SHE COULD hear the dogs baying in the distance. Thunder rumbled farther back, just clearing the mountains to the west and rolling over the Eden valley, a warning that was coming too late.
Samantha thought she should have seen a sign, a clue, some foreshadowing of this, even though a more logical part of her brain knew no normal person could have imagined the kind of madness that infected Sharon Russell. She still blamed herself for being naive and stupid. But that was pointless and she had no time to waste.
She ran through the woods, pain shooting through her with each jarring step. Her ribs and back ached from the beating she had taken the night before. Cramps knotted her shoulder muscles from the unnatural position she had been tied in, and her hands throbbed mercilessly now that the circulation had been restored. They were swollen and discolored, and fears of amputation flashed through her mind when she looked at them, but then, that was stupid, because she was probably going to die.
None of it would matter-her hands, her ragged hair, the cut that extended in a bloody throbbing red line from her right cheekbone diagonally across her face to her jaw. It wouldn’t matter what she looked like when she was dead. It wouldn’t matter if the dogs fell on her and tore her to shreds. She would have ceased to exist.
She wondered who would mourn her passing.
The notion was stunning, impossible to grasp. She had too much life ahead of her to die now. That thought compelled her to keep her feet moving and her heart pumping and her lungs working. Instinct and adrenaline spurred her to run, and she ran with no thought to pacing herself as she hurled her body between trees and through brush. Thorny brambles ripped the bare skin of her legs, lashed them with a hundred tiny cuts, and snagged the remnant of the white silk T-shirt that hung in tatters around her neck. With no shoes, her toes caught on exposed roots, and thistles and twigs bit into the soles of her feet, but she kept running. Her head felt as if it would explode, and her lungs burned until they felt like sacks of blood in her chest, but she kept running.
South. She didn’t know where she was, but she assumed they were still on Bryce’s property. If she ran east, she would only take herself deeper into the Absaroka wilderness. North would take her back to Sharon. South. Toward Rafferty land. She had no idea how far that might be. She had no idea how far Sharon would allow her to run. She didn’t let herself think about it. She made her mind go blank and focused only on putting one foot ahead of the other. She broke into a wide clearing and sprinted across it, thinking too late that she should stick to the cover of the trees. But what would it really matter? The dogs had her scent. Better to take the quickest route than one that afforded cover. Wasn’t it?
She could hear the hounds baying, their voices carrying on thin, wavering currents through the trees. The air was heavy and still, dense with anticipation of the storm. Sound bounced through it, traveling and echoing until she couldn’t tell where it originated. Were they behind her still? Or had Sharon taken another approach, circling around to cut off her escape? She pulled up to listen and get her bearings, falling heavily against the rough trunk of a lodgepole pine.
Darkness was creeping up from the forest floor and pressing down from above, creating a nightmarish twilight. Samantha looked around her, trying to establish a heading. She was weak with exhaustion and fear and hunger; dizziness swirled around and around her brain, making it difficult to determine direction or decipher the simplest of thoughts. The sweat chilled on her skin and she shuddered and strained against being sick, against panic that was like a ball in her throat. Tears blurred her vision and rained down her cheeks, through the dirt and the blood. She tried to wipe them away with the back of her hand and cried out at the pain in her fingers and in her cut cheek.
You’ll die out here, Samantha. Naked, beaten, shot in the head by a madwoman. Stupid kid. Stupid dreamer. The dream is over now.
Stupid girl. Stupid, silly virgin.
Sharon watched her quarry through a night vision scope attached to a Browning rifle. I could kill you now, little slut. But she wasn’t ready to end the hunt just yet. She had given the little bitch a fifteen-minute head start before riding out after her. The hounds had caught her scent immediately. The scent of blood and fear. A perfume of which Sharon found herself growing fond. Lucy MacAdam had been her first human kill. She thought the rush might be addictive. The idea excited her.
Her victim was perhaps four hundred yards away, leaning against a tree, barely in the cover of the woods. She could have given the dogs the command to take her down as she crossed the clearing, but it wasn’t time yet. She wanted to chase, to hunt. She wanted the girl’s fear to be so thick, she could taste it on the air.
She would be no challenge to kill. The fun was in the game of cat and mouse, and in the knowledge that she had the power to strike terror like a lightning bolt into the soul of her prey. For too much of her life that power had belonged to others. Now it was hers, and she relished it more than money, more than sex, more than any drug. Power. Control. The power to play God. A dark god. A dark avenger, taking back what was hers and punishing those who dared get in her way.
