by Rachel Lee
He liked the night. He liked the quiet and the solitude. He liked being able to step out his door and take long, undisturbed walks. The whole world changed at night, and a whole different set of creatures came into the ascendant. Night was the time of the predators, and the time of those who hunted them.
Ian McLaren was a hunter. And this evening he had definitely scented a predator.
CHAPTER TWO
Honor stood on the back porch of Ian’s house and stared across the hedge toward her own home. The morning sun was bright and warm in Ian’s treeless yard, but it failed to penetrate the shadows beneath the old oaks and Spanish moss that surrounded her house.
She had thought, when she first saw the house, only of its charm. It had the spaciousness of another age, large rooms and high ceilings, and it had solid oak floors. It had those little extras, like a built-in hutch in the dining room and huge walk-in closets, that were impossible to find in more recent construction. And the towering old live oaks and the shady curtains of Spanish moss had added romance to it all.
Now she looked at those same oaks and those same curtains of Spanish moss, and they looked ominous. The windows of her house seemed to be black and empty, holes leading into a pit. She wished suddenly that she had never set eyes on the place.
She had left her home in Seattle to escape the ghosts of sorrowful memories. Her father’s long illness and death, her own failed marriage, a sense of grayness to her life, as if she were cut off behind a tinted wall of glass. The Florida sunshine had drawn her with the promise of burning away the gray fog that had swallowed her since her father became ill.
Now she looked at her home and felt as if not even the tropical sunlight were enough to banish the dark.
God!
Shivering, she turned to reenter the house and wait for Ian McLaren. He must have heard her stirring this morning, because he had had breakfast waiting for her when she came downstairs, eggs and ham and plenty of hot, fresh coffee. As soon as he had seen her served, though, he had vanished upstairs. When he came down, he’d said, he wanted to look over her house and decide what she needed to make it secure. Then they would go into town and get it, so she wouldn’t have to worry tonight.
It was an awful lot of trouble for the man to go to, she thought, even if he did do only what he chose to. And maybe she was being too quick to trust him. But when she remembered how he had dashed out into the dark last night to look for the intruder, and how quick he had been to understand her terrors and take her under his protection, she felt guilty for even wondering about his motives. So what if his eyes were the strangest she had ever seen.
“Ready?”
She spun around at the sound of his deep voice and stared in astonishment. She hadn’t expected him to appear all decked out in BDUs, the army camouflage uniform, combat boots and a red beret. Wasn’t he retired? Dressed this way, he was even more overpowering than he had been last night. Bigger. Darker. More dangerous looking. And this morning those unusual cat-green eyes of his looked…eerie.
“I need to stop on the base on the way and check my schedule,” he said, as if she had spoken her surprise about his uniform. “I believe I need to be in the field this weekend.”
“Look,” she said, hoping she sounded reasonable, not wanting to offend him, but suddenly wanting very much to be away from him, “you’ve obviously got important things to do, and shepherding me around is only going to get in your way. Why don’t you just let me take care of this stuff?”
“No.”
No. The word seemed to hang in the humid air between them, as uncompromising a sound as any she had ever heard. No qualifier eased it; no explanation expanded it. Just no.
Tilting her head back, she glared up at him, then had a sudden, unexpected sense of the foolhardiness of her action. This man could undoubtedly kill her with a single blow of his powerful arm. She, who had never feared a thing, suddenly wondered if a little fear might not be wise. What did she know about him, after all? A bubble of nervous laughter escaped her. The only change in his rocklike expression was the lifting of a single eyebrow.
“Okay,” she said, swallowing another nervous laugh. “It’s your time.”
“That’s right.”
Turning, he exited his house and led the way around the hedge toward her back door. As she followed, she wondered what rank he had held before his retirement, then concluded that, whatever it had been, he was used to being followed and obeyed. It didn’t seem to enter his head that anyone would do otherwise. It was an attitude she knew well; her father had been a high-ranking sergeant in the Rangers. The left hand of God, she had sometimes thought. His dicta had had the force of law.
It was still early, but the Florida sun was already burning-hot, promising a stifling September day. The normally humid climate was more so this morning, after the night’s rain, and Honor wondered if she had been crazy to move here. Long ago, as a child, she had lived here, when her father had been stationed at the base. She had always remembered the Gulf Coast fondly, especially the white sand of the beaches and the aquamarine of the water. She had forgotten the heat and humidity.
Once around the hedge, they stepped into the cooler shadows beneath the trees, where the air seemed even thicker. The smell of rotting vegetation was strong here, almost overpowering, even though nothing grew in the shadows beneath the moss and the old trees. Honor shivered suddenly, despite the warmth of the air. Shadows that had seemed pleasantly cool only yesterday now seemed dank. Threatening. As if in stepping out of the light she had crossed some invisible barrier into an evil place.
Ian halted before they drew close to the house, and she halted beside him. He stood perfectly still, moving not a muscle, and she watched him curiously, wondering what he was doing.
