The Nymph's Curse: The Collection (34 page)

He threw the car into park and stepped up on the porch stair to wait for Aura. The dogs barked from the backyard and in the pasture to the left of the house, a few cows lazily nosed through the snow to get to whatever grass remained. It seemed quiet for the ranch — a little
too
quiet.

“Where’s Zeb?” Aura asked.

Dane shrugged and turning, sprinted up the steps to the front door and banged on the lion-shaped knocker. Silence. No footsteps, no television, nothing. He pressed his face to the glass and peered inside. The lights were off. He tried to ignore the concern that crept into his psyche. Zeb was fine. He was probably out in his office, or out talking to Pat about what needed to be done next. There were more than enough reasons that he wouldn’t be home in the middle of the day.

“Let’s head to the barn, maybe he’s over there,” Aura said.

She climbed in the patrol car and they drove the half mile to the barn. A red and white truck was parked outside the double doors.

“Whose truck is that?” Aura asked.

Dane shrugged. He’d seen it around town, but he’d never paid it much notice. With as many tourists and seasonal residents that lived in Somers it was hard to keep track of all the comings and goings.

His instincts took control and he put his hand to his sidearm as he pushed open the red door of the barn. Aura stepped behind him and the cover of the second door. “Is anyone in here?” he yelled.

The sound of metal banging against metal echoed out into the barnyard. Someone was inside. “Zeb?” he yelled again, as he moved to look inside the door.

A man stood behind a huge metal vise, a sledgehammer in his hand, and green hearing protectors over his ears. “Hey!” Dane yelled, trying to get the man’s attention.

The man looked up. “Hello?” He sat the sledgehammer down and pulled the protectors off. “What’s up?” He gave them a puzzled look.

“Hey, I’m Deputy Burke.” Dane dropped his hand from his sidearm. “We’re looking for Zeb, you seen him?”

“Hey, I’m Pat’s son, Ryan.”

The weighted silence hung in the air. “You’re Ryan … Ryan
Patrick
?” Dane said.

“The one and only.” Ryan walked over to him and stuck out his gloved hand. Dane gave it a strong shake. The young man seemed centered, put together, and completely oblivious as to why a Deputy Sheriff would be standing with him in a barn.

Aura pushed through the door behind him. “Ryan?” she said with an edge of desperation in her voice. “I’m Aura … Natalie’s sister. I tried to call you.”

“Aura … ” Ryan smiled too warmly, making Dane’s hackles rise. “Natalie’s talked so much about you.” He reached over and wrapped his arms around her.

“Hey now,” Dane said, grabbing the man’s shoulder in warning. The man could be a killer — he had no business touching her. “Step back.”

Aura’s cheek turned the color of an over-ripened apple and he dropped his hand from the man.

“
Dane
.” She wiggled free of the man’s arms.

The young kid glanced over, his smile never wavering. “It’s alright. If someone I didn’t know was touching Natalie, I’d do the same thing.”

“Ryan, have you seen her?”

“Well … ” He stared down at his feet. “She and I had a fight a few days ago. I haven’t heard from her since. I thought she’d gone back down south.”

“What did you two fight about?” Dane lost the edge of civility in his voice, only to be replaced with the authority of his many days on the force.

The young man’s smile disappeared. “Are you really going to pull bad cop on me, Deputy? My old man told me all about you and your brother.”

“Stop. Right. There.” Dane growled. “We’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to find out where your ex is — and if you had anything to do with her disappearance.”

“If you’re implying that I had something to do with her going missing you’re dead wrong. I love Natalie … ” The man stabbed his boot into the hay-covered dirt of the barn floor.

“That’s what most suspects say when a girl goes missing.”

“Do they all ask the girl to marry them too?” Ryan threw his gloves on the floor. “This is bullshit. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Goddamn it, I didn’t even know she was missing!” One of the horses from the back stalls whinnied nervously as the man raised his voice.

“He’s telling the truth,” Aura said, as she stared off in the direction of the horse. “He
loved
her.”

The way she said the word “loved” made it sound like it belonged down in the muck of the barn floor. What did she have against love? Or was it something else she had a problem with — him? He stopped. He was being overly sensitive and far too emotional. Letting his emotions boil to the surface was out-of-line, especially when he was dealing with a potential suspect.

