Chapter 19 — Wolves at the Gates

  Rachel knew she should do something to stop the burly Robert as his shadow receded back into the woods. He was a ticking time bomb, but Rachel was stuck in place. Her eyes were transfixed by the misshapen, broken body beside her. The light wind tickled her hair as it breezed through the hills, making the branches dip and bow as if in deference to the man who had died that night.

  She'd never learned how to deal with death. The only real experience she'd ever encountered were the three bodies in the RV. In that case, Rachel had been able to disconnect herself to an extent from the carnage. It was something brutal and horrible, yes, but she hadn't known any of them. She hadn't even known their names until the sheriff had told her. Rachel could approach it from a colder, logical view—examining the evidence and looking for clues and solutions.

  With the poor doctor, Rachel had no recourse. She already knew the killer, and she knew the method. She already knew everything. There was nothing to distract her or to set her mind to. All she could do was dwell on the awful tragedy of a man's death, one whom she'd been speaking to only hours earlier.

  She might have sat there for hours, but the night was still young. The trees rustled, and Rachel realized it wasn't just the sound of the wind drifting through the leaves. Someone else was moving, and they were close. Very close.

  She clutched at the rubies so hard she might have cut her fingers open. The trees seemed to loom over her, and the scent of smoke from the charred body was ever more ominous.

  I'm going to die out here tonight, Rachel thought bitterly. I'm going to die before I was able to do anything I wanted to do. The world is still a mess, magic is being used to kill people, and everything I tried to do was for nothing.

  A wolf padded out from around a tree. An honest-to-god, massive, grey-furred wolf with rows of glistening teeth and fierce cold yellow eyes.

  Her survival instinct kicked back into overdrive. Rachel scrambled away from it toward the nearest tree. She sent her mind into the gemstones, pulling every possible bit of flame she could and sent it at the wolf.

  A massive five-foot jet of fire fanned out from her fingers, hurled at the wolf with the force of a bullet. It was more flame than Rachel had ever managed to summon in her life by tenfold. She stopped trying to clamber up the tree, hoping that the conflagration would be enough to deter the animal from attacking her.

  The flames stopped just short of reaching it. Did I misjudge it? she thought desperately. Am I dead because I made another stupid miscalculation?

  She hadn't, as the fire began to swirl up above and around the wolf and dissipating into the air. Behind it, she saw Natalie Hendricks waving her hands in peculiar swinging motions that mimicked the movement of the fire. The girl was wearing her favorite jacket over a dark and expensive-looking dress, and another huge animal was a few paces behind her—a giant mountain lion.

  Rachel let out a deep breath as the clearing fell back into moonlit darkness once again. If these were Natalie's pets, she wasn't about to die.

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  "Natalie, what are you doing out here?"

  "Looking for the bad guys," she answered. In a single easy movement, she clambered onto the back of the wolf, ripping her dress slightly as she did. It was the same black dress she'd worn to the funeral, now caked in mud and with tears in it to let her move more easily.

  "Have you been home since yesterday?" Rachel asked tentatively.

  "No time. I gotta find who killed Jenny." Natalie looked around the clearing, finally noticing the body. Rachel expected her to shriek, but Natalie just looked at it with curiosity. "They got him too?"

  "Yes," she answered, not sure how to handle the girl—particularly when Natalie could easily overpower her on a whim. She was saved the trouble of explaining further by an exhausted and distinctly British voice calling out from the darkness behind Natalie.

  "Steady on, Nat! I can't keep up when you dash off like that!" Kendra Laushire came stumbling into the clearing. "Oi, what's this the—" She abruptly stopped as she spotted Rachel. Her voice and vocabulary shifted almost instantly. "Oh, good evening Rachel. What brings you out here so late?"

  She wordlessly pointed at her feet, which Kendra had somehow missed.

  "Oh, fuck me," she muttered.

  Rachel was utterly perplexed. Kendra never spoke without the most proper and uptight posh accent, and never swore. Something was very off about her—but then something was very off about the entire night so far. She put it out of her mind for the moment. There were bigger priorities.

  "Omega's work," she said shortly.

  "Indeed. And he's long-gone, I suppose."

  "Probably. We have bigger problems. Robert Harrison is on his way back to town, well-armed and angry."

  Kendra shrugged. "What could he possibly do? The man has no knowledge of Omega's location, the same as us."

  "He's blaming Cinza and her people."

  "Ah." She frowned. "I don't suppose they could supply an alibi for their whereabouts for the last few hours?"

  Rachel shook her head. Cinza couldn't possibly account for her last few hours, or there'd be an uproar on both sides of the town. "We have to defuse this now. Or at least, make sure anyone they'd want to hurt is kept safe until it burns out."

  "Will it burn out?" she asked pointedly.

  "I don't know."

  "He's not here," Natalie reported. "Gwen smells a trail going far away though. Something's weird about it."

  "Gwen?" Rachel asked.

  "The wolf," Kendra explained in a tired voice.

  "How does she know what it can smell?" Rachel asked, before realizing how pointless the question was. Kendra shrugged. Rachel turned to the little girl. "Natalie, can you do something for me?"

  "You never did anything for my dad," she answered petulantly.

  Rachel sighed. "I know, and I'm sorry. But this is really important, okay?"

  Natalie looked at her scornfully. "Don't talk to me like I'm a dumb kid. What do you want?"

  "Whoever killed him probably didn't get too far." Rachel realized belatedly she was possibly sending Natalie after her own father, but tried to dismiss it from her mind. It was too important that they caught the man before he could do more damage. "Do you think… Gwen… could track him for us?"

  "Maybe. I can ask her." Natalie frowned. "What about my dad though?"

  "Nat, please," Kendra said, crouching down next to her. "Do it for me, okay?"

  "Only 'cause it's you, Lily. Not for her," Natalie said, giving Rachel another damning look. Rachel didn't much care, so long as they got moving soon. She could deal with the disdain of a twelve year old.

  What did worry her as they set off into the woods following Natalie's pair of animal friends was the lack of signal to her cell phone. She'd sent Will an emergency signal, but so far she'd received no response. As far as she knew, Will was in a blind panic trying to locate her. If she could, she'd return to town immediately and let him know she was safe, but she couldn't pass up the opportunity to track down Natalie's father.

  She could only hope he'd see the connection between them and assume she was still alive. They had no idea how connections were affected by death, but her brief viewing in the clearing showed she was still linked to Smith even as his corpse was slowly rotting into the dirt.

  I'll give you a proper funeral when I can, Rachel promised as she was lead away into the dark forest.