Nightfall (10 page)
He sighed a sigh that seemed to come from somewhere around his toes. “You have no idea how much I would like to,” he said. “But I will tell you the absolute truth, which is that I wouldn’t feel quite right about it.”
She blinked. “What?”
He shrugged. “I would feel more comfortable if you slept off that delightful high, and then told me that you still wanted me to do delicious things to you. I loved what we just did, but I don’t want you to have any regrets.”
She stared at him, deep into his green eyes, trying to find any hint of sarcasm or mockery or teasing. “Who are you?” she asked, finally.
He gave a grin that would have been sheepish if he hadn’t been showing so very many teeth. “The last gentleman?”
“I think you must be,” she said. She went to sit up, but his hand pressed gently against her shoulder.
“You don’t have to go,” he said, his eyes softer than she’d seen them yet. “If you want to stay, I would—that would be all right. I can give you a ride home, of course, or walk you there if that makes more sense. Whatever you need.”
She reached out and wrapped her hand in his T-shirt. “Is it completely pathetic to say that I need you?”
He smiled and kissed her again. There was lust there, she could feel it in the gentle tremble of his mouth, but it was leashed and contained. “I think you need this,” he said, tightening his grip around her. She rolled with it, spooning back against him, letting him cradle her in his arms. It was a blessing the sheets were already so tangled on the bed; he managed to hook them with his foot and drag the covers up and over them.
Sleepiness came over her in a wave as he poked at a button on his phone and dimmed the lights. “What time do you need to be awake?”
“Probably by 4? I need to get home, get scrubs, shower, get to the hospital.”
She watched him set the alarm, then place the phone on a table next to the bed. He snuggled tightly around her, nuzzling into her neck like a puppy. She giggled and shifted her hips against him. He slapped her ass playfully, and she hissed in surprise that came as much from pleasure as being shocked he’d done it.
“Are you really going to sleep in jeans?” she asked him.
“It’s clearly the only way to maintain my masculine virtue,” he said in a prim tone that came directly out of a 19th century novel.
She laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Only a little,” he said, snuggling her even more tightly. His lips brushed over her skin and she sighed again. “Believe me, I’d like to take advantage of you. But that’s what I’d be doing: taking advantage. And… there was a time when I was that man. And I strive to be better than that now.”
“So next time, then?” Roxanne said, feeling a little tendril of hope traveling with the words, hoping that yes, indeed, there would be a next time.
It was almost like her little tendril met up with his somewhere over them, and the two knotted themselves together. His fingers found hers and intertwined. “It would be my absolute pleasure,” he said. “See you at 4am?”
“Okay,” she said. “I’d like that.”
She wasn’t in the right place. She held as still as she could, waiting for her mind to catch up to where she was. Somewhere dark, very dark, darker than her house. The sheets were cool and crisp, nothing like her own soft jersey. She was curled up around a feather pillow, and her body felt delightfully tired, comfortably sore.
Yes. The date. The date, and then Julian, and his wonderful and talented mouth teasing such excellent sensations out of her body that she’d screamed and cried. And they’d gone to sleep, but he’d been curled up around her, and he wasn’t there now. She knew even before she stretched out, reaching her arms across the bed, that there was no one in bed with her. No one in the room with her. She couldn’t hear anyone breathing.
The other side of the bed was cold. A curl of panic she didn’t quite understand wormed through her, tensing around her heart and winding into a coil in her stomach. “Julian?” She kept her voice soft, for no real reason other than how thick the darkness was around her. She almost expected her voice to echo back to her, mocking.
Silence.
“Julian?” There was more insistence in her voice this time, and more fear. She took a deep breath, in and out, and tried to will her throbbing heart into a calmer rhythm. No such luck.
She’d fallen asleep in her silk shirt and her soaked panties; the panties were still damp from her arousal before, and were clammy and uncomfortable between her legs. Her shirt felt too thin and too fragile to protect her from much of anything in this darkness. The underwire of her bra dug painfully into her sternum, but hell if she was going to take it off now.
She slipped out of the bed. The room was so dark that she could barely make sense of even the shapes within the room. It should be brighter than this; the full moon had been just a couple of days ago, and the day had been clear, so it should be almost as bright as day outside. She didn’t remember curtains. But then, she’d hardly been paying attention to the decor, just to getting him to tip her over onto the bed.
