Protector of One. Rachel Lee
of night. This was ranch country. An injured or sick animal might need putting down. A coyote might have been preying on someone’s sheep or chickens. So many legitimate reasons.
But something made him turn around and get back in his truck anyway.
Kerry turned in the damp sheets, eyes flittering to and fro beneath closed eyelids, her muscles rigid as if fighting to wake her…
“I’m starting to get really worried,” Leah said to Georgia. “The guys should have joined us by now.”
Georgia leaned closer to the campfire, seeking its warmth. “I didn’t think it was going to get so cold so quickly.”
“Georgia!”
Georgia looked up, smiling. “Cut it out, Leah. You’re driving me crazy. The minute you put Hank and Bill into the woods, they turn into Lewis and Clark. We don’t have to get back until Sunday, and neither of them is going to quit until they explore a cave or something. You know that.”
Leah rubbed her jersey-clad arms. Her down vest ordinarily proved sufficient, but not tonight for some reason. “Something’s wrong. I know it.”
Georgia reached for a stick and poked at the fire, stirring up sparks, causing flames to leap higher. “Well, we can’t leave the camp. They won’t know where to look for us. So you’re just going to have to relax until Sunday.”
Leah finally quit pacing and came to sit on one of the dead logs they used as benches by the fire. “They always do this,” she remarked.
“Exactly.” Georgia smiled at her friend. “Every damn time. They say they’ll be back by Friday so we can spend the weekend together, and they never make it. So relax. It just gives us more time for girl talk.”
Leah managed a tight smile. “How many years have we been doing these trips?”
“Well, I know this is our eighth trip, and we always go twice a year so…” Georgia shook her head. “You know exactly how long we’ve been doing this. What are you trying to say?”
“I don’t know.”
Leah hunched toward the fire, wondering why she felt so on edge. This always happened. The guys went off by themselves to take some more rugged hikes while the girls stayed close to camp. The two men always returned late, usually because they’d found something exciting—it invariably surprised Leah what could excite a geologist—and when they marched into camp eventually, they always bubbled over about some find. Meanwhile Leah and Georgia were merely glad to enjoy the break from their jobs and spend a week in the woods with nothing to do but read good novels and relax.
Hugging herself, waiting for the warmth of the fire to penetrate, Leah looked up at the shadowy trees looming over them. “I’ve always loved the woods at night,” she remarked.
“It’s primal,” Georgia said. She had a tendency to explain everything in life in terms of archetypes, genes and human psychology. That one simply had feelings never contented her. There always had to be a reason.
Leah shook her head. “How about I just like it?”
“But don’t you want to understand yourself?”
“Not to the point that I atomize and pigeonhole everything.”
This was an old disagreement, so old that it had become comfortable, and hence provided a good distraction.
Georgia sighed, a sound almost lost in the crackle of the fire. “You have no spirit of adventure.”
“Adventure? Analyzing my every thought against some template is an adventure?”
Georgia grinned. “Then what do you think is an adventure?”
“Sitting in the woods at night around a campfire, listening to an owl hoot, and wondering where the hell the guys have gone.”
“You are single-minded.”
“No, just realistic.” A twig snapped behind her in the woods and she looked around. “Did you hear that?”
“Yeah. Probably a raccoon.”
“Or a wolf.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of wolves. Believe me, they’re more scared of us.”
“Then bears.”
By this point both women were grinning at each other, building a story from the crack of a branch. “Yeah, bears,” Georgia agreed. “A mother and two cubs. Hungry. Annoyed because we’re between them and the bacon grease I dumped up the hill this morning…”
“Ooooh,” said Leah appreciatively, “that’s it.”
“Yeah. Are we supposed to run uphill or downhill?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Some adventurer you are…”
Just then a doe poked her head into the circle of light cast by the fire. Her eyes reflected red at them, and she froze.
“How beautiful,” Georgia whispered.
“You’re feeling a purely instinctual prey urge,” Leah started to tease her in a whisper. “No appreciation of the beau—”
The word never fully left her mouth. Before her very eyes, Georgia’s face transformed into a twisted mask as something sprayed from the side of her head. A split second later, a loud crack rent the night and echoed off the cliffside.
Leah froze like the deer had moments before, but the doe chose a different course, darting off into the woods.
Another crack and Leah felt a searing burn in her arm. She looked at it and saw a glistening wetness start to spread.
In the firelight, the wetness looked black.
Before she consciously comprehended what was happening, she turned away from the noise and fled into the night, running faster than she ever had in her life. Faster even than when she had been a sprinter in college.
Her body understood the situation even if her brain didn’t…or wouldn’t.
She had become the prey.
Kerry, who felt as if she had barely dropped off to sleep, woke up screaming from the nightmare. Even in her own ears the terrified sound seemed to echo. She sat up abruptly, feeling breathless, searching her room for a reason, a cause for the horrifying dream. Everything looked as it always did.
Just a dream, she told herself.
But then she switched on a light, climbed out of bed and began to dress. The compulsion could not be ignored.
There were a lot of ways to make a living, Gage Dalton thought, that didn’t involve climbing out of a warm bed in the wee hours, leaving behind the soft heat of a beautiful wife. His mouth twisted with grim humor at the thought, because all his adult life, with a break for recovery after a car bomb that had killed his first wife and family, he’d been doing exactly this. DEA, Conard County Sheriff’s Office, all the same, just a difference in degrees.
The call from Kerry Tomlinson had sounded nearly panicky, and she insisted there was no time to waste. He was halfway down the stairs, headed for the front door when his cell rang. This time it was Adrian Goddard.
“I heard two gunshots,” Adrian said. “I wish I could tell you for certain where they came from, but it seemed like the same general direction of the vics we found yesterday.”
“I’m on my way to the office. Kerry just called me. Something’s wrong but she could hardly talk and she said she had to get out of her house.”
“I’m already on my way. Another ten minutes.”
“See