Ripper (25 page)

“I’m sixteen,” I want to yell at him. I’m not a little girl anymore.

I stand there in the chill as the moon starts to rise and realize I can never, never tell him about the dreams I have. At night, mostly on the nights when the moon is full, I dream of running. I am alone in the woods and the solitude is perfection. I run, starting on two legs, but ending on four. When I change, the world is different. It’s better. I can see everything with my new eyes. Smells and sounds are sharper. There is nothing in these dreams except the hunt. Well, and the brown wolf who hunts with me. But I try not to think of him. My father would not like to know that I dream sometimes that he’s a wolf.

“We’ll put you on that tree there,” Dad says, his voice harsh. Mom says it’s because he smokes too much and there’s disdain in her voice when she says it. Sometimes I think she hates my father. She always seems happy when he goes on his trips. That’s when she takes my brothers and me places. When Dad is gone we go out to eat, and when I was younger, we went to the zoo and parks. Sometimes we went to East Texas to see my granddad. I wish I’d been able to spend more time with him before he died.

“Do I get a gun?” I ask quietly because I have to keep my voice down.

My father laughs like I said something hysterical. “No, idiot. I’m not giving you a gun.” His green eyes seem cold. They always seem that way. His gaze slides past mine. He never looks me in the eyes. I think he doesn’t like brown eyes. I’m the only one in the family with dull brown eyes. He calls them muddy.

I want to question him, but that’s when he usually uses his fists.

He picks up a length of rope. “Go stand by the tree. Take your coat off first.”

I do what he tells me to do. I start to shiver and not entirely from the freezing air. I can hear the wolves howl in the distance. He starts to wind the rope around me. My arms are free, but he wraps the rope around my waist. I am utterly helpless to run.

“What are you doing?” I begin to panic. I stay still though because he’s my dad. I want him to love me. Maybe if I do this for him, he’ll see that I can help him.

He tightens the rope and secures it. It burns against my skin it’s so tight. He’s good with knots. I watched as he spent hours teaching Jamie and Nate how to tie knots. I watched from the stairs of our little duplex because he didn’t teach girls. Sometimes Nate would come up after bedtime and he’d show me what he’d learned.

“There.” He finishes up, tightening it further, and I can tell he’s happy with his work.

“I’m cold,” I say before realizing I shouldn’t complain.

“Suck it up, girl.” He looks me over and then pulls out his wicked large bowie knife. “This’ll bring ’em.”

I try to beg him not to cut me, but it doesn’t work. He simply turns my forearms over and cuts a long gash in both. I start to bleed. There’s a lot of blood. How much can I lose?

“I’ll stitch you up when it’s over,” he says, but I’m not sure if I believe him. He walks off and I know he’s hiding. He’ll pick a spot where he can shoot quickly and efficiently.

I get woozy from the cold and all the blood. My arms feel strange, like they should be numb, but they’re tingling. My arms are covered in blood and I wonder if he means to let the wolves get me. It would be easy to pick them off while they’re feasting. My father says wolves go crazy when they eat humans. They love it, love the kill so much they don’t think about protecting themselves. They’re vicious animals.

I think about my mom. Dad picked me up from school. He’d been standing in the courtyard where I waited every day for Nate. Nate was a year ahead of me at Bell High School, and he always drove me home in that piece of crap Ford Mom had saved to buy. Yesterday had been Thursday and Nate had chess club. Dad thought it was for pussies, but Nate liked games, so I waited for him in the courtyard. Dad told me we were going hunting. I wonder if he even told Mom. I wonder if she thinks I ran away. Did Nate spend time looking for me?

I sense them before I see them. I look up and in the moonlight I can see them. My heart speeds up. There are four of them. They approach me cautiously. I wonder why. Why aren’t they growling? I am a helpless human. I am food. They should attack immediately because they hate us. They eat our flesh. The small group comes from across the river and I see for the first time this creature my father taught me to hate.

The wolves are brown, two larger than the others, though they seem small compared to the way I envisioned them. They crouch down and sniff the air, but I know my dad always masks his scent. The largest of the four looks at the rest and then comes in close. I know instinctively that she is female. I never expected her to be so beautiful. She’s graceful as she approaches me and she whines a little in the back of her throat and then snorts like she’s done something foolish. She sits back and I watch as she changes. One minute she’s a brown wolf and the next she’s a girl, maybe a year or two older than me.

