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“Ryder Hayes,” she murmured, misgivings underscoring her words. Her neighbor. If neighbor was the right term for someone she’d never met. Their two houses were the only ones on either side of the woods, and they were miles from town. No one ever casually strolled near her place.
Josie rubbed her eyes. The man must be Hayes. His property lay to the west of the woods and north of Angel Bay, the town. The dogs had to be his. No one else’s. She scuffed her toes in the dirt as she sorted through her confused memories of the past few months.
Seven or eight months ago, she didn’t know exactly when, he’d returned to the old house that backed onto the Angel River where it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. She hadn’t seen him.
Until now. She was dead certain that intense, solitary figure was Ryder Hayes, those terrifying dogs his. Keeping her gaze on the woods, she backed up. She wouldn’t let him get away with letting his pets—pets! she thought, outraged—roam uncollared and uncontrolled.
God knew what those beasts were capable of.
What if she’d been a child?
Sweaty and shaky, Josie shivered as the memory of those yellow eyes glazed her burning skin with ice. “You and your damned dogs can all go to hell, Ryder Hayes.” Alarm still whipping through her, she clasped her arms around her waist and swore, the words shocking her with their violence.
She hadn’t imagined the feral calculation in the dogs’ gaze. No. Despite everything she’d been through in the past seven months, she was firmly in command of her imagination. She jammed her hands deeper into her pockets, closing her fingers around the fragment of rippled green glass.
Unlike her emotions, the touch of the weathered-smooth glass caused no pain. Christmas Eve, Mellie had handed her the lumpy package wrapped in a piece of the Sunday comics. “Magic, Mommy,” her six-year-old had said, blue eyes solemn but still not hiding her excitement. “From the woods.” She’d waved her arm vaguely toward the trees and then stuck her thumb into her mouth, her eyes growing wide, her bowed pink mouth becoming an upside-down U.
Mellie wasn’t supposed to go into the woods by herself. Ever.
Christmas.
January.
And now this hellish July.
The shard of glass was cool against her palm, as cool as the translucent watery green of its tint.
A blue jay chattered angrily. In that instant when sounds rushed in, anger battered at her, anger at a world that no longer made sense, anger at the animals that had reduced her to a quivering heap in her garden.
That image of herself wasn’t one she liked at all. She’d be damned if she’d stay cowering inside because of a pack of animals. She didn’t like being helpless. Being a victim.
Damn Ryder Hayes. His animals could—
Fury gave her the strength to turn her back on the trees and shadows and tear into her house, the screen door of the porch slamming behind her. She’d rip a piece off Hayes’s hide, she would. She wasn’t going to let him get away with that kind of carelessness.
But she wouldn’t face Ryder Hayes’s dogs without some kind of protection. Wild, spooky as hell, they were only animals, after all. Nothing more. She could deal with them.
Yanking open the drawer in the kitchen, she pulled out a key chain with a silver cylinder of capsaicin attached to it. She needed something else. Staring wildly at her kitchen cabinets, she threw open a door and whirled the carousel of spices so hard that a bottle of cinnamon flew off. She snatched the can of black pepper and stuffed it into her shorts pocket with the silver capsule. On her way down the sagging back steps, she grabbed her garden hoe. Silt from her morning weeding still caked its metal edges.
The whang of the slamming door echoed in her ears as she left her yard.
Skirting the southern edge of the woods, she went up the west approach, following the faint path in the low brush. Even with her arsenal, she lacked the nerve to take the shortcut through the woods.
In January, though, she’d run screaming like a mad-woman through the moss-shrouded pine trees, the palmetto bushes, and wax myrtle. She hadn’t gone into the woods since.
January.
Mellie.
And the six other missing children, the latest a nine-year-old boy.
And only five bodies.
Oh, Mellie, Josie thought, and her throat closed tight. She scrubbed her face hard with her fists, a desolation beyond words cramping her breathing.
Looking down at the dirt path, she realized for the first time that she’d left her house barefoot. She was so used to going without shoes, she hadn’t even thought of them in the flush of anger. Stupid. Anger had propelled her down this path. Driven by the hot rage that boiled through her as hard as fear had earlier, she hadn’t thought clearly.
She’d had only one idea in her mind. Hayes’s beasts might be responsible for—
Off to her right, the woods had grown silent again as she neared Hayes’s mansion. Eerie, that sense of a gathering intelligence. Half expecting to see one of the animals, Josie raised the hoe and looked behind her. Whirling, she stumbled as she looked up into one of the live-oak trees a few feet into the woods.
