Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [91]
Which was what she was going to have to do, eventually. But in the meantime, she was this far. She might as well go the rest of the way, set her mind at ease. If Nate was still alive then he’d be there, waiting for her. He’d summoned her, and she’d always come when he called. He’d have answers, reasons for what happened. Reasons for carving words into her flesh?
But she couldn’t be sure it was Nate. Maybe it was some sick act of Dillon’s. Nate loved her—he’d never want to hurt her.
She turned off the headlights, and the forest was plunged into darkness. It wasn’t yet four o’clock, but with the snow and the towering trees, no light penetrated into the overgrowth. She reached into the glove compartment, hoping for a flashlight, but came up with nothing, not even a registration. Lucky thing she hadn’t been stopped, she thought grimly.
She flailed around under the front seat, and her hand wrapped around something narrow and cylindrical. She pulled it out, and then dropped it. It was a gun.
She turned the interior light on again to look at it. It had to belong to Dillon, and it certainly had to be illegal, since as far as she knew felons weren’t allowed to own guns. She didn’t like guns, but her father had, believing that everyone should at least know about them, enough to respect them.
Respect wasn’t the emotion foremost in Jamie’s mind, but at least she could recognize that it was well-oiled, cleaned and fully loaded. It was a nine millimeter with a clip, and she even knew how to fire the damned thing.
She reached back under the seat and came up with a box of bullets and the flashlight she’d been seeking. Did Dillon know he’d sent her off with a handgun? Things had been crazy when he’d gotten rid of her. He’d probably forgotten.
Except that wasn’t the sort of thing Dillon forgot.
She flicked off the lights again, pulled her cheap winter coat around her, and climbed from the car. She shoved the gun back under the seat. Who was she going to have to use it on—Nate? Dillon? Not likely.
Her discount-store boots were a far cry from waterproof, and the snow seeped through the vinyl as she made her way down the path. There were no tire tracks, no sign that anyone had been down here in the past decade. She had no reason to trudge onward, cold, miserable, frightened. But she kept going, until she could see the towers against the snowy night sky.
There were two of them. Or one and a half—the second one was little more than a pile of rubble, and the first looked about to collapse, as well. At the foundation of the towers lay a litter of deep pits and charred wood, twisted metal, broken glass. No one had touched the place since the fire that had killed Nate’s parents so many years ago. Odd, when her mother would have been the executor of her sister’s will. She would have thought Isobel would have restored the place or had it torn down, but she’d left it as it was. Why?
Maybe the pain and horror of their deaths had made it too difficult to deal with. Or maybe Isobel had kept it at Nate’s request. There was no way of knowing.
She skirted the vast expanse of the ruins, glancing up at the broken tower. It looked like some dark, Gothic sentinel, warning her away. But she’d been ignoring warnings for the past week, why change now?
At first she thought she was imagining the light in the darkness. She squinted her eyes, but the snow and wind had picked up again, making it almost impossible for her to see more than a few feet in front of her.
She kept going in the same direction. A tree branch slapped her in the face, and she cried out in pain, the sound jarring in the stillness of the snow-shrouded forest.
She was being an idiot. It was cold, dark and miserable out there, and she’d been through enough in the last week. She started to turn back, when the wind shifted, and she saw the light clearly. And she moved forward, her hands clutching the flashlight.
What had the old man said? That someone had run a chop shop out here? If so, she’d found the place. The two-story wooden structure must