by Kait Nolan
And I didn’t know how to stop it.
Chapter 6
Elodie
Someone is watching me.
I twitched my shoulders and resisted the urge to look behind me. Again. Because that would be too much of an admission that in the last two weeks, I’d turned into a paranoid freak. Okay, maybe not so much a freak. The whole town was on edge. It wasn’t a shock, really. We’d gotten Rich and Molly back, but nobody had been caught and punished for it. Whoever had snatched them was still out there. Somewhere. The sheriff was hypothesizing that whoever had done it had moved on when his plans were spoiled. Lots of people wanted to believe that, for obvious reasons. No one wanted to believe that one of our own was responsible for instilling night terrors in a ten year old or for Rich being laid up in the hospital still after having reconstructive surgery on his leg.
The part that made me a paranoid freak was that I was starting to wonder if the kidnapper was after me. Which was crazy. Because why would someone target me? I was nobody. I mean, unless you were a werewolf hunter who somehow managed to track my family line down despite all the ridiculous precautions my dad had taken to make us disappear. And what was the likelihood of that? The journal didn’t report any hunters for at least three generations. The entire point of my life was to stay off everybody’s radar, and I was really good at it. Well, except for the Barbie Squad, but who listened to them? No one noticed me.
“Yeah, that’s the girl that found the Phillips boy.”
I froze, my hand inches from the pack of paper towels. Okay, nobody had noticed me before I rescued Rich. Since then, I seemed to have acquired a certain level of notoriety, which Dad was less than pleased about. Given my aversion to being the center of attention, I didn’t care for it either. But that didn’t mean that someone was out to get me. What happened to Rich and Molly had absolutely nothing to do with me.
I looked casually down the aisle, first one way, then the other, frowning when I didn’t see anybody. Weird. She’d sounded like she was right there.
I grabbed the paper towels and stood, scanning over the top of the shelves for the others. Sawyer, David, and I were on a supply run at McIntyre’s Grocery and Mercantile. I’d learned a lot in the last two weeks on the job with Dr. McGrath. Not the least of which was the fact that, no matter how smart I might be, I was still even lower than an undergrad intern on the totem pole, and that meant I was a grunt, often relegated to the simplest and most boring of jobs. Any dreams of making some glorious scientific discovery that would immortalize my name in scientific journals had pretty well evaporated by now.
Still, I liked the work. I learned a lot through observation, and at least I got to be outside in the park. And I got to be with Sawyer. Not like anything had happened. No matter how I might wish otherwise, we were just friends. I knew that’s all we could be. Whatever was happening to me, I wasn’t willing to risk that final alleged catalyst. But hanging out with him was my guilty pleasure. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he was smart, almost reluctantly so, and he had a wicked sense of humor. When I was with him, I didn’t feel paranoid and freaked out. And strangely, I thought I was a good influence on him. Which sounds totally arrogant and stupid. But the anger he carted around like a shield seemed to take a backseat when he was with me, and it seemed like, maybe, he was starting to heal from his mother’s death.
On the far side of the store, I spotted two women looking at me and whispering. They were trying to look casual, glancing down at the end cap display, then back at me. I recognized them in that way that you recognize the faces of people you pass on a semi-regular basis in a small town, but I didn’t know them.
“I heard he was just covered in blood and gore—from some animal that maniac killed and spread around, but still—and she just radios in, calm as you please. That girl’s got ice in her veins.” The voice was as clear as if she’d been shouting.
Oh shit. The words sounded almost like praise, but were layered over with disgust. I wasn’t sure if that was for the maniac, the gore, or my professional attitude. I shouldn’t care. I didn’t care. I just wished she would shut up and leave.
“You okay?”
I jolted, bumping into Sawyer, who’d come up behind me with that curiously silent gait of his.
He put a hand briefly on my arm to steady me. “Bit jumpy today?”
Immediately I mourned the loss of his touch.
