Then, “Am I hearing you right? You’ve ditched the good guy, and you’re chasing after the bad one. Why would you do that?”
The question brings me up short. She has a way of cutting through all the bullshit, getting right to the beating, red heart of the matter. I find myself at a rare loss for words.
“He dangles the line, a little bit of Rilke, a little bit of intrigue, and you go running? What would Dear Birdie say?”
“Uh,” I say stupidly. I’m so far from my Dear Birdie mind. I didn’t even read the letters Jax sent. I just told her to forward them to Liz. It’s freeing in a way I wouldn’t expect, not to have those voices in my head. I feel like I can hear my own for the first time in a while.
Do you hear that?
No, I don’t hear anything.
What you hear is silence.
“She’d say that you need to check your impulses. She’d say that when your actions put you in harm’s way, you need to unpack that. You need to sit with it and ask yourself why.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not chasing after him.”
“Then what?”
I don’t answer because it sounds too dark.
But the truth is I’m hunting you.
What happens when I catch up with you depends largely on what you’ve done with those women. But Jax doesn’t know that side of me. Even my closest friend hasn’t seen all the facets of Wren Greenwood, and she’s never met Robin Carson.
“I’m going to go,” I tell her gently. “But I’ll be okay. And I’ll be in touch soon.”
“Wren.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Just take care of the house and Dear Birdie for me.”
“I really don’t like the way you sound right now.”
“I love you.”
“Wren, don’t you dare hang up this phone.”
I do, though. And then with one hand, I disable her ability to follow me and I turn off the phone. No more distractions.
When tracking a creature, focus and silence are critical.
The darkness fans out before me, dancing at the edges of my headlights.
I make the last turn on the directions you gave me. There is no final destination, no address, just a series of turns and road names, markers to look out for—an old barn, a rusted pickup up on blocks in the drive of a red farmhouse.
The road is rocky and dark. The moon dips behind the clouds.
I keep driving.
forty
Bailey Kirk didn’t believe in an angry God, one who punished and raged. His father was an atheist, but his mother believed that God was in everyone and everything, and that was why you had to treat yourself, and the planet, and each other with love and respect. As a family, they did not attend church, but his mother had a kind of spiritual practice that consisted of meditation, long walks in nature, good deeds, and some various rituals involving a sage stick and singing bowl.
Mom’s smudging again, his sister would say, with an indulgent roll of the eyes.
The smell would fill the house, cleansing it, she said, of stale energy or negativity, or inviting positivity, or expressing gratitude for some blessing. That smell of burning sage brought him right back to his childhood, to the warmth and safety of that place and time in his life.
It burned in his nostrils now, strong and tangy on the back of his tongue.
Open your eyes, Bailey. His mother’s voice. Wake up, son.
He followed the scent up through layers of darkness, only to find himself on the floor of a strange living room, definitely not his mother’s house. A man he’d never seen—or wait, had he?—knelt beside him, wearing a worried frown. When Bailey tried to move, a violent pain in his shoulder radiated down his arm and he cried out with it.
“Okay,” said the older man. “Take it easy.”
There was no smell of burning sage now, and that feeling of warmth and safety was long gone as the man, surprisingly strong, helped Bailey over to the couch. He leaned in to inspect the wound.
“You’re lucky. Looks like the bullet passed right through. Lost some blood, though.”
He was feeling a lot of things—lucky wasn’t one of them.
Rick Javits still lay in his recliner, pale and growing stiff, his final resting place, staring blankly. Okay, yeah, Bailey conceded to himself. Lucky.
The older man who was tall and broad, wearing jeans, work boots, and a barn jacket, walked over to the body, shook his head.
“Rick was a good guy. Who did this?”
The world pitched and tilted, and Bailey vomited on the floor, causing another bottle rocket of pain to shoot down his arm.