The Mortal Falls

by Anna Durand

  No footprints? But Nevan had run past the body. Impossible.

  Travis sighed. "You're coming with me, Lindsey."

  "But — "

  Kal jogged up the trail, halting at the edge of the clearing. Travis held up one finger to me. "Wait here." His lip curled once more as he told Nevan, "That means you too."

  Travis retreated to the clearing's edge to chat with Kal, their backs to us, their voices too indistinct to make out.

  I murmured to Nevan, "Thank you."

  "Are you expressing gratitude to me?" Surprise tinged his voice.

  "Yes. Thank you for sticking up for me with Travis."

  "You're most welcome." He hesitated, and when he spoke again, I swore I detected a note of anxiety in his voice. "But in the future, take care when thanking me. It may have unforeseen consequences."

  "Such as?"

  Another pause. "Take my word for it, that's all I ask."

  His clothes dissolved. No other way to describe it. They simply evaporated into nothing — save for the loincloth, which coalesced around his hips. His skin burned hot against mine as his arm shifted up to my shoulders and one fingertip traced a circular path on my upper arm, carving a trail of sensation in its wake. It felt so good I wanted to snuggle into him, lost to the tingle his touch ignited.

  No. I did not want to.

  I could not be attracted to a man I'd just met who had swirling eyes and the ability to poof in and out of view, who was arrogant and annoyed me. Then again, he had lured me away from the dead man because I seemed upset. And he distracted me from the problem until I calmed down. And he saved me from cracking my skull on a huge rock. He stood up for me with Travis too. Maybe I did know a little bit about him.

  But not nearly enough.

  I disentangled myself from his hold, scurried a few steps away, and spun to confront him. "Why did you do it?"

  He sauntered to the nearest tree, a couple yards away, and leaned his long body against the trunk. "You'll have to be a bit more specific, love, if you want me to answer."

  "Are you saying you will answer my questions?"

  "Possibly." He raked a hand through his hair and his biceps bulged from the movement. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. "If you're nice to me."

  "Nice?" I stomped closer. "What the hell do you mean?"

  "If you'd quit swearing at me, that'd be a start."

  I clenched my hands into tight fists. My nails dug into my palms and pain shot through my knuckles. "I'm so sorry if my language offends you. I'd think a guy who can poof in and out of sight would have a thicker skin."

  "My, but you are fetching when you're vexed."

  I scrunched my lips, fuming with an anger rooted in more than this man's sarcastic, blasé attitude. Yet I had seen glimmers of deeper emotions under the surface, which made me wonder if his nonchalance was a cover. For what, though?

  He arched an eyebrow. "Are ye all right?"

  "Fine." I forced my hands to unclench. "What are you?"

  "A man. Has it been so long since ye had one that you're unsure?"

  "I — wh — " My thoughts disintegrated, but I gathered the bits and pieced them back together. My brain ached from the effort. "My personal life is none of your business."

  He pushed away from the tree. Strode toward me. Stared into my eyes. The molten metal of his irises feathered a tingle down my spine.

  I floundered backward. "What do you want from me?"

  "To understand," he said in a sultry tone, as his eyes towed me down into their depths. "You intrigue me and I must deduce why."

  "Huh?"

  His gaze stroked over me from head to toe. "Shall we play, darlin'?"

  "This isn't a game."

  "It could be. If you'd loosen up a bit."

  "Loosen up?" The spell shattered, I shot my best glare at him. "Forgive me if I have trouble relaxing around a complete stranger."

  "It was a suggestion, not a command. Though I cannot comprehend how a person could be so tense and not snap like a twig underfoot."

  I had the most ridiculous urge to explain myself, but I bit it back. "This conversation is over. Thanks for the assist, but I hope I never see you again."

  His face pinched and he glanced away. When he turned back to me, the nonchalance swept in again. "I suppose you'll be returning to the shop then?"

  "Not that it's any of your business, but I plan to scarf down an insanely fattening lunch, gain five pounds in the process, and then go back to work and pretend none of this ever happened."