“I bet you don’t speak wolf,” she says with a soothing smile. She keeps her words calm. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. Who did this to you?”

Why is she talking to me? She’s supposed to attack. Wolves don’t help. Wolves don’t have warm brown eyes. The others are changing. Two boys and another teenaged girl.

“It’s all right,” she says. “It’s just my obnoxious kid brother and our cousins. Is the person who did this to you gone?”

They’re kids. They’re just kids like me.

“I can go get my dad,” the girl offers. “He’ll track this jerk down and make sure he doesn’t hurt you again.”

The boys are young. One is maybe ten and the other can’t be more than six or seven. He sniffles and wipes his nose on his forearm.

“I think we should go, Tina,” the other girl says. “We can send the pack back for her. We should never have come this far out.”

But it’s too late. The first shot rings out and I watch in horror as the girl who offered to help me looks down at the circle of red opening on her chest like a blooming rose. The bullets are silver and her eyes are blank before she hits the forest floor.

I see the next few moments in slow motion. The ten-year-old boy is next and then the girl. The little boy stands there, looking down at the girl named Tina. He cries and I think he asks her to get up. He doesn’t leave her. He doesn’t run. He loves his sister and it costs him his young life. I watch as my father shoots him between the eyes.

My father is an awfully good shot.

The forest is quiet again and I hear the crunch of his boots as he crushes leaves beneath him. He is a large, dark figure in the moonlight, gun still in his hand. He looks over his kills.

“They were kids,” I manage to say through my tears. They wanted to help me and now they were dead.

“Yeah,” my father says with a wealth of satisfaction in his voice.

“Daddy?”

His eyes are vicious as they look at me. “Don’t you call me that, girl. You call me sir.”

It was what he insisted on. I held my tongue. He was going to realize his mistake and he was going to feel bad.

He kicks the body of the ten-year-old boy over like it’s a piece of meat. “I always like to get ’em before they have a chance to breed.”

Something snaps inside me. I feel like I am a bottle of champagne and the cork is coming out. Rage bubbles up and flows from deep within. I have been lied to. The wolves aren’t animals. They’re different. Perhaps the wolves who killed my grandmother and my aunt were bad, but these wolves weren’t evil. The girl had been like me. I realize, too, that he intends to leave me here, staked out and bleeding. He will never tell my mother. He’ll pretend he doesn’t know what happened to me. Maybe he’ll shoot me and bury my body out here, then he won’t have to deal with a muddy-eyed freak anymore.

I don’t know how I do it, but the rope tears around me. I am strong all of the sudden and the cold is gone, replaced with a hot, satisfying anger.

“What the hell?” I hear my father whisper as I shrug off the bonds.

Something dark and deep takes over. I can feel it. It’s as though a door has opened in my soul and a piece of me I never knew before has been unleashed. I’m a bundle of instincts now. Two are foremost in my mind—survival and revenge. My father lifts the rifle, but I am faster. It is in my hand as he pulls the trigger, the shot flying wildly, impotently through the air. I hold the weapon in my hands and it feels good when I twist the metal. The gun will never work again. I toss it aside as my father backs away from me. I can smell his fear.

He is prey and no longer my father. He is meat that has done wrong to me and he will pay. He attempts to hit me, but I no longer allow such liberties. As his fist shoots out to connect with my jaw, it is so simple to block him. He moves like a man in slow motion. I simply raise my hand to catch him. His fist is large but I manage to crush it anyway. He cries out as his fingers break beneath the pressure I apply.

I have legs, too. I use them. I kick out neatly like I have done this a thousand times before. I catch him in the gut, knowing exactly where to place my heel so all the breath is pushed from his body. He would fall back and away from me, but I hold his broken hand like a tether between us. He falls to his knees and I crush his nose with my free hand.

“Kelsey,” he cries, but he’s too late.

He tries to pull his knife, but I smile down. I took it from him when he wasn’t looking…

“Kelsey,” a sharp voice startled me awake.

