Moon Stalked

by Aimee Easterling

  “Oh, snap out of it.” He tapped me on the head. “Anything in there? You know what I want.”

  The same thing he always wanted. “A night of dancing?”

  “Bingo!”

  I could only hope Bastion had the strength for the evening entertainment he craved when this was all through and done.

  Still, I didn’t let doubt paint my face. Instead, I nodded agreement. One second later, Bastion struggled across the room to close the door in my face.

  Then Luke and I were creeping downstairs through pitch darkness, too far from the windows to use moonlight as our guide. His feet were unerring. Mine nearly slipped off a step, at which point he caught my arm to guide me. His thumb stroked absent circles across the sensitive skin inside my wrist.

  At the bottom, Luke spoke too quietly for me to understand what he was saying. Hunting with a skinless was a different experience from partnering with Bastion. Frustrated, I shook my head.

  And Luke understood. Or so I realized when his breath tickled my earlobe. “Sinus trouble?”

  My cheeks heated. So he had realized my previous excuse was bogus.

  I didn’t so much speak as mouth my answer. “Something like that.”

  For half a second we were united in a heady rush of something powerful. Then his fingers tightened on my wrist.

  “He’s in. Go down the hall. I’ll circle around outside and cut off his retreat.”

  LUKE WAS GONE BEFORE I could answer. He slid out the front door so quietly I barely heard the latch click.

  For my part, I’d never been so glad to have tools once more at my disposal. Before leaving the upstairs bedroom, I’d belted on a dagger, a stun gun, and—after a moment of reflection—a lethal-force pistol. I never used the latter during hunts with Bastion, but the stakes were now too high for moral squeamishness. Now, as I felt my way through the living room, my fingers skimmed over the stun gun and settled on the hard metal butt of the handgun instead.

  Hugging the wall, I angled toward the kitchen. That must be where the intruder had entered, assuming Luke had been watching shadows slide across the grass.

  Assume, assume, assume. I knew nothing about skinless. I also knew nothing about whoever had broken into Luke’s house.

  Would the intruder know where he was going? If he’d scouted the space out previously, he might be out of the kitchen and in the hall already. The dining room yawned off to my right, the wall I’d been following disappearing from beneath my fingertips.

  Here, illumination from the streetlights turned the room into a mishmash of light and shadows. Right in front of me, a window-shaped beam shone like a spotlight waiting for an actor’s entrance. If I took one more step forward, I’d be totally exposed.

  I reached for my pelt, not intending to shift but instead seeking comfort. But I’d left the fur with Bastion. Could tell from the pins and needles in my fingers that the pelt was busy transferring energy from me to him.

  I couldn’t waste my cousin’s few minutes of lucidity on tentativeness. There was no way around the light other than through it. I took a single step forward...then everything happened far too fast.

  My pistol spun out of my fingers as if it had been struck by a baseball. The gun clattered against wood, disappearing into darkness just as an arm clenched hard around my neck.

  I gasped...or tried to. Meanwhile, the cool circle of another handgun’s nozzle pressed hard against my temple.

  Fear turned my senses almost lupine. Manufactured scents of grease and metal enfolded me. The harsh flow of someone’s breathing rustled the hair atop my head.

  My assailant was taller than I was. The muscles pressing against my throat spoke to strength and certainty. The gun backed up his threat.

  Luke’s voice emerged from the far end of the hallway. “Shit.”

  Backup had arrived just one moment too late.

  Chapter 21

  “Yes, ‘shit’. That is correct.”

  The voice that emerged from behind me was familiar. So was the paunch pressing into the small of my back. That could only be...

  “Slim?”

  If I hadn’t been afraid any movement would result in a bullet through my skull, I would have kicked myself. I’d completely forgotten the promise I’d made to this bounty hunter. And while I had been attempting to track down Jimmy English’s killer, I definitely hadn’t informed my supposed partner of what little progress I’d made.

  Nor had I sent my twin to waylay that confession letter. In the midst of worrying over a dying cousin, an anonymous murderer, and a pesky skinless, I’d totally dropped that ball.

