Obsession (25 page)

The door to the cabin flew open. Light spilled out. Dan appeared in the aperture, backlit by the glow behind him. She could see nothing of him beyond his shape, hear nothing beyond the pounding of her own heart and the wet slap of her uselessly rotating tires. But she knew, without having to see his expression, without having to hear a shout or curse, that he was coming after her.

And he did, almost instantaneously, racing across the porch and hurdling to the grass, pounding through the rain toward her, gesticulating, obviously yelling something that she couldn’t hear—just as the tires found purchase at last and the Blazer shot backward toward the road.

15

Punching the gas for all she was worth, she drove like a bat out of hell. The Blazer careened backward, almost overshooting the road, while she spun the wheel hard to the left in an effort to avoid smashing into the fortress of trees on the other side. Looking frantically over her shoulder as she reversed, she lost sight of Dan. Even as the tires bit into the gravel of the road, even as she braked and reached down to shift into drive, she looked wildly around for him.

She couldn’t find him.

Heart pounding like a jackhammer, breathing like she had been running for miles, she strained to see any hint of movement through the darkness.

Besides the faintly illuminated shape of the cabin, which was about the length of a football field away now, and the bold swath of silver rain and shiny wet gravel and brown tree trunks and green foliage caught in the beam of her headlights, her surroundings were cloaked by night. Dan could be anywhere, she realized with a rush of cold fear. He could be racing up to her door even as she had the thought. He could—and here her breath caught—be nearby, assuming that shooter’s stance she remembered from her dream, aiming his gun at her. He could . . .

The bottom line was, he could be anywhere doing anything, but she didn’t have to wait around to find out what it was.

Killing the headlights in the fond but probably futile hope of making the Blazer harder to locate, she put the pedal to the metal and did her best to peel mud out of there. The Blazer made a gallant attempt to answer, lurching forward, tires crunching as they chewed up the ground beneath them. The result was a slow, sideways slither, and she realized to her horror that underneath the top layer of gravel the road had turned into a sea of mud. Leaning forward as if to urge the car on, holding on to the wheel for dear life, she gritted her teeth and sucked in air and ordered herself not to panic. Then she did her best to ignore her runaway pulse and eased up on the accelerator.

It was too late. Even as she fought to get the fishtailing vehicle moving forward again, the right rear side smashed into a tree.

The sharp crunch of crumpling metal caught her by surprise. The accompanying shuddering jolt knocked her against the driver’s door. Unhurt, still holding on to the steering wheel for dear life, she wrenched around to see what she had hit. In the same quick, indrawn breath, she registered that it was a massive oak and that the Blazer was still drivable.

Jittery as a teenager with a fake ID in a bar full of cops, she tried to peer out every window at once.
Where is he?
Every instinct she possessed urged her to stomp the accelerator clear through the floorboard. But that, she knew, would only worsen the problem. Cursing under her breath, pulse pounding so hard it was difficult to concentrate over the frantic thudding in her ears, she reined in her surging adrenaline and gently, gently, eased down on the damned pedal.

The Blazer surged forward, held its ground strongly for a moment, then rocked back against the tree again with a scraping of metal on rough bark.
Oh, no.
Holding her breath, praying for all she was worth, she gently pressed the accelerator toward the floor once more.

This time the sickening
thuckety-thuckety
sound of wheels trapped in mud was her only answer.

Heart racing, stomach churning, she faced the horrible truth: She wasn’t going anywhere. The Blazer was stuck. She might be able to rock it out, but she didn’t have time. Dan could catch up with her at any second.

There was no choice. Unless she wanted to be caught there in the Blazer like a raccoon in a trap, she had to run for it.

That, she told herself even as she killed the engine, was another one of those problems to be worked out later.

