I’d already started turning back the way I’d come when a flicker of movement stilled my footsteps. I strained my eyes against the darkness—did the wealthy not believe in night lights?
My own breathing was so loud I couldn’t hear anything else in the hallway. The air was still and damp, the earthy aroma of leaf mold clinging to my nails from my earlier run.
I was imagining things. Spooking at shadows. Being just as cowardly as I’d been a decade earlier.
Then, ever so faintly, a dark silhouette became visible stalking out of Clarence’s room.
Chapter 14
It was a man—or so I assumed when I saw the sausage-like bundle heaved over one shoulder. No, not a bundle. That had to be Clarence, dead or knocked out or so sick he hadn’t even woken when he was gathered up and spirited away.
Just like my family’s pelts. For half a second, I was back in my childhood den. Quivering, four-legged, under the porch where I’d run in my terror. Listening to the pounding of feet on floorboards above me. Huddling there for an eternity after silence descended, until my twin’s face peeped in, upside down.
“She’s here!”
“Thank goodness.” My mother crouched at the edge of the yard. “My baby. You’re safe.”
She opened her arms and I crept into them, nosing for safety. The moon glowed bright above us, but my father stumbled as he came down the stairs toward us.
Human eyes were nearly blind in the darkness. Otherwise, Bright would never have asked:
“Where did you hide the wolfsfells?”
I shook. Not just my head, but my entire body.
I didn’t want to answer. Not when I’d only hidden myself rather than my family’s skins.
FOR THE SECOND TIME in a matter of minutes, I blinked away the past and returned to the present. I’d been a child then. Barely self-named. In the interim, I’d trained myself to be a warrior. Had learned to protect and attack with dagger and gun.
I’d lost my family’s pelts, but I wouldn’t lose Clarence. The tricky part would be taking down this intruder without harming the kid.
The dark shape stalked toward me, boots loud on hardwood flooring. But no one else stirred. The household was sleeping.
I could only hope Clarence—bent over the intruder’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes—was also sleeping. The fact that two people had died near here over the two nights preceding this one didn’t bode well for the Smythewhite teenager.
Regardless, I wasn’t letting this intruder escape.
The staircase yawned wide and open behind me. If the kidnapper made it past, he could escape into the downstairs and be gone before I found him. My fingers fell to my thigh. Slowly, ever so slowly, I eased up the snap restraining my dagger....
The barest click as metal slipped away from metal. The intruder hesitated.
The bundle on his shoulder slid sideways, and he hefted it back into place with an effort. He reached out to steady himself against Luke’s door....
And I sprang. Not wolf-like. Only human.
Still, the dagger was as good as fangs. It ripped into the intruder’s shirt, far enough away from Clarence so I wasn’t concerned about stabbing the teenager.
“Drop him!” I barked.
The intruder reached for me rather than obeying. I fended him off with my free hand.
For a moment, we were locked in place. His fingers were strong, his grasp like iron. In self-defense, my dagger slid past fabric and into skin.
The intruder yelped, reeling backwards. He was taller than me, but I could take him down. I knew it. I’d use the intruder’s top-heaviness against him, topple him to the floor being careful not to pin Clarence, hold him at dagger point until....
All of this flashed through my mind in the time it took Luke to rouse himself from sleep and react to our struggle. Or so I gathered when the door we’d been leaning against swung outward with the force of a charging werewolf.
The pivoting wood knocked both me and the intruder sideways. The dagger clattered out of my fingers as I lost both my balance and my grip.
And my plan didn’t come to fruition as intended. Instead, I wound up being the one on the floor as the intruder sprinted back the way he’d come.
FOR A MOMENT, I LAY there, stunned.
Luke was naked. No, not naked. He was wearing boxers.
And now my eyes could see in the darkness?
I shook my head, trying to clear it. My temple throbbed, and I couldn’t figure out whether it was due to my fall or to lending Bastion my pelt.
“Are you alright?”