“Do you know of anyone else who would have had cause to harm Natalie? Anyone who was upset with her?” He tried to regain his objectivity.

Ryan knelt down and picked up his gloves. “Look, all I know was that I told her that I loved her. That I wanted to marry her. Then she up and ran off. I tried to go after her, but she’d already taken all of her stuff out of my house and hit the road. Or so I thought.”

“Where’s your house, Ryan?”

“I’m staying up with my old man. Up on Twin Lakes Road.” He pointed north.

Twin Lakes Road was only two miles from where they’d found the women’s bodies. Had the kid killed the women after he’d been rejected by Natalie? Had he murdered in a fit of rage?

“What did you do after Natalie left?”

Aura looked over at him and frowned, as if chastising him for asking more questions. He had to ignore her — and the way her eyes seemed to grow brighter when she was angry, almost as if he’d lit a fire behind them.

Ryan turned on his heel and moved to a bin of grain that sat next to the long work bench that was built into the front of the barn. “I was pissed. I admit it. At first I wanted to chase after her. Run her down. Find her. Make her come back.” He sat his gloves down and perched on the edge of the bin. He looked haggard — like a man after a break-up and too many nights alone. “Aura, you know Natalie. Once she makes her mind up, there’s no changing it. So after she left, I stayed here. Worked on fences for a while, then headed down to Del’s for a beer.”

The kid seemed to hunch so low that it looked like he was shrinking. It was easy to see that he told the truth. The kid was heartbroken — that was a feeling Dane knew and could recognize all too well.

“Why did she say she wouldn’t marry you?” He should have left the kid alone, and let Ryan’s wounds heal, but that wasn’t his job. He needed to know the whole truth in order to find answers.

“She said we were too different.” Ryan picked at the edge of the plywood box. “Whatever the hell that means.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Ryan.” Aura stepped over beside him and sat her hand on his shoulder. “Natalie has a tendency to do things like this. It has nothing to do with you. I know she thought a lot of you … that’s probably why she — ” She stopped.

“Why she
what
?” Dane asked.

“Nothing. She’s just flighty, that’s all.” Aura’s cheeks tinged with pink. “It’s the Bohemian in her. She never stays in one place or with one man for long.”

Dane tried to hold back, but his emotions formed words and poured out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Are you like your sister?”

Her pink cheeks turned crimson. “Now isn’t the time, Dane.”

She was right. Why hadn’t he kept his damn mouth shut?

He turned back to Ryan. “We have a video, if you don’t mind taking a look.” He pulled Natalie’s phone from his pocket and opened the clip.

The man stared at the phone as the scene unfolded.

“I know this place … It’s not far from here. Look here.” Ryan paused the video and pointed to a tree behind the startled horse. “See that pine? That’s a bear rubbing tree.”

Dane scanned the photo. Long scratches scarred the bark of the tree that stood next to the horse. “Can you take us there?”

The saddle creaked as Aura bent down to miss a branch that flexed low under the snow. The mountain trail was barely six inches wide with thick bushes and trees to her left and a steep bush-covered decline to her right. She couldn’t quit thinking about Zeb and how he had called her a
filly
the last time they had spoken. Did he know the truth about her and his ex-wife?

She had to believe Zeb didn’t know, or he would have never let Ryan talk him into letting them borrow the horses and travelling onto the mountain. At the very least, Zeb mustn’t have known anything of the truth of the reason for their ride. Regardless, she was thankful to get the chance to finally investigate Natalie’s last known location.

The black gelding she rode laid its ears back. It huffed as she sat back up. Since she’d worked with Dancer, it was easy to tell Pat had been at his old ways and Aura could feel the resentment and hatred seeping up from the horse’s flesh. Dancer yearned to be free — to run without reins, without a bit, and without a master. She stopped the horse and stepped down from the saddle, careful not to slip on the wash of ice-covered stones that littered the trail.

The gelding snorted impatiently, hating to be left behind from its herd. The horse Dane rode on neighed back, answering with its own impatience.

“Shh … ” she whispered, running her hands down the horse’s neck. Its nostrils flared as it took in the scents around them. “It’s okay, Dancer,” she crooned.

