Unseen (23 page)

But this one—the One—had killed his brother and he had to make her pay. Had to burn her and send her back to the fires of hell. He was going to throw himself on her and listen to her scream. And then burn her. Burn her bad.

His head was pounding, a hammer slamming against an anvil.
Slam. Slam. Slam.

He was here. In Quarry. Could he risk going back to the diner? There were witches there. Many witches. Maybe he could have a taste of one of them…just a taste…before he got the One. The murderess.

He pulled the truck into the lot and stepped out. A baseball cap was tilted low over his eyes. He was in jeans and a red-and-black hunter’s jacket, the collar pulled up over the healing wounds on his neck. Ducking his head, he entered the diner and then stopped short, his heart seizing.

The witches were all dressed like witches in cartoons. Black gowns. Pointed hats. In disbelief, he stared until his eyeballs felt dry in their sockets. One of the witches sidled toward him, a stack of menus cradled in one arm. She had long, black hair. Like the mother-witch. And green eyes. And a smoky flavor that expelled from her mouth when she said, “Hi, I’m Heather. Let me show you to a booth.”

And she sashayed ahead of him in a black skirt with silvery stars on it. Wolf moved after her, dreamlike.

He sat down where she indicated, and when she handed him the menu, his hand brushed her fingers. Electricity. Desire.

“Happy Halloween!” she said, bending over to relight the candle on his table. He caught a glimpse of curved breast.

You can’t touch, little fucker,
the mother-witch said in his head. And she laughed and laughed in her harsh, smoky voice. Cackled. His hands circled her throat and he choked her and choked her. He threw her on the floor and fucked her over and over and still she laughed. On and on. Filling his head. Until finally she was still. It was October. Under a full moon. And then he dragged her outside and set her, and the fields behind his house, on fire. It had been a brilliant orange, smoke-filled inferno. Hell on earth. He’d just managed to drag her charred body away from the scorching blaze before the volunteer fire department saw fit to arrive and finally put it out. While they toiled he shoved her body into the basement closet and screamed and ranted at her until his brother came home to chaos.

“What happened?” EZ demanded, racing from Wolf to the window to outside. He was EZ to Wolf, not Easy like the dumb fucks like Lachey had labeled him because he screwed around a lot.

“I killed her,” Wolf said. “Burned her.”

EZ’s eyes had glowed like mirrors in the firelight. “What?”

“I fucked her and killed her and burned her.”

“She’s out there?” He threw an arm in the direction of the fire, his face contorted with revulsion and fury.

The wolf had nodded. Recognized that his brother didn’t understand. Better to let him think she burned.

“They’ll find her body,” EZ said.

“No.”

“They will.”

But Wolf just shook his head and of course they never did. The days were blurred and unseparated. EZ moved out of the house to an apartment. He pretended everything was the same. He helped get Wolf the job. But he was distant. He’d gone somewhere else. Away from Wolf. Away from the mother-witch. Wolf hadn’t known for a while that it was because of her, the One. Ani. EZ had been crazy nuts about her. That’s what he said. Crazy nuts. But she’d used him up and killed him.

Wolf had been lost at that time. In a dark place. A hell of his own. He buried the mother-witch’s body behind the house under the charred earth, under a full moon. Now the land was green again, but his brother had never come back and he never would.

The wolf had slowly realized his mission. He had to kill witches. All witches. He had to kill Ani. Find her. Shove his cock inside her while she thrashed and wailed. Then burn her.

He gazed at the flickering flame in the votive. His eyes traveled past the other customers to Heather. She was giggling and tossing back her hair. As if sensing his eyes on her, she flounced over to take his order.

Wolf couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Food disinterested him. He said, “Do you wear other costumes?”

“Huh?”

“On other days?” His eyes traveled past her to the only waitress who wasn’t dressed in Halloween garb. She had an orange button on her breast that lit up and flashed Boo To You! on and off.

“You mean our uniforms? Sure. Mine’s powder blue. Know what you want?”

Wolf’s gaze blurred. The mother-witch’s garb was blue.

“Grilled cheese,” he blurted. “Water.”

“Okay, then.” Off she went, her hips swaying.

The wolf’s fingers wrapped around the edge of the table and he tried to slow the heavy beating of his heart, tried to pull himself back from the abyss, tried to gain control.

But all he wanted to do was screw this young witch-whore and burn her. Send her back to the fires of which she was born.

