by Cal Matthews
The words hit me like a slap and I recoiled from him. “Fuck off, Leo.”
His eyes shifted, the golden glow returning, and I felt a wing of uncertainty brush my stomach when he didn't move or respond.
“Leo,” I said harshly, and he gave a jerk.
“Sorry,” he said again. “God, sorry, Ebron. It's just that smell.”
He moved forward again, sliding towards me and though I hadn't been afraid of him in years, there was something predatory and completely inhuman about him right then that made my heart speed up.
“Stop,” I said, hearing panic in my own voice.
“I just want to smell you . . .” he murmured, coming closer. To my shock and utter horror, he snarled, fangs out as he lunged towards me.
I hit him as hard as I could, slamming my fist into his throat. The contact stopped him, but only just. He gagged and made a strangled choking noise, his hands flying to his neck. I took the opportunity to fly off the couch, grabbing the gun again and raising it up to my shoulder. It wasn't loaded, but it made me feel a whole lot better.
He coughed and sputtered, tears streaming down his face, and after a moment I realized he was laughing helplessly in between coughing fits. His eyes met mine and even through the tears I could see that he was himself again. He waved at me, pointing towards my bedroom. I stiffened, but he shook his head.
“Go . . . take . . . shower,” he grated out, and I backed away, still holding the gun. Whistling to Johnny, who had retreated to his crate, I walked backwards to my bedroom, and locked the door when I got there. Feeling like I was in a fog, I stripped on my way into my bathroom, and turned the shower on. I scrubbed as hard as I could stand it, standing in water that felt like it would burn the flesh right off me. It took me a while to stop shaking.
Leo was lying on my bed when I came out of the shower, pink and raw, clad only in a towel. I jumped at the sight of him, and glanced at the door. It had been locked.
He put up his hands. “It's okay,” he said soothingly. “I'm fine now.”
“What the hell was that?”
“I don't know. You just - I couldn't - I mean, I knew it was you, and I didn't want to hurt you, but I couldn't think past that smell.”
“Did they, like, put a spell on me?” I asked, gingerly sitting down on the edge of the bed but keeping one eye on the suddenly unpredictable vampire.
“I . . . I think that they might have, Ebron. What did they say to you?”
“Nothing! I mean, nothing more than polite conversation about herbs. Yesterday they came in, gave me a list, and I got them for them. Today one of them came back for some more mugwort.”
“Nothing else?”
“No,” I lied, willing my eyes not to slide away from his. I thought about Marcus’s pretty eyes. About the phone number still sitting on the counter at the store.
“Hmm.” he laced his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. “I've never experienced something like that before. Literally, all I could think about was killing you and fucking you. Simultaneously.”
“Isn't that what you always think about?” I attempted hesitantly, and he turned his head to smile faintly at me.
“Yeah, good point. But not like that.”
“Do the witches know about you, then?” I asked. “Is that the point? Why try to get you to attack me? Or, I guess they must know about me?”
“I don't know. I don't know.” he held out a hand to me, and I crawled over to him, stretching my long body out beside him, tucking my head under his chin.
“I'm sorry,” he said softly, running gentle fingers down my bare back. “I'd never really hurt you, Ebron.”
I snorted. “I think you would, Leo.”
“If you asked me to, in a heartbeat. But not . . . like that.”
“Maybe someday, I'll ask you.”
He looked at me intently for moment, seeming poised on the verge of speech, but leaned in for a kiss instead, taking hold of my beard and giving it a tug.
“I like this,” he said. “You look . . .”
“Scruffy?”
“More like yourself.”
I didn't respond to that. Instead, I tugged the covers up to my waist and settled into his arms, hearing my own heartbeat thunder in my ears, all the louder for his lack of one.
“The one that came in today,” I said into the silence. “He said that they would be here all weekend.”
Leo's chin rubbed against the top of my head as he considered that.
