The Nymph's Curse: The Collection (30 page)

“She’s been missing seven days now. The last time I talked to her she was somewhere close to Somers. Her phone was traced back to that stretch of land.” She pointed at the sprawling mountains that rose up so tall their blue tips tore at the underbellies of the clouds that tried to pass over.

“How do you know she’s missing and not just failing to call you?”

“We talk every day.” Irritation poured out of her voice and she instantly felt guilty. He didn’t know. He was only doing his job.

“So she wasn’t angry with you?”

“Yes, but not enough to stop calling. I just couldn’t make it to Montana with her — I had to finish with a client — she got mad, but she’s not the type to hold a grudge for something that asinine.”

“What kind of client?” He gave her a sideways glance.

“I’m a horse trainer.”

He nodded approvingly, but something about him still made it seem like her every move was being scrutinized. “You’re from Arizona, correct?”

She glared at him. “You know the answer to that. I’m sure you did your little background check.”

He looked away from her. “Why was Natalie in Somers?”

Aura held back the desire to give him a snippy reply. He was trying to help. “She’d gotten a line on a great job from a friend. When she got up here, the job had dried up, but she liked it so much her friend convinced her to stay. They were hiking, then she just up and disappeared.”

Dane pulled the pad of paper from his pocket. “What makes you assume there has been any foul play?”

“She’d told me she’d been staying with a friend not far from the marina.”

“Was that what you were really doing there? Looking for evidence of your sister?”

She answered with a short nod. “I need you to make me a promise … I’ll tell you everything you need to know on one condition.”

“And what is that?”

“I want to be involved in every aspect of this case.”

“Impossible. I’m a cop. You’re a civilian. Have you ever heard of boundaries?”

“Boundaries are made to be broken … ” She smiled. “Now do you want to help me find Natalie or not?”

Dane shook his head resignedly. “I can’t promise you’ll be included with everything, but I will let you be as involved as I can.”

“Fair,” she said excitedly.

His eyebrows shot up. “So, if you’re telling the truth now, what do you really know about the hand we found at the marina?”

Of course he would think she had something to do with the hand. “All I know is that it wasn’t hers. My sister would never wear red nail polish. She’s too much of an
artist
.” Aura reached into her back pocket and pulled out the bunch of cloth she stuffed in it before she’d left. “Which means she wouldn’t have had any need for this.” She lifted up the blood smattered camisole with lace around its edges. “I found it in the back of her deserted truck.”

“What the hell?” He took the cloth and inspected it, then looked up at her. “You do realize that you’ve destroyed whatever evidence we could get from this? And why didn’t you tell me you found her truck? You do know what this could mean don’t you?”

Was he really going to lecture her?

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before you trespassed on the Diamond?” He jabbed the shirt at her.

“I called you about the hand — and look where that landed me.”
Right into the lap of the one man I should be running from.
“And besides, that’s not Natalie’s shirt. She doesn’t wear that kind of stuff. And I’m only here to find her.”

He twisted it gently around as he inspected the fabric. “Maybe we can still get a DNA sample from some of the blood.”

“I already told you, it’s not her shirt.”

“Well, whoever’s shirt this is, there’s a good chance that they aren’t alive.” He lifted it up so she could see the thin small hole that pierced the fabric of the front, just over where the wearer’s heart would have been. The dried brown blood ran around the hole and down the front of the shirt.

Dane was right. Someone out there, someone who was somehow involved with her sister, lay dead.

Just another great day at the office. Dane pulled the evidence bag shut around the white camisole. The lights of the patrol cars reflected against the snow as it blanketed the ground around the white Ranger.

He couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Aura hadn’t called the police when she’d found the bloody top. Who in their right mind would take evidence from a crime scene and stuff it in their pocket? The only thing he could fall back on was that she had been afraid to call the police about her sister’s disappearance. But why? What was she hiding?

The sergeant tracked through the thin layer of fresh snow toward him. “We’ve collected some hair samples and we found a small amount of blood pooled in the bed of the truck. We will send them off to the crime lab and see what we can get.”

