Hunter's Edge

Chapter Ten

Even her compulsive obsession with blood had been better than the pain. But then, like it had just been waiting for her, that obsession got stronger, stronger, and eventually, it overtook her thoughts. She couldn't make herself quit thinking about it.

It had started when Kel disappeared.

Months later, her obsession with blood had damn near caused her to slit her wrists. Not so much to kill herself, she didn't think...at least not at that moment. But to see the blood.

She dreamed of it, both awake and asleep. She dreamed...vivid, consuming dreams of blood, thoughts and needs that felt so alien, intruding on her, overtaking her, overwhelming her until they were all she could think about, all she could see. She'd wake craving the taste of it and with every passing day, she drifted farther and farther away from sanity.

It was nothing short of a miracle that she'd come back.

By the time she had finally gotten herself steady, Kel's case was all but dead in the eyes of the law. It hadn't been officially closed then, but with nothing but dead ends, Angel had known. Even without the cops coming right out and saying so, she'd known.

A rash of violence had plagued Greenburg for the two days following Kel's disappearance. Another teenager nearly died of blood loss after something attacked her and tried to rip her throat out. Outside of town, the police found the body of a dead hitchhiker.

But after those two days, it had all stopped.

Just like her life, it seemed.

A cold, wet nose brushed against her bare calf and she looked down to see a pair of soulful brown eyes gazing up at her over the rim of a blue plastic food dish. "Hey, Rufus," she murmured, reaching out to scratch the dog behind his ears.

Rufus was a big, ugly mutt, but as lovable as the day was long. She spent many a night cuddled up against him, her face buried in his thick fur as she cried herself to sleep. He was also a present from her current employer.

Jake Saunders.

Sometimes she wondered why she tortured herself like this, working for the father of her dead lover. It wasn't like she couldn't find another job. A better-paying one. It wasn't like she needed the heartbreak.

But he needed her.

Kel was gone, and less than two years after Kel had disappeared, Meredith had been killed. In the past twelve years, the man looked like he'd aged fifty years. He'd just turned fifty-five a month ago, but he looked like he was in his seventies. Frail, stooped and bent.

After a debilitating stroke two years ago, he'd retired from the church where he'd preached for nearly thirty years. The stroke kept him from driving, but not from walking, not from talking.

Not from hoping.

Being face-to-face with that hope almost every day was destroying something inside Angel, in what little remained of her heart. But she couldn't turn away from Jake. She owed him her life, as pathetic as it was, because he'd reached her just before she lost herself completely.

Even though it was a lonely, miserable life, it had to be better living it as a rational—or mostly rational woman, instead of locked in some mental facility. Or dead.

Angel was too stubborn to let herself contemplate how much easier things would be, how the pain would have stopped long ago if Jake hadn't pulled her back from the edge. She might not love her life, but it had a purpose.

Even if that purpose was just caring for Kel's dad.

All in all, it was as good a reason to go on as anything. Jake needed help, and Angel would give it. Because he was Kel's dad. She couldn't have walked away from this any easier than she could have stopped loving Kel—dead or not, it didn't matter. She still loved him.