The Rogue Hunter (4 page)

"I never would have taken Decker for a cottage-country-type guy," Bricker commented, interrupting Mortimer's thoughts. "He always seemed to have too much class."

"Yes, well, as you said, this place isn't exactly your average cottage," Mortimer said dryly as he turned from closing the door and glanced around again. The windows were all open now, when he was sure they hadn't been the first time he'd entered. Bricker, he assumed, had opened them to let the night air circulate.

"There are three bedrooms up here and another two downstairs, as well as a rec room and laundry room," Bricker announced, waving back toward the door they'd entered through.

Mortimer followed the gesture, surprised to realize that there were stairs right next to the entrance.

"Every outer wall on this level of the cottage seems to be full of windows," Bricker said. "There's no way of knowing how good the window coverings in the upstairs rooms are, but the bedrooms downstairs have no windows so I took our stuff down there. I put my stuff in the room closest to the stairs and yours in the far room."

"Thanks," Mortimer murmured, walking past the table into the unlit living room. While he was surprised one of their kind would own a home with so many windows to allow damaging sunlight in, it did come in handy at that moment. The windows allowed what little light the stars were shedding to seep inside. Like any good night predator, Mortimer had incredible night vision, and even without electricity, that bit of light was enough for him to see by as he moved toward the door leading into a hall.

"There's a bathroom up here and one downstairs," Bricker announced as Mortimer crossed the hall to peer through an open door into a three-piece bathroom.

Mortimer noted the standard services and then wandered up the hall to the right, glancing in one bedroom before continuing on to a second at the end of the hall. He walked back to find the last bedroom at the opposite end of the hall before turning back into the living room.

"So," Bricker said as Mortimer joined him by the sliding glass doors overlooking the deck. "What do we do until Decker gets back?"

Mortimer grimaced at the question. They should be unpacking; unloading the blood bags in the cooler and shifting them into the refrigerator, and then unpacking their bags, as well as unpacking and prepping their weapons. Once that was done, he would have pulled out the maps of the area and the information they had about where bitten mortals had been seen. The two of them would have pored over those while making up some sort of plan to hunt down and find the
rogue that
was biting mortals in the area.

However, not having power rather buggered up all of that.

"There's nothing much we can do at the moment," he admitted finally.

"Are you hungry?" Bricker asked suddenly.

Mortimer glanced at the younger immortal with amusement. He hadn't been hungry for a couple hundred years. The younger man couldn't know that, though, since Mortimer ate on the odd occasion just to keep him company. Mind you, eating was an ambitious description, since he really mostly picked at the food and pushed it around his plate to be polite.

"We don't have anything besides blood in that cooler, do we?" Bricker asked when Mortimer didn't respond at once and then complained, "I'm hungry."

"You're always hungry," Mortimer said dryly, and then turned away from the window saying, "Come on then, we'll go find an all-night diner or coffee shop with food and lights and look over the information and maps Lucian gave us."

Chapter Three

"Poor Alex."

Sam glanced over at Jo, who sat at the dining room table. She was supposed to be shucking corn, but now held a half-shucked cob forgotten, her attention directed out the front window of the cottage. Her mouth was pinched with worry, Sam noted. "What's wrong with Alex? Has she hurt herself?"

"No," Jo assured her. "She just looks so miserable out there."

Sam set down the half-peeled potato she'd been working on, snatched a piece of paper towel off the roll, and dried her hands as she crossed the room to look out the window too. They were both silent for a moment, eyes following their older sister as she pushed a lawn mower across the grass in front of the cottage. She was obviously struggling to move the old mower up the slanted lawn. Beads of sweat were rolling down her forehead as she worked under the blistering late afternoon sun. And she did indeed look miserable. Alex's face was red and fixed in a scowl so fierce Sam feared it might become permanent.

"I did offer to do it for her, but she insisted," Sam said with exasperation. "She'd rather do that than food prep any day."

"I suppose when you cook all week for a living, doing it on vacation would be a drag," Jo commented sympathetically.

