, she scampered out of her sleeping bag and silently helped him pack.

Sabriel copped half a dozen eggs from the still sleeping hens and left a couple dollar bills in the eggs’ place. He grinned at the thought of old Mr. Wagner’s surprise when he reached under the hen and came up with a dollar instead of an egg.

Once in the woods again, he hard-boiled his loot in the Jetboil and insisted Nora eat a couple, as well as one
of his homemade energy bars before they continued. Today’s hike would be no picnic; they needed all the fuel they could get.

They skirted the bog and made it to the other side of the meadow, then plunged into the woods once again. Dawn burst in an explosion of red against a clear sky. But the sunshine wouldn’t last. The smell of rain rode on the breeze and the changing atmospheric pressure squeezed at his sinus cavity.

He glommed on to the trail left by their hunters.

“That doesn’t look like Tommy’s and Scotty’s tracks,” Nora said behind him.

She was learning fast. “Nope.”

“Then why are we following them?”

“Know thine enemy.”

Chapter Nine

“Know your enemy?” Nora asked, pushing herself faster to keep up with Sabriel. Trees blurred in her peripheral vision. The rocky, rooty ground demanded concentration. Dawn’s chill was gone and sweat from the fast pace already soaked her back. She should take off a layer, but she didn’t want to get left behind. “We already know them. They belong to the Colonel. They want us to have an accident. They want Scotty.”

“We don’t know how many there are,” Sabriel said, the voice of calm to her tangled web of anxiety. “The degree of their training. What equipment they’re carrying. The state of their morale.”

“We can’t follow the men hunting us. That’s plain insanity. They’ll get ahead. They’ll get to Scotty first.”

Sabriel was a bloodhound on a scent, and nothing she said was getting through.

“You can get to know a man better through his tracks than by seeing him,” he said. “If we know them, we can beat them.”

“Or they can stop us. Kill us. Take Scotty back to the Colonel. Do you want him to crack and break the way Tommy did? The way Anna did?”

Sabriel slanted her a look over his shoulder and his eyes glittered ice-cold.

Stop it! Stop manipulating with guilt the way the Colonel does. It makes you no better than he is
. “I’m sorry, I—”

“You’re going to give up?”

Her hands fisted. “No, never!”

“I’ve taken you this far.” His expression focused and intent, he zeroed in on the tracks and plunged down the side of a ravine. She had no choice. She had to follow.

Trust. She had to trust that little voice inside that told her he was an honorable man. But none of what he did made sense. His actions seemed to drag her down into a deeper hell.

“Footprints indicate six men,” Sabriel said, interrupting the dark tangle of her thoughts as he crossed over a brook.

She sucked in a breath. “Six? That many?”

“They’re traveling light, and they’re getting hungry.”

“You can’t possibly tell that from a track.”

“What you think and what you feel shows up in the pressure releases. Tracks are like windows into a person’s soul.” He continued stalking, studying the tracks, taking them up a gradual climb. “They’re trained, but cocky. They
know
they’re going to win. They’re following Tommy’s tracks decently enough—but then Tommy can’t really hide his tracks because of Scotty.” Sabriel
pointed to a scratch on a beech. “Waist-high scuff on this tree shows they’re armed. One of them has a rifle.”

“What difference does it make if one of them has a rifle? They’ve got guns and they plan to kill us.”

“A rifle gives them range. But the hunted has the advantage. These hunters aren’t part of the wilderness. They’re just trespassing aliens.”

She snorted. “Too bad their mother ship isn’t calling them home.”

Half his mouth quirked up. “Maybe we can make them think she is.”

She frowned. “What exactly are you planning to do?”

“Even the odds.”

Another one of his take-charge phrases that pushed her out.
Don’t worry your pretty little head over this
. How many times had she heard the Colonel say those words to his wife? How many times had he used a not-so-polite version on her? “You have to stop treating me like a brainless twit.”

“It’ll buy us time.”

“Hey!” She grabbed his elbow and yanked. “I’m not the one who’s ten.”

He turned around, a flash of hurt hardening his eyes. “Will you trust me, Nora?”

“Only if you trust me.”

“Fair enough.” He turned back to tracking. “I’m going to try to get close enough to see what we’re up against.”

“Then?”

“I won’t know until I see.”

Not very comforting, but his job wasn’t to comfort
her, and she’d asked for straight talk. She hated to divert even one minute from the path that would take her to Scotty, but Sabriel was her guide and she needed him. She would give him the slack he asked for if it bought them time.

The pitter-patter of rain started soon after lunch, the striking sound of it more a nuisance than the widely spaced drops. After a short pause to wolf down a pouch of tuna and some fruit leather, and to change socks, they were on their way again, following the endless trail of tracks that seemed to lead nowhere.

After the rain, came the sun, taking the chill out of the air, making the afternoon warm enough to strip down to the base shirt layer.

Sabriel pointed out the single thread dangling from a branch. “See where this branch snapped? One of them plowed through here. Look at the break.”

“It looks fresh.”

He nodded, pleased, and his pleasure fluttered inside her. “They’re not far ahead.”

“Whatever you do, it can’t hurt our chances of finding Scotty.”

“There’s always a risk, Nora, that’s part of living.”

She walked in helpless frustration, wishing she could do more to help her son.

The closer they got to the Colonel’s men, the more Sabriel morphed into a predator on a hunt, bent over, his footsteps higher, faster, quieter than before. The more he became one with the forest, the more she felt like an alien who’d landed on the wrong planet—ugly,
clumsy, plodding. The dimming afternoon light didn’t help the feeling.

She gave a silent snort. Until she’d had Scotty, her worst fear had been to be left alone on a street corner. After Scotty, her fears had transferred to all the things that could harm him. But in all of her worst nightmares, she’d never pictured herself running in the woods with her son’s life on the line. She’d never pictured being chased, her own life in danger.

Sabriel slowed and pointed out shuffle marks. “Shows they stopped here and looked behind.”

“For us?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they just liked the view.”

Or maybe they were on to Sabriel’s ruse and were setting a trap for them. The thorniest part of their two-part mission executed, they could nab Scotty. Catching him was just a matter of miles.

Afternoon light snuffed out early in the mountains, bleeding the sky in a canvas of bloody red before dropping behind the mountaintops. Sabriel’s pace slowed, his footsteps became more measured—a fox scenting a chicken coop. He stopped at the base of a steep incline. One finger traced the faintly discolored stones turned over by passing feet, revealing their darker underside. “They’ve holed up on the ridge to rest for the night.”