She wouldn’t put it past him to throw her off the property and keep their trailer, as crappy as it was.
Or worse, maybe try to kill her.
Still, it’d been their home for over ten years, and she’d relished the relative peace and quiet they had living there. No, it wasn’t fancy, and no, they didn’t have a lot of money, but they’d been able to spend a lot of time together.
Considering neither of them came from reliable families, that alone had been more precious than any money or possessions. Cameron’s brother had been the only one in his immediate family with whom he’d maintained a strong connection, and he died in Yellowstone.
A dry roof over their head, food in their stomachs—that was all she’d needed when with him. Now the stakes were higher. A cockatrice woman, alone and pregnant, was an easy target with few allies.
No allies, in her case.
Until she knew what had happened to her husband, she didn’t want to leave Maine. She needed closure. Answers.
And a chance to make whoever hurt him fucking pay.
Not knowing what happened to him could make her even more vulnerable. Especially if the wrong people heard about the book. It’d be too easy for her to disappear without a trace. By her best guess, something had gone horribly wrong when he and his cousin went after the woman, but who knew? It could have been anyone, maybe from the last nest he was Heisenberging for, or one of the relatives of his brother or cousins who’d died in Yellowstone—anyone.
No nest, no mate, no family. She’d be a dead woman, with no telling how many people after her to get their hands on the book.
If she knew what happened to him and who did it, she could figure out what she needed to do to ensure her safety.
She stroked her belly. To ensure her baby’s safety.
Closing her eyes, she finally let herself cry.
* * * *
The next morning, after Aliah finished cleaning her assigned rooms and picked up her cash from the office, she opted to spend a few of the precious dollars she had and put gas in the truck. She parked outside a McDonald’s after cruising the drive-through for a couple of cheeseburgers. After wolfing down the food, she used her laptop and managed to hook into their free Wi-Fi. From there, she logged in to their cell phone account.
She’d forgotten about their family tracking feature until yesterday, because Cameron was usually the one who paid all the bills. When she paid the cell bill yesterday from her phone, she saw the feature on the app, but her phone was running too slow with a crappy one-bar signal for her to try to access anything but the basics.
And, of course, Wi-Fi wasn’t free at that hotel. Not even for “employees.”
His phone showed as inactive since the day after she’d last seen him with the signal untraceable. But the day before that, before he’d come to the hotel, it showed from the last verifiable coordinates that he’d spent some time in a neighborhood in the eastern part of town, backed up against a forest. And it was there he’d returned after leaving her at the hotel before he traveled out of tower range and the signal dropped for good.
When she pulled it up on Google Earth, she studied the neighborhood. Nothing spectacular about it, just an average rural residential area.
It was the only clue she had, the only place to start. Calculating how much gas she had, and how much money left, she figured it was worth the risk to try to find him.
One way or another.
During the drive, she once again considered her options. She’d given serious thought to calling her husband’s cousin, Carl, but would leave that as a last resort. She knew calling him would likely mean becoming beholden to him in ways she didn’t want to think about.
It also might mean him ordering her to abort her baby. And she damn sure wouldn’t do that.
While she didn’t worry about her own life with Carl, because while a royal shit in many ways, he wasn’t a cutthroat murderer like so many of their kind, she didn’t want to jump headfirst down a slippery slope.
When she turned to drive down one street that ended in a cul-de-sac, she passed a blue car parked off the road, under some trees on a wooded piece of land. With her senses tingling, she circled around at the end of the street and returned to park the truck next to the car.
After looking around and finding no one watching, she got out and walked over to the car.
Locked, of course. It bore New Hampshire plates, which meant it likely belonged to Gerry.
As she placed her nose close to the passenger door and inhaled, the very faint scent of her mate wafted to her.
It took every ounce of strength she had not to burst into tears.
She locked the truck and walked back down the street, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. It had rained since Cameron left her, so she didn’t hold out a lot of hope of finding much more than the faintest trace of his scent. She passed one house that looked vacant, even though a car sat in the driveway. The yard had grown up higher than its neighboring lawns, and it just felt…empty.
When she returned from the cul-de-sac, she marched up to the door and knocked, hard. She’d prepared a story about looking for her husband and his cousin and finding their car. That they’d gone missing, and that she was looking for information.
All true.
She wasn’t prepared to find the front door unlocked when she tried the knob after knocking several more times.
Pushing it open, she called out. “Hello?”
Immediately, she could see the living room had been ransacked. Here she could smell not only her husband and Gerry, but others. Cockatrice, and a couple of wolves.
She also smelled what she was pretty sure might be big cats. Tigers, or maybe jaguars.
The hair stood up on the back of her neck.
She closed the front door after using her shirttail to wipe her prints off the doorknob inside and out, locking it, then standing against it and staring at the house’s interior for a moment.
That she was alone here, she had no doubt.
The house’s air felt stale, too.
