Darkness closed in on her, shadows greedy to steal her from him, but Walker wrapped her in his arms and instead took her with him. When he spilled himself in her a second time, she felt two sensations from the explosion of her own pleasure creeping up through her womb, like ribbons of ice and flame that had become entwined, gentling each other until they were as cool as a northern breeze, as warm as sunlight on an upturned face.
Walker held himself over her, his eyes watching her as the heat of his fluids pulsed into her. When he had finished, and tried to roll away from her, she went with him, settling atop him and sighing against his open mouth before tucking her face against his neck.
He felt her relax as she fell asleep on top of him, and found himself doing the same. He slept as he never had, mindless and dreamless, and when he next opened his eyes, he felt new strength surging through his limbs.
When he woke in the thin gray light of dawn, she lay entwined with him, her hands resting on his chest and her body still linked to his, soft and giving. She stirred as he did, opening her eyes, drowsy and puzzled.
Walker?
He came back to consciousness with all the force he had used to take her, and he pushed her out of his head, horrified to know what he had done, helpless to take it back. He wrenched himself from her body, staggering back from the bed, unable to bear seeing what he knew would be in her eyes.
Lilah had trusted him. She had brought him back from the brink of death. And in return he had used her, just like all the others before her.
“Walker, don’t.” She pushed herself upright as he jerked on his clothes. “Please. Don’t go.”
He ignored her, stopping only when she came to him, and only to avoid her touch. “Stay away from me.”
“I can’t.” She came around him, trying to make him look at her, stumbling on the edges of the sheet she had wrapped around her body. “Walker, I’m all right. You didn’t hurt me.”
He ripped the sheet from her, forcing himself to look at what he had done. Bruises had bloomed on her knees, as angry as the abrasions on her breasts and the swollen redness of her lips. Thin scratches scored her shoulders and hips. He saw the imprint of his fingers against the sides of her thighs, and turned her, pushing her hair away from the bite-mark-shaped bruise on her nape.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said quickly.
“Where is it not bad? Where did I not hurt you? The top of your head? The soles of your feet?” He lifted the sheet, swaddling it around her before he set her away.
“Things got a little rough last night,” she admitted, “but sometimes they do. I wanted it as much as you did.”
“You’re lying.” He grabbed the jacket Annie had given him and pulled it on. “I won’t do this. Not anymore.”
“Wait.” Lilah ran ahead of him to block the doorway. “I’m not letting you walk out of here.”
He glared at her. “You would rather I stay and make use of you again?”
“You didn’t use me,” she assured him. “You can’t do that to me, not when you and I—”
“You have no idea what I can do.” He reached past her for the doorknob, and went still as she put her hand over his. He would have to hurt her again, one last time. “Did you think you were the first? I’ve had other women. I’ve taken them and left them as soon as I had finished. You’re nothing to me.”
She straightened her shoulders, her voice going quiet. “I was something last night.”
“This town is filled with women.” He pulled her hand away from the knob.
“Then they’ll all see me running naked after you in the street.” She held on to his hand. “Walker, please. You have to listen to me. Don’t go like this.”
He pushed her away and strode out of the room. Once outside, he eyed the coming dawn, and the emptiness of the street. He could go and find the sheriff, and finish what they had started last night. Or he could spare the other man’s life and give himself to what he had become.
Turning, he walked into the drifts at the base of the mountain.
Lilah almost made good on her threat to run naked after Walker, until she tripped over the sheet again and barely avoided falling on her face.
“Wait.”
She hit the door with her fist before she whirled around and hurried into the bathroom.
Grabbing the first clothes she found, she pulled them on. Annie had given her a pair of loafers to wear, probably her own, but they would do until she caught up with him.
Outside the bitter cold snapped at her face, and it was still too dark to see much. She looked down to see Walker’s fresh tracks leading across the porch and down the steps, but then they circled around the side of the inn, disappearing behind it. Lilah followed them until she hit the snowbank at the base of the slope. Walker’s trail led straight up into the trees.
He’d gone into the forest?
Lilah gingerly took a few more steps, but quickly began to sink down in snow up to her knees, and finally lost her balance and fell sideways onto her hands. She pushed herself up, and then spotted a much fainter trail running parallel to Walker’s. Overnight the older tracks had been reduced to little more than shallow hollows. She waded over to them, and moved so that her shadow didn’t fall over them.
The rising sun illuminated the remnants of the tracks, and their oval shape and curving lines at first made her think of stylized blossoms, somewhat flat and indented at the bottom, as if they’d been plucked from their stems. No flower had made these marks, however; the tracks had been left in distinct sets of four: two large and two small. They belonged to an animal that walked on all fours.
Lilah had extensive tracking experience, enough to recognize the distinct alignment of the front two depressions; she could also make out a thorn shape of a claw at the top of each. Those clues alone would have indicated the tracks had been made by a large canine, probably a domestic dog. The problem was the number of depressions; she counted five toe pads on the front- and back-leg tracks. The only creatures that left five-toed tracks were raccoons, weasels, badgers, and skunks.
“A raccoon, right,” she muttered, disgusted with herself. “Maybe one the size of a cow.”
Lilah brushed away the top layer of soft flakes, and found with further gentle excavation that the depressions were much larger than they appeared—easily as large as bear tracks, but without the elongated heel. She placed her hand next to the uncovered track to make a rough measurement, and figured the track was at least ten inches long. She looked up at the trail, and saw the distance between the tracks widened as they went into the trees. The last sets she could see were almost ten feet apart.
Whatever had left this trail had limbs long and fast enough to cover more than three yards with one stride.
