Nearly Human (Marked Book 1) Page 4

  I was loath to turn my back on him, but I had no other choice if I wanted to get in my car. He stood still, though, staring. My body screamed at me to hide, to go still, something, anything, just make the predator stop hunting us. Instead, I swallowed against the nausea, promised myself at least two cold beers once I got home, and unlocked my car. I threw my bag into the passenger seat before turning to face Waltrip once more. “I don’t care how good you think your reason was. You fucking stalked and terrorized me. You and your little friends. I’m calling your licensing board and the cops to report you once I’m out of here and safe.”

  “That’s fine,” he said, voice infuriatingly calm. “I just need to let you know that I’m looking into the Raymonds. I have questions.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit shitty shit, shit. “I’m off the clock,” I said. “Call tomorrow and the office secretary can schedule you an appointment.” And I’d make damn sure I had Ethan on hand for it, too.

  Red smiled, the expression completely transforming him. He looked good, damn it, and I hated that I noticed. At least when he was scowling or giving me that damned ‘I’m humoring you’ bland expression, he looked too gruff, too brutal. But smiling? He looked like one of those hot Scottish guys who throw giant logs around for fun. Damn it.

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  Tilting his head to one side, he inhaled slow and deep. My legs didn’t move, no matter how hard I tried. I wanted to get in the car and drive off while he did his little dominance display, sniffing the air for my scent and posturing to show off his larger size, but that stupid bunny part of me just stood there, frozen somewhere between fear and—goddammit—interest.

  “I’ve never been wrong before,” he finally said. “And I don’t think I am now, not really, but this morning, I could’ve sworn you were like me. Now…” He sniffed again, not as deep but twice as loud, making it obvious. “Now, I’m not sure we’re as much alike as I thought.”

  “Well. On that odd little note,” I said with a forced laugh. “Make the appointment. I’ll answer what I can but keep in mind, even though my patients are dead, they still have privacy rights.” I moved then, final-fucking-ly, and got into my car, locking the door before I started the engine. I didn’t look back at him again, but I knew he stared at me as I tore out of the parking lot.

  Friday flew past. I was proud of myself for not asking Reba about Waltrip calling until almost the end of the day. Sometime during the early part of my shift, two hearses from Tuttle Family Funerals and Crematorium arrived, and the Raymonds went home. The rest of my hours were filled with paperwork, phone calls, and inventory checks. Justin had skipped out on those, too, apparently. Reba muttered about writing him up, but so far, he hadn’t done anything fireable. Just shitty.

  Anxiety is the better part of valor or however the saying goes. Rather than going to grab lunch, I dove headfirst into my backlog of administrative paperwork to avoid seeing anyone, even Reba. At ten to five, I gathered up my bag and a few journals I wanted to read at home, shut down my computer, and headed for the reception area. Reba was already waiting by the door, texting with impressive speed considering the length of her nails. “Hey, I meant to ask. Do I have any meetings scheduled next week?”

  “Just the usual weekly one with the hospital folks on Monday at St. Dymphna’s Memorial and a lunch thing with some funeral director group on Tuesday at La Cheval over in Tyler.” She looked up from her phone and frowned. “Were you supposed to? Did I miss something?” She started to head back to her desk, but I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “No, it’s okay. I was just double checking. It’s been a weird week.”

  She waited until we were past the night guard and almost to the sidewalk before asking slyly, “Expecting a call from the sheriff? Were y’all gonna meet up?”

  “Good Lord! If you bat your lashes any hard, you’re going to achieve lift off!” Reba snorted but elbowed me, winking. “The Raymonds’ deaths are going to have a lot of questions heading our way.”

  “Oh, that’s so true.” She sighed. “I feel so bad for not thinking about that! Do you think whoever owns those dogs will be charged with murder?”

  We’d made it to our cars, parked next to one another today. There was no sign of Waltrip lurking in the parking lot, and my senses told me the only other creatures nearby were definitely of the non-predator variety. Safe.