Luke crouched beside me. He held me down when I started rising.
“Let me go. Clarence....”
Luke was so close I could see his nostrils flaring. “Blood. Who’s hurt?”
He’d smelled it. I could almost see his wolf waiting behind his human eyes.
And that’s what I needed at the moment. A wolf to track down the intruder.
Grabbing my dagger, I sprang to my feet. Okay, so “sprang” is perhaps a little overly ambitious for what actually happened. I ended up steadying myself against Luke’s shoulder while I spoke to his still-crouching form.
“Someone’s taken Clarence down the back staircase....”
Because that door yawned wide in the darkness. It hadn’t been open earlier—I was sure of it.
80% sure of it.
Suddenly not so totally sure.
But Luke accepted my first impression. “I’ll go first.”
“No.” I grabbed him as he started in the obvious direction. “We need to split up. Catch him in the middle. The kitchen has a back door. If he knows this house, he’d go straight out....”
“Okay.”
Luke was gone. One moment he was kneeling at my feet, the next he’d disappeared down the main staircase so quickly I barely saw him moving.
It was the darkness. It had to be the darkness. Or perhaps the skinless could do that? Move super-humanly fast?
It didn’t matter. Clarence was depending on us. I clenched the dagger tight in my right hand as I sprinted down the hall in the opposite direction. Pressing the door to the servant staircase a little wider so I could pass through it, something wet slid across my palm.
Blood. I hoped the wound belonged to the intruder rather than to Clarence. I hoped....
I didn’t bother to muffle my footfalls as I galloped down the stairs. The door at the bottom was closed. I flung it open just as Luke had done up above.
Here, there was a light.
The kitchen hallway looked nothing like it had the previous evening. At the time, even this distant off-shoot of the party had been full of hum and bustle. Now, the space was museum-like. Cavernous. Empty.
Was I right to think the intruder had gone out the back way? What was stopping him from waltzing out the front?
I hesitated, torn between turning left into the kitchen or right into the main part of the residence. Then a sound emerged from my left.
A muffled sob. The low rumble of an adult male voice.
Clarence is in there. And so was his attacker.
It wasn’t much, but the element of surprise was all I had going for me. I eased the door knob clockwise until the latch released its hold on the jamb.
Then I burst through, spinning sideways to shield myself behind the door.
Chapter 15
“What’s she doing?”
The questioning voice was as high-pitched as a child’s. Luke’s reply was deeper and entirely calm.
“Protecting you from zombie giraffes, of course.”
Their laughter was sweet as I sidestepped the door and took in the kitchen’s inhabitants. Luke crouched in front of a blanket-wrapped figure who, for half a second, resembled Bastion. But, no, of course that wasn’t the case. My cousin lay unconscious in the back seat of our family car....
As if reacting to those scrambled thoughts, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Ignoring it, I took a step forward even as Luke slid past me out the door.
“Clarence, I’m Honor. It’s good to finally meet you.”
From the way his family treated him, I’d expected someone small and ineffectual. But Clarence got over his fright quickly, unfolding into a teenager who was nearly as well-built as my cousins. His voice—when not surprised by a dagger-wielding woman whirling into his kitchen—was a mid-range tenor. “The pleasure,” he told me, “is all mine.”
The seventeen-year-old took my hand and lifted it to peach-fuzz-topped lips as if he were a fifties movie-star. Dark eyes flashed above freckled cheeks. The gesture would have been more debonair if he hadn’t been dressed in space-ship pajamas.
Still, I resisted the impulse to pat him on the head and instead spoke to Luke as he returned from his mission far too quickly to have done much scouting. “Do you want to search outside or should I do it?”
Luke shook his head, pulling milk out of the fridge as if we were preparing for a tea party rather than tracking down an intruder. “Too late.”
