May I have her as a pet?
KATE WOKE ON HER SIDE in the dirt. The steady throbbing at the back of her head was the first thing she recognized, and it took several moments to understand that she was still at George Perry’s hunting camp, that the sky was dark with clouds, and that she seemed to be alone. This bothered her, but she didn’t know quite why.
She couldn’t sit up. This puzzled her. Why couldn’t she get her hands beneath her and push?
Investigation revealed that they had been secured behind her back. Her feet seemed to have been immobilized, too. She couldn’t move, couldn’t reach up to feel the back of her head, which felt as if a piece of it were missing and all the exposed nerve endings were screaming for help.
Since she couldn’t move, she thought. At first there was nothing, a blank, black space devoid of faces, names, places. There was nothing there.
Panic gathered in her gut and threatened to rise up and choke her. She closed her eyes in fierce concentration. Her head throbbed with it but she wouldn’t stop, not until she knew it all.
Who am I? she thought. Think, Kate.
Kate. Kate, that was it, Kate Shugak, star of the Anchorage district attorney’s investigative staff, lover of Jack Morgan, granddaughter of Ekaterina Shugak, owner of a 160-acre homestead in the Park.
Or no. Emaa was gone, she remembered now. And she didn’t work for the DA anymore. But she still slept with Jack Morgan every chance she got, and she still owned her father’s homestead.
Tendrils of memory felt their way through the pain, one at a time. George Perry hiring her to guide the last week of August. The hunt before this one, which had gone off like clockwork, everyone had tagged their moose and shot enough ptarmigan and geese to fill up the rest of their freezers and gone home rejoicing.
The second hunt. The Germans. Fedor’s death. Hendrik’s. George taking the first body to town. Hiding the weapons and tossing the cabins. Klemens and the feuding moose. Jack. That gray streak, all furious yellow eyes and white teeth. The booming sound just before she blacked out. The subsequent yelp of pain and rage.
Her eyes snapped open.
She was facing the log in front of the lodge. The smooth white wood of the trunk was an inch from her nose. Spruce needles were digging into her cheek.
She waited, listening. There was no sound but the rustle of the wind in the trees overhead. A shift of her hips and she was rolling to her right, so that she could see the yard, a roll that should have been hindered by the presence of a .357 on her hip, but wasn’t because the .357 was no longer there.
The yard looked much the same, with one exception.
Jack lay sprawled on his face twelve feet away, a dark stain blotting the back of his shirt.
Something, some sound she did not recognize, ripped out of her throat. She launched herself toward him, wriggling, twisting, writhing, worming her way over rock, exposed roots, slivers of wood, ejected shell casings, cigarette butts, moving with agonizing slowness. Her universe narrowed to that one thing, all her ambition focused on achieving that one goal, to get to Jack.
Which was why she didn’t hear the footsteps, and was totally unprepared for the hand that reached down and grabbed her braid.
The hand used it to haul her to her feet. Pain sliced through her scalp and an involuntary cry escaped her, a sound of which she was instantly ashamed.
A grinning face appeared in front of her own, a face she had seen calm, expressionless and unchanging but never grinning, hugely, as it was now. “Have I told you how much I like your hair?” Eberhard said.
In one of those quirky, quantum shifts of memory, she recognized the parody of Jack’s nearly identical words the day before. Coupled with the sight of his lifeless body, the memory brought a welcome upsurge of rage, and with it a return of all her senses.
She masked it immediately. “No,” she said. She couldn’t quite manage a smile, but she was able to say, “How much do you like it?”
He took a fat loop of braid around his hand and jerked, and she stumbled forward until their faces were almost touching. In an odd way she was grateful for the support, as a wave of nausea seemed to begin with the dull pain in her head and roll over her entire body.
“A lot,” Eberhard said. “I look forward to seeing it spread out on my pillow.”
The rage beat back the nausea and this time she did manage a smile. “You’ll like it even better then.”
“And your brown skin, I like that, too. Very smooth. I will like to touch it. Too bad about the scar. It mars perfection.” Eberhard looked over her head. “I like this one. May I have her as a pet?”
“Of course you may, darling,” Senta’s voice purred. Involuntarily Kate turned her head to see Senta smiling down at her. “So long as you kill her afterward.”
Eberhard grinned again and stretched out his free arm to cup the back of Senta’s head. He pulled her into a grinding, carnal kiss. She responded with little grunting sounds that reminded Kate of the rutting moose in the meadow. It was animalistic and entirely without affection or tenderness.
Eberhard used Kate’s braid to muscle her closer, shoving his knee between her legs to rub her crotch with his thigh. Another, duller wave of pain radiated from her head and she fought back a second surge of nausea and willed herself not to shrink away.
Senta laughed at Eberhard when he let her go. They both looked at Kate, identical predatory smiles on their faces. “Perhaps we could share her,” Senta suggested.
