Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (11 page)

Across the open concourse, even with the flutter of pigeons and the distant sound of car engines, he heard a low laugh.

With a snarl, Bill ran. Too swiftly to be human, but he didn’t care now. He dared not risk being seen in his true form out here in the open like this, but was not going to worry about some street drifter talking about some guy who moved too fast to be a man.

The air made a hushed sound as he sliced through it. A long iron and wood bench was in his way, and Bill cleared it in a single hurdle. This place, usually teeming with life, was like some post-apocalyptic landscape now and there was nothing to slow his pace. He reached the spot where the watcher had stood but of course he was gone. Bill raced around in front of the main structure of Quincy Market, the marketplace’s granite steps on the right and the brick colonial grandeur of Faneuil Hall to his left.

No sign of anyone.

But the scent lingered.

And from not far off, the sound of running feet.

Another growl came, and this time he did not swallow it, but let it out in a rolling thunder that echoed off the buildings around him. His legs pumped beneath him, muscles rippling, and yet still he fought the change. All the questions that rose up in him at the thought of the corpse in his trunk were pushed away.
Why
would have to wait until he had in his hands the one being who could answer that question.

He breathed in the Prowler’s scent, and he
knew
it, but still could not place it.

Around the corner of Faneuil Hall, he ran past a glass structure that housed a small florist and then he came in sight of Congress Street, the wide avenue that separated the Quincy Market area from Government Center and the ominous concrete behemoth that looked more like a prison than City Hall.

A lone figure, crouched low, ran in a diagonal line toward the road. Lean and quick, but Bill couldn’t tell any more than that in the dark, from this distance. Despite the lateness of the hour, cars raced by on both sides of Congress Street. Bill swore loudly and kept up his pursuit, though a feeling of dread began to build in him.

No, no, no,
he thought, anger boiling up along with the dread.

He leaned into the wind, gaining momentum, aware that at his obvious age and size, anyone who spotted him from a passing car would have to remark on his speed, but not caring. He couldn’t be arrested for being fast.

Fast,
he thought, and grunted.
Not fast enough.

For up ahead, a convertible charged through a red light and squealed to a halt at the curb. From that distance, Bill could see that the driver had blond hair, but no more. The Prowler—the creature that had planted that corpse in his trunk—leaped into the passenger seat without opening the door. The tires shrieked as the car accelerated out of there, shooting up Congress Street in the opposite direction.

“Damn,” Bill whispered as he came to a halt, watching the car disappear. The word came out as a snarl.

Now he would have to find the answers to his questions on his own. He turned to walk back toward the parking lot where he had left his car. When he reached the alley, the police were waiting for him.

Only a few blocks from where she had picked Dallas up, Valerie slowed the Mustang down. Not only did she not want to attract the attention of the police, she was just plain nervous about driving his car. It was pristine, absolutely perfect, and just the thought of how crushed he would be if she wrecked it was enough for her to want to pull over right then and switch with him.

Dallas didn’t seem to notice. He had been laughing even as he leaped into the car, barely able to catch his breath. It was infectious, and Valerie had laughed right along with him. This was a part of Dallas that rarely surfaced. Each new challenge, each hunt, brought out a grim determination in him, so these moments of reckless abandon were precious to her. Over the years their relationship had been a sort of revolving door; for a time she would be his mate, and then one of them would grow bored and leave.

Whenever Dallas came back into her life, Valerie would learn all over again just what it was that made her miss him so much.

“Whooo!” he said happily, slouching down in the Mustang’s passenger seat. “He’s fast for a big one, isn’t he?”

A devilish grin split his features, and it made Valerie laugh again.

“I don’t get you,” she said. “You know him well enough not to want to kill him, but you’ll torment him mercilessly?”

Dallas shot her a blank look. “Well, yeah! I said I knew him. I didn’t say I liked him a hell of a lot.”

Valerie shook her head, still smiling. “You’re not going to tell me any more than that, are you? How you know him? What it’s all about?”

He slid over beside her in the seat and put a hand on her leg, suddenly intimate. “That’s on a need to know basis, darlin’. And you do not need to know.”