“Don't let them touch you,” he said after a minute. “If you see them again. We need to find out where they are staying.”
“I already know that. They're at the Comfort Inn.”
“Oh. Well. Good.” He moved under me, like tectonic plates shifting.
“You're going to go over there?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“In a minute.”
I started to get up, pulling away but his arms tightened around me and held me down.
“I'll go with you,” I protested.
“No,” he said firmly. “Go to sleep. Go hunting tomorrow. Let me handle this.”
“Leo . . . ”
“Ebron. Let me handle it.”
There was no sense in arguing with him; I knew my place and he wouldn't budge, no matter how bitterly I argued.
“I could have killed you,” he said quietly, a strange, surprised note to his voice.
“You didn't, though.”
“I'll handle it,” he whispered, almost to himself. He started to get up again and I pulled on his arm.
“Stay for a bit,” I said softly, tugging at the hem of his shirt.
He leaned over and kissed me again. I started to pull him down but he moved away. “Not tonight,” he said, and then he was gone.
Chapter Ten
I picked up Cody well before dawn, and he stumbled out to my truck bundled in layers of sweatshirts and coats, his eyes small and red. He gave me a nod as he slid into the seat and I handed him an aluminum foil-wrapped breakfast sandwich. My nose twitched at the smell of sour sweat and cigarettes.
“Thanks, dude,” he said with a familiar scratchiness to his voice and I peered at him in the dark cab of the truck.
“Are you hung over?” I asked, though from the way he was pressing his thumbs into his own temples, it was obvious.
“Yeah, a bit,” he said, slumping down and burying his face into his collar. “You know Kelsey Patrick? She bartends at J.J’s?”
“Yeah?” I said warily.
“I almost hooked up with her last night.”
“Almost?”
He shrugged, turning the aluminum wrapped sandwich over in his hands. “She didn’t get off until two and I wanted to head home early.”
“Too bad,” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed softly. “Next time.”
The snow had let off, but our breath bloomed out in the cold air. Both of us hunched over towards the lukewarm air my truck was spitting out. For a while we drove in silence.
Cody was easy to be quiet around, and I found myself drifting, my mind straying to Marcus. I replayed the whole incident over in my mind, from the moment he'd walked through the door. Yeah, walked through the door and saw a lonely hick and made me into a fool. I ground my teeth, a flare of anger surging through me. If I saw him again . . .but I wouldn't. Leo would find him first and the less I thought about that the better.
Cody cleared his throat. “So my divorce finalized yesterday.”
I looked over him, but he stared steadfastly out the frosted window. “I'm sorry, man,” I said.
He shrugged.
“If there's anything I can do-”
He nodded. “Thanks, man.” He said it with finality, and there wasn't anything else to say. But I saw his fist tighten a little where it rested on his leg and I made a mental note to myself to take him out for a drink as soon as I could swing it.
We headed farther up the mountain and took a left on a dirt road. The other w
ay lead to the reservoir, and I glanced thoughtfully in that direction. Only one mountain separated our destination from the reservoir where Aubrey had died. If Cody hadn't been with me, I would have gone up there to poke around. I considered going up there anyway, even with him.
Which reminded me. “What's the deal with these hunters on your land?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, I didn't talk to them.”
“But your mom let them on? You guys never let strangers hunt up here.”
“I don't know, man. Mom talked to them.”
“Are they local?”
“Dude. I don’t know.”
“Hmm,” I grunted, and eased the truck over a cattle guard. Cody jerked his chin to the side of the road.
“Park there. Let's hike up.”
I parked the truck on a small patch of frozen grass just off the side of the road. Sunlight began to edge over the mountain, across the still, frozen world around us. My breath plumed out in front of me when I creaked open the door of the truck and stepped out.
The icy ground crunched under my boots and though I pulled a balaclava up over my cheeks and nose, the cold wind still managed to sneak in through every crack, making my eyes water. My own exhalations dampened the fleece over my face.
