Hinterland Book 3: The Wolf's Hunt (Hinterland Series)

by K. T. Harding

  Her voice rose to a high-pitched whine. Her throat ached trying to get the words out. “I can’t stand this! I went through seven weeks of agony when you disappeared, and Dax got me through it. He was the one person who understood, and we faced everything together to get you back. Now I can’t even be happy you’re back because he’s gone. I can’t go through this again. I can’t face losing somebody close to me all over again. I can’t!”

  He put out his hand and laid his rough palm against her cheek. Her eyes blurred with tears, and she leaned into that touch the way she did so many times in her dreams. The reality only hurt worse for being real. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I know. I feel the same way. I should be thanking you for getting me out of there, but I only wish I was back there. I wish I never left Solaris. I wish I could stay a prisoner there forever if it meant he would be safe here with you.”

  Her emotions overflowed, and a tormented sob broke out of her. She couldn’t bear the grief tearing her apart. Without thinking, she put her arms around Bishop at the same moment he closed her in his big embrace.

  His shoulders shook with sobs, and his furry face scratched her neck. They held each other and cried all over again. How long would this go on? How long would they keep living in a wasteland of despair? Was their love destined to take this shape from now on?

  His shirt smelled musty and rank from sweat, and his hair matted in back. She couldn’t touch him like this, not even to find some solace from the grief. She pushed him back and wiped her tears away with her hand. “Come on. We need to get you cleaned up.”

  She steered him to his room. She never entered it before as anything but his apprentice, and she hesitated to enter it now. She stood him in the middle of the room and went to his closet.

  She ignored the armory she knew hid behind those walls. She concentrated on the clothes hanging from the racks. She picked out a clean suit and shirt, underwear and socks, and a new pair of shoes. She laid everything out on the bed and came back to Bishop.

  She paused again standing in front of him, and her eyes trailed up his disheveled form to his eyes. Behind the rough stubble of his beard, his unkempt hair and untrimmed mustache, mysterious fire glinted in his eyes. The old power blazed awake behind his broken exterior.

  He looked down at her mouth once and back up to her eyes. That sparkle of life and energy woke her own sleeping desire. She wanted him back in one piece, not a broken hulk lost in a sea of hopelessness.

  He lifted his hand and touched her cheek one more time. That touch no longer spoke of loss and despair but called back the ancient desire that once bound them together. He fingered her hair, and his heavy hand came to rest on her shoulder.

  Bottomless longing for him pushed her toward him. She touched his chest and felt the flimsy shirt separating him from his bare skin. As hurt as he might be, she still wanted him. She wanted to taste his sweat and his blood and his kiss.

  She unfastened the first button, and a starburst of scorching heat shot down her body to her crotch. She needed him under there. She needed every inch of her skin touching him. She needed to consume him into herself and feed him on her intoxicating essence.

  She unbuttoned his shirt down to his stomach. He shuddered at her hands slipping underneath to caress his chest. He burst out of his skin and swept her up in his arms. He pressed her in tight against him, and his kiss closed over her mouth.

  Raleigh collapsed into the unaccountable sweetness of that kiss. It brought back all the memories of their time together before he disappeared, but somewhere all tangled up in it, it awakened latent feelings lying dormant in her heart.

  All of a sudden, she wasn’t kissing Bishop anymore, but Dax. His warm chest radiated his energy into her breasts and ignited forbidden passions. All the aborted desires she never let herself feel toward Dax erupted to life.

  She kept her eyes closed to preserve the vision hovering in her mind. She kissed him and stroked his hair back from his forehead. She rubbed her breasts over his chest and her hips across the growing bulge between his legs. She urged him to raging hardness. She wanted him all over her.

  She massaged down his neck and raked her fingernails down his back. She dove under his shirt and jammed her hands down his pants to squeeze his ass. She attacked every spare inch of his skin at once.

