Red (12 page)

I knew Dad believed. Or believed enough that
he was willing to uproot us and force me into this fringe existence
where the most important Rule was to remain unnoticed. He’d been
scared
after we got the letter and the journal. He’d never
told me why. I’d gone along with it because it’s what he wanted. I
figured I would pass the age that Mom died and he would finally
accept that the only thing that was being passed down the female
line was some kind of mental disorder. Because, seriously, which is
more logical: that I was the latest generation of a curse that
follows the female line of the family because some long distant
ancestress couldn’t keep her skirts down or that my mother was a
raving lunatic?

I’d been all prepared to admit my own
insanity if it came to that. Because surely if I’d begun to think
that any of these physical changes were truly happening, it would
be nothing more than a delusion.

But I couldn’t argue with what I’d done
today.

Apparently great-great-great—however many
greats—Grandma Brynne had passed on something worse than big feet
or an overbite or any of a million other inheritable genetic
traits. Because it had to be genetic. I was too much a scientist at
heart to believe in anything like curses. Looking at this story as
a true scientist, it wasn’t Sabine but her lover who’d introduced
the werewolf gene. And evidently it was dominant. Like how the
offspring of a brown-eyed person and a blue-eyed person was
probably going to be brown-eyed, unless the brown-eyed person had a
blue-eye recessive gene to pass on. My AP Biology class hadn’t
covered genetics in enough detail to explain why only daughters had
been born from the line, but I figured there was some scientific
principle out there that covered it.

Punnett squares weren’t going to fix my
problem, though.

In the end, it didn’t matter whether it was
genetic or a curse or straight up magic. It was
happening
.
To. Me.

And I didn’t know how to stop it.

Chapter 6

Elodie

Someone
is watching
me
.

I twitched my shoulders and resisted the
urge to look behind me. Again. Because that would be too much of an
admission that in the last two weeks, I’d turned into a paranoid
freak. Okay, maybe not so much a freak. The whole town was on edge.
It wasn’t a shock, really. We’d gotten Rich and Molly back, but
nobody had been caught and punished for it. Whoever had snatched
them was still out there. Somewhere. The sheriff was hypothesizing
that whoever had done it had moved on when his plans were spoiled.
Lots of people wanted to believe that, for obvious reasons. No one
wanted to believe that one of our own was responsible for
instilling night terrors in a ten year old or for Rich being laid
up in the hospital still after having reconstructive surgery on his
leg.

The part that made me a paranoid freak was
that I was starting to wonder if the kidnapper was after me. Which
was crazy. Because why would someone target me? I was nobody. I
mean, unless you were a werewolf hunter who somehow managed to
track my family line down despite all the ridiculous precautions my
dad had taken to make us disappear. And what was the likelihood of
that? The journal didn’t report any hunters for at least three
generations. The entire point of my life was to stay off
everybody’s radar, and I was really good at it. Well, except for
the Barbie Squad, but who listened to them? No one noticed me.

“
Yeah, that’s the girl that
found the Phillips boy.”

I froze, my hand inches from the pack of
paper towels. Okay, nobody had noticed me before I rescued Rich.
Since then, I seemed to have acquired a certain level of notoriety,
which Dad was less than pleased about. Given my aversion to being
the center of attention, I didn’t care for it either. But that
didn’t mean that someone was out to get me. What happened to Rich
and Molly had absolutely nothing to do with me.

I looked casually down the aisle, first one
way, then the other, frowning when I didn’t see anybody. Weird.
She’d sounded like she was
right there
.

I grabbed the paper towels and stood,
scanning over the top of the shelves for the others. Sawyer, David,
and I were on a supply run at McIntyre’s Grocery and Mercantile.
I’d learned a lot in the last two weeks on the job with Dr.
McGrath. Not the least of which was the fact that, no matter how
smart I might be, I was still even lower than an undergrad intern
on the totem pole, and that meant I was a grunt, often relegated to
the simplest and most boring of jobs. Any dreams of making some
glorious scientific discovery that would immortalize my name in
scientific journals had pretty well evaporated by now.

