Alone in the Wild

by Kelley Armstrong

  I’m putting Abby to bed when Dalton declares dinner ready. We eat in front of the fireplace, Storm at our feet, Dalton stretched out on the sofa, me curled up at the other end, plates on our laps, wineglasses on the side tables.

  I plan to find other conversation for the meal, but as soon as we settle and I open my mouth, I hear myself saying, “I’m sorry.”

  He glances over, brows rising.

  “Earlier with Tyrone. When he mentioned your parents, I should have dropped it, and I didn’t.”

  He turns to me, and his head tilts, just a little, eyes piercing with a look I know well, from our earliest days. That keen scrutiny, as if he’s trying to peer right into my brain and figure out what I’m thinking.

  “Is that what was bothering you?” he says.

  I glance over.

  He sets his plate down, one knee coming up onto the sofa. “You looked freaked out when Tyrone was talking, and I thought you were just shocked by what he said. Were you honestly worried I’d be mad at you for asking?”

  “It’s your business, and if you wanted details, you’d ask. I shouldn’t do it for you.” I put my fork down. “It’s not just for you, either. I want to know. I want to understand. That isn’t right.”

  His head tilts again. “Being concerned for me isn’t right?”

  “It’s…” I flail my hands. “Complicated.”

  “Yeah, it is. Those relationships are complicated. Ours isn’t, and if I’m making it complicated, you gotta tell me so I can stop. I sure as hell don’t want you thinking you need to tread lightly or you’ll piss me off. You asked the obvious question. One I should have asked myself, but…”

  He shrugs. “It feels like picking at a scab. That scab’s not healing, though. I just…” He exhales, a long hiss of breath between his teeth. “I just don’t want to get into it.”

  He stops, lips parting. “Fuck, that sounds bad. It’s not that I don’t want to get into it with you. I don’t want to get into it with myself. Best to stuff it under the bed and tell myself it doesn’t matter. Except it does matter. I haven’t gone to see the Daltons since you arrived, and part of that’s because when we have time off, I want to be with you. But part of it is that you give me an excuse. They’re my parents, and I should want to see them. Only they’re not my parents, and unless they have a damned good excuse for what they did, I’m not eager to spend my free time with them.”

  He looks over at me. “They don’t have a good excuse, do they?”

  “I have no way of knowing that, Eric.”

  “But you think the same thing I do. They lied about my situation. They made shit up to justify bringing me into Rockton.”

  “Gene did.”

  He rubs his mouth. “Yeah, and I don’t know how to deal with that, because my gut says he lied to my mother, too. He presented her with a situation she wouldn’t argue with. Like Edwin trying to tell us the baby had been abandoned. If that’s the case, then I’m doing a shitty thing, shutting Katherine Dalton out of my life. But if it’s not? If she knew, too?”

  He looks at me. “If she knew too, that’s gonna hurt. I need those answers. I’m not ready to march down south and get them. But you don’t ever need to worry that you’re going to upset me by prodding. Fuck knows, I’m the king of pushing people to face shit they don’t want to face.”

  He lifts my plate and holds it out. “Eat.”

  When I hesitate, he leans in, his forehead touching mine. “I love you. You know that. Sometimes I wish there was something more to say, a higher escalation. I can’t find the words to go beyond it, you know?”

  I nod, still not speaking. I feel his breath on my lips, close enough to kiss, but he stays there, just breathing.

  “I’m still afraid,” he says, “of doing something to scare you off. I’m mostly past it, but I worry that if I dive into this, and I can’t deal with it, you’ll decide I’m just too fucked up to be with.”

  “Pretty sure my baggage is as heavy as yours.”

  “Yeah, but what’s in your baggage has been sorted and arranged, and you open it up for a look now and then. Mine’s stuffed in a suitcase full to bursting, held by triple locks, and I don’t even peek inside. You shouldn’t feel like I’d go ballistic if you even jangle the lock. Especially when I’m throwing yours open, riffling through it, tossing shit everywhere so I can see what you’ve got in there.”

  I laugh softly. “That is an awesome analogy.”

