“Where are you?” I asked. She told me and I said, “Okay. Half an hour.”
Jane swore and hung up. She had warned me about her mouth when she was hungry. I poked my hubby and when he swore too, I said, “I’m heading out to the old Partman place to pick up Jane. I’ll be back by dawn.” He grunted again and I slid from the bed, dressed, and grabbed the huge bowl of oatmeal, sugar, and milk from the fridge. Jane had assured me she needed food after she shifted back, and didn’t care what it was or what temp it was. I hoped she’d remember that when I gave it to her. Cold oatmeal was nasty.
Half an hour later, I reached the old Partman place, a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century homestead and later a mine, the homestead sold and deserted when the gemstones were discovered and the mine closed down in the 1950s when the gems ran out. It was grown over by fifty-year-old trees, and the drive was gravel, Jane standing hunched in the middle. Human, wearing the lightweight clothes she carried in the travel pouch, along with the cell phone and a few vamp-killing supplies.
I popped the doors and she climbed in, her long black hair like a veil around her, her thin clothes covering a shivering body, pimpled with cold. “Food,” she said, her voice hoarse. I passed the bowl of oatmeal and a serving spoon to her. She tossed the top of the bowl onto the floor and dug in. I watched her eat from the corner of my eye as I drove. She didn’t bother to chew, just shoveled the cold oatmeal in like she was starving. She looked thinner than usual, though Jane was never much more than skin, bone, and muscle—like her big-cat form, I thought. Criminy. Witches I could handle. But what Jane was? Maybe not so much. I hadn’t known shape changers or skinwalkers even existed. No one did.
Bowl empty, she pulled her leather coat from the tote I had brought, snuggled under it, and lay back in her seat, cradling the empty bowl. She closed her eyes, looking exhausted. “That was not fun,” she said, the words so soft I had to strain to hear. “Those vamps are fast. Faster than Beast.”
“Beast?”
“My cat,” she said. She laughed, the sound forlorn, lost, almost sad. “My big hunting cat. Who had to chase the scent back to their lair. Up and down mountains and through creeks and across the river. I had to soak in the river to throw off the heat. Beast isn’t built for long-distance running.” She sighed and adjusted the heating vents to blow onto her. “The vamps covered five miles from the McCarleys’ place in less than an hour yesterday morning. It took me more than four hours to follow them back through the underbrush and another two to isolate the opening. I should have shifted into a faster cat, though Beast would have been ticked off.”
“You found their lair?” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. “At the Partman place?”
“Yeah. Sort of.” She rolled her head to face me in the dark, her golden eyes glowing and forbidding. “They’re living in the mine. They’ve been there for a long time. They were gone by the time I found it. They were famished when they left the lair. I could smell their hunger. I think they’ll kill again tonight. Probably have killed again tonight.”
I tightened my hands on the steering wheel and had to force myself to relax.
“Molly? The lair is only a mile from your house as the vamp runs. And witches smell different from humans.”
A spike of fear raced through me. Followed by a mental image of a vampire leaning over Angelina’s bed. I tightened my hands on the wheel so tight it made a soft sound of protest.
“You need to mount a defensive perimeter around your house,” Jane said. “You and Evan. You hear? Something magical that’ll scare off anything that moves, or freeze the blood of anything dead. Something like that. You make sure the kids are safe.” She turned her head aside, to look out at the night. Jane loved my kids. She had never said so, but I could see it in her eyes when she watched them. I drove on. Chilled to the bone by fear and the early winter.
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