“Everyone’s jumpy,” I retorted.
His dark eyes searched my face, and I felt, not for the first time, as if he could see past all the walls and armor and defenses. Past the bullshit that kept everybody at arm’s length.
“What’s wrong?”
I really needed to work on my technique. “They’re talking about me.” I jerked my head toward the two old biddies, whose teased up hair seemed to bob with the animation of their conversation.
He lifted a brow. “And we have super hearing, do we?”
Apparently yes. “They keep looking over here while they’re talking,” I said defensively. “So unless I have something on my face that merits a distraction from their true conversation, they’re talking about me.”
Sawyer gave them a withering look. Both women’s cheeks reddened, and they moved on down into one of the taller aisles. He turned back to me and smiled. “Problem solved.”
My pulse skittered. “My hero,” I said.
“C’mon. David’s waiting at the register.”
We added our purchases to the pile and checked out, each of us grabbing a couple of bags to lug back to David’s Explorer. We’d had to park a couple of blocks away because they were doing some kind of work on the utilities under the street. The whole thing was a mess, with a clump of workers drilling down with jack hammers to get past the pavement. The noise was deafening, a staccato rumble that made my ears ache. The hammering stopped, but there was no silence. Cars drove by with a roar. Somebody coughed and sounded like they were right beside me. A shop bell jingled somewhere over a door. Down the street a kid shrieked and sprinted away from his mother.
“Tommy!” The mom tone snapped out, stopping the kid in his tracks. I could hear the crunch of his shoes on the grit and bits of gravel on the sidewalk across the street.
My head felt swimmy with too much input. Holy crap, how did Superman deal with this? Focus on something, I thought. That had worked with my sense of smell.
“They say that it’ll be months before the Phillips boy will walk again. And the little girl refuses to leave the house.”
I cocked my head, tuning in to another conversation from somewhere up the street.
“I heard the parents are considering moving the whole family away.”
“Well who could blame them? I sure couldn’t rest easy if my child was kidnapped and drugged and who knows what all and nobody was caught for it. It’s such a shame, really. Mortimer was always such a peaceful place. There’s not supposed to be any of that kind of nastiness here.”
“As if bad things never happen in small towns,” I muttered.
Something jerked me backward. My heart jolted, and I flailed, dropping the bags and slamming into something just as a pickup careened by, inches from my feet.
David shouted something profane and flipped off the driver. I couldn’t say anything for the arms clamped around my midsection. Sawyer’s breath seemed to be caught in his throat, and I could feel his body trembling against my back. He was . . . panicked?
“Elodie, you okay?” asked David.
Sawyer still wasn’t letting me go, and while I was really enjoying having him wrapped around me, people—okay David—was starting to stare. I laid my arm over Sawyer’s and rubbed lightly, trying to soothe. The muscles beneath my fingers were hard as oak.
“I’m okay,” I said. I squeezed his arm. “I’m okay.”
“Let’s try not to walk in front of traffic, shall we?” His tone was light, but he was still slow to release me.
“I’ll try to remember that. Thanks for stopping me from becoming ro
ad kill.”
“It would have been a terrible waste,” he said.
One of the bags I’d dropped had split on impact, so we took a minute to gather up its contents and redistribute them among the remaining bags. The hair on my arms was standing on end and my head was starting to ache, a sharp, lancing pain that made my vision flicker. I made another casual scan of the street expecting—hoping?—to find someone watching. But, though there were a few glances our way, nobody seemed to be watching us.
I didn’t know if I was disappointed or relieved.
“Earth to Elodie.”
I looked up at Sawyer and blinked as he looped another bag around my fingers. David was already half way up the next block.
“What is your current location and where can I get a ticket, because you are definitely not here today.”
“It’s stupid,” I mumbled, rubbing at my temple and checking both ways this time before I crossed the street.
“Lemmings following each other off a cliff to drown in the sea are stupid. You are anything but. What gives?”