  “Thank you. Totally true, too. I love you. I don’t want to lose you. You’re going to need to be patient with me. Right now, my life is fucking awesome, and if there’s this one suitcase under the bed that I don’t want to touch, I know that isn’t healthy, but I’m not ready to rip it open. You may, however, jangle the locks now and then to remind me it’s there, and that I need to deal with it eventually.”

  I press my lips to his. It’s meant to be quick, but he bears into it, pulling me against him, the kiss hungry, edged with desperation. I slide my plate onto the table and pull him to me as I fall back onto the couch.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’m on the floor, resting on my stomach, eyeing my plate of half-eaten food.

  “You know what we need?” I say. “A microwave.”

  Dalton snorts and pushes up. “You southerners make everything complicated.” He pulls out a tray that hangs over the fire, sets our plates on it, and adjusts it over the flames. Storm lumbers over to lie closer to the fire. She doesn’t even eye the plates. She knows better.

  “A microwave would be faster,” I say.

  “But it wouldn’t give the meat that nice, smoky taste. And if you were so hungry, maybe you shouldn’t have insisted on sex halfway through dinner.”

  “Insisted?” I sputter. “I don’t even remember asking.”

  “Exactly. That only makes it worse.”

  I pitch a pillow at him. He catches it, scoops me up, and deposits me on the sofa, then drops the pillow on my head. When I go to throw it back at him, he lifts my wineglass, and I stop.

  “Thought that’d work,” he says, handing me the glass as he takes away the pillow. “Don’t wanna spill the wine.”

  He’s about to settle in beside me when the baby wails. He levers up, but I put a hand on his knee.

  “I’ve got this,” I say.

  I root my panties and bra out of the pile of clothing—somehow, this seems the proper line between acceptable and unacceptable attire in front of an infant who can’t see more than blobs. I pull them on as I head upstairs.

  By the time Abby is changed, our meal is warmed.

  “You eat first,” I say. “I’ll handle cuddling duty.”

  I sit on the sofa with Abby, and she snuggles against my bare skin. Storm lies on my feet. I have Abby cradled in my arms, which apparently is the proper position for breastfeeding, because her head turns and her tiny mouth clamps down on my bra. I laugh and shift her away, murmuring “Sorry,” as I sweep my hair back over my shoulder.

  I look over at Dalton, and I’m about to make a comment when I see he’s staring, and the look on his face … It’s the same look I’m sure I had, watching him cradle the baby that first time, an expression of revelation and a pang of unexpected longing from some instinctive place.

  He looks away quickly and says something, too gruff to make out. I slide over and kiss his beard-rough cheek. He turns to meet the kiss, hand slipping into my hair. It’s a quick one, and then I’m back in my corner, watching him eat as he sneaks almost guilty glances my way.

  We’ll have to deal with this. With the questions Abby raises for us. But I’m no longer freaking out at the thought. For now, we have other concerns. I start by telling him Maryanne’s story. He stops eating several times as I talk, chewing over my words with his dinner, but he says nothing until I’m done. Then he’s done, too, and he wordlessly switches his plate for the baby so I can eat.

  “Huh,” he says as he bounces Abby, hand behind her head, as if this has become second nature.

  “Yep,” I
say. “Huh, indeed. Thank God I didn’t tell anyone else about my ‘council is responsible for the hostiles’ theory. You should have seen the look I got when I asked Maryanne whether anyone else could be involved. I felt like Brent with his crazy conspiracy theories.”

  I pull my legs up, sitting sideways and cross-legged as I dangle one hand to pet Storm. “For the record, I knew I was being paranoid suspecting the council.”

  “Yeah,” Dalton says. “Because they are never behind the weird shit that happens here. It’s not like they’re bringing in killers without warning us or setting spies among us or planting a goddamn secret agent to assassinate liabilities.”

  “Petra will love ‘secret agent.’ She might want a badge.”

  He snorts. “Nice job of ignoring my point, Detective. You never blamed the council. You only floated the possibility. Your primary suspicion was simply that the hostiles didn’t just devolve into fucking savages after a year or two in the wild. Now we know your main hypothesis is correct. The hostiles aren’t residents-gone-wild. They’re a cult.”

