Darkness Bound (33 page)

“That should cover it,” Leigh said.

“And this is what happens to a nice girl once she’s been with me?”

“You’re complaining?”

Silence didn’t last long before Niles said, “Pull over.”

She glanced in his direction, a smug grin in place. “We’ll be home soon.”

Niles looked very serious. “We’ve got to get started or I won’t manage everything I’ve got to do in a day.”

She removed one hand from the steering wheel and placed it on top of Niles’s firm thigh. “I promise to help
you. I wouldn’t dream of letting you shoulder the whole burden on your own.”

He sighed. “Leigh, this feels so good, just to let the tension go for a while and enjoy each other. We know we’ve got hard times ahead. But I do love you. I don’t know if I can ever tell you how much.”

“You’ll manage,” she told him.

Reaching over the console, he kissed her neck and ran the tip of his tongue around the inside of her ear. He slipped his right hand inside her coat, under her shirt, and gently lifted a breast from inside her bra. His thumb ran back and forth over the instantly rigid nipple and Leigh let out a cry.

“Mmm.” He bared her breast and bent his head to kiss her there.

“You’ll put us in a snowbank,” she said. “Oh, God, I want you now. Stop it till we get home.”

He continued to run the edges of his teeth over erogenous skin and pull her flesh into his mouth.

“Niles!” She slammed on the shrieking brakes and the car fishtailed into the nearest wall of snow. “Look what’s happened.”

Reluctantly, Niles looked up. They had almost reached the entrance to the track leading to Two Chimneys. Or the place where the entrance was supposed to be.

What he saw didn’t fool Niles. The track hadn’t simply been blocked by a fallen tree. Piles of snapped limbs, chunks from the trunks of trees, bushes, shrubs, and foliage of all kinds crammed together in an unholy mess only a supernatural rage could accomplish. Roots, spread wide and black from being under the wet earth, curled above the snow like big, inky spiders.

“Turn off the engine,” he said. “
Now
. I’m getting out. You’re staying here with the doors locked and if anyone but me comes your way, leave.”

Her shock almost immediately turned to a mutinous expression. “Where you go, I go. We’re sealed, remember.” She held up her palm to show the purple stamp there. The edges were still red.

She didn’t understand that there were some things she couldn’t do, some things she might do to slow him down. He covered her palm with his own. “I may have to move fast. You know what I mean? I need to know you’re safe. Go to Gabriel’s if you have to.”

“What’s the big deal?” she said. “It’s just the weight of the snow that’s made this mess.”

“Perhaps.” If she could think that, so much the better.

Out of the car, he waited for Leigh to lock the doors and went into a crouch. He hurried to the first demolished gatepost. The gate itself usually stood open, but he could see pieces of it scattered around.

Working rapidly, he hauled aside branches, jagged pieces of tree trunk, and one wrecked piece of forest and fence after another. He didn’t get it, not yet. What reason could there be for this—except rage? He tossed aside a twisted and rusted piece of metal that must have been buried in the undergrowth for years.

Rage with what, or with whom?

Leigh?

The wolves had come here, following Phoebe. That’s the only explanation that fit. They had followed her here, then back to her place. They didn’t share the werehounds’ ability to see in the dark, or not to the same degree.

What Phoebe had mentioned about one of them using
Leigh’s name made sense. Once they found out Phoebe “wasn’t the one” they had thrown her down and left.

Hell, why play games with the obvious? Brande and his pack were after Leigh. They knew she could be a bridge between the hounds and the humans and they wouldn’t want that. They had thought Phoebe was Leigh and followed her. There was no reason they would know what kind of car Leigh drove.

Then, when they hadn’t managed to find Leigh back at Two Chimneys, they had trashed the place. Trashing what didn’t belong to them was a favorite pastime of Brande and his followers.

They wanted to use Leigh against him—and ultimately against any werehound attempt to bond with the humans.

He cleared part of the track and started dragging larger branches into the forest. They would go back to nature there.

Niles walked backward, pulling the top twenty feet or so of a giant fir with him.

“How can you do that?”

His head jerked up and he glowered across the branches at Leigh. “I told you to stay in the car.”

“I’m getting bored. I want to help. This is my place.” She pointed to the chunk of tree he held up by a couple of snags. “That’s huge, Niles. It’s bigger than most trees. You’re tossing it around like a matchstick.”

“I’m strong,” he said. There was no point making up some elaborate story.

She opened her mouth to speak but crossed her arms instead.

“What?” he asked.

“I know how strong you are. Or maybe I don’t. I wonder how much I don’t know about you.”

“Your timing for an inquisition is great,” he said. “What don’t you think I’ve told you? Isn’t it enough to know I’m a—”

“I’m being stupid,” she said, cutting him off. Shrugging and giving him an abashed smile, she picked up several sticks. “Sorry.”

“No. You’ve been through too much, too fast—”

“Niles!” She shrieked his name so suddenly, he jumped. “Someone’s under there. I can see a foot.” Leigh pointed past him to a tangle of thick vines.

He saw the leg at once. A leg in ripped rain pants with a high-topped black sneaker on the foot.

“My God. Oh, no, Niles. Quick. I’ll help.”

He had torn aside the vines before she could start and sent a message out to Sean. He was the one to help with injuries, particularly serious ones, which this already looked to be.

“He’s dead,” Leigh said. She turned aside and he thought she would throw up but she took breaths through her mouth and held on to a tree for support.

Sean erupted into the scene.

Too late Niles saw that no medic, no matter how gifted, could do anything for this man.

“I think you need Saul,” Sean said before he got a good look at the corpse. “No, I guess not. He doesn’t raise the dead—or not that dead.”

