Burning for Autumn

by Freya Barker

  I pull out my phone, but before I can dial out, it starts ringing.

  “Luna,” I answer with a quick glance at my screen. “I was just about to—”

  “He’s got her.” She sounds out of breath like she’s running. “The fire alarm went off, I told her to stay put with her assistant, Sandy, in the office while I checked it out. When I came back Sandy was trying to get up off the floor—bleeding from a head wound—and Autumn was gone.”

  “Son of a goddamn fucking bitch!” Hauling out with my foot, I upend the coffee table, the remaining jars flying through the room, but Luna doesn’t stop talking.

  “…seen leaving with a Jeff Youngman, age forty-eight, and getting into a silver newer model Ford Ranger. I’m getting in my car now.”

  “On my way,” I bark, “call when you have a visual.”

  “What the fuck?” I storm out of the house and almost plow Ramirez over, who was running toward me. “What happened, I hear you yelling and cussing—”

  “Jeffrey Youngman.” I shove the container I’m still clutching in my fist at him. “He’s one of Autumn’s patients,” I clarify, having pulled the pieces together. I never lose stride as Tony hustles to keep up. “He’s got her.”

  “Hold up.” He yanks at my arm. “Where are you going?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? He’s got her. Caused a distraction at the hospital and snatched her right from under Luna’s eyes. I’ve got to get out there.” I try to shrug loose, but Ramirez holds on tight, and I swing around sticking my face in his and yell, “Let go!”

  “Think, goddammit, before you go off half-cocked. Where would he take her?” His question gives me pause and I take a step back. “That pyre out there is not an accident. That woman has been dead for a week or two. My guess is he was waiting for Autumn. He’s bringing her here. Think about it—what if he already knew she was here only temporarily? What if he was trying to find a way to keep her here?”

  “By supplying victims?” My tone is mocking, because it’s almost too farfetched to conceive, but my friend is poker-faced.

  “Absolutely. You’re trying to bring rationale into the equation, but you know there’s nothing rational about the way this guy’s brain works. He was angry when he saw you got the jump on him with Autumn, lashed out in anger at her. Maybe lashed out at this poor woman. My gut is telling me he’s bringing her here.”

  “He’ll see the Tahoe,” I consider, warming up to Tony’s logic.

  “Give me the keys, I’ll pull it back here, behind those trees.” He points at a small grove bordering one side of the yard.

  I toss them at him. “Grab the Remington from the clip in the back. Extra ammo in the glove box.” As soon as he jogs out of sight, I call Luna back. “We’re at his house, Ramirez thinks he’s coming back here. Head west on the 160. Right before the 140 cutoff, there’s a dirt road on the left side. About half a mile down, there’s a fork. Hang left. If you pick him up before you get here, give me a call.”

  Five minutes later, my Tahoe is mostly out of sight, Ramirez is crouched down on the far end of the porch, and I’m inside hiding in the small hallway. I’m able to keep an eye on the driveway through the narrow window in the front door.

  It doesn’t take long before I see the sun bounce off the hood of a silver pickup truck speeding toward the house.

  Autumn

  I sit quietly with my hands clenched in my lap, as far away from him as I can get within the confines of the pickup truck. The barrel of his gun remains pointed at me, and I’m still trying to process what got me here.

  At first it was shock when he barged into the office, immediately hitting poor Sandy in the head with the butt of the gun he was carrying. She was knocked to the ground, but I didn’t get a chance to check on her because he was already dragging me out of there and into a waiting elevator. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds. By the time the elevator doors closed, I got angry—yelled at him—but he never said a word. He quietly held up his phone, showing me a picture that froze every combative cell in my body.

  I still battle the sobs that want to escape at the sight of Boots and Ziggy, chained to a cinderblock. They looked to be at the bottom of an old well, a thin stream of water coming from the green garden hose hanging over the edge.

  He didn’t need to tell me, I understood completely: I put up a fight; my cats will die a horrifying death.