Dane handed the man the bag with the shirt inside. “I’m hoping they can pull some DNA from this. I don’t know how much use it will be, but maybe we can get something.”

What had Aura’s sister gotten into? Was she the murderer or was she going to turn up as another victim? For now, he could only hope that Natalie was still alive.

He glanced over at Aura. Her arms were pulled tight across her chest and she stared out in the direction of the timber that grew tall and dark along the sides of the logging road. If she hadn’t gotten turned around coming out of that ranch, she would have never run across the crime scene. She was either the luckiest or the least lucky woman he’d ever met — she kept popping up in the worst places for her and the best places for him to get a handle on the sudden wave of crime that was hitting the county.

What did all these crimes have to do to with her and her sister? Something about it all sat in him like a soured turkey sandwich. There was just something so wrong. If he didn’t get to the bottom of it soon, there would be hell to pay — not only within the department and the people of Flathead County, but within him as well. He couldn’t let a woman die in his county and let the murderer get away with it. Not to mention a possible missing person case.

Aura chewed on her lip like an angst-filled mother. A strange sense of guilt and empathy roiled in his stomach. He tried to swallow it away.
She’s just another face, another name in the books — even if I did kiss her, even if she is sexy as hell, I can’t think of her like anything more. I’ll lose my objectivity and my reputation.

No matter how hard he tried to rid himself of the feelings, they remained.

One of the secondary officers pushed out from the pine boughs and stepped up onto the road. “Sarge? I think we got something down there.” He pointed down the hill in the direction he’d come. “I think I found our vic.”

Aura’s face blanched and her arms tightened. He stepped toward her. A profound need to hold her flooded his senses. She needed him. She was strong, but she looked so terrified.

He stopped just short of her, and held his arms to his sides. “You stay here. We can’t have you contaminating another crime scene.”

She nodded.

Dane turned and made his way to the road’s edge. The officer led the way down the steep, slippery hill. He worked back and forth through the underbrush like a well-trained bloodhound. The sergeant walked ahead of him, grunting as he stepped over downed logs and tripped on the tiny bushes that littered the ground.

The pit in his stomach grew. Every part of him hoped that the person the officer had found wouldn’t be Natalie. Aura would be devastated. She cared so much for her sister. It was easy to see that her life revolved around finding the woman, and if she had been murdered …

The man led them to the edge of a wide pit where a pine had fallen, pulling its roots out of the ground. Its root ball stuck up from the far side of the pit, the top of it covered in a layer of snow. Dane stopped and stared down into the natural grave. At the bottom lay a dark-haired woman. She lay face down in the dirt. An icy breeze slid by him and slipped down into the hole, pushed the listless brown hair from the woman’s neck, and exposed the black horse tattooed on the base of her cervical vertebrae.

What was his ex-wife Angela doing here?
Dane’s breath caught in his throat
. Zeb was going to have a holy shit fit when he learned they’d found his wife dead.

Dark ruby red trails of dried blood clung to her neck like feasting worms.

Dane fell to his knees.

• • •

The hillside was slick as Aura worked her way down to Dane. He’d told her to stay behind, but the need to know for sure gnawed at her. If the victim was Natalie … well, it couldn’t be Natalie — but if it was, someone was going to pay.

Her foot slipped on an icy patch and she grabbed a handful of pine tree to stop herself from falling. Her heart thrashed in her chest as she regained her footing. Something wrapped around her fingers as she tried to pull them from the sapling. Aura glanced at her hand. Around her fingers was a handful of long black horse hair.

The hair was darker than Natalie’s. Aura lifted it to her nose and sniffed. The uric scent was strong, full of hormones, and there was a faint hint of something else that she couldn’t identify. From the urea it had to be a hair from another Mustang-shifter, but who?

