Submissive by Moonlight (2 page)

Nolan’s eyes narrowed. “And how do you know this?”

She folded her arm over her chest again. “I saw it. In a vision. Go! I’ll stay here and try to see her again if I can and guide you. Please.”

“Why didn’t you go yourself?”

“I’m not dressed for it. And I didn’t know she was a girl, until now. Why the hell are you hanging around?”

“Because I don’t believe a word you’re saying. No, don’t start. It’s not that I don’t believe you’re sincere, but I don’t believe in magic. Religion. Whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Why not both? She’s there, though. I know she is. Have you looked that way thoroughly yet?”

He shook his head. “I guess it’s as good as any.” He lifted his walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “This is Coralone, heading due east from where I am. Call it a hunch. Yeah. All right, roger that.”

“You’re going.”

“Yes.”

“I hope you find her. Soon. She’s losing hope.” Marisa tried to keep her brain away from sex, because the girl was more important, but she was naked in front of a drop-dead gorgeous man who obviously enjoyed looking at her.
It’s natural to feel attracted. Maybe he’ll come back later.

“If I were you, I’d hope we find her somewhere else than where you’ve said.” Nolan looked suddenly grim. “Because if we do, you’ll have some questions to answer, and they won’t be about your so-called visions.” He took a step forward, toward the circle, and then rolled his eyes and walked around the edge of the clearing heading east. Marisa stared after him.

Nice butt. But obviously not for me. So-called visions, indeed. Even when he sees, he won’t believe
. She shook her head and sat down. Her monthly ritual was over. Not as orderly as she’d planned, but she couldn’t ask for more than she’d received: a vision and a man to follow through on what she’d learned. Nature rarely lined up so well. Drawing down the moon seemed superfluous at this point, and her headspace was all wrong anyway. She took the bread from the altar, thanked Freyja and Freyr for the bounty of the earth, and chewed it thoughtfully.

Find her quick, skeptic. She needs you
. She closed her eyes, reaching her mind out for the girl. She hoped to find where she was, but she saw nothing and heard nothing.

* * * *

The game trail forked for the umpteenth time, and Nolan took the path that headed most in the direction Marisa had pointed. He was angry at himself for following her directions rather than sticking to the organized plan he’d helped develop back at headquarters. The only way she knew something was if she had seen the little girl after all, and he didn’t believe she was the kind of person to spot a lost girl in the woods and do nothing. Someone or something had been this way, though. There were a lot of broken branches along the trail. Of course, that could mean a bear as likely as a little girl.

He heard a whimper that sounded distinctly human. He knew better than to assume it was, because foxes in heat sounded like crying babies, and they weren’t the only animals that made hauntingly human-like noises. Still, if it was the little girl, she might be in trouble. He took off at a run, batting aside branches. Judging from the number of things in the way, whatever had been through here had a lower profile than he did. That included pretty much every animal in the woods. Only humans traveled long distances upright.

He locked gazes with a pair of animal eyes shining in the moonlight. He knew he was making a lot of noise. If it was a bear, it was going to be pissed, but even bears normally avoided fights with humans. He reached for his gun in case he needed it, and then the thing moved. He caught a glimpse of gray fur. It vanished into the forest.

He heard the whimper again and caught a glimpse of a pink dress behind a tree. “Clara?” he called as he walked forward. A mess of brownish hair appeared with a wild violet tucked into it, and then he saw her wet eyes and tear-streaked face.

“Policeman?”

He smiled. “That’s right, Clara. I’m a policeman. I’m here to rescue you. Your mommy was very worried about you.”

“There was a big dog, and it looked mean.”

There weren’t any wolves in Timberlake Park, even in this remote area. Gray foxes were rare, and mostly smaller than Clara, although one could still be frightening. Still, he was pretty sure he knew what he’d seen. “A coyote. It’s gone now. They don’t pick fights with things they can’t beat.” He put his gun back in its holster. Coyotes were new to Timberlake, having arrived in just the past decade, but they’d been advancing eastward for some time and were thriving. “It was probably as scared of you as you were of it.” Actually, Nolan rather doubted that, but clearly the coyote hadn’t felt she was safe food either.

