Walk on the Wild Side

by Christine Warren

  "So Drusilla was the last Felix's… what?"

  "His daughter. Everyone could see it was a bad match, but for a time it served its purpose."

  Kitty had a sudden thought and chuckled. "Sorry. It just occurred to me that's why Martin never remarried," she explained when Max looked the question. "After Misty and then Drusilla… I mean, talk about scared straight!"

  Max laughed and used the arm around her waist to urge her toward the car. "Come on. I've had enough excitement for one day. Let's get back to the city and get something to eat. How do you feel about steak?"

  "After that little interlude inside?" Kitty asked. "Predatory."

  They had each taken about two steps toward the Mercedes when the growl of an engine had them turning to look up the drive. A heavy, dark motorcycle liberally coated with dust came belting toward them at a speed Kitty's mind subconsciously registered as insane. Before anything beyond that could register, Max had swung her around and positioned himself between her and the machine so that she had to peer around his ribcage to get a glimpse of what was happening. She could feel his muscled frame tense, but he made no move to confront the driver, who finally eased up on the throttle and brought the bike to a skidding halt just a few feet in front of Max and Kitty. Without cutting the motor, the man on the bike dropped the kickstand and yanked off his helmet in one fluid motion.

  "We have trouble, baas,"' the newcomer said, ignoring Kitty in favor of focusing his intense, yellow-gold gaze squarely on Max.

  Kitty felt just fine with that, considering that the stranger looked like he topped out at a hair over six feet tall and probably weighed at least two hundred fifty pounds. And if an ounce of that was fat, Kitty swore to God she'd eat her new tennis shoes.

  In front of her, Max cursed. "Nick. What's going on?"

  "One of the men on the perimeter spotted camp signs on the ridge above the northern border."

  "Did you send someone to check it out?"

  "Yeah, only by the time Lou climbed up there, the camp was gone and it looked like whoever was there made an effort to wipe the trail."

  Max cursed again. Creatively. "Was he any good at it?"

  "Some. He covered their trail pretty good, but he didn't have time to wipe the places where he'd been testing the security system. And no matter how good he was with prints, no one can make two guys smell like just one."

  The tension in Max's body seemed to turn him to solid stone. "Who's on their trail?" he demanded in a voice as hard as his muscles.

  "David."

  "Good."

  "But it looks like they headed toward the dry canyon to the east of the community center."

  "And?"

  "Allison Avery's kindergarten class is doing a Wilderness Walk on the easy path at the base of the canyon. They were supposed to take a keep down there early this morning and be back by one."

  Reflexively, Kitty glanced at her watch. 2:42.

  "Does anyone know if she took a cell phone with her?"

  Nick nodded. "Jenni Jensen, the nursery school teacher, said she always has it on her, especially when she's got the kids out of the classroom, but she's not answering. Hopefully, it's just because the canyon walls are blocking the signal, but there's no way to tell for sure."

  What Max said at that news was violent and comprehensive, but even before he uttered it, Kitty had grasped that the situation was not a good one. Now she wanted to know exactly what was at stake.

  Stepping out from Max's shadow, she moved to where both men could see her and scowled at them collectively. "What's going on?"

  Max glared down at her and reached a hand toward her shoulder. "Get back in the house," he commanded.

  Kitty twisted out of reach. "After you tell me what's going on."

  Copper eyes blazed for a moment, then narrowed to dangerous slits. "I don't have time. Get back in the house and stay there until I come back for you. I'm going with Nick."

  "You're going to chase after a guy for camping near your property? Or do you automatically assume that campers are a malicious danger that can never be trusted in the same canyon as a kindergarten class?"

  She couldn't help pushing, not even knowing the risk that she was taking. Max was clearly not in the mode to argue, or to slow down and answer questions, but Kitty already knew him well enough to know he wouldn't hurt her. Spank her ass, maybe, but not hurt her.

  But she took another step backward, just to be safe.

