If they killed her, and tried to pin the explosion on her? It wasn’t going to pass editorial review.
Besides, Blade had his own problems internally. Always had.
Daniel was hollow as he stared at the hissing flame. Dead, though he lived—except he was going to take care of the last part of that tag. Really fucking soon—
The bullet was soundless as it came at him. And the hit in the center of his chest was nothing but a pfft.
The impact, however, was like a cannonball, pitching him backwards off his crouch, the torch going flying, his visual field swinging from the hatch seal, to the pines, to the gray sky above as he flew back and took his sight with him.
As he landed on his back and gasped, his legs churned in the pine needles and his hands flopped on his pecs to find the lead slug’s entry wound. But like that was going to help?
The footsteps coming toward him were muffled, although maybe that was because his hearing was failing already. And when he coughed and tasted blood, his brain struggled to come up with a plan to save himself—
The face that entered his visual field was not a surprise.
“Hi, honey, I’m home,” Mr. Personality drawled.
LYDIA JOGGED THROUGH the mountain’s forest, dodging trees, jumping over rocks, hopping across streams. She’d been careful to enter the preserve not through a trailhead, but on a convoluted course from the WSP headquarters. And in spite of all the sleep she hadn’t been getting, adrenaline made her hyperaware and fast on her feet.
Breathing hard, she hit a decline and then doubled back up. She was close, she was so close …
And then she slowed. Stopped.
Scrambled over to lock in behind a pine tree.
The main trail was up ahead, the broad concourse empty of hikers. But she waited, just to make sure she was alone and in the correct place.
Satisfied with both, she crossed the packed dirt and kept on going into the preserve, fifteen feet. Twenty. Thirty—
“Oh, God,” she gasped. “Oh … God.”
As she tripped on her own boots, she couldn’t believe she’d been correct: The body was stretched out face up, the arms and legs tied to stakes that had been driven into the ground. The clothes were unmistakable. Gray flannel slacks. Blue blazer.
“Peter.”
She approached the remains slowly. The dead man’s eyes were open in his pasty face, and as she stared down at him, it was unclear what he had died of.
Well, murder. Yes. But what had killed him? And who?
Looking him up and down—she saw no clues to the former. But the latter was answered. Words had been scratched deeply into a cleared stretch of dirt in the bed of pine needles.
You always Do the Right Thing
Scribbled, messy, cap’d in some places. Like it mattered.
Rick had done the killing on purpose here. Right in the place where she had found that wolf and called the WSP’s vet in the veil. This was the exact spot—she was certain because of the orientation of trees, everything burned into her memory from lying nose-to-nose with the animal as he’d suffered.
Crouching down, she saw a trail of blood out of one of Peter’s ears. And that was when it clicked.
Now she knew why the water had been running back at the barn.
Like a rat who had eaten RatX, Kaput, or d-Con, Peter had been seeking water. Before he had collapsed.
From the poison.
Lydia rubbed her face.
And when she dropped her hand and looked up—“Grandfather?”
In the shadows between the pines, standing in the darkness, the ghostly apparition of her isoisä was staring at her, his mouth moving as if he were trying to speak across the dimensions that separated them.
Lydia rose to her feet and took a step forward. “I need you, Grandfather. What do I do? Where do I go?”
She put her hands out as her eyes flooded with tears. “Please … don’t go. For once, stay and help me.”
Daniel coughed so hard, his eyes watered—and as a result, Mr. Personality’s hard face, as it dominated his diminishing corridor of vision, became wavy and indistinct. But Daniel had bigger problems to worry about. He was struggling to breathe, gasping and gurgling for air, so he heaved himself over onto his side and tried to clear his mouth out of the blood that seemed to be golf-sprinkling up his esophagus.
When he was finally able to catch some oxygen, he opened eyes that he’d been unaware of closing—
And there was his former roommate, still right up close.
The man smiled from his crouching position. “You know, I’m usually a good shot, but I think I didn’t take my emotions into account as I pulled my trigger.” That expression faded. “I didn’t want to play it like this, not with you. I got a little loyalty to you, my guy. I really do. Did. Whatever.”