Heather Yates thought Halloween was a fun holiday, though working at the diner today was lame, lame, lame. The diner job was just to keep her old man happy, since he was paying for her classes at Portland Community College and expected her to invest in her education, too. Not that he’d had to fork over much so far. He was just a cheap bastard. She guessed she loved him. He was her father, duh. But he could be such a
ginormous
pain in the ass. So she got a C on her accounting test. So what? Jesus. It was his idea that she take business classes and she just wasn’t into it. Now, fashion designer—she could do that. But these classes made her feel like her head was stuffed with cotton and her eyes were crossing.

Working her way through school was just a time-waster, really, until Barry asked her to marry him. He was real close, now. She could tell. She’d been hinting about a ring and thought Christmas was too far away. Wouldn’t it just be the coolest if he bought it for her for Halloween!

She wanted to squeal with delight at the thought. It was all she could do to keep her excitement contained. But the thought of him giving her a little velvet box while they were making out at Lover’s Lane tonight was enough to give her a little thrill right down
there
!

She wriggled her hips and shivered, glancing around the diner. The only person who seemed to notice was that creepy cretin in the baseball cap. He thought the diner uniforms were costumes? “What planet are you from, psycho?” she whispered beneath her breath, but then the door opened and a cute older couple in matching clown noses walked in.

She laughed and said, “Hi, I’m Heather. Let me show you to a booth. You both are
soooo
cute!”

Chapter Nineteen

“No need, hon,” Macie said into the phone. “Denise and Heather are here and the Halloween crowd is thinning out. Everybody’s getting ready to go home and take their kids trick-or-treating. You just stay put and take it easy. I gotta keep reminding myself that you’re a part-timer. I could get way too used to having you every day, and that just won’t work.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Gemma promised.

“No way. You’re not on Saturday’s schedule. I’m counting on you on Sunday.”

“I could be there both Saturday and Sunday.”

“To hell with that. Get a life, girl!” she snorted, then said over her shoulder, “Milo, for God sakes, what is wrong with you? The orders are piling up. I gotta go,” she said into the phone, then clicked off before Gemma could say another word.

Gemma hung up, thought briefly, wildly, about calling Will on his cell phone, then forced herself to go sit in her office. Macie was right. She was marking time and it was time to move on. Get out of the diner business and find what she wanted to do, what she was good at.

She just didn’t want it to be psychic readings.

She wanted Will. Wanted him right now. In her bed. Wrapped around her like a vine. Wanted to make love for hours.

She made a sound of disgust and shook her head at herself.

Think about something else
, she told herself, forcing thoughts of Will aside.

Immediately the name
Spencer Bereth
ran across the screen of her mind in big, black letters.

Someone had run him off the road. Someone had shot him. Someone had killed him.

Charlotte’s voice:
It’s Robbie Bereth’s dad! He came by the diner to tell me off about stealing the bike. But he’s the guy, Gemma. The one you chased out of the diner that day!

“But I didn’t kill him,” she said aloud.

Will said it was two days ago, right?

“I was home. Or at Tremaine Rainfield’s office.”

But yesterday you were really tired. Like you’d been awake all night when you were sure you’d slept like the dead.

And a few days ago you woke up naked on the couch with no memory of taking your clothes off.

“But I didn’t kill him,” she said again, in a voice that sounded less convinced.

Will looked down at his desk, then over at Barb’s empty seat. He was wondering where she was when she came down the hall with Sheriff Nunce. “I’ve decided to retire,” the sheriff said as he entered the room. “For real. You should run for the job,” he told Will.

Will smiled faintly. His mind had been on the way Gemma’s hips moved when she walked, the way her hair swung around her chin, and her lips curved, and her breasts felt, warm and firm and luscious. What would the sheriff think if he knew his number-one choice for his position was sleeping with a suspect in a homicide?

“What’s with you?” Barb asked as she rolled back her chair and perched on it.

Nunce was talking amiably with Jimbo, whom he’d met in the hall. Will watched them walk off together.

“Have you got that partial plate number?”

“Yeah. But I’m not giving it to you.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Because you’ve been sleeping with the enemy.”

Will had been in the process of looking over the notes on his desk. Now he deliberately didn’t react. She couldn’t know. It was just a figure of speech. Still, his heart rate jumped. “I’m assuming you mean Gemma LaPorte.”

“I don’t know what the fascination is for her but you’ve got it bad.”

He picked up his cell phone and placed a call. Barb gave him the
Who?
frown and he said, “My mother. I want to know how she rode out the storm.” Then, “Hi, Mom, it’s Will.” And he turned a shoulder to Barb, more to collect himself than worry that his conversation was overheard. His mother gave him an earful about what she thought of the noise of the storm and Will let her ramble. Barb kept her eyes on him for a while, then finally dug into her own work.

