ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (36 page)

Elie didn’t stay in bed long after Jake left. Her internal cocktail of emotions was stirring like a blender and Elie had to get up and move.

“Want to go for a walk Jasper?”

At the word ‘walk’, Jasper’s huge ears perked up. Since he was allowed to roam around their yard freely, one would think he wouldn’t care so much about going for a walk. But in a second or two he was leaping off the bed like an Olympic diver and skittering to the stairs.

“Slow down!” Alison called after him as he raced through the kitchen; Elie could hear his nails clicking on the tile.

“I’m taking Jasper out,” Elie told her as she followed the shepherd’s trail of through the house.

Alison looked like she wanted to ask about Jake. There was a short list of possible topics that could have given Elie’s mother that boiling-over curious set of the face. But Elie shook her head and walked quickly to the front entry, where Jasper’s leash hung on the coat rack.

“Go for walk?” Elie teased him as he spun circles in the tiny space. She clamped a hand on his collar and tried to clip the leash on. “Walk? You wanna go walk?”

Jasper whined and quivered and growled sadly, as if begging her to stop this terrible game and just open the door already. Elie laughed and clipped his leash on.

Just as she was straightening, there was a knock on the door; Jasper howled—more out of excitement than alarm—almost directly into Elie’s ear. Shocked, she clapped a hand over it too late; the sound still echoed through the bones of her inner ear as if they were stuck repeating it over and over.

Half-deaf, she stuck her eye to the peephole. If it was Jake, she wasn’t answering it.

It wasn’t Jake. Hesitantly, Elie turned the knob and swung the door open to see Bryan Mosley standing on her front porch. He’d dressed down today, jeans and boots and a white t-shirt. It wasn’t too cold, so no motorcycle jacket today. In fact, it seemed he’d walked here, since his motorcycle was nowhere to be seen out front.

“What do you want?” she grunted. Standing here, now, all Elie could see when looking at this idiot was Brittany Langland and her skeleton-skinny meth-scarred arms.

Bryan shrugged; her change in attitude since he’d last seen her clearly confused him, but he didn’t comment on it. “Just thought you might want to catch a bite or a drink or something.”

Elie stepped out with Jasper, who sniffed Bryan, whined, and moved to Elie’s other side. “I’m taking the dog for a walk, if you want to come along,” she offered gruffly.

“Sounds good,” he replied, and fell into step with her. Elie headed off down the street, with Jasper on one side and Bryan on the other.

“What’ve you been up to?” he tried to start conversation.

“Hanging around. Trying to find a job. Meeting old friends, that sort of thing,” Elie replied noncommittally.

Bryan nodded, hands in his pockets. “Anyone I know?”

“Probably not.”

They lapsed into silence, awkward silence. Elie was simmering. She’d almost slept with this asshole, this user, this baby-daddy. She should have told him to get lost; why did she invite him along to walk with her? Stupid. Damn stupid.

“Sorry about the other night,” he offered finally. They were moving away from the houses, now, towards the spot where Elie had seen that grizzly a few nights prior. Nervously, she checked again, but it wasn’t as dark now and she could make out the underbrush pretty well. No bear, at least not at the moment.

And oddly, it occurred to her that that hadn’t been a bear. It had been Jake. She knew it without question. What a strange, serendipitous coincidence.

“What? Oh, the other night,” Elie shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. They probably just wanted to ask you about the meth, right?”

She raised her eyebrows and waited, and Elie was not disappointed. Bryan seemed to be half-listening, because it took him about fifteen full seconds before he stopped short and looked at her with a very unfriendly edge.

“What did you say?”

“You’re bringing meth up from town, right?” Elie laughed. “Or maybe someone’s cooking it for you out here. I doubt it’s Brittany, although she seems to be a regular customer. That’s why you don’t work at the mill. You already have a job.”

