I shoved the book into the satchel that lay next to me on the floor. “Sure, you can join me,” I told him, lifting a piece of chicken out of the basket and pushing it toward him. “Though I don’t believe in charity, at least not when it comes to you. I deal strictly in quid pro quo transactions. I do something for you, you do something for me in return.”
“Should’ve known you’d try to cut a deal.” He took a drumstick. “What did you have in mind? A kiss?”
I made a face at him. “No such luck. I’m actually hoping you might stick around and help me talk to Liv and Gavin after the crowd thins out. You know social skills aren’t exactly my strong point.”
“Trust me, I know. I still remember when you thunked me over the head with that last Harry Potter book.”
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” I couldn’t help smiling at the memory. “And you deserved it. I was flirting with Andy Thayne.”
“Which is why I had to intervene. He was a thug.”
“You knocked him into the art display.”
Hunter shrugged. “He survived. And as I recall your flirting didn’t have the same effect on him after that.”
“Looks like you were the thug,” I said. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.”
“In college we call that irony.” He flashed me another wicked grin. “But enough ancient history. Why do you need me to help you talk to the Michaels?”
Hunter was the only one who could tease me about not going to college. If anybody else said that, I would’ve floored them, or at least made a snarky remark right back at them. But I didn’t mind Hunter saying it because he knew school had always been easy for me. He’d backed me when everybody else freaked out when I didn’t apply to any colleges my senior year. He understood how I felt about flying, maybe more than anybody else.
I finished off my latte and pushed the glass toward the edge of the table for a refill. “I’ve been having these dreams,” I said, lowering my voice. “About Annie.”
He didn’t say anything right away. Hunter wasn’t just the only person who knew how much I loved to fly. He was also the only one I’d told about my dreams besides my mother. “What about Annie?”
“She keeps disappearing. I’ve had the same dream, more or less, for the past two weeks. It changes but by the end they always leave with her screaming in their arms. Then I wake up. I’m worried something’s going to happen to her. That somebody’s going to take her.”
“Just like they took your brother.”
I nodded. Even after sixteen years it was still too hard to talk about it out loud.
“And you want me to help because you don’t think Liv and Gavin will take you seriously?”
“Would you?” I asked, leaning forward across the table. “If somebody you didn’t know all that well told you that she had a dream about your kid being abducted, would you believe her?”
“I might believe you thought what you were saying was true,” Hunter said. “But no, I probably wouldn’t think there was anything to it.”
“So how can I make them understand I’m telling the truth?”
“I’m not sure you can, even with my help.”
“So much for quid pro quo.”
“Guess you took your charity case, after all.”
We stared at each other in mutual exasperation just as Tammy showed up with a replacement latte for me. She took Hunter’s order (though not before she’d pointed out she already knew what he was going to ask for) and disappeared out back, returning about fifteen minutes later with one of Liv’s frou-frou pasta creations. I grabbed another piece of chicken, but I secretly admired Hunter’s adventurous streak when it came to cooking. I’m a pretty basic kind of girl. I gravitate toward what I know—cheeseburgers and fries, a decent cut of steak, maybe a plate of fettuccine alfredo every now and then. Every week or so I tell myself I’ll change my eating habits but I never do.
Hunter rolled some pasta onto his fork and held it up to my mouth. “Try it,” he said. “It’s really good.”
Not only was I a little reluctant to try his pasta, but it felt weirdly intimate for Hunter to be sharing his food with me. And weirdly intimate was not a status I wanted to engage in, especially not with Hunter Jackson. Not when he’d be heading back to college—and college girls—in less than a week.
“C’mon,” he urged. “It’s not poison.”
“Okay, okay.” I opened my mouth for the pasta. “Not bad.”
“There’s more to culinary life than burgers and fried chicken. Especially now that the Michaels are here.” He rolled another forkful of pasta for me and held it out.
This time I didn’t hesitate. It really was good. “Point taken.”
“Maybe some time you could stop by and visit, if you happen to be in Anchorage. There are some pretty decent restaurants we could go to,” he said. “If you were down there, for business or something.”
So much for avoiding weirdly intimate. Make that weirdly intimate with a huge dose of awkward thrown into the mix. “Uh, yeah, sure.” I glanced around the room desperately in hopes of being rescued by anybody who might know either of us. “If I’m down there.”
An emotion I couldn’t put a name to flickered across Hunter’s face. Hurt? Anger? Annoyance? Or maybe just plain shock at being quasi-dissed. He sure as hell couldn’t be used to it, anyway. Which also helped make me feel a lot less guilty about my less-than-enthusiastic response. I had no doubt in my mind that Hunter could get any girl he wanted at school. He probably did.
“Don’t look now,” he said. “But here’s your chance.”
I whirled around in my seat just in time to see Liv walk out of the double doors that led back to the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked around, as if she were checking to make sure everybody was happy. She didn’t need to worry. Everybody was happy.
Well, almost everybody.
“Now or never,” Hunter said under his breath. “I can’t babysit you all night, you know.”
I swallowed. “Okay, okay,” I whispered. “I’m on it.”
