by Anna Leonard
Then he did swoop, fingers sliding up against her scalp, holding her head steady while he plundered her mouth. His lips were cool against hers, but his teeth were sharp as they nipped her flesh, and when she tried to protest, his tongue slipped warmly against her own, tasting, and leaving that salty green tang behind in return.
Her own hands had been resting flat-palmed on the table; now they lifted as though of their own accord, curling lightly around his forearms as though not sure if she wanted to pull him closer or push him away. His breath was hot on her face, his body inches away that might as well have been a mile, for all the contact they made; it was all fingers and lips, breath and spit.
She broke away, her knees wobbling.
“That’ll do it.”
She sat down rather more abruptly than planned and picked up the pen.
Help me.
Her handwriting was suitably shaky, like a woman under duress. She thought about adding more, but decided that brevity was more likely to work. They needed to bait the trap, not overact a melodrama.
“The knife?”
He hesitated, his eyes still dark and stormy as he watched her.
“Come on, we agreed. The knife.”
“Let me do it.”
“Can’t. If they check…I’m on record.” She was a regular blood donor; if anyone really wanted to make sure, they could get her records, somehow. She doubted Dylan could say the same. And if his people were as secretive as they seemed, that was how he’d want it.
This had to be one hundred percent real for it to work.
He swallowed hard, but took the knife out of the neoprene sheath and handed it to her, hilt-first. It was a lovely, dangerous thing, simple lines and sharp edges in the black plastic handle, and she didn’t doubt that it could fend off anything that grabbed a leg in the watery depths.
“Be careful. It’s sharp.”
“I noticed.”
He looked like he wanted to say something else, then thought better of it.
“Right, then.”
Now her hand really was shaking, and she had the passing thought that she should have done this first, and then written the note.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” she said with grim humor. “All those warnings my mother used to give me about running with sharp objects must have actually sunk in.”
He reached out as though to take the knife from her, to prevent her or to do it himself, she didn’t know. Not waiting to find out, she gritted her teeth and jabbed upward.
“Ow!”
“I told you it was sharp!” he said, annoyed, and suddenly there was a towel wrapped around her hand, catching the blood that was dripping out of the slice in her palm. She tilted her hand so that a drop escaped and scattered across the note. With her unbloodied hand, she smeared it across the corner of the page.
“Keep pressure on that,” he directed her. “And keep it elevated. What were you thinking? A little cut would have done the job. Humans!”
He said that word, she thought, sitting back down, like some men might say “women,” and some women said “men!”.
“I’m fine,” she said, waving him off. “Done worse with an X-Acto blade.”
He gave her a Look, but picked up the note and folded it carefully. “You really think this will work? They know you’re seal-kin. You heard the Hunter on the beach—she knew.”
“Yeah. Maybe. But they can’t be certain. And even if they are, they’re not the ones this is for. Having them wondering if I’m really a helpless victim will put them off balance.” She hoped.
He glanced at the digital clock on the cheap dresser. “Almost time.”
By now, the Hunters should have traced them to this town. It wouldn’t take much longer for them to determine that two strangers had taken a room.
Beth pressed the towel against her palm and winced. She probably should have let Dylan nick her. He was the one with the knife-wielding experience.
Dylan, meanwhile, had put the knife back into his bag, and had dropped the bag next to hers by the door. “Might as well make that bit of stupidity useful. Come here.”
He had that ordering-around voice again, but she got up with a sigh—he had gone along with her ideas, she would go along with whatever he’d thought of, too.
She came up next to him, unwrapping the towel as she went. The blood was thickening already; she had always been a quick healer but this seemed faster than normal.
“You’re amazingly brave,” he told her.
“I’m terrified out of my mind,” she admitted.
“I know. But you’re still doing this. That’s—”
“Bravery, yeah, I know. I’ve gotten the speech before, too. I’m still terrified. If you weren’t here…”
She could tell that his first reaction was to take responsibility, to take the blame. She glared at him, and he kissed the tip of her pointed nose. “I am here. I will always be here, so long as here is where you are.”
It was a promise nobody could make and keep, not with one hundred percent certainty. Beth knew, with hard personal experience, that things happened, people left you, even people who loved you. But…she believed him.
He took her bleeding hand and kissed it gently, then wrapped the palm around the door handle, the weight of his hand forcing the cut to open again against the metal. She cried out, more from surprise at the sharp pain than the pain itself. “Hold it there a moment,” he said, his voice muffled against her hair, barely reaching to her ear. “Spoor, in case they bring in a tracker.”
Spoor. Right. “This is not how I normally spend my Saturday. Just so you know.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised with another kiss.
“Damn well better,” she said, not believing it, not really, and let go of the door handle. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter 12
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”
“Help me. Please.” Beth put a little extra curl of pathos into the last word, figuring that overkill was better than coming across as too calm. Her body tensed up, and she let it. Method acting, right?
“Ma’am?” From the extra attentiveness the operator put into that word, it worked. He was convinced.