Which was what made Valerie think that whatever Dallas’s connection to Cantwell was, it involved a woman.

“What do you think is going to happen with Paul’s body?” she asked.

They sped beneath streetlights and she turned left, planning to double back to where they had started. The engine hummed smoothly, making her think of the constant low drone from a beehive. Dallas turned sideways and looked back the way they had come as though he thought Bill Cantwell might still be chasing them. His grin evaporated.

“If the police respond as quickly to my phone call as I expect them to, it won’t be up to him. Just in case, though, we’re going to go back and keep an eye on him.”

A tiny alarm went off in Valerie’s mind. “Let’s just be careful, all right? He’s got your scent now, maybe mine, too.”

Dallas stroked her leg suggestively. “We’ll stay downwind. Once it all plays out, we can hunt the other three together, make a party of it, just you and me and the prey.”

A shiver of pleasure went through Valerie. Together would be nice. And the feast they would have . . . her mouth had begun to water just from his words. She reached out and ran her hand through his beautiful hair.

“How I’ve missed you,” she whispered.

A horn blared. Valerie looked back at the road to find that she let the car drift into the opposite lane. She jerked the wheel back just before she would have collided with a pickup truck. Both hands on the wheel, she held tight and slowed the car even further, her chest heaving with panic.

After a long moment, Dallas began to laugh again, though softly this time.

“Keep your eyes on the road.”

The front door to Bridget’s was locked when Molly finally returned to the pub. It was one-thirty in the morning and she felt as though she had been through the longest day of her life. A trip to the beach always left her exhausted and the long drive back and forth had not helped, but she knew that she was more emotionally drained than plain tired. She had her keys in her pocket, but when she reached the pub she saw Courtney inside, shutting off some of the lights.

Molly rapped on the window and Courtney looked up quickly. When she saw who it was, she smiled, but there was something bittersweet about it. Courtney hobbled to the door, punched in the numbers that would deactivate the burglar alarm, and unlocked it.

“Hey,” Molly said.

“I wasn’t sure you were coming back tonight,” Courtney told her.

“Neither was I.” Molly shrugged a bit and then slipped past her, waiting while Courtney locked up again. “But I have to work tomorrow, and I didn’t think it would be fair to you to just disappear.”

Courtney rested her weight on her cane and regarded her closely. Molly thought the woman looked like she had a lot to say, like she might be about to launch into some kind of lecture or begin to philosophize. Instead, she simply nodded.

“I appreciate it. I’m sorry about all this, Molly.”

“Me, too.”

After a moment’s pause, Courtney stepped up and gave her a small hug made awkward by the cane. “I’ll be up in just a minute.”

Molly nodded and headed for the stairs at the back of the restaurant.

“He’s probably waiting up for you,” Courtney said from behind her.

“Good,” Molly grunted. “He and I need to have a talk.”

Many of the stairs creaked, something she only noticed when the pub was empty and quiet. Fans rotated lazily on the ceiling; Courtney would leave them on low all night to keep the place from heating up early. Molly had never realized how many steps there were to the apartment.

The door was unlocked. It was almost always unlocked, even when the pub was open, a fact that Molly had chided Courtney and Jack for many times. Eventually, she was sure, some drunk was going to find his way up from the bar. But the Dwyer siblings were both stubborn and hardheaded, and getting them to change their behavior was even more difficult a task than Molly would have guessed.

She pushed the door open and stepped into the apartment. It was mostly dark, save for a small light in the bathroom that was always on and the pale blue flicker of the television in Jack’s room. His bedroom door was wide open. The air conditioner in Courtney’s room hummed quietly. It was turned up high enough that it was almost cold in the apartment, and Molly shivered. She went down the hall and stood in the doorway to Jack’s room.

He was sitting up on the bed, and when he saw her he froze as though he had been caught doing something awful.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Molly swallowed hard. “You’re up late.”

Jack glanced away nervously, but only once. After that he kept his gaze steady on her, as if he thought it would prove something to her.