“Julian,” she said one more time, and the fear wrapped around her voice made her more nervous than the darkness itself. What had happened? Where was he? What in the name of all that was holy was going on?
Her bare toes brushed across something rough as she stepped cautiously over the floor. She stood still for a moment, carefully investigating, and felt a band of leather run through loops of thick fabric. It took a moment for the image to click; her jeans. She was brushing against where Julian had tossed her jeans once he’d liberated her from them. She snagged them off the floor and stepped into them, sliding them up her hips.
She felt a touch braver once her ass was covered. She kept her pace slow, because the house was still strangely dark, but she walked through carefully, peering down hallways and into rooms as she went. He’d probably just gotten out of bed for a sandwich or something. She had no idea what he did for work, really, but she did know that he hadn’t gotten himself torn to bits climbing rocks. Climbing razors, maybe, but not rocks. And who knew what kinds of hours he normally kept.
It was odd that he wasn’t answering her, though. The house was big, but it was no mansion; she wasn’t trying to stay quiet. Wherever he was, he should be able to hear her.
Roxanne walked down the stairs, trailing her hand over the railing. There was a sensual edge to the darkness, now that the fear was receding. “Julian?” she called. “You said later… it’s later…” She fought the urge to laugh. It seemed wrong, like laughing in church. But the sound was burbling in her like a kettle, ready to boil over as soon as it could.
She heard a sound as she came to the landing where the stairs curved, halfway through the flight. She paused. It was a sound that seemed familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. Something scraping—scrabbling—over something hard. Clicking, almost. Her heart started to slam again, pounding without reason in her chest. She tried to keep her breathing slow and deep—it was a trick she’d learned a long time ago in the ER, when the urge to panic threatened to overwhelm her—but something primal in her brain was taking over, synapse by synapse. Her breathing was high and tight, and she could feel her muscles tightening, prepared to run.
That sound again. That clacking. Upstairs. Something upstairs was coming down the hallway. And the sound—it was like a dog, a dog’s claws clacking on tile or linoleum. Or wooden floors.
She pushed her feet back into motion, and through some miracle of willpower, kept herself from running. There was no reason to run, and besides, you didn’t run from things that liked to chase. That was an incredibly bad idea. That was how—
—that was how you ended up torn to shreds, looking like you’d been put through a grinder.
Her feet were moving faster, even though she hadn’t given them permission.
She didn’t know the layout of the house at all, and it was so dark. Shapes rose out of every corner, taunting her. She flinched away from a hat rack and cowered for a moment in fear of a bookcase. She didn’t remember which way they’d turned from the living room to get to the stairs. The house wasn’t this big last night, she was sure of it. She couldn’t still be walking and not have found a way out.
Where the hell was Julian? She had to have walked the length of the house by now. Was he hiding somewhere? God, was he the thing that was stalking her? No, that didn’t make sense—why would there be claw sounds if it was him?
Was it the thing that had attacked him, the thing he didn’t want to talk to her about? Had it come to his house and attacked him? Was he lying dead somewhere? Had she already walked past him in the dark?
She started running her hands along the wall, looking for light switches near doorways. Nothing. No lamps, no nightlights, nothing. The silence was deafening her. She should be hearing cicadas and the sounds of electricity—the refrigerator cooling or a computer fan quietly spinning. Why couldn’t she hear anything?
She needed to get out, and she needed to—should she call the police? Izzy? The National Guard? She tried to laugh at herself and failed.
Calling the police because of a bad dream and a creepy house seemed extreme. She had no idea where Julian was.
The floor fell away under her foot. She screamed, felt her balance shift forward, but just before she tipped over, her foot landed on something solid, and she had just enough strength and momentum to push herself backwards instead of down the stairs she’d just discovered. Her knee hit badly, and she screamed; her ankle twisted under her.
“Fuck,” she hissed, trying to think through the pain. She ran her hands down her leg, feeling out the potential damage. Nothing seemed misaligned or particularly sharp in her knee, but it did feel like she’d banged it in the sweet spot just behind her kneecap, and it hurt like hell. Her ankle was harder to assess; there were so many tiny damn bones in feet, and it was so hard to know what happened to them without an x-ray. At least she hadn’t gone head over heels into the basement that she’d just discovered.
