Dying For You (13 page)

He dropped to one knee by the left rear wheel, bristling with disapproval at the sight of the plump tires—tires that would tear up the beach in no time at all. He leaned forward
and took a chomp. There was a soft
fffwwaaaaaaahhhh
as the tire instantly deflated and the SUV leaned over on the left side. Burke chewed thoughtfully.
Mmmm…Michelins…

He did the same to the other three, unworried about witnesses—this time of year and day, the beach was nearly deserted, and besides, who’d expect him to do what he just did?

He walked back up the beach to retrieve his bucket and rake, using an old razor clamshell to pick the rubber out of his teeth. He belched against the back of his hand and reminded himself he wasn’t a kid anymore—he was looking at half a night of indigestion.

Worth it. Yup.

Serena Crull heard someone come close to her hole and went still and silent as…well, the grave.

This was an improvement over what she had said twelve hours earlier, upon tumbling ass over forehead into the eighteen-foot-deep pit: “Son of a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…ooommpph!”

This had been followed by: “Shit!”

And: “Son of a bitch!”

And: “Ow.”

Which had been followed by roughly twelve hours of sulking silence. She had tried climbing out: no good. She’d just pulled more slippery sand down onto herself. She hadn’t bothered to try jumping: she wasn’t a damned frog. She’d once jumped down, but it was only a story or so and, frankly, it had hurt like hell. Not to mention she hadn’t stuck the landing. Jumping up? Maybe in another fifty years.

Then the sun had come up, and she’d
really
been screwed. She scuttled into a corner (or whatever you call the edge of a hole that gives shelter), pulled some sand over herself, and waited for the killing sun to fall into the ocean one more time. What she would do after that, she had no idea.

And she was starving.

She was dying and she was
starving
.

Okay: She was
dead
and she was starving.

From above: “Hey.”

She said nothing.

“Hey. Down there.” Pause. “In the hole.”

She couldn’t resist, could not physically prevent her jaw from opening and the nagging voice from bursting forth, it was just so exquisitely
stupid
, that question: “What, down the hole? Where else would I be? Dumb shit.”

Longer pause. “I’ll, uh, get help.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll be fine.”

“Someone’ll have some rope in their truck.”

“Why don’t you have rope in your truck?” she couldn’t resist asking.

“Don’t need it.”

It was amazing: the man (nice voice—deep, calm, almost bored) sounded as indifferent as a…a—she couldn’t think of what.

“I don’t, either.”

“Don’t either what?”

Nice voice: not too bright. “Don’t need a rope. I do not need a rope. No rope!” No, indeed! A rescue right now would be disastrous. She could picture it with awful clarity: heave
and heave, and here she is, thank goodness she’s safe, and what the hell? She’s on—She’s on
fire
!

As her hero, Homer Simpson, would have said: “D’oh!”

“How did you even fall in there?” her would-be rescuer was asking. “It’s impossible for there to be a deep hole on the beach. The sand would fill it up.”

“I’m not a marine biologist, okay?” she snapped.

“Geologist,” he suggested. “You’re not a geologist.”

It was amazing: she’d spent the day alone, in hours of silence, terrified of the sunlight, hoping she wouldn’t face an ugly death, and now she wanted her rescuer to get the hell lost.

“Get the hell lost.”

Pause. “Did you hit your head on the way down?”

“On
what
?”

“You seem,” he added, “kind of unpleasant.”

“I’m in a
hole
.”

“Well. I can’t just leave you there.”

“Oh, sure you can,” she encouraged. “Just…keep going to wherever you were going.”

“I didn’t really have anywhere to go.”

“Oh, boo friggin’ hoo. Is this the part where I go all dewy between my legs and talk about how I’m secretly lonely, too, and how it was meant to be, me falling on my ass and you hauling me out? And then we Do It?”

“Did someone push you down there?”

“Shut up and go away. I’ll be fine.”

“Maybe the fire department?” he mused aloud.

“No. No. No no no no no no.”

“Well. You can’t exactly stop me.”

She gasped. “You wouldn’t
dare
.”

“Even if you are crazy. I can’t just not help you.”

“Go away, Boy Scout.”

“It’s just that I can’t hang around too much longer.”

“Great. Fine. Have a good time, wherever you’re going. See ya.”