“I was worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Or as fine as I can be. I walked around a lot, went over to Helen Darcy’s for a while. It was . . . I hadn’t seen her in weeks, so it was good, just to be with someone else. Someone who doesn’t know . . . what we know.” There was a pause then. It felt to her as though they were not people but actors on a stage and the audience was all around them. Jack sat on the bed in his underwear and a Boston Red Sox shirt, and Molly stood a few feet away with her unruly hair spilling all around her and the distance between them felt full, almost pregnant with expectation.

The audience,
she thought, and a chill went through her.

“Are we alone?” she asked suddenly.

Jack blinked. “How do you mean?”

She stared at him. “Are we . . . alone?”

Understanding dawned on his face with a comical expression. “Oh. Well, yeah. As far as I know. But I can’t always tell.”

Molly glanced at the television, where an ancient western in black and white flickered on the screen. “Do you have any idea how pissed off at you I am?”

“Kinda,” he replied.

She shot him a withering glance.

“Okay, maybe not,” he allowed. “But you didn’t even give me a chance to explain. It wasn’t up to me, y’know? I wanted to tell you. It was—”

“No!” she said quickly, and held up a hand. “I’m pissed at him, too, but don’t lay this off on Artie. You felt something happening, the same way I did. Something between us. As . . . as wrong as that would be, for it to happen so soon, only a few months after he was murdered . . . it was happening.” Molly forced herself to stare at him, snapping off every word now as though it tasted vile to her. “
You should have said
something.”

For a moment, she thought he was going to defend himself. But then Jack just nodded.

“You’re right. I should have. And I’m sorry.”

The anger was rolling out of her now, and it felt good. All the emotions that she had caged within her all through that day and night could finally be set free.

“It’s like this big joke on Molly, now. Courtney obviously knew, otherwise she would have brought it up to me just now. I’m assuming Bill knows, too.”

Jack glanced away, and she knew it was true.

“So it’s just me. Do you have any idea how much that makes me feel like an outsider? With all I’ve been through, even with the awful things we’ve seen together, I felt like, for a little while, I had a family. As long as we stayed here, working the pub, hunting these monsters together, I was a part of something. I was even thinking that maybe it was a bad idea for me to leave for Yale right now, that maybe I should put it off or even go somewhere else, somewhere closer, because someone has to fight this fight, and it’s
us.
We’re already in it. It’s something we share.

“I felt like I had a family, Jack,” Molly said, calmer now, anger all used up, only the sadness remaining. “But then I found out I was just a stray you’d taken in. You and Artie plotting to protect me from myself. Well that just sucks, Jack! It isn’t fair. What would have happened if we
had
started to get . . . closer?” Some flicker of recognition went through him then, and Molly stared at him.

“Let me guess,” she said slowly. “You talked about it, didn’t you? With him? You couldn’t talk about it with me after we kissed in Vermont, but you talked about it with him?”

Jack let out a small, defeated sigh. “Yes, we talked about it. To tell you the truth, Artie’s been pushing for us to get together for a while.”

Her mouth hung open, and she just stared at him.

“He . . . how could he want that?” she asked in a tiny voice, feeling as though she had withdrawn to some place deep inside herself. “If he loved me so much, how could . . .”

She could not finish, and only stared at Jack, distraught and hoping for some sort of explanation that would make sense of it all.

“Artie loves us both,” he said gently. “But he’s gone, Molly. I can talk to him sometimes, but he isn’t really here. Artie thought that if you knew, you’d never really be able to put it in the past. As for us . . .”

The pause brought her attention and Molly stared at him, still thunderstruck. Jack shrugged.

“I’ve always loved you as a friend. I care about you so much, and Artie knew that. Knows that. He said he hoped something would happen with us because he knew I would take care of you.”

The words were like a door slamming shut in her mind. Molly stiffened, stood up straight, and glared at him with all the venom she could muster.

“I don’t need you to take care of me, Jack Dwyer,” she said bitterly. Then she stared around the room, wondering if Artie could hear her, hoping that he could.