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She wrapped her hands around the arm, trying to tear it away from her trachea, but she was off-balance, heels dragging in the dirt, clutched tightly against the attacker’s chest.
Her heart hammered in her chest. Her first thought was: Please God don’t let him have a knife. Her second was: Aidan?
“Don’t scream, okay?” a deep male voice rasped in her ear.
That voice did not belong to anyone on her crew.
The hunter.
Why did they always say “Don’t scream?” Of course you would scream if you could. Wasn’t that the most logical response unless there was a knife pressed against your throat? Was there a knife pressed against her throat? She didn’t think so. She slid her hands up the offending arm to be sure.
The arm tightened, choking her. Her attacker took a couple of steps backward, dragging her so she couldn’t regain her balance, hiding them both in the shadow of the forest. “That fucker Troy, trying to keep you from me. I can’t believe it took so long for me to find you again. Why didn’t you give me better clues? Now we only have tonight...”
Black spots danced across her vision. She tugged frantically at his arm, trying to get even a tiny breath of air.
“You calmed down now, Kyla?”
She would have answered if she could breathe. Instead, she stopped struggling and made herself go slack, sagging against him. Maybe he’d believe she was unconscious. She wasn’t far from it.
The arm rasped away from her throat. The hand slid away from her mouth and he spun her around, clamping her arms with both hands to hold her up. “It all came together, Kyla. We’ll be okay now, right? Just—”
He stopped, grabbed her higher, digging his fingers into the tender trapezius muscles between shoulder and neck. “Kyla?”
The stranger thrust his face close to hers until their foreheads nearly touched. His breath smelled like he’d been feasting on road kill. Then he shook her, hard. “Shit, you’re not Kyla. Who the hell are you?”
Rubbing her throat with one hand, she managed to croak, “Her replacement.”
Her whistle was around her neck, under her shirt. If she could somehow just unobtrusively pull it out...
Spittle flew from his lips as he demanded, “Why are you pretending to be Kyla?”
Sam flinched. “I’m not.” She curled her hands around his wrists. “Let go of me!”
His grip was as strong as a gorilla’s. She couldn’t shift his hands. His fingers were pinching nerves; her arms were going numb.
He stank like a burger left out in the hot sun; even the long dark hair that hung down around his face smelled like it hadn’t been washed for six months.
“What the hell did you do with Kyla?” he growled, sending more foul saliva her way. “Is this a trap?”
Grungy camouflage fatigues covered his wiry frame. A knife was sheathed on his belt, and the strap of his rifle was slung over his left shoulder, the tip of the barrel protruding from behind his back. A scope was attached to the barrel. He was definitely the hunter who’d been following them earlier.
“Are you Erik?” She wiped the back of her hand across her face. “Klapton?” She could feel the whistle against the skin of her chest, and tried to slip her fingers under the cord to pull it out. Why hadn’t she ever studied self-defense, for godssake?
“How do you know that? Are you in on the deal, too?” He shook her, digging his fingers into her shoulders again, holding her at arm’s length so she couldn’t reach his chest. “Where’s Kyla?”
“In on what deal?” He’d started to say something about what Kyla had told him. “What did Kyla tell you?” she croaked.
Letting go of Sam’s shoulder with his right hand, he grabbed her by the throat, his thumb and fingers digging into the soft flesh on both sides of her trachea. He demanded, “Where is Kyla?”
She slapped at his fingers around her throat. He loosened his grip enough for her to gasp. She coughed twice. “What the hell is wrong with you? What do you want?”
“Where’s Kyla? Tell me!” He grabbed the front of her jacket this time.
“Kyla’s dead.” So she could say it. The word fell out of her mouth and thudded onto the ground between them.
He stared at her for a moment, bloodshot eyes gleaming in the faint starlight. Then he shoved her backwards, slamming her into a tree trunk. “What the fuck?”
She rebounded off the tree and staggered forward, rubbing at the back of her head, one hand held out to fend him off. Troy had been right when he said that Erik Heigler was not in his right mind. This maniac wasn’t even trying to be quiet. Surely one of the crew kids or Aidan or Maya would hear their ruckus and show up soon. “Erik, Kyla and Kim were murdered a month ago.”
“What? What!” Wild-eyed, he pulled at his greasy hair. The rifle strap slid off his shoulder.
She wanted to run, but assuming the rifle was loaded, he could probably shoot her in the back faster than she could get away. And then he could go to the camp, to the sleeping teens...
Her heart was pounding so loudly in her head that she could barely hear him. She had no idea whether she was whispering or talking in a normal voice. “Kyla and Kim were murdered a month ago,” she repeated.
“No!” He shook his head as if he could cast off the fact. Snatching his knife from his belt, he pointed the tip at her left eye. “That fuckhead Charlie.” He let the leather strap slide down his arm and swung the rifle around with his left hand, pointing it in her direction with his other hand.
She was nearly cross-eyed, trying to focus on the knife and keep the gun within view at the same time. The roar of blood in her head was deafening. Charlie?
When Heigler looked at her again, his eyes were shiny with tears. “Who killed them?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Troy? That douchebag Chris? Kyla wrote me. He’s the one, my ass.”
