48
“
A
re you all right?” Faith shouted as
she and Josh jumped down from the porch. Her words were ripped out of her mouth by the wind.
“I’ll live,” he said, sounding remarkably calm, so much more like his father than the sulky, tattooed, and pierced teen he’d been a mere two days ago.
The good news was, like so many sledders, he’d left the key in the ignition of the snowmobile.
“I wonder how badly you got him,” he shouted, as he twisted the key and brought the engine to life.
They got their answer a second later when they heard the whine of a second sled start up from behind the house.
“Fuck!" Josh gunned the throttle. “Hang on!”
Climbing onto the sled behind him, she wrapped her arms around his chest.
The snow hit her face like sandpaper grit. Wondering how Josh could even see to be steering the sled, she shut her eyes tight. Then, deciding if they were about to crash into a tree and die, she wanted advance warning,
she forced herself to open them again. Just in time to watch him turn into a grove of aspen.
“You're very good at this,” she screamed in his ear as he wove h
is way through the winter-naked-
limbed, white trees, which looked like ghosts bending in supplication to the wind.
“I surf. Or did,” he shouted back. “It’s not that different. Mostly a balance thing.”
As the chain-saw roar of Drew Hayworth’s sled screeched over the howling wind behind them, Faith was grateful for any edge they could get.
Her ungloved hands were already starting to turn numb. Her lips felt frozen on her face and her lashes were getting caked with snow. How long could they go on like this?
“There’s a forest service road not far from here,” Josh told her. She had to strain to hear him. “I doubt, with the storm, any plows would have gotten around to it.”
“Wouldn’t it be better if they had?”
“Plows make ridges. It’s too easy to hit one and get thrown.” He swerved around a snow-covered boulder. “Hold on.”
What the hell did he think she was doing? Nevertheless, she clung harder.
They were suddenly airborne. She shrieked, the way she might on a roller-coaster ride at an amusement park. But there was nothing even remotely amusing about this.
They landed like a stone, jarring every bone in her body, before sliding precariously so far that her right
shoulder was nearly dragging in the snow. But miraculously—at least it seemed a miracle to her—they remained upright.
“All right!” Behaving like the teenager he still was, Josh pumped a fist into the air.
‘'Would you please just hold on with both hands?”
He turned his head to look back at her, his teeth flashing a bold grin in his ice-frosted face.
“Yes, Mother,” he said, as he gunned the engine again.
Damned if he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. For, from what she’d been able to tell, one of the few times since he’d arrived in Hazard.
The enjoyment was to prove short-lived.
After weaving deftly around a second boulder, he topped a small hill and cursed.
“Jump!”
Not taking time to think about the peril, Faith did as instructed. An instant later, the sled plowed into a fallen, snow-covered Douglas fir. The thick tree was no less impressive lying on its side than it would have been towering into the sky.
“We are so fucked!” Josh shouted, slamming a bare hand against the trunk of the tree.
“Not yet." The bag she’d strapped across her body when she’d jumped aboard the snowmobile had not fallen off during their wild ride. “Get behind the tree.”
She would have joined him, but the gigantic limbs, still wearing their dark green needles, would be in her way.
“Holy shit!” He goggled at the .45 she pulled out of
the bag. “Do you actually know how to shoot that cannon?”
"Yes.” Faith stood up in the position Sal had taught her. The memory made her heart clench and she wanted to cry at the idea of his having been killed because of her.
But as if she could hear him yelling at her to concentrate, she spread her legs, keeping her knees firm, but not quite locked, setting her trailing foot so that her natural point of aim would be on her target. “I do.”
She took a deep breath, instructing the rest of her body to relax, which was difficult when her stomach was turning somersaults, every nerve was jangling, and her heart was doing the jitterbug in her chest.
She held the heavy revolver in both hands and prepared herself for the
kick of the recoil as Drew Hay
worth came flying over the hillock on his wicked-looking, sleek black snowmobile.
