“We’ll need someone to keep watch while the three of us search,” Grant said. “We can keep an eye on each other that way.”
He made it sound sinister.
So Grant, Anastasia, and I stepped out to the front porch, but I was sure they were watching each other as much as they looked out to the dark, searching for an attack. Ariel, joined by Jeffrey, waited by the door, and their job was to look to the forest for anything suspicious. Grant held a flashlight; Anastasia and I didn’t. A faint glow from candles leaked to the outside, but otherwise, nothing intruded on my night vision. I could see individual trees and the stripe of sand along the lake shore. Above, the Milky Way was a visible band, a cloud of stars. I had my ears and nose tuned to the air, listening for footsteps, voices.
What I needed were a bunch of the guys from a police procedural TV show. Then I needed the world to act like the world in a police procedural TV show so that they could actually figure out what was going on by the scraps of clues lying around. They had to be lying around, right? A little piece of fabric that would light up under a UV light with a complete description of what was happening?
Didn’t think so.
Anastasia ran her fingers along the wood post where the railing had broken off, studying the sabotage that had killed Dorian.
“Are you okay?” I said softly.
“Fine.” She turned her attention to the clearing in front of the porch and walked away.
We went along the porch, searching for anomalies. Then, reluctantly, I moved off the porch, to the steps. Every third second I glanced to the trees, sure that something was watching us. Maybe it was the paranoia talking.
I stopped on the last step.
A stripe of gravel in front of the steps was different. I hadn’t noticed it before because I hadn’t been looking. The brain glosses over a thousand anomalies a day—someone had been fixing the wiring or the pipes, or putting in a sprinkler system, or making a repair. There were a hundred reasons why there’d be a stretch of off-color ground near a house like this. But now, when I looked on everything with suspicion—what was the reason? A mound of dirt, raised fractionally, as if something was buried.
Grant saw me staring and said, “I’ll get a shovel.”
Ariel shone the flashlight on the spot while we dug. We didn’t have to dig deep, only a few inches. There, just under the surface, we found a steel rod sprouting a dozen spikes, maybe a couple inches each. Again, I could come up with a dozen reasons why something like this might be here: some arcane piece of construction left over from a remodeling job and accidentally buried, some unknown bit of landscaping. But digging out to either side, we found the rod was attached to a motor, and the motor protruded above ground, just a little, in a spot sheltered by the porch steps. There, a tiny antenna suggested some kind of radio transmitter or receiver.
Grant demonstrated: when the signal arrived, the motor would turn the rod, and the spikes would spring to vertical, emerging from the ground like some parking lot tire-killing defense barrier.
“Oh, my God,” Ariel said, wincing.
The spikes were a razor-sharp steel and silver plate. If Lee, Jerome, or I had been standing here or passing over this spot when the signal came, the spikes would have launched, torn through our shoes, and cut our feet. Silver poisoning would do the rest. It would be slow and agonizing, as silver-poisoned blood climbed from the feet to the heart.
The trap was sneaky, clever, and cruel. Standing outside, my back suddenly felt exposed. There wasn’t any kind of trip wire. It wasn’t automatic, which meant someone had to be watching to know the right moment to spring the trap. Maybe our hunter was out there right now, watching us. Peering through the scope of some high-powered sniper rifle. With silver bullets. I took a deep breath but couldn’t scent anything on the breeze, and the smells of the others around me were too strong. But he was out there.
Grant completely excavated the trap, found where the motors on each side were anchored to the ground with stakes, and dug them out. He shoved the whole thing under the porch, out of the way. My skin was still prickling with nerves.
When the crack came, I thought it was a tree branch breaking. I didn’t make the connection, because it didn’t sound like gunfire—it was too small, sharp, and focused. A silencer, I realized. But stuff like that only happened in the movies, right? I waited for the rip of pain that was sure to follow the gunshot.
Jeffrey caught Ariel as she fell. She dropped the flashlight.
“Inside! Now!” Grant hollered. I was already on the porch, opening the door and helping pull Ariel inside. We laid her down on the floor, and I slammed the door shut. The big picture window in front didn’t have drapes. I wished I could draw drapes and shut out the world.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Tina said.