Narrowing her eyes, she realized the tree was dead, leafless. What she’d taken for leaves was a thick colony of birds. Every branch of the tree was covered with silent, watching grackles, their black plumage blending into the shadows, their bluish purple heads turned in her direction.
Her heart fluttered against her ribs as she squinted at the tree. She was close enough to see the bronze necks and throats, the yellow irises of their eyes.
Not a wing fluttered. Not one bird made a sound as she took another step down the path, but their yellow eyes followed her every movement.
“Scat, you stupid birds! Leave me alone, you devils!” Spinning in a huge circle, she waved the hoe in their direction, her voice shrill. In a huge, dark cloud, the birds rose, silent as ever, their wings beating as one. Wheeling left, they spread out, their shapes black Vs against the bleached white sky.
Then, as if directed by one mind, they hovered over the treetops, above her.
Josie shuddered. “Go away!” she shouted, waving the hoe toward the sky. “Shoo!”
And still they floated over her shoulder, their presence up there in the sky following her, the silent sweep of their wings drifting across the white-hot sun.
There was something chilling about the sight of the heavy clump of birds moving as one. Unnerved by their silent passage but not understanding why, she broke into a run. Even Ryder Hayes was preferable to this storm cloud of grackles. Gasping for breath in the heat, she came to the turn in the path that led either to Angel Bay or to the Hayes property.
The sickly-sweet branches of a drought-pinched oleander whipped against her shoulder as she pushed them aside and came to the shell drive leading to the Hayes house. Her breath rasping deep in her lungs, she paused. The edges of the crushed shells were sharp against the sole of her foot as she hesitated.
Tilted closed, the louvers of the wooden shutters gave the house a hostile, secretive appearance. In the smothering heat, the house seemed to shimmer in front of her, illusive.
Someone was watching her.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose.
She spun around.
The grackles had flown away.
Nothing behind her but the path.
No dogs there.
No one, in fact, merely that sense of being observed. She looked around and saw nothing, no one.
To her left, the distant curve of Angel River.
And in front of her, the house.
She hadn’t seen it in years. The paint on the tall white columns flaked to gray underneath, and dead vines crawled like spiderwebs against the blank wall of the right side. Decay, rank and ripe, lay heavily over the house.
Walking slowly up the driveway, Josie kept one hand in her pocket tight around the pepper can. With her other hand, she clutched the hoe like a weapon. Shells popped and cracked under her feet. She kept her eyes moving from left to right, half expecting the pack of dogs to come around the corner of the house, to leap at her from the bushes massed at the edge of the porch that circled the front and sides of the house.
As she made her way up the center of the steps, she thumped each one with her hoe, announcing her presence. The smell of rotting wood and insects filled her nose as the wide steps squeaked and splintered. She watched carefully where she placed her feet and tried not to think of what might have taken root or made its home in the recesses under the raised porch. Once more she wished she’d taken the time to slip into a pair of shoes.
Clutching the hoe like a walking stick, she cursed the stubbornness that kept her moving toward the front door of Ryder Hayes’s house when what she wanted was to turn and run as fast as she could away from the oppressive gloom of this house. Her lungs were constricted, leaving her dizzyingly short of oxygen as she trudged across the warped expanse of porch.
Her stubbornness would be the death of her someday. Anybody with half a brain would know when to quit. But she hadn’t had a choice, not really. Not with those dogs running wild—
She shut off her brain. She wouldn’t think of the children.
A prickling awareness made goose bumps on her skin, stayed with her.
Taking one final step, she swallowed as she paused in front of the huge, heavily carved front door and raised her fist, pounding on the grinning faces, the grimy wreaths and grapes chiseled into the wood, unleashing her frustration and terror and grief against the unyielding mahogany.
The door should have creaked. It should have groaned. There should have been cobwebs hanging from the frame and a humped Igor to open the portal a crack.
Instead, the door swung inward, and a gaunt figure appeared in the dim foyer, shading his eyes against the sunlight. A draft of air coiled around her ankles and up her thighs like the brush of an unseen, cold hand.
The door had been opened so silently that she hadn’t heard it, and her fist, still raised to pound against the door, slid against the cool cotton shirt of the man who leaned against the doorjamb. Her knuckles brushed against the thin black T-shirt, against the cords of his stomach, and she heard his swift intake of breath. His head snapped up and his dark gaze met hers.