  She craved his touch, his kiss, his nearness for so long, she couldn’t hold back now. She welcomed his hands running down her hip to grapple her thigh around his waist. She locked her ankle behind his back and groaned when he plowed his prick between her legs. Her moist slit screamed for him inside to fill up her emptiness at last.

  He mauled her lips in rabid kisses. He pawed her breasts to hard nubs. His erect member stabbed through his pants to torment her quivering mound. He would have her in a second. He would fulfill all her dreams and scatter the ghosts haunting her to the four winds.

  He spun her around so he faced the bed. He backed her up to it and bumped her knees against the mattress. His fingers started working on her shirt buttons, and he tore off her mouth to look her in the eye.

  The moment their eyes met, the shocking reality hit Raleigh in the face. She wasn’t kissing Dax at all. She wasn’t caressing him in anticipation of falling into bed with him. She was staring into the startled eyes of Knox Bishop….The Wolf of Hinterland.

  Bishop gasped and stared back at her. What was he thinking just a moment before in his frenzied rush to rip her clothes off? That didn’t matter, because when they looked at each other, they both saw one thing: Dax.

  The passion died in the blink of an eye. The instant they looked each other in the eye, they couldn’t do anything. Dax stood between them, and they became once again two tattered hearts grieving for something they would never have again.

  Raleigh’s hands fell to her sides. Bishop’s skin turned cold to her touch, even when he burned warm and alive under his clothes. His energy repelled her, and she repelled him. The apparition they saw in each other’s eyes killed any spark of desire they could ever feel for each other.

  Raleigh stole a glance at Bishop’s mouth. She loved kissing that mouth, but she didn’t want to kiss it anymore. She only wanted Dax, and she could never have him.

  Bishop eased back a fraction of an inch, just enough to let that insurmountable separation grow and breathe between them. He looked down at the clean clothes lying on the bed. He cast a quick, embarrassed glance at her face and tried to smile. “I guess I better get changed.”

  Raleigh took the hint and turned to the door. Already the idea of kissing him and undressing him and touching him like that struck her as unseemly and inappropriate. She didn’t want to see him with his shirt off. She didn’t want to graze his hand by accident.

  She nodded to no one in particular. “I’ll tell Mrs. Mitchell to bring you up a hot bath.”

  He called after her. “Thanks, Raleigh.”

  She didn’t turn around. “Don’t mention it.”

  They were nothing more than friends, colleagues, partners. They never had been anything else. She wouldn’t see him take his clothes off, and she certainly would never watch him take a bath. Mrs. Mitchell could comb his hair and tend his wounds. None of that was Raleigh’s job. It never had been, and it never would be.

  She opened the door. Just before she went through it into the hall, she caught sight of the lamp glowing in his office. She would stop by there and take another look at his papers before she went to sleep in the maid’s old room behind the kitchen. Maybe she would find something relevant to their investigation.

  The investigation and all its thousand details waited for her outside this room. She turned back at the last second. “Bishop?”

  He looked up. He had gotten as far as taking off his old shirt and unbuckling his belt. He stood in the center of the room bare chested. His eyes registered no modesty at her seeing him like this. “Yes?”

  “Did you know the Maple Midges eat only metal?”

  He blinked a
t her. “Yes, I knew that. Didn’t you know?”

  “Klimpt told me. I didn’t know it before.”

  He cocked his head and frowned. “I thought everybody knew that. Why do you ask?”

  She shrugged. “Just something I was thinking about. Dax and I went through the papers on your desk. I hope you don’t mind. We were looking for some clue who hired you to find the twen.”

  “I don’t mind,” he replied. “You did what you had to do to carry on the investigation. I’m proud of you both.”

  She started to leave again, but something drew her back. “When you disappeared, when Dax and I came home after the explosion at the Guild of Martial Arts building, we found the house broken into and ransacked. Almost everything in the house was destroyed, and the only thing the culprits took was your father’s notebook. I’m sorry. We haven’t been able to recover it.”

  “That’s all right,” he replied. “I have a duplicate copy.”

  She stared at him. “You do? I thought you kept the original in your wall safe.”