49
D
espite the way once again a woman
had put a crimp in his plans, the man who’d been the boy raised by wolves was in near metaphysical exhilaration as he chased his prey over the white and drifted
snow.
He’d been right. This was much better than the silent, quick kill. This was hunting on a grand scale. Akin to galloping a horse across the mountain steppes chasing a snow leopard.
Whenever he’d hunted with the tribe he believed to be the Saks, the leopard had always died. Always. The men had been exceptional hunters.
But the death had always seemed anticlimactic to the chase. And as magnificent as the white mountain cat was, both in life and in death, it couldn’t live up to a human.
But, for the pleasure and profit together,
Allow me the hunting of Man
—
The chase of the Human, the search for the Soul
To its ruin—the hunting of Man.
It wouldn’t be long now. His blood stirred and, despite the cold, warmed with sweet anticipation.
He’d planned to kill the boy quickly so he wouldn’t be burdened by dragging them both away from the house.
But thanks to Faith’s
changing the rules of the game
by trying to escape, he was going to be able to take his time and kill them both slowly. Painfully. Soon.
Double
your pleasure, the hunter thought with a smile as the sled soared over the hill.
Double your fun.
It was then he saw her. Standing in front of him, the barrel of a revolver pointed straight at his chest.
Roaring with a warrior’s rage, rather than turning away, the man who’d once been the boy raised by wolves pointed the sled directly at her.
Then gunned the accelerator.
50
W
ill had never thought he’
d be
grateful for the damn Ride the Divide race that had sledders racing all around Hazard night and day. Until a group came speeding
toward him, their engines sound
ing like a hundred, no, a thousand, furious wasps.
“Sheriff’s office,” he shouted, holding up his badge just in case they hadn’t noticed the big gold seal on the side of the Jeep’s black doors.
Middle-aged and law-abiding, the entire pack immediately came skidding to a halt, sending up frothy white rooster tails of snow.
“I’ve got an emergency and need to commandeer one of your vehicles.”
They exchanged confused looks.
“Like now,” Will stressed, reminding himself that just shooting someone and taking the sled could well be considered overkill. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Then this is the baby you want, Sheriff,” one of the sledders said, climbing off a black-and-silver Bullet chassis with CMSA stickers plastered all over it. Her
voice revealed what her heavily padded, yellow spaceman suit did not, that she was a woman. It also indicated Great Lakes roots. “I did one hundred and fifty-four miles an hour in a thousand feet on it back home in Clearwater, Minnesota.”
Lake racing and powder were two entirely different things. But fast was fast.
“Thanks.” Will pulled a helmet he kept in the backseat of the Jeep. “I’ll get this back to you.” Hopefully in one piece, but Will had been a cop long enough never to guarantee anything. “Where are you staying?”
“The Red Wolf Lodge. Alone,” she tacked on in an obvious feminine ploy that caused more than one of the other sledders to chuckle.
“Well, like I said, thanks.”
He strapped his rifle onto his back, swung his leg over the seat, and roared off.
“
H
e’s going to freaking kill you!” Josh yelled at Faith from behind the tree.
“Not if I kill the bastard first,” she shouted back.
“Christ, if we get out of this, remind me to warn my dad never to piss you off.”
“When
we get out of this,” she corrected. “Now shut up and let me concentrate. I’ve never shot an actual person before.”
You can do this.
Focus.
Find your center.
No. Find
his
center.
One advantage Faith had was that if Drew continued straight toward her as he was doing, he presented the largest possible target.
The disadvantage was that with the huge tree behind her, she could become trapped, without anywhere to run. No way to escape.
She took a deep breath. Another. Narrowed her concentration, closing off the falling snow, the howl of the wind, the needlelike ice hitting her face.
Her sphere of vision narrowed. Until there were just the two of them. Faith and the man she’d foolishly, mistakenly considered a friend.
She stilled her mind.
Took a third, steadying breath.
Then pulled the trigger.
With every part of her being focused so intently on her attacker, Faith did not hear the crack of the limb overhead. Nor did she hear Josh’s shout of warning.
