The Awakening (18 page)

At first, she heard nothing, and then the sound of sniffing broke through the silent night air. Her pulse spiked and she felt blood rush from her head. It was hunting them—smelling the air to determine where they were. Very little breeze stirred, but what did wafted across them and then past the barn to where the creature stood.

They were upwind!

Josie wasn’t a tracker and her only hunting had been with her dad in her teen years, but she knew they had to move or their prey would quickly zero in on them.

Tanner tapped her on the arm and held up three fingers, then two, then one, counting down the seconds until they struck. When his last finger closed into a fist, he launched around the corner of the barn, gun leveled.

Josie immediately jumped around the corner after him, holding her pistol with both hands. At that exact moment, a dark cloud covered the moon and pitched them all into darkness. Twenty yards away, leaves crunched and they both yanked their heads around in the direction of the noise.

Two yellow eyes glowed at them in the darkness and the creature began to growl.

“What the hell?” Tanner said. “Stop right there, or I’ll shoot!”

The yellow eyes disappeared and a high-pitched howl rang through the silence, piercing her ears so badly she flinched. A second later, the sound of pounding footsteps filled the air.

“He’s running!” Tanner yelled, then took off in the direction of the footsteps.

Josie hesitated only a second before setting off behind him, afraid of what they were chasing, but more afraid to be left behind. What if it circled back around? What if it wasn’t alone? A sickening smell wafted past her as they ran and she almost gagged.

The moon began to peek out from behind the clouds as they ran. A dim haze of light inched across the pasture, growing brighter with every step. When the last bit of the cloud slipped away, Josie scanned the edge of the swamp just in time to see a creature with long gray hair slip into the swamp.

She grabbed Tanner’s arm and pointed. “There!”

“I saw it,” Tanner said, and tore across the pasture to the swamp.

Josie ran as hard as possible, trying to keep pace with him, but was unable to. Her thighs burned with the effort, but she barely registered the fact. When they reached the edge of the swamp, Tanner stopped. The swamp was silent again. No footsteps echoed in the mass of trees and brush.

Tanner pulled out his flashlight and shined it on the ground in front of them, then cursed at the mass of dead vines that covered the ground. He pointed the light at the brush around them and found a broken leaf. He leaned over to sniff the leaf and then pointed past the brush.

“He went this way,” he said.

Tanner pushed past the broken leaf deeper into the swamp. He followed the tiny signs that Josie would never have found, especially in the pitch-black night and using only a flashlight. The farther they moved into the swamp, the more the smell of the creature dissipated until it finally disappeared altogether.

The sounds of the night creatures returned and Josie knew the creature was long gone.

Suddenly, Tanner came to an abrupt stop and she ran into him.

“Sorry,” he said, and sighed. “The trail ends here, apparently.”

Josie stepped to the side to see him shining the tiny light on a three-foot-wide dirt trail that cut through the swamp.

“This is the path to Emmett’s cabin,” she said, immediately recognizing the path she’d traveled thousands of times.

“Really? Then maybe we should pay Emmett a visit, see if he’s home this time.”

“Definitely,” she said, hoping to put his suspicions of Emmett to bed one way or another. “This way.”

She stepped in front of him and followed the trail to the left, deeper in the swamp. A thin ray of moonlight streamed through the canopy of trees, seeming to light the pathway

“His cabin is about a half mile from the main house,” she said. “He moved into one of the guest rooms after Dad got sick, but as soon as I came home, he was right back out here in the weeds.”

“Do you have any idea how much farther it is to his cabin from here?”

“Not far—maybe about fifty yards.”

He walked in silence after that, but she knew the wheels were turning in his mind, putting all the pieces into a nice little box. She hoped like hell that Emmett was passed out drunk or not home. Anything that would convince Tanner her dad’s oldest friend wasn’t her attacker.

She saw the lights from the cabin before she could make out the outline of the roof. Country music carried through the thin walls and down the path to greet them. Emmett’s truck was parked right in front of the cabin.

One option gone.
Josie could only hope he was drunk.

They walked up to the door and Josie rapped on it. She heard the scuffling of a chair inside and a couple of seconds later, the door flew open and Emmett glared at them.