“Oh, no,” Jeffrey breathed.
Ariel wasn’t moving. I dropped beside her, touched her forehead. Her eyes stared. “Ariel?”
I couldn’t hear her heart, but her skin was still warm. She was just standing there a second ago—
Kneeling beside me, Grant felt her neck, then turned her face. He smoothed back the hair over her ear and pointed to the bullet hole. A tiny little thing, maybe the width of a pencil, with just a tiny trickle of blood leaking from it. But it went right through the middle of her brain.
I bent over until my face was next to hers and tried not to scream. I held her, pressed my forehead to hers, and clenched my hands. A howl was building in my throat, but if I let it go, I wouldn’t stop. I’d have to shift. I’d have to go running, to find the person who did this and rip his throat out. And if I tried to do that in a fit of rage, I’d fail.
“Kitty,” Grant said. I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder, a comforting touch, but I didn’t, which was good. I’d snap at anyone who offered such a meaningless, stupid gesture.
I took a long, snuffling breath and realized I was crying. My head was going to explode. My hands were going to turn into claws. I wanted to know if the bullet was silver. I wanted to know if it had been meant for me. It should have been me.
Sitting back, I idly smoothed Ariel’s hair. I hadn’t gotten to know her well enough. She was too young and pretty for this. That scream built up again. Despairing, I looked at Grant.
His expression was long, mournful. I’d never seen him look so sad.
“We have to get whoever did this,” I murmured. Grant nodded once.
Wolf was close to the surface. I felt myself walking around with a hooded gaze, my head low, watchful, my body stiff, my fingers curled. Not just Wolf, but Wolf on the hunt. A Wolf who wanted blood.
I tried to relax and take a deep breath, because I didn’t want to shift right now. Because I had a feeling that was what the hunter expected me to do. Grant watched me; he’d seen this before, and he knew the signs.
I shook my head. “I’m okay.” I wasn’t, not really, but I wasn’t going to shift. Not right now.
The others watched us: Gemma with her hand over her face, like she couldn’t believe it; Tina looking away, holding Jeffrey’s arm. Jeffrey facing us, but with his eyes closed. Lee, staring out the window, hands clenched by his sides.
“Get away from the window,” Anastasia said, moving up to him, displacing him from the spot that gave whoever shot Ariel a perfect view. Lee curled his lips, a silent snarl. I wondered if he felt the same way I did. Or worse—his escape routes required open ocean. He had to be going crazy.
“Kitty, Lee,” Anastasia said, urgent, with a commander’s voice and not the urbane vampire voice I’d always heard from her. “I need your help. Leave out the back. I’ll draw him out. Be ready.”
“What?” Lee said. “What do you—”
But I knew. This plan was familiar, and I knew it without even hearing it. Lee didn’t recognize it because he didn’t hunt with a pack.
“Be ready,” she said.
I took Lee’s shoulder and guided him to the kitchen as Anastasia left through the front door. I pulled Lee out the b
ack door in the kitchen.
“What does she expect us to do?” he said harshly, the anger of helplessness showing through.
“We have the best noses,” I whispered. I waited for the sound of a gunshot, for the sign that the sniper was still there and waiting for the next target—the bullet wouldn’t have done anything to Anastasia. She’d walk right through it, but maybe the shooter didn’t know that.
Who was I kidding? The arrow that killed Jerome was silver-tipped. The shooter knew what he was doing and wouldn’t waste a bullet on the vampire. No, his bullets were most likely silver, and he’d save them for me and Lee. I wondered if Lee had figured that out.
I wasn’t a vampire. My senses were not so fine that I could follow the path of a bullet, but I could tell when something didn’t fit, when something was wrong. I could smell the gunpowder and sense that we’d been invaded. Anastasia was moving toward that wrongness; she needed our help.
“You flank left,” I said. “I’ll move ahead and flank right.”
