Hunter's Need

by Shiloh Walker

  Kind eyes—or rather they seemed kind, but below that mask lay madness.

  “Who are you?” she muttered, absently rubbing her hands up and down the legs of her cotton capris.

  Abruptly, she climbed off the couch, moving so fast she knocked the remote onto the floor, but she didn’t notice as she strode across the living room toward the kitchen table. It was covered with books, notes, maps and pictures—research into the death of women who’d died too young, too violently.

  She riffled through them until she found Leah’s picture, a copy made from a newspaper article that had run in the weeks after her disappearance. Grainy and small, it showed a young woman with a wide, open smile and dark, friendly eyes. “I need more,” Ana muttered, but if somebody had asked, she couldn’t have said if she was talking to herself or somebody else.

  Of course, there was nobody there to answer.

  Other than Duke, she hadn’t seen a soul—or a spirit, since returning home two days earlier. He wasn’t there now, out to get some food—she thought. The guy ate like a horse.

  Dropping Leah’s picture, she went through everything, searching for the pictures she found of Marie. “Where are you?” She found the picture and stared at it, all but willing the ghost to appear.

  Leah hadn’t known her killer, even though she’d died with his image emblazoned on her mind.

  Marie didn’t remember anything about that night.

  And none of the others had ever made their presence known to Ana. She needed answers, but she really didn’t know where to look. She needed to find him, but she didn’t know how to go about doing that. “And sitting here talking to yourself is going to do a lot of good.” Taking a deep breath, she pulled the chair out and settled down at the table.

  “Start at the beginning. Isn’t that what people always say?”

  The beginning.

  With Marie.

  But there wasn’t anything within these books and papers that she hadn’t already read over ten times. At least.

  She needed more.

  There were answers, she knew it. She could all but see them in front of her, obscured by the mists of time, hiding in them. Damn it, she’d seen that man before. Frowning, she grabbed a pencil and a blank piece of paper, jotting down the features she remembered clearly. White male. Age—? She left it blank, because she couldn’t be sure. Twenties, maybe. Or a little younger. A little older. Brown eyes. Thin lips, but not too thin. Close set eyes, skinny blade of a nose. Hair? She couldn’t recall the hair color.

  Chewing on the eraser, she studied the sheet of paper. “This is just going to be another waste of time,” she muttered. But instead of tossing the pencil aside, she bent forward over the page and got back to work.

  DUKE juggled the grocery bags when his cell phone started to ring. Eying the number on the display, he debated on whether or not to answer. If he thought, for five seconds, he could avoid messing with Kelsey Hughes, he would have just ignored her. But she’d keep calling. And calling. And when he didn’t answer, she’d start calling Ana.

  That was one thing he definitely didn’t want just yet. That nosy woman would just start asking Ana questions, and Duke knew the witch too well to think they’d all relate to the job at hand. Chances were, once she knew Ana was okay, very few would relate to the job.

  The phone stopped ringing while he was still trying to decide and he heaved out a sigh of relief.

  It was short-lived, though. He’d only managed to stow one of the reusable grocery sacks Ana had given him before the phone started ringing again. “What?”

  “Duke, we really need to work on your phone skills,” Kelsey said, her voice amused.

  “If I was paid to answer to a phone, maybe. Since I’m not? Not worried. What do you want?”

  “Just wanted to see how things are going.”

  Duke rolled his eyes. “Since when did you start checking up on people, Kelsey?”

  “I’ve always checked up on people—when I feel the need.”

  Yeah, and he could just imagine why she felt the need, too. “I’m alive. Ana’s alive. We’re working on the problem. Anything else?”

  “How is Ana? She handle things okay from the other day?”

  “Okay? No. As well as can be expected? Yes.” Absently, he braced his elbows on top of the car and stared across the street, without really seeing anything. He opened his mouth to reply—most likely with something biting or insinuating, but the words shriveled up and died, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth as he found himself looking at a face that was very, very familiar.

  Carter.

  “You still there?”

  Distracted, Duke said into the mouthpiece, “I got to go, Kelsey.” He disconnected in the middle of her sentence, tucking the phone back into his pocket and tossing the second tote of groceries into the car.

  He almost started for the crosswalk, but at the last moment, he decided against it. He could see just as well from over here, and he was much less likely to be noticed by Carter or the woman he was with.

  Woman—hardly more than a girl, Duke decided. Twenty. Maybe twenty-one. Pretty. Dark. The golden skin and near-black eyes of a native. A smile that lit up her entire face. And she looked far too much like Marie did.

  SHE was still trying to jog her memory when the door opened a little while later. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched as Duke came in, two black totes hooked over his shoulder.

  He gave her a distracted smile but didn’t say anything as he started unpacking the bags. A whole hell of a lot of junk food, then some stuff for sandwiches and salads. Ana pushed back from the table and went to help put things up, neatly sidestepping in front of him when he would have just dumped stuff into the refrigerator.

  He was acting weird, she decided as he went back to unpacking the rest of the stuff without saying anything, without even really looking at her.

  “Are you okay?”

