Taken by Storm
Page 22
HOW LONG AGO DID SHE LEAVE? I typed back.
DON’T KNOW. The reply came almost immediately, and it was followed by an addendum, which set the phone to buzzing once more. LAKE SMELLS BLOOD.
Caroline and I were going to have to have a serious conversation about her texting habits. Seriously. “She was here”? “Lake smells blood”? These kinds of things merited a phone call.
Glancing back up at Archer, I noticed that he had a funny smile on his face. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen you actually look your age,” he told me.
Right. Because texting was so very teen.
Unsure whether he’d find me making a phone call equally amusing, I dialed Caroline’s number.
She answered on the third ring and cut right to the chase. “Maddy was here, but she’s not anymore. Lake smells blood. I want to go inside, but Chase and Lake seemed to think we should ask you first.”
Blood? Check.
Potentially rabid werewolf? Check.
Of course Caroline wanted to go inside.
“How far away from the house are you guys?” I asked, uncertain how close Lake would have had to get in order to pick up on the scent.
“We’re about a hundred yards out.”
My breath caught in my throat. At that distance, if Lake was smelling blood, it meant one of two things: either there was a lot of blood, or it was fresh.
“Archer,” I said.
“Yes?” His amusement seemed to have dwindled, based on the content of my conversation.
“Three questions,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers as I spoke. “One: do you have a car? Two: do you have plans tonight? And three: how fast can you drive?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE BLOOD WASN’T HUMAN AND IT WASN’T FRESH, but it was everywhere. The entire cabin smelled like copper and rotting meat. The floorboards—wooden and rotting themselves—had soaked up most of the actual liquid, but there was splatter on every wall in the house.
“You,” Archer said, coming in on my heels and appraising the “decorations,” “live a very strange life.”
I couldn’t exactly argue the point. Chase and Lake were waiting out in the forest. This much blood—even if it was animal blood, even if it was old—might have been too much for the predators inside them, and that wasn’t a chance any of us could afford to take, so that left Jed, Caroline, and me to appraise the inside of the cabin—with Archer tagging along.
“What happened here?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question. The pattern of gore made it look like something had been eviscerated.
Maybe multiple somethings.
“There aren’t any bodies.” Even Caroline sounded disturbed, and that couldn’t possibly have been a good thing. “There’s nothing but blood.”
As we walked from room to room, I noted the way Archer kept his distance from Caroline, and the way that Jed never took his eyes off Archer.
Four psychics walk into a rotting cabin….
I didn’t let myself finish the joke. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened here. Someone had been living in this cabin—most likely Maddy. How long ago had she left? What had she done while she was here? Was she the one who’d painted these walls red with blood?
In the corner of the back bedroom, I spotted a bundle of blankets. As I knelt down to investigate, I saw a small brown tuft of fur. For a split second, I froze, but after ascertaining that the tuft wasn’t moving, I nudged it with the tip of my shoe, revealing the rest.
A teddy bear.
It was old, worn, and missing both eyes, and I was fairly certain someone had made a regular habit of gnawing on its ear.
“Who lives here?” Archer asked.
I picked up the teddy bear, running my thumb over the edge of its worn fur and wondering if it had belonged to one of my kids.
“No one lives here,” I said. “Not anymore.”
I grabbed the blankets, too, and headed back out to the woods. I’d seen enough. Remembered enough.
This place had been steeped in blood long before someone had taken to slaughtering animals here. Wilson had seen to that, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time than I had to imagining what life would have been like for the kids in my pack, growing up under a psychopath’s thumb.
The last thing I wanted to think about was Maddy coming here, because she couldn’t come home.
Wordlessly, Chase took the blankets from me. Lake took the teddy bear. Without my even having to ask, they lifted their respective targets to their faces and inhaled. My mind was flooded with their impressions.
Running water. Fresh-cut grass. Maddy.
She didn’t smell like us anymore, but she didn’t smell like a killer, either. If anything, she smelled a little bit like—
“Shampoo,” Lake declared out loud. “Drugstore shampoo—the cheap kind. Smells like she used the whole bottle.”
“How long ago was she here?” I asked. “Can you tell?”
Lake looked at Chase.
“It’s hard to be sure,” Chase said. “She slept on these blankets every night, so her scent would be strong, regardless.”
