“I, on the other hand, am quite worried about your well-being.” He stared at me.
I stared back at him.
“So, you’re not trying to get me out of the area?” I asked, my frail little id forcing me into clarification of that all-important point.
“No.”
“OK. Good.” I gave him a dazzling smile. All was right in my world again.
He ignored it, frowning at me. “I will be the one leaving this region once I have the proof of the murderers.”
It was as if the sun turned to lead. I didn’t want him leaving. I wanted him right there, where we could explore the possibility of a relationship, and have fabulous—if very quick—sex in the bed, and the bathtub, and possibly outside, assuming we found a private enough location. I wanted him where I could watch his eyes, and wait for another of those brain-melting grins, and where I could reach out and touch the lightning flower that trailed down his chest.
I just wanted him, period.
“How long do you expect that to take?” I heard a flat, lifeless voice ask, and was momentarily startled to find it came from my mouth.
His gaze met mine, then flickered away before I could pinpoint the emotion in it. “I need that vial. I can’t prove anything without it. I will have to find a way to search the camp without my cousins knowing I’m doing so.”
It would be wrong to wish that vial a million miles away. Someone had been murdered, and the person who committed that crime had to pay. Still, I couldn’t help making a wee little wish that it took Peter a bit of time to find the proof.
I felt so guilty by that desire that my mouth opened up and said, “Would you like me to help you?”
“Search the camp?” he asked, shaking his head. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I could help you get into the camp so you can search it,” I said slowly, not feeling in the least bit threatened by Mrs. Faa’s family, but knowing that helping Peter solve the case was the right thing to do, even if it did make me feel as if all the joy had gone out of life.
He looked thoughtful. “How would you do that?”
“We could smuggle you into my tent, and then wait until everyone was asleep. My tent opens to the woods, not the camp itself, so no one would see if you if it was dark, and you slipped in from the trees.”
“And how would I search the caravans if everyone was asleep inside them?” His voice was neutral, but I saw a hint of warmth in his eyes.
I gave a half shrug. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Kiya.” He took my hands in his, and turned them, pressing a kiss to each palm. The heat of his mouth made me give a little shiver of pleasure. “What’s wrong? All of a sudden you sound as if you’ve lost your best friend.”
I looked at our hands, and said nothing. What could I say? That I didn’t want him to leave? That I thought we might be on the edge of having something wonderful together? Every explanation that my brain came up with sounded trite and unrealistic, like dialogue from a badly written TV show.
Real people didn’t tell the man they met a few days ago that they thought they were about to fall in love with him. Real people didn’t beg that very same man not to walk out of their lives, leaving them alone and lonely again.
Real people didn’t act needy, no matter how vulnerable they suddenly felt.
“I have to go,” I said after several seconds of awkward silence. Reluctantly, I pulled my hands from his. “I have an anal-gland squeezing appointment that I’ll get hell if I miss.”
“Please tell me that appointment is for one of Lenore Faa’s dogs,” he said as I collected my purse and started for the door. Humor was rich in his voice, making my knees wobble a little as I walked.
“Would you still love me if I said it was for me?” I heard my id asking, and, horrified, I slapped my hand over my mouth.
Peter looked surprised, and opened his mouth to answer.
“Oh my god, I didn’t just say that,” I said quickly, before he could speak. “You did not hear that, OK? It’s my id, I can’t take her anywhere!”
“Kiya,” he started to say, but I just could not take what I knew he was going to say next.
“Seriously, pretend that never happened. My mouth says stuff all the time that I don’t authorize. It’s really embarrassing, and I’m going to go sit in my car and try desperately to remove the last few seconds from my memory. Bye. Thanks for the baths. And…the other. In bed. It was fun. Bye.”
I dashed out of the room before I dropped dead of embarrassment, running smack-dab into the motel hussy named Alison. She squawked something at me, but my brain had had as much mortification as I could stand. I pushed past her and ran to my car. I heard Peter behind me, followed by Alison’s seductive tones, and knew that she had snagged him.