Walking carefully, she found the kitchen first. Groceries sat on the table, still in the bags, and now she smelled the sour, bad stench of refrigerated food that hadn’t been put away and went bad.
She leaned forward to look into the bags. That would match what Cameron had told her about running into the woman at the store.
Now she could clearly smell a male wolf, and the woman’s hybrid wolf-atrice scent that Cameron had described.
She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and opened the fridge, then the freezer. Unable to resist, she pulled out a microwaveable dinner and quickly had it cooking, her stomach loudly grumbling.
Two weeks of eating cheap cheeseburgers had grown really old, really fast, and she had a baby to think about.
While it cooked, she searched the rest of the house, pausing at what was obviously a nursery.
Damn bitch.
She stepped forward, fingering the crib. How would she ever be able to afford nice things for her baby? To raise him—she was already convinced he was a boy—in a decent life? A safe life?
She couldn’t bring herself to settle down with a clueless human, even just for the stability it could mean. It wouldn’t be safe, anyway. She’d always be looking over her shoulder, on the watch for strange cockatrice.
Honestly, she didn’t want to settle down with anyone. She wanted her mate, and it made her heart ache that his scent lay all over the house, the last tangible evidence she had of him.
In the kitchen, the microwave dinged that her food was ready. Returning to the kitchen, she ripped open another box from the freezer and got that one cooking while she quickly devoured the first.
For the first time in two weeks, she could fully sate her hunger and not drink glasses of water to try to fill her grumbling stomach.
It was only after she ate a third one that she finally felt full and decided to continue her search.
That was when she discovered the doo
r leading down to the basement. It was obvious from the heavier scent that, even though it smelled weird, a cockatrice other than her husband or Gerry had been kept captive here. Another hybrid, maybe?
Fucking bitch.
Now more than ever convinced the hybrid woman had killed her husband, Aliah knew she’d do whatever it took to make her pay.
Unfortunately, it didn’t bring her any closer to answers.
She discovered a window broken out in the back door, her husband’s scent lingering there as well. Walking around outside the back of the house, where the ground was sheltered by the overhanging eaves, she found two faint but distinct scent trails left by her husband and Gerry. One came from the front of the house. The other led toward the woods behind it.
Now she had an answer.
She walked through the tall grass to where the woods butted against the backyard. There, she dropped onto all fours, nose close to the ground. It took her nearly an hour but, finally, she got a hint of where they’d headed. At least at this point they’d still been together.
Knowing she couldn’t blindly go in after them without a plan, or at least an idea of where they might have ended up, she returned to the house. After searching through the house, she found little of value that she could easily take and sell or pawn. She didn’t feel like wrestling with a TV.
In the kitchen a set of car keys hung on a hook on the wall by the fridge. She took them and headed out the front door again. Sure enough, they fit the car. It started for her, but it only had a quarter of a tank of gas.
It also reeked of the hybrid cockatrice bitch and the male wolf.
Still, it would be better on gas than the truck.
Shutting it off, she locked it and went back into the house. After grabbing her trash and wiping off the microwave and fridge to hide her fingerprints, she locked the front door behind her again and returned to her truck, the car keys in her pocket. She’d left the house’s back door unlocked.
It would make a great free hiding place, if nothing else, as long as it remained vacant.
* * * *
Later that evening, knowing it would take a while, Aliah headed out on foot before dark to walk back to the house. Three hours later, she slid behind the wheel of the car and cranked the engine, breathing a sigh of relief when it started. She’d brought the long siphon tube Cameron kept in the truck for just that purpose. Parking close to Gerry’s car, so that the cars’ gas filler outlets were just a few feet apart, she quickly worked the tube down the filler outlet of Gerry’s car and managed to get a siphon started.
As she waited for gas to drain from Gerry’s car into the stolen one, she crouched between them, looking for any sign of someone watching. She didn’t have an arrest record despite being in her sixties, but she wanted to be careful not to get one now. She, as well as Cameron, looked like they were only in their twenties, and it was something that had served them both well throughout their years together.
Gerry, she knew, wasn’t as smart. He’d not only been arrested and done jail time before, but currently had arrest warrants out on him. If law enforcement discovered his fingerprints on his car, she didn’t want hers to be there, too, just in case.
Once she siphoned as much gas as she could from the car, she threw the siphon tube into the stolen car’s trunk, used a rag to wipe off any fingerprints of hers that might be on Gerry’s car, and headed back to the hotel. She now had over half a tank of gas. It would last her a lot longer than in the truck.
Tomorrow she wasn’t scheduled to clean any rooms, her day off. She’d use it to search now that she had an idea of where to look.
* * * *
In the darkness, the thing shivered. He used to have a name.
He even used to know it.
Collared, shackled, and chained, he could barely move, not that he wanted to.
Moving hurt. Pretty much everything hurt, but moving hurt a lot.
He no longer knew what was reality, memory, or madness. The three were indistinguishable from each other, and the pain.