“I have this thing.”

“Okeydokey!” she said brightly, her inner Minnesotan coming out, which was an improvement over her inner cannibal, which wanted to choke and eat this mystery man, claw strips of flesh from his bones and strangle him with them, then poke a hole in his jugular and drink him down like a blue raspberry Slushee Pup. “Bye-bye then!”

“But I could maybe keep you company until it’s time to…for me to go.” Another pause, then, in a lower voice: “Although that might not work, either.”

“Aw, no,” she almost groaned. “You’re going to talk down my hole, then go away?”

“Yeah, you’re right. That won’t work.”

“For more reasons than you can figure, Boy Scout.”

“I don’t have a cell phone, is the thing.”

“Me neither. Aw, that’s so sweet, look how much we have in common; too bad we’re not having sex right this second.”

Pause. “You keep bringing up sex.”

“Yeah, well. It’s been a long fargin’ day.”

“Fargin’?”

“Shut up, Boy Scout.”

“It’s just that you don’t have to worry.”

“That’s a humungous load off my mind, Boy Scout.”

“Because the thing is, I can’t…you don’t have…it’s that I’m not attracted to you at all.”

She clutched her head. “This. Is. Not. Happening.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Insanely, he had. “Hey up there! For all you know, I’m an anorexic blonde with huge tits, skin the color of milk, and a case of raging nymphomania.”

Another of those maddening pauses. “Anyway, that’s not really the problem. The problem—”

“Bud. I so don’t need you to tell me what the problem is. Please get lost.”

She heard a sudden intake of breath, as if he’d come to a quick, difficult decision, and then there was a
whoosh
and a
thud
, and he was standing next to her.

Five minutes later she was still screaming at him.
Right
at him. The hole was only about three feet in diameter. They were chest to chest. And she was loud. Really loud.

“…left your
brains
up there, Boy Scout, not that you ever were that
heavy
in the smarts department in the
first
place!”

“It just seemed like a good idea, is all.”

“Seemed like a good idea?”

“Wow. You’re really loud. While you’re yelling, I’ll make a step, and throw you out.”

“You’ll make a what and what me what?”

“Make a step with my hands. Like this.” He bent forward to show her, and they promptly bonked skulls.

“Ow!”

He could feel himself get red. “Sorry.” And red wasn’t the
only thing he was getting. What had he been thinking? She was right: he’d left his brains up there with the seagull shit.

“This was your solution?” she scolded, rubbing her forehead. “No cell phone, no rope, and now we’re
both
down here?”

“It’s really small down here,” he said, trying not to sound tense. “It didn’t look that small from up top.”

“It’s a hole, Boy Scout. Not a cavernous underground lair.”

He scratched his arm, and when his elbow knocked against the side of the hole, sand showered down, which made him itch more.

“Can you breathe okay?” He tried not to gasp. “Is there enough air down here? I don’t think there’s enough air down here.”

“Oh boy oh boy. I am not believing this. You actually took a terrible situation, made it worse, then made it
more
worse. Are you all right?”

“It’s just that there’s no air down here.” He clutched his head. “None at all.”

“You’re claustrophobic and you jumped down into a hole?”

He groaned. “Don’t talk about it.”

“But why, Boy Scout?”

“Couldn’t just leave you here. But you’re not really here.” He sniffed hard. Her hair was a perfect cap of dark curls (he thought; there wasn’t much light down here), and under normal circumstances he would find that extremely cute. He sniffed her head again. “I don’t think you’re here at all.”

“Boy Scout, you have lost what little tiny cracker brains you had to begin with.” She managed to fold her arms over
her chest and (he thought) glare at him. “If this is some elaborate ploy to impress me in order to get laid—”

“I can’t have sex with you. You’re not here.” He gasped again. “I can’t breathe. How can you breathe?”

“Well, apparently I’m not here,” she said dryly. “And don’t get me started on why the whole oxygen thing isn’t a problem for me. I— What are you doing?”

He stumbled around and was scrabbling at the sandy walls, digging for purchase and doing nothing but pulling a shower of sand down on them both.

“Boy Scout, get a grip!” She coughed and spat a few grains of sand at his back. “You’re just making it worse!”

