Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 (22 page)

“You tried him?”

She nodded. “Three times. I left messages. He’s probably on the way here. Could be traffic, or a fender bender or something. He drives that boat around, he’s gonna hit something eventually, right?”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Jack said. “Don’t start worrying yet.”

But they both knew that the worrying had already begun. The Prowlers were back, or at least one of them, a killer with a vendetta. A corpse in Bill’s trunk, an attempt on their lives. Jack shot the bastard in the shoulder, but he was a Prowler. A wound like that was not going to slow him down for long.

As Wendy returned, Jack stepped close to his sister and gave her a quick hug. “He’ll be here.”

Courtney tried to tuck the loose locks of her hair back and seemed to prop herself a bit higher with her cane. “Go get ready for work.”

“Gone. You don’t even see me.” He started toward the stairs at the back of the restaurant that would lead up to the apartment, then turned to regard her again. “What happened to your car?”

“I let Molly take it to Dorchester to see her mother.”

“Oh.”

Jack tried to process that as he trotted up the stairs to the apartment. Molly avoided going to her mother’s unless she absolutely had to, so he wondered what had prompted her to make a drive over there. The door stuck slightly, swollen with humidity, but he got it open and pushed inside. The air-conditioning unit was off when no one was home, and it was sweltering inside. He wished he had time for a shower.

Instead, he went quickly into his room and changed into dark pants and a hunter green, collared Bridget’s shirt. In the bathroom he splashed some water on his face and into his hair, then ran his fingers through it, trying to neaten it up a little. As he walked to the door, ready for work, he caught a glimpse inside Molly’s room and saw her clothes laid out on the bed, open suitcases on the floor. Jack paused and leaned against the doorframe.

“Ah, Mol,” he whispered to himself. “Damn it.”

“
Sucks, huh?”

Jack’s heart skipped a beat, but even before he went farther into the room, he knew it was Artie. He glanced around and spotted the ghost in a corner on his left. Though his spectral form was diaphanous, as always, the wall visible through him, Artie seemed to Jack unusually vivid. The color of his hair and his sweatshirt, the dirty laces trailing untied from his sneakers, all seemed a bit more tangible.

“Hey,” Jack said. “Did you get anything?”

“
I found a few new arrivals over here, three definite murder victims, but all of them are basketcases still. I’m trying to shake them loose, see if I can figure out which one is our guy.”

“All right. Keep at it,” Jack replied. Then, quickly, he told Artie about Eden and what he had learned about the Ravenous, and that somehow the Ravenous had caught his scent and could track him if he truly looked into the Ghostlands.

“
Whoa.”

“No kidding. Look, stick around. I can’t call for you, so you’re just going to have to hang out for now. The faster we get this over with the better. I’m going to call Eden, see if she can come down. Let’s see if this Seth guy can help us out.”

“
Not like I have a hot date waiting,”
Artie said. “
I’ll linger. It’s what I do best.”

Molly’s mother lived in a decrepit little two-bedroom house in a Dorchester neighborhood where most people Molly knew would never go after dark. There were a hundred things her mother could have done to improve the appearance of the house and the postage-stamp yard around it. A simple paint job and some grass seed would have done wonders. But even in her lucid moments, when the alcohol tide had receded in her brain, Tina Hatcher’s attitude had always been laissez-faire. What was the point, after all, of improving her own property if the rest of the neighborhood looked like shit?

Molly had told her several times that if it did not matter to her, then there really
was
no point.

With traffic it took her nearly three quarters of an hour to drive to her mother’s house. She was almost surprised to find that her key still fit in the front door. The inside was as bad as the outside, maybe worse. The paint was peeling and the dust thriving, and the smell of mold and human sweat and stale beer filled the place. Despite the heat there were not enough windows open.

“Mom?” she called.

“Who’s that?” her mother barked from her bedroom at the end of the hall.

“Who else calls you ‘Mom?’ ” she snapped back. Molly had given up being surprised by her own bitterness a long time ago.