  “Folks at the sheriff’s department said it looked like wild dogs,” I replied carefully, not wanting to lie and dig myself a hole. “If it was wild dogs, there are no owner to charge. Poor things will be put down, though.”

  Reba tutted, fishing her keys from her cavernous purse.

  “Well, it’s a damn shame, is what it is. Those kids are barely older than my sister, and I can’t imagine her…” She shook her head. “I know it’s part of the job, but some of these deaths are just a little too close to home.”

  We parted a few minutes later, her heading toward what passed for downtown Tuttle, and me heading for my tiny house on the outskirts of the city, just before it turned into miles of forest interspersed with small farms. It was early enough in the evening that traffic was light, even for Tuttle, and I made it home in record time, pulling into the open carport next to the house.

  As soon as I stepped out of the car, my senses went on high alert. Freeze, hide, get under the car, don’t move!

  “Shit.” The word came out as barely a tremor of sound. Next door, the sound of Mrs. Hudson’s TV blaring the evening news out of Tyler was loud through her open window. I could smell the chili mac she was making for dinner and the sweet-sour smell of something slightly off in her kitchen. Milk a little too close to being bad, maybe. She was humming, moving around, talking to someone in another part of the house.

  I closed my eyes against my better judgment and tried to focus, filtering her out and letting my senses reach for whatever was hunting me, sending my awareness into overdrive. I breathed in slowly, letting the evening smells wash through me, picking them out one by one. Grass, hot car, drying earth, my herb garden, a cat pissed in the roses again, cold charcoal in the grill, wood rot sneaking through the walls, rodents, asphalt…

  And there. There it was. Fading fast. Sour-animal-hunter-wrong. The smell that had been on the Raymonds.

  The killer. The were. They’d been here, outside my house.

  The smell wasn’t strong, maybe a few hours old, meaning they’d crept around while I was at work. Taking a step toward my back door, I stopped myself mid-stride. Don’t be stupid. You know how this goes. Call the police first!

  And tell them what? Hey, I’m kind of a werewolf but without the cool parts and my super senses tell me a killer was sneaking around my house. Oh, how do I know? Well, I sniffed two corpses yesterday and—

  Yeah, calling the cops would go well. Okay. I had to do it myself, I reasoned, taking another step and hating how my pulse made my ears ache with its intensity.

  Or… you know, you can call a specific cop. And see if he’d be willing to come check this out. And, you know, hang out and talk. Reconnect.

  “Great. About to be murdered and I’m considering a booty call.” Next door, something clattered in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen, and I jumped, jerking my head around to see the source of the noise. Mrs. Hudson started cussing up a storm at Bitsy, her mutt that liked to jump on the kitchen table, and I blew out a long breath. Until I checked my house out and knew it was safe, being calm was a pipe dream. Raking my fingers through my thick blond hair and making it stick out in just about every direction, I muttered, “C’mon, Landry. You got this.”

  Great. I was talking in third person. The hallmark of someone who’s ‘got this.’

  I made it all the way to my front door before a car crunched up my gravel drive, stopping me in my tracks. A low-slung, shiny, dark-blue car that looked way too fine for Tuttle pulled up behind my little Fiesta, the driver giving me a wave as he shut off the engine.

  “Well, fuck me,” I muttered. “Speak of th
e devil and he shall appear.”

  Chapter Three

  “Oh, thank God!”

  Ethan paused, still half in his car. “I honestly wasn’t expecting such an enthusiastic greeting. Accusations of stalking maybe but not praise to a deity.” He stood fully, holding up a cardboard carrier. “I brought a local IPA, thought maybe we could have a few drinks?”

  “I need you!”

  His grin was slow and familiar, and very, very hot. “Very definitely not expecting that.” Folding his arms, he leaned against his truck and nodded at my house. “Like the color scheme you’ve got going on here. Really works with the midcentury style of the house.” He nodded, pleased with what he was seeing. “A lot of people get these post-war VA homes and start stripping ‘em down to modernize the exterior. Glad you kept the aesthetic.” He flashed me a bright smile. “Now, what’s this about needing me? Care to elaborate?”