“It’s just . . . I keep having this feeling that someone is watching me.”
“You’re beautiful. Of course people watch you.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I stumbled.
Naturally he somehow managed to get a hand under my elbow to steady me, despite the bags in his hands. I never used to be this klutzy before.
I was saying something before he distracted me with compliments . . . Oh right.
“I mean like creepy watching me. Skulking around corners and staying hidden kind of watching.”
“Are we on that stalker thing again? Because I’ve been with you the whole time.” His face was set in an I’m completely innocent expression. I knew if he was joking about it, he’d forgiven me for my misgivings when we’d first met.
“No, not you. I just . . . Ever since we found Rich, I’ve felt like I’m being followed.”
Sawyer said nothing.
“I told you it was stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” he said, all traces of teasing gone. “Just because you may be paranoid, doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You’re not going out on your own, are you? You promised your dad.”
I arched a brow at him.
“What? If you were my daughter I’d have made you promise not to go out alone after all this.”
“Fair enough. And no, I’m not breaking my promise and wandering around the park on my own. The only stretch of alone I’ve got is when I drive to and from work.”
Dad had been so freaked out by what happened to Rich and Molly, he’d finally broken down and bought me a second-hand car. Well, okay, really it was probably more like a fifth-hand Toyota that was closer in age to my dad than me. It was pushing 250,000 miles and had paint so faded I couldn’t tell you what the original color was. But so far it ran reliably, got me where I needed to go, and made me, in theory, less accessible than my bike, which he’d agreed was a lost cause.
“I just . . . I don’t know. I feel really unsettled, I guess. I think everybody will until someone is caught and punished for this.” Jesus, I needed some painkillers. This headache was brutal.
“Maybe I should start following you to and from work,” said Sawyer, chucking his bags in the back of David’s Explorer and reaching for the ones in my hands.
I waved him off. “I’m just being nervy, and it’s out of your way. Forget I said anything. Let’s just get back to work.”
I climbed into the backseat and rubbed my arms until the gooseflesh was gone.
~*~
Sawyer
I was getting desperate. My fascination with Elodie was starting to edge dangerously close to obsession. It was as if my world had narrowed down to tunnel vision where all I could see, all I could think about, was her. I hadn’t crossed any truly creeptastic lines—yet. But I had to know what her secret was, what she was hiding. I’d been watching her like a hawk during work, and following that rattletrap car of hers home after, hoping to catch some glimpse of a clue that would prove definitively that she was or wasn’t like me.
Was she or wasn’t she? It’s the question that kept me awake at night. It shouldn’t be possible. Her father was one hundred percent human. I’d briefly considered that she wasn’t his child, but despite the difference in coloring, it was obvious they were related, so that was out. Her mother was an unknown. If she’d been a wolf . . . I’d never heard of such a pairing, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t theoretically possible. And it would explain why I couldn’t sense it with any certainty. I wanted so badly for it to be true that I couldn’t be positive if the things I’d seen were real or a product of my own imagination.
Like today. Just before she nearly walked out in front of that truck—holy crap my heart still hadn’t quite slowed down from that scare—she’d been muttering what sounded like a reply to a conversation up the street. Which, of course, she shouldn’t have been able to hear. Just like she shouldn’t have been able to hear what those old women were saying about her. But I wasn’t sure. The explanation she’d given me in the store was perfectly plausible. And given where her mind was these days, she could’ve just been talking to herself on the sidewalk.
I needed something that was absolute proof. Hence the near obsession.
But damned if I knew what that proof would be.
She was younger than me. Which meant that if she was a werewolf, she should have been unstable enough to shift in the middle of all that blood and gore where we found Rich. That scene was practically tailor made to flush a werewolf, a fact that had given me more than a little pause and a half a dozen nightmares in the three weeks since. But Elodie hadn’t shifted. She’d been sick, but hell, anybody would’ve been. Instead, I was the one who barely held it together.