Jerking the keys from the ignition, she pushed the door open and scrambled out into the steamy night. The muddy gravel beneath her feet felt warm and squishy. In the typical fashion of summer showers, the rain was easing off now—now that it was too late to do her any good, she reflected bitterly. A few fat drops hit her in the face; more plopped into standing puddles that formed gleaming black pools on the road. The moon, a silvery crescent, peeked out from beneath the blanket of thick, gray clouds, unexpectedly illuminating everything—including herself and the Blazer.
Of course.
Closing—not slamming, on the off-chance that Dan was deaf, blind, and stupid and was thus somehow not aware of the Blazer’s location and fate—the door, she punched the lock button on the key ring.

It repaid her for her cleverness by responding with a beep and an acknowledging flash of light.

Breaking into a ragged run, she took off at a slant through the trees. Except for the whole beep-and-flash thing, locking the door had been a good idea, she told herself defensively. If he wasn’t able to get the door open, trying to determine whether or not she had locked herself inside was bound to eat up some time. Anyway, once she was well away from the Blazer, given the darkness and the vastness of the space she had to hide in, she figured she would be almost impossible to find.

With that in mind, she ignored the weakness in her legs and the light-headedness that made thinking a chore and the various aches and pains that should have slowed her down, and determinedly kept on chugging over the thick, wet carpet of fallen leaves that covered the ground. There beneath the trees, only a few fine drops reached her, and those, she suspected, were falling from the canopy. Mist rose from the ground, ephemeral as a chiffon veil, as stray beams of moonlight filtering down through the trees shone through it. The air was thick and humid, and she was sure the earthy smell of damp vegetation must be strong, although she caught only the merest whiff of it. The soprano piping of tree frogs mixed with the whirring of insects to form an incessant background chorus. Small pairs of eyes, luminescent as stars, gleamed down at her from high up in the trees.

As long as they stayed up there, she decided, hunching her shoulders instinctively in case something should decide to take a flying leap, it was all good.

“Katharine?” Dan’s voice cut through the darkness like a knife, its sharpness only slightly blunted by distance. He was at the Blazer, she was almost sure from the direction of the sound. She imagined him rattling the door handle, trying to peer inside.

“Damn it, where are you?”

The question was yelled into the night. Her heart gave a great leap. Glancing instinctively back—he was standing in front of the Blazer, one hand on the hood as he stared in her direction (she was sure she was right, although it was too dark to allow her to see anything except the moonlight-limned shape of him)—she almost smacked into a low-lying branch. She managed to dodge it but lost her footing and went down on one knee. It made painful contact with a rock.

She cried out. The sound wasn’t loud, and it was almost certainly muffled by the little creature chorus and the spattering rain and the rush of the wind ruffling through the leaves high overhead, but it was sharp and high-pitched and it made her cringe even as she forced herself to get up and go on.

But when she glanced back, he was gone. The Blazer was still there, so she knew she was looking in the right place, but he no longer stood where he had a moment before. There was nothing now in front of the Blazer but the empty darkness of the road that, because it was open to the moonlight, was a lighter shade of black than anything else around.

The discovery that she could no longer see him gave her the willies.

She wasn’t far enough away yet. Not nearly far enough away to be safe. Panic gave her a renewed burst of speed. Chest heaving, gulping in air, ignoring the new pain in her knee and her old pains alike, she fled through the trees. The ground began to slope downhill, and the wet slickness of the leaves made the footing tricky. Fortunately, there was very little undergrowth. Except for the places where gossamer ribbons of moonlight slanted through, it was dark as the inside of a cave. She dodged through dozens of closely spaced tree trunks poised like silent, immovable sentinels that were visible only because their solid columns were a shade blacker than the surrounding woods.

Then two things happened at once: She emerged into a small, moonlit clearing, and a hand grabbed her arm.

Her heart leaped. Her adrenaline surged. Her pulse went off the charts.

She screamed. She couldn’t help it. It was such a shock, she hadn’t heard him coming, hadn’t heard a thing above and beyond her own labored breathing and the hurried slap-slap of her own footsteps in the wet and, of course, the whole woodland chorus. But here he was, Johnny-on-the-spot again, lunging out of the darkness, catching her arm.