Still, I liked the work. I learned a lot
through observation, and at least I got to be outside in the park.
And I got to be with Sawyer. Not like anything had happened. No
matter how I might wish otherwise, we were just friends. I knew
that’s all we could be. Whatever was happening to me, I wasn’t
willing to risk that final alleged catalyst. But hanging out with
him was my guilty pleasure. Despite his protestations to the
contrary, he was smart, almost reluctantly so, and he had a wicked
sense of humor. When I was with him, I didn’t feel paranoid and
freaked out. And strangely, I thought I was a good influence on
him. Which sounds totally arrogant and stupid. But the anger he
carted around like a shield seemed to take a backseat when he was
with me, and it seemed like, maybe, he was starting to heal from
his mother’s death.

On the far side of the store, I spotted two
women looking at me and whispering. They were trying to look
casual, glancing down at the end cap display, then back at me. I
recognized them in that way that you recognize the faces of people
you pass on a semi-regular basis in a small town, but I didn’t know
them.

“
I heard he was just
covered in blood and gore—from some animal that maniac killed and
spread around, but still—and she just radios in, calm as you
please. That girl’s got ice in her veins.” The voice was as clear
as if she’d been shouting.

Oh shit. The words sounded almost like
praise, but were layered over with disgust. I wasn’t sure if that
was for the maniac, the gore, or my professional attitude. I
shouldn’t care. I didn’t care. I just wished she would shut up and
leave.

“
You okay?”

I jolted, bumping into Sawyer, who’d come up
behind me with that curiously silent gait of his.

He put a hand briefly on my arm to steady
me. “Bit jumpy today?”

Immediately I mourned the loss of his
touch.

“
Everyone’s jumpy,” I
retorted.

His dark eyes searched my face, and I felt,
not for the first time, as if he could see past all the walls and
armor and defenses. Past the bullshit that kept everybody at arm’s
length.

“
What’s wrong?”

I really needed to work on my technique.
“They’re talking about me.” I jerked my head toward the two old
biddies, whose teased up hair seemed to bob with the animation of
their conversation.

He lifted a brow. “And we have super
hearing, do we?”

Apparently yes.
“They keep looking
over here while they’re talking,” I said defensively. “So unless I
have something on my face that merits a distraction from their true
conversation, they’re talking about me.”

Sawyer gave them a withering look. Both
women’s cheeks reddened, and they moved on down into one of the
taller aisles. He turned back to me and smiled. “Problem
solved.”

My pulse skittered. “My hero,” I said.

“
C’mon. David’s waiting at
the register.”

We added our purchases to the pile and
checked out, each of us grabbing a couple of bags to lug back to
David’s Explorer. We’d had to park a couple of blocks away because
they were doing some kind of work on the utilities under the
street. The whole thing was a mess, with a clump of workers
drilling down with jack hammers to get past the pavement. The noise
was deafening, a staccato rumble that made my ears ache. The
hammering stopped, but there was no silence. Cars drove by with a
roar. Somebody coughed and sounded like they were right beside me.
A shop bell jingled somewhere over a door. Down the street a kid
shrieked and sprinted away from his mother.

“
Tommy!” The mom tone
snapped out, stopping the kid in his tracks. I could hear the
crunch of his shoes on the grit and bits of gravel on the sidewalk
across the street.

My head felt swimmy with too much input.
Holy crap, how did Superman deal with this?
Focus on
something
, I thought. That had worked with my sense of
smell.

“
They say that it’ll be
months before the Phillips boy will walk again. And the little girl
refuses to leave the house.”

I cocked my head, tuning in to another
conversation from somewhere up the street.

“
I heard the parents are
considering moving the whole family away.”

