by A. S. Green
“Uh, hey,” said a male voice on the other end.
“Who is this?”
“This is Riley from the rental office. Um…I don’t mean to gross you out, but I just took out the trash and noticed that some kind of dead animal has been deposited on your doorstep.”
“What?” Cormac glanced up to see that Meghan had followed him and was standing close.
“Yeah,” Riley continued. “My cat sometimes brings home dead birds and baby rabbits, but this is quite a bit… uh… bigger. I’ve called sanitation to come get it, but you’ll want to use the back door for a while.”
Cormac had heard enough. He put the receiver back in its cradle. Then he took Meghan’s hand, ignoring how much he enjoyed the feel of it, and pulled her out of the bedroom and through the hearth room to the front door.
Cormac flung open the door and a sweet sickening smell rushed into the cabin.
Meghan took a step back. “Shit! Is that…? Oh, God. I’m gonna be sick.” She slapped a hand over her mouth.
There, on his doorstep, was another mutilated daoine sídhe—but this one was male and barely full grown, his khaki pants shredded and soaked in blood.
“Get me something to wrap him in,” Cormac said without looking at her. “There’s an extra sheet on a shelf in the bedroom.”
Meghan rushed out of the room and came back just as quickly. “What’s going on?”
“It’s a message.”
“From the person you’re hunting?”
“Aye.” Cormac shrouded the body with reverence, wrapping the sheet and tucking in the end. Then he looked up at her, and his gaze dipped to her neck. “Jesus, Meghan, are ye feeling okay? Your rash is coming back.”
“It is?” Meghan’s hand rose to her throat.
Yes, it definitely was. He could hardly believe there might actually be something to his theory, but he’d have to wait and think on that later. “Put your shoes on. You’re coming with me.”
“What? Where?”
“To bury the body.” It wasn’t like he was going to leave her here alone.
Meghan looked down at the wrapped form on the doorstep, and her skin turned a pale shade of green. “Uh… I’d rather…”
“Meghan…” He needed her to come with him, and he didn’t have time to argue.
“Shouldn’t you call the police? Or a coroner?”
“We can do that later.”
“You’re not telling me something. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”
Cormac grimaced. He could see it in her eyes—the doubt, the fear, the revulsion. She’d realized he wasn’t a bounty hunter, at least not in the normal human sense. If she needed some time to gather her wits so she could listen to what he had to say, he could give that to her. This wouldn’t take long. He could be back in less than an hour. Then he’d lay all his cards on the table.
“Get the salt,” he said.
“Salt?” she asked, her eyebrows drawing together. Then she glanced down at the body. “Why?”
“Just get it.”
Meghan shook her head in disbelief, but she went to the kitchenette and came back with a novelty salt shaker in the shape of a Dominican friar with chubby pink cheeks.
“Is this what you want?” She thrust it in his direction.
“Yes,” he said, but he held his hands up and didn’t take it from her. He’d stayed clear of that evil little monk since moving in, and he wasn’t about to touch it now. “Sprinkle a line of salt along the windowsill, then along the back door off the bedroom. All the windows in there, too.”
“What the hell is going on?” Her voice was going higher and more panicky by the second.
He closed his eyes and sighed. “Just do what I said. I don’t have a lot of time. I can explain better when I get back.”
She glanced down nervously at the body, then rushed out of the room with the salt. When she came back, her face was scrunched up with an expression of confusion.
“Okay, good,” he said. If she wouldn’t come with him, at least this would give him some tiny bit of comfort. “When I leave, lock the front door and salt it as well. Don’t answer the door to anyone but me. And for the love of Danu, stay awake.” His concerns about angry leannán hadn’t left him.
“But—” She was looking at him like he was crazy. He felt a little crazy.
“When I’m done, I’ll come to the back door. That’s how you’ll know it’s me.”
She pinched her lips together and agreed, but only reluctantly. “Just tell me what message you think this body is supposed to send.”
“Whoever did this…depositing the body on my doorstep… He knows what I’m doing, and he knows where I am. He’s taunting me.”
Cormac watched as Meghan swallowed hard, then nodded her head.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. A single tear escaped the corner of her eye.
“All right. Don’t worry. I’m going to bury the body, but I’ll be back. It won’t take me long. Thirty minutes. Tops.”
“Okay,” she said.
Cormac tipped his head, and his eyebrows came together. “You’re sure?”
“You’ll come back.”
He took that as a question needing confirmation. “Aye. You can trust me.”
She nodded. “I thought so.”
Cormac felt the weight of those words somewhere deep in his gut. She trusted him. No one had reason to trust him, but she did.
Meghan gave her chin a jerk to say, Get going then, and Cormac lifted the wrapped body in his arms and stepped out.
“Lock the door,” he said, giving his final instructions. “Salt the threshold when I leave. Then stay put. Stay awake. And put some cream on that rash. It’s getting worse.”
“And you be careful.”
Cormac looked at her for another long second. Then slowly she closed the door. Only when he heard the lock, did he close his eyes.
And then he was gone.