  “You sound so surprised. Did you forget I existed?”

  And now I’d hurt his feelings. If the gun hadn’t been so cold and hard against my skin, I would have started laughing. This wasn’t a break-in. This was a couple’s therapy session.

  “No, of course I didn’t forget about you.” I shifted my weight sideways, wanting to be prepared if Luke provided a distraction. Even flicking on the light would have proved helpful....

  Apparently, though, Luke didn’t want to solicit gunfire in his dining room. Because his voice was just as far away as it had been previously when he spoke again. “How about we take a seat? Discuss this like rational human beings.”

  Slim’s bark of laughter vibrated through my body. “Just like in Bastion’s July story from last year. Talk down the guy with the gun. Offer him a beer. Get him comfortable. Then—” the hand around my throat loosened for a split second as he gesticulated “—boom! Someone sneaks up behind me and knocks me over the head.”

  “Except, your back is to the wall.”

  Luke sounded so calm. But here in the darkness, I thought I could smell him. Wolf-like, the aroma came to me as an emotion rather than an odor. Worry. Tension. He was preparing to strike....

  A move that not only wasn’t necessary; it was contraindicated. Slim was a reasonable guy. He wouldn’t shoot me...unless some stranger dove toward him out of the dark.

  So I did my best to defuse the situation by keeping the other bounty hunter talking. “How did you find us?”

  “The old thumb-drive-in-the-police-parking-lot trick.” Slim shrugged. “Found out you’d been present during a second suspicious death and that this guy was your only alibi. It wasn’t hard to track down where he lived.”

  The room fell silent. I could almost see the way Luke’s eyebrows drew together as he requested clarification. “Thumb-drive-in-the-police-parking-lot trick? I don’t get it.”

  “December, three years ago?” Slim’s arm loosened a little further. “Subtitle: Cops Can’t Help Being Helpful? If you drop a thumb drive in their employee parking lot, someone’s bound to pick it up and plug it into a computer to see who it belongs to. If it comes preloaded with a virus underneath innocuous files, then you end up with a backdoor into password-protected servers.”

  Slim’s arm wasn’t so much around my throat now as resting on my shoulders. A few more of Bastion’s stories chewed over and he’d let me go so we could chat with each other face to face.

  So I translated, first for Slim: “I don’t think Luke reads the forum.” Then for Luke: “Bastion likes to write up our adventures. He has a lot of fans.”

  “Fans I promised to introduce you to.” The light in the dining room flipped on after all, but Luke wasn’t the culprit. Instead, Bastion stood swaying in the hallway...then he crumpled to the floor.

  LUKE WASN’T THE ONLY one to bark expletives this time. All three of us swore a blue streak.

  I did more than emote, however. I also let my knees fold just as fast as Bastion’s had. Turned the drop into a roll. Then sprinted to my cousin’s side.

  In the process, Slim’s gun grazed my temple. I’d bruise, but that didn’t matter. All I had eyes for was Bastion’s head against the hard floor tiles.

  Which way had he fallen? When my eyes winced shut at the end, had his crumple turned into a swan dive? I was afraid to move him and find out.

  “He fell on
his ass. He fainted. He’s fine.”

  Luke’s words sounded brusque, but they tasted like honey. His hand brushed mine aside, slid into the indentation between Bastion’s collarbones. Luke’s eyes closed as he counted. Then he nodded, gaze latching onto mine and buoying me up before he explained verbally. “A hundred beats per minute. Just about what he was at previously. Not great, but no worse than he has been.”

  Only then did I look away from my cousin, expecting to find Slim’s gun trained on the three of us. Instead, the bounty hunter had his phone out. If I wasn’t much mistaken, he was about to call an ambulance.

  I put every ounce of authority I could into my voice as I barked. “Don’t.”

  “Bastion can’t write my story if he’s dead.” The rebuttal should have sounded petulant. Instead, I got the distinct impression Slim was less interested in the promised writeup and more interested in ensuring that his idol remained safe.

  Grace would have pounced on that weakness. She would have manipulated Slim’s emotions until he let us entirely off the hook.