When Will said good-bye and hung up, Barb reached over and handed him a paper. He glanced at it. It was the partial license plate. “I’ve got about four possibles for a white or tan truck.”

Will’s heart beat hard. He gazed down at the numbers. They weren’t even close to Gemma’s father’s truck’s license. It hadn’t been her vehicle.

His relief was so intense he sat frozen for several moments.

Then he came back to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: whose was it? Who was doing this?

It almost seemed like someone wanted Gemma to be the prime suspect.

Halloween night was clear though scudding clouds shut out the moon and stars. Wolf sat in his truck and turned the cigarette pack over and over in one hand. He thought of the mother-witch and how she would light up, aware he was watching her, how she would slide him a sideways look, almost like she wanted him. But she was waiting for his brother. She let smoke drift lazily from an open mouth, enjoying that he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Tonight he’d parked above the quarry but out of sight in between scrub oak and sumac. He’d come here because that’s where she’d come—the witch girl. To a ridge high above the quarry. He’d waited patiently for her outside the diner, idling the time watching little children trick-or-treating with their parents, and older kids running in packs, whooping and hollering and carrying loaded bags of candy.

He’d followed this one in her witch’s garb to a slightly run-down, two-story house. She’d been greeted by an older man, whom Wolf now knew was her father. She treated him with disinterest, almost disdain. Wolf could hear the old man demanding to know where she was going. He didn’t much like that she was leaving with “that no-good Halberton boy.” Wolf had parked on the road in front of the house, his truck wedged between two other vehicles, a beat-up Ford Explorer and an old black, now gray, Dodge Monaco. His truck and GemTop fit right in.

That “no-good Halberton boy” had showed up driving a souped-up green Camaro with no muffler. He got out of the car, his jeans so loose they about fell off his hips. He had a scrubby goatee and a buzz cut that had grown out about an inch. The wolf saw a tattoo of some kind on the back of his neck, just visible above the collar of his brown leather jacket.

There was something about him that reminded him of his brother. He could almost hear Ezekiel’s voice.

“Call me EZ,” he said. “Like nice and easy. I’m a lover, not a hater.”

“But you’re always yelling,” the wolf said, wanting to understand, desperate to learn from him.

“When am I yelling?”

“When you fuck our mother.”

“Shut your stinking mouth!” EZ had grabbed him by the throat, surprising him. “We don’t fuck, okay.

She’s a witch. A witch! She has powers and she needs me.”

“She’s a witch…” he had repeated.

“She comes from those people,” EZ whispered. “Those women who live alone. One of them fucked an Injun and that’s where she came from. They killed that Injun boy. Smashed his head in with a rock. She told me. And they left her with his tribe but the tribe didn’t want her ’cause she was a witch. So they left her on a large, smooth rock and they went away.”

“Where?” Wolf asked.

He waved vaguely. “South. They were tired of their young men mixing with the witches, so they left. But she’s not the only one. There are more.”

The wolf had absorbed the lore.

“She uses me,” EZ said. “I can’t stop. I won’t.” But the look on his face was full of torture.

“Why won’t she take me instead?” the wolf asked.

“Because you’re not smart,” EZ had stated. “Whoever your daddy was was a moron, not like mine. Mine was a doctor. He was supposed to treat her, but he fell under her spell.”

“Then I’ll kill her,” the wolf said soberly.

“Don’t be a damn idiot.” EZ snorted. “She can’t be killed. She sucks out your life force.”

But the wolf knew he could kill her. From that day forward he determined she would die. He would fuck her himself and then send her to hell. And he would find those other witches and take them, too.

But one of them had gotten to EZ first. He was close to finding her but these other ones had to go, too. He had a sense of time running out. Of being unable to fulfill his destiny, of ridding the world of them. But he would take this one, and his brother’s murderer. That he could do.

She came out of the house in new clothes. A short black skirt which flashed bare legs above shiny black boots and a red jacket. She’d scrubbed herself clean of the hag makeup and now she looked like a little whore.

She kissed the scraggly-bearded boy and jumped in the passenger side of his Camaro. The wolf let them get ahead of him and then followed them to the ridge. He stayed well back. He saw them park and the whore-witch jumped on top of that no good Halberton boy and they were wrestling in the front seat, ripping at each other’s clothes. The wolf now understood they’d chosen this spot above the quarry on purpose. That this was a prime spot for sex.