Chapter Ten
MEGHAN
Meghan pressed her hands against the door and let the last few minutes sink in. She would have liked to have made sense of it, but it was beyond her comprehension. The only thing that was clear: Cormac’s job was even more dangerous than she had imagined, and it seemed the tables had just been turned on the hunter.
For a second she thought she should go, get far away from whatever nightmare she’d stumbled into. But she’d made Cormac promise to return to her, and she’d promised him that she’d stay. And she did want to hear his explanation…whatever it might be. She could always decide to leave then, if that’s what needed to happen.
God, I hope that doesn’t need to happen.
There was a knock at the door. Had he forgotten something? She yanked it open. “Did you for—”
But it wasn’t Cormac.
The woman from before, Branna she thought he’d called her, was standing there, scowling. Her eyes, intense.
“Cormac’s not here,” Meghan said.
Branna pushed in anyway. She was short, but she was strong.
Meghan closed the door and set the salt shaker on the windowsill. “What do you want?”
“Since you ask, I want you to pack.”
Meghan turned her head and looked at her through narrowed eyes. All the nerves and stomach-turning confusion from before had left her body, replaced by a new level of supreme annoyance. Cormac said this chick wasn’t his girlfriend, so what the hell was her problem?
“I don’t care what you want.” Meghan scowled and straightened her shoulders. “I’m not leaving. Cormac told me to—”
“I know what he told you,” Branna said, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder. “I didn’t say I expected to get what I wanted. I rarely do. And I never do when a MacConall is involved.”
Meghan swallowed and reassessed. Maybe she wasn’t Cormac’s girlfriend, but she could be his bitter, possessive ex. Was she some psycho fatal-attraction
girl?
Branna’s face turned even more sour than before. She looked Meghan up and down. “I don’t like it when he’s unhappy. And he’s unhappy.”
Meghan didn’t know what she was talking about, but it seriously pissed her off. “And you think it’s my fault he’s unhappy? I’ve known him for all of two days. Not even two days.”
Branna almost laughed. “Oh, you’re definitely making that dog miserable, whether you have any control over that…. My point is, I don’t want to see him hurt.”
“You think he’s going to get hurt?” Meghan’s mind went to whomever it was who’d dumped a body on Cormac’s doorstep, and she felt a flicker of fear before realizing that wasn’t what Branna was talking about. Branna was talking about her. As if—with all the crazy-ass shit Cormac was clearly dealing with—she, Meghan Walsh, would even register, let alone hurt him.
“I can’t believe he’d want to spend a second in your presence, especially after all he’s been through.”
If nothing else had got Meghan’s attention, that certainly did. What would any of Cormac’s history have to do with her? For God’s sake, she’d just met the guy!
Branna stepped closer again, and her eyes narrowed. “Know this. It would take more than a shrinking violet to deal with all of Cormac MacConall’s shit. He needs an equal partner, not…you. Not a pádraig.”
Was that some regional slang? Whatever it meant, she could tell it wasn’t a compliment. Cormac said he wanted to take her on as a partner because she was a stranger in the area. The logic seemed thin at the time. Now, after what happened moments ago, it sounded downright irrational. Was that what Branna was getting at? Did she know what Cormac was doing right now, and why?
Still, Meghan wasn’t about to let this woman, whoever she was, push her around.
“For your information, I don’t shrink. Not from anything.” Well…not from anything except helping Cormac bury a mutilated body.
“Understand me,” Branna said, raising her hand and pointing her finger at Meghan. “Cormac is emotionally stunted.”
“That’s not a very nice—”
Branna flexed her wrist and gave Meghan her palm. “His sole desire is vengeance. Once he has it… Once he’s caught his man, he’ll have no more use for you. You’ll never see him again. That’s the truth.”
Meghan swallowed the lump in her throat. Branna wasn’t telling her anything she hadn’t already told herself. So why did it hurt so bad to hear it confirmed?
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, and she was horrified to hear the quake in her voice.
Branna made a scoffing sound. “Not to be cruel—if you can believe that—just to be honest. Do yourself a favor, gather your things together and hit the road.”
She glanced at the windowsill as she took the door handle, then glanced up at Meghan with a patronizing expression. “And for the love of Danu, bring the salt when you go. You’re not very popular around these parts. I will not be blamed for anything bad happening to you just because you were stupid.”
Then she opened the door, slammed it behind her, and was gone.
What the fucking hell?
Meghan stared into the empty room, rehashing Branna’s visit. How could she be unpopular? No one even knew who she was. And what was the freaking deal with the salt?
Something weird was going on—weirder than what she’d already gathered—and whatever it was, it was more than she needed to deal with at the moment. Hallucinations. Cryptic warnings. Freaky ex-girlfriend types. Multiple dead bodies…
Was Cormac into something illegal? Oh, shit. If she got swept up in a sting, she’d end up rotting away in a jail cell. There was no one in her life who’d be willing to bail her out.
