Kim Harrison - Hotter Than Hell

Somehow going into a tent to collect bound and gagged old men with tears running down their faces seemed completely anticlimactic. But as the squad opened the tents, they backed away in pure horror leaving the flaps flung up. Each tent was tiny, the size it appeared on the outside. What happened to the sumptuous love dens? Where were the bound and gagged hostages they’d been shown?

A buck was bound and gagged in each tent now. The animals had congealed blood on their coats exactly where the original mortal injuries had been. Glassy, dead, animal eyes stared at Vincent and his men. The poor creatures had been dead so long that rigor mortis had set in and each animal was washboard stiff.

“Oh, shit—we got played, partner,” Donovan whispered.

A cold sweat made Vincent’s t-shirt cling to him. The twitching of one deer freaked everybody out.

“What the fuck do we do now?” Jermaine yelled, beginning to walk in a circle.

Then another deer twitched, and still another, until the fragile nervous systems around Vince snapped, frayed, and popped, and guns got drawn toward the carcasses.

“No!” Vince shouted, not sure why. “Don’t screw with any more evidence. Leave it. Let’s put our heads together, we have to think through this, pick up the trail, we gotta…”

His voice trailed off as a human cough riveted everyone’s attention to one of the tents. A pudgy CEO lay naked, shivering, and bound by vines, leaves stuffed in his mouth. Terror-stricken, they watched each dead animal reanimate and then transform into a hostage. Jesse and Dutch stared at each other, voices choked.

“We weren’t drugged,” Jesse whispered.

“It happened.” Dutch wheezed, grappling at his chest as though having a heart attack, and then stumbled away and puked.

Nervous glances passed around the squad.

“Gotta still be the crap that’s in our systems,” Lou said, his voice quavering.

Vincent looked at the tents and then out into the vast wilderness, knowing. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s all it is.”

ARTEMIS KEPT HER WORD. THINGS WORKED OUT, more than he could have imagined. Since the glen, every man on the squad retired. Donovan got a boat as an unspoken and untold gesture of appreciation from the CEO he helped half carry to the rendezvous point. He headed down to the Caribbean and disappeared. Last anyone heard, Donovan regularly had three gorgeous, out-of-this world babes on his yacht.

Jermaine went back to Brooklyn, and then moved to Harlem to buy a brownstone in the up-and-coming section…the squad quietly heard tell that some appreciation dollars fell off the table. Now Jermaine is tracing his family genealogy after a nymph mentioned something about him being a dead-ringer for an ancient king. Jesse went to Wyoming, and somehow some cattle land got ceded to him, mysteriously enough, along with a hundred head of healthy beef. He’s a happy man who only takes a harmonica into the woods these days. His hunting days are over.

Dutch was traveling abroad, last anyone heard, and getting VIP treatment wherever he goes—no expense spared—all financed from a nice, quiet Swiss account. Lou moved to southern California, joined Greenpeace, and became a New Age guru. Some say that a nice investment portfolio that changed hands as a private thank you allows him to pursue his environmental platform with gusto.

Major Harcourt still knows something about the whole story wasn’t right. There were no hallucinogens found in anyone’s systems, but all insisted on such bizarre occurrences that mind control or a new, experimental substance that leaves no trace could be the culprit. He is still searching for that drug or method of group hypnosis.

That day in the glen changed each and every man—both those who were captives and those who were hostages. Vince…well…he went back on home to Neah Bay on the Olympic Peninsula and is using his quiet, unspoken gift from the appreciative wealthy to help build up the town and rebuild the traditions of his people…preserving, especially, the culture and the oral stories called by some legends and myths.

He spends a lot of his days contemplating the universe and the wisdom of the ancestors as he burns incense and waits for the crescent moon in a quiet glen…from where he sits he can see across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island. The equinox is their anniversary. She comes so swiftly that he doesn’t mind waiting to be hunted, knowing soon he’ll be felled by a true goddess.

He loves her, plain and simple. She finally learned his name and has visited his people, unbeknownst to them what she really is. She still thinks he’s a Titan, and cannot believe him to be a mere mortal…because she hasn’t been so adored since the times of old, and never, ever, quite so personally.

WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN, SHE DREAMED OF horses.

Most of the girls her age were horse-mad, and Catalina was no exception. That alone would have explained the dreams. But Abuelita, after whom she’d been named, had different ideas.

“It is a sign,” Grandmother had told her. “The women of my line have often been blessed with such omens. You must not forget this, but watch for its tokens in the future.”

Mom had laughed; she’d grown up with Abuelita’s stories, but she had never believed. And Dad had merely rolled his eyes. The Irish, he said, had the same kinds of superstitions. None of it was real.

Catalina believed. She saw the black horse when she slept, his glossy neck arched, his eyes shining with invitation. But she never got close enough to climb up on his broad, powerful back. He ran, and though she chased him she never caught him.

In time she almost forgot about the dreams. There was no room for real horses in Bel Air. Catalina went to law school just as Dad wanted. She married an attorney from the top law firm in Los Angeles, a man of ambition and little imagination. Life was busy and successful and very ordinary until she began having the dreams again.

Then it all fell apart.

Catalina O’Roarke, formerly Mrs. Neal Kirkland, Jr., jumped out of the battered Chevy truck, her new boots raising little puffs from the dusty ground. The ranch house was small and rustic, surrounded by empty corrals and a few scrawny cottonwoods. The prairie stretched all the way to the foot of the mountains; the countryside seemed almost desolate, mile upon mile of nothing but sage, chamisa, and open sky.

It was exactly what she wanted.

“Can I do anything else for you, miss?” the aging cowboy asked.

Cat managed a smile. “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

“Then I’ll be headed back to Taos. Turk and Pilar will look after you right and proper.”

He got back into his truck and drove away on the rutted track that passed for a road. Cat picked up her bags and walked to the porch. The boards creaked under her feet. The smell of cooking beans wafted out one of the windows.

She closed her eyes and let the tension drain from her shoulders. “It doesn’t look like much,” Heather had said, “but the place always seems to help me get my head on straight when I can’t take L.A. one minute longer. Just give it a chance.”

Give it a chance. She didn’t have anything to lose.

With a rueful shrug, Cat stepped through the door.

Turk adjusted the buckle under the saddle’s fender and stepped back. “That’ll do ya,” he said. “Perfect fit. And you don’t have to worry about ol’ Kelpie here…he’s the gentlest horse we got. He’s Miss Heather’s favorite.”

Cat shifted in the saddle, already anticipating the sore muscles to come. Seventeen years ago she would have given anything to be where she was now: mounted on a handsome buckskin with the prospect of a long, solitary ride ahead of her.