Unseen. Nancy Bush
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LOST MEMORIES
“We don’t know how you got here, Ms. LaPorte. You walked into Emergency and collapsed. Did someone bring you? Did you drive yourself?”
Gemma moved her head slowly from side to side and felt a twinge of pain. “I don’t remember.”
Will paused, regarding her with dark, liquid eyes. She could sense his strength and knew he was good at his job. A tracker. Someone who never gave up. Someone dogged and relentless. She shivered involuntarily as he said, “You don’t remember the circumstances that brought you here.”
“No.”
“What’s your last memory?”
Gemma thought about it a minute. “I was looking out the window and thinking we were drowning in rain. It was a downpour. The dirt was like concrete and the water was pouring over it in sheets.”
The deputy was silent for so long that Gemma felt her anxiety rise. She sensed that he was deliberating on an answer.
“What?” she asked.
“It hasn’t rained for three days…”
Books by Nancy Bush
CANDY APPLE RED
ELECTRIC BLUE
ULTRAVIOLET
UNSEEN
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
UNSEEN
NANCY BUSH
ZEBRA BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Prologue
A yellow moon rose over the line of fir trees, so close and huge that it seemed like an artist’s distorted vision, not the real thing. He watched it climb slowly upward through dispassionate eyes. It sent an uneven strip of light across the field behind his two-room home and glimmered in the pond that was ruffled by a light wind.
As if in response to the moon’s appearance, a light switched on in the main house across the field. Equally yellow. An evil color. A witch’s color. He was glad the house was so far away, wished it even farther.
For a moment he saw her standing in the field, dark, near-black hair flowing around her shoulders. She wore her witch’s garb and she stared back at him, her eyes black pits, her mouth curved.
“C’mere, boy,” she said, and he wanted to go, but she was looking beyond him. She wasn’t beckoning him. She’d never asked for him.
Still, she stripped off her clothes and melted into the pond. A moment of shadowy reflection and then just moonlight.
She was a witch. She had to die. And he was the hunter.
He gazed hard at the moon, now glowing a ghostly blue-white, shed of its earthly restraints, higher in the sky, smaller, more intense. He closed his eyes and saw its afterimage on the inside of his eyelids.
Witches had to die. He’d already sent two back to the hell they’d sprung from. But there were more. And some of them were filled with an evil so intense it was like they burned from the inside out.
He’d found the one who’d stolen from him. He’d been on a search for her, but she’d eluded him until last night. In a moment of pure coincidence, he’d seen her walking across the street. Wearing her witch’s garb, hair flying behind her and tangling in the wind that swooped down, bitterly cold for such a mild autumn.
He’d followed her and it had been a mistake because he’d gotten too close. She’d sensed him. She gazed hard at him and he turned sharply away, afraid she’d recognize him. But then she’d been the one to run away, out the door as if Satan were at her heels. And she’d put herself out of his reach, but it wouldn’t be for long because now he knew where she haunted. Now he knew where to find her. Soon, he would strip her bare, crush her naked body with his, thrust himself into her again and again as she howled and scratched and screamed.
Then he would throw back his head and roar because he was the hunter. A wolf. Hunting his prey.
Jaw tense, he threw another look at the moon, now a white, hard dot in a black sky. The natives called it a hunter moon. The full moon seen in the month of October.
October…
The witch’s month.
He was the wolf. And it was time to hunt the witch.
Chapter One
She wished him dead.
She knew about him. Witnessed the way his gaze ran lustfully over some preteen girl. Saw how his eyes glued to her athletic limbs and small breasts, how his lips parted and his cock grew hard.
But wishing wasn’t enough. It almost was, but it wasn’t quite. Sometimes wishing needed a little push. So, she waited for him to go to an unlucky place, the kind of place where bad things happened. Deaths. Accidents. Poisonous secrets. She knew about those places better than anyone because bad things had happened to her at an unlucky place a long time ago, and she’d spent many formative years getting payback for those bad things.
She waited with her jaw set. She was good at action, not patience. But today it had all come together, his unlucky place had materialized: a soccer field, with lots of tweens, their limbs flashing in nylon shorts and jerseys. She herself was very lucky and when people asked her name, which wasn’t often because she avoided encounters with strangers as a rule, she told them, “Lucky,” and they generally oohed and aahed and said what a great name it was.
People were stupid, as a rule.
The soccer fields were full of young bodies. A jamboree was taking place: kids of varying ages playing half-hour games and then moving on to another field to challenge another team. The boys were playing on the north-side fields, over by the water tower. The girls were closer in, on the hard-packed dirt of the south-side fields—fields that looked as if they’d been forgotten by the parks department. Fields good enough for girls, not for boys.
Her lip curled. Figures, she thought. She wasn’t a man-hater, but she had definite thoughts about certain members of the male sex. She was responsible for the deaths of several of their gender