why that deputy came to see me?” she asked shakily. “He didn’t really say.”
Nurse Penny had seen a lot of patients in her forty years on the job. She prided herself as a good judge of character. Had only been fooled by someone once, and that was the bastard she eventually married and divorced. She hoped he rotted in hell somewhere.
She could certainly feel this patient’s reluctance and fear, but there was no sense of maliciousness or criminality emanating from her. She knew what that felt like. She’d been cajoled and lied to by an assortment of bamboozlers over the years and she’d seen right through them. No. This girl just seemed scared. Maybe angry. She’d muttered some vile things in her sleep, but Nurse Penny believed she was a good person at heart. “There was a hit-and-run. A man was seriously injured. They’re looking for the vehicle that ran him down, and the driver was described as a young woman about your age.”
Gemma felt cold. She absorbed the news silently. The nurse frowned, not liking the sense that the girl felt guilt. Could she have been wrong about her?
Gemma kept her silence as the nurse bustled around the room. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, not fooling Nurse Penny for a minute. Eventually, though, the nurse had to return to other duties and she left the room, pausing for a moment to look at the girl in the bed. She shook her head and left, a faint disturbance of air marking her passage.
The room fell quiet except for the soft whirs and clicks of the monitor.
Gemma opened her eye cautiously. She was alone. Lifting her arm, she examined the IV running into the skin above her wrist, felt the pressure of the cuff surrounding her upper arm. She began peeling off the tape that held the IV in place.
The sun skidded behind a cloud, plunging the October afternoon into early darkness, but the wolf welcomed the veil of shadow. He stood next to the bus stop bench, lifted his head and smelled the thick fall air, heavy with pent-up rain. He was glad for the clouds. He was a hunter and he preferred darkness.
A young couple sat on the bench, fighting over whether they had time to stop by her parents’ after visiting his father, who was recovering from hip surgery. The wolf was as remote to them as a distant star. He could have been invisible for all they noticed. Like the people living in the big house, he wasn’t worth noticing. He was insignificant. Unnoticeable. Maybe a little dull.
He pushed thoughts of them aside and concentrated on the woman inside the hospital. He’d followed her through all the strange turns that had brought her here. He was furious with her. She’d taken something from him. He needed to take her down, have her in his control. The need was near killing him. He could practically see her spread-eagled on the floor before him. He saw her squirming as he visualized unzipping his jeans and releasing his cock, then jamming it inside her again, and again, and again, as she threw back her head and thrashed and screamed. He knew she wanted him as much as he wanted her, but like the witch of his youth, she was teasing, taunting, pretending. Ignoring him.
He was going to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze and squeeze while she bucked beneath him. She’d killed his brother. It was her fault. All witches were alike. They had to be burned. Burned…
Feeling his hands clutched in fists, he unwound them. The pressure in his head hurt. He had to get himself cool. Hold back. Wait…
Hunters needed to be patient. Wolves needed to be patient.
Pressing the fingers of his left hand to his forehead, he rubbed hard. He was afraid he would be noticed by the young couple but their words were growing more and more heated. They couldn’t see past their own stupid problems.
He closed his eyes. A tremor ran through him. The pounding in his head felt like a growing beat throughout his whole body. Oh, how he wanted her. The witch. He was going to make her pay for what she’d done. He was going to mount her over and over again and then he was going to burn her. That’s what it took to destroy a true witch. Burning. Sending them back to hell. Their birthplace. He’d killed before but she…she was the one he hated most. He’d almost lost her, but then had found her again.
The bus came and the couple climbed on board. He moved away, shading his face in the afternoon shadows, his hair covered by a watchcap, his shoulders hunched. On the side of the hospital where the laurel bushes grew high, he crouched into a corner. Several younger nurses walked toward their cars. He watched them in their pastel green pants and tunics, their crepe-soled shoes, pretending to be so clean. So tidy.
But it was all a lie.
He stared and stared.
They were all like her. Soulless. Seductive. Raging inside with Satan’s fire.
One of the nurses unlocked a champagne-colored Honda three cars down from his. For a moment he saw her ringed by a fiery areola. A witch. Not as powerful as the one who lay in the hospital; no one was, any longer. Not since that first mother-witch. But this one was a witch, nonetheless, hiding herself in her clean clothes when he could smell the rotted flesh underneath.
The stench filled his head and he turned and walked quickly to his own car. He would follow her. Find her. Cut her down. Make her shriek and beg.
Hunger transformed his face into an urgent mask of desire.
He was the wolf again.
And wolves killed witches.
Chapter Three
Will stepped out of Gemma’s room, then stopped in the hall outside and looked back through the still open, handicap-sized doorway. In his line of vision was a chair, the end of the bed and the window drapes. He couldn’t quite see the hump of Gemma LaPorte’s feet, nor was there anything he could view that gave a hint of who she was and why she’d ended up at Laurelton General.
Someone wasn’t playing straight with him. Gemma LaPorte wasn’t playing straight with him.
“Officer?” a young nurse asked him, and he turned to give her his attention. “Um, Billy’s waiting for you in the ER? The EMT who saw her come in? Nurse Penny told me to make sure you knew.”
“Thanks.”
Will headed toward the stairway. Laurelton General was stair-stepped down the north face of a bluff, its levels ranging from two below street level with windows that only faced north, to three above. Will pressed the down button to take him from four to three, which was street level, then he walked briskly down a wide hallway that angled toward the south end and the ER.
The place was quiet at five p.m., but he doubted it would be for long. It was early October under a full moon. The old superstition about behavior changes at the time of a full moon seemed to hold true. Bad behavior, and just plain odd behavior, prevailed. If anything weird was going to happen, it most certainly did beneath a full moon, and teenagers especially seemed to be affected, at least in Will’s experience. They drove too fast and drank and smoked things they shouldn’t, not giving a damn what the adults thought.
Live fast and die young.
Will’s brother had lived by that credo…and died by it as well. Sophomore year, home from college for Thanksgiving, and a wild, drunken party at a friend’s parents’ house had resulted in Dylan’s jumping off the roof into the pool. His leap to the water had fallen short, landing him on the cement apron surrounding the pool.
A year younger, Will had been dinking around through his freshman year when