“What the hell are you two doing roaming the swamp in the middle of the night?” Emmett’s voice boomed into the muggy night air.

Chapter Fourteen

Tanner gave the man a quick once-over before replying. He didn’t appear winded and his skin wasn’t flushed. There was no smell to speak of except for the coffee brewing in the kitchen.

“We were tracking something,” Tanner said. “We caught up to it near the barn but lost it in the cloud cover. I tracked it in the swamp until we hit the trail to your cabin.”

Emmett narrowed his eyes and waved them inside. “You said ‘something.’ You don’t know what it was?”

“It was the Tainted Keitre,” Josie said.

Emmett sighed. “You know I don’t put any stock in that.” He studied Tanner for a second. “I wouldn’t have thought you did, either.”

“I deal with the facts,” Tanner said. “It was large and close to seven feet tall. It had yellow eyes and a gray coat.”

“You sure it wasn’t a bear?”

“Unless it was a gray bear sprinting on its back legs, yeah, I’m sure.”

Emmett stared at him for a minute, then nodded. “Let me put on my boots, and I’ll help you check things out.”

Emmett walked into the bedroom and Tanner scanned the cozy living room, kitchen and breakfast area of the cabin. BBs and gun powder sat in bowls on the tiny breakfast table along with empty plastic casings and a reloading press. Finished shotgun shells were in a plastic tub on the other side of the press.

The coffeepot was half-full and still brewing.

Regardless of how innocuous things looked, it was still possible that Vernon had been the one they’d chased. Tanner hadn’t been winded by the time they reached the cabin. Vernon appeared to be in good shape for his age, and not carrying extra body fat like most of the older men Tanner had seen around Miel. Vernon might have had time to recover before they arrived.

The foreman emerged from the bedroom a minute later wearing boots and a long-sleeve shirt. He carried a spotlight and a shotgun. He dipped his hand in the plastic container of shells and stuck a handful in his jeans pocket.

“Where do you want to start?” he asked Tanner.

“I figure we should head back to the main house. I don’t like leaving the place unattended with everything going on.”

Vernon nodded and they exited his cabin. “We’ll take my truck. It’s quicker.”

They all climbed into the cab of Vernon’s truck and made the ride to the main house in silence. The tension was only slightly diminished by the apprehension and fear coming off Josie as she perched on the front seat between the two men, her body completely stiff.

Tanner scanned the house and the grounds as they pulled up the drive. Everything seemed normal, but then, everything had seemed normal right before that thing walked out of the swamp. He shook his head as he climbed out of the truck, trying to clear his mind of what he’d seen standing in the pasture. It had to have been a trick of the moonlight.

Yeah, that was it.

“Let’s check out the pasture first,” Tanner said. “See if there’s anything there.”

Vernon nodded and Tanner started across the lawn to the pasture, hoping they found something to eliminate possibilities he didn’t want to consider. Unfortunately, what they found in the soft soil near the barn removed all thoughts of trickery.

Vernon shined his spotlight directly at the area Tanner had indicated.

“What the hell...” the foreman said, his eyes wide.

Tanner glanced over at Josie, who was staring at the ground and biting her lower lip, then looked back at the print. The four-toed, semihuman-looking print.

“Maybe a bear got caught in a trap,” Vernon said. “Yeah, that’s it. Caught in a trap and it damaged his foot.”

“Did it make his foot several inches longer and a lot thinner?” Tanner asked.

Vernon frowned but didn’t argue. Tanner knew the foreman couldn’t identify the print any more than he could. He could also tell that he was struggling to align the facts with something rational. Tanner could appreciate that, as he’d been struggling with the same thing ever since he’d seen those yellow eyes glowing at him.

Vernon shined the light away from the print toward the swamp, but most of the pasture was thick with rye grass. The likelihood of finding more prints, especially in the dark, was slim.

Apparently, deciding the same thing, Vernon turned the light from the print toward the barn.

“Was he going for the horses, you think?” Vernon asked.

“I don’t know,” Tanner said. “But they were spooked, for sure. They knew a predator was nearby.”