  My brows shoot up.

  Shades fall over his eyes—the pride of a brilliant man who realizes he can misunderstand concepts those from “down south” take for granted. It only lasts a second, though, before he relaxes as he remembers who he’s with.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That might not be the right word. We had someone up here, a few years back, escaping a cult, so I did some reading. Maybe not as much as I should have.”

  “The fact that you did any research to help understand a resident’s situation puts you head and shoulders above most of us, Eric. And my look didn’t mean you had the wrong idea. It was surprise that you had the right one.”

  When he chuckles, I say, “Sorry, that came out wrong. I’m not surprised that you had a good idea. I’m surprised because I hadn’t thought of it that way. While I never dealt with cults down south, I did attend a seminar on them. Most times, you have a charismatic person recruiting easy targets—people who want to get rich or feel loved and accepted, depending on what your cult is selling. They’re always selling something. The hostiles don’t fit that.”

  “Yeah, crappy analogy.”

  “No, it’s not, because the basic idea still works. People who leave Rockton are seeking something. A more natural way of life and a stronger community. Most of all, though, they’re looking for a new experience. That’s what Maryanne wanted. The hostiles aren’t willing recruits, though. Sure, I suppose it’s possible someone could be attracted to that lifestyle, but mostly, they’re being brainwashed. That’s where the cult analogy works best.”

  “It starts with the tea,” Dalton says. “A group of settlers, maybe with some experience in drugs, looking for that kind of back-to-nature experience. Rockton got a lot of that in the early years. People grew their own marijuana, their own mushrooms. Neither was particularly conducive to productivity, though.”

  I smile. “No, I suppose not. But yes, back to nature can mean plant-based methods of communing with the forest. Early settlers probably did experiment with what they found out there.” I turn to him. “What is out there, anyway?”

  “Fuck if I know. We still get residents poking around. They end up in the clinic for smoking all kinds of shit.”

  I laugh.

  He shifts Abby to his other arm. “No one’s ever found anything that’ll send them on a drug trip. My guess is that whoever concocted this tea knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t just randomly throw plants into a pot.”

  “The inventor and their fellow settlers get into it, and everyone likes how it makes them feel. It makes them more comfortable with violence, more fixated on daily survival and less concerned with everything that gets in the way of it.”

  “The tea hones their survival instincts and dulls their self-awareness.”

  “So they don’t sit around moaning about wanting a shower.” I remember what Maryanne said, about how that was the big concern with her parents’ hippie friends. Scarcity of creature comforts is the thing people complain about most in Rockton. I’ve learned to live without a microwave and internet access, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the lack of them. That’s where Dalton has the advantage.

  It would be simpler if we could temporarily forget the lack of comforts. That’s why we control alcohol so tightly. It’s also why Rockton had a hellish problem with a homemade drug when I arrived. Drinking the hostiles’ tea would be rewarding in so many ways.

  I reach for my wine and sip it, thinking. “I feel like there’s more to it, but we have a good starting hypothesis. We know at least some hostiles are there against their will, and we’ll need to decide what to do about that. For now, in regard to Abby, we know she isn’t a baby hostile, and we know the dead woman—Ellen—was a former hostile. She wasn’t shot by one, though, so it seems any connection to the hostiles is only tangential. Our goal is finding Abby’s family.”

  I tell him what Cypher did—and did not—say on that matter.

  “Yeah, fucking complicated,” Dalton mutters. “Everything always is. He’ll tell us where to find these traders, though, especially if he gets laid tonight.” He looks at me. “So Jen, huh?”

  I sputter a laugh that startles Abby. She cranes her neck, looking toward the source of the noise. Dalton hands her to me, and I expect her to complain. Instead she snuggles, cheek on my bare skin, chubby legs and arms drawing in like a frog’s.

  I stroke her back. “Yep, Jen. Gotta give him credit for keeping his aspirations reasonable.”

  Dalton throws back his head and laughs, and Abby makes a chirping noise, but only snuggles more, as if she can burrow into me. I tug up a blanket.