  "Your friend the sheriff seems intent on detaining you."

  "He's not m — Ugh, forget it. Maybe I can talk him out of arresting me." Riiiight. And then I'd take my pet unicorn for a stroll.

  Amusement tugged at one corner of Nevan's mouth. "Good luck with that, darlin'."

  I whirled on my heels and stomped toward Travis. I felt Nevan's gaze tracking me, like a warm breeze tickling the back of my neck. Don't look back, just keep walking.

  A raven squawked overhead.

  I shielded my eyes to spy the bird swooping in front of the sun. Its head angled in my direction, those coal-dark eyes sharp on me. I had the strange sensation the bird was sizing me up.

  The raven flew out of sight.

  I tapped Travis on the shoulder. He started, half turning toward me. How he missed the weirdness unfolding right behind him baffled me, but I didn't have time to worry about that. I held out my hands, wrists together. Right now, a jail cell sounded like a haven from the insanity around me. The supernatural around me. "Arrest me or let me go, please."

  Travis's brows shot up. He nodded to Kal, who set off down the trail toward the shop. Travis hooked the cuffs around my wrists, each locking shut with a metallic snick. My stomach twisted. My fingers grew cold, despite the sweltering day.

  "You ain't under arrest — yet." Travis placed a hand on my shoulder to guide me down the path in front of him. "But I am taking you in."

  A pang tightened the back of my throat.

  Travis's brow furrowed, his gaze scanning the woods behind us. "Where'd your friend go?"

  Good question. Nevan was gone, again. "He had to leave. Urgent personal business."

  "How the hell'd he get past me and — Never mind." He cursed under his breath. "I'll track him down if I have to comb the whole county to do it."

  I bowed my head. A bead of sweat rolled down my temple to splat onto my chest.

  Travis gave me a little shove, urging me to move faster. "You won't see the sun again, Porter, till I get answers to every damn one of my questions."

  *****

  "Couldn't find a body, if there ever was one," Travis snarled. He slammed the driver's door of the vehicle. A sticky breeze surged in through the open windows. I slumped into the backseat, a sour taste infiltrating my mouth. He'd left me here for an hour — inside his Ford Expedition marked with the sheriff's logo, branding me a suspicious character by association — while he, Kal, and Stan searched for the missing corpse.

  They found nothing. No body, no tracks, no evidence aside from the blood stain. For a moment, I feared I'd imagined the whole incident. But Travis had met Nevan, which meant I wasn't crazy. Probably. Hormone-addled, yes. Crazy, not so much.

  Revving the engine, Travis rolled up the windows as the air conditioner rushed cool air through the car. "I'm sending the blood sample off to the state lab for analysis. If it comes back as porcupine, you're in big trouble for wasting police time."

  "There was a body." My attention wandered to the rear of the rock shop and the woods beyond it. I pitched sideways, straining for a better view. "Nevan corroborated my story, remember?"

  He twisted around to nail those cool, gray eyes on me. "Yeah, I'm sure your boyfriend wouldn't lie for you or anything."

  "Nevan is not — " I'd almost blurted out he wasn't my boyfriend. Do
n't tell him the truth, dummy, it'll blow your alibi. Yeah, because I had such an ironclad one. "Nevan's not a liar."

  But I was. Nevan hadn't exactly lied to me. He refused to tell me much of anything.

  Travis's lips flattened into a thin line. He let out an exasperated sigh. "I don't get it. Why'd you hook up with a sleaze like Nivea?"

  I clamped my lips between my teeth for a second to avoid laughing. "His name is Nevan. And it's none of your business who I hook up with."

  Jeez. For the first time in my life, I'd uttered the phrase "hook up." Not that I'd done any such thing.

  "Guess you're right," Travis said. "And I reckon I should worry more about what you'll do to him than what he'll do to you."

  "You have no clue what really happened with Calder."

  "Enlighten me."

  I ground my teeth, which only made my jaw ache.

  He draped one wrist over the steering wheel, his fingers coiled into his palm. "No body, no crime. If you won't talk, I can't help."