This was her private game. No one would ever know. She had made a mistake in leaving Lucy’s body, assuming no one would come across it. She would not make that mistake with Samantha Rafferty. The girl would vanish from the face of the earth. She would be gone without a trace. Life would go on.
Sharon wondered how Bryce would react to the girl’s disappearance. Had he been in love with her long enough to grieve? Would he ever wonder, ever suspect?
Will he look into my eyes and know? And what if he does? What will he do?
I killed for you, you bastard. Twice.
She had saved him from his obsessions. She had preserved her own spot at his right hand. She knew too much, was too valuable to him to be pushed aside by an object of simple lust.
What would Bryce do if he knew she had killed for him? Would he recoil from her or would that knowledge be an aphrodisiac? Would he want to watch the next time she went on a hunt and make love with her afterward, when the blood was still fresh on her hands? The image sent heat sluicing through her.
The dogs howled, eager to be off. The bigger one started to bolt down the trail across the clearing. Sharon ordered him back, pointed a remote control in his direction, and hit the button that delivered a jolt of electricity to the animal through a device in its collar. The dog let out a yelp of pain and wheeled around as if he had been yanked back on a leash.
She raised the rifle once more and smiled as she looked through the scope. Bryce’s little Indian princess was moving again. Running toward safety she would never find.
Slinging the rifle across her back, she gathered her reins and spurred her horse into a tightly controlled canter moving to the south and west.
Clyde picked his way down the trail as if he had some knowledge of where he was going. Mari suspected he was faking it. She was pretty certain they had zigged when they should have zagged, but darkness was sweeping down the mountain beneath the trees, making it difficult for her to recognize the vague landmarks that had guided her up here. All in all, this did not strike her as the ideal time to get lost in the woods. There were dangers on this mountain that made bears look dull by comparison.
She had not been able to persuade Del to come down the mountain with her. The idea of actually going into New Eden to speak with the sheriff had upset him to the point of stuttering. Nor would he go with her to her place. Agitated by everything that had been going on and by simply telling her about what he had seen, he had insisted he stay put. He had to keep watch. He had to guard the ranch.
Mari hadn’t argued with him. He was in a fragile state of mind, a man teetering on an unstable ledge. She didn’t want to be responsible for pushing him off. J.D. would never forgive her.
“J.D. As if he’s still part of the big picture, Marilee,” she mumbled. “You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”
As big a jerk as he had been, he should have been the furthest man from her mind. But she couldn’t stop thinking about him with his back up against the wall, trying to protect what was his-his land, his uncle, his heart. She blamed him for her missing her turn on this damned trail.
God knew, she had more pressing matters to consider. She had to take the videotape and Lucy’s notes to Quinn and relate to him everything Del had told her. She worried a little about him believing Del, but then, Del was a Rafferty and that would weigh in his favor, and the tape corroborated his stories of the hunts.
It had been difficult to listen to him try to sort fact from fiction in his tale of the tigers and the dog-boys, but it had torn her heart out to hear him struggle through the recounting of Lucy’s demise. He told the story in fragments, with many pieces missing and some borrowed from other nightmares, but Mari was convinced he had seen Lucy running for her life, that he had heard the hounds that pursued her and seen the murderer take the killing shot.
The other blonde. The blonde that danced with the dog-boys.
Sharon Russell.
Mari could only guess at motive. Perhaps Lucy had tried to squeeze blood out of the wrong stone. Maybe she had had something on Sharon that would have threatened her position with Bryce. Or maybe Bryce and Sharon had decided jointly that they were tired of Lucy scavenging off their pigeons. Whatever the reason, Sharon Russell had hunted Lucy down like an animal in the dead of night, killed her, and left her body for the carrion feeders, then blithely went on with her life as if nothing had happened.
The thought made Mari’s stomach turn.
She pulled Clyde up and looked around for anything that was even vaguely familiar. Trees. One looked pretty much like the next. City girl. The mule shifted restlessly beneath her. Thunder grumbled in the sky like an empty belly. Swell. The storm would bring an early end to what daylight there had been. And she was lost on the side of a mountain where millionaires killed endangered species for sport.
“You’ll be the endangered species if they catch you up here, Marilee.”
She could just see the horrified look on her mother’s face when the cops came to tell her her rebel daughter had been gunned down while riding a mule in the wilds of Montana.
