Comes Now the Wicked Woodsman (2 page)

Landa had been working it extra hard last night, rubbing up against me with each drink or fresh pitcher she delivered, the scent of her pussy heavy with her arousal. The first hour into my ill-considered binge, I'd pushed her back each time. But as the night wore on, my pushes grew less adamant and, when she took too long to come out with a fresh bottle of whisky, I had ventured into the kitchen to find my own.

Bile filled my mouth, burning my throat and tongue. I swallowed it down, grabbed the body wash and squirted an even bigger glop.

Fuck, I had really done it, hadn't I?

I scrubbed ruthlessly at my skin, nails scraping hard enough at the surface to leave long trails of red that took a few seconds to disappear. I would have to dip my dick in bleach a couple times before it was clean enough after Landa. No wonder it didn't want to work.

A fist pounding at the bathroom door snapped me out of my panic. I yanked on the handles and stopped the flow of water just as Clover finished shouting through the thin layer of wood, her words lost on me.

"What?" I snarled and jerked the shower curtain to the side.

The bathroom door flew open, Clover's mouth instantly going from the shape of the rant she was about to deliver to a shocked
O
. She spun around, hands jumping to shield her eyes far too late.

"Some scars don't heal, dude," she complained. "Not even for a shifter."

"Who the fuck told you to open the door?" I slid a towel from the rack with a snap then wrapped it around my waist, my noncompliant half-erection finally fading now that my little sister had barged in.

"You've been in here forty-five minutes," she said, ignoring my perfectly valid question. "Paisley's probably back at her grandmother's from the feed store and I need to go."

"She didn't ask you," I said, my body blocking the door to keep her out as I swiped a palm along the steamed up mirror.

I didn't actually know that Paisley hadn't asked, but things had been falling apart at a faster clip these last few months, so I figured I was right. And pointing it out would help bring a quicker death to their friendship.

The sooner the better, I thought, running a comb through my beard. They were both headed toward a far bigger heartache than a lapsed friendship.

"Paisley knows she doesn't need to ask for help," Clover growled, pushing her way past me to grab her cosmetics bag.

"Just like she knew we'd eventually find out about Holly dying on our own or her arrival?" I prodded.

Clover's face went haywire, the top half scrunching together while her lips pulled wide and down, a visible tremor running through them. I instantly felt like a complete asshole, but the tears were inevitable. I was just trying to control their timing and how long they lasted.

"Fuck you," she said, her face still a twisted mess as she slammed her cosmetics bag on the counter and tried to squeeze back into the hallway.

Turning, I wrapped my arms around her and tried to pull her to my chest. She fought me but her muscles were no match for my strength. I pushed a gentle wave of alpha energy to stop her struggling before she hurt herself.

She rewarded my efforts with a sharp bite.

"Don't pull that shit with me!" she growled, nothing but pure fury shaping her expression. "Just because you're afraid to act on how you feel about Paisley doesn't mean I'm cutting her out of my life. Fuck you if you're not alpha enough to handle that."

My hands dropped to my sides. Despite all her struggling a few seconds before, she didn't move, just looked up at me with her soulful green eyes.

"I don't have any feelings for Paisley," I said, the mechanical voice unfamiliar to my ears.

"Liar," she whispered then escaped down the hall.

********************

Paisley

With Mojo heading back to Night Falls to pick up a few parts for the furnace, I went into my grandmother's room. I skirted the bed, eyes averted, and dragged the footstool in front of her reading chair over to the closet.

Pulling on the chain for the closet light, I did exactly what I criticized her for at least a dozen times a year by stepping onto the rickety footstool. The top shelf where all her treasures were kept was just out of reach without the damn thing. They were dangerously within reach with it.

Teetering forward, I grabbed the pink and white box decorated with roses and slid it toward me. Hopping down, I stood on tiptoe and eased it the rest of the way off the shelf.

Bumping my shin hard against the footstool as I turned, I shook my head. All I needed to do was go out into the barn and grab the step ladder. But just like my grandmother, I was too obstinate to concede that I was one of the shortest people in Night Falls.

Forgetting myself for a few seconds, I bent to place the box on the bed but immediately pulled back. A chill ran down my spine. A habit of creature, Holly had laid center of the bed pretty much every night since my grandfather's death. The mattress had changed a couple of times since then, but not the sleeping pattern, and enough years had passed since the mattress was new that I could see the outline of her shape.

They'd found her there, covers tucked up to her chin and a serene smile on her face. If she hadn't been so notoriously habitual, it might have been days after she died in her sleep before the discovery was made. But if Holly Ulster said she would sell you eggs at seven thirty in the morning on Tuesday, she would be in the barn waiting for you at seven fifteen. When she wasn't, her first customer of the day had immediately investigated.

"Sorry, gran," I whispered, backing up from the bed. "I can't sit with you, not yet."

Taking the box into the living room, I placed it on the coffee table and removed the lid. White mailing envelopes yellowed with age, their size uniformly nine by twelve, rested one on top of the other within the confines of the box.

I took out the top one marked with my name and plopped it on the table. The next one made my fingers hesitate, infected them with a small tremble.

Phaedra and Jack.

I placed it more gingerly atop the one with my name.

Little Phaedra.

By "little," Holly had meant my mother from the time she was born until she became a married woman at the age of twenty five -- which was three years before she died in the car wreck that also claimed my father and almost claimed me.