  I keep telling myself Keith will find me. I’m sure Luna has discovered I’m gone by now and would’ve been in contact, but when he turns onto the 160, driving away from Durango, that hope gets thin. Any escape scenario I can imagine means my cats perish, and I honestly don’t know what I will do when the time comes I may have to make a choice—their life or my own.

  “Your hands—they’re soft. Caring.”

  I almost jump out of my skin when his low voice fills the cab, my heart thundering in my chest.

  “I’ve never felt touch like that. Special—or at least I thought it was.”

  Keep him talking. The thought swirls persistently through my mind.

  “Why?” I turn my eyes to him and he seems surprised at my question. “Why the fires?” I push.

  “I couldn’t let you leave. Not when I just found you. They were burning for you, a gift—for you. As long as you have patients, you can’t leave. Then I saw you with him.”

  The gentle timbre of his voice stands in terrifying contrast to the madness contained in his message.

  “You were responding, I could tell. You smiled at me.” His voice crescendos as he turns his head toward me. I struggle not to heave when I see the insanity in his eyes. “I thought you were my salvation, but you are nothing but a seductress.” Spittle flies from his lips as he hisses the words at me.

  I can do nothing but stare back at the pure hatred twisting his face, when it suddenly morphs back into the quiet, placid mask as he turns back to the road.

  His voice, soft once again, he continues his soliloquy. “It’s an honor, you know? Being blessed by fire. The Vikings honored their loved ones with fire. Even to this day, there are cultures and religions that use fire to send their dead to a higher realm.”

  He falls silent, focusing on the road ahead. Just a minute or so later, he slows down, turns on his blinker and turns left onto a dirt road. I look in the side mirror and watch the highway disappear farther and farther from sight. Then he makes another left turn. My instinct for self-preservation is too strong, and I make the decision in a split second.

  Reaching for my seat belt clip at the same time I pull on the door lever, I launch my upper body toward the opening door. I’m already thinking about rolling the moment I hit the ground, when my body is suddenly yanked back into the truck by my hair. I can’t stop the scream flying from my mouth, as the truck comes to a stop with screeching tires in front of an old ramshackle farmhouse.

  He drags me by the hair over the center console and out the driver’s side door. With my legs still in the vehicle, my body plummets, my legs fly, and I hit the ground hard, knocking the air from my lungs when I land flat on my back. His body leans down over me, one hand still tangled in my hair and the other pressing the barrel of the gun against the side of my head.

  “Get up,” he hisses, pulling up on my hair. Still gasping for breath, I scramble to get my feet under me.

  As he’s dragging me up the steps of the porch, I see movement to my right, and the next moment I hear a yell.

  “Red! Down!”

  With the sound of Keith’s voice a rush of adrenaline surges through me, and I instantly let my body drop down, ripping hair from my head.

  Shots are fired, more screeching tires sound as chaos ensues, and all I can do is cover my head with my arms. I hear one last shot, and then a heavy silence settles around me.

  “Jesus, baby…are you hurt? Talk to me, Red.” I feel Keith’s hand on my back as he brushes away the hair covering my face with the other.

  “I’m okay,” I whisper, following it immediately
with, “Is he dead?”

  Keith doesn’t say anything as he helps me to my feet, immediately turning and pressing my head to his chest, and I already know the answer. Relieved and shaky, I grab onto his shirt and bury my face, willing away the tears that want to fall. Suddenly I stiffen in his arms.

  “Oh no…my cats.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tilt my head back and my eyes well when I see the confused concern in his beautiful face. “Boots and Ziggy. He had them all this time. He’s slowly killing them, and I don’t know where.”

  It takes me a minute to explain about the picture on his phone.

  “Stay right there,” he orders as he steps around me.

  He should know by now I don’t take orders well, and I turn around to find him bent over the body of Jeffrey Youngman, rifling through his pockets. He’s dead. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. A large pool of blood has formed under his body, and as unscathed as it looks from this angle, I know there’s a good-sized hole in him somewhere to cause such a large leak.

  I’m surprised at how unmoved I am at the sight. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a dead body, but it’s the first time I’ve seen someone who died a violent death.

  “Is this them?” Keith holds up the phone and the first tear starts rolling when I realize they may not even be alive anymore. I swallow hard and nod sharply.

