The creature was right on top of him.
Talons dug into his shoulder, went for his eyes. Warm breath hissed onto his face. Was it a bobcat? A lynx? A mountain lion? No, not that. There were no big cats here, weren’t supposed to be, anyway. A wolf? Gone for at least a hundred years, but people said…
‘Perfume?’ Nick whispered.
What kind of cat wore perfume?
The thing began trying to scramble away from him. Nick grunted. His hand closed on something fragile and bony. An ankle? A wrist? Did cats have ankles and wrists?
Perfume. Delicate bones…
Nick’s eyes widened against the darkness.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You’re a woman!’
And then something hit him hard, in the back of the head, and he slipped down and down into deepest, darkest night.
* * *
Holly stood over the unconscious intruder and trembled with fear.
Was he dead? Had she killed him?
At first, she’d thought she was dreaming. She’d been lying in bed, still shaking with cold despite wearing her long johns, wool socks, a hat and her New England Patriots sweatshirt, buried to the tip of her nose beneath half a dozen quilts, busily telling herself there was nothing the least bit spooky about being alone on the top of a mountain with no lights and a blizzard raging outside, when she’d heard something.
A sound. An engine.
Good, she’d thought. The snowplows were out.
Snowplows? Back home, in Boston, yes. But here? On the top of this mountain?
Holly’d shot up in bed, her heart pounding. The night was so still. Every sound seemed magnified a hundred times, and each had sent a wave of terror straight through her.
The thud of a car door. The scrunch of footsteps in the snow. The thump of booted feet mounting the steps, crossing the porch. The sound of the front door being battered open.
That was when she’d moved, jerking out a hand for the portable phone on the night table, remembering even as she put it to her ear that the damned thing wouldn’t work with the power out. Petrified, almost breathless with fear, she’d looked around desperately for a weapon. Something. Anything.
The phone. It was a weapon. It didn’t have as much heft as she’d have liked but she was in no position to be choosy.
Now what? Should she hide and hope the intruder wouldn’t find her, or should she tiptoe down the steps, see what he was doing, slip up behind him when he wasn’t watching and knock him over the head?
Whatever she did, she’d be quiet. Oh, so quiet. Super quiet, like a little mouse, so that he wouldn’t so much as suspect there was a woman in the house. A lone woman…
And right then, just as she was tiptoeing to the top of the stairs, trying to hear herself think over the thud of her heart, the intruder had spoken in a low, angry voice.
‘Come on,’ he growled. ‘Where are you hiding? I know you’re here.’
Terror had impelled her, then, terror and the realization that he knew she was here. She’d raced downstairs, tried her damnedest to bash his brains out right away and, when that hadn’t worked, she’d screamed the way Belinda had once said she’d been taught to scream in a martial arts class and hurled herself straight at the intruder.
He was huge. Seven feet, for sure. Eight, maybe. Three hundred pounds, no, four hundred, and all of it muscle. And he was strong as an ox. He’d struggled mightily, grunting and shoving and trying to dislodge her, but she hadn’t given an inch. Then his hand—a hand the size of a house, and as powerful as a steel trap—had closed around her wrist.
‘Perform,’ he’d said, in a voice as deep as a bass drum, and just as a hundred terrible explanations for that command swept into Holly’s mind his grasp on her wrist had tightened. ‘Blood,’ he’d snarled, ‘you’re a human!’
Perform? Blood? Human?
Holly hadn’t hesitated. She’d swung the phone again and that time she’d hit him on the top of his miserable head.
Now he lay sprawled at her feet, face-down and motionless.
She poked him with her toe. He didn’t move. She poked again. Nothing happened.
Holly’s heart was in her throat.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered.
Had she killed him? Had she killed this—this escapee from a funny farm? Her teeth banged together, chattering like castanets. What about all that stuff she’d always laughed at? The tabloid headlines that screamed about visitors from outer space? Did an alien lie at her feet, looking to perform some bloody human sacrifice?
Holly forced out a laugh. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she said shakily, ‘get a grip!’
This was no alien. It was a man, and even if he was a certifiable loony who thought he’d been hatched on Mars, the last thing she wanted was to have his blood on her hands.