Christine curled her hands into fists, all her sorrow and worry turning abruptly to rage. That evil bastard! There was no way Jenny was with him of her own volition! He must have kidnapped her walking home from work or something!
She marched back inside and went right for the phone. She had a cell, of course, but she also still had a landline—the signal up here in the mountains was unpredictable at best and it was best to have a connection you could count on.
But when she called the Sheriff’s office, she just got their answering machine saying they were busy helping other citizens. Either the Sheriff and his deputy were pointedly ignoring her calls, or both of them were out “patrolling” and pulling over out-of-towners to give them tickets for speeding or running the two second light on Main Street.
Christine had long been of the opinion that some of the traffic stop money they made ought to go to a real dispatcher—someone who would be there to take calls even when the Sheriff and his deputy were out of the office. However, that hadn’t happened, even though she had raised the idea the last two town hall meetings, and she was beginning to doubt it ever would.
“Listen up, Sheriff,” she said, when the old-fashioned machine finally beeped and she was able to leave a message. “I just saw Jenny Albright in Mike Fenster’s truck and the poor thing looked scared to death. He was bringing her up to his trailer and God alone knows what he’s planning to do to her. That girl is only fourteen! Get your ass up to the Fenster place now!”
Then she slammed down the phone, still fuming. Damn it, even if the Sheriff came back and listened to his messages right away, it would still take him time to get up the side of the mountain to come check on Jenny. And that meant that Fenster would have plenty of opportunity to do whatever he wanted to her. Plenty of time to take her innocence and ruin her life.
“Can’t wait for Wainright,” Christine muttered to herself. Leaving the phone, she went to her bedroom. Dragging a chair over to the corner of the room, she stood on it and reached for the trapdoor above.
The attic in the cabin wasn’t much more than a crawl space, but it was big enough to store a few valuable—and in this case, dangerous—items. Christine felt around until she found a long object wrapped in a tarp. Carefully, she lowered it and laid it on the bed to unwrap it.
Her Great Uncle’s shotgun gleamed in the low light of the bedroom. Though she had ever only used it once, to frighten off a very persistent black bear that kept nosing around her cabin when her kids were young, Christine kept it oiled and in good shape. Once a month, she took it down and cleaned it and made sure it was in working condition. She made certain it was unloaded, but she kept a case of shotgun shells within easy reach, just in case.
Now she found the box and shook some shells into her hand. Another of her momma’s sayings popped into her head, “If you’re gonna get in a fight, be sure you go loaded for bear.”
She didn’t know if Mike Fenster counted—though if she had to guess, she thought he would probably be at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the black bear she’d frightened off all those years ago. But she wasn’t going to let that stop her—and she certainly wasn’t going to let him rape and abuse poor little Jenny.
She loaded the shotgun and closed it with a deadly sounding, snap!
It was time to go hunting.
THIRTY-FIVE
Roarn was getting close to home—close to Christine’s cabin. It wasn’t really his home, but it felt like it was, he thought. The curvy little Elite had made him feel so welcome—indeed, she hadn’t wanted him to go and search for the remains of the ship he had wrecked in. But he was glad now that he had.
The crash site hadn’t been as far away as he had feared—it had taken only a few hours tracking to get to the place where it had been. The Kindred had removed the ship itself, just as Christine had predicted, but the scent imprint was still there.
Roarn had spent an hour sniffing around, filtering out the smells of burned metal and flattened earth as well as the scents of the other Kindred and Monstrum who had come to investigate. He had found both the scent of the pilot and the coppery smell of his blood. Then, several feet distant at what must have been the back of the ship, he had found his own scent.
Though he sniffed carefully and thoroughly, Roarn couldn’t find any place where the two scents intersected. Relief had filled him, making his knees weak, when he realized that there was no way he could have attacked the pilot and caused the crash. It must have been an engine malfunction or some failure of the pilot himself that had caused the ship to go down.