Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

More than the hunter had bargained for. Madness strips away control, pulls even the soulless over its edge and into the maelstrom.

Outside, the wind rips through the trees, lays flat the slender stalks that grow in the shallows. The creatures of the night bolt and shy, heads turning, eyes wide, nostrils scenting the air as they turn toward the eye of a vortex of violence. The moon punches a hole in the blackness, but the thunder rolls nearer, and lightning fractures the sky like cracks in glass.

The storm comes. Without. Within. Savage and wild. Screaming. Slashing. Rain pelts the bayou and tears at tender growth. Blood spatters walls, prey, and predator. The silk tightens. The end rushes up from the black depths of hell. The moment explodes with power unimagined. With triumph, with defeat, with release from torment-torment from within and without.

The wind dies. The storm wanes. The need ebbs. Control settles in place like dust. Calm returns, and logic with it.

Another dead whore for the unsuspecting to find. Another crime committed to go unsolved. The predator smiles in the blood-drenched night. An adversary might suspect, but none will believe her.

Laurel didn't awaken, she was torn from sleep. In the middle of a dark, disturbing dream, cold, frantic hands reached into her psyche and pulled her out of one realm of existence and into another. She emerged gasping for air, like a swimmer breaking the surface after a long dive in frigid waters. The air around her was warm and moist, a pocket of heat and humidity that had sucked in through the French doors to escape the storm. The room was dark and still, a stillness that held something other than simple quiet. Loss. She felt alone in a way she had never felt before in her life, and her thoughts turned automatically toward Savannah. She had never been alone; she had always had Savannah.

Heart bumping hard against her breastbone, she fought to untangle her legs from the sheet and raced out onto the balcony in nothing but the camisole and slip she had fallen asleep wearing. Down the corridor she ran to the set of doors that opened into her sister's room. She fumbled with the latch and threw them back, stumbling as she pitched herself into the bedroom.

The stillness lingered here, too, hanging like a shroud. An unseen hand closed around Laurel 's throat as she looked around the room. The bed was unmade, empty, the covers left in a drift, pillows strewn everywhere. It looked the same as the last time she had seen it. She tried to swallow the fear that crowded her tonsils and turned slowly, taking in the jumble of jars and pots and bottles on the dressing table, the discarded clothes draped over chairs and abandoned on the floor. There was no way of telling when last Savannah had occupied the room.

A chill raced over her and seeped bone-deep into her. Tears pooled in her eyes. She twisted her hands together, pacing beside the bed. "Don't be stupid, Laurel," she muttered, her voice cutting and harsh. " Savannah has slept elsewhere more times than you can count. Just because she isn't here tonight-that doesn't mean anything. She's with a lover, that's all."

To distract herself, she tried to think of which one it might be. Ronnie Peltier with his jackhammer penis. Taureau Hebert-the man Savannah had fought over with Annie. Jimmy Lee Baldwin-who preached morals and played bondage games. Conroy Cooper-whose invalid wife had been terrorized only the night before.

The tag lines that accompanied each name swarmed in Laurel 's mind like gnats. She was trained to add up facts as an accountant does a row of figures. She was trained to put puzzle pieces together in her sleep. Tonight she wanted to do neither. The subtotal of the column, the picture that began to take shape-both gave an answer she didn't want to know.

Standing beside the bed, she leaned over and gathered up Savannah 's champagne silk robe, bringing the elegant fabric to her cheek. Cool, soft as a whisper, smelling of Obsession. She didn't want to think that Savannah was ill. She didn't want to face the truth that the sister who had mothered her and shielded her had declined to this point without her doing anything but judging. How many times had she wished Savannah would block out the past, rise above it, get beyond what Ross Leighton had done to her? While Laurel herself had lived to atone for that same past, ignoring her martyrdom, calling it a career.

Tears spilled across the silk, and she wished with all her heart her sister would walk through the door so she could go into Savannah 's arms and beg her forgiveness. But no one came through the door. Only the empty room heard her cry.

Drained, she tossed the robe back on the rumpled bed and wandered back out onto the balcony. The latest fit of rain had passed, leaving everything dripping. Moonlight caught on droplets, turning them to diamonds. The wind rustled restlessly in the trees. Laurel curled an arm around the pillar outside her own room and leaned against it, her gaze traveling the distance to L'Amour.

Some people said it was haunted. She wondered if the ghosts that haunted Jack had anything to do with the history of the house, or if they were his own, brought here with him from Texas.

He'd been at the heart of the Sweetwater incident, Vivian had said. Sweetwater was a Houston subdivision built by developers that touted the good life, a place to raise families. A little piece of heaven that backed onto a little piece of hell. Illegally buried in the field beyond, drums of chemical waste poisoned the ground. Laurel hadn't followed the case except in snatches caught on the nightly news. She had been wrapped up in legal battles of her own. She remembered the barrels had been almost impossible to trace. The trail had led from dummy company to dummy company.

Jack had unraveled the snare for the feds. He was the best man for the job, she supposed, because, if Vivian's information was correct, he had been the one to lay the paper trail away from Tristar. If she hadn't known him, she would have called him a dozen names. Ruthless, godless, greedy bastard would have been one of the nicer ones. But she did know him. She knew he had clawed his way up through the ranks because he thought he needed to prove himself. What must it have done to him to reach the peak only to find out he was on the wrong mountain? He said he had crashed and burned and taken the company down with him.

And his wife?

The word lay bitter on Laurel 's tongue. She might have said she didn't want him, didn't want any kind of a lasting relationship, but the bald truth was she didn't want to think of his loving someone else.

But had he loved her, or had he killed her?

A light winked on in one of the second-story windows of L'Amour, faint, as if it came from a room within the depths of the house. Faint, yet it pulled at her like a beacon. She needed to know who he really was. Which Jack stood behind the final facade? The shark, the rogue, the man who claimed he didn't care about anyone but himself, or the man who had held her and offered her comfort, who had come to her rescue, who had distracted her from problems and fears?

She couldn't see him as a killer. Killers didn't warn potential victims away or walk them home to keep them safe. No, "homicidal" wasn't a word she could apply to Jack. Troubled. Angry. Wounded.

Wounded. The word struck a chord inside her. The light in the old house beckoned.

Jack climbed the stairs to the second floor, bone tired, his body aching, begging for sleep. But he knew his mind would never grant the wish. Not tonight. Ignoring the rustlings of mice in a pile of fallen wallpaper down the hall, he shuffled into his bedroom and flicked on the lamp that perched on his desk a level above the old black Underwood typewriter. A white page glared up at him, reminding him not of deadlines or plot twists, but of Jimmy Lee Baldwin. Jimmy Lee standing above his devoted followers, asking them where demented minds get the inspiration to kill.