He must have figured it all out, because he nodded. We ran, jogging behind the lodge and toward the trees, arcing in opposite directions, keeping low and quiet. At every moment, I expected to hear a bullet whine toward me. Or a mine to explode under my feet. As a werewolf, I was tough and healed fast, but I didn’t know what an explosion would do to me. It didn’t matter, I understood what Anastasia was asking: she would flush the quarry, and then we would strike.
This was when Wolf could be an asset. I used her senses to range much farther ahead and around me than I could see. I moved quietly and knew where all the shadows were to hide in. Quickly, I reached the trees, entering the woods, gaining as much ground as I could to be in position. A prickling in my neck made me pause and look back toward the lodge. I spotted the vampire. To Wolf’s eyes, night wasn’t dark. It was filled with nuance, shadow, moments of light, spots of movement. Anastasia wasn’t moving, but she was incongruous, a poised figure in her tailored black clothes. Her face was pale, brilliant, like ivory. Her gaze focused on a spot. Something had been hidden before, but now she studied it, her chin tilted up slightly. Her figure was entrancing, beautiful; I could have just watched her. Instead, I looked to where she did, tried to find what had caught her attention. My nose flared, trying to detect it by scent. Finally, I saw it, well masked in the shadows: a man perched fifteen feet off the ground, on a branch of a pine with a view of the front porch a hundred yards away, where the picture window shone with light from the candles inside. Ariel had been backlit, a perfect shadow, a perfect target.
I couldn’t scent him because he smelled richly of pine, maybe sap from rubbing against the branches as he’d been sitting there. The extra-straight branch near him was his rifle, which smelled of burned gunpowder.
He saw Anastasia. He was quickly loading something into the rifle—and what kind of special bullet would you use on a vampire? Could you make a bullet with holy water or garlic in it? No doubt someone had tried somewhere along the way. What was Anastasia doing? Just waiting there for him to load and fire?
But she was gone, suddenly as mist, moving almost too quickly to see. Then she was climbing the tree—even though the lowest branches were a dozen feet up. Somehow, she must have found fingerholds in the bark. Or her hands were made of glue. Didn’t matter. She would need help; this was the time. I loped around, putting myself on the far side of the tree. I caught a whiff of sea and salt—Lee. He crouched between the tree and the path. All escape routes covered.
The guy was moving but not panicking at Anastasia’s rapid approach. He finished loading the gun, then stood, bracing himself against the trunk so he could look down on her, sighting along the barrel. Anastasia shifted, rotating along the trunk—I had no idea how. The sniper followed but had trouble; the branch he stood on got in the way.
I had to distract him. Anastasia had flushed him—time to overwhelm. Dropping to my knees, I grabbed a pinecone and threw. I didn’t have great aim, but this just had to make noise. Get him to look somewhere else. But I did better than I thought—the pinecone struck the tree above his head, rained a few needles on him, made him look up, then out to where the projectile had come from. At me, in other words.
And Anastasia was standing on the branch in front of him, perfectly balanced on her high heels, hands on her hips, staring him down. She might have said, “Boo.”
He fell—and his safety harness and line secured to the branch caught him. He’d probably used it to haul himself into the tree in the first place. Recovering quickly, he righted himself, planted his feet on the trunk, and used the rappeling gear to lower himself the rest of the way down. Man, this guy was good.
He unclipped from the line, started running—and this was my game, now. He was human, and whatever else I smelled, whatever confusion my senses were going through, I didn’t doubt that he was a regular human with no other superpowers than what his fancy equipment gave him. Flat out, I could run faster than him.
I didn’t run straight at him but parallel to him, flanking him. He spotted me—that was the idea. As I’d hoped, he veered away from me—toward Lee. He still held the rifle, which was worrying. But he didn’t aim and fire, which made me think that whatever ammunition he’d switched into it wouldn’t kill werewolves. A small bit of luck.
Then he switched the rifle to his left hand and drew a handgun from a belt holster. Shit.
Two instinctive reactions vied against each other: I could dodge, drop, hide out, and let him get away—some prey wasn’t worth the effort; or I could charge him and maybe surprise him out of any meaningful action. In either case, I had to hope he didn’t get a good shot off. The decision happened in half a second. This was the guy who killed Ariel, Jerome, and Dorian. I couldn’t let him get away.