She was yammering at his back and he didn’t hear, couldn’t hear, sand was everywhere, in his mouth, in his ears, in his eyes, and it was so close, it wasn’t a hole, it was a grave and it was filling up, filling up with him in it.

He clawed at the wall, pulled, yanked, scrabbled, tried to climb, and he could hear the woman yelling, screaming, feel her blows on his shoulders and they were as heavy as flies landing.

Then the moon was there. The moon came for him in the grave and took him out, took him up and out, and he was able to gouge himself out of the grave with two ungainly leaps and then he was screaming, screaming at the moon, howling at the moon, and she wasn’t screaming anymore, the grave was full and she was quiet, at last she was quiet and he ran, ran, ran with the moon and his last thought as a man was, “What have I done?”

“It’s around here,” Burke said, so ashamed he couldn’t look up from the sand.

“Around here?” Jeannie Wyndham, his pack’s female Alpha, poked at the small dunes with a sneakered toe. “That’s pretty vague for a guy with a nose like yours. Is this the spot or isn’t it?”

“I…think it is. It’s hard to tell. I can’t smell her at all. I can just smell me. And I’m all over the place. After I got out of the gra—hole, I just ran.”

Michael, his pack leader, was crouched and balanced on the balls of his feet as his yellow gaze swept the area. He said nothing, for which Burke was profoundly grateful. He couldn’t have borne a scolding, as much as he deserved one.

“Burke, give us a break,” Jeannie said, sounding (no surprise
at all) exasperated. “You stumbled across a woman who needed help—”

“And I left her to die.”

“—and you did what you could. You guys are— Every werewolf I’ve ever
met
is such a screaming claustrophobe you should all be on tranqs, but you jumped into a hole to try to save her before you Changed. She didn’t have a chance in hell anyway.”

Burke could think of several chances the poor dead woman might have had, but it wasn’t prudent to correct Jeannie, so he stayed silent.

“There, I think,” Michael said. There was a deep depression in the sand, a jumble of footprints—and wolf tracks, leading away. “You’re right, Burke. I can smell you all over the sand, and a few other people—tourists who just came out for the day, people just passing by—and that’s it. Certainly there’s no scent of a woman who’d been trapped in the bottom of a hole for over twenty hours.”

“Well, if you can’t smell her, and Burke can’t smell her…” Jeannie trailed off, then mumbled, “He needs a girlfriend.”

“I’m not making it up.”

“Of course not,” Michael said with a hard look at his wife. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he continued. “But there have been, ah, concerns. You’ve lived alone most of your life. No one sees you. The only time any of us see you is if I summon you—God knows I don’t do that unless it’s a real emergency, or to meet a new baby—”

Burke didn’t say anything, but he knew where Michael was
going. Werewolves were
not
solitary creatures. They were designed to mate young and drop lots of pups. Rogues—even gentle ones—made everyone nervous. Now they thought that the stress of never having children had driven him over the edge. If he hadn’t been so miserably ashamed, he would have laughed.

“At least yesterday was the last night of the full moon,” Jeannie said, shading her eyes as she watched the sun dip into the ocean. “Or there’d be no talking to either of you in another five minutes.”

“I came back to the mansion as soon as I could,” Burke explained. “When I woke up this morning, I was in Vermont.” No surprise. He had run and run and run, but had never managed to leave his shame and guilt and horror behind.

“Well, no one’s around. Why don’t we do a little digging and see what, uh, comes up?” Jeannie asked with
faux
brightness.

Burke knew, as did Michael, that despite the deepening gloom there
were
people around, but no one was close. And in any case, digging holes in the beach wasn’t exactly suspicious behavior. Hell, people paid money for clamming licenses
just
to dig at the beach.

He dropped to all fours and began to scoop out great handfuls of sand with his hands, ignoring the shovels Jeannie had brought.

“Cheer up,” Jeannie said, shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “There probably isn’t anybody—I mean, we might not find anything.”

“And if we do find anything, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Excuse me,” Burke said politely, “but it was
entirely
my fault. I appreciate you coming out here with me.”

“Like we’re going to let you dig around in the dark by yourself, thinking you’ll stumble across a corpse? Yuck, Burke! Besides, the whole thing’s a joke. You’re only the nicest, gentlest, quietest werewolf out there. You’d no more kill a woman than I’d break Lara’s arm.”