  I fidgeted, the cuffs biting into my wrists. "I didn't ask for your help."

  "But ya sure as hellfire need it."

  Maybe I did need help, but I positively did not want his assistance. So I changed the subject. "Why did you follow me here?"

  "Somebody called in a tip, Porter."

  "No. Why did you follow me to Michigan?" I'd moved here to get away from the Blackwell clan and everything I'd suffered in Texas. Six months after I came here, Travis showed up and wouldn't explain why or how he'd found me. "How'd you even track me down?"

  He scratched his neck, eyes averted. "I'm a cop, Lindsey, and you ain't exactly an experienced criminal. Tracking you down wasn't that complicated."

  "Why bother? You hate me." I'd avoided asking him for three years, because I avoided contact with him as much as possible and I avoided conversation with him at all costs. He might think he wanted the truth about his brother, but he'd never believe me if I told him what Calder had done.

  Travis stared into space for several seconds, while I squirmed in an attempt to scratch an itch on my back by rubbing it against the seat. At last, he looked at me over his shoulder. "I gotta protect the good citizens of Mandan County from the likes of you."

  He steered the vehicle out of the parking lot onto the highway, taking me back to his office for an interrogation. I glanced behind the car, into the woods. My life had changed irrevocably and I still had no idea how or why.

  I wrinkled my nose at a strange odor wafting over me, something like cat urine but not quite. Did Travis never clean this car?

  A sensation of pressure slithered down my neck, almost like fingertips closing around my throat. Tighter. Tighter. I fought for breath but couldn't budge a muscle. My pulse thundered in my ears. In the rearview mirror, Travis's eyes stayed focused on the road ahead. The pressure choked my throat and a voice growled in my ear.

  "Mine forever, sweet thing, or no one's."

  Dark splotches encroached on my vision. I struggled to shout for help, but it came out as a strangled hiccup.

  The phantom fingers sprang free of my neck. I sucked in a wheezing breath.

  "You okay back there?" Travis asked, studying me in the rearview mirror.

  I coughed, rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, and drew in a slow breath. "Just got a little overheated, I think."

  He cranked up the AC and cool air flooded into the backseat. The blessed relief of it calmed my nerves, but a lingering doubt niggled at me. Maybe I'd had a panic attack due to the stress of the day, or my mind snapped under the strain of paranormal shenanigans. I might've believed that, except the words I'd heard a moment ago were familiar. Calder Blackwell issued the same threat on the night that destroyed my life.

  I tucked my hands between my thighs, my fingers suddenly chilled. He wasn't here. He couldn't be.

  Calder had been dead for three years.

  4

  The shade of a tall aspen tree blanketed me, shielding my skin from the sun's heat. With the late-afternoon air temperature in the high eighties, though, and the humidity almost as high, sweat oozed out of my pores to dampen my flesh and hair. I rested against the tree trunk, an uneaten turkey sandwich in my hand and an unopened bag of baked potato chips on my thigh.

  Travis had relented on his promise I wouldn't see the sun again. After three hours of interrogation, he'd let me go. I honestly couldn't provide the answers he wanted, because I had no clue what was going on. The memory of those hours replayed in my mind, still fresh. Travis had ordered me to sit in a chair beside his desk, which abutted the wall, and then he dragged a folding chair in front of me, flipped it around, and settled his large body onto it with his forearms resting on the back. His knees grazed mine.

  Once he uncuffed my wrists, Travis started in on me. "Come on, Lindsey. Fess up."

  "To what? I didn't even know the guy."

  His fingers moved as he spoke, punctuating his words. "I'm not buying any of this. You were first on the scene and all you can tell me is some person fled the scene."

  "Nevan told you. He saw the suspect."

  "Right." Travis elongated the syllable into a sarcastic insinuation. "Nevan. There's a high-quality witness. He skedaddled and left you high and dry."

  He kind of had. But as Nevan had warned me, his presence did nothing to alleviate my predicament. Instead, he chafed the sheriff even more. There in his office, Travis's questions had run in circles, a tornado of accusations and demands for answers I either didn't know or didn't dare give.