Sam snorted. "More like she has little lackeys to do this stuff at work and she thought she'd rather mow than play lackey herself… but she forgot about the deerflies."

"Is that what that gray fog is around her head?" Jo asked with alarm. "Why didn't she put on some bug spray?"

"She did," Samantha assured her. "She used the heavy-duty stuff too. Twice. But it's hot out there, and she sweats it off after ten steps."

They watched silently as Alex and her swarm crossed the yard again. She wasn't even halfway done. She'd be eaten alive by the time she was.

Mouth tightening, Sam headed for the door. "I'm going out there and try to help keep the bugs off her."

"How are you going to do that?" Jo asked with amazement.

The question made Sam pause and turn back. She'd need weapons to defend Alex.

"What on earth is that woman doing?"

Mortimer gave a slight start at Decker Pimms's words and turned from the window to glance at him with surprise. He'd been concentrating so hard on what was taking place next door that he hadn't even heard the man approach. "You
are
here. Lucian said you were, but the cottage was empty, and I began to think I'd misunderstood."

"No, you didn't misunderstand," Decker said with a shrug. "I was up here on vacation when Mother called saying Uncle Lucian was trying to reach me about this biting business."

Mortimer nodded, but kept back any sympathetic comments about his vacation being wrecked. Decker wasn't the sort to appreciate sympathy.

"I was told to expect you two around midnight."

Mortimer grimaced at the pointed comment, but merely said, "The journey took longer than expected."

"Bricker made you stop at every restaurant you passed along the way?" Decker guessed with amusement.

"Yeah," Mortimer admitted wryly. Anyone who had worked with them was familiar with Bricker's voracious appetite.

Smile widening at his expression, Decker explained, "I waited until two a.m., but when you guys hadn't shown up by then I ran out to run some errands. I checked back after dropping some mail in the box in town and hitting the garbage dump, but you still weren't here, so I went out to reconnoiter on my own."

"Garbage?" Mortimer asked doubtfully. "Don't they pick up here?"

Decker shook his head. "And you can't leave containers of empty blood bags in the shed; it attracts bears. I pay extra to the local guy who takes care of the dump to let me in late."

"Ah," Mortimer said with a small smile.

Decker shrugged. "Anyway, it was a little after dawn when I got back."

"It sounds like you missed us both ways," Mortimer announced. "We arrived just after two, then went in search of an all-night coffee shop for Bricker to eat."

"I take it that means you didn't have any trouble finding the key over the door?"

"No problem at all," Mortimer assured him.

Decker nodded. "Most people don't bother to lock their doors up here, and I wouldn't either, but I worry about kids, or the curious, or even ne'er-do-wells wandering in and happening on the blood…"

Mortimer merely nodded in understanding. Their kind were trained from birth to hide what they were, as well as any evidence that might give them away.

"I gather you took the spare room down here?" Decker asked.

"Yeah. Bricker put my stuff in there when we arrived," he admitted, and then raised an eyebrow. "Is it a problem?"

"No, not at all," Decker assured him, and then smiled wryly and added, "His being in my room was, though. When I found him there, I invited him to choose one of the empty rooms upstairs and then I crashed."

Mortimer grinned, knowing Decker well enough to be able to say with some certainty that the invitation had probably been offered via rousting Bricker from the bed. He didn't feel much sympathy for the younger man. When he'd seen the large, opulent room Bricker had chosen for himself, Mortimer had suspected it was the master bedroom. But when he'd suggested as much that morning, Bricker had just shrugged and said that if Decker wanted the room, he'd move. He probably hadn't expected that to be in the middle of the day, though.

Mortimer was surprised the noise hadn't woken him up. He was usually a light sleeper, but that morning he'd dropped off the moment his head hit the pillow and—despite being in a strange bed—he'd slept right through… until about twenty minutes ago, when he'd woken to the raucous growl of their neighbor's lawn mower. Mortimer had tried to filter out the sound at first, but it was hard to ignore. This lawn mower's muffler appeared to be broken… if lawn mowers had mufflers, he thought with a scowl.

"Jesus," Decker said, his attention again shifting to their neighbor's yard. "What
is
that woman doing?"