At the door to her mother’s bedroom, she paused and gazed inside, her stomach queasy. Guilt raged in her over her revulsion at this place, at this woman who had borne her and somehow managed to raise her even through the alcohol and pills and men. But guilt or no guilt, Molly could almost not bear to be here. Now that she had a place where people wanted her, a place where she felt she belonged, it hurt to come back to this place.

How sick is that?
she thought.
I’d rather be somewhere my life is in danger than here with my own mother.

But she stared into her mother’s room, and her guilt dissipated. The bed was a mess, soiled sheets spilling onto the stained carpet. The room reeked of marijuana smoke. Half empty bottles of vodka and tequila lined the windowsill, and there were empty beer cans stacked in towers on the bureau. A man’s work boots lay cast aside next to the bed, but to Molly’s great relief, her mother was alone.

Tina Hatcher stood in front of a full-length mirror dressed in a shirt that was too tight and a skirt that was too short. She was only thirty-seven years old, and despite how she had ravaged her body, she still had a decent figure. Tina might have pulled off the outfit if it weren’t for the way her makeup was caked on, and the beer bottle in her left hand.

“What do you think?” she asked without turning, her voice too loud, too forced.

Molly wondered how many of the beer cans on the bureau had been emptied today.

“I just . . . I leave for college the end of next week, and I wanted to pick up a few things.”

At last her mother turned, but there was a dark anger on her face, almost a sneer, that made Molly look away. No one in the world could make her feel badly about herself as quickly or as easily as her mother.

“So you’re just gonna leave? Taking off, big college girl?” Tina said, voice heavy with loathing. “What about me? What am I supposed to do?”

Molly only sighed. She had given up trying to tell her mother what she ought to do years earlier.

“So you figured you’d come by and see what you could sneak out of here?” her mother went on.

Nausea rushed through her, and Molly felt as though she might have to run to the bathroom to throw up. She forced the feeling down and shook her head.

“I just came to say good-bye.”

Her mother took another swig of beer and set the bottle-down. Then she picked up a brush and ran it through her red mane, puffed up with too much hairspray.

“So you didn’t say. How do I look? Got a date tonight with this new guy, Rob.”

As Tina went on about the new man in her life, Molly turned and went back down the hall and out the door, furious with herself for even coming out here in the first place. There was nothing inside the walls of that place that she needed, or wanted. Nothing.

Even as she went to the car, started it up, and drove back toward Boston, she kept insisting that to herself.

* * *

The first thing Bill was aware of as he returned to consciousness was the sharp almost-pain of fingernails being dragged slowly, languorously across his face. Not hard enough or fast enough to break his skin, but enough to leave light scratches, enough to hurt. Confused, he opened his eyes and tried to swat the hand away, but he found he could not move. Before him stood a lithe, petite woman with spiky hair that was dyed a deep ebony black to offset her pale features. She wore a tight, belly-baring white T-shirt with the words SNOW WHITE printed on it in red, and a wraparound cloth skirt that fell barely mid-thigh. She watched him, amused.

Metal rings encircled his wrists and Bill struggled against them, fully expecting them to snap off. They did not. If these were handcuffs on him, they were far more substantial than average police issue.

“Mmm, look at you squirm. You are a big boy, aren’t you?” cooed his captor.

Still putting together the pieces in his head, reconstructing the last thing he remembered, Bill caught that familiar scent in the air again, and he remembered it all. Despite the manacles on his hands—and the chains he now realized bound his legs—Bill pressed his back to the wall and ratcheted himself around.

Across the room, in a brown leather chair with a reading lamp craned above it, sat the wiry, swift killer whose western outlaw features and overlong blond hair he had recognized instantly. They were the features Bill’s own sister, Claudia, had fallen in love with several decades before. Images flashed through Bill’s mind then. Claudia, tall and elegant as a human, but as a Prowler, her body sleek with a coat of burnt copper fur.

He had always been so proud of her, but never more than when she became a teacher in a public high school. Though as brother and sister they often disagreed, Bill and Claudia had one thing they could be in absolute agreement about—their desire to live peacefully among the humans.