Ice and heat burned her fingertips.
Josie jerked back, one heel scraping against a splinter. She couldn’t help her reaction. Power rising toward her, threatening to swamp her and suck her under, sweeping her out beyond safety. Coming from him.
Slumped against the door with his aloof burning gaze meeting hers, he looked too weary to speak, too weary to live, and yet waves of energy came from him, battering against her, and she took another step back, stunned by the force of his presence.
“What do you want?” Exhaustion made his low voice gravelly and he shaded his eyes again, taking a step back.
Josie gripped the hoe and stepped forward. The man looked ill. “Ryder Hayes?”
“Most of the time. Usually.” He sank more heavily against the frame as he glanced at her hoe. Slurred in a rough drawl, his words sounded as if he’d dragged them up from some dark cavern within himself. “Unless that’s a weapon?”
“What?” Josie frowned.
With a barely perceptible movement of a long index finger, he pointed to the hoe she held in a death grip. “Have you come, lady of the moss green eyes, like some medieval villager with torch and hoe, to burn me out?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Confused, Josie reached into her pocket for the cylinder of capsaicin.
“I see. Not a weapon, then.” He shook his head and pulled himself upright, almost disappearing behind the shield of the door. “Sorry, but I’m not interested in buying farm tools.”
“Good. Because I’m not selling anything.”
“Of course you are. Everyone’s selling something.” Cynicism curled the edges of his words.
“I’m not. I’m here to see Mr. Hayes.” Josie thumped the hoe emphatically. “Are you Ryder Hayes?”
“I’m afraid I am.” Slavic cheekbones sloped down to a full, sharply delineated mouth that curved down at the corners. “Not that I seem to have any choice about the matter.”
“Then I’ve come about your dogs, Mr. Hayes.”
“My dogs?” Straight white teeth flashed under the hood of his hand as his mouth stretched in a yawn. “I can’t help you.” He edged the door shut.
“You know good and well what I’m talking about.”
“Do I?” His voice became only a drift of sound.
“The dogs that almost attacked me this morning. Those beasts. Your pack of dogs.”
White lines scored his beautiful mouth, nothing more than a minute pull of muscle. He lowered his hand and his dark eyes met hers again, eyes so tortured that Josie dropped the hoe and stretched her hand to him. Clattering to the porch, the hoe fell between them and she bent down to pick it up as he said, “I have no dogs.”
“I saw you with them,” she insisted, stubborn in the face of his denial and confused by the torment she’d glimpsed.
“Did you?”
“Near my house. In the woods,” Josie said.
“Perhaps you imagined you did.” His voice was remote, disinterested, but underneath the polite dismissal she heard a disturbing note that kept her standing on his porch.
“I don’t imagine things. I know what I saw.” She gripped the hoe until her hand hurt.
“Unlike the rest of us, then? How fortunate for you. To know what’s real. What’s not.”
“I saw you. You stopped the dogs from attacking me.”
“Did I? Fascinating.”
Wanting to shake him out of his indifference, needing to make him admit the truth, Josie reached out and grasped his arm. With her movement, the capsaicin cylinder flew out of her pocket and racketed across the porch into the grass. His forearm was all muscle and bone under her fingers.
“Hell.” He doubled over and groaned, yanking his arm free and brushing his hand across his eyes. His hand trembled. “Damn.”
“Are you all right?”
“I suppose it depends on your definition.” He straightened and stepped away from her, putting the edge of the door between them before she could help him.
“Do you want me to call a doctor? Are you sick?” she repeated, concerned about the pallor that swept over his face.
“Sick?” His laugh was humorless and sent a ripple of shivers along her spine. “Spirit-sick, ‘sick almost to dooms-day,’ as the poet put it, but, no, lady green eyes, I don’t believe I need the services of a physician. Thank you for your concern.” Preparing to shut the door, his narrow, long fingers gripped the edge.
Glimpsing the strained white knuckles that tightened as she watched, Josie had the strangest impression that he was falling over the edge of a chasm and holding on with the last of his strength, but she couldn’t let him escape without settling the issue of his animals. “Wait!”
“I thought we were through. Wasn’t that all you wanted to know? About the dogs?” he drawled, his voice bored.
“They’re dangerous. You were there. You saw them start to come after me.”
“So you said.” A flicker of pain stirred in the depths of his eyes. “And I’ve said, they’re not my animals.”
“You controlled them,” she said flatly. “They obeyed you.”