Eventually she realized. He was allowing his eyes to adapt to the fainter illumination under the trees, but he was also taking in impressions with all his senses. His nostrils flared a little as he inhaled, and she wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to discover that he was separating out every scent and cataloging it individually. His eyes scanned everywhere, appearing to overlook nothing, and his head cocked at each sound, identifying it and locating it.
Like a hunter, she thought. Like a mountain lion. Like a jungle predator. Another shiver rippled through her, and she wondered again why she had trusted him so readily.
He stepped forward in a smooth gliding motion that made him look almost like one of the gently swaying shadows beneath the trees. “It’s too dark under here,” he remarked. “There are too many places to hide.”
Honor looked around, wondering what it was he saw that she had missed. To her, except for the trunks of the trees, her yard looked positively barren. Grass couldn’t grow in this shade, never mind bushes or shrubs that might hide someone.
“I can’t do much about the shadows,” she said, hesitantly. “I really don’t want to cut down the trees.” Although the idea was sounding more attractive by the minute. Why hadn’t she noticed before just how tomblike it felt beneath all this moss? Damp, chilly, cut off.
“We might get rid of some of this moss.”
Yesterday she would have been appalled at the very notion of disturbing that beautiful, graceful moss—which at this moment didn’t look either beautiful or graceful. “Maybe,” she said uncertainly. Lord, was she letting last night’s events poison everything about her new home? But she couldn’t seem to help it.
He glanced down at her. “Last resort,” he said, plainly recognizing her reluctance. “Let’s see to more practical things first.”
She nodded and followed him around back. He didn’t approach the house immediately, but instead circled the detached garage, checking out the windows and door.
“Don’t park in the garage anymore,” he said. “It’s an obvious place for somebody to lie in wait, even in the middle of the day.”
“All right.” She never would have thought of such a thing. Never.
“When you have to come home after dark
, give me a call. I’ll wait for you and make sure you get in okay.”
“But—”
A look from his cat-green eyes silenced her. “There are things out there that masquerade as human,” he said intensely. “They walk, talk and look like you and me. But they’re not human. They’re not human at all. They get their pleasure from inflicting pain. They feast on the suffering of others and make a banquet out of their victims’ agony. The sweetest music to their ears is a tortured cry for mercy.”
He faced her fully, impaling her on the glowing, gemlike hardness of his gaze. Honor instinctively took a step backward, feeling his intensity as if it were a vortex in the very air. As if he somehow gathered energy from the atmosphere and focused the power of it on her.
When he continued speaking, his voice was low, quiet, but forceful. “If one of them has set his sights on you, it will take more than ordinary caution to protect you. And sacrificing a little independence is a small price for avoiding capture by a demon.”
The chill that had fallen over her in the shadows seemed now to reach to her very bones. “Demon?” she repeated hoarsely. No one talked in those terms anymore. She wanted to believe he was exaggerating, but the look in his strange eyes was deadly serious, disturbing. Witch eyes. “You mean like…possession?” She whispered the last word, hardly able to bring herself to say it.
“They’re sure as hell not men.” He looked past her, seeing something elsewhere, elsewhen. “They’re real, though. Too damn real.”
He turned abruptly toward the house. “I can put locks on doors and windows to stymie them, lady, but I can’t put locks on you. You have to exercise reasonable caution.”
“Well, of course,” she said weakly, following him. Maybe she was a fool to trust this man. He was talking about demons, after all, and if that wasn’t, well, weird, then what was? “Uh…Mr. McLaren? I can just have someone come out here and install a security system—” She broke off suddenly, the full import of his words striking her. “Wait a minute.” The words were little more than a croak.
He heard them and turned. Standing there in the deep shadows beneath the moss, he settled his hands on his hips and stared at her. He looked, she thought crazily, like a being from another world, not quite mortal. He was too big, too powerful.
“Demons,” she repeated hoarsely. “You’re not joking.”
“No.” Again, that single uncompromising syllable.
“But—look. Somebody broke into my house last night. And he fled as soon as he was discovered. There’s really no good reason to think he’ll ever come back. Making the house more secure is simply to make me feel better, right?”
He just stared at her with eyes that burned like green fire.
“This demon business… Well, I don’t believe in that kind of stuff.” She managed to say that firmly, with conviction. She even sounded normal. Inside, though, her conviction was losing force, and she was beginning to feel as if the firm ground on which she had so confidently stood were turning into quicksand beneath her feet. Abomination. The word whispered through her brain, so strange as to feel alien. She was too tense at the moment, though, to pay it any mind.
For a moment he continued to stare at her in silence. Finally he spoke, his voice a deep rumble, like thunder in the distance. “He may not come back. You’re right. There’s no reason to assume he will.”
Honor nearly sighed with relief. At least he could be rational.
“However,” he said, shattering her moment of relief, “you really can’t afford to bank on that, can you?”
Suddenly angry with the way he was trying to frighten her, she glared at him. “Perhaps not. But I don’t need to start imagining ghosts and goblins in every corner, either. With all due respect to you, Mr. McLaren, I don’t believe in demons.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’” He shrugged, his expression never changing. “I don’t care what you believe, Ms. Nightingale. The question is whether you want to risk meeting one in your bedroom in the dead of night.” The words hung starkly in the dark, heavy air.