  His only response was a noncommittal grunt. Rolling her eyes, Ana turned back to the refrigerator and put up packages of cold cuts, lettuce and tomatoes. She finished and turned around to find him staring down the book she’d bought weeks earlier.

  Unsolved—Mysteries of the Far North. He flipped it open, going directly to the short section that detailed Marie’s disappearance. “Did you think of something?” she asked, but she didn’t really have any hope in the answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and his voice had that same distracted tone to it.

  She glanced back to the table, eying the notepad with her neat little lists. She’d spent the past couple of hours trying to think of the men she knew. Most of them were either too young, or too old, and none of them really seemed to fit.

  “You don’t by chance know any police sketch artists, do you?”

  That caught his attention. Curious, he looked up at her and lifted a brow. “Sketch artists?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “Afraid not. At least none that I can go talk to.”

  “Why not?” she asked, puzzled.

  A grin curled his lips, showing a ghost of his normal humor. “Because I’d scare the shit out of them if I showed up on their doorstep. They think I’m dead, sweets. I knew them back before . . . well, before I ended up at Excelsior. It’s a different life. Everybody from before that point thinks I’m dead. They had a funeral and everything.”

  “How can they have a funeral without a body?”

  He flipped the book closed and shrugged. “As far as I know, there was a body. Just not mine.”

  She gaped at him.

  He sauntered over to her and placed his finger under her chin, nudging her mouth closed. “I fell into a group of people that know how to make messes go away when it suits them. I was gunned down in front of at least one human. They had to do something.”

  “So they just found a body and said it was you? What if somebody said otherwise?”

  Duke shrugged. “The only person around that could have said otherwise was in a coma until a few weeks afte
r my so-called funeral. They weren’t going to dig up a casket just to let him take a look-see.” He draped his arms over her shoulders and dipped his head, nipping her lower lip. “So why do you want a police sketch artist?”

  “Because I have somebody I want sketched and I’m no artist.”

  “Who?”

  Cold fear settled in the pit of her belly. She licked her lips. Man, her mouth had just gone seriously dry. “Him.”

  “Him.” He studied her thoughtfully. “Ana, it’s been twenty years since Leah saw him. He isn’t going to look the same now.”

  “I know that.” Ana dropped her head forward and let it rest against his chest. She slipped her arms around his waist and settled against his body. “Yeah, it’s been twenty years. Yeah, he’s going to look different—there’s something familiar about him, Duke. I don’t know what it is, but I swear, I know I’ve seen him before.”

  He stiffened. Big hands came up and closed around her arms. “What?”

  She swallowed and lifted her head, wincing as she caught sight of the look on his face. “I’ve seen him. Somewhere. Hell, for all I know, it’s one of the local news anchors. But I know I’ve seen him.”

  He cupped her face in his hand, eyes locked on her face, staring at her as though he was trying to see through to her soul. “Where have you seen him?”

  Ana rolled her eyes and said, “I just told you. I don’t know. Wherever it was, he doesn’t look the same as he did then. I can’t . . . I dunno, but something about him is just too familiar. His eyes . . . ” She closed hers and pulled the memory of his face to mind. The eyes.

  “It’s his eyes,” she repeated softly. “I’ve seen those eyes somewhere.”

  Then she sighed and rubbed a hand over the back of her neck. “I just can’t remember where.”

  Duke bit back a snarl. It wasn’t going to help anything if he lost his temper, but damn was his control pretty much shot. Every protective instinct he had was screaming, jerking and struggling to be free. He wanted to hunt. Wanted to lose his skin and find his other self, take to the hunt until he scented his prey.

  Carter—

  Calm down. You don’t know it’s him. Hell, she sees him every damn day. If it was him . . .

  But then again, Duke had seen the bastard several times and he hadn’t once gotten that vibe off of him. Of course, he hadn’t been able to fully rely on his instincts the entire time he’d been here. The few days they’d spent up near Palmer, his instincts had just about gone haywire on him.

  Then there was the night the girl had died—he hadn’t felt a damn thing.

  Abruptly, he recalled how he’d automatically assumed it had been because of Ana. He knew better now and he’d just started thinking that maybe he wasn’t meant to save that girl. It hadn’t ever happened like that before, but it made a lot more sense than anything else he could think of.

  Ana hadn’t done it, so why else would he have just blanked out? Unless there really was another like Ana. Unlikely as it was, over the past few days, he was starting to realize that it had to be the case.

  Unlikely as it was, Ana had stumbled across a serial killer with a gift way too similar to her own. It would explain so much—why he hadn’t felt anything, why Ana wasn’t affected as much up at Chugach—she’d been more immune to it, since she lived within her shields all the time.

  With somebody else blocking him, possibly Carter, he wouldn’t have felt anything until it was too late. More, if somebody was blocking him, it could keep him from picking up on the clues he’d normally follow. Leaving him in the dark.

  Carter . . .

  Was it possible she’d been living next to a killer for a year without ever realizing it? Possible—well, hell. Yeah, it was possible. Those shields of hers—unless she was in physical contact with somebody, it definitely was possible that she wouldn’t be picking up anything from the guy. If he’d been a threat to her, her instincts would have kicked in, but Ana didn’t fit the profile of the guy’s victims so there was little chance of him being a threat to her on that level.