The afternoon had grown very still, and it occurred to Elie that she had dropped this bombshell in a very thoughtless place. The distance to the houses in one direction and downtown Hemford in the other suddenly seemed much farther. Her anger had gotten away with her again; if she’d waited ten more minutes to snap this off at him… if only…

Bryan wasn’t a big guy, not like Jake. But apart from some minimal self-defense, Elie’d never gotten in a real fight. At the moment, however, it looked like she was about to get her first shot at it, because it didn’t take a rocket scientist to read that glare that Bryan was shooting at her now.

“Who’ve you told?” he hissed. “The cops? Was it you that tried to rat on me?”

A shiver cascaded from neck to naval at the odd likeness of the question. It hadn’t even been an hour since someone else had asked almost the exact same thing. Elie snorted; she was trying to look confident. A scared target was a target half beat. “If I had a lick of proof I’d give it to them, but I don’t. Proof or no, I don’t want to see your face at my door again. I’ll call the Sheriff on you in a hot minute, and I doubt he’d need any proof to run you off for harassment.”

Bryan stared at her for a long time; he seemed to be thinking. He seemed to actually be taking her threat seriously. Elie’s confidence had almost become real.

But then he chuckled.

Faster than Elie could have ever thought possible, he lashed out and caught the side of her head in a dizzying punch. She reeled; she’d squabbled with a couple drunk bar-flies before, but she’d never been struck so hard in her life. It almost felt like she’d been knocked right off the ground.

Jasper barked, and it was the bravest sound Elie had ever heard him make. But it was followed by a harsh caw from Bryan, and Elie regained her vision in time to see him kick a boot into Jasper’s side. The dog scampered off, limping and whining, towards town.

“Did you just kick my dog?” she shrieked, half hysterical. She must have taken brain damage, Elie thought later, because without much of a good reason she flew at Bryan as if her five-foot-five fight-virgin stature somehow could be overcome by mere vehemence. She must have surprised him, because her fist actually connected with his jaw, not once but twice, before he knocked her silly and Elie watched the world blink out.

It didn’t seem to be gone long; a world of trees and sunlight, forest floor and leafy ferns underfoot, kept appearing and disappearing. But it had been a cool, breezy afternoon—why was it already half-dark? She wasn’t walking. She could see someone’s legs and boots. They were carrying her. It was Bryan. Bryan was carrying her. Oh shit.

Elie’s limbs seemed very far away, as if she were trying to call them through a downed phone line. Her hands were hanging down Bryan’s back. She could see them, but the effort to make them move cost her snippets of consciousness. He didn’t even seem to notice her batting at his waist—in fact, he probably thought her arms were just swinging with the motion.

It was getting dark out. So, so dark. With the situation being what it was, that made Elie heart-stoppingly nervous.

Without warning, she was hauled off Bryan’s shoulder and onto mossy dirt. She blinked; they were within sight of the lake. A dock jutted outward against a liquid mirror, reflecting the sun as it began to set. Bryan appeared over her.

Elie remained very still. Full consciousness had almost returned, and she knew she was in trouble up to her ears. She’d thought Bryan handsome at first; he still was, if you were into psychopaths. He stared down at her, calm of face, but with a glimmer in his eye that spoke insanity a little too clearly.

She was so afraid to ask, but he seemed in no hurry to say anything, and Elie couldn’t handle the suspense. “What now?”

He laughed, as if she’d told a joke. “Well, I’ll tell you, honey.” He crouched down and folded his hands, like an adult explaining to a child why it wasn’t nice to tell lies. “Right over there is my parent’s boathouse. It’s not much of one, or else I’d take you in there, but they do have a nice little canoe in that shed, and when it gets dark, I’m going to chain some cinder blocks to your feet and take you out into the middle of the lake and throw you overboard.”

Elie stared. In a hysterical way, this made perfect sense. Hidden Lake was a valley lake; its center was deep, much deeper than it appeared. She’d be fish food long before anyone found her body. What an irony. Her corpse was going to be hidden in Hidden Lake.

What had she been thinking just last night? It would be slow, here. Slow, yes. Drowning was a rather slow death.