  “I do—I mean, I did. I also kept an exact copy of it in a safe deposit box in town. I never wanted to be without that information in case something happened to the original.”

  Raleigh punched her fist into her palm. “Dang! I wish I’d known that. We could have used that copy these last few weeks.”

  “What did you want the notebook for?”

  “To find out who you were working for, or to find out how close the cabal was to creating the Elixir of Life, or to find out who hired that cab to run your father down. There’s a million details in that notebook we could have used instead of floundering in the dark.”

  His eyes bugged out of his head. “What did you just say?”

  Her head whipped around. “What’s the matter?”

  “Who hired that cab to run my father down?”

  She breathed a sigh. “I should have told you. We found out someone hired the cab to stand in that particular spot, and the fare made the driver get out of the seat so the cab would be unattended. The same man contracted Chivvy to deliver a trainload of blue mussels to some factory in Henleyville, which is also where the Guild of Martial Arts is setting up their new headquarters. You might also like to know the cab driver retired to Henleyville after he left the service. There’s a lot going on in Henleyville at the moment.”

  Bishop stared at her another long moment. Then he pursed his lips, shook his head, and got to work stripping the rest of his ruined clothes off. He showed no sign of noticing Raleigh watching him. “Get downstairs and tell Mrs. Mitchell to start heating the bath water. As soon as I’ve changed, meet me in my office. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we leave in the morning.”

  “Leave in the morning?” Raleigh repeated. “What do you mean?”

  He sliced his finger through the air. “Get moving, and while you’re waiting for me to take a bath and comb my hair, get down to the armory and arm yourself. We’re going back. We can’t let the trail go cold.”

  Raleigh hurried out of the room. She found Mrs. Mitchell seated on a bench in front of the kitchen fire. Raleigh would recognize that blank stare anywhere, but when Mrs. Mitchell heard that the Master wanted to take a bath and cut his hair, she rocketed out of her seat. She bustled around the kitchen and hauled water. She never hurried faster in her life.

  Raleigh went down to the armory and spent the next hour sawing off the buttstock on one of Bishop’s spare crossbows so it fit her. She restocked her empty ammo wallet and found a short scimitar that could function as a throwing blade. She hefted it in her hand. It didn’t quite feel right, but it would work for now until she got it tuned and balanced.

  She buckled two gun belts around her hips and primed and loaded the pistols. She tried a few quick draws to make sure their handles pointed the right way. She felt better, now that she was armed.

  She didn’t realize how coming back unarmed from Solaris affected her thinking. Without her weapons, she was nothing but a helpless farm girl. The Eol’i, the Guildsmen, the Uk, and the Eochehxea robbed her of the tools of her trade. They turned her into nothing. Without her weapons, she was incompetent and not fit to walk the streets.

  Now she had them back. She was a slayer. She was on her way to do her job, and nothing and nobody better stand in her way. Once Bishop got his old clothes on, his frock coat draped around his shoulders, and his guns buckled around his hips, he would feel the same way. He would come back.

  She went upstairs. The sound of splashing water and Mrs. Mitchell’s harsh voice came from behind Bishop’s closed bedroom door. “Will you keep still? How exactly do you expect me to get these snarls out without pulling?”

  Bishop’s low voice growled back, but Raleigh couldn’t make out the words. She walked away and returned to Bishop’s office. She went through his papers and set aside anything she thought he might want to keep. She didn’t bother to empty the overflowing basket of trash in case he wanted to go through it and keep it after all.

  She came to the end of the last stack of paper none the wiser. She pushed it aside. She had nothing else to do in here until Bishop came and took over for her. At least she didn’t have to be the senior on duty anymore. She could hang back and let someone else run this investigation for a change.

  That little detail about the Maple Midges kept nagging at her thoughts. She’d seen them almost every day for more than ten years, and always in the same context. They devoured the kataracts she killed. She killed more and more of them every year until their numbers eclipsed every other monster in the district.