When her glance fell on me I lifted my arm and waved her over to our table. She smiled and hurried over, anxious to trade gossip.
This wasn’t going to be pretty.
“I see you ordered the siracusani,” she said to Hunter. “Please tell me you managed to get Kira to try at least one bite.”
“Two, actually,” he said drily.
“It was amazing.” I hoped my enthusiasm for the pasta would win me some brownie points. “I’ll definitely be ordering that next time.”
“You had me until amazing. But don’t try and convince me you’re going to order anything besides fried chicken.”
“Maybe a burger,” Hunter offered, his face a mask of composure.
Suppressing the urge to kick him under the table, I turned to Liv. “Could you take a minute to talk?”
“Only a minute, sorry. It’s been a madhouse tonight.” She pulled a chair over from the next table. “What’s up?”
My expression probably told her I wasn’t going to tell her about Sherry Stieg accidentally dyeing her hair purple. And if she thought the place was a madhouse, she’d be absolutely convinced after I told her why I’d waved her over to our table. “It’s about Annie.”
“What about Annie?”
I braced myself and plunged onward. “I keep having these dreams—that somebody takes her—and I thought you should know.”
Liv’s expression changed. It wasn’t that she looked unfriendly. But she didn’t look as if she wanted to sit around talking to me anymore, either. “Thank you for telling me.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I know you see Annie all the time and it’s probably natural for you to worry about her. I used to have dreams like that too, right before she was born. Sometimes I dreamt she was slipping out of my arms and I had to catch her. Sometimes she’d be screaming and I couldn’t find her. I even talked to the doctor about it. She told me it was natural to worry about losing s
omebody you loved. That people do it all the time, especially when—”
Liv broke off mid-sentence. She didn’t need to finish. I knew what she thought. She hadn’t lived in Amarok when my brother disappeared but she’d heard the stories. Annie was the same age he was so it made sense for me to be projecting my fears about Miki onto Annie.
If I weren’t psychic it would almost have been convincing. Unfortunately, I was. “This isn’t about my brother, Liv, though I get why you would think so. I’ve never told you this—never told anybody except for my mother and Hunter—but I dream things and afterward they come true. I’m not saying something’s definitely going to happen to Annie. I just want to make sure you keep an eye on her, to be on the safe side.”
I thought Liv would argue with me or ask me more about the dream but she didn’t. Instead she fixed her gaze on Hunter. “She told you before about these… dreams?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She did. Back in high school.”
“And you…believe her?”
Hunter hesitated but only for a second. “I do. Absolutely.”
“Why?” The desperation in Liv’s voice was hard to miss. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to believe me. I wouldn’t want to believe my kid was in danger either. But letting Liv go on living her fairy tale wasn’t going to help Annie.
“Because one of her dreams was about me.”
I tried to hide my surprise. My dream about Hunter wasn’t something he liked to talk about, even though it was what had cemented our friendship. Unlike most of my dreams, it hadn’t been about the future but about the past. “You don’t have to tell her.”
Liv glanced at me and then back at Hunter. “She’s right,” Liv told him, though I could tell it was killing her to say it. “I don’t need to know.”
“I think maybe you do,” he said. “And I don’t mind telling it. It used to make me sad to think about what happened but it doesn’t anymore. At least not that much.” He flashed Liv one of his signature grins and she couldn’t help smiling back. Apparently married women weren’t immune either.
“Okay,” Liv said. “As long as you don’t mind.”
“I don’t,” he said. “It was a long time ago. My grandfather and I were out snowmobiling, miles from town. Nobody knew we’d gone and so when we crashed I knew it was going to be a long wait before anybody started looking for us. It was about ten below and I was only seven or eight years old so I was pretty damn scared. We were riding really fast and when we rounded a corner there was this tree wide as a car right in front us. There was no time to turn, so we hit it head on.”
Hunter stopped talking and traced his finger around the rim of his water glass. Nobody said anything. “Grandpa Jackson died on impact. Went straight into that damn pine tree. I tried to do what I could but I was only ten. Anyway, there was nothing I could’ve done. I was a lot luckier. When I was thrown from the snowmobile I landed on my right arm and the fall snapped the bone in two. I couldn’t move too well and the pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt. I can tell you I was convinced I was going to die out there, right alongside my grandfather.”
“What happened?” Liv asked, ignoring Tammy’s frantic wave from behind the counter. I wondered what was going on but wrote it off as jealousy. If she really needed her boss she’d walk over to us and drag her away from the table. Tammy wasn’t exactly the wallflower type.
“The wolves came. It was a small pack, there were only around six or seven of them. The pack leader lay down next to me and so did a couple of the others. I was in too much pain to be afraid. And I knew they wouldn’t hurt me. They lay there like that until the search party came. They weren’t expecting to find me curled up with a bunch of wolves, I can tell you.” Hunter looked up from the water glass and locked his hazel eyes onto Liv’s blue ones. “They saved my life.”
“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” she said quietly.
“Me too,” he said.
“I hate to say this,” Liv went on. “But I still don’t see why that made you believe in Kira’s dreams.”
