I shook my head. “I don’t think I can do that.”
It felt like an insult to the almost-but-not-quite completely innocent encounters I’d shared with Evie to even contemplate being with another woman.
“Whatever man.” He shrugged. “I just miss my brother, the one who knew how to hunt with me and then have a little fun afterward.”
His words made me recall the time, back when Evie was still nothing more than a dream based on a memory from high school, when Eth and I would finish a hunt and then stumble into the local bar together to find some girls. It had all seemed so innocent back then. So easy.
Of course, that had been before I’d experienced the passion of love—something not even an encounter with the most attractive stranger could come close to emulating.
Clearly realizing I wasn’t taking part in his debauchery, he left me and sauntered over to the girl who leaned closer to him as they spoke. Her brunette friend gave me a smile that seemed to say: “Can you believe them?”
An hour, and God only knows how many drinks, later—not long after Eth had left with the redhead—the brunette and I were locked in a passionate kiss. Although I couldn’t say how it happened, I wasn’t in a hurry to stop it either. I was fairly certain that I hadn’t initiated the contact, but being able to do something other than mourn things that I could never have and hate myself for the choices I’d made was actually something of a relief.
Feeling desire and need, even if it was only through the haze of a boozy night, was definitely preferable to yet another night spent drinking myself into oblivion.
The next morning, I woke with a raging hangover, a naked brunette draped across my body, and a newfound level of disgust for myself.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“MORNING.” THE GIRL’S voice was croaky, which probably had a lot to do with us being so close to the fire the night before. She offered me a watery smile that echoed many of the things I felt myself—uncertainty, doubt, and the effects of very little sleep.
“Hi.” I attempted my own weak grin.
Natalie, the latest victim of my need for solace, took courage from my grin and pressed her lips against my shoulder. Her eyes asked the question her lips refused to, “What happens now?”
It was the question I could never answer, at least not the way some of them had expected. The response was inevitably an answer I didn’t want to give. I hated letting anyone down, even a stranger whom I barely knew.
Despite that, every so often—when the guilt, or grief, or disgust became too much to handle on my own—I searched for the comfort that could only be found in the arms of another. Even if I was upfront about only wanting companionship for one night with no attachments, some women hoped I would change my mind after a night spent getting to know them. Maybe that assumption was right for some men, but for me it didn’t matter who the girl was—how pretty, or clever, or funny she was—it always started and ended the same way.
At first, I let everything go. My mind reacted to the attention I received, and my body responded to the touch of another. When that happened, my head and body took my heart captive and refused to allow it to guide me.
Eventually though, usually in one spectacular instant of self-hatred, it all came crashing down.
My heart, forever searching for the piece it missed—the part that I’d left with Evie—forced me to recall the perfect touch, the feeling of fire inside my veins, and a blaze in my heart. When that happened, the woman I was with, no matter how perfect or wonderful she was, would become substandard by comparison.
In that moment, it was over.
Even the most sensual touch couldn’t guide me back to a place where I held any real interest in enjoying the embrace of a stranger.
In an attempt to stave off that feeling for longer, I’d tried so many things with some of the women to simulate the warmth I craved—from adjusting thermostats to playing with candle wax. It never worked though; it was never enough to emulate the way Evie held my heart and blazed through my veins when we kissed. My mind tormented me with possibilities of how it would have felt to take Evie in my arms properly—to hold her like I’d held the random women I’d tried to forget her with.
It had been three days since I’d first met Natalie, and forty hours since she’d invited me back to her place for a nightcap. We’d spent the majority of that time wrapped up together.
We hadn’t been clothed at all in that time. In fact, the meals we’d shared consisted solely of leftovers from her fridge consumed together while sitting naked at the end of her bed. The alcohol had flowed freely, and we’d only napped together for as long as we could before need overtook us again.
“What’s on the menu this morning?” she asked with a delighted smirk on her face as she moved to hover over me.
As usual, my body reacted instantly to the surplus of nubile, naked skin at my fingertips and, for all intents and purposes, I was ready to respond to the signals she was giving me. Only my heart was finally fighting free of the hold my hormones had over it. It had taken almost forty hours this time—a new record. Yet it wasn’t enough. Not for the first time, I wished Evie hadn’t ensnared my heart so thoroughly, holding it captive in an unknown place—possibly thousands of miles away.
Ignoring Natalie’s advances, I dropped my head back down against the pillow. I should have known it was close to the end when I’d insisted on screwing her next to her open fireplace. With the heat of the flames licking at my skin, I had closed my eyes and pretended Natalie was someone else for precious seconds at a time. Squeezing my eyes tightly closed during the quiet lulls between her gasps of delight, I’d been able to imagine I was with the one I really wanted.
My fingers found their way into Evie’s hair; my mouth had pressed against Evie’s lips. For stolen moments of time, Natalie faded away to be replaced by the one I wanted more. It wasn’t fair to anyone. Not Natalie, not Evie, and certainly not me.
