Page 31 of Captive Mate
And Parker was still out there.
That was really the rub. I could hope he gave up after I disappeared, or hope to evade him if he didn’t, but — I was tired of running. I wanted to kill him.
While he was here, distracted and not on his home turf, would be the best possible opportunity.
Lancaster it was — and then, once I was supplied with what I needed and not simply on the run with nothing but my relatively small claws, I’d scope out the Kimball territory, find Parker, and kill him with extreme prejudice.
I took one last slurp of the clear, cold stream water, told my hungry belly it’d need to wait, and set off to the northwest.
Chapter 12
On the Hunt
Even if you ignored the infestation of vamps, Lancaster was a shithole. Okay, sure, it was supernatural-friendly, and it had an all-organic grocery store — which just pissed me off, because it made me think of Matthew’s Prius. But it was a shithole all the same.
Laceyville, the even smaller town a couple of miles from the edge of the Armitage territory, didn’t even qualify as a shithole. More of a shit stain, since that was all that was left. The paper mill closing had killed it.
Lancaster, on the other hand, had a thriving cannery and a few vineyards (the latter all owned by Fenwick), and there were campgrounds that brought in tourists of the more bearded and smelly variety. The cannery didn’t strike me as a particularly desirable place to work, but at least it kept the locals mostly in beer money.
Gods, but I wanted a beer.
It’d taken me two full days plus a few hours to reach the edge of Lancaster, about forty miles from the edge of the Armitage territory. Part of the first day after escaping had been spent hunting and resting; I’d left in the middle of the night, and I’d been flagging by mid-morning.
But I’d made it. It was approaching dawn on the third day, and I needed to find a place to hole up and make a plan.
At the moment, I hadn’t gotten past perching on the roof of a gas station’s convenience store at the top of a small hill, where the main road from the east dipped down into the town. I was doing my best to pick out landmarks, but I hadn’t spent much time in Lancaster while working with the Kimballs. Lancaster was Fenwick’s territory.
I knew that Fenwick had a large, fancy house somewhere on the northern edge of town, and he owned businesses all over it. There could be vamps anywhere. And it was absolutely guaranteed that Dor had warding up — one reason why I’d stopped at this gas station, which sat just outside the city limits. I was hoping Dor hadn’t bothered with wards beyond that boundary.
Opening myself up to my magical senses, I extended my vision as far and as deeply as I could. The day before, knowing that by morning they’d have been certain I was long gone anyway, I’d used up the last of my reserved magic to break Nate’s spell, which was attenuated and weak from the distance I’d traveled.
The snap of it had given me an instant headache; I wondered if Nate had felt the same effect.
But I was free of it, and I had all my magic at my disposal after sleeping for a while and devouring a rabbit I’d hunted in a forest clearing.
I couldn’t see Dor’s wards, though. I tried again. Nothing. I could see sparks of magic around the town, the life force of Fenwick’s vampires pulsing darkly, a couple of green blobs that had to be gnomes, and a blur of pastels that would’ve shown me all the humans in the town, if I’d had the strength and focus to separate them all out.
But no magic that looked like Dor’s — and no Dor or Fenwick, either, though I’d have been shocked if they’d left themselves open to being spied on like that by other mages.
Which left me taking my chances. I’d have to depend on the spells I’d used to conceal myself and hope shifting within the borders of Fenwick’s territory didn’t trigger anything.
The convenience store was only a one-story building, so I hopped off the roof without difficulty and loped down the hill, staying near the road but not near enough to be seen from passing cars. At last the trees thinned out, and strip malls and scattered houses started to take over. From here I’d need to be a lot more careful.
It was a cold pre-dawn, with faint apricot-gray only starting to stain the eastern horizon, and my breath steamed in front of me. I slunk through a small suburban neighborhood, seen only by a chihuahua that lost its mind barking through a window. I bared my teeth at it and went on. Too bad it wasn’t outside; I could’ve eaten it for breakfast.
At last I trotted through an alley and came out at the edge of a small shopping plaza’s parking lot. The place reeked of stale bread and grease, the garbage in the nearby dumpster, and asphalt, with an undertone of cigarette smoke and the much more pleasant scent of mice.
Mmm. Mice. My nose twitched and my stomach growled.
Maybe later. The dumpster and its little residents weren’t going anywhere, and I might be able to get some human food along the way and skip having to hunt.
The plaza contained a chain pizza joint, a liquor store, a nail salon, and — bingo. One of those work uniform stores that specialized in Dockers. Perfect. A quick trip around the back of the plaza, a tiny application of magic to the lock on the back door and another to the security system to fritz it, and I nosed my way inside.
When I stepped out again, I was fully equipped in sturdy pants and a t-shirt and jacket, with a few changes of clothes in a backpack and a pair of steel-toed boots on my feet. They’d even had cheap sunglasses. I changed my appearance too, using magic to make me look shorter and broader than I was, with shoulder-length brown hair.
The sun wasn’t peeking over the hills yet, but it was fully light, the alley washed gray and dingy by the unforgiving purity of sunrise.
I took a deep breath, holding it in until my lungs burned, and then let it out slowly. I couldn’t smell the mice in this form, luckily, because they weren’t delicious at all to my human taste buds, but the garbage and old pizza remained.