“She dreamt it, the whole thing. Told me the story so clearly it could’ve been me telling it,” he said. “Except there was one detail she knew that I didn’t. The whole time I was lying there with the wolves my grandpa was there too, watching from a few feet away. He was the one who called them.”
“Okay, now you lost me.” Liv shook her head. “I just don’t believe in that stuff. I’m from New York, for Christ sake. We barely believe in the rest of the country.”
Hunter shrugged. “I believe her because it was the truth.”
Liv turned a kindly gaze toward me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Kira, but you probably heard the story in town and didn’t even remember you had. You would’ve been around the same age as Hunter and it probably had a big impact on you. It would make sense that you dreamt about it, even years later. And as for the ghost stuff—it was just part of the dream.”
“It wasn’t just a dream.” If I could hear the quiver in my voice, so could they. I pressed my lips together and forced myself to stay calm. “I’ve always dreamt things I couldn’t have known about, at least not in any way that could be explained. Believe me, it’s not easy to sit here and tell you this stuff. But I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to Annie because I was too afraid to say something.”
Liv pushed her chair back from the table and smoothed her apron with both palms. “I’m glad you told me and I hope you won’t be angry with me if I can’t agree with you. I know you mean well and if it will make you feel better I promise I’ll be careful. It’s probably hard for you to understand this because you grew up here, but one of the things I love about Amarok is that it’s a safe place. That’s one of the reasons Gavin and I decided to move here. We didn’t want to start a family in a city where you’re always watching your back. I’ve always felt Annie was safe and if she wasn’t I feel like I’d know it. I’m her mother, after all.”
“Thanks for listening, Liv. Sorry if I upset you.”
“You didn’t,” she said a little too quickly. “No worries.”
Hunter laid some cash onto the table next to the check. “This one’s on me,” he said. “I wish I could’ve helped you more.”
I lifted a twenty-dollar bill off the stack and handed it back to him. No way was I going to let him pick up the check when I’d roped him into doing something he didn’t want to. “You tried.” I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and laid it on top of his cash. “That counts. And you’re not paying for me. It’s not like this was a date or anything.”
“Trust me,” Hunter rested his hand over his heart, “I know. You’re the ice queen.”
I wasn’t nearly as icy when it came to Hunter as he thought I was. I wasn’t about to tell him that though. “Well, at least I live in the right place then.”
We got up from the table and walked outside. I threw a last glance behind me and saw Liv deep in conversation with Gavin. No doubt she was relaying what I told her. From the look on his face it didn’t take much to figure out how credible he found my story.
Well, I tried. That put me in the clear, didn’t it? I told myself it did and stomped on the part of my conscience that wouldn’t shut up. If Liv and Gavin didn’t believe me that was their business. No more One Who Gets Into Everything. I was done with that. I had to be.
Despite the cold, it was a beautiful night. I looked up at the river of stars running across the sky. Off in the distance, the shadows of the mountains loomed. It was one of those moments when I knew no matter how far I traveled, I’d always come home to Alaska.
Hunter walked me to my snowmobile and touched his finger to my chin. “So what next?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t tell me you’re not going to let it go at that.” He raised my chin so that I was looking directly into his eyes. “I know you.”
“I’ve changed.”
He laughed quietly. “I doubt that, Pakak.”
We weren’t all that far fr
om the restaurant and I got the feeling we weren’t alone. I looked over my shoulder at the Blue Moon just in time to catch a glimpse of the back of Tammy’s head. “I think we’ve got company.”
He let go of my chin and followed my gaze. “I don’t see anybody.”
“She’s gone now,” I said, adding by way of explanation, “Tammy.”
“She was probably waiting for me to kiss you.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s what she wanted.”
Neither of us spoke and for a second I almost thought he’d try it. But the moment passed and the next thing I knew he was headed back toward his Explorer. “I’ll be at my dad’s through Sunday morning,” he called out. “If you need anything—or even if you just want to talk—I’ll be around.”
“Okay.” I wondered if the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach was because of the food or my fear for Annie. Or maybe it was because when I’d thought Hunter might kiss me I’d wanted it. Just for a second. And that scared me almost as much as the Annie dreams.
I climbed onto the snowmobile and powered it up, giving a final wave to Hunter as he drove off in the opposite direction. I fastened my helmet and pulled away from town, increasing my speed when I turned onto the road that led to my cabin. The pines blurred by on either side of me and after I’d driven another ten minutes or so a yellow square appeared on the horizon. I’d left the kitchen light on and I knew my huskies would be at the door waiting for me when I walked in.
Back home I had everything I needed and I’d fulfilled my obligation to talk to the Michaels. All in all, it had been a good day, a good week.
So why did I feel so unsettled?
Chapter 3
For the next two nights I didn’t dream of anything at all. Or at least when I woke up in the morning the first thing I remembered wasn’t Annie’s screams as she disappeared into the night. I told myself the reason the dreams stopped was because I’d done my duty and could move on. I even managed to convince myself the dreams were ordinary dreams, just like Liv said they were.
Then I saw the article.
Wraith Page 2