Frostfire (23 page)
Authors: Lynn Viehl
She’d spent her entire adult life hovering on the fringe of society, hiding inside her solitude, terrified of being exposed for who and what she was. She’d never thought being kidnapped by people who wanted to dissect her like a frog would be liberating, but it had freed her. The moment she’d woken in Walker’s arms, she’d stepped out of a prison cell she’d built around herself. She was never going back to that.
Walker’s trail came to an abrupt end outside a broad thicket of brush surrounding an old log cabin. So did the other trail, although the tracks had changed over the last fifty yards. All Lilah could see were sets of twin depressions, now distorted into longer, broader tracks that sank almost as deeply as Walker’s had.
As she looked all around the hidden cabin, she saw no sign of an attack or a trail leading away from it. She walked up to the brush, and examined it until she found an area of disturbance. From the broken branches and dislodged snow, she could see someone had pushed his way through the overgrowth.
Joy and relief made Lilah’s heart flutter madly against her ribs. He’d found shelter. He’d gone inside. He wasn’t suicidal. She wanted to shout his name, and jump over the brush, but another, darker emotion made her go still.
Not this time.
She wasn’t warning him that she was here, or giving him another chance to dodge her. This time, she’d make him listen. Even if she had to bash him in the head with something.
Icy branches clawed at her face as she navigated her way through the brush, which had grown up to cover two-thirds of the cabin’s walls. When she broke through, she stood directly in front of an old string-latched door, and bent to peer into the narrow groove around the string. The inside of the cabin was dark, but she could smell a trace of woodsmoke. Glancing up, she saw a thin tendril of smoke rising from the stone chimney.
Suicidal men didn’t build fires.
Lilah tugged on the dry, cracked strip of hide until the door creaked open, and stepped inside. A little sunlight filtered through a filmy square of glass at the back of the cabin, illuminating an old plank floor, a wide dusty table, and a rocking chair with a broken back. Dusty cobwebs hung from sagging rafters, creating a ragged, ghostly canopy. Five pallets, their mattresses split and spilling rotting hay, lined one side of the room, while a hearth with a small fire occupied the center of the opposite wall. The air, thick with dust, smelled of burning pine and oak.
She closed the door behind her and let the wooden latch bar fall into place, not bothering to disguise the sound. Equally silent, Walker emerged from one shadowed corner by the hearth, inspecting her as she moved toward him. Melted snow dripped from his hair, and his pants were soaked to midthigh, but he looked much better than she felt.
He didn’t have to ask what she was doing here; his entire body was shouting that question.
“I tracked you. It wasn’t difficult. I’m an animal control officer, and you leave a trail like a bulldozer.” She bent down to unfasten the straps of the snowshoes. “Is there someplace I can hang this coat to dry?”
He peered at her as if she’d sprouted another head, but still said nothing.
“Yes, it was ridiculous for me to come after you. A lot of stupid things have happened this morning.” She took off her coat and shook it off by the door before walking to the table and draping it over one end. “I don’t suppose you found a coffeemaker or a stash of doughnuts around here. I didn’t even get a chance to brush my teeth.”
“Lilah,” he said, his voice low. “Go back to town.”
“No, I’m not going to do that.” She went to the split-log bench in front of the hearth, and gingerly tested it with one hand before she sat down and took off her gloves. “Come over here.”
“I don’t want you.”
Anger, always her enemy, welled up in her, but she let it pass through and out of her. When she felt calm again, she said, “I’ve spent the last hour in subzero temperatures snowshoeing up a mountain to find you. I don’t know where I am. I can’t feel my nose or my ears. My lungs feel like I’ve been snorting snow cones.” She held her hands out to the hearth. “So come over here, Walker, and sit down by the fire with me, or I’m going to hurt you.”
He approached the bench and sat down as far away from her as he could without falling off. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
She held up one finger. “You’re not going to do any of the talking this time. I am. You’re going to sit there and listen to me.” When he opened his mouth, she wagged her finger. “I mean it. Not a word. Or I swear to God, there will be pain.”