Fuck. I wasn't ready for this. I needed to pack everything into bigger boxes and put it into climate controlled storage for a few months. When the semester was over and enough grief had drained away, then I could sort through what pictures I wanted to keep and which ones I would donate to the county museum after digitizing them. Until then, I didn't need to dredge up any more memories than necessary.

Hearing the crunch of tires on the drive, I stepped to the front door. I looked out the narrow window that ran the length of the door, my hand absently reaching for the rifle that should have been there but wasn't.

Clover's Jeep -- another thing I wasn't ready for.

Clover, not the Jeep.

Sighing, I pulled the door open and waited just inside the threshold until she stepped onto the porch. Seeing she had a bag full of groceries in each arm, I took one from her and stood to the side while she entered the cabin and went into the kitchen.

"You didn't need to do this," I said, shutting the front door.

"You mean you picked up food for yourself?" she asked with what I recognized as a false brightness from all our years together.

"No," I confessed.

Her next question had a tart smack to it I wasn't sure I deserved. "Suddenly learned to cook from scratch?"

"No." Irritation seeped into my response. Gran didn't go to town but more than once a month. She'd get all the feed she needed for the animals and a few basic staples for the kitchen. Everything else she grew, milked or butchered on her own. She didn't even have a microwave.

"Oh, I know," Clover said with a saccharine sweetness as she took the second bag from me and started putting away the contents. "You've decided to be sensible and stay with me."

"No," I mumbled.

Her eyes rolled up in her head and one impatient foot stomped against the cabin's wood flooring. "Is that the only word you know, Paisley Williams?'

I huffed a small laugh because there was only one answer I could give her. "No."

"Damn it!" She threw a bag of muffins at my head. "You're as insufferable as Braeden sometimes."

I wanted to toss another "no" out, both because I was nowhere close to as insufferable as her big brother and because I had a good chain going, but I wisely kept my mouth shut.

"I'll make us some tea." Reaching into the cupboard, she found a bottle of my grandmother's homemade plum brandy. She laughed, turned to me and raised one mahogany-colored brow tweezed to a fine arch. "With a shot or two of this."

Me drunk around the best friend who had been slipping through my fingers like quicksilver the last three months was a terrible idea.

I moved to the front door and shrugged into my Michigan State jacket. "I don't have time. The stalls haven't been cleaned in at least a week. I don't want everything smelling like goat shit when the buyer comes."

"Braeden can get one of--"

"No," I snapped. I was beyond sick and tired of Braeden handing off chores he used to volunteer for to virtual strangers, most of them males who avoided me like I was a plague victim covered in boils and pus whenever they encountered me in town.

Turning to Clover, I caught her staring at the floor, her usually proud shoulders sagging and her fingers dancing lightly at her sides.

"I spent all day in a car yesterday," I said, not quite willing to say I was sorry but skirting the edges of an apology nonetheless. "And I'm not ready to sit in here with all the memories this place has. I need to do this."

"Not alone," she warned, her green gaze lifting with the threat of tears if I tried to turn her away.

I sighed. My best friend was the town cannonball. Anything she aimed herself at got knocked over eventually. Only Braeden, whom she practically worshipped, could rein her in.

"You'll have to use my gloves," I lied, hoping the idea of my working barehanded might dissuade her from joining me.

"I brought my own pair," she chirped and jingled her keys at me. "Just gotta pull them out of the glove box."

Suppressing a groan, I led the way out of the cabin and worked on dragging one of the barn doors across the half frozen ground, the half dozen goats inside beginning to yell for attention.

"You want both of these open?" she asked, pulling on her gloves and kicking the Jeep's door shut.

"Yeah, need to back the truck in and unload some straw bales," I mumbled, resisting the urge to relax while she was around. It would be too easy to forget the gap that had opened up between us these last few months. Forgetting would lead to a lot more pain when reality came back and bitch slapped me with a reminder.

With gran dead, there was nothing left for me in Night Falls.

"Okay." She sounded deflated. A quick glance at her as she started tugging on the other barn door's handle was enough to confirm the impression.

"I know Holly's passing hits deep," she started, pausing in her fight to wrestle the door open. "She was the last blood relative you have. But that doesn't mean--"

A sharp crack punctured the air.

I spun around, my gaze scanning the surrounding field and tree lines. The property might look like nothing, but the house and barn were right in the middle of a hundred acres that had been in my family for generations. No one had permission to hunt the land without coming up to the cabin first.

So no one should be firing anywhere near the house or barn.

"Could you tell where that came from?" I asked, my attention riveted on the tree line.

Clover didn't answer.

It took a second for that to sink in.

The only sounds were the kicks and bleating of the goats spooked by the rifle shot. Clover hadn't so much as cursed since the shot was fired.

My head snapped left to where she had been pulling on the door.

Her body rested in a crumpled heap.

Before I could scream at seeing the puddle of blood forming on the ground, another shot rang out. A plank of the barn wood by my head splintered.

I dropped to the ground in a roll and kept rolling until I reached Clover's unconscious body.

I didn't have time to assess her condition before a third shot ricocheted off the metal handle on the door. I shoved my arms underneath hers and dragged her toward the barn's interior, running and stumbling backwards until we were out of view and I collapsed.

What the hell was going on? Why would someone shoot at either of us?

A soft moan stopped the questions running through my head. I had to focus. The front left panel of Clover's jacket was soaked through with blood. The back of her jacket was clean, no exit hole. She needed help -- fast and far more than I could give her -- or she would die.