She did hear the roar of the revolver. Felt the recoil force her arm up. The last thing she heard was Drew scream like a wounded animal.
“I got him,” she murmured as the crashing limb dropped her to her knees.
51
F
uck, f
uck, fuck!
What the hell did the bitch think she was doing?
Didn’t she know who he was?
What he was?
He was the man who was once the boy raised by wolves. He was a predator.
You couldn’t kill him! He was fucking invincible.
“Invincible!” he screeched, as a bolt of fire ripped through his upper arm.
As if validating his claim, a limb from the downed tree suddenly cracked off, falling through the shaggy branches. The hunter watched it strike the back of his adversary’s head.
Felt a surge in his loins as she fell, facedown, into a deep drift of snow.
Invincible, he repeated as, clenching his teeth against the pain, he managed to slow his speed in a low skid.
Game on.
* * *
* *
T
he snow was getting heavier. Wetter. The roads more and more treacherous. The good thing was that the sled could go where even the Cherokee, with snow tires and chains, couldn’t get to.
Will had only been back in the valley six weeks. But some things a guy never forgot. Like all the forest-service and country, two-lane, dirt roads crisscrossing the landscape. When you were seventeen and looking for a place to make out with a girl, you pretty much kept a GPS in your head.
As he tore through the trees, he brought up a virtual map. Remembered that halcyon summer day when he’d been parked out in the woods with Vicki Dayton. It had been the first time a girl had ever touched his cock.
The road was close by and, if he remembered correctly—and please, God, let him be right—should be a shortcut to Faith’s house.
Even better, Will thought, as he sawed the sled back and forth to avoid ancient ice-age boulders and fallen trees, the plows wouldn’t have gotten out here yet to pack down the s
now and risk it turning to ice.
The wind was howling, the snowmobile engine was screeching, but Will had spent too many hours on the police range not to recognize the sound of a gun being fired.
It ricocheted over the snow, through the trees, slamming into his brain.
Will couldn’t remember the last time he’d prayed. Even when he’d been lying on those cobblestones, a
dead man a few feet away, sirens wailing, and Gray shouting into his face, it hadn’t crossed his mind to request help from anyone.
But now, as he raced toward the sound of the gunfire, hitting the bumps at a speed that rattled his bones, one plea reverberated over and over in his desperate mind.
Please, God. Don’t let Faith die.
H
e was bleeding. Blood was pouring down his sleeve, spilling over his hand, making the throttle slick and greasy. The damn bitch had winged him. And for that she was going to pay.
He hit the brake, int
ending to stop just long enough
to
stab his blade into her chest. A collapsed lung would
keep her from running away. But she’d stay alive. For a long time. Long enough for him to do everything he’d been dreaming of doing to her. All the dark and perverse things she’d been asking men to do for the last twelve months.
Oh, she hadn’t said the words out loud. To do so, especially in these post-Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident days, would have go
tten her kicked off the airways.
But you didn’t have to be a psychological anthropologist to know that there wasn’t a man in the high country who didn’t listen to
Talking After Midnight
and know, deep in his gut, his groin, that Faith Prescott was just begging him to get down and dirty with her.
And this man was more than willing to oblige.
As he approached the tree, the sheriff’s kid was down on his knees, try
ing to lift her out of the snow
bank.
Change of plans. Actually, he’d go back to the original. Kill the kid, quick and sweet. Then deal with Faith.
He’d bought a hunting cabin from a math professor this past fall, not quite sure what he was going to do with it. But now he realized the real estate deal was serendipity.
The former owner was currently spending the holidays in Greece, which meant he wouldn’t be around to tell the sheriff that he’d just happened to sell a remote one-room hideaway to the hunter the entire country would undoubtedly be looking for by dawn.
He’d have plenty of time to do everything he’d been fantasizing. After he was finished with her, as he’d promised back in that cozy kitchen, he’d let her go.
Then he’d hunt her down.
And this time, he would kill her.