“He’s broken,” Leigh cried. Niles put an arm around her. “He’s bent backward so far his spine must be broken… in several places.”

Niles caught Sean’s eyes and they exchanged thoughts.
“Our special operations method,”
Niles indicated.
“Neck will be snapped, too. Fastest, most efficient way to kill without a lot of noise and without much to hide.”

“Just a rolled-up bundle of bloody bones and flesh,”
Sean responded.
“Only we bagged ’em afterward. I thought we were the only ones who did this.”

Niles simmered.
“I thought we invented it and we only used it in extreme situations.”

“On someone who would kill us if we didn’t kill them,”
Sean said.
“In a war zone.”

Niles wrapped Leigh hard against him and kept staring at Sean.
“We left all this behind.”

“You never quite did.”
Sean shook his head.
“I shouldn’t have said that. We have to deal with whatever comes our way and get over it. We’ve got a chance to start again.”

Niles looked at the heap of human pulp on the ground.
“You wouldn’t know it from this. Leigh will expect us to call the police, not get rid of him.”

“Might be the best thing to do.”
Sean knelt and turned the man’s broken neck to the side to show his face. “Shit. We know this one.”

Leigh gasped. “It’s John Valley.”

L
EIGH CRINGED.
She pushed away from Niles and made herself look more closely at the dead man. “That’s terrible, but at least it must have been fast.” She scuffled around in her coat pockets and found a crumpled piece of paper. “He left this at Gabriel’s for me last week. He kept trying to get me to—you know how he asked me about selling this place? He tried again and then there was this offer someone made.”

Frowning, Niles took the paper from her, looked at it, and passed it to Sean. “That’s a lot of money but it is beautiful land.”

“I kept on saying I didn’t want to sell but he wouldn’t give up.”

“There’s soot on him,” Sean said.

Leigh felt very sick but she made herself stand up straight. “Call 911.”

She couldn’t miss the nonverbal communication that passed between Niles and Sean.

“What’s with the dead birds?” Sean asked. “Don’t tell me they died when he fell on them. They would have flown off.” Several large, black, dead birds lay around Valley.

Niles gently pushed one of the birds with the toe of his boot so they could get a better look at it.

“Crows,” Sean said. His gold brown eyes caught the cold morning light and Leigh couldn’t look away. If anything about a man could be ethereal, then Sean’s eyes were just that.

“I like crows,” Leigh said hollowly. “They’re intelligent.”

A sudden crashing coming from the direction of the cottage startled her.

Innes, his hair wild and his face streaked with soot, broke through to them. He saw John Valley and halted. His arms fell to his sides and his face became rigid.

“Tell us,” Leigh said, as gently as she could. She liked Innes’s ebullient personality. “What happened?”

Slowly Innes raised his head and looked from one to the other of them. “I chased him off. That’s it. Some crazy little fae in purple satin rushed down to your place, Niles. I was leaving something for you and Leigh. He stood on my shoulder and hissed in my ear. He said you two were his protectors.”

Innes’s audience didn’t have anything to say.

“He said—the fae, that is—he said some guy was on Leigh’s roof doing something to her chimney and wanted me to deal with it. And the guy was there, just like the fae said. I scared him off—almost all the way up here—then went back to see what he’d done to the cottage, if anything.”

Innes noticed the disapproving look on Niles’s face. “Stop looking at me like that, dammit. I dragged him off the roof and gave him some shoves. I didn’t”—his attention returned to Valley—“hell, look at that. I didn’t do it. We left all that behind.”

“Where’s Percy?” Leigh said. “The fae?”

“How should I know? There’s a pile of soot in your living room and some dead crows. Like those only dirtier.” He pointed at the birds on the ground.

Niles grabbed her hand and went rapidly downhill toward the cottage with the other two men trailing behind.

“We need to call the police,” Leigh said, the cold air snatching her breath away.

“Let’s get the whole picture first,” he said. “No one can help John Valley now.”

“Look,” Innes said, loping along easily despite the mess underfoot. “I didn’t do—”

“We know you didn’t,” Niles said. “But who did?”

“Whoever it was wanted it to look like us,” Sean said.

“What good would that do?” Niles said. “No one around knows… aw, shit. If a word gets dropped in the right place and the authorities make some inquiries, we could be unlucky enough for them to hit some big-mouth paper pusher willing to talk about special ops and a contract operation no one is supposed to know much about.”

Leigh’s heart beat faster and harder. At the cottage, Niles put her into Innes’s hands and opened the unlocked door.

“I’m going in,” she told Innes and Sean. She held up her hand, showing the seal, and they took a respectful step backward.

Niles would have to learn to accept what their union meant. He was not the boss where she was concerned.

She ran into him as he was coming back out of the cottage. “I’m going to take a look,” she said, and evidently he heard the edge to her voice, because he didn’t try to stop her.

Apart from a putrid smell of soot and two more dead crows spilling from the fireplace onto the floor, there was nothing to see.

Outside again, Niles took a leap, gripped the edge of the roof, and landed on it lightly. He disappeared for what felt like a long time before he slithered down again with two black plastic bags.

He held up one. “More sacrificed birds.” The other he set down carefully. “We’d better give Percy a medal. That’s what Mr. Valley intended to use to start his chimney fire. You were supposed to get home, Leigh, go inside, and get scared out of your mind by birds and flames shooting out of your fireplace. Call 911.”

Leigh realized she was shaky. Everything that happened to her now carried some horrible risk. What would happen next?

She searched for her phone. “I don’t know what I did with it. Someone better call me or I’ll never find it.”

Niles used his own phone to call her. “I might as well make the call to the cops, too.”