“Help me.” A gasp, as though she was terrified. Not so much acting there, actually. She was scared out of her mind. Just not for reasons she could tell this nice man. “Oh, God, he’s coming back. Please, help me….”
“Ma’am, who is there? Can you get away safely?” An almost minute pause, as the operator read information off his screen, determining the exact address she was calling from, the precise location of the caller. Thank God for technology. “Ma’am, I have a squad car on its way….”
Beth dropped the phone onto the cement, hating herself for worrying the operator, and maybe taking a cop away from somewhere important, and turned to Dylan. His brown eyes were shadowed with the same regret she could feel etched into her own face. This was an emergency. It was.
He reached out and took her undamaged hand, drawing her away from the phone and out of the old-fashioned phone booth, amazingly still in working condition despite the overwhelming presence of cell phones everywhere. Hers was at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, probably. Or maybe ringing inside a tuna with indigestion….
One operator, and one squad car, for the greater long-term good. It wasn’t as though they were in any kind of a high-crime zone, and there was a crime being committed—she was just calling the emergency in preemptively. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She kept telling herself that.
Only once out of range of the phone did Dylan speak.
“By now, whoever was cleaning up the motel room will have found the note, and seen the blood. Are you sure they’ll do something?”
“No.” She wasn’t sure of anything right now, except that she wanted very badly to bury herself in Dylan’s arms and not come out again. “But that’s why I slipped the cabbie who brought us down here a twenty, too, so he’d call the cops. Or, b
etter yet, the press.” Her blood had been on that bill, too. Not intentionally, it just happened, but nice verisimilitude. A little too nice, maybe. Between that, and the way Dylan had manhandled her out of the cab… She doubted he’d ever heard of method acting, but he played the part of the maybe-kidnapper, maybe-ex-boyfriend pretty well. Only the way his hand trembled on hers, and the soft brush of his lips on the back of her neck in apology, gave him away.
There was going to be a lot of explaining required to everyone, after all this. If the cops actually showed up.
Assuming that they actually got out of this in any position to explain. She supposed someone more heroic, someone more self-sacrificing, would believe that their deaths would be worthwhile if the Hunters could be stopped, once and for all. She was pragmatic, practical and a planner. Heroic did not begin with P.
The idea wasn’t to wipe the Hunters out, anyway. Being practical and pragmatic, there was no way she could create a plan, with their very limited resources, to do that. They could, though, send a message: the selkies of this territory were not easy prey any longer. That they would fight back, using modern means and modern protections.
If Hunters were all about money, then she—they—were going to hit them where the money lived.
Her hand had stopped bleeding, and was in fact nicely scabbing over. Was she healing any faster than she usually did? No, she didn’t think so. Wishful thinking, maybe. Probably the cut had been bloody but not really so very deep after all.
She took Dylan’s hand in her uninjured one and tugged him over to the side of the seawall, a low stone fence that ran the length of the beach, overlooking a length of sand ending with wavelets that lapped gently at the shore. It was high tide, and she could see tiny pleasure boats bobbing at anchor, and farther out, the larger fishing boats heading to shore with their catches.
This was a small harbor, catering to sailboats and small powerboats. There weren’t even any day-charter boats moored here, so it was quiet and peaceful and perfect for their plan. A simple, practically foolproof plan, except for the fact that so much could go wrong.
“If this doesn’t work…” she started to say.
“It will work.”
“If it doesn’t. Hit the water. Change. Do whatever it is you do, just get out of here.”
He looked at her, his eyes even wider than before, wider and darker in disbelief. “My Elizabeth, I won’t leave you.”
“Not even to save me?”
His blank look wasn’t quite adorable—in fact, he looked, well, like someone had hit him in the head with a hammer. But it melted her a little anyway, because the fact that he would do anything—even something he hated to do—in order to save her was still something new and to be treasured.
“I have a presence here,” she said, sitting on the wall and tugging him down with her. Their legs dangled a few inches off the sand, and the stone was cold under her ass, even through the fabric of her jeans. “I’m a citizen, I pay taxes and have friends who will raise a fuss if something happens to me, who may already have raised a fuss.” They weren’t counting on it, but it could only help the plan if someone—Ben and Glory, or Joyce, or Jake or anyone—had noticed that she was missing, and yelped. “That may slow the Hunters down—or, worst-case scenario, it might get them into serious trouble when my deskinned body shows up somewhere, chock-full of oh, so identifiable DNA.”
She already knew, through the dream, what the Hunters did with the deskinned bodies. Their methods might have gotten more sophisticated over the years, but they were still careless, knowing the seal-kin had no recourse, no place in modern society. Her body, tossed aside, would become evidence that, combined with the note left in the hotel room, and the call to 911, might be enough to hang them, even if the main plan failed.
Oh, God. Would they charge Dylan? If he wasn’t in the system at all, they’d never be able to prove he even existed, and the Hunters had to have left some trace that could be tracked. She held on to that hope, even as her brain started to run scenarios to deal with things she might have missed.