Too late to find Clarence’s almost-kidnapper? Luke moved fast, but even he would barely have had time to circle the house and come in the back before I joined him in the kitchen a few minutes ago. In the thirty seconds he’d been gone just now, he could have done no more than lock the front door. How could he know the kidnapper was gone?
I frowned. But before I could puzzle out what Luke might be hiding, my phone buzzed three more times in quick succession.
Only Grace would be so impatient. I took a step sideways, unlocking my phone while half listening to Clarence and Luke argue over beverage selection.
“I don’t like cocoa,” Clarence whined. Never mind that he was the victim of a failed kidnapping attempt and needed something warm and sweet to derail shock before adrenaline started fading.
I would have been tempted to browbeat him into submission. Luke just shrugged, pulling sugar and powdered chocolate off the top shelf without having to stretch to reach the packages. “It’s not crap from a mix.”
“You can do that?” Clarence sounded so floored by the notion of homemade cocoa that I couldn’t help smiling as I opened my text messages.
Then my amusement faded. Because the last message told me exactly what I’d wanted to hear an hour earlier and now couldn’t handle.
“Where are you?” Grace demanded. “Bastion is wide awake.”
BEFORE I COULD PULL together an answer, the elder Smythewhites burst into the room as a unit. They must have heard me pounding down the stairs. Or perhaps parental intuition had drawn them to the kitchen. Whatever the reason, they were here, using up all of the air in the room.
“Honey, what happened?”
Clarence dropped his mug on the counter, visibly shrinking as his mother threw her arms around him. One moment, he was seventeen going on thirty. The next he was a little boy afraid of a bump in the night.
“I...I’m not sure. I think someone came in through my balcony...?”
“Wait,” I tapped into my phone, sidling toward the back door as Clarence fumbled through an explanation. I grabbed a handful of my curls and tugged them, hoping pain would dislodge a solution. Could I take advantage of the kidnapping aftermath to sneak Bastion into the residence? Maybe tell the Smythewhites that my family was an evidence-gathering crew? Or....
“Where are you going?” Luke stood in front of the exit, even though I was certain he’d been ten feet away a second earlier. He cocked his head, reading my text messages upside down. “Who’s Bastion?”
“How can you know the kidnapper is gone?” I countered. “We need to check the backyard. Or rather, you do. My sinuses....”
Luke’s lip quirked ever so slightly. “Nice sidestep.”
I had sidestepped, both literally and figuratively. And Luke had inched over to join me, his hand hovering six inches from my hip as if we were preparing to waltz.
The incipient contact burned. Like when Luke had run his hands across my pelt, pressing deep until the palms of his hands bit through the fur and hit the skin beneath it.
Only there was no pelt in the mix this time. Just me, my hormones, and Luke.
Tensing, I forced myself backwards, expecting Luke to demand more information about my cousin. Instead, he answered my initial question, speaking so quietly I could barely hear.
“I smelled this door when I came in and the front one a moment ago. They both reek of Lysol across their entire surface. The Smythewhite cleaning crew wiped down the door knobs when they left yesterday. No one but me has touched them from the inside since.”
He paused, his eyes full of lupine intensity. “No one left the house. You’re the only one who entered it.”
For a moment, I forgot my phone buzzing angrily as my twin resisted my request for patience. I ignored Clarence’s parents hovering around him, ignored the way Mrs. Smythewhite stepped aside to speak fast and urgent into her cell phone.
Instead, I focused on Luke while translating his intent stare into words to make sure I understood him. “You’re saying the kidnapper dropped Clarence in the kitchen then circled back around to the main stairs while you were outside and I was coming down the back way.”
“That’s my guess.”
“So either the kidnapper has been hiding in the house all night waiting for an opening...”
Luke picked up where I left off. “Or whoever took Clarence had a reason to be here from the start.”
Chapter 16
The only people who had a reason to be here overnight were me, Luke, and the Smythewhites. I knew Luke wasn’t responsible since he’d interrupted my tussle with the kidnapper, which left Mr. and Mrs. Smythewhite as the only possible culprits.