Eberhard liked this idea. “Perhaps we could. We have all night, liebchen, before the plane returns. And I think this one will do anything we ask of her, just to stay alive. Look at her, she hasn’t even looked at her man, for fear it will make us think she cares for him, that she might want revenge for him. How much farther will she go? It could be—” he bent his head and ran his teeth along Kate’s jaw “—amusing to find out.”
He bit Kate, hard, where jaw and throat met.
She stood motionless in his grasp, enduring it because she had to, because for the moment there was nothing else to do. Now was not the time to fight.
Soon, but not now, not yet.
His hand cupped her breast and squeezed, not gently. Ruthlessly Kate restrained her instinctive shrinking, her cry of protest. Not now, not yet. She chanted the words over and over again in her mind, like a mantra, reaching for strength. She should have been encouraging his advances if she wanted to gain any herself, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do more. She looked past his shoulder instead of up into his face.
Her heart gave a great leap.
Jack’s body was lying two feet closer to the trestle table than it had been the last time she had looked.
There were knives on the table.
The sight galvanized her, spurred her to action, the only kind of action available to her. She let her knees loosen and swayed on her feet, leaning against Eberhard for support. It was only partly an act. “Could I sit down?”
“Certainly, pet,” Eberhard crooned.
He walked her to one of the deck chairs sitting near the fire pit, herding her like a wolf would a sheep. Someone had kindled a Sterno log, on top of which half a dozen chunks of wood had been inexpertly piled. The wind helped, whipping the flames up the sides of the logs.
She sat down. She forced herself to look up with a smile and say, “Thank you.”
He chucked her beneath the chin. “You can thank me later, pet. In many, many ways. I’ll make sure of it.”
She looked past him at Senta, standing straight and proud, triumph glittering in her eyes. Most criminals shared the universal urge to brag about how clever they were. Kate said humbly, “May I ask where the others are?”
Kate had used the right approach, just the right touch of cringing servility, slave to mistress, peasant to patrician. Senta preened at this tacit acknowledgment of her authority. “Certainly you may ask, Kate.”
“Later.” Eberhard’s voice was guttural. He was staring at Senta with narrowed eyes.
She met his eyes. Kate saw the instant of realization, actually saw her nipples erect beneath his gaze. Senta looked at Eberhard and ran a deliberately provocative tongue around parted red lips. One hand began to unbutton her shirt, the other slid over a hip and between her legs, part offer, part incitement.
It worked. Eberhard crossed the distance between them in three steps.
Kate tried not to watch what happened next, tried not to listen, but it was impossible. Senta and Eberhard wanted an audience. They took every care not to roll out of view. Kate focused on the trees at the edge of the clearing and tried not to show her disgust.
She didn’t run because she couldn’t, because her hands and feet were immobilized, with duct tape she saw now, that force that bound the universe and her hands and feet together. She could have hopped, she might even have made the trees before they caught her, but Jack was taking advantage of their captors’ distraction by inching forward again, and his hands and feet were free. If he could just get to one of the knives in time.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to scratch Senta and Eberhard’s itch. When they were done Jack was a foot closer to the trestle table, well within arm’s reach if he were ordinarily mobile. How hurt was he? Was he able to wield a knife? Kate thought of the Swiss army knife in her pocket, pulled her bound hands first from one side and then to the other. Useless; she could not reach.
Senta, naked, hair loose around her shoulders, got to her feet and stalked to the fire. The logs were enveloped now in leaping flames two and three feet high. She nudged one closer to the flame with a bare toe.
In the fading light the flames gilded her hair, above and below, threw the lines and curves of her body into bold relief, flickered over her skin like sunlight on water. The wind rippled through the clearing and raised her hair from her face.
Kate had nicknamed her “Ice Queen” in her mind; the ice had melted now, to reveal the harpy within. All Senta lacked was the hooked beak, the claws and the stench, but as Kate very well knew, many if not most monsters looked as everyday as the girl next door. The Ice Queen had only been an image, carefully cultivated, to hide the putrefaction beneath.
Seeing her in those terms steadied Kate, concentrated her attention on her options. Her focus had narrowed. It didn’t matter what had happened on the ridge that day, or on the creek the day before, or on the hunt the day before that. It didn’t matter why DRG was being investigated, or by whom, or if that investigation had led to murder, and what looked like mass murder at that.
Today, here, now, Senta had ceased to be human, ceased to be worthy of human regard, ceased, in Kate’s eyes, to have any human rights whatever. With Jack, wounded, perhaps dying not six feet away from her, with Mutt missing, with Old Sam and Demetri and the rest of the hunting party unaccounted for, and Klemens, she remembered suddenly, where was Klemens?
She forced the thought from her mind.
No, she had no problem assuming the role of judge, jury and executioner.
It was time to make a move, to bring attention back to herself.
She stretched her legs, groaning, she hoped not too theatrically.