Tanner studied the ground between the print and the barn as Vernon’s spotlight exposed it, inch by inch.

“There!” He grabbed the light from Vernon and pointed it at a lump of something dark on the ground. “What is that?”

They hurried over to the mass and Tanner shined the light on it. Josie took one look and groaned, turning her head away from the bloody mass of flesh.

Vernon reached down and flipped what was left of the carcass around, studying it. “This wasn’t killed here. It’s a piece of something bigger, maybe sheep or goat.”

“It tore up a sheep or goat and dragged pieces to my pasture to eat?” Josie’s voice went up about two octaves.

Tanner looked at the edge of the bone sticking out of the meat and back at Vernon, who was looking straight at him, a worried expression on his face. Tanner knew the foreman wasn’t going to tell Josie the truth, and Tanner could tell by the look on the other man’s face that he didn’t want Tanner to say a word, either.

A million good reasons for lying passed through Tanner’s mind, all of them completely valid, if not for the promise he’d made to Josie. By not telling her about his past in Miel, he was already lying by omission. He wasn’t going to add to his crime by lying about this, even though it was tempting.

“It wasn’t torn apart,” Tanner said. “That bone was sawed off.”

Josie’s hands flew up to cover her mouth. “I don’t understand. How could that creature get a saw, even know how to use a saw?”

“It didn’t,” Tanner said. He walked back to the print and directed the light at the grass, trying to determine the creature’s path from the swamp. About twenty yards from the print, he found what he’d expected but had hoped he wouldn’t find.

Kneeling down, he ran his hands across the dark, sticky liquid that covered the grass and smelled it.

“Blood?” Vernon asked.

Tanner nodded.

Vernon let out a string of curses that Tanner appreciated and agreed with.

Josie looked back and forth between the two men. “I don’t understand....”

“It was bait,” Tanner said. “Someone left pieces of whatever this was across your pasture to lure something to the barn. Maybe they figured a bear would pick up the scent. Maybe something else. All I know for sure is that this was deliberate.”

He looked at Vernon, who studied the ground, an angry expression on his face. Was he angry because someone was threatening Josie or angry because the whole thing had gotten out of hand?

“It’s time to get the sheriff out here,” Tanner said, “and make him do his job.”

* * *

I
T WAS AN EXHAUSTING TWO
hours later when Josie let Sheriff Reynard out the front door and closed it behind him. He’d been mad and looking for a fight when he arrived, but after Emmett and Tanner showed him what they’d found in the pasture, he got serious really fast.

“You think he’s going to look into it like he says he will?” Josie asked.

Tanner stared out the front window as the lights on the sheriff’s truck faded into the distance. “Maybe,” he said, and turned to face her. “Or maybe he already knows what’s going on.”

“You think... Oh, wow. I guess I still haven’t gotten the hang of this suspect-everyone thing.”

“I know it’s harder since they’re all people you grew up with.”

Josie felt tears of despair well up in her eyes and she looked down at the rug, struggling to hold them back. She didn’t want to look weak in front of this man who was doing so much to protect her and her home. A man she’d grown to respect in such a short time.

“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly.

She looked up at him, and one glance at the concern in his expression had her tears spilling over. He moved immediately to her and gathered her in his arms.

“I didn’t know it would be so hard,” she said, her face buried in his chest. “I’m looking over my shoulder all the time and questioning the actions and words of people I’ve known my entire life. I know I should have realized it would come down to someone I know, but I guess I never dwelled long enough on that fact to think about how difficult it would be.”

“It would have been harder not knowing. Even if the threats stopped, would you be satisfied?”

She thought about his words for a bit. Would it have mattered? If everything had faded away and she opened her bed-and-breakfast without another hitch, would she have pressed to find the culprit? Or would she have thanked her lucky stars that it stopped and hoped it never happened again?

She leaned back so that she could see his face. “I...I think I would have needed to know. I would have eventually gotten around to where you are on my own, and then I would never have been able to look at the people in this town the same way again. I wouldn’t be able to talk to someone or even wave at them across the street without wondering ‘was it him?’”