Terror clawed at her insides, but it would have to do more than that before she’d beg. She wasn’t even close to scared enough to beg. Not from this scum. She glared at him, hateful.

She told him to go do a few things that were rather unlikely, and perhaps not anatomically possible. Bryan grinned wider, and Elie did not appreciate that. She curled her fist into the moist earth beneath her.

With an exhaled huff of desperate fear, Elie scattered a handful of dirt at Bryan’s face. He yowled and rocked back; it seemed she’d gotten his eyes. Scrambling, Elie gained her feet and tried to run for the lake. She’d be able to find her way back from there.

But Bryan leapt forward and hooked one hand around her ankle. Elie broke free, but tripped and fell headlong into the mulch, and before she could jump up and try again Bryan’s weight was on her back, one hand fisted in her hair. He whistled.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her, straddling her buttocks. Elie could feel him hard against her jeans, and struggled viciously to free herself, but he had her in a helpless position. “I wasn’t going to let your last few hours be boring. I have some fun planned before we go on out on the boat.”

He was still holding her face in the dirt with one hand. Bryan struggled to loosen his jeans with the other, apparently wary of letting Elie have too much freedom. Her brain was shooting in every direction, but so far Elie hadn’t come up with a plan. The best she could do was try to throw him off, but he was heavy and wasn’t unbalanced easily.

Exhausted, Elie fell still to catch her breath.

“There we go! Now, yours.”

His fingers dug into the waistband of her pants, and a terror colder and sharper and deeper than Elie had ever known twisted inside her. Tears welled up, out of anger, out of fear, out of despair, whatever the source, they blurred the darkening forest as her skin was exposed to the cool night air.

“Hey! HEY! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!”

Elie sobbed; she’d never been so happy to hear Jake’s voice.

The weight on her back disappeared at once, and Elie rolled away, trembling like a leaf. She reached to pull her jeans back in place, and found it difficult with fingers that wouldn’t listen to her properly. She looked up at the rush of sprinting boots, still tugging her clothes back up.

Jasper and Jake had come barreling through the forest; the shepherd let out a mournful howl and came to her immediately, sniffing her frantically, whimpering.

“You’re—r-really a—a coward—Jasper,” she whispered, hugging him close as Jake caught up.

Elie had seen Jake angry, but this was frightening. His face seemed gouged by lines of rage and hate, pulsing a purplish red with quivering veins bursting from temple and neck. He fell on Bryan like an avenging angel, and Bryan never had a damn chance. Jake had him by the collar, punching solid blows like hammer strikes that sent resounding cracks through the stillness of the forest.

Elie was still huddled with Jasper, digging her fingers through the spiny fur of his neck and shoulders. She watched in growing dread as Bryan Mosley’s attempts to fight back weakened and eventually stopped. By the time she managed to get her legs under her, Jake held him, limp, by the shirt collar, and was still going, going, going, like he was hypnotized. Blood coated Jake’s fist, and splattered across the front of his t-shirt, also white; in the twilight it looked powdery-blue, and Elie’s mental picture of Gwen Framer’s last moments jarred in her head like a struck bell.

“Jake!” she called. “Jake, stop! You’ll kill him!”

“I don’t give a damn,” he growled. Not only him. Something… else… thundered in his voice, something deep and inhuman. His eyes flashed gold, amber, in the dusk.

“I don’t care about him, I care about you,” Elie came closer. She looked at Bryan, fairly sure he was alive, but it was hard to tell. Jake had paused, looking at her, his chest heaving. “If you beat him to death, it’ll be second-degree murder, no matter how you slice it. Yeah, he tried—he tried to rape me, and he’s a meth dealer, but you’ll still get stuck with a murder charge. I don’t want that for you. Not over this asshole.”

She reached out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll sic the cops on him when we get back to town.”

Jake looked at her hand, curiously, as if he wasn’t sure what it was. Then he blinked, shook his head. He dropped Bryan Mosley and put his hand in Elie’s; it was the hand that was slick with blood. Elie clutched it tight.

“Let’s go,” she repeated.