From time to time, people showed up, men. Then more pain happened.
Lots of pain.
Voices, commands to remember, taunts…
It all bled together.
Sometimes, he was standing at the cliff again, reaching out, vainly trying to grab her as she sailed back and out of his grasp and into his memory as madness.
The things she’d said to him couldn’t be true, the taunts had to be lies. Maybe she was just upset that he’d left for so long even though he’d tried to make her understand…
A shudder rippled through his body, causing more pain. He waited for it to pass.
He always returned to the cliff. Even before all of this, he’d thought about it every day.
How he wished he’d been the one who’d gone over the edge instead of her.
Somewhere, a light snapped on, pulling him out of his thoughts and as close to reality as he ever got now.
“Hello, Rodolfo,” the jaguar said. “Ready to play some more?”
He closed his one remaining eye and wished for death.
Chapter Three
Elain insisted on helping Ryan get Mercedes placed in the grave. After he climbed out, he offered Elain a helping hand out of the hole.
She started to scoop up a handful of dirt, then hesitated. “Wait a minute.”
Quickly scanning the garden, Elain walked over to the back porch, to a large, rectangular planter with several rosemary bushes growing in it. She broke off a couple of branches, running them through her hands and deeply inhaling their aroma while she walked back to the grave.
She knelt and dropped them onto the tarp-shrouded body. “There. It’s not roses, but at least it’s something.”
“Ah. I wondered,” Ryan said. “Instead of flowers. Magickal meaning, I take it?”
She looked up at him. “No. Shakespearean. Romeo and Juliet.” She stood after scooping up a handful of dirt. “Remembrance.” Holding her hand out over the open grave, she considered her words. “Mercedes, I didn’t know you well in life. At all, actually. And for that I’m sort of sad. I know we all have flaws.”
She snorted. “Well, your choice in mates was lacking, for damn sure,” she muttered. “And you were not only part cockatrice, you were Rodolfo’s daughter. But you saved Jim’s life. For that alone, our family is forever in your debt. Not to mention you hated Rodolfo as much as the rest of us. Maybe more.”
She opened her fingers and let the soil fall into the grave, where it softly pattered against the tarp. “You deserve better than a nameless hole in the ground that will eventually be lost to time in the middle of the woods. I’m sorry this isn’t much better than that, but maybe you’d appreciate the irony.”
The vision Elain had earlier came to mind. “I don’t understand what you meant by it being a garden of secrets, but I hope you’ll tell me at some point.”
Ryan leaned against the shovel handle and watched without comment.
Elain brushed the dirt off her hands. “Considering everything I now know, combined with everything I know I don’t know, I suspect you’re going to go on and have another life at some point.”
She propped her hands on her hips. “I wish I could offer you promises of vengeance or whatever, but it looks like Marston took the fuckers out and saved me the work. I do promise not to forget you or what you did for our family. I hope that’s good enough.”
That felt right. She turned to Ryan.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she softly said, holding her hand out for the shovel. “I’d like to do a little, please?”
Without argument, he passed it to her. After gently covering the body with a layer of dirt so the tarp was no longer visible, she quickly began scraping dirt off the pile next to the grave. After a few minutes, she realized she was crying.
Ryan reached out and covered her hands with his. “Let me,” he said, his tone quietly firm.
She relinquished the shovel and sat on the
grass next to the grave, watching as he wordlessly began filling it.
Once they had Mercedes safely interred, Elain helped him move the sundial back in place. The dirt was obviously disturbed around the base of the pavers.
After studying it for a moment, he knelt down and touched the grass with one hand, and with the other reached inside his collar and touched something hanging around his neck.
Before her eyes, the ground returned to normal, looking completely undisturbed. The scent also disappeared, except for where it still clung to their clothes.
“You couldn’t have done that instead of the old-fashioned way?” she snarked. “Not that I’m complaining. And thank you, by the way, again.”
He smiled. “I think she deserved the attention. And I think you needed the closure.”
Elain nodded. “The smell?”
“Other wolves shouldn’t be able to detect it any longer. A simple, but effective charm.”
She didn’t want to know the details. “Good.” She let out a laugh. “I’m really an idiot. I didn’t even think about that.”
He smiled. “Luckily for you I have plenty of experience in this area.” He returned the shovel to her. “Let me prepare you an early dinner. Go inside, take a nice long, hot shower and relax, and I’ll return shortly.”
“I’m not about to refuse that.”
While in the shower, she kept her mind as calm and still as she could. She didn’t want to contemplate everything right then.
Hell, she didn’t even want to contemplate being pregnant.
She was already dressed when Ryan returned. He looked like he’d showered and changed as well. She sat at the kitchen table at his insistence and watched while he cooked.
“So who was I before?” she asked. “In another life.”
Ryan turned to her from where he stood at the stove. Whatever he was cooking for them had started smelling yummy. “I’m not exactly the Google of arcane knowledge.”
“You sure about that?”