“I won’t leave you,” he started to say again.
“You’d force me to watch you die, first?”
It was a low blow, and she watched it land with masochistic satisfaction.
“I’ll do what seems best, if it comes to that” was all he could give her, and she accepted it. If they got lucky, it wouldn’t come to that.
“How long do you think we have? Before the Hunters find us, I mean.”
Dylan looked up at the sky, calculating something. “An hour, maybe. Maybe not even that. We gave them the slip because we took them by surprise. But that will only have annoyed them.”
“That woman seemed like the sort to get pissed off easily, yeah.” Beth was amazed at how easy it was to be flip about it. She had always mocked heroines who quipped their way through danger, but obviously all those late-night movie marathons had gone deeper into her psyche than she thought. Or maybe it was just easier to be flippant than admit that you were scared.
“That woman is a barracuda,” Dylan said. “I think fear turns her on. If she makes any kind of move in your direction, don’t run away—charge her.”
“I thought it was sharks you hit on the snout?”
“Barracudas are—”
She never got the chance to find out what he thought barracudas were—there was the distinct sound of car tires on the gravel road behind them, and he shoved her off the seawall, so that she landed on her knees on the sand below, her head below the wall and invisible from the parking lot.
“Stay down!” he ordered her.
“Is it her?”
“Hush!”
She had never taken well to being hushed. Or pushed, for that matter. She decided she would forgive him this once.
“She’s here. And four goons.”
Only four. There had been at least that many on the beach the first time. Either the woman hadn’t called for backup, or there was backup and they were staying out of sight. Assume worst-case scenario. Where would the backup be waiting, and until when?
Beth had chosen to make their stand on Cape Cod—and this specific harbor—for a number of reasons. She knew the area reasonably well. It was easy to get to from the mainland, for one—just over the bridge and down the road. Second, it was well-populated enough that anyone planning anything illegal would have to be cautious. No meets in dark, secluded groves for this girl, no. Again, watching all those movies late at night when she was a kid was finally paying off.
And third, it wasn’t her home. She agreed with Dylan on that—you didn’t give them the chance to strike at the people you cared about. She knew people here, but none of them were family, and none of them had obvious ties to her. Nobody the Hunters could drag into their sick games.
“No sign of guns.” Dylan was keeping a running commentary, barely moving his lips as he spoke. “Fourth man still in the car, engine’s running. No other car—unless they put us in the trunk, they’re going to be doing it here.”
“I bet they like the sand. It soaks up the blood, gives them a place to dump the bodies, and the tide takes care of any traces they might leave behind.” She was scanning the water, making sure that no small boat was coming in toward them. All quiet.
“Yeah.” He must have the same memories she did now. The shadow of that dream swept over her again, and she shuddered, a full-body quake.
His gaze raked down the long narrow driveway leading to the main road. “Where are the cops?”
“We don’t want them here until something happens,” she reminded him. “Otherwise— Someone’s coming.” She had heard the sound of tires on the gravel before he did.
“A truck. One of those little ones, with stuff on the top.”
Stuff. What stuff? She risked peeking over the wall. A van, dark blue, with antenna gear on the top. “A news crew?”
She ducked below the wall, her back to the stone, and stared out at the bay. A news crew. What the hell was a news crew
doing here? Was it sheer bad luck or…
“The cabbie probably got a better deal from them than the cops,” she said in disgust.
“News? Television?”
“Local station, cable news. Damn it.”
“That’s not good?”
“Guns versus cameras? Do the math, Dylan.”
“But they’re human. Totally human.”
“Which means they’re witnesses. Damn it, we need to get them out of here!”
“Or not.” He caught her shoulder before she could protest. “Think about it, Elizabeth. Media. Better than police, anyway. No guns… Coverage. Publicity.”
Beth stared at him and felt a grim smile creep onto her face to match his own. He was right. Played carefully, this could work—and keep Dylan out of official view, as well.
She put her hands on the top of the wall, wincing as the grit pressed against her cut, and pushed off anyway, climbing back over the wall.
“Dylan!”
The woman in sunglasses. She was wearing jeans now, and the leather jacket, and her hair was pulled back in a braid. She looked way tougher than either one of them could handle, even without her goons. No guns visible…but one of the goons had something in his hand, something that glinted bright in the afternoon sunlight.
A knife. A large, curved knife. Beth felt the bottom of her stomach plunge into somewhere around her knees, and she wondered if she had time to throw up.
There was the sound of a door opening, and a guy got out of the driver’s seat of the van, even as the side of the van slid open and a guy with a camera on his shoulder got out.
Damn. At least it looked like it was just a roving camera crew, not a hotshot reporter who would want to get up in their faces and ask exactly the questions that would get them killed.
“We still need to get them out of here alive,” she muttered. A shadow fell over her, and she looked up just in time to see Dylan move forward, away from the wall and toward the newcomers.