He felt himself go hard. He didn’t want them to have sex. He wanted to stop them now. But there was still some traffic. Still some Halloween activity, although the whore-witch and her boy didn’t care. Another car drove by and cat-called at them.

He had to let them go at it.

It didn’t matter.

She would be his.

He saw her in his mind in her pale blue uniform. The same color as the mother-witch’s.

He turned the cigarette pack over and over, tapping it against his thigh.

The phone rang and Gemma’s eyes snapped open. She’d fallen asleep fully clothed on her bed, reading about DID. And then she’d been dreaming about Will Tanninger and the images that crossed her mind brought on a slow blush as she shook off the remnants of sleep. Glancing out the window she saw that night had fallen while she’d indulged in her fantasy. At that same moment, her doorbell rang and she hurried downstairs, grabbing up the phone as she headed to the front porch.

“Hello,” she said into the receiver. Through the side windows she thought she saw trick-or-treaters. Some black material floated on a breezy upsurge.

“Gemma? It’s Vera Weatherford. I know I said Tim always comes home but he didn’t last night. I was wondering if I could call that detective you were with?”

Gemma snapped to attention. “I’ll call him. Do you have any idea where Tim might have gone?”

“Um…maybe the quarry?”

Back to Lover’s Lane. Gemma wondered if he’d tried to coerce a different woman besides herself to join him there. “I’ll call Detective Tanninger and we’ll go look for him,” Gemma promised.

“Bless you,” Vera said.

Gemma was distracted as she opened the door. For a moment she stared at the young visitor in the Batman suit. “Charlotte?” she said.

“Batman,” Charlotte said from behind the mask, her voice faintly distorted. “Although some people think I’m Bruce Wayne.”

The headlights of the car parked at the end of her drive, where the clearing gave way to her house, flashed at her twice. Macie. “Well…just a minute, Bruce.”

“Batman,” she corrected.

“I’ve got to get some bat food. You can step inside, if you like. It’s in the kitchen.”

Gemma hurried to a cupboard where she’d purchased one bag of tiny Snickers bars. She’d done it on a whim because she seldom received trick-or-treaters. Snagging it open, she grabbed a couple of bars and handed them to Charlotte who put them in a black Hefty bag. “Planning to make a haul?” Gemma observed dryly.

“Did you tell that detective about Mr. Bereth?” she asked urgently.

“Charlotte, Mr. Bereth was in a bad accident.”

“What?” she asked, sounding dazed. Then, “He’s dead, isn’t he? Robbie wasn’t at school today cuz his dad’s dead.” Alarmed, she asked, “Did he die on Halloween?”

“No, earlier.”

“Oh.” She processed that, then said, “He was a bad dad.”

Gemma forced herself not to check the time. She wanted to call Will and head out to find Tim.

Macie tapped the horn and Charlotte slowly turned back to the door. “I gotta go,” she said reluctantly. “Will you tell me more about Robbie’s dad? I think he was like that other guy. I think that’s why you were chasing him.”

“That other guy?”

“The one who was trying to kidnap that soccer girl.”

Gemma, who’d been distracted, gave Charlotte her full attention. “I didn’t run Mr. Bereth off the road,” she assured her.

“Okay.”

“You believe me?”

She gazed at her through the Batman mask. “I believe you mean what you say,” she said cryptically, then she hurried down the steps and ran to her mom’s car.

Disturbed, Gemma placed a call to Will, surprised and thrilled when she got through immediately.

“I’m just leaving work,” he said. “Climbing into my Jeep. Was thinking about coming your way…”

There was a world of information left out that Gemma picked up on. “Can’t wait,” she said with a smile in her voice, then, “But I have a task for us, first.” Quickly she explained about Little Tim and Will offered to help before she could even ask.

Thirty minutes later a black Jeep pulled up to the house. Gemma had never seen his personal vehicle and she was also surprised to see him in jeans, a brown corduroy shirt, and a windbreaker. She stepped onto the porch to greet him and he pulled a pig mask from his pocket and put it on.

“I guess we aren’t in uniform for Halloween after all,” Gemma said.

“Maybe you’re not. Cops are pigs, you know.”

She laughed and he pulled off the mask and swooped her near, planting a kiss on her mouth, pushing her back through the open doorway at the same time. They kissed and fumbled and stroked each other with more fun than desire, and only when things started turning serious did Gemma reluctantly pull back from his embrace.

“Duty first,” he said, his lips slightly swollen from her kisses.

She kissed him one more time, gently biting his lower lip and pulling on it, reluctantly releasing it. “Duty first,” she repeated on a sigh.