Elodie was worried. She’d been worried ever since we’d found Rich, which was a normal enough reaction that I hadn’t given it too much thought. Everybody was worried. Dad had made sure we weren’t out in groups less than three for any assignment. Reasonable precautions. If someone else was following her, I hadn’t noticed. But I’d been so focused on her, I hadn’t paid enough attention to be sure, something I would be rectifying immediately.
I wondered if I looked guilty. I felt it. Especially since two hours ago I’d just flat out lied about the fact that I’d been following Elodie for the last couple of weeks. Hell, I was doing it again right now. Dad and Patrick had cut us all loose early for the day. I figured Elodie and I would hang out, but she had to get home to catch up on chores. Not in that scared rabbit with a predator way—we were past that thankfully—but still nervous. I wondered if she was in trouble with her dad again and he had her on some kind of lockdown except for work. But she wasn’t going home. She bypassed the turn at Hansen’s and circled around a few more miles to a trailhead I hadn’t used before.
There was an overlook on the opposite side of the road several hundred yards back, far enough that I didn’t think she’d see me. I pulled into it beside a Suburban and watched through its windows as she got out of the car and circled around to the trunk. She hefted out a full frame backpack, balancing it on the edge of the trunk as she buckled it on.
“Elodie, what are you doing?” I muttered.
She’d promised her father she wouldn’t go into the park alone. From what I knew of her, she wasn’t a person to break promises lightly. She was clearly up to something. That was no day pack she was hauling. If she was hiking into the park now, she had a reason.
I left the Jeep parked at the overlook and slipped into the woods across the road, setting a path to intersect hers. I could have just straight out caught up with her, demanding to know what she was doing or that she let me accompany her because there was safety in numbers. But I needed answers, and putting her on the spot wasn’t likely to get me any, so instead I adjusted my path so I ran parallel and well behind her.
The air was hot and sticky. God, would I ever get used to the humidity in Tennessee? It certainly didn’t seem to bother Elodie. Even
with the loaded pack she moved at a steady clip up the trail, never slowing to take in the scenery or to catch her breath. I got the sense that wherever she was going, she wanted to be there before dark. Which was—I checked my watch—in approximately three hours. Maybe she planned to be there and back again by sunset. I hoped so. I didn’t relish another confrontation with my dad about my post-work whereabouts.
Elodie left the trail after half an hour. I didn’t have her knowledge of the park, but my general sense was that we were starting to curve back slightly toward her house. Of course that was miles and several ridges and hollows and peaks away. Maybe access to wherever we were going was easier from this side. Not surprising, the terrain got rougher the further we went from the trail, and I had to fall back further to keep from being seen or heard. It was much harder to be silent on two feet amid all the leaves and deadfall. The wind was on my side, at least. When I lost her by sight I could still keep track of her scent.
I didn’t like having her out of my sight. Not with some potential, unknown threat hanging out there. I had this gut feeling that as long as I could see Elodie, I could keep her safe. As long as I could see her, nothing could harm her. Which was totally stupid. Even if I or my father had seen my mother, been with her, we still couldn’t have stopped the bullet. It was truly an accident. I was starting to be able to admit that now. That still didn’t mean I was ready to forgive my father for whatever fight he’d had with her that sent her out there in the first place.
When I crested the next rise and didn’t immediately catch sight of Elodie, I felt a spurt of panic. Where was she? I lifted my head, sniffed. I could still smell her, like honeysuckle and rain. Nothing like the coppery tang of blood to suggest she’d been injured. So I shoved the panic back and followed the scent trail as quietly as possible.
I nearly stumbled headlong into the cave. It was partially hidden by a pallet of interwoven branches that, when fully in place, would mask it from the eyes of casual onlookers. The cover was partially askew, and inside I could hear Elodie moving around. Unpacking? Since I couldn’t just go in and ask her what she was doing, I withdrew to the cover of trees and hunkered down to wait.