  My face was a lovely shade of beetroot, heat spreading up my chest to my neck before suffusing across my cheeks. Ethan’s quick grin did nothing to help my embarrassment. And if my previous experiences with Ethan were any indication, there was no way he was going to let me forget the double entendre or my blush.

  “I need your help,” I corrected, baring my teeth in a parody of his grin. He laughed but got the rest of the way out of his car and came to me with an easy lope that would have looked ridiculous on almost anyone else. He stopped just out of arm’s reach and fell into an easy posture, hip cocked and arms loosely folded. I wasn’t fooled, though.

  He wasn’t waiting. He was waiting.

  His gaze flickered from my house, curiosity evident in his expression, to Mrs. Hudson’s where the clatter and rush of the dinner hour was now in full swing, then back to me, his brow quirking in a silent question.

  “I think whoever killed the Raymonds was here earlier.”

  He startled, jerking up straight so fast, I was surprised nothing popped. I told him quickly what I’d noticed, and he gave me a curt nod, striding away from me and toward the back of the carport where it opened into the small yard I shared with the Hudsons. He was gone less than five minutes, leaving me standing alone and awkward in my own driveway. He came jogging back with a grim set to his mouth, brows drawn and expression dark.

  “Is your house unlocked?”

  “Uh, no? I mean, I locked it when I left this morning but—”

  He cut me off, holding out his hand, wiggling his fingers. It took me a second to realize he wanted my keys.

  “You could use your words like a big boy, you know.” I dropped the ring into his hand anyway. Ethan sighed gustily and started picking through the keys before I had pity on him. “The silver one with the pink dot of nail polish on top.”

  He hesitated for a moment, glancing up at the house and then back at me. “I know I’m going to hate myself for this in a minute but come inside with me. You’ll be able to tell me if anything is off.”

  He honestly thought I was about to let him go in there without me? “To be frank, I was planning on following you in,” I admitted, brushing past him closely enough to get a good, hard hit of his smell, bergamot and sandalwood and salt-sweat-skin. Get it together, Landry! “Just let you flush out the killers first.”

  “Thanks,” he drawled. “Glad to be useful.”

  The déjà vu hit hard. We’d had a very similar conversation That Summer (yes, it was worth the capitals). I had gotten home from work, a part time thing at the dinky little Dairy Queen knock-off in Belmarais, to find my house standing wide open from front door to back when no one was home. I’d turned my bike (because I was that kid) around and high tailed it to Ethan’s, begged him to come back with me and check out the house. “I don’t wanna call the cops. Aunt Cleverly would flip if they got all up in her shit and there wasn’t anything wrong.” Ethan had thrown on his shirt (and he was that guy, never owned a shirt he didn’t take off and throw in the corner as soon as he could) and made me put my bike in the back of his truck.

  Back at the house I shared with Aunt Cleverly, he’d walked around the outside, making me stay back at the truck before telling me to follow him into the house and see if anything seemed out of place. We’d gone through every room and cupboard, even the tiny little closet where the water heater lived. Nothing was gone or moved. Ethan had declared that the door probably didn’t catch on the latch as Cleverly left for her shift earlier that day and the wind had blown it open, but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling someone had been there, looking around.

  We’d gone back to his place, ignored his brothers, and hung out in his room till my aunt was home from work. And by hung out, I mean we had hot, sweaty monkey sex for hours with the enthusiasm only newly out teenagers who just figured out what their dicks were for could muster.

  The walk through my house was haunted by the ghosts of that moment in time. Everything was still locked tight, Ethan using the key on the deadbolt to let us in. Not a thing was out of place, down to the sock I’d aimed at the laundry basket that morning and missed. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling.

  “You ever go into a room, and you know someone was just in there but left like the second you walked in?” I asked once we rounded back into my small kitchen. Ethan took a seat at the table as I headed for the fridge, accepting the beer I held out in his direction. “That’s what I feel right now.”

  “I’m not trying to downplay your concerns,” he said carefully, taking the open beer I offered him, “but I think it’s possible you’re projecting a bit.”