I digested that piece of information. There was no shortage of beds and cots in Wilson’s cabin, but Maddy—who’d come back here for reasons I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around—had slept on the floor.
“Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?” Caroline was all business.
“Months,” Chase said, looking up from the blankets. “I’d say she left three, maybe four months ago.”
That left three months unaccounted for after Maddy had left the Wayfarer, and at least as much time between when she left here and the Wyoming murder. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d hunted in the woods, but couldn’t figure out why she would have gone to the trouble of killing so many animals in the house. Why had she come here in the first place? Why had she left?
“Did she sleep with this, too?” I turned back to the battered teddy, the one that had probably once belonged to Lily or Sophie or one of the younger kids.
Lake nodded, and I wondered if she could picture Maddy the way I could, curled up on a blanket, holding on to the only piece of the pack she had left.
My heart hurt.
The day was almost over, and Callum had told me we’d have at most a week. We weren’t any closer to finding Maddy than we had been when we left, and the state of Wilson’s cabin didn’t do much to assuage my doubts about Maddy’s mental state.
Time to bring out the big gun.
“Here,” I said, taking the teddy bear from Lake and handing it to Archer. “You said you needed something that belonged to Maddy. It’s not clothing or hair, but hopefully, it’ll do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NIGHTFALL—AND SLEEP—COULDN’T COME FAST enough. We set up camp again, on our side of the border, but Archer opted for sleeping in his car—either because he didn’t like people watching him work, or because the idea of sleeping in close proximity to two werewolves, a girl he’d tried to kill, and a girl he’d been conditioned to think of only as a killer probably fell under the classification of “let’s not and say we did.”
Or maybe a little of both.
Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I’d seen the past few days—every horror, every drop of blood—and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.
And then I practiced letting it out.
This time, I didn’t start with a specific memory. I didn’t walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head—a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.
In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I’d been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there—in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.
In a way, I’d been building rooms just like this one in my mind my entire life—for fear and sadness and everything I couldn’t let myself want. But this time, it was different, because even though there were no windows or doors, no way out—there was a way in.
DON’T KNOW. The reply came almost immediately, and it was followed by an addendum, which set the phone to buzzing once more. LAKE SMELLS BLOOD.
Caroline and I were going to have to have a serious conversation about her texting habits. Seriously. “She was here”? “Lake smells blood”? These kinds of things merited a phone call.
Glancing back up at Archer, I noticed that he had a funny smile on his face. “I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen you actually look your age,” he told me.
Right. Because texting was so very teen.
Unsure whether he’d find me making a phone call equally amusing, I dialed Caroline’s number.
She answered on the third ring and cut right to the chase. “Maddy was here, but she’s not anymore. Lake smells blood. I want to go inside, but Chase and Lake seemed to think we should ask you first.”
Blood? Check.
Potentially rabid werewolf? Check.
Of course Caroline wanted to go inside.
“How far away from the house are you guys?” I asked, uncertain how close Lake would have had to get in order to pick up on the scent.
“We’re about a hundred yards out.”
My breath caught in my throat. At that distance, if Lake was smelling blood, it meant one of two things: either there was a lot of blood, or it was fresh.
“Archer,” I said.
“Yes?” His amusement seemed to have dwindled, based on the content of my conversation.
“Three questions,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers as I spoke. “One: do you have a car? Two: do you have plans tonight? And three: how fast can you drive?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE BLOOD WASN’T HUMAN AND IT WASN’T FRESH, but it was everywhere. The entire cabin smelled like copper and rotting meat. The floorboards—wooden and rotting themselves—had soaked up most of the actual liquid, but there was splatter on every wall in the house.
“You,” Archer said, coming in on my heels and appraising the “decorations,” “live a very strange life.”
I couldn’t exactly argue the point. Chase and Lake were waiting out in the forest. This much blood—even if it was animal blood, even if it was old—might have been too much for the predators inside them, and that wasn’t a chance any of us could afford to take, so that left Jed, Caroline, and me to appraise the inside of the cabin—with Archer tagging along.
“What happened here?” I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question. The pattern of gore made it look like something had been eviscerated.
Maybe multiple somethings.
“There aren’t any bodies.” Even Caroline sounded disturbed, and that couldn’t possibly have been a good thing. “There’s nothing but blood.”
As we walked from room to room, I noted the way Archer kept his distance from Caroline, and the way that Jed never took his eyes off Archer.
