Hunter's Edge

Chapter Five

Sorry this didn't get posted last week. Things were crazy.

The Attack

The low-level burn in his gut had Kel speeding down the expressway with the gas pedal pressed to the floor. His eyes kept straying to the digital clock on the dashboard and each minute that ticked by seemed to last an hour.

All damn night, something had been driving him nuts. Edgy, anxious, itchy, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Then twenty minutes ago, he'd known. The itch had bloomed into a low-level burn and he'd known.

Angel.

Something was wrong with Angel. She was in trouble.

He turned off the expressway, five miles to go. That low-level burn wasn't low-level anymore. It was a high-octane explosion and he could feel Angel's fear, her terror—and pain. She was in pain. She was hurt. His neck burned in sympathetic pain as he took a left on Mulberry and then sped down the street, veering onto the shoulder to go around a slow-moving minivan. The driver laid on the horn as Kel cut back onto the road.

The Estates of Whispering Oaks took up several hundred acres of land along Deermont Road. The fourth and last street was the street where Angel had lived most of her life. Kel took it at a speed that had his tires squealing and as he hit the brakes in front of her house, he realized he couldn't feel that fear any more, or the pain.

He couldn't feel Angel at all. Even when he tried to reach out, tried to sense her, he couldn't feel her—it was something that had never happened. For a good eight years, from the time he was eleven—Angel had been in narrow strip of trees behind her house, playing in an old tree house built by the previous owners, and she'd fallen, broken her arm. Nobody had heard her scream but Kel had been in his room, grounded because of a C- he'd brought home on a project for science.

Something had been wrong. He'd felt a burning pain in his arm, and he'd known instinctively it was Angel. From that time on, he'd always been able to reach out and just feel her—he knew when she was happy, when she was scared. But now, he couldn't feel her and that scared him more than anything else.

Logically, that drive took thirty-four minutes—he kept track of every last one. Those minutes were endless and when he pulled up in front of the old colonial house where Angel had grown up, he left the keys in the ignition and the engine running. Leaping up the steps, he knelt down in the flower bed and grabbed the little rabbit statuette, wiping the soil away from the false bottom and digging the key out.

He got the door open and dimly, his mind registered an electronic beeping—part of him seemed to recall the alarm system, that he needed to reset it—it was weird the way his mind cataloged all those minute details even when his heart was rushing like an express engine and his breathing coming in hard, rough pants.

As he passed by the narrow console table in the main hall, he grabbed a silver letter opener. It looked delicate but felt damn solid in his hand. The blade was thin and not meant for cutting, but the point if it was damn sharp. Not much of a weapon...

Fuck.

He saw her now, up on the landing between the first and second floors—at least he saw her hair at first, the long, pale golden sweep of it hanging down. The rest of her body was obstructed by a big, mean looking bastard who held her clutched against him.

The man shifted a little and Angel's arm swung into view. Kel saw red. Literally—and physically. Thin streams of blood flowed down her wrist, down her slack fingers to drip down onto the floor.