Chasing Shadows(49)

Juliette was unconscious, he went on to say, and it looked as if she had suffered a great deal. “A beating perhaps. Possibly torture.”

Mark growled again. “I’m gonna kill whoever did this. I swear I’m gonna kill him,” he said vehemently. “Why did they dump her in the driveway? How the hell did they even know where to take her?”

“I suspect, my brother, that whoever injured fair Juliette is behind the barn fire. He or she has likely been watching Saphrona’s place for some time.”

“But why me?” I wondered. “Why would someone target me? I don’t get that at all. And why on Earth would they attack Juliette? She barely knows me.”

“Could this have anything to do with your investigation into Vivian Drake?” Lochlan queried. “Perhaps her source does not wish to be discovered.”

“Oh really—you think?” Mark snapped.

“Look, Lochlan, I’m going to let you go for now,” I said. “You just concentrate on taking care of Juliette. I’ve got to call her parents and let them know she’s been found.”

“Aye. That I will do.”

After hanging up, I dialed the number I’d copied from my house phone’s caller I.D., and Monica Singleton answered on the first ring. I told her what Lochlan had said about finding her in the driveway and that she’d been the victim of some kind of attack, but that my brother was taking care of her until we could get there. She expressed some concern about that, and I assured her that even though he was a vampire, Lochlan would not harm Juliette, reminding her that the two had met more than once already. “He’s actually rather fond of her,” I said. “I’d say he’s near as angry as we are about what’s happened.”

I then cleared my throat, saying, “Ma’am, what are you going to tell your husband? Jules told us that he doesn’t know about you.”

She sighed. “He will by the time we reach your house,” she said solemnly.

I knew that she faced a very difficult task, and I did not envy her. I did, however, feel a little sorry for her—the truth should never have had to come out like this. I wished her luck and then hung up again.

“What were you wishing her luck for?” Mark asked, pulling up the off-ramp just then and rolling through the light, heading back toward town and home.

“Your mother said she was going to tell your father the truth. She probably feels that with what’s happened to your sister, she has no other choice now.”

“Aw, shit,” Mark muttered. “This is just great. He’s got to face the fact that not only was his baby girl beaten and tortured God knows why, but that she’s a freak of nature that can turn into a dog. He’s got to face the fact that she’s not the only one—his wife is a dog, too, and she’s been lying to him for thirty f*ckin’ years.”

“Mark, I’m very sorry this is happening this way,” I said. “I know that she was protecting him—protecting both of you—but if Monica had been honest with him from the start, it wouldn’t be so hard on him.”

“Don’t you think I know that?!” he shouted back at me, then groaned as he ran his free hand down over his face. “Saphrona, I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.”

I took a moment to steady my nerves by looking out the window of the passenger door. “I understand that you are on edge. We’ve all been on edge since Friday—hell, for that matter, I’ve been on edge ever since Wednesday.”

“Wednesday? You mean when we met?”

“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But really, it was my sister’s visit, conveying my father’s request that I look for Vivian Drake’s source that started it all. She rattled me, and I’m usually unfazed by her particular lunacy. Then I got that phone call from you, and then you turned out to be a dhunphyr, and then your dog turned out to be a shapeshifter and… I wondered just what it was that I had done to deserve all those complications all at once. I wondered if meeting you meant I was being drawn back into the world I had tried so hard to leave behind.

“But then I thought about it, and I realized I had never really left it behind, that I never could leave it all behind. Vampires and the supernatural are a part of my life, a part of who and what I am. I’ve been trying to deny it for so long that I refused to see that there is no denying it. And that’s when I began to wonder if my attempts to do so all these years were what had brought all this down on me.”

I sighed and shrugged, “This life isn’t easy. It’s not safe. Your mother and your sister understand that. I know that they were just trying to protect you and your father, but I can’t help feeling like if you’d both been told the truth a long time ago, you would both have been better prepared to deal with it all.”

Sighing again, I went on. “I don’t know what’s going on now. I don’t know why my barn was torched and my animals killed. I don’t know why whoever did that would attack your sister. I get the feeling it has nothing to do with her, that she was just the thing used—like the barn—to send a message to me. And yes, I know how pretentious and self-centered that sounds. But what other reason could there be?”

“Saphrona, please look at me,” Mark said.

I looked over slowly. “What?”

He reached for my hand. “I am sorry for yelling at you,” he told me. “And you are right, it does seem like this is, at the root, an attack against you. I might not understand all the supernatural stuff, but it seems to me like it’s related. But I wonder if it’s just about you, or does it have something to do with me. Is this a message of some kind to the both of us?”

Mark was turning the truck onto our street at this time, and he pushed down on the accelerator to get us there faster. “I don’t know. It could be,” I said, “but the question again is why? Why come after us? Why make poor Juliette suffer for whatever agenda or grudge they have against us? It doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

When Mark turned into the driveway, we noticed that there were dark stains on it where Juliette had lain, and his jaw clenched as he drove over them. Pulling up to the wide parking spot by the house, we came to a stop between Lochlan’s Escalade and a late-model, flash-free Chevy Impala. We climbed out of my truck quickly, and as I rounded the front end, I said to Mark, “No matter what’s going on, right now this is about Juliette, and helping her to get better. And it’s about helping your father cope with all of it.”

He nodded and, taking my hand, led me up the back stoop and into the house.



*****



The first person I saw through the arched doorway between the kitchen and the living room was an older version of Mark. Daniel Singleton was a handsome man, his shoulders broad like Mark’s, his hair short and only sparsely grayed. His expression was wide-eyed as he stared across the room, his arms crossed over his chest defensively, and his head snapped around at our entrance. Daniel took a step toward us and stopped, appearing to recall something that his wife had told him, and his eyes darted between Mark and me.

I leaned close to Mark. “Your father is very nervous right now. I can smell his fear. Be careful with him,” I said in a soft voice.

Mark nodded as we crossed into the living room. I turned to see Monica sitting on the arm of the couch by Juliette’s head, and I noted that she, in turn, was an older version of Juliette—same curly brown hair, same sky blue eyes, same frown lines between her brows. She had a hand resting on Juliette’s forehead, brushing her hair back over and over. Juliette was nude from the waist up—a blanket had been laid over her legs—and Lochlan was cleaning and tending the wounds along her ribcage. Her arms were already bandaged up here and there.

“How is she doing?” Mark asked softly.

“Juliette was badly wounded,” Lochlan replied. “She was beaten up pretty badly, and it looks like she was tortured as well. There are several burns all over her.”

“Has she regained consciousness?” I asked.

There was a pause before my brother answered. “Not yet,” he said at last, and it was then that I saw it: he was pissed, and barely holding his anger in check. I’d known that Loch liked to exchange banter with Juliette and that he found her attractive, but now I was seeing proof that he actually cared about her.

“What about the accelerated healing thing?” Mark asked. “Isn’t that doing its job?”

“Aye, but it’s sluggish,” Loch answered, his accent thickened with anger. “From the scent o’ the blood, whoever did this knew she was a shapeshifter, and they knew of at least one drug what slows the healing of a shifter. Her body’s sodding full of it.”

“Y—you mean there are drugs that stop this?” wondered Daniel, speaking up for the first time since Mark and I had come in.

Monica looked at him. “There are some drugs that can slow our healing process and inhibit the transformation, but only temporarily. And they’re not common knowledge, even among shapeshifters.”