He stared into the fire.
“I’ve never really talked to anyone much. I always had to be careful not to let anyone get too close—even my friends on the Internet. So I already know I’m not going to be good at this.” If she stopped to think about it, she wouldn’t be able to continue, so she forced herself to go on. “Last night you and I had sex. It was consensual. I did not fight you off, or ask you to stop, or scream for help. We both had orgasms. You had two. I think I had three. Maybe four. I haven’t had that many that I ever needed to count. After the sex was over, we cuddled and fell asleep.”
Walker didn’t move.
“Look at me.” She waited until he turned his head toward her. “None of that—not one second of that—was unwanted or abusive.”
His eyes narrowed, and then he shook his head.
Lilah understood. He wasn’t going to agree or argue with her. He had pushed her away and now he was shutting down. Which put the full burden squarely back on her.
For him, she would bear it. “I know why you came up here, and it wasn’t to move into this place and play mountain man. You thought you’d go after those things that killed our kidnappers. But not for revenge, right? You were hoping they’d do the same to you.” She folded her arms. “This death wish of yours is really getting on my nerves. I’ve been there, Walker. Getting torn apart by a starving animal is not the way you want to go. I speak from personal experience.”
His shoulders stiffened.
“Yes, I guess I forgot to mention exactly how I got my ability. It takes a near-death experience to switch on our psychic powers, and mine happened to be a wild-animal attack.” She rubbed a hand against her throat. “Do you know what it’s like, to be knocked down, to feel the fangs tearing into you? The blood doesn’t gush. It sprays. Everywhere. You hear it spraying.”
He stared at her, appalled.
“The pain is like the animal: It’s big and terrifying and tries to eat you alive. The only good thing about it is when you black out, and even then you’re thinking, you’re wondering, how much of me will be left for someone to find? If anyone finds me at all.” She looked into the fire, sickened by her own words. “Believe me, Walker, it’s not how you want to go. Anything is better than that.”
He propped his arms against his thighs, his head bowing.
“I don’t know what made you so angry with me last night, or so upset this morning,” she told him. “I have some theories, but honestly, I don’t have to know everything you’re thinking. We’ve both been through hell, but we got through together. I’ve never been able to depend on anyone else like this, and I’m guessing you haven’t, either. Maybe it’s new, and scary, but compared to being drugged and experimented on and kidnapped, I think it should be a piece of cake.”
He rested his head against his palms.
“I told you, I haven’t been with a lot of men,” she added. “The truth is that I only dated when I couldn’t stand to spend one more night alone. It wasn’t that often, maybe once or twice a year. Most of the time, Walker? I didn’t even sleep with them. It didn’t make me feel better, but while I was with them for a couple of hours, I could pretend that I was like other women. That I was normal. But I know I’m not.” She blinked, hard, and cleared her throat. “There are plenty of other women in town, like you said, who are probably better in bed than me. Just keep in mind, none of them were in that truck with you. I was. And while I’m not normal, I have a lot to offer that they don’t.” She suddenly remembered she’d ordered him to shut up. “You can say something any time now.”
He made a strangled sound. “I’ve taken enough from you.”
“It’s not something you can take.” She shifted closer, and curled her hand around his. “This, I have to give.”
She saw the faded bruises on their wrists, remnants of the hours they’d been cuffed together. In another day they would likely be gone, but Lilah thought she would always see a ghost of them there. And now he had dropped his hands and was looking at her, his expression so bleak it tore through her heart, and gave her the strength to tell him the rest.
“I didn’t track you just so we could talk about last night,” she told him. “I came after you because I’m in love with you.”
He didn’t move a muscle. “You don’t know me.”