Cody cradled his gun in one arm and pointed up the northeastern slope. “Let's head up there. I was checking cows the other day and saw some deer up there.”
Black Gulch ran north to south, thick with pine and fir trees. Next to it rose a small mountain, wide rather than tall. And on the other side of that was the reservoir, maybe ten, twelve miles from here. Maybe less. I stared up in that direction long enough Cody had to make a coughing noise to get my attention. He raised his eyebrows at me.
“Nothing,” I said, and we started walking up the gulch.
Up here, we waded through snow knee deep and by the time we were under the cover of the trees, both of us huffed for breath, sweat pooling on the waist band of my Carhartts and slicking my sides. Sound carried in the brittle frozen air, and our crunching footsteps were all I could hear. Now and then we stopped to catch our breaths and listen. A few ravens cruised overhead and loitered in the tops of the pines, but the forest was silent.
After a bit, Cody called to me to stop and I waited while he peed against a tree. He was looking a little better, the exercise and the cold air reviving him.
“I'm gonna eat,” I told him, and he shrugged.
“I'll head down around those trees,” he replied. “See if I can flush anything out.”
“All right.”
I watch him crunch down the slope, his hunter's orange vest a block of color against the white world. I settled myself against a tree and dug into my pack for breakfast. The early morning sunlight made the mountainside sparkle, and the valley stretching below me looked gorgeous, the pine trees just barely dusted with snow. The coffee in my thermos was still hot and the breakfast sandwich was only slightly soggy. I exhaled and worked out the kinks in my shoulders and waited.
It had been an exhausting couple of days, and even with the cold and wind, I found myself relaxing finally, tension draining out of me. Being in the woods had always done that for me. It put things in perspective.
Usually my life was mundane, boring even, the occasional resurrection aside. I went to work, I came home, I took Johnny on long hikes. When Leo was around, we fucked and went out to the bars, and occasionally we stayed in bed for hours and talked. There wasn't much else, but I was under no illusion that my life was any more or less exciting than anyone else's. We of the tiny, unimportant lives.
Having Leo show up unexpectedly, coupled with the unusually gruesome dead girl, and the incident with Marcus - those were minor events simply blown out of proportion by their proximity to each other.
No part of my brain could believe Leo really attempted to kill me. It didn't make any sense, and I felt strongly that I'd made some sort of mistake, or that Leo had. Marcus had barely brushed my hand - he couldn't have done anything to me in that brief second. And I didn't think it was possible that he could have done anything without me knowing it. I was wired to know those sorts of things . . . wasn't I?
And I was avoiding the most uncomfortable question: what exactly was Leo going to do, if - no, it was definitely a when - he found Marcus? I kept seeing those enormous green eyes, the way they had crinkled a little at the corners when he had smiled at me. There was no way he'd been flirting with me. But he'd said that he would come back . . .
To do what? I reminded myself sharply. He'd made a fool of me. I'd sicced my vampire on him. It didn't matter at all what those smiles had meant. There was only one way things ended.
A small movement caught the corner of my eye, and I straightened, reaching for my binoculars. The sun had risen just a little more, and the morning fog rode thick along the trees. I'd been woolgathering for too long.
Glassing over the valley, I waited for movement, searching for orange against the snow. I hoped that if deer were bedded down there, they hadn't already slipped away in the dawn. It was possible. I hadn't really been paying close attention.
But I saw nothing but magpies and sparrows, and settled back against the tree. After a while, I saw Cody walking west along the gulch. He stopped and waved to me, making a circular motion, which I took to mean that he was making his way back in my direction, and I got to my feet to meet him halfway.
By late morning, we headed back down the gulch, having seen no game at all. My limbs moved stiffly, my toes felt numb, and my cheeks burned from where the cold bit into them. But the woods made me feel more refreshed than I had in days. Cody started to loosen up, telling me about the new truck he was rebuilding, and the ranch rodeo he had competed in over in Wilsall. He didn’t mention his brand new ex-wife. The sun peeked out again and burned away the last of the fog, and by noon it was downright balmy. We began shedding layers.