Aura ran her fingers up to the horse’s white forelock and rubbed slowly, letting her energy seep through her fingers and into the horse’s mind. It only took a few seconds before his eyes glazed over.

Have you seen my sister, she’s a horse-shifter — a pretty bay?
Aura thought.
Her name’s Natalie.

The horse stared at her.
Yes … We ran together. She was scared.

Of what?

A man …

Aura tried to control her excitement. They were close — they would find Natalie. They had to. She rubbed her fingers under the front of the horse’s mane.
Who?

Her mate.

What did he look like?
Aura tried again.

Dancer drew back from her fingers, breaking the connection. She reached up again, but the horse stepped back and looked around her.

“Aura?” The sound of Dane’s voice broke her concentration. She turned to see him sitting high in the saddle on the trail in front of her. He smiled brilliantly, the picture of a stunning cowboy as he sat on the beautiful roan mare. “What’re you doing?”

She dropped her hand and smiled. “Nothing. Just needed to stretch my legs.”

“You, the woman who seems more comfortable with horses than humans, needs to get off the horse to stretch her legs? Ryan told me about what you did with Pat and that horse.” He looked at her with disbelief.

He and Ryan must have been talking. At least it was an improvement from the way Dane had seemed to instantly dislike the young man. She couldn’t decide whether it was because he was a possible, but unlikely, suspect or if Dane disliked him for the air of sexuality that seemed to come off Ryan.

“Hey, you guys coming?” Ryan pushed past a tree and stopped his horse next to Dane. “We’re running out of daylight.”

Aura slipped her foot into the stirrup and pulled herself back up and into the saddle. “Let’s go.”

Ryan turned. “It’s not much further.”

If they had any luck at all they could find evidence of exactly what had happened to Natalie, but thanks to Dancer the circle of suspects had grown a little smaller. There were only two men that were involved in her sister’s life — the man that led their group and Shawn — the man’s voice in the video. Shawn had to be the one responsible for Natalie’s disappearance. Maybe he had been upset that she’d gone with Ryan. Maybe he was upset about her leaving him. Or maybe they’d had a fight, Natalie had accidently filmed it, and she and Shawn had made up — maybe they had simply run away.

The chills ran up her spine like a trail of spiders. Natalie wasn’t okay. She was being stupid to think that Natalie was anything less than in mortal danger. The only thing she could hope for was that her sister was still alive — that she wasn’t like those girls lying in the morgue, being poked and prodded by the little gloved hands of the brunette that seemed to have had a thing for Dane. She shivered in her thick down jacket.

Dancer snorted nervously. His body tensed beneath Aura’s legs. Something was wrong.

The brush rustled ahead of Ryan. His horse’s nostrils flared as it snorted and its ears pointed at the rustling bush. A black form slunk through the brush, barely visible.

The horse jerked under Ryan’s legs and he tried to calm her, but it was no use as the horse danced around, trying to get out of the danger zone.

A black wolf jumped out from the scrub, its teeth gnashed together as a deep snarling growl rippled from its throat. Its ribs were visible beneath its ragged, mangy-looking coat as it moved in front of Ryan’s horse and lunged toward the horse’s throat. The mare’s front legs rose from the ground as it reared back. Ryan tried to hold on as the horse lurched beneath him. The mare reared again, catching him off guard, and its head connected with the bridge of Ryan’s nose with a blood-chilling crunch. The man slumped.

The horse stomped at the wolf, its violent action throwing the unconscious Ryan around in the saddle like a ragdoll.

The wolf moved to Aura’s left and moved behind Dane’s horse and lunged toward the horse’s hamstrings. The horse kicked, just missing the wolf’s snarling mouth. Dane twisted in the saddle as he looked back to her. The horse kicked again at the wolf, upsetting his balance. A look of terror filled his eyes.

“Dane!” she cried.

His body moved to the left, away from the wolf, toward the mountain as the horse leapt to the right. The wolf lunged again only upsetting Dane further. His left foot slipped in the stirrup as his body slipped from the saddle. His body fell back as his hands grasped the air for something to grab to stop his fall. He grimaced as he flew downward. His head bounced off the flagstones that lay next to his horse’s hooves and his face went blank. The mare jolted, pulling him underneath her belly. His foot was caught in the left stirrup. If the mare moved — if one solid footfall struck him — he would be gone.