The worst part about it was that she couldn't turn around and go back for more at the moment. The animals needed tending, and with only one man somewhat on his feet, that responsibility fell to her. Jonas had taken care of the dozen horses kept in the barn and pens, but he wasn't up for the trek to the feeding stations for the cattle. So she had to do it. Having Toren along for company would be nice. She'd have a chance to get to know him better. Ha. Better late than never.
The specter of her father's nasty accusations leapt up to haunt her with the thought. Damn the bastard. Would he never—No. She refused to allow him to intrude further on the most amazing experience of her life. Never again would she give him that kind of power over her. She resolutely returned her head to the tasks before her.
A quick inspection of the truck satisfied her the bucket of bolts would survive the day-long trek. All the tools they might need were packed into the bed, and Kassie's food container sat full and waiting in the place of honor in the middle of the seat. All things considered, the day promised to be beautiful.
A soft sound alerted her to Toren's presence. How such a big man could move so quietly mystified her. He stopped directly behind her and slid his arms around her waist to pull her back against his body.
Sam's muscles automatically threatened to tighten in protest to the intimate touch, but she easily brought the response under control. After what she'd already allowed him to do, a hug was nothing.
A soft moan vibrated through his chest and he dropped his head to nuzzle along her neck. His beard stubble rasped against her skin, raising the most delicious goosebumps at the memory of how that stubble felt against other skin. Her head dropped back against his chest to give better access to more flesh. She wanted his touch everywhere.
Her surrender seemed to trigger something within him. He drew her tighter against him as a growl rolled through his body with a shudder. "So beautiful." Little puffs of warm air against sensitive skin set her heart pounding. "I could spend eternity making love to you. I had no idea it would be like this." He growled again and bent to bring his incredible mouth toward the front of her neck, his tongue leaving trails of flame as he turned her in his arms.
His mouth found hers in a blaze of need. His firm lips slid over hers, teasing, gently nipping and tugging before the tip of his tongue swept across her lips, seeking entrance. She willingly parted her lips in invitation. The velvet rasp of his tongue against hers brought a needy moan to her throat.
Eventually, he drew back, breathing hard. "We'd better go take care of those cattle. Or I'm going to have you stripped right here so I can taste every inch of your delicious body."
When he spoke like that, she almost believed him. Until the reality of her existence struck again. A plain woman, more masculine than feminine, didn’t attract that kind of attention from a gorgeous man for long. Maybe it was a little diversion. Maybe he was bored and so accustomed to female companionship, he just automatically seduced any female that came within range. No matter how badly she wanted to believe he was genuine, she was perfectly aware of the real nature of men.
With a sigh she forced herself out of the fantasy. "We should go."
Halfway expecting him to insist on driving, Sam hung back a little until it was clear Toren intended to go to the passenger side. With a shrug, she climbed behind the wheel and coaxed the truck to life.
"By the way. Do you know anything about the new hole in the truck's floorboard?" She'd discovered the hole on the drafty drive back the ranch after the little sojourn in the hunting cabin, but hadn't said anything. A piece of sheet metal tack-welded in place took care of the problem, leaving only the mystery of the hole's origin.
"Um, sorry about that." The sheepish note in his voice made her glance up to find reddened cheekbones. "It's my fault. When I brought you to the cabin after the fire, the cabin sort of loomed up out of nowhere and I hit the brake harder than I intended."
He left it at that and she didn't ask further. A man as big and powerful as Toren probably had accidents like that on a regular basis. When she popped the clutch and they jolted over ruts, Toren braced himself securely, but didn't complain about her driving. Probably afraid she'd insist he drive so he'd end up Fred-Flintstoning the truck down a hill.
The first location would take about an hour to reach with the snow, if she didn't have to use the blade attached to the front of the truck to clear part of the track. "You never did tell me where you were from."
He was so quiet for a moment, Sam thought he might refuse to answer. "It's hard to explain. I didn't grow up in a traditional home."
She grinned, unable to resist teasing. "What? You sprang forth fully formed?"
He glanced at her, surprise clear on his face. "How did…" The shock turned to a smile. "Nevermind. Sometimes I wish it had been that easy. But no, I never knew my parents or family. So answering that question isn't easy."
Okay, she felt truly horrible. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to press you for details. I didn't know." How could she have been so insistent on something he clearly didn’t want to discuss?
"No, don't worry. I didn't say it was bad, just not traditional." He leaned across the truck to touch her cheek. "Why don't you tell me about your childhood instead?"
She spent the next hour sharing some of her most significant childhood memories with him. Fears. Dreams. Nightmares.
Before she knew it, they were rolling up to the first hay shed. The work went quickly and without a hitch. At the second, she discovered that the fire had smothered itself before doing serious damage. The outer surfaces of some of the hay bales were charred, but not much else. Miraculous.
Four stops later, she hardly believed they were almost finished. One more to go, then they could get back to the hunting cabin.
They went through the routine again, loading hay and moving it to the steel frames that kept the cattle from trampling it. There were fewer cattle waiting to eat than she'd expected. Some must have found an area with decent forage not too hard to access. Still, it was something to check into later.