Reminded of what he'd been watching, Mortimer turned to glance out the window again. Decker's cottage had been built on a hill. The upper floor was completely above ground and had a deck surrounding it, but only this large rec room was above ground on the second floor. All the rooms at the back of the cabin, or facing toward the road rather than the lake, were built into the hill itself, hence the reason there were no windows in the downstairs bedrooms. But the front of this room—like the one above—was a wall of windows, and every one of them was shaded by the deck outside. It left a lovely shady spot to stand and peer through the trees at the lawn next door and the two women mowing it.

Well, only one was mowing the lawn, he supposed. The sister named Alex. The other, the woman he recognized as being the clumsy Sam, was following along beside her, madly waving a dish towel and fly swatter about her sister's head.

When he'd first spotted the pair, Mortimer thought Sam was attacking Alex, but the mad waving continued while the two women walked in sync. Mortimer then watched perplexed as the clumsy Sam staggered along, stumbling over her own feet as she madly flailed her items. She was mostly wielding them about Alex's head, but stopped every few minutes to flail them around her own before chasing after the mower to wave them around Alex again.

As he watched, Mortimer's irritation slowly turned to concern. He was quite positive that one of these times, in her mad dash after the lawn mower, Sam would stumble and fall right into it. She really was the clumsiest creature he'd ever seen. As unsteady on her feet as a new foal… or a drunk, he supposed, and frowned. Surely it was too early in the day to be drinking.

He glanced to his wrist, but had taken his watch off before crawling into bed and hadn't thought to retrieve it when the lawn mower noise had woken him.

"What the
hell
is she doing?" Decker breathed with dismay.

Mortimer glanced back out to see that Sam had once again paused to wave the dish towel and fly swatter about her own head. He wasn't surprised at Decker's shock. The woman looked spastic… The first time she'd done that he'd thought she was having some sort of seizure. "I think she's trying to chase off mosquitoes or something."

"Ah." Decker nodded, but said, "Probably deerflies."

"What about deerflies?"

Both men turned to see Bricker as he stepped off the stairs and crossed the carpet toward them.

"They tend to be pests up here for the mortals," Decker explained. Insects generally left immortals alone. It had been hypothesized that immortals secreted some hormone that either confused or was unattractive to them. "I guess they're bothering our neighbor while she's mowing the lawn."

Bricker nodded at the explanation and paused next to them to peer out the window too. He watched Sam's antics for a moment, his expression becoming increasingly perplexed, but merely asked, "Do you know them?"

"No," Decker said. "The Realtor gave me a short rundown of the neighbors when I bought this place, but I've avoided the whole getting-to-know-the-neighbors thing."

Mortimer wasn't surprised to hear this. Getting to know the neighbors would limit how long Decker could keep the cottage. The best possible scenario was that he didn't see them at all.

"So what did the Realtor say about them?" Bricker asked curiously.

Decker's expression turned thoughtful as he tried to recall the information. "They're three sisters. I think the family name is Willan, but I don't remember their given names. The Realtor told me, but…" He shrugged with indifference. "Their parents bought or built the cottage when the girls were just kids and the family spent a lot of summers up here. The parents died a couple of years ago—some kind of accident—and they left the cottage to the three sisters."

Mortimer saw his gaze narrow on the women on the lawn, and then Decker admitted, "In the two years since I bought the cottage, this is the first time I've been here during high season. I usually only come up in fall, winter, and spring. It's pretty quiet then, with just a handful of year-round residents, who are generally easy to avoid. On the rare occasions I haven't been able to avoid them, I simply took control of their minds and sent them on their way."

A moment of silence passed, and then Decker glanced at Bricker and asked, "Did the lawn mower wake you up as well?"

"Yeah," the younger immortal admitted, irritation wreathing his face. "These walls are paper-thin, Decker. What did they build them out of? Toilet tissue?"

"I don't think that would be up to code," Decker said with amusement and then added, "I plan to tear it down eventually and build new. I'm just waiting for my neighbors to decide to sell so I can buy their land and spread out a bit."