Unable—or perhaps unwilling—to notice my disinterest, Natalie kissed her way across my shoulder until she reached my neck. Her breasts pillowed against my arm, but the feeling no longer elicited any need or desire in me. I felt nothing—I was little more than an empty vessel incapable of feeling anything for anyone other than the one person I could never have.
I pulled away from Natalie’s embrace and reached for my pants. No matter how many awkward morning afters I’d endured in the six months since the first night I’d fallen into bed with a stranger, I never got used to them. Maybe it was because I didn’t bed women with the regularity that Eth did, or see it as the sport he seemed to. Somehow, he’d perfected the art of remaining friends—and had a network of useful contacts that sprung from his conquests.
“Natalie,” I said with a sigh. “I think we need to talk.”
AS I left Natalie’s apartment for the first, and last, time, the guilt over the way I’d ended it raced through my mind. She hadn’t taken the news as well as some, but it had definitely gone better than others. She hadn’t threatened me with castration or pulled a weapon on me at least. She’d known from the beginning that I wasn’t interested in anything more than a casual fling, and just like the others, she’d said at the beginning that she wasn’t either.
“It just felt like something had changed last night, by the fire,” she’d said as her tears began to fall. The sentiment echoed in my mind long after our conversation finished. The words twisted through my body, weighing down my limbs. It was as if I’d deliberately led her on and let her believe what I felt was love. I couldn’t tell her the reason for the change though. At least, not without risking hurting her further by explaining that what she’d felt had been nothing more than a weakened echo of my feelings for someone else.
It was the final straw though, the one moment that made me see how selfish I’d been. Regardless of whether I was upfront about what I wanted or not, it was wrong to want to find someone to screw away my guilt and self-hatred. The girls I’d been with deserved better than the broken man I’d become
, and I deserved more than a meaningless fuck.
I made a resolution with myself to not fall into the trap again. From that moment on, I wouldn’t screw anyone until I actually felt something for them. Something, anything, even if it was little more than a shadow of the memory of Evie’s hold on me.
As I thought of Evie the guilt and pain worsened. I wondered where the hell she was and whether she’d found a place where she could be safe. Had she found someone else that made her happy, someone whose past didn’t add to the dangers she faced? Or was she destined to live her life within the shadows of the past like me?
There was one question that burned me more than any other.
Had I meant as much to her as she meant to me?
Could she have moved on already as if I was nothing more than a temporary love interest?
The fact that she might have been killed barely entered my mind, mostly because it was too painful to even consider, but also partly because I didn’t believe it was true. Somewhere in the depths of my aching heart was the certainty that she was alive. It was likely my own blind hope, but it gave me the peace I needed to not recklessly track her down and bring danger back into her life.
It wasn’t enough to stop me from keeping an eye on new cases logged into the Rain systems though, always dreading the moment another phoenix case crossed onto the radar. Whenever I checked that, I inevitably looked up the case file for both Emily and Evie—hoping that enough time had passed that the search wouldn’t raise any red flags in the system.
When I looked up Emily’s file, it was purely to examine her photos. It was uncanny how similar she looked to the one I missed, and it was easy to fool myself that it was a photo of Evie. Whenever I closed Emily’s file, I always looked over Evie’s to remind myself that despite the belief of everyone in the Rain, she wasn’t dead. Every time I read Eth’s debrief notes about how she’d leaped from the car into the river, I was reminded of her appearance when I’d seen her a few hours later—muddied but alive. When I read his assumptions about the water quelling the fire that should have destroyed her, I recalled the fire that claimed her father’s life.
It was dangerous to have such an interest in her, and I’d tried not to, but since the incident in New Mexico with the púca, my time with Evie had played on my mind that much more.
I’d even considered running another photo of Evie through the photo recognition software, but I couldn’t be certain that my actions weren’t being monitored. Although the hierarchy would probably frown upon my looking over the old files, they wouldn’t stop me as it wasn’t technically hurting anything and I hadn’t made a move to leave again.
It wouldn’t raise their suspicions about any possibility of Evie having survived. If they were watching and I ran a live search for Evie, it would tip them all off to the fact that she was still alive. As desperately as I longed to see Evie one more time, I couldn’t risk that.
Trying to push all of my emotions from my mind, I checked my cell phone to see if there was anything there that could take my mind off everything for a while.
Kenora, Ontario. Three days.
The message from Dad didn’t say what we’d be facing or how many of us would be needed, but I didn’t care. It was a distraction and that was exactly what I needed. The cycle I’d fallen into—rotating between using girls and murdering monsters as a distraction—was ridiculous. I knew that, but I hadn’t been able to think of any way to break free. At least, not in a way that didn’t involve hunting Evie to the ends of the Earth and endangering her life again.
Thoughts of a reunion, however impossible it may be, had been growing in regularity, and the desire I felt for one was enough to send a warm feeling racing through my veins, chasing away the cold dread.
Maybe everyone was right. Maybe her hold over me is something more sinister than just simple desire.
