Kay Hooper - Stealing Shadows

His scowl intensified, but his voice was low, almost gentle. "You really shouldn't talk to me like that, Abby. Until those final papers are signed, you're still my wife. And a wife should never say such things to her husband. Not if she knows what's good for her."

Abby felt an all-too-familiar chill of fear and fought to keep him from seeing how easily he could still manipulate her emotions. "In thirty seconds I'm going to let go of this dog. From the sound of him, I don't think he'll need any encouragement at all to take a few pieces out of you. And while he's doing it, I'll be calling the sheriff."

Maybe he remembered that shotgun she had pointed at him on his last night in this house, or maybe Gary simply recognized that Abby was not going to back down this time. In any case, he was the one who retreated, slowly, down the steps.

"And Gary?"

He looked at her, silent, face hard.

"Just so you know – if anything happens to this dog, like poison, for instance, or a stray shot from some anonymous hunter's gun, or even a car that doesn't stop, I'm going to give your name to the sheriff."

His expression darkened just a bit, proving to Abby that she did indeed know her husband. Then he swore beneath his breath and stalked away. She heard the gate open, and then close with a loud click.

Abby stood stiffly, listening until she heard a car start up nearby, then the crunch of tires on the snowy street and the engine fading into the distance.

Then she slumped against the doorjamb.

She really needed to get a padlock for the gate, a strong one. And the security company had recommended shrubbery lights and a post lamp at the front walkway, so that no one could approach the house at night unseen. Burglars, they'd said, tended to avoid houses with good perimeter lighting.

She wondered if violent ex-husbands would.

Bryce was whimpering softly, obviously disturbed. Abby managed to get hold of herself enough to take him out onto the porch. But the dog refused to move more than a few feet away from her, lifting his leg against the nearest bush and returning quickly to her. Maybe it was the cold or the snow still drifting lazily downward that made him disinclined to linger. Or maybe he simply knew that he needed to remain close.

Abby brought him back inside and locked the door, then reset the security system.

"Tomorrow," she told the dog as she dried his feet and brushed a bit of snow from his glossy red coat, "we're calling the security company and getting those lights put in. And we'll get a padlock for the back gate."

Her voice was calm, but her heart still thudded, and that horrible cold knot of anxiety that Gary always created lay huge and heavy in the pit of her stomach.

She was afraid. She hated to be afraid.

"I don't want to scare you, Abby. But you have to be careful. I saw a possible future for you, and it isn't good.

There's a chance… I saw him kill you, Abby. I couldn't see his face, and I don't know who he is, but he was enraged, cursing, and his hands were on your throat."

"What? What are you saying?"

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. You have to be careful. He's a madman, sick in his mind, and he'll kill you unless – "

"Unless?"

"The future is not static, Abby. Even prophecies are not always what the seer interprets them to be."

That had been Alexandra Melton's warning, and all she would say. Since Abby had only a few days earlier thrown her abusive husband out of the house, she had been half convinced it had been her own fear and anxiety the older woman sensed, that the "prophecy" had arisen from that.

Still, she had continued to be wary, to take care. Given Gary 's propensity toward violence, it had been obvious to her that if Alexandra had indeed seen a future event, the madman in her vision would certainly be him.

Until, as Matt had baldly stated, a killer had begun butchering women. Now she had to be wary, not only of her ex-husband, but of virtually every other man as well.

They were certainly not reassuring thoughts that followed Abby to bed that night. And when Bryce looked at her with pleading eyes, she allowed the big dog to stretch out happily beside her.

She kept her hand on him all night.

FEBRUARY 25, 1999

Cassie woke in the morning with a sense of expectancy. She lay in bed for some minutes, thinking, aware from the brightness of the room that it had snowed considerably more during the night, but in no hurry to get up and look. Her sleep had been unusually restful, dreamless as far as she remembered, and she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

The evening with Ben had been surprising. As he had noted, she was able to relax her guard in his company, yet even as her "extra" senses lay peacefully dormant, the other five had awakened with a vengeance. She had been hyper-aware of him, of his voice, his movements and gestures, his smiles.

Especially his smiles.

And oddly aware of his awareness. She found that strange because it was something completely new for her. Always before, either she could read a man – such as the sheriff – or she could not. If she could not, it meant he was a closed book to her, revealing nothing of himself that was not visible.

Perhaps because of the violent male minds she had routinely dipped into her entire adult life, Cassie had seldom felt more than a fleeting interest in any man personally. And even when the natural urges and drives of a healthy young female body had presented themselves, she'd had little difficulty in pushing them from her consciousness.

When one's only experience of sex lay in horrible mental images of unspeakable violence and death accompanied by terror and agony, it was virtually reflexive to completely avoid even the possibility of becoming involved with any man.

So Cassie knew herself to be dangerously isolated and inexperienced when it came to saner human emotions, and ridiculously ignorant about the physical side of a normal male-female relationship.

Ben was attracted to her, she was sure of it. She knew she was attracted to him. Instincts she hardly understood told her that the attraction was strong and intensifying, and that it was only a matter of time before…

Before what? Before they ended up in bed together? Before they fell in love? Before he swept her off her feet and into some absurd emotional fairy tale she hadn't believed in since she was eight and possibly not even then?

Cassie threw back the covers as she sat up, her earlier sense of happy expectancy deflated. She was, she told herself, being an absolute idiot. For the first time in her adult life, she had been thrown into the company of a handsome, sexy man whose mind was closed to her and who had shown her what was undoubtedly only ordinarily polite attention, and her imagination was running away with her.

Ben needed her to help catch a madman threatening his town, and that was the only reason he needed her. His devotion to this town and its people was strong, his abhorrence of insane killers even stronger, and in her abilities lay possible tools for him to use to protect the former and destroy the latter.

That was all.

Having reached that conclusion, Cassie tried to stop thinking about it. About him. She got up and dressed, then put the coffee on, got her boots from the laundry room, and took Max out for his morning run.

It had snowed about four inches, not so much that it made walking difficult but just enough to cover the winter-flattened grass of the fields with a blanket of pristine white. The bare limbs of the hardwood trees were frosted with a thin layer, while the pines so common in the state bore the weight of snow on drooping boughs that appeared to slump in weariness.

Cassie watched Max dash around happily, then lifted her gaze to the mountains. Ryan's Bluff was nestled in a valley high up against a shoulder of the Appalachians; normally the view of the mountains was pleasant and often a bit hazy, but today the dull green and brown was dusted with snow and the cold, clear air made the hulking shapes seem to loom nearer than they actually were.