  Max stalked her like a predator. "We're going to find the nomad who's been trying to get through your father's security and to make sure he doesn't run into or hurt the kids who don't know he's out there. And while we do that, you are going to keep your pretty little ass in. The. House. Understand?"

  Kitty would have opened her mouth to argue, but that seemed a little silly. Especially once Max unleashed his Other speed in a leap that closed the distance between them faster than she could blink. By the time she was ready to launch a protest, he'd scooped her up, thrown her over his shoulder, and carried her bodily back through the front door of her father's house. Stopping in the hall, he deposited her on the slate tile, turned away, and locked the front door behind him on the way out.

  She stood for a moment, her hands at her sides, her eyes wide with disbelief. When her mind stopped spinning, she stared at the panels of solid wood in front of her and breathed, "Oh no, he didn't."

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  "HE DID NOT TRY TO LOCK ME INSIDE THE HOUSE LIKE a useless piece of fluff," Kitty muttered to herself as she eased open a door and peeked out into a corridor in the shadowed northern wing of her father's enormous, sprawling house. She barely mouthed the words, because she was trying not to make any noise. Partly because she didn't want to risk waking her father or incurring the wrath of his hovering nurse, but mostly because finding a hidden exit from a house became more difficult when people spotted you looking for it.

  Oh, when she'd first recovered from the shock of Max's high-handed tactics for getting her back into the house, she tried to maintain some semblance of dignity by walking calmly, if furiously, out the front door. She'd decided it served the jerk right if she took his car and drove herself back to Vegas without him. Let him find his own way back to the city. After treating her like some swooning heroine in a Dickensian novel, he could walk through the whole desert for all she cared.

  Unfortunately, things hadn't worked out exactly as she'd planned. She'd no sooner opened the door than two well-armed and seriously grim guards had materialized out of nowhere to inform her that the baas had instructed them that no one was to enter or leave the house until Max had returned. They had stood firm in the face of anger, threats, bribery, and outright whining, forcing her to close the door and indulge in some pacing to regroup.

  First, she had thought that if she just explained the situation to Martin—using the appropriate epithets to describe the particular brand of contempt in which she held Max's recent behavior—he would feel badly enough at her treatment to offer her an alternative method of getting back to the city. His nurse, however, out the kibosh on Plan B, proving as determined to keep her out of her father's room as the guards had been to keep her in the house.

  Kitty was now deep in the implementation of Plan C.

  It turned out that her father's house occupied several thousand square feet of rocky desert land near the southern edge of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge. Kitty had learned—thanks to an apple-cheeked housekeeper with long, dark braids and a fondness for gossip—that it boasted ten bedrooms, twelve baths, an indoor pool, a state-of-the-art projection screen theatre, tennis courts, a library, a fitness center, a sauna, a chef's kitchen that made Mrs. Sanchez (the housekeeper) sit down and weep, and a thousand-bottle wine cellar. The architect had designed it in the shape of a letter "F," with only the lower portion and crossbar kept open since Mr. Lowe had fallen ill. Since he no longer entertained or had guests to stay, the bedrooms and most of the specialty rooms had been closed up. Only the recepti
on rooms at the front of the house and Martin's suite at the junction of the crossbar remained open, along with the kitchens at the rear of the house. The pool and sauna at the end of the top wing hadn't been occupied in at least six months. Even the cleaners only went back there every couple of weeks these days, to dust and clean the windows. Take a right just beyond the pool, Mrs. Sanchez boasted, and you'd run into the doorway to the wine cellar her employer had ordered specially dug into the red rock below the house.

  Oh, the trouble that cellar had caused! According to the housekeeper, the zoning and building inspection people had kept Mr. Lowe on edge for weeks while they sorted that one out. Because it had no windows and would be located completely underground, the contractor had been unable to complete it without adding a second exit from the stone-lined space. Just in case of emergencies.

  Unlike the exits at the front, rear, and sides of the house, the exit from the wine cellar emerged not onto the well-manicured grounds immediately surrounding the house, but on the other side of the outdoor pool house. Out of sight of the main building.