Before I could over-examine every minute of the time I’d spent with Evie, for perhaps the fiftieth time, I dialed Eth’s number to see whether he knew anything more about the assignment. I hadn’t seen him in almost two weeks, not since we’d spent a week freezing our asses off camping near Mount St. Helens in Washington, trying to find a tribe of skoocooms spotted in the area. Since then we’d all been on R&R, waiting for confirmation of our next case.
“Get your ass out of bed,” I said before he’d had a chance to say anything more than a sleep-muffled greeting.
“What time is it?” he muttered. The sound of the phone being shifted crackled in my ear and then his voice came back onto the line. “You do realize it’s not even nine yet, don’t you?”
“Did you get the text from Dad?”
“Dude, I only answered your call because I thought it might be an emergency. Which it’s clearly not, so I’m going to go now.”
Before he’d even given me a chance to respond, he’d hung up. I didn’t want to call Dad; he and I’d still had a relationship that could only be called tenuous—it had been like that between us ever since they’d found me in Charlotte. Instead, I called Lou.
“To what do I owe the pleasure? You haven’t fallen for a sasquatch have you?”
Even with so few words, she was able to piss me off. If I could have reached down the phone and slapped her, I probably would have. It was a reminder why I liked to be teamed with Eth—at least he put up with my shit.
“What’s in Canada?” I asked rather than biting back over her sarcastic remark. She’d been Dad’s favorite for years, long before I’d screwed up, so I knew she’d already have the inside track.
“A wendigo.”
“Why are we needed then? That’s not exactly a priority case.” The words had already left before it struck me as a little strange that a wendigo would even be active in February. It should have been in hibernation. For the creature to be hunting during winter, it meant that it mustn’t have gathered enough prey to last through the winter. It was rare, but it did happen on occasion.
“This one is. It’s slipped through the net of five local teams and the death toll keeps rising.”
Useless fucking morons. A wendigo could be a slippery creature, but so long as you kept your wits about you and had the right tools, they were a relatively simple beast to kill.
“Fine. Tell Dad I’ll be there.”
“I’m not your damn secretary. Tell him yourself.”
“Whatever.” I hung up before she could get under my skin any further.
Every time we saw each other lately, it descended into a slinging match about how terrible a person I was for leaving the family and developing a conscience. How I’d broken our father’s heart, even if he’d never show it. That I was the one responsible for all the various fractures that had torn our family apart. I was sick of the bullshit and blame, but I didn’t know what else I could do about it either. She was still my sister; they were all still my family. Even though sometimes it felt like they hated me, I knew it was only my actions they disliked. It still sucked though.
I’d learned it was easier to avoid facing my sister when I could and that we definitely didn’t work well together.
Understanding there was no point hanging around and waiting for Lou’s attitude to change or for Eth to put his dick back in his pants long enough to arrange anything, I decided to book my own flights and just meet everyone else in Canada. If nothing else, I could get a jump-start on the research we’d need to find out why the wendigo was hunting so early—or late, depending on how you looked at it—and exactly how it was able to evade capture.
A little over a day later, I was jogging on a snow-covered track alongside the highway in Canada. I was miles away from the town, and heading farther away. None of my family were in Kenora yet, and I couldn’t stay cooped up in the motel just waiting for them.
Even though I’d told myself I was heading up to Canada early to get a head start on the research, the moment I’d booked into a motel, all I wanted to do was escape. I wanted the freedom of not having to feel—the freedom only burning lungs, aching legs, and a
pounding heart would give me—so I’d changed into a pair of sweats and an old T-shirt. Because of the cold winter, I pulled on my favorite hoodie to keep me warm until my blood started to pump.
I headed north until I hit the Kenora bypass, and then I followed that road. Even though I had no destination in mind, my body itched with the need to be . . . somewhere. When my feet hit Dufresne Island, I left the road and headed into the trees. The conifers swallowed up the road behind me after only a fraction of a mile.
I was alone.
Stopping for breath, I leaned forward against one of the evergreens and ignored the dread I felt that I’d soon have to head back to the motel and tell my family I’d arrived.
I’ll just enjoy a few more minutes out here first.
Under the peace and quiet of the trees, it was easy to imagine a different world. One where I hadn’t been raised in a family who wanted to destroy the girl I loved. I turned to rest my back against the trunk of the conifer and allowed thoughts of Evie to fill my mind.
For the first time in forever, I chose to forget the guilt that always rushed through me when I thought of her. With the perfect moments we’d shared running on repeat through my head, I closed my eyes and relived it all. Hidden away in an unspoiled corner of the world, I was with her again, if only in my mind.
“Hey stranger,” her voice whispered in my ear. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you too, Evie,” I choked out. “So much.”
Once I let her in, truly let every memory and desire overtake me, I longed to start running again and keep going—never stopping until I found her. I knew it was useless, but that didn’t stop me from imagining what I might do with her, and to her, if it wasn’t.
Besieged by Rain (Son of Rain #1) Page 19