Eberhard turned his head. He, too, looked magnificent in the firelight and deepening dusk, powerful shoulders, well-muscled arms and legs, a strong neck. Kate had always liked a strong neck. “What’s the matter, pet? Cramping up a little? We can’t have that.” He rolled over and looked up at Senta. “Shall we play with our new toy?”
Senta looked down at Kate. The feral smile and the purr were back. “Why not?”
Eberhard took that as a yes and rose effortlessly to his feet, padding toward Kate on bare feet. His penis, flaccid now, bobbed between his legs, a misleading statement of manhood. It looked silly, as flaccid penises do, and she had to repress the bubble of laughter that rose to the back of her throat. He’d kill her if she laughed. He was going to kill her anyway, but if she laughed at the family jewels he’d kill her sooner rather than later. She couldn’t laugh.
Eberhard knelt at her feet and began ripping at the duct tape around her ankles. “First let’s get this off you,” he said, his voice sounding too much like Senta’s purr for Kate to find any comfort in it. He grinned at her. “Might be a little inconvenient later on, hmmm?”
Senta came to stand behind him, avid, amoral, ruthless. “Don’t hurt our plaything,” she said to Eberhard, looking into Kate’s eyes and smiling.
Kate didn’t flinch, either from the rapacious expression on Senta’s face or from the way Eberhard twisted the duct tape to dig into her ankles even as he removed it. She wanted them to think she was beaten, without hope, that she had given up every thought but survival, that she would do anything she was told for that end and that end alone.
It seemed to work. “How well she is tamed,” Eberhard said, sitting back on his haunches. “I don’t think I like it.”
Senta laughed, a wild, excited, animal sound. “I trust you, liebchen. You’ll wake her up.”
Eberhard’s penis stirred and began to grow again. “Of course you are right, as always.” He leaned forward to shove Kate’s legs apart. Her feet slid back, too, parallel to and outside the legs of the chair, directly beneath her body weight and center of gravity.
In that moment Jack heaved his torso up from the ground and snatched not a knife but a box of twenty-two shells from the tabletop and tossed them into the middle of the fire. It landed with a sound like a log popping. Jack collapsed back onto the ground and lay without moving.
Neither sound registered with Eberhard or Senta, intent on opening up their new toy and playing with it until it broke. Kate took a deep, steadying breath as Eberhard’s hands went to her belt.
The flames licked up around the box and the cardboard divider melted like wax.
Eberhard worked the buckle free and his hands went to the snap.
Suddenly the clearing was filled with the clamor of primer igniting and cartridge cases rupturing. Even to Kate, who had witnessed Jack’s action and who knew that in spite of the noise the bullets weren’t going anywhere, it sounded like a full-scale assault by an entire infantry division.
Eberhard leapt to his feet and ran not for his clothes but for the weapon leaning against the log. There was something wrong with that rifle but for the moment Kate couldn’t think what it was, and she didn’t have time to figure it out because it was at that moment that Mutt exploded out of the brush and over the log in one graceful, deadly leap, teeth bared, going straight for Eberhard’s throat.
Senta, startled and gaping, had no time to get out of the way before Kate’s right shoulder caught her solidly in the belly and hurled her backward onto the fire.
She screamed, a piercing shriek louder than the exploding shells, louder than Eberhard’s yell as he fought off a set of sharp, snapping teeth. She rolled frantically out of the fire and kept rolling until she hit the side of the lodge, to lie there curled into a fetal position, moaning and sobbing.
Kate didn’t hesitate; she jumped straight for Jack, who was on his feet. Together they headed for the trees, giant steps awkwardly taken because of his wound and her bound hands.
The rifle boomed and there was a protesting howl from Mutt.
Kate screamed. She couldn’t stop herself.
“Don’t stop!” Jack roared. He gave her a shove. “Keep going, we can’t help her now!”
The rifle boomed again, clipping the branch off the birch tree. It fell, missing Jack’s head only to bounce painfully off Kate’s shoulder.
Klemens rose up before them like a specter, blood streaking down one side of his face. He raised his rifle and for a split second Kate thought he was going to shoot her. “Klemens, no!”
The rifle cracked and the bullet sang past her shoulder. “Run, Katerina!” he said through clenched teeth, and fired again.
There was an oath from Eberhard, followed by another boom of the big rifle, and half of Klemens’s face disappeared.
She plunged into the brush, crashing through the alder and the spruce, hearing Jack battling through behind her, knowing they had little time to gain a lead, that Eberhard at least would be after them as soon as he pulled on his pants.
In the meantime, she ran, lungs burning, heart pounding as hard as her feet, skin scratched and torn from the brush from which she had no hands to shield herself, her only thought to put as much distance between herself and the two killers as possible, to get Jack to safety, to see to his wound, to find a weapon and to return and exact vengeance for what had been done to her and hers. She ran.