“Oh.” Clara edged out from behind the woods. “Me and Spot were going to beat it up if it tried anything.”

“Spot?” The mother hadn’t reported that the little girl had a dog with her, and he didn’t see any sign of it.

“Spot!” said Clara, proudly presenting a foot-tall stuffed white bear that had seen better days. She held it in front of her and pushed it forward to show how it would attack.

Suppressing a chuckle, he walked over to her and crouched down to take a good look at the bear. “Coyotes are afraid of bears, for sure.”

“Even little ones?”

“Even little ones,” he assured her. “Coyotes are smart. They figure if there’s a little bear, the momma bear is probably nearby.” He offered her a hand. “Let’s you and I walk out of here and head to Mommy, okay?”

Clara looked at his hand doubtfully, then let go of Spot with one hand and put her hand in his. “Mommy’s okay? Without me and Spot to protect her? I was worried about her.”

He grinned at the show of bravado. “Mommy’s okay.”

Clara had been right where Marisa had said she would be, according to his GPS. South of straight east from the clearing, a little over a mile. Either Marisa had seen her and left her, or she’d had a hell of a lucky guess. Or she was psychic.

He scratched the last possibility off his list. No one had ever proved that psychic powers existed. Those who had tried were often revealed to be second-rate magicians. There was money, good money, being offered to anyone who could prove the existence of psychic phenomena to trained researchers, and no one had collected the money yet. So that left uncannily lucky, or complicit.

“Have you seen anyone besides me, since you— I mean, since Mommy got lost?”

“No.” She looked as if she might cry again. “Nobody.”

They walked about a quarter of a mile together before Clara announced that she was tired. He picked her up. If the ground had been more open, he would have tried setting her on his shoulders the way he did with his nephews and his niece, but she’d get whapped by a low hanging branch every thirty feet.

Sixty seconds later, she was asleep. She felt warm and comfortable in his arms, and she was such a tiny thing she didn’t even slow him down. To serve and protect was what had got him involved in police work in the beginning, and no one needed protection more than Clara did at that moment.
Someday maybe I’ll have a few kids of my own. I just have to find the right woman first
. Marisa popped into his mind, and he frowned.
Right woman and hot chick are not the same thing. Besides, I haven’t even seen her with her clothes on.

Marisa sat at the computer, holding the steaming cup of tea near her cheek. The steam helped clear her nose, and she needed the caffeine to keep herself awake and focused on the task. The C++ code on the screen was as obfuscated as any she’d seen, and she suspected it’d been written that way on purpose. No one could be stupid enough to code it so badly on accident, with variable names that didn’t indicate what purpose they served, no comments to speak of, and convoluted subroutine calls. It could be a sort of job security, writing code that no one else could understand. Wiser programmers knew it could also make you impossible to promote. In this case, neither had happened; the man who had written the particular mess Marisa was supposed to clean up had gotten another job offer and moved on. Sooner or later, it was likely he’d find himself stuck maintaining his own code for the rest of his life, unable to get a good recommendation. Karmic retribution could be a bitch sometimes.

Her first task was to go through the code and add comments as she tried to unravel the puzzle. She was good at what she did, and a few months of work for hire each year paid for groceries and the mortgage. She sipped her tea thoughtfully.

She remembered the policeman’s threat from the night before. While she hadn’t had another vision, she was certain he’d found the girl right where she’d told him to look, which meant he’d be by with questions. The worst part about that was that she actually wanted to see him again.
Why is it always the jerks who are so good-looking?
But she’d felt the lust in his gaze, and her body had responded.
There’s no way he’s going to sleep with me. He’s a cop, and he’s decided I’m a suspect. But that tight ass, those muscles. Yum. And he’s seen me naked. It seems unfair I didn’t get to see him naked too
. She somehow doubted he’d be convinced by that line of argument.