  As far as Kitty was concerned, making a prompt statement of independence definitely qualified as an emergency.

  Straining her ears, she listened to the sounds of anyone else nearby but heard nothing beyond the faint stirring and humming of Mrs. Sanchez in the kitchen two rooms and a narrow hall behind her. The coast was clear.

  Keeping her back to the wall and her steps light, Kitty glided down the hallway in almost total silence. It took some concentration, but she felt kind of proud of herself that she could manage to move with such cat-like stealth. For the first time, she could almost believe being half-Leo might confer on her some actual advantages, instead of being like some kind of chronic disease she needed to learn to manage despite her resent. But that didn't stop her from thinking that these new sneaking skills would have come in even handier had she discovered them when she'd been fourteen instead of twenty-four.

  She made it down the hall and around the corner by the pool without seeing or hearing another soul. When she smelled the odor of fresh water, copper, and ionized air, she knew the pool must be close. Turning her head, she peered halfway over her shoulder and picked out the bend in the hall that the housekeeper had described. Bingo. She'd nearly made it.

  Kitty's heartbeat raced, and she struggled to keep her breathing in check as she rounded the corner and grasped the faux-antique latch on the cellar door. Pulling slowly, she gave silent thanks that her father's staff kept his house in such pristine condition that the hinges offered not even a sigh as they swung open to reveal a smooth stone stairway descending into darkness.

  Stepping onto the landing, Kitty quickly pulled the door closed behind her and paused to let her eyes adjust to the darkness around her. It happened almost instantly. She swore she could nearly feel her pupils dilating, opening wide and hungrily soaking up every small scrap of light in the narrow space. Within a couple of seconds, she could see where the plaster walls met the concrete foundation and where the foundation gave way to the rough sandstone beneath. A plain wooden handrail on the right crossed all three surfaces, pointing downward like a finger into the depths of the cellar. Unfortunately, what Kitty didn't see was a light switch.

  Frowning, she lifted both hands and ran them over the face of the walls on either side of her, but she felt nothing. When she tilted her head back, she saw a small fixture attached to the ceiling and whispered a curse. The switch must have been outside the door. For a moment she debated stepping back to look, but she'd made it all this way without attracting attention, and who knew when her luck might run out? Her vision seemed keen enough to keep her from tumbling headfirst down the staircase, so how much more light did she really need?

  Feeling a surge of confidence and more than a touch of awe at the power of her newly discovered senses, Kitty laid her hand lightly on the rail and stepped down.

  The stairway wasn't long, but it was steep and the change in temperature brought the fine hairs on Kitty's arms to attention by the time she reached the lower landing. The rail she'd been touching continued another two feet in front of her, then took a ninety-degree turn to the left and continued the length of two short paces before angling downward again. Following it, Kitty stepped down five more treads before the floor of the wine cellar leveled out in front of her.

  In the eerie quiet of the space, she could hear her breath echoing off the low stone ceiling. Down here, almost no light penetrated, leaving the room darker than pitch to human eyes and only slightly less inky to Kitty's keener sight. There simply wasn't enough light for even her Leo eyes to magnify. By straining, she was able to make out the difference in the quality of the darkness that indicated the presence of tall racks positioned along the near, left-hand wall and in what looked like a freestanding row to her right, which meant the far wall couldn't be any closer than a few feet beyond. The only way to tell for sure would be to look on the other side. If she didn't find the door elsewhere, she would have to.

  Stepping forward carefully, Kitty held her hands out before her and used the bulky shape of the racks on her right to guide her deeper into the gloom. The cellar smelled of dust and wood and stone, and if she'd had a light source and a tour guide, she might have enjoyed poking around and examining labels, but at the moment, she had other things on her mind.

  A few more steps brought her to a point where the wall to her left turned in, narrowing the area to a slender aisle barely wide enough for two to walk abreast. She continued on, trying to ignore the feeling that the racks on either side of her were leaning in on her, looming precariously overhead. It was just the dark playing tricks on her, she assured herself, but she hurried her pace regardless.