Not even that kept me from running away in shame. I chastised myself both verbally and mentally the whole time I drove back to the camp, and continued a short while later while taking the pugs for their morning walk.
“Is something amiss with you?” Mrs. Faa asked when I returned. She watched me measure out the dogs’ food, keeping an eye that I matched the correct tiny can of dog food to the small bowls containing varying amounts of dried food. “No, the lamb and rice belongs to Maureen. She cannot tolerate chicken. You look flushed. Are you ill?”
“I’m perfectly fine,” I lied, and switched cans before opening them and dumping the contents into the appropriate bowls.
She gave a little snort of disbelief, but returned to her RV after giving me an envelope with money for the vet and the dog groomer.
The anal-gland squeezing was not an experience I wish soon to relive, although I was pleased that I managed to escape the vet teaching me how by gasping at the clock on the wall and exclaiming that I had to run or we’d be late for the spa day. I bustled the newly squeezed Jacques out, along with his compatriots, and into the back of Eloise. By the time I returned to Rose Hill, and dropped the dogs off at their grooming appointment, I had worked through the worst of my embarrassment, and decided on a policy wherein I would disclaim all knowledge of what I had said should Peter bring it up again.
“Like he’s going to do that,” I muttered to myself, pausing outside the grooming shop to look up and down the street. “Men hate talking about relationship stuff. Especially if you don’t really have a relationship beyond a highly erotic night and morning. Hey.”
I shaded my eyes against the sun to better see a block away where a familiar-looking man got out of a car and stood in front of the church motel.
“Hey!” I said, this time in a shout, and waved my arm when the man’s head turned to see the source of the noise. “Dalton! I was just talking about you!”
He watched without moving as I jogged toward him, a hesitant smile on his face.
“How are you feeling?”
“Me? Just fine, thank you.”
“Good. It’s odd seeing you when I was just talking to Peter about you. I didn’t realize you were his boss.”
“And I didn’t realize you knew Peter,” Dalton said with another smile. “What a very odd coincidence. Have you known him long?”
“No, just since I ran into him outside my employer’s camp. So, are you staying here?” I asked, nodding toward the motel.
His smile grew broader. “I am. I was about to go inside. Would you care to come in so we can have a cozy chat?”
“Sure, I’ve got a bit of time. Have you seen Peter this morning? I think he was looking for you.”
“No, I haven’t. I’m sure I’ll see him later, though. This way.” He unlocked and held open a door right next to the front entrance. It was dim inside, the sunlight not able to penetrate the thick curtains on the windows. As I entered the darkened room, I stumbled over something large that was lying in the inky shadow cast by the bed.
“Whoops. Sorry, I tripped over your bag or some-thing—oh my god! That’s a body! Holy shiznit, Dalton, there’s a body in your room!”
My mind shrieked
at me to run far, far away, but I had trodden on the body, causing it to roll onto its front. The police would freak out if they knew I had disturbed a crime scene. Without thinking, I reached out and rolled the body back the way it had been before I tripped over it, my brain coming to a grinding halt at the face attached to the body.
“This…it’s…it can’t be.” The face was the same one I’d seen just seconds before. It was Dalton. I stared down at him, trying to resolve what it was I was seeing. “What exactly—”
Pain burst into being along the back right side of my head. It didn’t last long, but that was only because blackness claimed me, swallowing me up and leaving me completely insensible.
The world as I knew it swam for a few seconds, then settled down into a more-or-less well-behaved manner. Except for the light. That was wrong. I blinked, and shaded my hand against the sun, noticing as I did so a familiar man standing in the gravel parking lot at the side of the motel. “Hey!” I called, waving at him. “Dalton! I—”
Horrified, I dropped my hand. “No,” I whispered to myself, and then dived into the doorway next to me when Dalton looked in my direction. My head suddenly swam with pain. I clutched my forehead and held my breath against the wave of nausea that followed my unwise movement for a few seconds before exhaling slowly when the pain dimmed down to a bearable level. “Oh my god, one of them must be around!”