For a moment the idea of a love spell passed through her mind. It would solve all sorts of problems, end any police inquiry, and get her some lovemaking at the same time. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, and he fit her fantasies well. She believed in relationships of equality; it was the tug of dominance that made her wet. Nolan had an air of command to him, but the karmic backlash of bending someone to her will wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, it was wrong. Men weren’t usually worth the bother, anyway.
They can’t all be jerks. I’m probably just unlucky or too strange.

She was on her feet, still holding the tea cup, fifteen feet from the computer.
When did that happen?
It wasn’t a horribly unusual occurrence, although once she got into something she could work for hours and not notice time flying by until her tummy rumbles got too loud to ignore. That was why the pizza delivery place in town was the one and only number on speed dial on her phone. They didn’t usually deliver this far out, but they knew Marisa would pay extra for their trouble.

She walked back to the computer, sat back down, and stared at the code some more.
This subroutine doesn’t even do anything. What the fuck?
She didn’t delete it, although she would eventually. Instead she turned the whole section into a comment, which wouldn’t execute, and did the same thing with the line that called the routine.

The doorbell rang, and Marisa jumped, sloshing tea on the keyboard. No one ever rang the bell, and she’d been expecting Nolan to want to ask her questions.
Maybe he sent someone else. Maybe it’s the postman doing his rounds early.

But when she looked through the peep hole, she saw Nolan Coralone. Fine. She took a deep breath and opened the door. “Hello, Sergeant. Won’t you come in?”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said and walked in.

She loved the way a man looked in uniform. It wasn’t very witchy of her to have a fetish for a man in modern clothes, but she hadn’t conformed at any other point in her life, and she wasn’t going to be a stereotype now. She gestured to the various chairs and couches in the living room. Her computer was there too. Most of her house went unused, save for the living room, kitchen, and her bedroom. The place was too big for her, but the location was perfect. “Can I get you any tea? Soda? Water? Wine?”

“I can’t drink on duty, Ms. Clarke, but water would be fine.” He took a place on the couch where he had a good view of the kitchen, and she felt his gaze on her back as she poured a tall cup from the tap.

She brought it back. “Would you like hemlock with that? Or Yohimbe bark?”

“Isn’t hemlock poisonous?” He took the glass from her hand.

I should put a leash on my sense of humor
. “Well, yes. But you seemed to be watching me rather closely, as if I might poison you, and I thought I’d offer in case I was a disappointment.”

The corner of his eye crinkled, the only indication that he understood it was a joke. “And what does Yohimbe bark do?”

She chuckled. “It’s good for erectile dysfunction.”

He laughed. “Okay, okay. Not an issue, I can assure you.”

“Good to know.”
No. I am not going to flirt with him.

He waited for her to take a seat on the chair opposite him. “We found the little girl. She was exactly where you told me she would be. I talked to her for a while, and she didn’t remember seeing you. Neither did the mother. So the question remains, how did you know where she was? And don’t give me that nonsense about visions.”

She sipped her tea, biting back her first, angry reaction. There was no point in getting defensive. “You’ve rejected the most obvious hypothesis, Officer. So what is left? I’m just extraordinary lucky. A chance in a million that my random place happened to be the right one.”

He shook his head. “If psychic powers existed, we’d know by now.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

He frowned but seemed to take a moment to think it over.

“What was threatening her, Nolan?” She hadn’t meant to use his first name or show any sign that she remembered it even, but it had come out anyway. She had never been a formal person.

He raised his eyebrows. “Don’t your psychic powers tell you things like that?”

She shrugged. “I get to see what I get to see. That’s all. Before you told me it was a little girl that was missing…” She let her voice trail off. She didn’t see what good it would do to tell him the details of her vision.

“There was a coyote. It probably wouldn’t have dared attack her. They’re usually pretty wary of humans.”

She heard a
but
in his voice, so she pressed. “Usually.”

“Bad things have been known to happen. And coyotes crossbreed with dogs and wolves. There are very few purebred coyotes out there, if any. Those with a bit of dog in them are more likely to approach a human, and as a result, there have been a few attacks on small children.”

“But the little girl wasn’t hurt?”