  “Show me,” Tony, who I’m surprised seeing, steps up and takes the phone from Keith. “That’s a well.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I agree.

  “I think I know where it is.” He turns to Keith. “When I was moving the Tahoe behind the trees, I drove over a garden hose just like that.”

  Keith is already running before Tony even finishes talking.

  “Where are they off to?” I just start moving after them when Luna appears by my side, watching the guys disappear around the corner. She looks at me and her face softens. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry—” Without slowing my pace, I hold up my hand to stop her.

  “I’m fine. He had my cats. Stuck them in some hole, chained them down and it’s filling slowly with water. Tony thinks he knows where it is.” Beside me, Luna picks up her pace.

  Behind the house, I spot the hose Tony was referring to and we follow it into the trees. That’s where we see the guys, Tony is lifting a lid from the crumbled wall of what appears an old well. Luna sprints past me, and by the time I reach the well, Keith is already lowering her into the hole.

  Chapter 28

  Keith

  I died a thousand deaths.

  I never understood the concept of that phrase until today.

  Luna’s call started the count. When I saw the door swing open on that speeding truck and caught a glimpse her red hair swinging toward the opening, before being violently yanked back, I swear it felt like I’d never draw my next breath. Seeing Autumn with a gun pressed against her temple, it was all I could do not to storm out of my hiding place and tear that fucking miscreant limb from limb with my bare hands. One last remaining fiber of common sense is all that held me back from what likely would’ve ended in a loss I can’t even begin to conceive.

  Not with Autumn beside me in the Tahoe, alive, breathing, and tending to her two half-drowned cats while I speed to the nearest vet.

  It was actually Luna’s bullet that killed him. She pulled up just as I burst out of the front door. Both Ramirez and I were firing, and when he went down, my focus shifted to Autumn lying in a crumpled heap on the porch. I didn’t see his gun come up until it was almost too late. Luna did and took him out with a single shot to the head.

  We’d been just in time. I initially thought we were too late—only two little cat faces barely sticking up from the rising water—but Luna yelled at me to lower her. With a strength that still amazes me in that small body of hers, she somehow managed to pick up the heavy cinderblock, scoop up the cats, and lift all three up into our waiting hands.

  “How are they doing?” I peek over at the sorry pile of fur on Autumn’s lap. It had taken until the first emergency vehicle came down the driveway, to get the damn chains off the cats’ necks. Both had nasty abrasions from trying, God knows how long, to pull out of those makeshift collars.

  “They’ll be okay.” Autumn’s words are confident, but the tone of her voice is not.

  I go a little faster. I’ll be damned if I let that monster take one more thing from her. She’s lost enough at his hands. And I almost lost her.

  I love her.

  I’m actually surprised I’m able to identify this feeling of having your heart so deeply connected to another person’s, you can actually feel every one of their emotions. It’s both amazing and terrifying.

  “I love you,” I blurt out. Not exactly a romantic declaration, given the circumstances, but one I feel compelled to make nonetheless. “I can be an idiot, I have a temper that gets the best of me, and I have no fucking idea what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway because I love you.”

  Her eyes—big, shiny green orbs behind those red glasses that miraculously survived the ordeal—find mine, and I don’t need to hear the words, I can see them clear as day.

  I’m not a fool. I know love alone does not solve every problem. We’ve got a lot of shit going on, a lot of things to sort out, but I’m sure we can battle through them—one by one.

  “You wait,” I instruct her when we pull into the emergency veterinary clinic. “I’ll come around and take them from you.”

  We’d wrapped the cats in the windbreaker I keep in the back of the Tahoe, and I scoop the whole bundle from her lap. She hustles ahead and pulls the clinic door open for me.

  It’s not until I hand both cats over to the vet, that Autumn grabs onto my arm, shaking like a leaf. Delayed reaction. I quickly wrap my arms around her before she hits the floor, and an alert assistant shuffles us into a small examination room, giving us some privacy.

  “Let it go,” I mumble in her hair, after sitting down on a plastic chair and pulling her onto my lap. “Let it all go.”