The rumble of the sergeant’s voice broke her concentration. She wrapped the hairs in a Kleenex and stuffed the little square into her pocket. Dane would be pissed that she was concealing evidence, but she couldn’t risk exposing her kind. He wouldn’t learn anything even if he followed the horse lead.

Natalie had come here on the promise of a job at a ranch, but had there been another reason that she had been lured to this place? Had Natalie been hiding the truth from her in the same way Aura was hiding the truth from Dane?

Standing on the edge of a wide pit was the stiff-backed sergeant; at his side were Dane and another officer who clicked away with a digital camera. Dane was crouched in a tight ball, almost like a tiger waiting to strike. Aura’s hands shook as she made her way to them. Nausea rolled through her as the cold putrid scent of death wafted up from the pit.

Dane stood up. “Don’t come any closer.”

She pushed past him and peered in. There was a brunette woman at the bottom she didn’t recognize.

The woman’s left hand was missing.

A sense of pity for the woman passed through her, quickly followed by relief. The nausea disappeared.

Natalie is still alive.

“Thank the gods.”

“What?” Dane stared at her with a pinched angry look upon his face. “What the hell do you mean by that? You’re happy my ex-wife is at the bottom of a pit?”

The wavering nausea returned and she covered her mouth as she stared at the black tattoo that matched her own. She reached back and ran her fingers over her skin, trying to hide their shared secret. It was so hard to kill a nymph — who ever had killed the woman must have known the truth of their existence. No bullet, no drowning, nothing could kill them. The murderer was either aware of their secret, or the murderer was a nymph … like Natalie.

“I’m sorry.”
Dane had been married to a horse-shifter. Did he know about her kind?
“I … I didn’t realize.”

He looked back toward the pit and away from her apologetic gaze, but there was no sign he knew the truth about her or her kind.

“Goddamn it.” His shoulders fell and there was an air of vulnerability that surrounded him. “Who would want to kill her? She was no saint, but why?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said almost in a whisper. Before she could stop herself, Aura leaned down and wrapped her arms around his back and pressed her face into the sweet scent of his neck like he was one of her injured horses — another soul in need of help.

He reached up and touched her hand that rested below his chin. “You didn’t know.”

No … but she hadn’t known that he’d been married before either. The revelation came as such a surprise; Dane hadn’t seemed like the type that would get a divorce. He seemed strong, centered, and devoted. What had happened that would have driven him to leaving his wife? Or had she left him because she was a shifter? Had she wanted to protect him from the curse of their kind? Her leaving would make sense of the way he was one minute so close and in the next forcing himself away. She must have hurt him almost beyond repair.

His hand slipped from hers and he tensed beneath her arms. She was suddenly all too aware that she had committed a faux pas in front of Dane’s sergeant and fellow officer. What had she been thinking? She had made Dane look weak in front of his comrades.

“I’m sorry for your loss.” She released her hands and stepped away from him.

“Thanks.” Dane’s face was turned from her as he nodded. He gave a long sigh, as if he was trying to express his sadness and anger in the only way he could.

The sergeant gave her an appreciative nod, as if he was relieved that the quick display of emotion had come to a stop. His world must have been such a drain it was no wonder he avoided emotions — dealing with death and mayhem each day must take a heavy toll on the men of the force.

She had so many questions. What did this woman have to do with her sister? And why would they find her body so close to the truck? Did Natalie have something to do with this woman’s death?

The sergeant clicked on his radio and notified dispatch of the body in a low, brusque, monotone voice. The flash of the other officer’s camera bounced off the snow, illuminating the dark shadows that rested around the body.

For the second time in as many days, Aura felt horribly out of place, like a demon in a church choir. The radio’s static filled the forest, echoing the emotions that buzzed within her.

Why had she allowed herself to become involved with the police? Why did she have to be so close to her enemy? Especially a man who was secretive, work-obsessed, and so handsome that every time she was near she wanted to press her body against him and bask in his strong manly scent like a puppy nuzzling its master.

Aura tried to relax and let the emotions cascade from her, but a creeping sensation swept up and down her spine.