  He felt half sick even thinking it. His stomach knotted and he flexed his hands. His body wanted to shift so bad, it left his bones aching. He took a minute to drag in a couple of breaths, hoping to cool the rage. It didn’t do much, but he did manage to get some measure of control back.

  “You’re sure you’ve seen him before?”

  “Sure?” Ana repeated. She shrugged restlessly. “I don’t know, Duke. But there’s something about those eyes . . . no, I’m not sure, but I really think I’ve seen him before.”

  Duke ground his teeth together. It helped keep the growl locked in his throat. Still, his voice came out deeper, rougher, harsher than he’d intended. “But you don’t know where?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face and swore. Now what? Did he tell her? And what if he was wrong?

  Ana, I saw your landlord a few hours ago. He was sitting with a girl that looked enough like Marie to be her sister. I really don’t know if there’s anything to worry about, but . . . Yeah, that would go over real well.

  “Fuck, ain’t this going to be fun?” he muttered. “Okay, so here’s what we need to do. We need to sit down and just make a list, I guess . . . ” Actually, what he needed was for Ana to be distracted so he could either run a search on Carter himself or call somebody back at Excelsior to run it. Maybe a picture of the guy from twenty years ago—

  Or you could just try telling Ana that you saw him with that girl, lay it out. See what she says.

  Screw that idea. He wasn’t going to get her pissed off at him unless he had a bona fide reason for it. He glanced up and realized Ana was watching him expectantly. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he said, “Shit, Ana. I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “I’d noticed. You’ve been acting a little off ever since you walked in the door.” She quirked a brow at him.

  Go ahead. Just lay it out.

  No. Screw the voice of reason right now. He wanted the voice of facts before he went and did or said something that would make her mad—or hurt her. Scare her. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to hide it if Carter was his man, but he’d damn well have a little bit of time to work out how to tell her. And maybe there wasn’t even anything to tell. Heaving out a breath, he scrubbed a hand over his face and said, “Sorry. Distracted. All this shit’s driving me nuts.”

  “You and me, both,” she murmured. She leaned forward and kissed his chin, then settled back against the counter with her hands tucked inside her pockets. “Anyway, what I’d said was that I wanted to go back and talk to Marie’s sister again.”

  Marie’s sister? Duke frowned, thinking back. Vaguely, he had some memory of a discussion involving the murdered woman’s sister. “Again . . . when did we talk to her the first time?”

  “We didn’t.” Ana smiled. “I did. It was before you got up here. She couldn’t really tell me much. But . . . I dunno. Maybe I wasn’t asking the right kind of questions.”

  “So now you think you know what the right questions are?” The wheels in his mind started to spin. This could work—if he went, he’d know where the sister lived, and then track down a picture of Carter from twenty years ago, go back out and see her without Ana . . . maybe he could get lucky and the woman would know Carter, remember him from all those years ago—if it was him. That would be something linking them, at least, and he could decide what to do from there.

  His gut insisted that Marie had known her killer, somehow. Okay. Yeah. This could work.

  “I don’t know if I know the right questions now, but I’ve got a better idea of what to ask at least. This might sound crazy, but I get the feeling that Marie somehow knew the guy that . . . well, the guy that killed her,” Ana said in an eerie echo of his own thoughts. “I don’t know how and I could be wrong. It’s just a feeling I’ve got. But maybe if I describe the guy I remember from Leah’s memories, maybe . . . I don’t know. Maybe Beverly knew him, too.”
>
  Then Ana closed her eyes and sighed, her shoulders slumping. “We’re putting an awful lot of hope onto maybe.”

  “You have to go with what you got, Ana.” Closing the distance between them, he went to her and hooked an arm around her neck. She had some maybes—and he had a gut instinct. With any luck, one of them would pan out and they could actually get something accomplished.

  He pressed a kiss to her brow. She snuggled up against him, rubbing her cheek against his chest. Duke’s heart clenched inside his chest and he skimmed a hand up her back. Protectiveness, need, other crazy emotions he wasn’t ready to examine just yet swamped him. Staring out the kitchen window toward her landlord’s house, he told himself there was time.

  They’d get this done—figure it all out. Then he could get to work on what to do about Ana.

  CHAPTER 14

  IT took them an hour to get out the door. Ana finished putting up the groceries after Duke said he needed a few minutes on the computer. Keeping an ear out to make sure she didn’t get close enough to see the screen, he logged into his email and sent a note back to Excelsior. He needed information on Hoskins, and until he had something concrete, he’d rather not have Ana catch him digging around on the Internet looking for dirt on her friend.

  The few minutes ended up being forty-five and by the time they climbed into the car, it was edging on three thirty.

  “We’re going to have to make this quick,” she said as he pulled out of the drive. “She watches her granddaughter during the day and she isn’t going to want to talk to us when her daughter comes to pick the girl up.”

  “Should we wait until tomorrow?” Duke shot her a glance. If they waited, maybe he’d get lucky and get something back on Hoskins—like a picture from twenty years ago. He could even figure out a way to show it to Ana, see if it matched the image she’d caught while Leah took her on a grisly trip down memory lane.