  I know what it’s like when adrenaline wears off. It leaves you feeling emotionally raw and physically exhausted. Adrenaline can sustain you under dire circumstances but there comes a time, when the immediate pressure is gone, that the full impact of all you’ve been through hits you full force. I’ve seen men break under that wave. Hell, there’ve been times where I’ve been so overcome; I buried myself in a bottle. Downside of that option is waking up the next day feeling like the crap stuck to the bottom of your boot.

  Unsure how much time has lapsed, her shaking has subsided some, and she lifts her face from where it was buried in my neck.

  “Thank you.” Her already smoky voice sounds even raspier, and I brush a soft kiss to the crease between her eyebrows.

  “Always,” I promise.

  Autumn

  When we walk through the front door, it’s hard to imagine it was only about eight hours ago I left to go to work.

  Keith disappears into the hallway to his office and I collapse on the couch. Both Jack and Gizmo come over, sniffing me up and down. They can smell their buddies, I’m sure.

  The vet assured us both cats should be fine, but since they’re both at risk for infection, they were put on IV antibiotics and will be kept at the clinic for at least forty-eight hours. I was able to see them before we left, and almost started bawling when Ziggy actually purred when I scratched her behind the ear.

  Almost, but not quite. I’ve done enough of that in the past twenty-four hours to last a bloody lifetime.

  “Come with me.”

  I open my eyes and find Keith standing over me, his hand stretched out. I let him pull me up and lead me to the guest bathroom, where water is filling the tub. Without a word, he starts stripping me, carefully examining every square inch of my body. I let him. I get what this is about. I can tell him a million times I’m fine, but he’ll still need to see for himself.

  “You’re starting to bruise here,” he says, whispering his f
ingers over my shoulder and down to the swell of my butt. “Here too.”

  “Probably the fall out of the truck,” I suggest.

  “Hmm. Get in, Red. Relax. I’ll be right back.”

  He holds my hand as I step into the tub and groan with pleasure when I slowly sink down in the water. He rolls up a towel and props it in my neck before leaving me alone.

  I’m almost asleep when he walks back in, carrying a bottle of cold water and a plate with cheese, rolled up lunchmeat, and slices of apple.

  “No wine?” I joke to hide the sudden swell of emotion at his gentle care for me.

  “Not until you properly hydrate and get something in your stomach. You haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “I bet you haven’t either,” I return.

  “You didn’t think this was all for you, did you?” He hands me the plate, sets the bottle on the edge of the tub, and promptly starts stripping out of his clothes, and sinking into the water facing me.

  It’s kind of amazing, really: just being with someone. Not much talking, not necessarily doing anything other than feeding the body, and nourishing the soul.

  I could easily stay in this moment, oblivious of the passing of time, if not for the insistent buzz of Keith’s phone in his pocket. Setting the almost empty plate on the floor, he reaches for his jeans.

  “Blackfoot,” he snaps into the receiver, but his soft eyes never leave mine, holding on to that connection a little longer. “Make it here, and make it half an hour.” Ending the call, he tosses it carelessly on the pile of clothes. “Come here.”

  This time the order is gentle enough to sound more like an invitation. I scoot over, turning so I can fit myself between his cocked legs, my upper body against his chest. His arms come around me and his chin leans on my shoulder. I can feel the heat of his swollen cock in the small of my back.

  “My plan to get you so relaxed, you’d have no trouble falling asleep in my arms later, has hit a glitch.” Even as he’s talking, his hand slides down between my legs, cupping my sex. “I have exactly twenty minutes…” He moves his feet between my stretched legs, slowly spreading my knees as wide as they can go. “…to make you come…” Fingers slide along my crease, already slick with arousal. All it takes is the deep vibration of his voice behind me. “…and leave you enough time…” First one, and then a second digit slips inside, slowly pumping in and out. Already my hips undulate and soft groans escape under his ministrations. “…to get dressed before…” His other hand slides through my curls, finding my clit easily. Blood rushes in my ears, my mouth falls open as my own fingers pluck mindlessly at my nipples. “…they get here.”