Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [810]
God help her, she didn’t need to get very close to see that it was Teddy lying there. The teen’s favorite black-and-red flannel shirt was sticking out of the shredded, bloodied mess of his heavy down parka. His dark brown hair was iced over where it rested against his cheek and brow, his olive-colored skin frozen and waxy, tinged blue where it wasn’t coated brick red with coagulated blood from the torn, gaping wound where his larynx used to be.
Alex rocked back on her heels, sucking in a great gasp of air as the reality of what she was seeing slammed into her. Teddy was dead. Just a kid, for crissake, and someone had killed him and left him there like an animal.
And he wasn’t the only one to suffer that fate at this remote family settlement. Shock and fear clawing at her, Alex stepped back from Teddy’s body and swung her head around to look at the surrounding area and houses. A door was smashed off its hinges across the way. Another motionless bulk lay outside one of the cabins. Still another, just below the open door of a pickup truck that was parked alongside an old wooden storage shed.
“Oh, God … no.”
And then there was the body she’d seen on her descent into the settlement, the one that looked so like Pop Toms, dead and bloodied at the edge of the woods behind his house.
Taking a firmer hold on her rifle even though she doubted that the killer—or killers, based on the depth of carnage here—had bothered to hang around, Alex found herself drifting toward that scarlet-drenched patch of snow near the tree line, Luna following at her heels.
Alex’s heart and stomach twisted together with each dreadful step. She didn’t want to see Pop like this, didn’t want to see anyone she cared about brutalized and broken and bloody … not ever again.
Yet she could no more stop her feet from moving than she could keep from kneeling beside the grisly, facedown corpse of the man who’d always greeted her with a smile and a big, warm bear hug. Alex set her gun down in the red snow next to her. A wordless cry strangling in her throat, she reached out and carefully rolled the big man’s shoulder. The ruined, sightless face that gaped up at her made Alex’s blood chill in her veins. His expression was one of pure terror, frozen across his once-jovial features. Alex could not even begin to imagine the horror of what he must have seen in the instant before he died.
Then again…
The old memory leapt out at her from the dark, locked corner of her past. Alex felt its sharp bite, heard the screams that had shattered the night—and her life—forever.
No.
Alex didn’t want to relive that pain. She didn’t want to think about that night, least of all now. Not when she was surrounded by so much death. Not when she was so totally alone. She couldn’t bear to dredge up the past she’d left eighteen years and thousands of miles behind her.
But it crept back into her thoughts as though it were yesterday. As though it were happening again, the unshakable sense that the same horror she and her father had survived so long ago in Florida had somehow come to visit this innocent family in the isolated wilds of Alaska. Alex choked back a sickened sob, brushing at the tears that burned her cheeks as they froze against her skin.
Luna’s low grunt beside her broke into Alex’s thoughts. The dog was digging at the snow near the body, her muzzle buried in the powder. She moved forward, sniffing out a scent that led toward the trees. Alex got up to see what Luna had found. She didn’t see it at first, then, when she did, the sight did not compute in her mind.
It was a footprint, bloodstained and partially obscured by the new-fallen snow. A human footprint that she had to guess would have fit a size fifteen or larger boot. And the foot that left it was naked—more than improbable in this deadly cold, impossible.
“What the hell?”
Terrified, Alex grabbed Luna by the scruff of her neck and held her fast