I charged.
Ignoring the repetitive chorus of Holy crap, I’m gonna die playing in my head, I ducked and wove, hoping to mess up his aim. I wasn’t much watching, thinking only of tackling him before he could fire the gun. Like maybe he’d be so surprised he’d just stand there. He didn’t. He kept running, too, gun in hand, raising his arm to shoot. But I ran faster.
Lee tackled him from behind.
Lee wasn’t a runner, not like me. I had wolf in my blood, and he had seal. But seals are master ambushers. He’d been waiting for the chance, and I slowed down the sniper enough to give him his opening. He knocked the sniper to the ground and held him there. They writhed, the gunman struggling to escape and Lee struggling to stay on top of him, digging his elbow into the man’s back, pinning him with his legs. Lee’s teeth were bared, and they may have been a little more pointy than normal.
I grabbed the rifle, threw it, and kicked the handgun away. The guy wasn’t even screaming. Up close, I saw details: he wore black commando gear, close-fitting fatigues, utility belt, leather gloves, combat boots, even a full-face stocking cap, and black paint shaded the skin around his eyes. Hard-core.
“Let him up,” Anastasia commanded. She stood before us, at the sniper’s head, in perfect position to stomp one of her heels through his skull. Not a hair or fold of clothing ruffled, she didn’t look like she’d been climbing trees.
Lee growled, a gruff noise between a bark and a sigh, and the vampire said, “Let go. I’ll handle this.”
Lee leaned away from the sniper, who jumped to his feet as soon as the pressure was off him. The guy was patting down pockets like he was searching for something he’d misplaced—the first sign of panic he’d shown. Maybe he had stakes or crosses stashed somewhere.
Anastasia didn’t give him time. She grabbed his neck with a hand, fingers bent like claws, stepped around him like they were part of some strange tango. He clutched her arm and screamed, a noise of gruff, primal fear. From behind now, she wrapped her arm around his face and snapped. It all happened in a second. He crumpled in her arms.
I looked away. Lee was panting, crouched on the ground, head bent. His skin had taken on a sickly, grayish tone. Blood draining in fear—or near to shifting?
/> “Lee?” I murmured.
“I’m okay,” he said, his voice rough. He pulled himself back from the edge. His breathing slowed, and his skin returned to its brown human tone.
Anastasia wasn’t breathing at all. She knelt, the sniper still in her arms, holding his body close, his head cradled on her shoulder. I took a deep breath, collecting scents, gathering information. The sniper—he was still warm. He hadn’t started cooling in death—because his heart was still beating. Anastasia had broken his neck without killing him. She’d known exactly what she was doing.
If I’d had the chance, I probably would have just beaten the guy’s head in or ripped his throat out, depending on how far I was gone. Anastasia’s calculating action left a chill in my gut. I didn’t want to have to look in his eyes and see the knowledge of his impending death. I was a coward. I just wanted a normal life, and this was more proof that I wasn’t cut out for a life so red in tooth and claw.
She was murmuring to him, in mocking seductive tones. “Hush there, darling. You played the game and lost. That’s all. You’ll be able to sleep soon enough, so relax.”
The sniper’s body was limp, still. But his eyes were wide, shining, unblinking. Terrified. I gagged on the lump in my throat.
Gently, careful to keep his head and neck still, to keep him alive for the next few moments at least, she peeled off the knit mask, sliding it up his face, then letting it fall off the top of his head.
“Oh my God,” I said, stepping back, hand over my mouth.
It was Ron Valenti. One of the producers of this horror show.
Chapter 16
He’d covered his clothing with pine sap to mask his scent. Until we were nearly under him, he didn’t even smell like a person, much less one we knew. If I’d caught his scent moving back and forth earlier, it was because he’d been here all week.
Anastasia took the news without a reaction. She stroked his hair, crooning at him like he was a babe in arms.
Kitty's House of Horrors kn-7 Page 16