Glad to be nearly finished, she pointed the truck toward the last stop. She almost missed it, but several vultures chose the right moment to startle away, flapping and hopping about in protest. They settled back onto a dark patch of snow that lay in shadow.
"Great. Looks like we have a dead cow. No wonder there weren't very many there to eat. The smell spooked them." She stopped the truck and set the brake and started to climb out.
"Wait. Where are you going?" Toren didn't seem comfortable with the idea of her checking the dead animal.
"I have to go see it. We need to know why it died, if possible." The act of pulling the 30.06 out of the rack behind the seat seemed foreign to her. Odd. It wasn't as if she'd never had to take the rifle along before. She ignored the feeling and grabbed the ammo pouch, loading the rifle with quick movements. "I need to know if it was winter killed, sickness, or predators. I can't have a wolf-pack or big cat feeding on the stock, and if there's sickness, I need to get ahead of it."
Toren just watched at first. "Let me."
Did he think she'd never seen a dead cow before? "Nonsense. I'll go. You're welcome to come along if you want." She crunched through the snow, barely willing to admit she was glad to hear Toren's footsteps crackling along behind her. Walking up on a dead animal meant possibly encountering a large predator still guarding a kill. Having someone to back her up couldn't be a bad thing.
She scanned her surroundings, looking for any possible hiding spot where a bear or mountain lion might be lying in wait. The dark area lay in a slight depression, making it difficult to see clearly what lay ahead. As they drew near, the first thing Sam noticed was the smell. The coppery stench of blood hung in the air and Sam automatically wrinkled her nose in an effort to block it out.
Twenty feet away, she could tell there was something odd about the kill. When predators killed an animal, or scavenged one already dead, they generally ripped pieces loose and scattered bits around. The
re weren't any stray parts lying about, or splashes of blood, or any kind of mess.
At ten feet, it looked really strange. There was no blood, as if it had been killed elsewhere and dumped there. The abdomen had been opened and the organs pulled out, arranged neatly along the side of the corpse. Nothing appeared to be missing at first glance. Not even the blood rich liver and heart.
"Look around. The snow isn't disturbed and torn up. This cow wasn't killed by another animal." He was right.
How could she have overlooked something so obvious? Sam scolded herself to pay better attention. "What else could have done it? I don't see a reason why anyone would come all the way out here, kill and butcher a steer, and leave it."
Even though vultures had alerted them to the kill, it appeared even they had kept their distance. Droppings and stray feathers littered an area of torn up snow a few yards away. No other scavengers had come near either.
"I don't know who or what could have done it, just that it's not a normal animal kill." Toren moved closer to the corpse, continually scanning the surrounding area as he went.
Did he seriously think whatever had killed the steer would attack them? A chill crept up Sam's spine at the thought. Just in case, she levered a round into the rifle's chamber and stayed close to Toren.
Staring down at the steer, her jaw dropped and refused to go back where it belonged. The hide over the abdomen had been opened with surgical precision and laid back to reveal the underlying muscle and fascia. Individual muscles had been incised and teased apart to reveal bundles and fibers. Sections of blood vessels and tendons protruded, the ends segmented and dissected. The organs had been removed from the abdominal cavity and arranged neatly beside the open body, all with dissected sections.
But the head and neck were the most shocking. The hide had been removed from half of the head, leaving all the underlying tissues exposed. The eyeball lay outside the socket, also dissected and the steer's tongue protruded from the side of its mouth. The killer had taken the time to do a very detailed dissection of the neck, including the blood vessels and air passages. Likewise the ear and the side of the skull had been taken apart to the smallest scale.
Sam just stared, fascinated, for several long minutes. Toren moved around and looked from different angles, but she couldn't bring herself to move. "Dear Lord, please let this poor beast have been dead before all this happened." She prayed for it, but she doubted the attacker had allowed the steer to die before.
Toren finished his inspection and stood back. "We should leave. Now."
For once, she didn't feel the need to argue. She turned back to the truck. "What could have done this? A bear or mountain lion surely would have eaten part of the kill." Already her mind started blurring certain details, emphasizing others.
With Toren in the truck at her side, the rifle back in its place behind her, she started the truck and turned it around. "Only one more stop and we'll be done. I have to admit, I'll be glad when this one's over."
Toren looked at her in a way that gave her an odd feeling, as if he knew more than he were willing to say. "We should just call it a day. Come back tomorrow or the next day."
She shook her head. "No, it's less than half an hour from here. If we come back tomorrow, it's nearly three hours out of the way from the stations on the other side of the ranch. Since it's just the two of us running things for the time being, we don't have that kind of time to waste."
He relented, but she could tell he wanted to insist on stopping for the day. That dead steer must have really given him the creeps.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The ruby mist dissipated and Karly looked around, not sure whether to be pissed or surprised. One of the worst, and best, parts of being married to an angel was when he felt strongly about something, he had the power to force the issue.