“
Well who could blame them?
I sure couldn’t rest easy if my child was kidnapped and drugged and
who knows what all and nobody was caught for it. It’s such a shame,
really. Mortimer was always such a peaceful place. There’s not
supposed to be any of that kind of nastiness here.”

“
As if bad things never
happen in small towns,” I muttered.

Something jerked me backward. My heart
jolted, and I flailed, dropping the bags and slamming into
something just as a pickup careened by, inches from my feet.

David shouted something profane and flipped
off the driver. I couldn’t say anything for the arms clamped around
my midsection. Sawyer’s breath seemed to be caught in his throat,
and I could feel his body trembling against my back. He was . . .
panicked?

“
Elodie, you okay?” asked
David.

Sawyer still wasn’t letting me go, and while
I was really enjoying having him wrapped around me, people—okay
David—was starting to stare. I laid my arm over Sawyer’s and rubbed
lightly, trying to soothe. The muscles beneath my fingers were hard
as oak.

“
I’m okay,” I said. I
squeezed his arm. “I’m okay.”

“
Let’s try not to walk in
front of traffic, shall we?” His tone was light, but he was still
slow to release me.

“
I’ll try to remember that.
Thanks for stopping me from becoming road kill.”

“
It would have been a
terrible waste,” he said.

One of the bags I’d dropped had split on
impact, so we took a minute to gather up its contents and
redistribute them among the remaining bags. The hair on my arms was
standing on end and my head was starting to ache, a sharp, lancing
pain that made my vision flicker. I made another casual scan of the
street expecting—hoping?—to find someone watching. But, though
there were a few glances our way, nobody seemed to be watching
us.

I didn’t know if I was disappointed or
relieved.

“
Earth to
Elodie.”

I looked up at Sawyer and blinked as he
looped another bag around my fingers. David was already half way up
the next block.

“
What is your current
location and where can I get a ticket, because you are definitely
not here today.”

“
It’s stupid,” I mumbled,
rubbing at my temple and checking both ways this time before I
crossed the street.

“
Lemmings following each
other off a cliff to drown in the sea are stupid. You are anything
but. What gives?”

“
It’s just . . . I keep
having this feeling that someone is watching me.”

“
You’re beautiful. Of
course people watch you.” He said it so matter-of-factly that I
stumbled.

Naturally he somehow managed to get a hand
under my elbow to steady me, despite the bags in his hands. I never
used to be this klutzy before.

I was saying something before he distracted
me with compliments . . . Oh right.

“
I mean like creepy
watching me. Skulking around corners and staying hidden kind of
watching.”

“
Are we on that stalker
thing again? Because I’ve been with you the whole time.” His face
was set in an
I’m completely innocent
expression. I knew if
he was joking about it, he’d forgiven me for my misgivings when
we’d first met.

“
No, not you. I just . . .
Ever since we found Rich, I’ve felt like I’m being
followed.”

Sawyer said nothing.

“
I told you it was
stupid.”

“
It’s not stupid,” he said,
all traces of teasing gone. “Just because you may be paranoid,
doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You’re not going out on your own, are
you? You promised your dad.”

I arched a brow at him.

“
What? If you were my
daughter I’d have made you promise not to go out alone after all
this.”

“
Fair enough. And no, I’m
not breaking my promise and wandering around the park on my own.
The only stretch of alone I’ve got is when I drive to and from
work.”

Dad had been so freaked out by what happened
to Rich and Molly, he’d finally broken down and bought me a
second-hand car. Well, okay, really it was probably more like a
fifth-hand Toyota that was closer in age to my dad than me. It was
pushing 250,000 miles and had paint so faded I couldn’t tell you
what the original color was. But so far it ran reliably, got me
where I needed to go, and made me, in theory, less accessible than
my bike, which he’d agreed was a lost cause.

“
I just . . . I don’t know.
I feel really unsettled, I guess. I think everybody will until
someone is caught and punished for this.” Jesus, I needed some
painkillers. This headache was brutal.