Game, set and match, thought Honor grimly as she walked behind him to the house and tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter what he called them. He would probably say Charles Manson was a demon.
Shivering internally against the chill that had settled over her the instant she stepped into the shadows, she glanced around her yard and wondered uneasily if perhaps there were more things out there than she’d dreamt of.
The house still held the night’s coolness and seemed just as oppressive as the shadows outside. She tried to tell herself it was just an aftereffect of last night, but the fact was, if someone had offered at that moment to take over her mortgage, she would have been packed and gone before noon.
She’d been living here for almost a month, and only yesterday she’d found herself wondering why it was taking so long for this place to feel like home. As an army brat, she was accustomed to making a new home every year or so. Nothing about this move had seemed wrenching or unusual. The only difference was that she couldn’t seem to settle in. Couldn’t escape the really discomfiting feeling that when she stepped in here she was stepping into someone else’s home. She kept telling herself that a fresh coat of interior paint would make all the difference, yet she kept putting off buying the paint.
Ian began his self-imposed task immediately. He pulled a small memo book out of one of his pockets and handed it to her, along with a pen. “Write down the measurements as I give them to you, will you?”
“We’re not going to put bars on the windows or anything, are we?” She couldn’t stand the thought. It would make the house feel like a prison.
He glanced at her and shook his head. “No, but I want to get some locking bars. They’ll make it impossible to jimmy the windows, even if someone breaks out a pane of glass.”
The windows were multipaned, and each pane was too small to climb through without breaking the wood frame, as well, and that would make a terrible racket. Honor nodded her understanding.
“I’m especially concerned about this window, though,” he said, indicating the one right beside the back door. “That’s how he got in last night.”
“That was how I was planning to get in when I got locked out of the car last night,” Honor admitted. “It was the first thing that occurred to me, to break out a pane of glass and reach around to unlock the door.”
“The only way to prevent that is to board up the window. Or shutter it. Could you live with a shutter?”
“On the inside?”
“Or outside. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it can’t be opened from the outside once it’s closed.”
She nodded reluctantly, unable to argue against the wisdom of it, and watched as he measured the window and its frame, inside and out. “This isn’t right,” she said a little later, as he worked his way through her house.
He looked at her, his eyes as hard as chips of jade. “No, it isn’t. But this isn’t a perfect world. Your only alternatives are to make yourself as safe as possible or leave the area.”
She really didn’t need him to tell her that. She might be only twenty-six compared to his— She glanced at him, wondering again. Retired from the army meant only that he had to be at least thirty-eight, but even knowing that much, she couldn’t be sure. His hair was the dark color of teak, and the only gray in it was a startling, intriguing slash of white that looked as if it might have come from an old injury. Otherwise, the man was ageless. The lines in his face had come from the elements, from the sun and the wind, not from the years.
She followed him up the stairs, certain he was preceding her because it was safer, and found herself at eye level with his buns. Each time he flexed a leg, camouflage fabric tightened over his buttocks and revealed just how hard and muscled he was.
Oh, Lord, maybe she was losing her mind. How could she even be noticing his buns at a time like this? Last night someone had been waiting f
or her here, inside her very own house, and only because of some ancient survival instinct had she realized she was being watched. If she had walked up to the house and stuck her hand through the glass to unlock the door, if she had come into her own kitchen…
Something dark seemed to be hovering at the edges of her mind, something dark and threatening. It soaked the light from the room, the breath from her lungs. Suddenly she was standing in the middle of her own bedroom, with the hair on the back of her neck prickling as if some evil force still lingered in the house from last night.
Ian reached out suddenly. Cupping the back of her neck with one hard, callused palm, he forced her down until she sat on the edge of her bed with her head between her knees.
“Delayed reaction,” he said, as calmly as if he were used to dealing with this kind of thing every day. “It’ll pass in a little while. Just keep your head down for a minute.”
God, was she turning into a wimp? she wondered miserably, remembering the darkness that had been closing in on her, not sure she had just been faint. But then, she told herself, she’d never had to deal with anything like this before. What did she know about delayed reactions and fainting except what she had seen as a nurse, as an observer on the outside looking in?
But now her safe little world had been invaded in the worst possible way, and instead of bucking up like the capable woman she had always believed herself to be, she was acting like a Victorian miss whose stays were too tight. Angry at herself, she sat up and waited for the brief bout of dizziness to pass.
“That’s it,” said the deep, dark voice of the man who seemed to be taking over her life with breathtaking speed. “Get mad. It’s healthy.”
He yanked the window open and leaned out to look around. Honor knew what he saw: the front porch roof, right under her window. She’d been thinking about building a small balcony there, thinking it would be a pleasant place to sit in the evenings, since a hole in the trees gave her the only real view she had, though it was only of the road leading up to the highway. Now she could think only of how easy that roof would make it for someone to get to her bedroom.