Hunter's Edge

Chapter Twenty Three

Sunset

"Sunset." The word slipped out through numb lips. Angel shuffled forward, her limbs stiff. She knew from experience how very physical the pain from a broken heart could be—it was a pain that no medicine could ease, no doctor could fix.

Nothing could fix it. Even time... Time may dim the pain a bit, but nothing took it away.

But this guy seemed to think sunset was going to do...what, exactly? She swallowed the lump in her throat and crouched down by the two men. Blondie's chest was moving up and down in a slow, steady rhythm, but Kel—he was still now as he'd been upstairs.

She wanted to cry, but her eyes were painfully dry as she reached out and trailed her fingers along his jawline. How could it be possible that he looked exactly the same? No signs that he'd aged, no physical signs of change at all.

So cold.

So cold.

The cold of his flesh seemed to seep into hers and she shivered, pulling away. The ugly, pitted wound in his chest caught her eye just before she stood and she frowned, leaned in a little. It...no. A trick of the light? Had to be. Something made that wound seem a little smaller.

"You can't just stay here like this. You need to do something," she mumbled. She needed to do something. Call the police. An ambulance for the crazy blond.

Slowly, she straightened, bracing her weight against the wall. If she hadn't had something to lean on, she never would have made it upright. Once she was, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.

She felt painfully, achingly ancient—as though she'd aged decades in the span of one night. Each step took far too much energy and by the time she reached the basement stairs, her legs were shaking with exhaustion. Still, she forced herself to climb and she didn't once look back.

It wouldn't help.

He was dead. All these years, Jake had been right to hope that somehow, Kel had survived whatever happened to him that night. He'd survived that night only to die now.

Man. Fate was such an ugly bitch.

The phone caught her gaze but instead of going to it, she shambled into the living room and stared at the gaping open window frame. The glass was shattered, laying all over the floor. A few distant thoughts circled through her mind that she should clean up the glass—she didn't want Rufus cutting his feet.

But the distant thoughts never quite spurred any action. All she did was shuffle around the perimeter of the room until she could get to the door. She hadn't even closed it after she'd dragged Kel inside her house and now, the interior of the house was cool. Shivering, she reached for the door and started to shut it—

But the sunlight creeping over the horizon caught her eye. Don't look don't look don't look—but she looked. Smears and splatters of blood all over the porch. A couple of busted floorboards and the banister on the western side of the porch was trashed.

She could also see why the floodlight hadn't been working earlier. It had been mounted on a wooden pole next to the driveway, and now, that wooden pole was split into two pieces, one laying off to the side and the bottom half jutting up from the earth.

One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, she moved out of the house, onto the porch and down the porch steps. The farther she went, the worse it got. As she neared the place where Kel had lain as he died, there was grass still wet with blood.

Sunlight fell across the grass at her feet—and the body laying just off to her right. Angel felt oddly disconnected as she shifted her gaze from the blood-stained grass to the corpse.