  “Isabel and Phil, Cypher and Jen…” I say. “Spring must be just around the corner.”

  “Nah, up here, it’s winter that gets them. Long, cold nights.” His gaze travels over me, still in my panties and bra. “Speaking of which…” He leans toward me. “I was kinda thinking we might spend our evening playing a game.” He waggles his brows.

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  He leans to whisper in my ear. “I swiped Scrabble from the community center. You in?”

  I grin. “Totally.”

  “How about you bring Abby’s bed downstairs so she can hang out with us. I’ll start coffee and break out the homemade Irish cream.”

  “And cookies?”

  He smiles. “I believe I can find cookies.”

  * * *

  It’s just after eleven when a familiar pound on the door has Dalton calling, “Come in!”

  A moment later, Anders steps around the corner, his hand over his eyes.

  “Ha ha,” Dalton says. “We’re decent.”

  Anders walks in and looks at the Scrabble board. “You guys know how to rock an evening in, don’t you?”

  I lift my cookie. “We do indeed.”

  Anders shakes his head. “It’s been, what, a little over a year, and you’re already an old married couple, spending your one evening off playing Scrabble and drinking coffee.”

  “It’s spiked coffee.”

  “Oooh, living it up. Better be careful. Too much of that might lead to the proper definition of couple’s night in.” His gaze travels over to my shirt and jeans, crumpled on the floor, and he glances back at me, realizing I’m wearing the shirt that Dalton is not. “Ah, no, Scrabble is the afterglow. Carry on, then.”

  He reaches down to scoop up Abby. As he does, he gets a look at my tiles. “Boss? Better block ‘phone.’ Casey’s about to change it to ‘xylophone’ for a gazillion points.”

  I smack his leg.

  “Hey,” he says. “Baby on board. Careful.”

  Dalton alters “phone” to “telephone.” I smack Anders again.

  “I like you just fine, Case,” Anders says. “But he’s the boss. Now he owes me at least two days off for helping him win.”

  “He was already winning.” I wave at the board. “House rules allow profanity, and he’s really, really good at it.”
<
br />   Anders laughs. Then he hunkers down. “So, as much as I’d love to share one of those spiked coffees, I’m not interrupting your evening merely to be annoying.”

  “Merely,” Dalton murmurs.

  “Disrupting your sappy domestic bliss is always a valid side goal. However, my main purpose is to tell you that someone was skulking around your old house, where Maryanne is spending the night.”

  I shoot upright. “What?”

  He motions me down. “It’s okay. It was just Phil, who already knows she’s there.”

  “You said ‘skulking.’ That implies he wasn’t popping by to see if she needed extra pillows.”

  “Yeah, it was weird, which is why I’m here. And before you freak out, Casey, I confirmed that the doors were locked and ordered one of the guys to keep a watch on the house while I ran over here. I didn’t tell him that anyone is in it—just that a resident was poking around your old place.”

  “Okay. So explain the skulking weirdness,” I say.

  “I’m getting to that. Just fending off ‘Oh my god, you saw criminal activity and just walked away!’”

  “I never—”

  “The point?” Dalton says. “Or do I need to go investigate myself while you two squabble?”

  Anders continues. “Phil was definitely skulking. Dressed in dark colors, no flashlight, hood pulled up. He was wearing one of the militia parkas instead of his completely inappropriate for the weather but terribly stylish ski jacket.”

  “Was he doing anything besides skulking?” I ask.

  “Yep, which made it extra weird. So, I’m on patrol, and on each round, I pass the house twice. I’m literally walking by the front when he darts from behind a tree. I’m, like, seriously? Could you not wait ten seconds for the guy with the flashlight to move on? I turn off the flashlight and take it slow, but I’m not Eric Cloud-Foot. You can hear my boots crunching snow. I slip around the house, and Phil’s trying the back door. Like he expects it to be open. I yell ‘Hey!’ and he takes off.” Anders shakes his head. “The guy would starve to death as a cat burglar.”

  “You’re sure it was Phil? You saw his face?”