TWO
The gun jerks, and I yank away, but she has my wrist in an iron grip. Dalton lunges, barking, “Raise your fucking hands!” but the woman doesn’t seem to see him. She’s staring at me, blue eyes impossibly wide. She hisses a harsh stream of foreign language, as if she’s uttering a curse.
Storm’s right there, growling, Raoul at her shoulder. I order them back. Storm retreats a few reluctant steps, and Raoul moves to Sebastian’s side, still growling.
I shift my gun to my left hand, letting the woman keep hold of my right. Her fingernails dig in, blood welling up. Dalton
snarls again for her to let me go, but she just stares, eyes locked with mine.
“It’s okay,” I say, as much for him as her.
I hand Sebastian my gun, and Dalton inhales sharply, but I ignore his disapproval. My gaze holds the woman’s feverish one. I reach down and peel her fingers from my wrist, and she just keeps talking, a stream of frantic babbling that my gut identifies as Germanic.
Her babble acts like an adrenaline pause button, giving me time to pull back and assess. I’d jumped to conclusions about her clothing. Yes, it’s brown—the color and texture of tanned hide—but it’s modern. Expensive hiking wear. Tourist wear.
That’s almost certainly what she is. A tourist on a backwoods excursion. During my time in Rockton, we haven’t seen so much as an abandoned campsite, but Dalton says it happens, people pass through the area, never realizing a town of two hundred people lies a few kilometers away.
Right now the important thing is that we have a woman in distress, collapsed on the ground, her fingers digging into my hand, raspy voice telling me …
I have no idea what she’s telling me, do I?
“Ich spreche kein Deutsch,” I say. I don’t speak German. As a cop, I learned variations on those words in a half dozen languages along with a few more, like: “Sprechen Sie Englisch?”
Do you speak English?
The woman doesn’t even stop babbling to listen to me. I say it again, louder, and then I try “Je parle français”—I speak French—in hopes of commonality there, but I still can’t be certain she even hears me.
As cruel as it seems, I block out her words and lift her chin for a better look at her face. She doesn’t fight me. If anything, her words only come faster, hoarse with excitement at this sign that I’m paying attention.
Her eyes are fever-bright, her skin hot to the touch. I don’t see any blood. I run my hand over her head, and she leans into it, eyes closing, as if I’m stroking her fevered brow. Instead, my fingers palpate her skull while I watch for a flinch of pain.
My hands are all the way around the back when she shrieks, convulsing and slamming her fists into my chest. I grab her wrists, and she writhes and bares her teeth. The dogs both lunge forward, Sebastian grabbing Raoul to restrain him.
Dalton wordlessly restrains the woman’s hands as he motions for Felicity to grab her flailing feet. The woman bucks and writhes and spits, as if delirious, and I part her hair but see no sign of injury.
“Blood,” Sebastian says.
“What?” My head jerks up.
I realize he still has my gun, and he’s training it on the woman. Letting the sociopath hold the gun may not seem like the best strategy, but he’s actually the least likely to freak out and pull the trigger. When you struggle to empathize, seeing others in danger barely raises your heartbeat, and while we’ve been fighting with a madwoman, he’s been assessing her from his vantage point. He nods at her stomach, where her shirt has pulled up in her struggles, and I see a long strip of blood-soaked cloth around her midsection.
“Shit,” I mutter.
That explains why she lashed out—not from the pain of a head injury but because, in lifting her, I’d engaged her injured stomach muscles.
The woman suddenly goes still, panting, and Felicity eases back.
“Don’t—” I begin.
The woman kicks, foot flying up to smack Felicity under the jaw. It’s the woman who screams in pain, though, gnashing her teeth as she rasps something, her bloodshot eyes fixed on Felicity.
I glance Felicity’s way, and she nods abruptly. Her eyes simmer with annoyance, half at the woman, half at herself. It’s only then, as Felicity grabs the woman’s legs, that I see her feet are bare. Bare and bloodied.
I motion for Dalton to take my spot, and I creep down to Felicity. I take one of the woman’s ankles firmly, ignoring her kicks and howls. The soles are filthy, her feet and ankles crisscrossed with scratches.
Running through the forest. Barefoot.
I glance at the bloody bandage around her waist. It’s crimson now, fresh blood seeping through. I move up the woman’s side.