Only the rain falling on the leaves and the earth.
And then she was out of the cornfield, and in the next few minutes she had entered the trees.
Shelter.
Dimness.
So many familiar scents …
She dropped down beneath an oak tree to catch her breath and look out at the cornfield to make sure that she hadn’t been fooled by that lack of sound.
Nothing. No movement. No sound but the falling rain.
He had given up for the time being. Probably until tomorrow, when he’d call DEFACS and tell them she was lost and he needed their help to find her.
She leaned back against the trunk with a sigh of relief. It would be all right here for a little while. She could rest before she started out again. But she’d have to be far away from here by morning and keep traveling until she felt safe.
Safe?
She looked away from the cornfield and back into the depths of the woods.
It looked … different at night.
Dense and mysterious and threatening.
She could feel herself tense. Silly. She had been here so many times. She had even tried to make friends with some of the animals who lived in these woods.
But she didn’t know everything about this place, and animals could be as different from one another as people. Maybe, after all, there was something to fear here.…
There is something to fear everywhere, she told herself impatiently. If there were bad things here, she’d find out and avoid them. Just as she’d learned to avoid her father. But it couldn’t be as bad as what she’d faced in that three-room house only a few miles from here.
See, she was already feeling better. The dimness and mystery of the forest were not so threatening after all. If she kept thinking like that, she’d be fine. She closed her eyes and forced herself to relax.
The rain on the leaves of the oak tree above her.
The scents …
Could she hear the sounds of the animals sheltering here? If she reached out, could she join with any of them?
She put out a tentative probe. “I’m here. I’m no threat. I’m just alone and I need to be part of all this. I’m not wanted out there. But neither are you. Maybe we can help one another?”
A stirring. Raccoon?
Yes, definitely a male raccoon. No real interest in her.
But there was another stirring near the stream to the north.
She put out another probe in that direction. “No threat. It would be nice not to be alone.”
“Yes. To be alone is not good.” A pause. “No threat.”
It was a doe. Margaret could sense the freedom, the wildness, the singing speed held in restraint. What would it be like to be joined to all that beauty?
“Later?”
“Later.”
Margaret felt a rush of sheer exhilaration. This was different from the cautious approaches she’d made to domestic and farm animals in the past. This bonding was pure and clean and as wildly natural as the forest itself. Because now she was part of the forest, and, if she studied and was careful, she could become one with the animals who inhabited it. She had the sudden wild impulse to rush out giddily and start right now to do that.
Not yet. There was time for all of that later. She mustn’t intrude, any more than she’d want to be intruded upon. It was enough to be here, to be one of them, to have a chance to be free and not alone any longer.
To have a home at last.
*
“You’re not answering me,” Lassiter said. “How did you feel that night?”
His words jarred her back to the present. “You wouldn’t understand.” She shrugged. “And I have no intention of trying to explain myself.”
He smiled. “You’ll tell me someday.”
“No, I won’t.” She hurried on to divert him from that very personal question by giving him a more general answer. “It took me quite a while to learn how to adjust, but I did it. Nature is a great teacher. Animals understand survival and they accept what you are without question. On the other hand, when you’re not ‘normal,’ people feel uneasy around you. It can be … lonely.”
“Can it?” He was holding her gaze, and she suddenly felt as if he was surrounding her with warmth. Strange, when she had rarely seen him anything but wary and edgy. “You were only a kid. Someone should have been there for you.”
She laughed and shook her head. “That’s life, Lassiter. You take what you get. I’m sure you know that. I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways.”
“Someone should have been there for you,” he repeated. He slowly reached out and gently touched the hair at her temple with an almost caressing hand.
She inhaled sharply as she felt the warmth of his fingers through the pulse point beneath that strand. She could feel her heartbeat escalate as she looked up at him, and it bewildered her. It wasn’t sexual, was it?
No, it was something else, something that she didn’t think she had ever felt before. That touch was so gentle, so exquisitely caressing, that she felt safe and infinitely … treasured. And his intent gaze was giving her that same sensation of—
No, it was too weird and she shouldn’t be feeling like this.
She tore her gaze away and jumped to her feet. “And now that we’ve covered that particular question, I think that I’ll take a break and go talk to Cambry for a while. You caught me by surprise and I don’t like to feel this vulnerable.”
He was silent, still looking at her. She could see a multitude of expressions crossing his face, but she couldn’t decipher any of them. “Neither do I.” He was suddenly standing and looking down at her with a reckless smile. “But it’s worse for me, because I appear to also be finding you’re becoming addictive. I’ve been hunting you, searching for every detail about you for too long. Yet it’s evidently not enough. I want to know more, get closer, go deeper. And that’s the worst thing that I could do.” He took out his phone. “So let’s try to slow it down, shall we?”
She was staring at his phone. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to call Juan Salva.” He was punching in the number. “You remember Salva? He works very closely with Nicos. He remembers you. I paid him very well to tell me all about any of Nicos’s weaker links.”
She moistened her lips. “Yes, I remember him.” She could see him now as she’d seen him that night. High forehead, brown hair tied back to reveal his finely molded features, faint mocking smile.
Blood flowing across those black-and-white tiles.
“I thought you would.” He’d made the connection and spoke into the phone, “Lassiter. I have Margaret Douglas, Salva. Let Nicos know that we might be able to deal in a couple weeks. I’ll get back to you.” He hung up the phone. “Done.”
Done, she thought numbly.