“One of who?” a woman at the counter asked. Carefully, so as not to aggravate my aching head, I glanced around. I’d leaped into the small café that was Rose Hill’s morning coffee spot. Several older people seated at small plastic tables watched me with evident concern. I tried to smile, gave it up when a couple of the old people looked horrified, and released my hold on my head.
“Sorry, just talking to myself.” I straightened up and tried to look like I hadn’t just had time stolen from me. “Um…can I get a coffee and bagel to go, please? And maybe a piece of that berry pie. I think I’m in shock. Are those chocolate muffins? I’ll take one of them, too. Chocolate always makes you feel better.”
“Mmhm,” the waitress said, not meeting my eye.
I lurked at the window while the woman packaged up my order. There weren’t very many people out on the street—the general population of Rose Hill didn’t seem to be too inclined to stroll around on the two blocks that made up their little community—but those who were going to or from cars were not familiar to me.
Somewhere out there was one of Mrs. Faa’s family. And one of them had stolen time from me. Again. The bastard.
I gritted my teeth, not in pain, but in frustration. I hated the helplessness this whole time theft left me feeling.
After a quick check to make sure the road was clear, I took my food and coffee, and walked as smoothly as I could over to my car, where I managed to hit my head three times climbing into the front seat.
“Son of a sea biscuit!” I swore the third time, slumped into the seat and holding my head again. “I do not know why I have such a massive headache. I didn’t have one the…other…time….”
A vision rose in my mind’s eye as I spoke, a vision of a darkened room, and twins, two identical twins. And something very, very wrong…
“What on earth?” I murmured, then remembered that Carla had once told me to clear my mind of all troubles in order to concentrate when something I wanted to remember was just beyond my mental reach. “Right. A little meditative thinking never hurt anyone…ow! Oh, holy hand grenade!”
When I leaned my head back against the headrest, a red wave of pain washed down over me, threatening to make me pass out. I focused on keeping the wave from swamping me, breathing in and out in the prescribed manner of one who is fighting to retain consciousness. A few minutes later, I lifted a shaky hand to gently feel the back of my head. My fingers came away sticky and red.
“Ow?” I said to my fingers. “What happened?”
My fingers didn’t answer me, and to be honest, I was thankful for that, because it meant that I hadn’t suffered any brain damage—noticeable, at least—from the injury to my head.
“Right. Whichever one of those rat bastards hit me on the head when they stole my time is seriously going to get what’s coming to them,” I growled. “Now. I just have to focus on what I was doing before they stole my time, and then I will tell Peter, and he will beat the living daylights out of whoever it was. And I will help him.”
It took another five minutes or so before my brain was calm enough that I could relax, and focus on what had happened. That same mental image of a darkened room containing something sinister rose before me. “I was with someone,” I told Eloise, my eyes screwed up with the effort of remembering. “Someone I was talking to. I went into the room and…”
If the top of my head lifted off and let the sunshine into my brain, it wouldn’t have been less startling than the flood of memory returning. As if a switch flipped, I remembered kneeling next to the body of Dalton McKay.
“But it was Dalton who let me into the room,” I said, staring blindly ahead as my skin crawled in the very best horror movie way. “We had been walking together. And talking. Which means he was alive. Unless…oh, merciful mangrove trees, what if he was a zombie!”
My flesh didn’t just crawl at that thought—it all but leaped around in horror. I scrabbled through my purse for my phone to call Peter, praying I had enough battery power to tell him I’d been in contact with a zombie, and demand some sort of a cure for the rampant zombieism that was sure to affect me. Just as my fingers closed around the phone, it rang, making me jump in the seat so hard that I banged my sore head on the roof.