“I don’t know a lot
about
you,” she corrected, “but from the way I understand it, you don’t fall in love with someone’s past, or the mistakes they’ve made, or whatever they think of themselves. You fall in love with them, and that makes them the most important person in the world. That’s who you are to me.”
about
you,” she corrected, “but from the way I understand it, you don’t fall in love with someone’s past, or the mistakes they’ve made, or whatever they think of themselves. You fall in love with them, and that makes them the most important person in the world. That’s who you are to me.”
She pressed her lips together until she could control their trembling, but she couldn’t do anything about the tears that refused to stop filling her eyes.
“I don’t know why or how this happened, but it did.” She had to tell him the rest. “Walker, you’re not just the man I love. You’re the love of my life. That’s why I’m here. If you die on me, if you kill yourself, I’m going to be alone forever, and I can’t . . . I won’t . . . ” Her voice broke.
“Lilah.” He hauled her across the bench and onto his lap, and bundled her in his arms. “I won’t die.”
“Okay. Good.” She buried her face against his chest and sobbed.
He let her cry all over him while he held her and stroked her hair. When the tears ebbed, he brought a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it in her hands. Lilah knew she wasn’t a pretty crier, and red splotches probably covered her face, but he didn’t look away as she mopped up and blew her nose.
“Thanks.” She rested her cheek against his shoulder and released a shuddering breath. “I almost wish we were back on the truck. Things seemed a lot simpler when we were naked and handcuffed together.”
“Things will never be simple with me,” he said softly, and for the first time she heard the shadow of an accent coloring his words. “There are things about me that you must know. You will find them difficult, if not impossible, to believe.”
“I just stole clothes from a woman I put to sleep telepathically,” she reminded him. “Trust me, my belief system is wide-open.” She remembered the tracks outside. “Were you really going after that thing that killed the men?”
He nodded. “I tracked it here and came inside to see if it was occupying the cabin. From the window I saw more tracks leading away toward the peaks.” He glanced around. “Someone from town has been using this place as shelter. The hand pump works, and there is soap and towels. I also found clothes, stacked firewood, and a radio.”
“But you didn’t find any food,” she guessed, thinking of the shape of the tracks at the end of the older trail. “Did you?”
He shook his head.
She thought for a moment. “It hunts out in the open with a group of others like it. They drag off their kills, probably to a place where they can hide them from other predators, or maybe the townspeople. So they’d only need to come here to wash and change.”
“Change what?”
“Their bodies,” she said. “Walker, that thing wasn’t an animal. It’s human, or at least it is part of the time.”
He regarded her steadily. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve tracked a lot of animals, and this one has five toes on each foot, weighs maybe two hundred pounds, but can run so fast it doesn’t sink into the snow,” she said. “It can also walk erect on its hind legs. The cabin says it can take shelter, chop firewood, wash, and use a radio.”
His expression grew skeptical. “You cannot believe an animal has been living here.”
“No,” she agreed. “I think what made those tracks and uses this cabin is a human who can change into an animal. I think you’ve been hunting a werewolf.”
Lilah must have expected to be derided for her werewolf theory, as she hurried into an explanation of the tracks outside the cabin and the reasons they couldn’t belong to a dog or any other large, wild predator.
“There are no wolves in Colorado, according to Annie,” she added quickly, “and I read an article once about how they were exterminated back in the forties by cattlemen who wrongly blamed them for attacks on their livestock. But whatever is out there is leaving canid and biped tracks, moves like lightning, and is probably the size of a pro wrestler. Since we’ve only seen it at night, it could be nocturnal. Maybe the shifting process takes place after dark, and then during the day, the werewolf takes human shape. . . . ” She made a face. “Feel free to tell me I’m crazy any time now.”
“You know these animals better than I.” He considered telling her about all the strange things he’d seen during his lifetime, but she would not believe him. That, along with other revelations, would keep for now. “Whatever is using this cabin will not care to find us here. We will return to the inn.” When she started to protest, he said, “We are unarmed and certainly outnumbered. Besides, you need food and rest.”
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