"I'm fine," she insisted, getting irritated now, and thankful for the anger that was letting her put her troubling past on the back shelf where it belonged. "Look, forget what I said tonight. I didn't mean anything by it, I was just messing with Big Dave."
"Well, he's an ass**le and he deserved it," Jenna said, looking more than a little relieved that she wouldn't have to call in the white coats after all.
Alex smiled with a lightness she didn't really feel. "I'm gonna go. Have fun at Pete's, you guys." She hardly waited for them to tell her good-bye. Her rush to the door impeded by a trio of little old ladies talking and walking in slow motion, Alex's pulse was racing by the time she got her first lungful of the frigid night outside. She stood under the snow-laden eaves of the log-cabin church and glanced in all directions, looking for the striking face that had burned itself into her memory that first instant she saw him. He wasn't there.
Whoever he was, whatever had brought him to Harmony when the rest of civilization was barred by bad weather, he'd simply walked out into the darkness and vanished into the thin, cold air.
Chapter Five
Kade trekked deep into the frigid wilderness of the bush, leaving the tiny town of Harmony some forty miles behind him. There were only a handful of winter travel options for humans this far incountry: plane, dogsled, or snow-machine. Kade traveled on foot, his duffel and gear slung onto his back, his snowshoes carrying him over the surface of blowing drifts that could swallow a man to his earlobes. The brittle wind sawed at him as he ran up one steep rise then down through yet another gully, his inhuman speed and endurance all thanks to the part of him that was Breed.
It was his Alaskan heart and soul that relished the cold and the punishing terrain, calling to the wildness inside him--the wildness that was quick to rise again now that he was back on the familiar tundra of his homeland.
Following the frozen KoyukukRiver north toward the general location of the Toms settlement was easy enough. Once he got close to the area where the killings had occurred, his acute sense of smell led him the rest of the way. Despite the thick cover of fresh-fallen snow from the storms of the past couple days, to one of his kind, the taint of spilled blood still carried on the wind like a beacon lighting the path toward the scene of the recent carnage.
What he'd seen on the Web-posted video images Gideon had obtained in Boston had prepared him somewhat for his mission. He'd gone to Harmony's airstrip after the town hall meeting to get a private look at the dead who lay on ice in the yard's sole hangar. The wounds had been grisly on the video. Seeing them up close and personal certainly hadn't been an improvement.
But Kade had studied the lacerations--the near eviscerations--with a cool head and an objective eye. He hadn't found any surprises during his visit to the makeshift morgue. It hadn't been either animal or human that killed the Toms family.
Something else had brutalized them ... just as the young woman, the pretty brown-eyed blonde named Alexandra Maguire, had insisted in the gathering at the town church.
Now, she, on the other hand, had been a surprise.
Tall and lean, with a simple beauty that needed no enhancements, the female had stunned Kade when she stood up and declared that she had seen something strange in the snow. For one thing, Kade had not been aware of any witnesses, except the idiot who'd recorded the video and had the bad sense to post it online. Locating and silencing that particular problem was among Kade's top mission priorities for the Order, just below the priority of identifying the Rogue vampire--or vampires--responsible for the bloody attack and seeing that justice was served with a cold, swift hand.
But now there was an added complication in the form of this female, Alex. Just one more wrinkle in a situation already full of them. Whatever she saw, whatever she knew about the killings out here in the bush, she was a problem that Kade would have to deal with before things were complicated any further. He could sure as hell think of worse things to do in the line of duty than pump the attractive blonde for information.
One of those worse things loomed ahead of him in the darkness--the shadowy cluster of houses and outbuildings that comprised the Toms family settlement. Kade's nostrils twitched with the scent of old blood beneath the white cover of snow that blanketed the site. From this distance some hundred yards away, the scene looked picturesque, peaceful. A quiet frontier outpost nestled among the spruce and birch of the boreal woods that surrounded it.
But the stench of death clung to the place even in the cold, growing more pungent as Kade walked up to the stout log building nearest the trail. He removed his snow-shoes and walked up the two steps to the porch. The rough-hewn door was closed but unlocked. Kade squeezed the latch and gave the door his shoulder, pushing it open.
A large pool of frozen blood glistened like black onyx in the scant glow of the moonlight spilling in around him as he stood on the threshold of the house. His body's reaction to the sight and scent of the crystallized red cells hit him like a hammer to the skull. Even though the blood was spilled and old, of no use to Kade, whose kind could only take nourishment from the veins of living human beings, his fangs punched out from his gums in response.
He hissed a low curse through those stretching fangs as he lifted his head and caught sight of more blood--more signs of struggle and suffering--in the smeared, dark trail that led from the main room of the cabin toward the short hallway that cut down its center. One of the victims had tried to escape the predator who'd come to kill them. Kade set down his duffel and snowshoes, then followed the corridor. The human had only sealed its fate by fleeing to the back bedroom. Cornered there, the garish splatters on the walls and unmade bed told Kade enough of the brutality of this slaying, as well.