I fought him blindly, only knowing the nightmare still had me in its clutches. Gray pinned me, his big body covering mine and holding me down.

“Kelsey, wake up,” he commanded.

The fog began to lift as I realized I’m not in those woods any longer. I was with Gray. I could feel the heat of his body, the satisfying weight of him on top of me. The ceiling fan turned overhead and I took a deep breath. “Gray?”

His face gentled, his hands coming down to smooth back my hair. “It’s all right, baby. You’re here with me. It’s okay.”

He got off me and sat down on the edge of the bed. He turned on the small light on the nightstand. “Is that better?”

I nodded, still shaking from the dream. This was why I rarely went to bed sober. When I passed out, I didn’t dream about that night.

“Was it about your dad?”

“How do you know about that?” I asked, my voice as sharp as broken glass.

Gray looked down at me unflinchingly. “Jamie told me. You’re not the only one who has nightmares. We were on a stakeout a couple of years back and he fell asleep. He blew our cover when he woke up screaming. He told me about the things your father forced him to do. He told me about how it was nothing compared to what he did to you. I intend to kill your father if I ever find him.”

“Are you looking?” I wondered who my father would be more afraid of, me or Gray?

“I’ve been looking for him for almost a year,” Gray admitted. “I had a solid lead that he was in Canada, but a man can get really lost in the Yukon. I don’t have the time to track him like I should. If it would make you feel better, I’ll take some leave and I promise you, I will find him.”

He was serious. If I told him to, he would put in for a sabbatical and go to Canada to try to kill a man he didn’t even know so I would sleep better at night. No one before ever cared about me so much. It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends or brothers who loved me, but Gray was different. I shook my head. He could kill my father, but it wouldn’t stop the dreams. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Gray that the monster in my dreams wasn’t my father.

It was me.

I felt a gentle hand brush against my cheek. I wanted to tell him to stop. I didn’t want to be touched, but I allowed it. Gray seemed to need to do it. It got easier to handle until I leaned into his hands, wanting it. Until the need overcame everything else. His fingers brushed against my skin and I felt the electricity between us.

“Tell me,” he whispered against my hair.

I hesitated. I hadn’t told anyone but Jamie and Liv. I should blow him off. Tell him something about being scared of wolves.

Instead, I opened my mouth and told him everything.

He ended up moving behind me while I told him about my childhood and that night in the woods. He didn’t interrupt me, merely let me lay back against the comfort of his chest. He rubbed my shoulders and my arms, willing warmth and relaxation into my bones. It was easy in the soft light to believe he would protect me. It was easy to believe I could tell him anything.

I wanted to not be alone anymore.

“I walked away from him,” I finished tonelessly. “I think he was alive.”

There was no judgment in Gray’s voice as he replied. “And you never saw him again?”

I shook my head.

“I’m sure he was alive,” Gray said. “I did find a John Atwood matching your father’s description. I tracked his movements from Atlanta up to the Yukon. He was still hunting. Honey, what you did to him was in self-defense.”

I kept my mouth closed. I didn’t tell him that my father had been down and defenseless and I kept right on beating him until I heard wolves coming. The pack had been looking for their children and that was when I ran. I hadn’t been able to face them.

“How did you get to a town?”

“I walked.” I hadn’t. I’d run, faster than I could have imagined because those wolves had been looking for me and I doubted they would have been in the mood for explanations. I’d run and when I could, I’d tracked back to the river. I swam a few miles in the freezing water to mask my scent. I’d made it to Heber Springs ten miles away, walking in twenty-degree temperatures, wet and without a coat. I evaded the police and managed to steal warm clothes. When I was properly dressed, I found a truck stop and a waitress let me use the phone. My brother picked me up eight hours later.

I didn’t even catch a cold.

Gray ran a hand down my left arm, seeking the scars that should have been there. “Are you sure he cut you? You don’t have any scars.”

“I guess it just seemed deep.” I remembered the feeling of that knife cutting deeply into my forearms. I remembered the way the blood welled and how weak I felt.

I didn’t mention to Gray that six months later, I’d slit my own arms from wrist to elbow. I’d heard that was the best way to commit suicide. I’d cut hard and deep, sure that it would end my guilt, my suffering. That was when Nate and Liv had found me.