Chapter Seven

Night settled over us like a cool, velvet curtain. I’d never slept under the stars. I wasn’t sleeping now.

Despite my exhaustion, oblivion would not come.

Murphy wasn’t having any problem. After we’d partaken of cold sandwiches and warm water—no camp-fire in this heat—he’d rolled into his sleeping bag, and I hadn’t heard another word out of him. At least he didn’t snore.

In the years since I’d lost everything, I’d had trouble sleeping. Every time I closed my eyes I saw my daughter the way I’d seen her last.

In a coffin. No mother should have to see that.

I tried to count stars. There had to be a trillion. If assigning them a number didn’t bore me into unconsciousness, what would?

I’d reached 810 when a rustle from the foliage made me tense and lose track.

I held my breath, strained my ears, waited. Then I waited some more. Just when I’d begun to relax, figuring I’d heard nothing, or if something only a snake or a rodent, the sound came again—closer this time—much bigger than any rodent, much heavier than any snake.

My knife was on the ground next to me, but only a few feet away lay Murphy’s rifle. He had a pistol somewhere, too. I’d seen him take it out of a cavernous pocket in his cargo pants, making me wonder what else he kept in mem.

I was thinking far too often and too fondly of what Murphy kept in his pants. I wished I’d never seen
his ass.

I wasn’t wishing all that hard. A girl had to have some fantasies.

The rustle continued, slow and stealthy, from the far side of the camp. I had an intense desire to turn and look, except I doubted I’d be able to see. Only a faint sliver of a moon shone so despite the trillion stars, there wasn’t much light.

Nevertheless, I walked my fingers across the ground until my hand closed over the rifle, then drew it toward me, wincing at the scratch of metal against dirt.

Sleeping Beauty slept on. I felt so safe.

My other hand crept toward the flashlight I’d commandeered in case I had to hit the outdoor bidet sometime in the night. However, considering the sound of what was out there, I’d do better to hold it until morning.

Slowly I turned my head, just as a faint rumble broke the night. Distant thunder? Or the growl of a predator much closer than that?

Considering the number of stars in the clear night sky, I was pretty sure I was in trouble.

I hit the button on the flashlight. A bright yellow beam brushed the trees and the foliage, highlighting a single pair of eyes.

“Shit!” I exclaimed, sitting up, fumbling with the gun. I hadn’t really expected to see anything!

“What the—?”

Murphy had awoken at last, but I didn’t have time to explain. The bushes shook, the eyes never blinked, as whatever waited there crouched and crept closer. I dropped the flashlight, and the glare splashed across the ground.

There came a rush of movement, the crack of twigs, the crunching of rocks. Though I knew it was foolish, I fired.

The report was obscenely loud, the silence that followed even more so.

“What the fuck?” Murphy yanked the rifle from my hands.

I scrambled to my feet, figuring I’d have less chance of getting my throat ripped out if I was standing.

“There. There.” I couldn’t seem to do anything but point and repeat myself.

Murphy got my meaning immediately and spun toward the threat, lifting the rifle to his shoulder. I was impressed with his speed, his agility, his fearlessness, as he stalked toward the shadowed trees.

I expected something large and fierce to erupt. Something I’d really pissed off by shooting at it.

Nothing happened. Maybe I’d hit the thing.

I snatched the flashlight off the ground and hurried after Murphy.

“Stay,” he ordered.

I ignored him, shining the light on the area where I’d seen the eyes. Murphy reached out and shoved back the foliage.

I yelped, and the beam of light j iggled, revealing grass, dirt, a lot more trees, but little else.

He shot me a disgusted look. “You sure you didn’t have a bad dream?”

“I wasn’t even asleep, which is more than I can say for you.”

“Sleeping is what we’re supposed to be doing in the middle of the night.”

“You were supposed to be protecting me.”

“I don’t recall protection as part of the deal. I’m taking you to the bokor.”

“You can’t take me if I’m dead!”

Well, he could, but that would be kind of sick.

“I woke up,” he muttered.

“After I took care of things.”

Murphy continued to frown into the night. “You sure you weren’t dreaming?”

I scanned the shadowy darkness, traced the flashlight across the ground. No blood, no paw prints. Hell.

Maybe I had been dreaming.

But I didn’t think so.

“You shouldn’t shoot at people,” Murphy said “It gets you in trouble, especially when you hit them.”

“Who said anything about people?”

“What else would be creeping up on us?”

“Something that growled, with shiny eyes—yellow, maybe green, hard to say in the dark. About so big.”

I leveled my hand near my waist.

Murphy stared at me as if I were crazy. “You think you saw an animal out here?”

“I know I did. I’m not nuts.” Lately . “And I wasn’t dreaming.”

He shook his head and returned to his sleeping bag, placing the gun nearby.

I followed. “Aren’t you going to stand guard?”

“Against what?”

“The… um…” I frowned.

“Exactly,” he said, and put his hands behind his head, closing his eyes.

“Wolf?”

His lips twitched, but he kept his eyes closed. “In Haiti?”

Wolves did tend to hang around cooler climates. Unless they were werewolves.

I glanced at the trees again. If a werewolf had been out there, it would have run toward me rather than away. They were funny like that.

I turned back. “Jaguar?”

“Nope.”

“Cougar. Leopard. Coyote.”

“Not here.”

“What do they have?”

He opened one eye. “Flamingos are pretty common.”

“That was not a flamingo.”

Unless it was a very, very big one. In this new world I’d discovered a few months ago, such a thing was actually possible. Still, no matter how huge flamingos got, I didn’t think they growled.

“Anything furry?” I pressed.

“Most of the wildlife was hunted into extinction centuries ago, but even before that, Haiti had no large mammals-”

That’s what they all say. Then there’s the death and the bodies and the werewolves.

Take the situation in New Orleans—a place where wolves had been extinct for about a century. Yet —surprise!—there’d been some, but only when the moon rose.

But in defiance of popular legend, the New Orleans werewolf was a loup-garou, cursed to run as a wolf beneath the crescent moon instead of the full. This made for twice the bloodshed, since that particular phase waxed and waned on both sides of full.

According to Edward, the werewolves were evolving—using magic of many kinds to become more numerous, more powerful, more deadly. Perhaps they’d begun to use voodoo here.

“Go to sleep,” Murphy murmured. “From now on it’s just you, me, and our feet.”

My gaze was drawn to the mountains rising above us.

Somehow I doubted that.