This Branna person was a bitch, for sure, but Meghan still had a strange sense of gratitude for her visit because she’d definitely let her guard slip. She’d let herself get pulled in by Cormac’s looks, his strength, the growing feeling of…connection. In doing so, she’d lost sight of everything the last twenty-one years had taught her. For Christ’s sake, she’d seriously been considering partnering up with a guy who buried dead bodies in the woods without calling the cops!
Fuck! She had to get out of there. She had to leave before he could come back and suck her in more deeply.
She didn’t want to do it. She had to do it. As painful as it was now, it would only get worse if she delayed.
She glanced at the windowsill and saw the fat friar salt shaker. She still didn’t know what the freaking deal was with all this talk about salt, but at least she could have the shaker as a memento of this weird experience. She could add it to her collection.
A second later, it joined the snow globe, the Papa Gino’s menu, and the hotdog keychain in her suitcase. And then she left.
Chapter Eleven
MEGHAN
Meghan was having flashbacks to junior high gym class—those days of being the only late bloomer surrounded by beautiful girls who filled out their bras, had legitimate pubes, and talked about giving head way before Meghan knew what that meant.
The only difference between then and now was that Meghan wasn’t hunched over in a locker room hiding from the beautiful people. At the moment, she was strung up and spread-eagled, her wrists and ankles bound by ropes and tied between two trees while surrounded by five stunning women all dressed in black.
Two hours earlier, she’d bailed on the rental cottage, not even leaving a note, and headed north. Getting back on track with her original plan seemed like the smartest thing she could do. Once she got to Canada, she could forget all about Cormac MacConall and rediscover a world that might be less interesting, but at least made sense.
To get a good start on “normal,” she’d hitched a ride with a nice older lady who lectured her on the dangers of hitchhiking but took her as far north as Covill—which didn’t seem to be an actual town but a stretch of more forested highway.
From there, she walked until her feet hurt, and she found a sheltered area in some bushes off the edge of the road to take a nap. Sometime later, she heard the singing.
As if in a trance, Meghan rose and followed the music. It drew her in like a tractor beam, and she followed the sound, tripping along a well-worn path and into the trees like she was a junkie following the promise of top-notch heroin.
She tightened her grip on her suitcase and hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet when she hit a clearing and saw the source of the hypnotic sound: five women dressed in black, standing in a circle, all holding hands and singing.
“Welcome,” said one of the women. She pulled her mouth into a smile that gave Meghan a tingling sense of fear. “Please join us.”
Over the years, Meghan had developed a strong instinct for people and situations that required her to get-the-hell-away-and-not-look-back. There had been her uncle’s work buddy who came to the house to play cards every Friday. He always had a unique talent for entering the kitchen at the same time Meghan went in looking for a snack.
There was the party in tenth grade where a kid brought a gun, and the time she accidentally discovered her neighbor’s basement pot farm.
None of that came even close to her current predicament in the you-better-run department. But as much as Meghan’s feet twitched in her shoes, wanting to return to the road, her head leaned forward, pulling her body deeper into the clearing.
Which brought her to now.
The hypnotic pull had disappeared, no longer needed now that she was tied to the trees and rendered immobile. Meghan yanked and twisted against the ropes that bound her. “Let me go! Please!”
“You came to us,” one of the women said. “And now you want to leave?”
“So impolite,” another said, clicking her tongue.
“And ungrateful,” said another who tapped her fingers against her black leather-clad thigh, “but what more would you expect from a pádraig?”
There was that word again. Meghan felt a strange numbness flooding through her. Nonononono! Not again! It
seemed like she’d been barely hanging on to consciousness for the last couple of days.
Her vision blurred, and her muscles went limp. As the women closed in, she had a weird recollection of a show she’d seen on National Geographic about giant spiders. Jesus, these women were like beautiful black spiders. Luring her in, trapping her, then anesthetizing her before they consumed her. How had they given her something without her knowing it?
A tingling, sleepy sensation wriggled over her scalp and down her arms, but she vowed not to succumb. She promised Cormac she would stay awake. He made it sound important—like life or death. She hadn’t understood at the time, but things were getting clearer. If she stood a chance of getting out of here alive, she had to fight it.
“There’s something familiar about her,” one of the women said, as she dragged a finger down Meghan’s arm. “Do you sense that?”
“Familiar?” asked one of the other women as she stroked Meghan’s cheek. “I don’t know, but I can certainly feel the energy rolling off of her, can’t you, sister?”
“Mmmm. It practically overflows her.”
“She can’t expect us to resist her now,” said one who, to Meghan’s horror, was kneeling at her feet. What the fuck? This isn’t real. It couldn’t be. She had to be hallucinating.
Meghan looked up at the sky and did her best to stay conscious. She really should have listened to Cormac.
“She thinks of someone. A lover?” the one at her feet asked.
“Oh, please let it be a lover. It makes them so much more satisfying.”
These things liked her thoughts? She could fix that. She focused on the most obnoxious ear-worm of all time and began to hum, hoping it made her less of a tasty treat.
I’m Henery the Eighth, I am. Henery the Eighth, I am, I am.
The women drew even nearer, if that was possible, and Meghan felt their noses skimming across her skin as they drew in her scent.