  The cellar aisle seemed to stretch on forever. Kitty followed it, hoping like heck that the inspectors had come out to ensure the builders had actually complied with the requirement for the second exit. Just when she was beginning to wonder if Mrs. Sanchez had known what she was talking about, Kitty reached the end of the aisle. Faced with the choice of either turning back or turning right, she glanced to the side and found another long aisle stretching off in that direction. But unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, she thought she saw a slightly lighter shade of blackness off in the distance.

  Crossing her fingers, Kitty took the right-hand turn and passed the ends of two more rows before reaching the far wall of the wine cellar. While the rectangular shape of the room ended there, the aisle in front of her continued as a narrow corridor bounded on each side by walls of bare stone, and off in the distance, the blackness definitely seemed to lighten.

  A surge of excitement pushed her forward and Kitty stepped eagerly. She soon discovered the hall to be even longer than she had estimated, but as she traveled down it and the increasing illumination became more apparent, she began to appreciate why it had been designed that way. Someone had thought ahead and anticipated a Leo making their way out of the cellar in darkness, because the length of the hall provided Kitty's eyes with the opportunity to adjust gradually to the increased light. By the time she reached the end of the corridor, her eyes were exposed to light equivalent to twilight shining in from a small room on the other side of the glass-and-wood door she found there.

  Opening the door, Kitty found herself stepping into a small bare room with a large hexagonal opening in the ceiling and a sturdy-looking ladder stretching up toward it. Triumph had her smiling as she scrambled up the wide heavy rungs.

  She slowed as she reached the top and cautioned herself not to charge out into the open like an escaping prisoner. Just because Mrs. Sanchez had told her the tunnel came out away from the main house didn't mean someone like Max would leave it unguarded, especially since a secret exit from any building provided an equally discreet means of entrance. Holding tight to the rungs, Kitty peered over the top of the aperture and swept a look around her.

  The tunnel, she quickly realized, emerged in a large gazebo several yards beyond the outdoor pool house, just as Mrs. Sanchez
had described. The hexagonal opening had been concealed by a set of benches built all around it and facing outward as if to take advantage of the property's wonderful views. Unfortunately, from what Kitty could see, the main views from the structure consisted of the back side of the pool house to the south, a sheer rock face to the east, and rocky desert stretched out toward the infinity of the west. To the north, the landscape sloped upward in the increasingly rocky terrain of the foothills of the nearby mountains.

  Having grown up in a place where mountains grew thick with foliage and green battled for supremacy with a thousand other shades of life, Kitty couldn't imagine the gazebo as a place where visitors would be eager to stop and take in the beauty of nature. It looked too harsh and forbidding for comfortable contemplation. Which was probably why someone had felt it would be a good place for the tunnel exit.

  And, apparently, a good place for a man to stand guard, armed with what looked like nothing but a pair of binoculars and an impressively complicated-looking walkie-talkie.

  The guard actually stood about thirty feet to Kitty's right, facing the sparse, rocky landscape to the north. He had his hands crossed over his chest, and his hip leaned against the side of a boulder as he scanned the horizon for any potential threats. She couldn't see his face, but she caught a whiff of dust and denim and sweat and realized the slight breeze she felt against her skin was coming from the direction he faced. He was upwind of her and she must have been fairly quiet, because he didn't even twitch as she eased herself over the top of the south-facing bench and crouched down behind its solid shelter to come up with a plan for her next move.

  With her back exposed to the pool area and the house beyond, Kitty didn't want to waste time. She needed to move quickly in order to minimize her chances of being seen, but her confidence in her new-found sneaking skill didn't extend to walking across the gravel landscaping that surrounded the gazebo. It seemed likely that someone had laid it down deliberately to keep skulkers like her from taking the house and the guards by surprise. Maybe if she could gather up a few pebbles, though, she could throw them and create a distraction long enough to bolt around the side of the house and up toward the drive. It wasn't much of a plan, but at the moment, it was the best Kitty could come up with.