Page 4 of Blood Bearon
“A…shit, I don’t know.”
On her left, a giant wall ran for ages, tall, thick, and built from very light tan stone. Every so often, a crenellation jutted up from it, interrupting the smooth flow of the top of the wall. Way up ahead in the distance, she could see what appeared to be the source.
“Fire of some sort,” she said. “I’m arriving on scene, checking it out.”
She slowed her unmarked car to a halt, pulling as far over to the side of the road as she dared. There was enough snow to hide the edge of the embankment, and thelastthing Rachel wanted was to get stuck way out here. She’d never live that down.
“What the hell happened here?” she asked the empty space, looking around.
A huge cluster of trees on the outside of the wall for nearly seventy feet stood simply incinerated. They still smoked. Getting closer, she put up a hand, stunned by the heat coming off them. It was so intense, she had to stop twenty feet short of the closest tree.
Movement caught her eye, and she instinctively went for her gun, suddenly feeling alone and vulnerable out here in the middle of nowhere. Focusing on the source though, she realized it wasn’t a person, but the tree. It was…
“Holy shit.” It wasn’t movement she’d seen, but flames. Flames frominsidethe tree. They were burning up from the inside out.
The ground below the trees was all wet. Even the heat from the burning had only been enough to melt the snow, not dry it out. Inspecting the area nearby, her eyes picked out all sorts of tracks.
None of them made any damn sense, of course, unless a herd of various farm animals had gone through the area. She could see hooves of various sorts, other marks that looked like they belonged to predators, and even a few human boot tracks.
“What in the world,” she muttered, looking around, trying to piece it all together.
Over and over again, her eyes kept moving back to the wall.
“Dispatch, what’s on the other side of this wall?” she asked, radioing in. “Who owns this property?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that one, darling,” Sherry said. “It’s not listed.”
Not listed? Odder and odder. Something was definitely off about the whole scene. Moving a way down the wall from the trees, she reached out and held her hand an inch from the stone. No heat radiated off it, and so a second later, she touched it. It was cold.
The top of the wall had to be ten feet high, but Rachel wasn’t about to let that stop her. Twenty minutes of work later, she had a pile of snow pushed up against the wall, packed down enough that it would hopefully support her.
A quick scramble up, a wet sock as her boot sank in low at one point, and a grunt of effort later—and she was on top of the wall.
Almost immediately, her senses began to scream at her, telling her to duck and get under cover.
She wasn’t alone.
Slipping as quietly as possible from the top of the wall, she fell into a snow bank that had piled up against the inside. The snow rose to her hips, and she crouched into it, hiding her as much as she could. The radio at her side cracked, and she frantically shut it off, trying not to betray her position.
Someone, or something, was out there, somewhere in the trees that started perhaps thirty feet or so from the wall. Cautiously looking left and right, she noticed that no tree, no bush, came close to the wall.
There was a deliberate space between the two. That wasn’t good. It meant whoever lived here was paranoid about their security. They wanted to be able to see anyone coming over the wall, while they hunched down in the cover of the forest.
Her eyes were trying to tell her something, and so she let her gaze wander away from the tree line to the ground around her. In here it was also covered with tracks, much of the snow flattened underneath. Here and there, the snow was melted or discolored. Purple? It definitely wasn’t blood. Not that she’d ever seen.
The cold was starting to get to her while she squatted in the snowbank. Rachel couldn’t stick around for much longer. As stealthily as possible, she stole forward across the compact ground, hand on her gun, ready to draw. Her sense didn’t calm once she was among actual cover. Whoever it was, they were nearby. Very,veryclose.
Closing her eyes, she listened carefully, trying to pick up the slightest sound. Filtering out the beating of her heart and the air from her lungs as it condensed in front of her in the cold, she reached for more. A crunch of snow, a snap of a twig. Anything.
There.
Her eyes opened, darting to her two-o’clock. Whatever, or whoever it was, it was over there. In the midst of shadows. She stared into the deepest part of it. Even in the daytime, the evergreens were thick overhead, providing plenty of darkness. The longer she stared, the more Rachel became convinced that whoever was in there stared right back at her.
On a hunch, she slowly brought her hand in front of her, then raised the middle finger on it. Perhaps she could get them to reveal themselves.
“Well that’s not very nice.”
Rachel yelped and dove to the side, gun sliding free from her holster as she rolled, fetching up hard against a nearby tree.