She repeated, “Nobody knows.”
“Is this for real? Are you shittin’ me?” He lowered the knife tip to her throat. With one quick thrust of his hand, he could kill her.
Were those footsteps she heard coming their way? Heigler turned his face toward the sound. She stepped back, reached into her shirt, yanked out the whistle.
The maniac swiveled around, caught her before she could get the whistle between her lips. “I’ll kill all you motherfuckers.” Snatching the whistle from her fingers, he jerked hard. The cord yanked her head forward, slashing into the back and sides of her neck before it snapped. “Why couldn’t you be Kyla?”
She took advantage of her own forward momentum to knee him in the groin. When he crumpled, mumbling “Bitch,” she grabbed the rifle with both hands, shoving the barrel to the side. He pulled back. She twisted the barrel along with his arm, yanking the strap off his arm, but he held on and grabbed for the trigger.
The rifle discharged. Heat shot through the barrel under her hands and the boom instantly rendered her deaf, but she kept her grip tight and managed to slam the butt into his chest. When he staggered back a step, she ripped the rifle from his hands and slung it in a wide arc out over the lake. It splashed into the water thirty feet from the shoreline.
“Shit!” He shoved her again, so brutally this time that her head snapped back against the tree trunk.
Fireworks exploded in her brain. She slid down the trunk, ending up on her backside, black spots closing in on her vision. A rock stabbed into her thigh.
He’d pull out his knife now to finish her off, and then he’d be after her crew. No, she couldn’t be absent again when someone died. She grabbed for the rock beneath her leg, realized it was her whistle, managed to cram it between her lips and let out a long piercing blast with the last of her breath.
His cursing was the last thing she heard before his fist slammed into her head. Her vision faded to the sound of his footsteps running away. Pain flooded out from behind her eyeballs to wash over her brain, leaving only blackness in its wake.
* * * * *
She came to slowly, confused by blurry black spots dancing in front of her eyes. They slowly resolved into fir branches overhead. Why was she sprawled on the ground? How long had she been out? The murmur of a footstep on gravel scratched close by and from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the toe of a hiking boot.
Klapton! The knife! Panic came rushing back. She clawed her fingers into the dirt and struggled to a sitting position.
“You okay, Cap’n?” Aidan asked. “I heard your whistle.”
She peered up into a flashlight beam so blinding it felt like a bolt of lightning darted through her brain. She ducked her head again and pressed a hand against her brow as a shield. “Get that flashlight out of my face.”
He complied, and then held out his hand to help her up. “Is that blood running down your neck?”
Gaining her feet, she swayed for a moment like a drunk. Gingerly rubbing her fingers over her neck, she felt the sting of raw flesh and wetness running down into her shirt collar. “Did you see him?”
“See who?”
“Klapton. I mean Heigler—Erik Heigler. Our hunter.”
Aidan tilted his head. “You okay, Sam? You’re not making any sense.”
She squinted to bring him into focus. Like the other boys, Aidan’s face was scruffy now, with more than a week’s worth of reddish whiskers. In the dark, the shaggy beard lent him a menacing aspect.
“I just got attacked by the guy who left that Klapton note,” she said. “He’s the hunter we saw twice before.”
“Really?”
“Think I’d make that up? Turns out Klapton is Troy Johnson’s nephew. He was looking for Kyla.”
“What? The hunter is Klapton? Wait—didn’t he have a gun?” Aidan glanced around nervously.
“A rifle. It’s in the lake. He had a knife, too.”
“Should we call 9-1-1?”
A snort escaped her lips. She loved the wilderness for its lack of civilization, but that same aspect rendered it dangerous in emergencies. Even when cell phones worked up here to summon help, no assistance would arrive for hours, maybe even days. “I think he’s gone now.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because I’m not Kyla?” That sounded weird, she knew. “But it sounded like he came here for her, and now he knows she’s not here. He seemed upset that she was dead.”
“Really?” Aidan ran his fingers through his ragged hair. “What a freak.”
What an odd thing to say. But then, this was a very odd conversation in a very odd situation. Wincing, Sam touched her cheekbone where the maniac had punched her. “Or maybe he ran off because I threw his rifle in the lake and blew my whistle.”
Aidan glanced at the lake and then turned back to her, tilting his head to one side. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night, anyway, Sam?”
She moved her hand to the back of her head. Although there was a sizeable lump there, she was relieved that she didn’t feel any blood. “I’ll ask you the same thing, Aidan. That plane woke me up, and when I got up to check the camp, you were gone.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was sitting down by the lake when that plane flew over. That seemed weird, so I walked down the shoreline to see if I could spot what the pilot was looking for.”
“Did you find anything?”
He shook his head. “Nada.”
Her peer counselor was trying too hard to appear nonchalant. That fuckhead Charlie. Aidan Charles Callahan. She’d bet he was involved in tonight’s events somehow.
She sucked in a long slow breath and then blew it out again, clearing enough of a space in her brain to get a sudden vision of Heigler circling back to the group site with that knife.
“We’ve got to get back to camp.”