“Ow. Hello? Ow.”
“Kiya? It’s Peter. I wanted to tell you—”
“Peter! Oh, thank the good, green earth. I was about to call you. I’ve been with a zombie!”
“—that I have reconsidered…you what?”
“Been with a zombie! Been with a zombie! What’s confusing about ‘I’ve been with a zombie’? It’s pretty straightforward, really. There was a zombie, and I was with him, and I think he may have touched me, although I can’t really remember, because when one of your bastard family members stole my time, they also whacked me on the back of the head and it’s bleeding and everything, and oh my god maybe it was the zombie who chomped on me! I thought that brains thing was just a joke! OH MY GOD, Peter! A zombie tried to eat my brains!”
“Kiya, I don’t…a zombie?”
“Yes, yes, a zombie!” Quickly I rolled up the open windows lest the brain-muncher decide to come after me again. “The walking undead. Really, Peter, I don’t see why you are having such a problem understanding this. It shakes my faith in you a little, it really does. I was hoping you’d be the sort of man who, upon hearing that his lover has been mauled by a flesh-consuming atrocity of nature, would rush to be at her side to comfort her, check her flesh wounds, and speed her to the nearest zombie immunization office so that she doesn’t end up ripping off his limbs because she’s a mite peckish.”
“Kiya—”
“Great, now I’m trapped in my car and it’s getting hot because I had to roll up the windows. That or I’m already getting feverish from the zombie virus.”
“Kiya!” Peter said loudly, making my head hurt worse.
“What?” I snapped, somewhat crankily, to be true, but I felt a certain amount of crankiness was justified after a zombie attack.
“Be quiet a minute and let me speak. First of all, there is no such thing as a zombie virus.”
I had puffed myself up at the way he had told me to more or less shut up, but at his words, my outraged deflated. “There isn’t?”
“No.”
“But there are zombies.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. They are called revenants, though, and they are not the monsters made popular by mortals. Most revenants are perfectly normal, and you’d be hard put to tell them from anyone else.”
“Do they eat human flesh?” I asked, wincing when I touched the back of my head again. r />
“They can, but most of them are strict vegetarians so as to avoid temptation. So unless you’ve come across a rogue revenant who’s gone off his diet, I’d say the chances are extremely slim that someone tried to eat your brains. I’m more concerned about what you said concerning my cousins. Did you lose time again?”
“Yes,” I said, both relieved and feeling somewhat pouty. At least I didn’t have to worry about becoming a brain-slurper myself. “One of them must have hit me on the head if it wasn’t the zombie.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Well, I got done dropping off the pugs at their spa—what?”
“Nothing. I just snorted disgustingly.”
“Don’t be such a hater. Those puggies are adorable, and besides, the doggy spa really is just a bath and brushing. And blueberry facials, but we won’t go into that. Anyway, I was walking to my car and I saw Dalton.”
“Dalton? Dalton McKay? The Dalton I work for?”
“Yes. He’s the zombie!”
“He’s what?”
I explained how I had met Dalton and gone into the motel with him.
“Dalton had a motel room? That doesn’t make sense. He didn’t tell me he was staying there.”
“Well, he is. Only when I got into his room, I stumbled over him, and he was lying dead on the floor!”
“Who was dead on the floor?”
I sighed. “I have an open head wound, and have had time stolen from me, not to mention having suffered from a huge zombie scare. If you could please pay attention, I’d appreciate it.”
“I am paying attention, and I’m sorry you’ve been hurt. I would, in fact, rush to your side and whisk you off to the nearest zombie immunization center, or in this case healer, but as you don’t seem to be in too much distress, I’d like to get the facts straight first. Who was lying dead on the floor?”
“Dalton.” I couldn’t help but smile to myself at the fact that Peter said he’d rush me to the zombie center. A man who would do that wasn’t a man who would just walk away from a woman. Would he?
“I thought you said Dalton was the revenant?”