  But I wasn’t my twin. Plus, I had a sneaky suspicion Slim might prove useful.

  So, instead, I rolled back on my heels and offered what I hadn’t given Slim previously. A pie-shaped slice of the truth.

  Chapter 22

  Of course, I couldn’t tell Slim about pelts and shifters. But the story held together pretty well as a simple murder mystery...as long as I tweaked the tale to include Bastion being poisoned and the killer possessing the only cure.

  We couldn’t go to the police, I embroidered, because the murderer had left a note threatening to ditch the antidote if we brought in backup. We couldn’t take Bastion to a hospital for the same reason. Plus, it was too late to pump his stomach and the poison was too exotic to be easily identified via conventional lab tests.

  Our only solution was to tail Mr. Smythewhite and try to find what he was hiding from us. To my ear, the story sounded far-fetched and Gothic. But Slim went for it. He straightened like a soldier granted a promotion then asked: “What can I do to help?”

  Luke’s eyebrows rose before I could answer. “Honor, may I speak with you for a moment?”

  With my eyes, I tried to relay what I’d thought was obvious. We needed to nullify the Slim problem and I needed to track down the killer. Taking Slim with me was the obvious way to kill two birds with one stone.

  But Luke was having none of it. Not even when I teased him. “There’s nothing to worry about, Luke. This isn’t the habitat for zombie giraffes. Zombie buffalos maybe....”

  Rather than laughing, he responded with the bone-rattling rumble of a growl. Werewolf not woelfin. How had I let myself forget that? Flashing Slim a pained smile, I followed Luke around the corner into the living room.

  There, he planted his feet, looked me in the eye, and proved he really was one of the skinless. “No.”

  “No what?” I asked even though I understood his statement already.

  “No, you’re not taking a middle-aged human along as your sole backup. He’ll stay here and watch Bastion until one of your pack mates can come to spell him. I’ll go with you on the hunt.”

  “Luke.” I took a step forward until we stood toe to toe, which meant I had to tilt my head back to peer up at him. “I need someone I trust here with Bastion. You....”

  Luke cut off the incipient baring of my soul with a hard jerk of his head. Side to side. An abrupt negation. Then he stilled as, in the room we’d been in a moment earlier, Bastion moaned.

  My cousin’s pain sharpened my rejoinder. “Stop being an alpha asshole,” I demanded. “This isn’t your responsibility. I’m taking Slim. Bastion needs a protector. Are you willing to stay here and watch my cousin or not?”

  HE STAYED. WE WENT. It should have been a success—winning an argument with one of the skinless.

  Instead, as Slim and I sat in his car staking out Mr. Smythewhite’s office, I felt so lonely I called my sister up.

  “Are you sure Mr. Smythewhite is still in there?” I asked Grace over speaker phone.

  Because, in addition to playing bodyguard, she’d taken on the role of telephone actress. She’d rung Mr. Smythewhite before he left his office, pretending to be the secretary for a very important client. Predictably, he’d been more than happy to wait for a document to be messengered over.

  “I texted you this already.” From her tone, my twin wasn’t pleased to have her work questioned. But she answered anyway. “I called him back fifteen minutes ago rescinding my request. He’ll be at his car shortly. Are you doubting my abilities?”

  Despite her snark, a roughness in my twin’s voice suggested she’d been crying. No wonder when the most recent report from Luke suggested Bastion was now bruising wherever he was touched, the same way all of our parents had done forty-eight hours before passing away.

  “It’s not over until it’s over.” I winced as soon as the placation emerged from my lips. If I was the one sitting alone in the Smythewhite house while one cousin rushed to the deathbed of another, that pep talk would have grated. So I hastened to return to a topic we could agree upon—protecting the weak. “How’s the household there?”

  “Clarence was out like a light the minute he got home from chemo. His mom retreated to her bedroom an hour later. I’m sitting in the hall just in case we’re wrong and she’s the culprit.”

  Despite Grace’s willingness to rattle off a status report, her annoyance at being left guarding the least important cog in the sleuthing machine was palpable. I was going to owe her much more than a night of dancing once all this was through.