She whirled, screeching, to face him—and her foot slipped out from under her and she went down.

“What the hell . . . ?” he began, catching her other arm as well to break her fall, only to break off abruptly as he went down, too, when she grabbed at him instinctively for support and he lost his footing right along with her.
“Shit.”

When they hit the ground, smacking into the cushiony carpet of leaves at the same time and sliding a little, they both ended up on their sides facing each other, but she was quicker. Even as he lay there cursing, she retained the presence of mind to roll away and try to scramble to her feet.

The leaves were slick as ice beneath her bare soles; they slipped and slid beneath her, making a speedy getaway impossible.

“Oh, no, you don’t.” Lunging upward, he grabbed at her, his fingers scrabbling at the back of her T-shirt and then hooking in the waistband of her too-snug jeans, yanking her back, yanking her down. Then, when she hit on her stomach and instinctively rolled, he heaved himself up and over her, shoving her onto her back. Before she could move, he came down on top of her with all the subtlety of a truckload of wet cement. Her breath expelled with an emphatic
ooph.
“You’re not going anywhere. ”

He had her pinned in place. He was too big, too heavy. She stood almost zero chance of getting away now, she knew. Heart racing, pulse pounding, painfully sucking in as much air as she could squeeze into her squashed lungs, she still fought for all she was worth.

“Get off,” she cried, shoving at his shoulders. He was still shirtless, she realized, and his skin was warm and damp and smooth beneath her hands. His shoulders were wide enough to almost completely block her view of the roiling night sky; his muscles felt solid as stone walls. Wriggling like a fish on a hook, she beat at him with her fists and jerked her legs up between his in a heartfelt but ultimately futile attempt to knee him.

“Damn it, stop it.” He batted her fists away, then grabbed for them and missed, but did manage to put an end to her attempts to knee him by the simple expedient of trapping both her legs beneath his.

“
Get the hell off me.”
By this time she was practically breathing fire.

“No.”

At this brutally simple response she went nuts, heaving and kicking and punching at him while he cursed and dodged and warded her off as best he could. Ducking his head, he hid his warm, bristly, unwelcome face in her straining-to-avoid-his-touch neck—then, in a lightning attack, caught her wrists at last and pinned them on either side of her head.

“No,” she cried, but it was a waste of breath and she knew it. She could struggle all she wanted to: She wasn ’t going anywhere.

Exhausted, she lay still at last. She was breathing hard and so was he. The heat from his body radiated through her wet clothes; his weight pushed her down into the leaves. Now that it was safe, he lifted his head and looked down at her. Their faces weren’t more than six inches apart, and she realized that there was just enough moonlight so that she could see him fairly well. Their eyes met. His were dark, narrowed, impossible to read. But from the set of his jaw and the line of his mouth, she got the definite impression that he wasn’t in the best of tempers.

Well, goody, goody,
she thought, because neither was she. Being forcibly pinned on the wet ground beneath approximately ten tons of overmuscled man was making her feel more than a little pissy.

“Coward,” she spat, quivering with outrage, and gave one more try at jerking her arms free even though she knew it was a waste of energy. His fingers were long enough to wrap easily around her wrists, and strong enough to snap said wrists like twigs. His body was solid and heavy as a fallen tree atop hers. She was mad as hell about being manhandled. She was apprehensive about being caught, and about finding herself so completely at his mercy. She was worried about what he was going to do now, about what was going on here that she didn’t understand, about her whole weirded-out life in general. But she was not, she discovered with dawning interest, actually physically afraid of him. “Let me go.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” His voice was a furious growl. His eyes glinted down at her as they moved over her face. “Why on earth would you just take off like that?”

“What, am I supposed to be some kind of prisoner now? I wanted to leave, so guess what—I left.”