Their history together was a scattering of moments, playing in the desert as children, hunting in the mountains of Europe as youngsters, exploring American cities with only each other for company. But those were only the images of them together. Both of them had had their own lives, their own loves. And Claudia had never loved anyone the way she loved the laughing, charismatic, bright-eyed killer she met one hot summer when America was tearing itself apart over a war on distant shores.

Fifteen years or more they had done a dance of heartache and longing, Dallas always coming back, but never to stay. Until at last Claudia had become pregnant. With her child on the way, she told Dallas he had two choices, to stay or to go. She would not allow him to treat their daughter the way he always treated her.

But Dallas could not promise her, it was not in him. He had never been part of any pack, no matter how small. Claudia told him to leave, but he wanted to stay to see his daughter born. The mother-to-be had driven him away with claw and fang and the two, as far as Bill knew, never talked again. Yet now here he was. The scent in the alley the night before, all around his car, the figure he had chased through Quincy Market, the intruder who might have killed Molly and Courtney and Jack.

“Dallas,” Bill growled. “How’s the shoulder?”

The female clucked her tongue. “That’s not very nice.”

“It’s pretty sore, actually,” Dallas confessed, rotating his left arm with a grimace of discomfort. “But I’ll get over it. Dwyer’s a tough kid.”

Something in his tone made Bill hesitate, a twist of dread in his gut. From the moment he realized who his attacker was, he had presumed that this was all about him. But now . . .

“You stay away from them,” Bill warned. He bared his teeth and snarled long and menacing. “You stay away.”

Dallas gave him a regretful look and began to pace the room. The place was decorated with tasteful antiques, an Oriental carpet on the floor, several plants placed where they would get the most sun. The house was as much a mask as the human faces all three of them wore, Bill thought, but beneath the surface of it rippled the wild, the predatory nature of the beast. Dallas shook his long hair back and scratched at the week-old stubble on his chin. Then he reached out and traced his fingers across the female’s back as he passed her, still pacing. She shuddered and smiled shyly, as though he had tickled her.

“I can’t do that, Bill. I have a contract.” Dallas paused and shot him that regretful look again. “Truth is, the contract includes you. But I figure the client has to give me some leeway given our history. Plus my daughter would never forgive me. So for Olivia’s sake, I’m going to keep you here until it’s over.”

“No,” Bill growled, and the sound grew louder in his chest. He bucked against the shackles that bound him, and he began to change. The fur spiked up through the skin all over his body and he strained to free himself. His jaw clicked and bones slid painfully over one another as his facial structure changed, elongated. Claws lengthened and muscles became more prominent beneath his fur.

Dallas produced the taser from inside his pocket and held it ready just in case he freed himself. But as hard as Bill struggled to break the manacles on his wrists, he could not. After a moment, Dallas relaxed again. The female had retreated a few feet and stared with wide eyes, almost salivating. Now she ran her hands through her short-cropped hair and chuckled nervously.

“Had us going there a second, didn’t he, Valerie?” Dallas said to her. Then he regarded Bill closely. “You know what amazes me, Bill? Your focus, your level of concentration. I mean, I have worked very hard to be able to hold off the change even if I’m in pain, being tortured, whatever. It’s part of what I do. But you? I zapped you good with that taser more than once, and again to keep you unconscious, and you never lost your concentration, never let your focus be shattered so much that you let the animal out. I’ve got to admire that. The way I’ve got it figured, you spent all those years playing football, getting hit, you had to be focused enough not to reveal yourself every time you got knocked down.

“Do you think that’s it? The football?”

Bill’s gaze ticked from Dallas to Valerie, who stared at him in fascination, and then back to his sister’s former mate again.

“You said you had a contract,” Bill growled. “Who’s your client? Who sent you to kill us?”

Dallas sighed as though it were the most ridiculous question in the world. “Come on, Bill! You know I can’t answer that. Where would my reputation be if I didn’t keep the identity of my employers confidential?”

But Dallas did not have to answer. Bill knew of only one creature who hated them all enough to hire an assassin, and yet would also be reluctant to try to do the job herself.