She found herself too tired to argue. And how very odd was that? Karly looked around at the deep cavern her darling angel had brought them to. She followed a stray shaft of light up to a narrow slit far above. Roaring water echoed off the cavern walls and Karly momentarily considered the thin stream of water that fell from above into a wide pool to create such a racket. Romantic feelings and ideas pushed into the annoyed spaces in her head until she remembered the whole medical clinic he kept insisting he take her to. Was this it? The angel hospital thing for them to figure out what sort of danger they might be in from that monkey-man bite? That was the last place she wanted to go, but apparently she no longer had a choice.
When Kassern remained silent, she gave in. "Why are we here?" She'd felt out of sorts the last couple of days and her damn leg hurt. Worse every day. The skin stayed pale and smooth as ever, with only some mild bruising, despite the burning agony left in the wound created by the monkey-man's bite. So she was a bit short on patience. "Did you have to flash us out of the kitchen without a word to anyone?"
His eyebrow quirked in that odd little frown he wore whenever something made no sense to him. "The kitchen? That's the last thing you remember?" His tone wasn't quite disbelieving.
Vague unease settled in the pit of her stomach. What was he talking about? "I was eating breakfast, you were frowning at me."
He tilted his head. "You don't remember sucker-punching Troy? Or running out into the street, out past the shields? Or the demon you chose to stay with when I started to flash us away the first time?"
"What? That's insane. Nothing like that happened." A faint memory of sinking her fist into Troy's belly struck, followed by rising panic.
"Yes it did, Karly." He reached for her hands. "I had to restrain you to get you out of there before more demons showed up." He tugged and she went, letting him pull her close to his chest. "What's happening Karly? I can't help you if you won't tell me."
She sighed, ready to tell him about the odd thoughts and feelings that had plagued her, and the ever-increasing pain in her leg. "I should have told you from the start, but you had so much on your mind and it didn't seem important." A spear of heat shot through her leg and she winced. The pain wasn’t new, but it had never been so severe. She drew a deep breath for courage. "Then you started talking about doctors. Kassern, I don't do doctors."
Kassern slid his lips across her forehead in a series of little kisses and smoothed her hair back. "These aren't human doctors, Karly. You know that. And there's no choice. We have to know what sort of problems those things can cause by biting." He tipped her head back with a gentle finger under her chin. "We have to know if it will have any sort of lasting effect on you."
He was right, of course, but she still didn't like it. "I know it's crazy, but I just have a bad feeling about going to your angel doctors for this. Like a dangerous feeling." There. She'd said it. No more hiding, looking like a contrary crackpot.
He drew back a little and gave her that look again, the one that said he didn't quite know what to do with her. "Tell me—"
The pain that cut into her leg interrupted his words with a scream. The dim cavern went even darker around the edges while the muscles of her leg felt like they were being shredded from the inside out.
Kassern caught her as she started to fall. "Karly? What is it?" The panic in his voice spurred her own.
Despite the need to tell Kassern what was wrong, agony stole her strength as thick darkness devoured her consciousness.
** ** **
Toren’s mercury was going nuts. Something was wrong. “Head back to the house. Now.”
“What? No, look, it’s right there, I can’t turn around now, I have to…what the hell?”
Toren jerked his gaze right. What he saw seemed impossible and he had to stare for several seconds before he realized it was definitely real. “STOP!”
Sam slammed the break several hundred yards from the surreal horror before them. The second she did, the two beings working over a cow right in the middle of the field jerked their heads toward them.
“What…on earth?”
By Samantha’s tone, she wasn’t seeing what he was. The beings w
ere too far for human eyes to see what he did. One of the monkey mongrels and clearly a reanimated human were performing abominations on the animal. The whites of the steer’s eyes showed all around as the reanimated human performed bestiality from behind and the monkey man slowly mutilated the poor creature where it stood. Muscles strained as the cow tried laboriously to flee the torment, but it remained stuck fast, caught by some invisible supernatural restraint.
“Turn the truck around. Now.” Toren’s voice flowed, silky with his mercury thinning rapidly, preparing his body for violent action.
"Oh my God, oh my God!” Samantha hurried to comply when the two beings began walking toward them.
“Take your time baby, keep it steady,” he whispered, keeping his eye on the beings as they approached. They suddenly broke out into a hard sprint toward them. “Okay, hurry!” he ordered.
She got the truck turned and gunned it, throwing a look over her shoulder as she did. “Oh God, oh God, what the fuck are they?”
“I don’t know, just drive as fast as you can. Don’t slow down. Not for anything.”
Shit. He couldn’t let the things follow them to the house. Damn. “Sam?”
“What! Oh my God,” she whispered checking the rear view mirror. “They’re running too fast! Toren!”
“Sam!”
“What!”
“I need to tell you something and I need you to not freak out.”
She flashed glances at him.
“Eyes on the road sweetheart.”
“Tell me! What the hell is going on? Are you a-a-a psycho criminal?”
Toren looked back at the beings closing in faster now, both running like cheetahs. “Aww hell,” he whispered as the monkey one landed on the hood of the truck and the human in the truck bed. Sam screamed and Toren slammed his palm on the dashboard in frustration. Without the support of a bound quadumvirate, his powers were limited. He'd have to do this the human way.
Summon Toren (Archangels Creed #3) Page 13