Four psychics walk into a rotting cabin….
I didn’t let myself finish the joke. Instead, I tried to piece together what had happened here. Someone had been living in this cabin—most likely Maddy. How long ago had she left? What had she done while she was here? Was she the one who’d painted these walls red with blood?
In the corner of the back bedroom, I spotted a bundle of blankets. As I knelt down to investigate, I saw a small brown tuft of fur. For a split second, I froze, but after ascertaining that the tuft wasn’t moving, I nudged it with the tip of my shoe, revealing the rest.
A teddy bear.
It was old, worn, and missing both eyes, and I was fairly certain someone had made a regular habit of gnawing on its ear.
“Who lives here?” Archer asked.
I picked up the teddy bear, running my thumb over the edge of its worn fur and wondering if it had belonged to one of my kids.
“No one lives here,” I said. “Not anymore.”
I grabbed the blankets, too, and headed back out to the woods. I’d seen enough. Remembered enough.
This place had been steeped in blood long before someone had taken to slaughtering animals here. Wilson had seen to that, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time than I had to imagining what life would have been like for the kids in my pack, growing up under a psychopath’s thumb.
The last thing I wanted to think about was Maddy coming here, because she couldn’t come home.
Wordlessly, Chase took the blankets from me. Lake took the teddy bear. Without my even having to ask, they lifted their respective targets to their faces and inhaled. My mind was flooded with their impressions.
Running water. Fresh-cut grass. Maddy.
She didn’t smell like us anymore, but she didn’t smell like a killer, either. If anything, she smelled a little bit like—
“Shampoo,” Lake declared out loud. “Drugstore shampoo—the cheap kind. Smells like she used the whole bottle.”
“How long ago was she here?” I asked. “Can you tell?”
Lake looked at Chase.
“It’s hard to be sure,” Chase said. “She slept on these blankets every night, so her scent would be strong, regardless.”
I digested that piece of information. There was no shortage of beds and cots in Wilson’s cabin, but Maddy—who’d come back here for reasons I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around—had slept on the floor.
“Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?” Caroline was all business.
“Months,” Chase said, looking up from the blankets. “I’d say she left three, maybe four months ago.”
That left three months unaccounted for after Maddy had left the Wayfarer, and at least as much time between when she left here and the Wyoming murder. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d hunted in the woods, but couldn’t figure out why she would have gone to the trouble of killing so many animals in the house. Why had she come here in the first place? Why had she left?
“Did she sleep with this, too?” I turned back to the battered teddy, the one that had probably once belonged to Lily or Sophie or one of the younger kids.
Lake nodded, and I wondered if she could picture Maddy the way I could, curled up on a blanket, holding on to the only piece of the pack she had left.
My heart hurt.
The day was almost over, and Callum had told me we’d have at most a week. We weren’t any closer to finding Maddy than we had been when we left, and the state of Wilson’s cabin didn’t do much to assuage my doubts about Maddy’s mental state.
Time to bring out the big gun.
“Here,” I said, taking the teddy bear from Lake and handing it to Archer. “You said you needed something that belonged to Maddy. It’s not clothing or hair, but hopefully, it’ll do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NIGHTFALL—AND SLEEP—COULDN’T COME FAST enough. We set up camp again, on our side of the border, but Archer opted for sleeping in his car—either because he didn’t like people watching him work, or because the idea of sleeping in close proximity to two werewolves, a girl he’d tried to kill, and a girl he’d been conditioned to think of only as a killer probably fell under the classification of “let’s not and say we did.”
Or maybe a little of both.
Rather than sleeping myself, I practiced. I practiced taking everything I’d seen the past few days—every horror, every drop of blood—and locking it away, so deep in my mind that I could pretend that nothing had happened.
And then I practiced letting it out.
This time, I didn’t start with a specific memory. I didn’t walk myself step by step through a scene. Instead, I built a room inside my head—a tiny room with white walls and no windows and no doors. No way out.
In that room, I put the sound of screams, tearing flesh, and heavy breathing, the smell of rancid blood. Everything I’d been holding back, everything threatening to devour me whole was there—in the ceiling of that room, the corners, the floor.
In a way, I’d been building rooms just like this one in my mind my entire life—for fear and sadness and everything I couldn’t let myself want. But this time, it was different, because even though there were no windows or doors, no way out—there was a way in.