Of the two, Mrs. Smythewhite was tall enough but was as slender as my sister. If she’d tossed Clarence over her shoulder, she would have fallen down the stairs...assuming she even made it that far.
Mr. Smythewhite, on the other hand, had the muscles of a forty-something who spent several hours per week lifting weights at the gym. He could easily have tossed Clarence over one shoulder then trotted down the stairs.
“But why?” I started, only to be interrupted by the sound of sirens. Soft at first, they grew louder and shriller by the second.
Mrs. Smythewhite had called the police. Of course she had. And, given the wealth of the potential victim’s family, the force had expedited their response.
I turned my back on Luke and the dilemma he presented. Typed a terse reply to my twin. “You can’t come now.”
Grace, unfortunately, was a double-thumb typer. Her response appeared before I could turn my phone off.
“WTF?! Bastion is awake. Let me repeat that. Your DYING cousin is available to hunt for his wolfsfell. Get off your ass and unlock the gate for us. WE’RE ON OUR WAY.”
I felt Luke’s warmth against my back one second before I looked up to find him once again reading over my shoulder. I braced myself, expecting him to understand that “wolfsfell” plus “cousin” added up to “woelfin.”
Instead, he latched onto a different part of Grace’s message. “Dying?”
I nodded.
“He needs to be here?”
The doorbell rang, as assertively as if it had been punched by my sister. But I’d timed the drive here from Walmart. I still had at least five minutes before this crime scene turned into a farce of familial proportions.
“Honor?”
Luke’s prompt was as sweet as sun-warmed honey. Despite my better sense, I nodded a second time and allowed him to pry the phone out of my fingers.
“I’ll deal with it,” he promised. “Don’t let Clarence out of your sight.”
DEALING WITH IT DIDN’T seem to mean averting a visit from my family. Or so I concluded when my flagging muscles grew more energetic with every footstep I took trailing the Smythewhites to the entryway.
On the one hand, it was nice to feel the fog of exhaustion lifting as my pelt was driven toward me. On the other hand, wolf skins didn’t fly through the air solo. Which meant Luke hadn’t managed to talk my family i
nto staying away.
The police, of course, were the more pressing issue. “Is there some place we can go to talk with Clarence?” the older officer asked, fighting back a yawn.
His silent partner was more perceptive. Icy blue eyes narrowed as they passed over me, and I twitched in reaction.
Was it possible Slim had already visited the station and filed his complaint? Was I wrong in assuming we’d gotten tossed out of our motel due to an overdrawn credit card?
But no handcuffs were produced. Blue eyes skimmed past to assess the hall, the parents, the teenager wrapped like a burrito in his blanket. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Smythewhite sounded like anything but a concerned dad when he interrupted our trip from foyer into the more private portion of the downstairs.
“This isn’t really a police matter.” Clarence’s father might as well have erected a flashing sign above his head saying, “I’m the murderer!” No wonder Officer Blue Eyes sidestepped until he stood between father and son.
For my part, I itched to drag the head of the household away and debrief him with wolf fangs. But there was no evidence for Mr. Smythewhite’s guilt beyond surly temperament. So I held my peace while Officer Blue Eyes raised both brows.
“An attempted kidnapping only a day after a death on the same premises? I’d say it’s a good thing you called us.”
Clarence shivered despite the blanket cocoon that had heated his cheeks to redness. “But Serena just fell over the balcony, right? We’d been drinking a little....”
This was news to his mother, and apparently news she didn’t want broadcast. “Honey!”
“Perhaps we could speak with Clarence alone?” This was the yawning officer. He didn’t look so sleepy now. In fact, his hand rested ever so subtly on his handgun.
By this point, we were standing in front of an open door leading into a darkened lounge area. The family den, I’d concluded when I ransacked it earlier. Now, I hesitated, trying to think up an excuse for coming inside that wouldn’t make the police ask the wrong sort of questions.
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