Somewhere far off to her right she thought she heard dogs barking and she tensed in the saddle. Clyde shook his head angrily in an attempt to snatch the reins from her control and danced from foot to foot. Lightning cracked like a whip above the canopy of trees, and the mule sat back on his haunches.
Mari’s heart sprinted into overdrive. Her hands tightened on the reins. Dogs. Scenes from the videotape flashed through her memory. The rough-looking guide with his shark eyes. The dirty dog-boys. The muscular hounds, straining at their leashes, with their teeth bared and lips curled in feral snarls.
Thunder boomed and the mule leapt forward, his muscles bunching and quivering with nervous energy. Defying the pressure exerted on the bars of his mouth, he leaned against the bit and lunged forward, skidding down the grade with his hind legs tucked beneath him. Gritting her teeth, bracing herself back in the saddle, Mari wrestled for control, trying to turn him to the right. His big ugly mule head came around until she could nearly look him in the eye and still he pushed his stout body forward and down the hill.
Lightning lashed across the sky, flashing surreal white light into the gloom of the woods. Thunder shook the air. The world was tilted at a crazy angle and Clyde was hell-bent on hurling them down it headlong. Then the thicket of growth to their right ripped open, and a woman burst through, naked and bleeding, her eyes huge and her mouth open in terror. Her scream was swallowed up by another crack of lightning. Hands outstretched in desperation, she flung herself at the mule.
As in a dream, everything seemed to go to slow motion. The woman lunging at them. Clyde bolting sideways with such power that Mari felt herself coming out of the saddle. She pulled back on the reins, realizing a split second too late that she had hold of only the right one and that in hauling it back she sealed her own fate.
Jerked off balance, Clyde went down heavily, flipping ass over teakettle down the grade. Already half out of the saddle, Mari was flung clear of the tangle of hooves and thrashing legs. She hit the ground hard and tumbled like a rag doll, end over end. The dead stump of a broken pine tree brought her to an abrupt halt. Dazed, she lay there among the dead leaves and pine needles, her ears ringing, her eyes crossed, pain telegraphing along her entire network of nerve endings.
The woman ran toward her, a trio of ragged, bloody images.
“Help me! God, please help me! Please!” Hysterical, she flung herself down on her knees and began pulling at Mari’s arms.
Mari shoved herself up into a sitting position, thrusting an arm out to fend off the woman’s frantic pawing. “Stop it!” she ordered, scrambling to get her feet under her despite the dizziness. Terror gripped her by the throat and shook her hard. She couldn’t think beyond the moment, couldn’t see beyond the woman with her ragged black hair and wild dark eyes and slashed face, and her hands, grotesquely swollen and purple, grabbing at her clothes. She wanted to push her away and run. Then recognition hit as the lightning snapped across the sky.
“Jesus,” she muttered, stunned. “Samantha? Oh, my God! Samantha?” She managed to get hold of the girl by the upper arms and she shook her hard, as if she might shake the panic out of her. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
A wild keening sound strained up out of her throat and tears came scalding out of her eyes and down her cheeks. “Run! We have to run! She’ll kill us!”
“Who!”
“Sharon! She’ll kill us!” She doubled over from the pain and the fear, sobbing. “She killed that other woman. She’ll kill us too!”
Sharon.
“Oh, shit,” Mari mumbled as a chill poured down her back and arms and legs, raising goose bumps in its wake. She stared at Samantha in shock and disbelief. The beautiful long hair had been chopped off savagely. Her face was filthy and tear-streaked, the cut that bisected it open and raw. She was naked except for the dirty rag that had once been a T-shirt, and her arms and legs were lashed with tiny cuts and dirt and bits of bark and dead leaf.
“Sharon did this to you?” she said, shrugging out of her denim jacket. She tried to give it to the girl, but Samantha either couldn’t grasp it with her purple hands or was too consumed by her terror to think of what to do with it. Mari took hold of one of her arms and awkwardly worked it into the sleeve.
“She’s crazy!” Samantha cried. “We have to run!”
She tried to grab Mari by the arm to drag her down the trail where the mule had disappeared. Her fingers fumbled on the ends of her hands like sausage links, numb and useless. The baying of the hounds in the distance triggered a need to scream, but she stifled it to a pitiful mewing that seeped out between her teeth with bubbles of spittle.
“Hurry!” she begged.
Mari looked around them, not able to see anything but the dark trunks of the trees. She thought the sound of the dogs had come from down the hill. She had no clue as to where they were on the mountain. A good long way from home, she was willing to bet. The only thing she knew for certain was that up the mountain Del Rafferty had a cabin and an arsenal of weapons large enough to fend off an army.