She sat on the stairs for a minute and tried to collect herself. She was frightening herself for no reason. The sound she’d heard was probably a branch snapping, or the house settling. It certainly wasn’t a new building. Old houses made old house noises. Julian could be anywhere. She could have been snoring, and he could have decided to move to a couch. He might be a heavy sleeper, and not have heard her calling his name. He might have had some sort of emergency and made the choice to let her sleep. He might have left her a note that she didn’t see in the darkness.
It took a moment for the rumbling noise below her to resolve into real sound and break through the haze of searing pain that her knee was putting up around her brain. It took another moment beyond that to realize that the sound wasn’t something mechanical. It was animal. It was something growling. And then the growl shifted into a snapping snarl, and bright yellow eyes opened up in the darkness, reflecting whatever light filtered into the dark basement.
The smart, human part of her brain that could logically tell her that you did not run from a predator, because it turned you into dinner, shut off with a short little scream. The more animal parts of her brain, the parts that knew that running was a dumb idea, but waiting to be eaten was even dumber, shoved her up of her ass and onto her feet. There was an awkward and wretched moment when it felt like her knee was going to give out and pitch her down the stairs, but after a stomach churning moment, it held, and she was able to stumble forward.
Every step made her cry out. She heard the animal coming up the stairs, its claws scrabbling over the hard surface as it made leap after leap. She dragged herself into the kitchen, hung on the counter for a second, and then shoved off again. She had to get out. Out of the house. She didn’t know the house well enough to find a safe place, and outside, she could scream for help. The house was set back from the road, she’d have to run to get the attention of a passing car, but she could do it.
Maybe.
The moonlight was so bright that it almost blinded her, after so long in the darkness. She stumbled into the living room, wondering how in the world she hadn’t found it before, and all the glass let in so much moonlight that the very air seemed to glow. She found the glass door that led to the back porch. The front door would be better, her knee was screaming in earnest now, and the idea of dragging herself all the way around the house seemed like a horrible and agonizing idea. But this was better than staying in the house.
She yanked on the doorknob. It didn’t turn.
She felt for a lock. There wasn’t one, or at least not one she could find. She slapped the door with the palm of her hand, screaming in frustration, which made no difference at all.
She saw the eyes from the basement, glowing in the glass. A reflection? No, because then the eyes resolved, and she saw the face of the monster. A wolf, a huge gray wolf.
No, that wasn’t possible. Gray wolves had been hunted out of Texas in the seventies, and they’d always been more in the western parts of the state anyway. The efforts to rebuild the population had done no good at all—the ranchers hated them. There weren’t wolves in Texas. There were some ‘yote/red wolf hybrids, but that was it.
And then she realized that the monster she was staring at, which was twice the size of the wolves that didn’t exist, wasn’t a reflection of the monster that had been in the basement. It was too solid for that. No, this was a huge wolf, the size of a Saint Bernard, outside the house. And it was baring its teeth and snarling at her.
She heard a scream, a loud and panicked sound that made her feel sorry for whoever had released the sound. The part of her mind responsible for the screaming was so far away, so distant, that it didn’t seem to matter. She backpedaled, trying to turn, but unable to take her eyes off the huge wolf, which had dropped onto its haunches and howled. The sound froze her spine, and she felt her bladder try to let go; she caught the flow at the last second. She found the arm of the couch with her butt and went ass over tea kettle into the cushions, all tangled arms and pillows.
So she missed the wolf’s leap. She heard the shattering glass, and she heard herself scream again, though with no more force than a puff of air escaping a Ziploc bag. She had just enough sense left in her mind to hope that it killed her by snapping her spine up high, and ending it quickly, and that she wouldn’t have to feel it tear into her.
And then a whoosh as something flew over her, and the sound of fighting.
In a horror movie, she would have immediately pulled herself over the back of the couch to see what was happening; in her reality, far too much of her attention was devoted to keeping her bladder under control. It took her several moments to cope with the fact that she wasn’t dead before she could bring herself to look over the back of the couch and see what was happening.
When she did, she didn’t understand what she saw. There was flesh and fur flying in all directions, two shaped tangled together, snapping and snarling furiously. They rolled together, holding each other off, tearing at each other. The end came before she’d really even seen the beginning; the one that was all wolf flew back, slamming into the back of the couch hard enough to make it yip, hard enough to make the couch slide a few inches on the floor. And then the other one, the one that her mind couldn’t put into words, was on the wolf, and blood flew, and the wolf kicked for a few moments, and then was still.
