Dee told herself she was on a mission from God. She couldn’t just sit in Salem’s Fork waiting for Xan to bring disaster down on them. She had to try and prevent it, and the only way she knew was to find her aunt before she had a chance to act. Xan was close, metaphysically. Dee could feel it. So she searched for her like Tommy Lee Jones tracking a fleeing felon. She refused to admit that she was using her search as a means of avoiding Danny.
He’d bought her Nutter Butter bars. He’d fed her onion rings. She hadn’t even been able to dredge up the courage to so much as kiss him thank-you. After all, how gracious would it be to respond to such kindness by sending the man into therapy for the rest of his adult life? Especially a man who’d just said that he loved her.
What if Xan was right? What if Dee actually had found her true love, only to have to give him away again? She’d never had to survive that kind of alone before.
So, she ran. The problem was, Danny James refused to be left behind.
‘Butterflies make me hot,’ he whispered as they stalked the halls of the General Lee Motel. Dee was trying to be surreptitious, but she knew she looked like a German shepherd sniffing out bombs. Come to think of it, if she weren’t so distracted, it might have been easier to shift into one. Nobody stared at a dog that sniffed the air.
‘From what you’ve told me today,’ Dee said, ‘breathing makes you hot.’
‘If you’re the one breathing.’
Dee flushed, unaccustomed to the flirting. Terrified to anticipate anything beyond his escort through motel halls.
There was no Xan here. Not that she should have been surprised. It was one of those brown-and-gold-paisley kinds of places with a pool smack in the middle so the chlorine clogged up your nose. But even chlorine couldn’t mask cinnamon and sulfur. At least not Xan’s mix. And there wasn’t a trace of it.
Dee had only caught her scent once, at the Peaceful Garden B and B down the road in Martinsville. The owner swore the only guest she’d had was a shy librarian sort who’d checked out that morning. Dee had nodded and moved on to the next place. She wasn’t going to give up until she’d checked out every hotel, motel, and rented room in a ten-mile radius.
Danny held open the General Lee’s front door. ‘Why don’t you just meet with her?’
‘I did.’
Danny frowned at her. ‘Then why are we chasing her around town?’ Dee struck the General Lee off the list she’d scrawled on the back of deposit slips and stepped out onto the cracked parking lot. ‘Because I can’t let her get another jump on me. Next time, she could really hurt us.’
‘She hurt you?’
‘Not enough to matter. Not like my parents. I was right. She killed them. So I’m not going to let her kill my sisters.’
‘She told you that?’
‘She did, actually. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I guess. She said it was their fault, of course.’
‘Can you tell me anything else?’
Dee considered him a moment, with his clear honest eyes and his untested power. ‘Not yet. I’m sorry’ Danny nodded. ‘Okay’ He steered her to the bike. Dee stopped. ‘That’s it? Okay?’
He shot her a bright smile that could make a girl forget her name. ‘Sure. Witch hunts make me hot.’
He bent far enough that his lips fluttered over the shell of her ear. ‘Especially when the hunter is a gorgeous redhead with a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder’
Dee damn near melted into a puddle on the spot. God, she wished he’d stop doing that. He was driving her insane. Already she felt as if she needed to borrow one of Mare’s bras. Hers suddenly seemed so tight. He handed her in and out of doors, on and off the bike, and always managed to find a bit of exposed skin to brush against. Wrist, throat, the gap between her jeans and T-shirt above her hip. She felt as if he’d stroked a live wire over her. And he kept riding her back and forth across those godforsaken cobblestones. How did he know?
‘I’d say I should dye my hair,’ she challenged, ‘but you’d tell me that brunettes make you hot.’
‘Do they have tattoos?’
She giggled. She couldn’t help it. He was keeping her in an agony of ambivalence. He tempted her so much, with his mad blue eyes and sly smiles. But he terrified her even more. She’d seen the horror in men’s eyes. She couldn’t bear to see it in his. For all the brave talk in her studio, all she wanted was to put off the inevitable as long as possible.
They stopped by a Dollar Dayz and got Dee a small spiral notebook to replace her deposit slips, a package of rubber bands for her hair, which Danny immediately snatched, and ten more Nutter Butter bars. Witch-hunter supplies. They also discovered that Xan had been in. Of course everybody in the place remembered the stunning visitor from the day before. Staying over to Bicksburg, they thought. Two of the men even pulled out phone numbers. Dee would have told them how hopeless a return call was, but Fred Norton had tried to bully Mare in high school. Mare had knocked two of his teeth out, of course. Dee figured Xan would make him grovel like a serf. She tucked her new notebook in her purse and headed for the door.
‘Can we have sex now?’ Danny asked, following. Dee patted him like a toddler. ‘After Bicksburg.’
‘You promise?’
‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’ she demanded as they walked across the parking lot.
He never slowed. ‘No man ever thinks of anything else. Well, except rare moments when they’re trying to remember football statistics.’
She was smiling again. Damn him. He made her want him.
‘You don’t have to kill yourself, Dee,’ he said, touching her arm again. Always touching her. ‘You know she’ll find you.’
‘The best defense is a good offense.’
He grinned. ‘Football coaches-’
Dee laughed, pushed him again. ‘We can’t have sex.’
She should just get it over with. She should haul him into one of those cheesy pressboard-furniture-and-industrial-carpet rooms they’d been scouring, toss him on the bed, and break most of the cardinal rules of nature. He sure wouldn’t be whispering in her ear after that.
‘You’re not going to have sex with me until you find her, are you?’ he asked.
Dee stood by his bike, running her hand over the butter-soft leather. ‘I have responsibilities. Since you showed up, I’ve forgotten most of them. But that’s not going to keep Xan from coming after us. If we don’t stop her first, we’ll never be safe.’
‘Coward.’
She straightened to find that he wasn’t smiling anymore. The storm shadows collected in the hollows of his cheeks and made him look fierce.
‘I am not a coward.’
‘You’re hiding behind your sisters, behind the threat of your aunt. Behind the door of that little house of yours. You’re braver than that, Dee.’
‘I’m not hiding. I’m trying to live a normal life, just as I dreamed when I was a little girl. Hell, I even have a white picket fence.’
She knew she was trembling again. Her stomach was suddenly in turmoil. Right there in the middle of the Dollar Dayz parking lot, for God’s sake. Couldn’t he challenge her in private? Couldn’t he not challenge her at all?
‘You have a prison surrounded by a big garden.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered, her voice suddenly hoarse. ‘You don’t know what Xan really is.’
‘I’m not talking about Xan.’
‘Then what?’
He bent over so he could face her eye to eye and took her face in his hands. ‘Not everyone hides her passion in the attic, Dee. Come out into the sunlight.’