“This way,” she ordered. She grabbed Samantha by a coat sleeve and started up the way she had come down.
“Up the mountain! Are you crazy! She’ll be on us in no time!”
“We go up, she has to go up too,” Mari said as she climbed.
“She’s on a horse!”
“Christ.” She cast a hopeless look down the hill. Clyde was long gone. All they had was themselves. And snarling dogs on their tails. And a murderous psychotic after them.
She turned to Samantha. “Look, Sam, we don’t have any options here. Del Rafferty’s cabin is this way. If we can get to Del, we’ll be safe.” She started up the trail again, adding under her breath, “Provided he doesn’t shoot us.”
They climbed the steady grade as fat raindrops plummeted down through the cover of the trees. Mari prayed for a downpour. No one listened. The clouds hung over the mountain, snarling and snapping, but holding their water. Between thunderclaps the baying of the dogs grew steadily closer.
This was what it had been like for Lucy. Tracked down by dogs, run down like a rabbit and shot for sport. Mari could feel Sharon Russell behind them, could sense her presence as ominous as the storm clouds above, and terror clogged her throat and shot through her mind in bright, hot arcs. She had to fight to keep her thoughts focused. She had to think. Their brains were the only weapons they had.
Sharon was on a horse. She had dogs. She could have been on them by now if she wanted. This was some kind of sick game to her. In a corner of her brain Mari wondered if insanity had pushed Sharon to this or if the decadence of her life-style had lured her further and further out into the waters of depravity until the depths were bottomless-the way it had pulled Lucy deeper and deeper, until blackmail seemed like an acceptable profession. At least Lucy had posed a threat. Samantha was just a kid who knew nothing of Bryce’s world. What could she possibly have done to deserve this?
What could they possibly do to escape?
They were too far from Del’s cabin. She knew that, but she kept on putting one foot in front of the other and pushing herself up the trail.
Samantha ran behind her, beyond exhaustion, choking on her fear, broken sobs catching in her throat. Her legs were rubber beneath her. She wanted nothing more than to lie down in a ball and have the nightmare be over, but it went on and on. She wanted to be held and comforted. She wanted Will. Stupid to think of him now. Stupid to want him when he didn’t want her.
They broke out of the woods onto the edge of a meadow. Mari stopped and stood bent over with her hands on her knees, her lungs working like a pair of bellows. The wind had come up and the tall grass rippled and waved, the shades of green altering with every movement the way velvet looks when a hand draws across it. The rain came a little harder. She recognized the place with a sense of doom. This was where Lucy had met her end. Karma. The skin at the base of her neck tingled.
They were both as good as dead. Sharon was after Samantha for reasons known only to her own insane mind, but Mari knew she would not discriminate when it came to doling out the bullets. She wouldn’t leave a witness.
Sam sank down into the grass, pressing the heels of her purple hands against her eyes, crying soundlessly. Mari’s heart broke looking at her. The poor kid. Bryce had sucked her into his world for his own purposes and she had gone, no doubt overwhelmed by the fine things and the excitement and the celebrities. And Bryce’s people had taken her in and used her and abused her without a thought to her innocence.
Goddamn him. Goddamn the lot of them. How dare they come here and poison this place. The anger that burned through her was proprietary, territorial. Mari didn’t question it. There wasn’t time.
The sound of the dogs breaking through the brush some distance back in the woods pushed her upright.
“Come on, kiddo, let’s haul ass.”
“I can’t,” Samantha sobbed, facedown on the ground. She already looked like a corpse, bloody and dirty, her limbs bent at odd angles.
Mari wanted to lie down beside her and offer comfort, but comfort would likely get them killed sooner than later. She grabbed the girl by the jacket collar and pulled her up to her knees.
“You damn well better!” she barked. Del’s place was still a long hike up some steep and rugged ground. The only chance they had of making it was if they kept moving and Sharon prolonged the hunt.
The crack of rifle fire dispelled the second possibility. The bullet slammed into the same tree stump Del had struck the first day Mari had ridden up here. Rotted wood splintered in all directions. Sam screamed, doubling over as if the bullet had passed through her. She pressed her hands over her ears and screamed again. Mari shoved her roughly toward the cover on the hillside, yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” and pushing the girl onward and upward.
From the deep cover of the woods behind them, the eerie sound of laughter floated through the rain, and Mari’s blood ran like ice in her veins.
God help them. They were both as good as dead.