  Sinking into the chair across from him, I tried not to be annoyed. It’s possible I failed, because my next words made the scowl between his eyebrows deepen. “You think I’m crazy again?”

  “Landry, I never thought you were crazy. Never.” He didn’t quite meet my eyes, looking at my shoulder instead. “I said some shitty things but that was… Hell, a lifetime ago, almost. I’d hoped you’d have moved past that by now.”

  “Wow. That’s kind of shitty, you know?” I took a deep pull of my beer, wincing at the acrid, sour bite of it. “Are you over it?” I asked, cutting him off when he spoke. “I mean, that whole thing? Not just us fucking like rabbits.”

  “Which part?” he asked, setting his beer aside and leaning forward, forearms resting against the table. He pinned me with the intensity of his glare. “The part where you lost your shit and told me to go to hell? Or the part where you broke my heart and took off to fucking Baltimore before I got back to town?” Ethan blew out a rough breath, leaning back to scrub at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I guess we can safely say the answer to that question is no,” he murmured. “Sorry. For about a second before I opened my mouth, I really thought the only thing I was going to say is ‘yeah, no big deal, water under the bridge’ or something bro-y like that.”

  “I think having our dicks in each other’s mouths for the better part of four months put us past bro status some time ago.” I took another pull of my beer, staring at him over the bottle. He smirked, shook his head, and ducked his face away. I could see the pink tinge to his ears and felt myself unbend just a tiny bit inside. “I’m not going to apologize for everything. I thought…” I trailed off, rolling my mostly empty bottle back and forth between my hands. “I believed you when you said I was just an experiment.”

  “Jesus, Landry. You know—”

  “No, I didn’t. Hell, I trailed around after you like a hungry dog after a bone for the better part of middle school and high school. Everyone knew I had a thing for you. When you got interested in me, I jumped on it because, hell, it was every damn wet dream I’d had come true.”

  Ethan set his bottle down carefully, lips parting on something unspoken before he shook his head, closing his eyes like he wanted to block me out but couldn’t.

  “When I told you about me, about…” I gestured vaguely at my temple. My little ‘problem’ had been a mental one—or at least I thought so back then. Like my mom, like my grandma. None of us Babins were right in the head, and everyone in Belma
rais knew it and loved to remind me about it. “You didn’t freak out on me. You treated me the same as ever. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” I laughed, raising my bottle to my lips. Damn thing was empty. How’d that happen?

  Ethan raised his brow again, damn it, and glanced from me to the fridge. Daring me to get more liquid courage. I sighed and settled back in my chair. Best to get over this and get all the dirty laundry aired before we had to work together again.

  “The most beautiful boy I’d ever seen, the one I had been dreaming about day and night since I figured out my girls-are-yucky phase wasn’t a phase, not only liked me back but didn’t think I was one of the headcase Babins? Didn’t tell me all this weird shit happening to me was my brain being broken? Shit, I thought I’d hit the lotto.”

  Ethan huffed, something between a laugh and sigh. “I thought you were a were, like me.” His beer was empty, too. I knew he wasn’t feeling it at all. A benefit of being were was a very fast metabolism. Beer buzzes never lasted longer than a minute or so, if even that long, and even then, it would have taken a tremendous amount of beer, not one bottle of the shitty light beer I kept in my fridge. Still, I blamed the alcohol for the look he gave me, all blown pupil and unwavering focus. “I thought you were being coy with me whenever I hinted around about it. I didn’t realize you had no idea.”

  “Not until Tyler.” I sighed.

  “Fucking Tyler.”

  Apparently, everyone in the Stone family had thought I was a were, too. I just thought they were being antsy around me because of my family’s reputation, but they were being paranoid about a new wolf in town, one from a family with no history of weres in the bloodlines. Tyler, bless his little heart, decided to force my hand one day, make me prove I wasn’t trying to encroach on pack territory or something. Walked right into the den where Ethan and I were definitely not having a sneaky grope underneath a blanket, no sir, and shifted right in front of me. Looked me dead in the eyes and shifted. Everyone on the block heard my scream.