  "Who's the suspect you claim fled the scene?"

  "Are you sure the alleged victim was dead?"

  "Where did the body go?"

  "How come you didn't call nine-one-one?"

  "If somebody fled, why aren't there any footprints besides yours?"

  He'd insisted on verifying I had a permit to carry a handgun, though he damn well knew I did, adding more time to the ordeal.

  The grumble of car engines roused me from the memories. The noise originated just over a little rise that hid the shop building from my view. Customers rarely visited this part of the woods, because the only trail leading to it was a narrow track worn down by deer. This was my little sanctuary. Every day, I tromped out here on my lunch break to escape the stress of work — and the incessant watchfulness of Stan Lagorio. Today, Stan had given me honest-to-God permission to take a late lunch, even though I'd been gone for hours in the middle of my shift. He knew the sheriff had taken me in for questioning and I swore he was… sympathetic.

  The world really had flipped upside down and inside out.

  For the umpteenth time, I lifted the sandwich to my mouth. Although my stomach growled at the prospect of food, I stared at the layers of meat and cheese with a growing sensation of nausea. I dropped my hand to my lap.

  "Your meal doesn't look particularly fattening."

  The sandwich popped out of my grasp as I jumped at the masculine voice emanating from behind me. The sandwich flew apart. The bread landed on the grass while the meat and cheese plopped onto my jeans.

  Nevan ambled from behind the tree and halted near my feet. "Not that I have much experience with mortal food, but from what I've seen, that sort of meal is considered healthy."

  "Could you please quit scaring the daylights out of me?"

  "I do apologize. I had no intention of frightening you."

  "Hmph." I plucked the tatters of my sandwich off the ground and tried to reassemble it. "What do you want this time?"

  "I see your gratitude has waned."

  Flicking bits of grass from the sandwich, I raised it for a bite. The scent of turkey and swiss cheese wafted into my nostrils and my gorge rose in my throat. I stuffed the sandwich back into its plastic bag. "I was grateful, yes, but that's done and gone. You split before Travis could interrogate you and he took his frustration out on me."

&n
bsp; "I'm deeply sorry for abandoning you."

  "Yeah, whatever." I played with the zipper seal on my sandwich bag. "Why are you here?"

  "To be quite honest, I'm not certain."

  I glanced up at him. Big mistake.

  From this angle, his loincloth provided me with a glimpse of what lay beneath it. Just a glimpse. A hint of flesh. But I recognized the shape of the flesh and my cheeks flamed at the realization. I'd caught a peek at his manly parts.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I clamped my lips between my teeth. The spark of pain did nothing to free me from the knowledge of what I'd seen. Almost seen. Sort of seen. Oh jeez. Why me? Why did I have to stumble over a teleporting corpse? And out of all the billions of women on earth, why did I have to acquire a supernatural stalker who pranced around in next to nothing?

  Burying my face in my hands, I groaned. The heat of my blush warmed my fingers.

  "Are ye not well, darlin'?" His voice sounded too close.

  I peeked out between my fingers. He was crouching so near me I could've extended one finger to poke his nose. His face hovered inches from my hands, his expression concerned. He laid a hand on my upper arm, the touch light and casual, but it stirred something inside me. A want I'd suppressed for too long. The sensation wasn't sexual, not entirely. I longed for more than a kiss or a sensual caress. I longed for connection, belonging, for someone to need me. But a stranger could not need me.

  "Lindsey."

  "Everything's fine." My hands muffled my voice.

  "Why, then, are you hiding in this manner?"

  "Um… " Blast it all. I was acting like a teenager who'd sneaked into her first R-rated movie with nudity and sexual content. I lowered my hands, the fire in my cheeks somewhat abated. "Really, I'm fine. Thank you for your concern."

  His eyes widened a hair, enough to remind me of what he'd said earlier about thanking him. The statement had made no sense. Gratitude exacted no consequences, at least none so dire it justified his fear. Then again, I was talking to a half-naked man who popped into and out of sight whenever he felt like it.