The curse had bound me here—I was the prisoner. Unable to hunt anywhere else. Unable to return home.
I covered my ears, bowed my head, but I could still hear every footstep Maddie took and each one took her farther away from me. Yes, I might be able to seduce her, to enchant her for an evening.
But in a few days she would leave and go back to the world of humans, she would return to her place of prominence. I knew what she truly was—a master storyteller. In my world, she would have been royalty, she would have been the one to rule this village and I would have been the peasant, even lower than Thane.
If she knew what I had done, she would hate me. If she knew what I was . . .
I stood suddenly, with a snap of wings in the brittle cold, lifted my head.
I could feel him now, pulling on the tether that connected us—Driscoll, climbing in his car, tires grinding gravel, running away.
A sharp ache tugged at my chest like a grappling hook, pulling me unwillingly toward the fleeing human. I didn’t want to go, but the curse had wearied me, burned down my resistance. I felt as if I had been dipped in wax, all senses deadened to the world everyone else inhabited.
I longed to follow Maddie—the storyteller—I wanted to see where she would go this last night when she walked through my world. Wanted to see every blade of frost-crusted grass that she touched. Wanted to drink the fragrance of her ideas trailing behind her like pale ghosts.
But I couldn’t.
The curse demanded that I follow my prey.
And stop him from escaping.
Chapter 64
A Quiet Night
Sheriff Kyle:
I sat in my patrol car with Rodriguez, both of us eating the roast-beef sandwiches I had picked up over at the Steak & Ale about an hour and a half earlier. So far it seemed like a quiet night, unusually tame for a Halloween. Even the kids’ pranks had been toned down this year. No animals locked in the garage or eggs splattered on new cars. A few complaints had sizzled through on the police radio: rocks in mailboxes, flattened tires, and apparently a spray-painted barn. But old Mr. Hudson had needed to paint that barn for years. Served him right for leaving an eyesore like that right on Main Street where everybody could see it.
The radio crackled to life again.
“Kyle, you there?”
I sighed.
“Here,” I answered. No need to follow protocol when Alice was working dispatch.
“I just got a bunch of weird calls, Sarah Duncan over on Timberline, Jane Culpepper on Creek Wood, and the Walkers on Mountainview—that new couple that just moved to town, remember them?”
“I remember, Alice. What happened?”
“Oh, yeah, well, each of the women just walked into their living room and found their husbands asleep on the floor.”
Deputy Rodriguez looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“Do they want us to go over and make sure everything’s all right?”
“Well, you could, but then I got a call from Bob Miller. He says Agnes hasn’t come home yet. Guess she’s like clockwork, locks up the Steak & Ale at nine, drives home, in the door by nine fifteen. He tried calling the pub, but no answer. No answer on her cell either.”
I glanced at my watch. 10:08 p.m. I set my sandwich on the seat and started the engine.
“Tell Bob we’re on our way.”
The streets were deserted, all the trick-or-treaters had either gone home or headed over to the annual bonfire. The patrol car fishtailed in the snow on the corner of Main and Running Springs Road. That was when I noticed the string of Buicks and Hondas and Mazdas with cracked windshields, all leading toward the junkyard.
The kids had taken it up a notch after all.
“We should stop at the bonfire after we’re done with Agnes,” I said. “See if we can figure who’s been up to trouble.”
“Good idea,” Rodriguez said, then she stuffed the last bite of roast beef in her mouth.
I glanced at my own sandwich with longing, realized I probably wouldn’t get to finish it. We drove slower through town, giving it a visual once-over just in case anything else was amiss. Saw a flurry of overturned trash cans, picket fences kicked in and a broken picture window on Charlie Mitchell’s house.
“Kids have been busy,” Rodriguez noted as we pulled into the Steak & Ale parking lot. One car waited for us, covered in snow.
Agnes’s car.
I stepped into the cold, felt an uncharacteristic shiver run over my back. I walked toward her car—a Honda Element. “Check the front door of the pub,” I told Rodriguez. Meanwhile, I brushed the snow off the windshield, stared through the tinted glass. Empty, all doors locked. No purse or coat inside, just a few empty Diet Coke cans and a half-eaten package of donuts. “Agnes!” I called out, sweeping the nearby bushes with my flashlight. No footprints in the snow out here, no evidence that she’d been to her car recently. I paced around the lot, stared into the thickening gloom that had settled like glue amid the shrubbery.