Like that thing that attacked the men at the truck.
Lilah struggled out of the bank, swiping at her clothes until she’d knocked off most of the snow. She wasn’t worried that Weirdfoot was hunting Walker; the animal’s tracks had been made while it had still been snowing, and from the evidence of how fast it moved, it had to be long gone by now. Walker must have seen the tracks when he walked back here, and followed them into the forest, but why would he want to hunt that thing? He’d seen firsthand how fast and lethal it was, and that it wouldn’t even hesitate to attack a human....
Lilah clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh, God, Walker. No.”
Chapter 14
S
he couldn’t go after him dressed as she was; while the sky was clear, the temperature was well below freezing, and the snow had to be at least two, maybe three feet deep.
“Morning,” Annie said, smiling as Lilah rushed back inside. “You folks like pancakes and sausage? I’ve that for breakfast, or . . . ” She paused as she saw Lilah’s face. “Why, honey, you’re white as a sheet.”
She didn’t bother to lie. “It’s Walker. He’s gone up on the mountain. I have to go after him.”
Annie’s eyes widened for an instant before she reached for the phone on the wall. “No, you can’t do that; you’ll get, ah, lost. I’ll call Ethan, and he’ll round up some of the men and bring him back down.”
Lilah seized her wrist, reaching into her mind as she guided the receiver back onto the base. “You’re not going to call Ethan, Annie. You won’t tell him or anyone about this.”
“Not a soul,” Annie agreed, her eyes glazing over instantly.
“I need gloves, boots, snowshoes, and a coat.” She guided the other woman around the desk and followed her to a closet, where Annie retrieved the articles. “Are there wolves up there on the mountain?”
“Wolves?” The older woman sighed. “No.”
Holding on to Annie’s wrist, Lilah walked her back to her room. “I want you to go back to bed for a couple hours. When you wake up, don’t bother to check on us. If anyone asks for us, tell them we’re sleeping in.”
Once Annie had gone inside, Lilah closed the door and finished dressing in the hall before leaving through the back door, stopping long enough to buckle the straps of the snowshoes over her boots before following Walker’s trail up into the high drifts.
All around her the snow began to sparkle as the full circle of the sun appeared on the horizon. Lilah focused on using the snowshoes, which she’d expected to feel awkward and cumbersome at first. Once her legs had remembered the way to walk in them, she looked ahead, trying to see the direction of his trail. He had waded through with enough force to push the snow up onto the drifts on either side, carving two narrow, continuous trenches through the dense pack of the snow.
He’d clearly followed the beast’s tracks, because his trail never crossed or strayed away from the blossoms in the snow.
Lilah could see how determined he was. Plowing through the drifts as he had would have exhausted an ordinary man, but the trenches cut ahead of her as far as she could see. The trail also angled up with the slope of the mountain.
How could he do this? After last night, after being with her, how could he even
think
of killing himself this way? What was wrong with him?
Her chest burning, Lilah stopped and braced herself against a fir the storm had half buried, dislodging a swatch of white clumps from the branches. Her breath puffed out in harsh, billowing clouds, each one rising and dissipating slowly in the still air. She tried and quickly realized that she couldn’t warm herself alone; she needed Walker to generate the heat that had protected them last night. The only way to keep warm was to keep moving at a brisk pace, something the snowshoes made impossible. To chase after him like this was not only foolish; it was dangerous.
I don’t care
, she thought as she drew herself up and trudged on. She wasn’t going to leave him out here like this, not thinking that by making love with her he’d somehow abused her. Why hadn’t she been able to stop him? It was as if he hadn’t believed a word she’d said.
Maybe he didn’t.
Last night Walker had been angry, out of control, and it had startled her, even scared her a little. She didn’t understand what had set him off like that, and she always avoided situations that involved anger because they often touched off her own. But at no time had Lilah been afraid that he would hurt her. He’d been rough and wild, almost crazed with lust, but he’d brought the same out in her. Hadn’t she jumped on him when he’d tried to leave?
By the time they’d made it to the bed, she’d stopped thinking altogether, and instead immersed herself in that frantic, merciless passion. She’d never felt anything like it, and when she’d woken this morning, she had wanted to cling to him and touch him and kiss him for hours. She was convinced that if he hadn’t pushed her away, they would still be in bed now.
“But you didn’t do that,” she scolded herself. “Did you?”
Instead of telling him what she wanted, and how much she needed him, she’d wasted her words, begging him not to leave her. She should have stopped whining and given him reasons to stay. She could have shoved him onto the bed, climbed on top of him, and shown him what she wanted, what had made her whole for the first time in her life. Now, because she’d been too worried about becoming angry, she might never get the chance.
Why hadn’t she done that?
Because I’ve trained myself to be nice
, she answered herself.
A nice, polite little wimp. Who Walker thinks he abused.
Her lungs burned as she tried to move faster, spurred on by the images in her head. He was out here somewhere, alone, hurting, maybe even delusional. He could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she realized. Whatever the cause of his behavior, she was the only one who could absolve him of whatever wrongs he imagined he’d done. If he didn’t find the beast, he might do something equally desperate, like jumping off a cliff. She had to stop being so timid and useless and tell him how she felt. Whatever the rest of the world had done to him, however confused he was, he was hers, and she was not going to spend another hour apart from him.
Lilah took in a breath so painful that it felt as if she were inhaling a thousand tiny knives, and knew it was only partly due to the cold. Some of the pain came from recognizing that the life GenHance had stolen from her no longer mattered. Even if she could go back to Florida, there was nothing there for her.