  In the meantime, all I could do was toss out more praise and hope she didn’t find a way to strangle me long distance. “That’s great. I...”

  A beep from Slim’s phone saved me from putting my foot in my mouth a second time. Two previous messages had alerted us to data being added to the police station’s internal server. First, a kid had been caught shoplifting at a convenience store. Then officers had been sent out to deal with a drunk and disorderly downtown.

  Neither case seemed relevant to Bastion’s pelt, but it wasn’t lost upon me that the serial killer had struck nightly and was due for another murder very soon. If I was wrong about Mr. Smythewhite being the culprit....

  Slim read the information his thumb-drive hack had garnered in silence. In response to my questioning gaze, he shrugged and shook his head.

  “Amber alert.”

  A lost kid was no good, but the crime was unlikely to be related to Bastion’s pelt. I opened my mouth to say so, then reached over and slammed Slim’s phone down into his lap to stifle the glow.

  “Wha...?” He started. But I clenched down on his knee to hush him.

  We couldn’t afford to be seen or heard by the businessman who had just stepped out of his office’s front door.

  PREDATORS RECOGNIZE each other. Watching Mr. Smythewhite now, I couldn’t understand how I’d missed his darker side when I first set eyes on him at the benefit ball.

  Because his head turned left then right. Slowly. Carefully. He wasn’t checking for traffic—there was none on this side of town at this late hour. Instead, he was watching for observers, almost as if he could feel Slim’s and my gazes boring into his skin.

  “Close your eyes,” I demanded.

  My temporary partner wasn’t as quick on the uptake as Bastion would have been. “Huh?”

  “Slim.” I reached out, half expecting to have to slap my hand over his face to make him obey me. “Now.”

  Slim’s eyes flicked shut one second before I was forced to resort to drastic measures. I closed my own...then waited while questions without answers bounced off my skull.

  What kind of power might a woelfin pelt provide for an ordinary human? Could murder combined with woelfin magic pump up mortal senses until they were supernaturally strong?

  I could only guess at the answers. Luke would have known I was watching him. Possibly would have even heard my hushed whisper from this distance.

/>   My skin tingled. I swallowed against a throat as dry as the Sahara. I itched to open my eyes and see if Mr. Smythewhite was stalking toward our car.

  Instead, I let my right hand drop to the gun I’d recovered from Luke’s dining room. I could barely grab it at first, the pelt wrapped around my arm puffed up like a cat scared of lightning. But, finally, I got my hand in position...and if a finger had been on the trigger, I would have shot myself when the purr of a nearby engine started up.

  Luckily, I have a high regard for gun safety. So all I did was bark my knuckles on the side of the car while Slim asked: “Can I open my eyes yet?”

  “Wait one more second.” Mr. Smythewhite’s car slid onto the road, the breeze of its passing pressing hair into my face and exhaust into my nostrils. I hoped his eyes were human-dull enough to miss our presence, our shapes blending into the seats’ shadows. I hoped Slim wouldn’t move and give our fakery away.

  He didn’t. In fact when I opened my eyes to catch taillights shining one block in the distance, Slim’s eyelids were still squinted shut like a kid playing blind man’s bluff.

  “Okay,” I told him, “now you can look.”

  WE DROVE WITHOUT HEADLIGHTS, staying far enough back so the streetlamps wouldn’t give away our presence. “Tell me more about Jimmy English’s death,” I said, breaking through the silence that hung heavy over our car.

  I’d racked my brain earlier, trying to guess who Mr. Smythewhite would choose as his next victim. Originally, I’d assumed those who touched my pelt attracted the killer. But Mr. Smythewhite wasn’t heading toward Clarence, Bastion, or Luke—those with whom I’d had recent skin contact. So maybe his choice of victim was random after all.

  Slim shrugged. “There’s not much in the reports that didn’t make it into the paper. The officers in charge seem to think good old Jimmy was drunk and hiding from the law. The current hypothesis is that he tripped over his own feet then cracked his head on the pavement. The coroner’s report matches the idea of an accidental fall.”