  She never once disposed of a kataract in her life. The Maple Midges consumed them, blood, flesh, and bone. They never left one tuft of fur on the ground. That could mean only one thing. The kataracts must be made of metal.

  How was that possible? She saw kataracts all over the place. She once saw a farmer from the other side of Tunstead leading a kataract on a chain across the road. Blood dripped from a wound in its side, and intestine bulged from the gash. While she watched, the farmer turned around and jabbed the creature with a powerful electric cattle prod. It bellowed in pain before he led it away.

  That kataract was alive. It certainly wasn’t made of metal. No Maple Midges came out of the forest to buzz around its wound and peck at it. Yet all the kataracts Raleigh killed around her father’s farm got eaten in the end by Maple Midges. Something didn’t make sense here.

  Then there was the time she visited the Hodges farm on the other side of Tunstead. She was inside the house when a kataract attacked their pig sty and started munching the new piglets one after the other. Raleigh’s friend Quentin Hodges and his two brothers raced out and shot the kataract so full of bullets it fell right on top of the pig sty. It crushed the sty with two sows still inside.

  After that kataract lay dead, no Maple Midges swarmed out of the trees to eat it, either. In the end, the boys cut it up and fed the meat to their hunting dogs.

  Why hadn’t Raleigh remembered this before? If this was the case, only one conclusion remained. The kataracts around her father’s farm were made of metal, while the other kataracts in the neighborhood were not.

  Raleigh shivered. This couldn’t be right. The whole scene at home flashed before her eyes. Her father stooped under his kitchen roof beams to step into the kitchen. The tall, thin man with the sharp features and the sharp way of talking. The farmer who didn’t act like a farmer. The kataracts growing more numerous with every passing year until Raleigh developed into a killing machine. The kataracts dropping off and fading away after she left Tunstead to work for Bishop.

  The whole terrible reality congealed into one cohesive picture before her eyes, and this time, she didn’t push it away. It was right there in front of her face the whole time, and she didn’t see it. She couldn’t, because she didn’t have all the facts until this very moment.

  Her father never told her Ethan went to join the Guild of Martial Arts. He never told her anything about Hinter
land, but he must have known all about it. He must have known about the Guild of Martial Arts from the beginning. What could induce him to want his son to join the Guild if Benjamin Douglas wasn’t a Guildsman himself?

  Generation Guildsmen trained from their earliest childhood to join the Guild, and that’s exactly what Ethan did. He worked as a slayer for years to hone his skills. He worked as a slayer—on his father’s farm.

  Could it be? Could it really, truly be? Did her father train Ethan to kill monsters around the farm in preparation to join the Guild? Why else would he start Ethan’s training so young?

  And what about Raleigh herself? Benjamin started her training even younger than Ethan. Did he plan to send her to the Guild, too? If he planned that, why didn’t he?

  The answer couldn’t be simpler. He never planned to send her to the Guild. He sent her to Bishop, even when she didn’t want to go. All those kataracts she used to slay in the fields around her home—they weren’t real. They were metal contrivances designed to perfect her skills. When she destroyed them, the Maple Midges ate their remains and left nothing behind.

  Raleigh walked away from Bishop’s desk. She paced down to the window and gazed out at the night before she came back to the same place. The desk sat in exactly the same place. Nothing had changed, and yet everything changed.

  Why did her father send her to work for Bishop? He insisted Bishop was the best, that she couldn’t hope for any better way to continue her career as a slayer than to work for the great Knox Bishop. Why would he say that, when there was a better way? She could have joined the Guild along with Ethan. She would have become a better slayer, but he didn’t send her there.

  He must have had a reason, and the reason was right there in front of her eyes. Bishop’s wall safe stood open the way Raleigh left it. She plucked the stack of folders and papers out of the safe. She turned over the folder’s top leaf and stared down at the records from the blue mussel farm.

  Bishop told her this was the only blue mussel farm in the world. Any trainload of blue mussels heading for a factory in Henleyville would come from there. She flipped the pages.