“What do you think?” I asked Cody as we scanned the forested hillside.
“I think my parents’ hot tub is calling my name,” he said, wiping his runny nose on the sleeve of his coat.
“You want to start back to the truck?”
He rustled through his pockets, finally producing a tube of Chap stick that he carefully applied, delicately holding the tube in his big hands. I bit back a snort.
“Yeah,” he said and popped his lips together a few times, smearing the Chap stick around. “Let’s call it. I’m freezing my ass off.”
We followed the creek down into the hollow, the wet grass sliding against my waterproof pants and dragging on my boots. The sun warmed my face, and I could see dozens of tracks in the snow, everything from elk to the tiny toes of mice.
It was when we were headed back up the ridge that I finally saw the herd, their tawny bodies almost invisible against the scrubby rock and sage, their breath steaming in the icy air. A jolt of adrenaline went through me, and I took a deep breath to calm myself, willing myself to relax and to look. Beside me, Cody had likewise gone still. Slowly, we eased forward, moving to bring the herd into view.
Five does, one buck. The buck was a beauty, a five point at least and he was fat on the alfalfa from the ranch. But I was looking for a meal, not a trophy, and so I sighted on one of the closer does, waiting for her to pass behind a rock. Cody waited for me. He gave me a nod.
“You go ahead,” he said.
I breathed. I waited. I shot her.
A second later, birds burst into the sky, circled once, and disappeared. We slid down the icy slope, towards the limp body lying in the trampled snow.
Sometimes when I was about to gut deer, I thought about bringing them back, the life returning to their graceful limbs, awareness coming back into their eyes. Their bloody tongues withdrawing into their mouths. They were always so beautiful to me in that moment, with my hands resting on fur still warm. It was the potential. The possibility. Maybe it was the power.
The afternoon faded fast by the time we got back to my truck, the gutted deer dragging behind us.
I was tired and bloody, but pleased. The doe would yield a good seventy pounds of meat after I got her processed, and a well-stocked freezer going into winter cheered me up considerably.
It was a good feeling, after all the complicated bullshit of the previous day, to simply feel happy and accomplished. Together, Cody and I hauled the deer in the back of the truck. I peeled off my coat, and hopped in the truck to head back home, turning up the radio.
I crept along the rough road, carefully steering over the ruts and around the rocks. Cody had gone quiet again, picking at the cuticles around his nails. The clock on my dashboard said 4:46 - Leo would be up soon and I was anxious to talk to him, to find out what, if anything, had happened the night before. What if he had found Marcus?
The late afternoon light faded to shadows as we bumped down the mountain. I took a corner slowly, then sped up again as the road stretched. Out of the corner of my eye, something was illuminated by my headlights. A lump, misshapen and out of place amongst the underbrush.
We drove on, through the corridor of trees, but uneasiness slammed into my chest. I could have imagined it. My feet tapped the brakes anyway, and Cody swung his head towards me. I bit my lip, staring straight ahead, my hand hovering over the gear shift.
I stopped the truck and backed up, steering the truck slightly to the left to shine the headlights into the trees. I switched off the radio and sat breathing in the sudden silence.
“What is it?” Cody asked faintly.
I pushed the creaky truck door open, my boots crunching on the rough, rocky, dirt. I crept forward, my heart pounding. Behind me, the truck door slammed and Cody appeared at my shoulder.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
I swayed. My body understood long before my mind did.
There was a body on the side of the road. I would have recognized the face, too, even as bloody as it was, but it was the scarf that my eyes fixated on. That and the gaping red smile sliced across his stomach.
Feeling calm, I thought musingly that Leo would be disappointed to know that I had found Marcus first.
And right behind that thought was this one: Or had I?