Blood Red

When she woke up, she was in her bedroom and the alarm was blaring at her.

“I can’t take these dreams anymore. Fuck, I just can’t.”

She slipped out of bed and stood, chilled by the early morning air and by the memory of Bill’s fury.

She didn’t even notice the letter opener near her feet. It had bounced when she dropped it earlier and was now mostly obscured by the covers.

III

Ben finally made it to his car just after sunrise. He had plenty of company along the way; a gathering of crows kept an eye on him as he walked the three miles toward Tom’s house.

He’d parked a block away from the place. Not by choice, mind you, but because the crows decided to land on his car and obscure his view until he did.

There was something very unsettling about having big black birds with wickedly sharp beaks telling you what to do. Still, he did it. He knew that Maggie needed him then and there, and he wasn’t going to let having to walk stop him.

Thinking back on the night that had just passed made his mind want to run and hide. He was fine with the whole thing, except for Maggie covered in blood. He could live with the demented intuition telling him he had to find her. He was dealing pretty damned well with the whole birds-hijacked-my-car-and-made-me-drive-here thing; it was really, really creepy, but he could manage to swallow it.

What was bugging him most was the sight of Maggie when he finally saw her. Damn near anyone else would have had trouble recognizing her right then. Most people didn’t know every feature of her face well enough to identify them through a caul of drying blood. The curve of her jawline and the teeth he knew so well were what gave her away. The way her hair fell, even when thick with crud, told him her identity. And her eyes as she came out of whatever spell had seized her; that was what really told him everything he needed to know.

She’d looked so confused, so dismayed . . .

Maggie didn’t really let a lot show on her face all the time. She was not an open book by any stretch of the imagination. When she was at school, she was studying; when she was in public, she kept a careful guard on her emotions. It was when she was alone that she showed the most emotion. Sometimes, she let herself relax around him, too, and he had learned to understand her expressions.

She’d been horrified by what she had done. He knew that. There were other emotions that warred with her fear in that moment before the crows swept through and blocked everything else, but he’d seen her repulsion at what lay before her on the ground.

He’d been horrified, too. There was a moment, very brief and fleeting, when he’d been afraid of her. She hadn’t looked human when he saw her; she’d looked more like a demon or a goddess or something that went beyond Ben’s definition of human. He’d been scared, and maybe he still was a little. But it was Maggie. Whatever else she might have become, no matter how frightening, he was in love with her.

And yes, he had recognized the remains of Tom Pardue, as well. Despite the vast mutilations, he had known the face of his enemy in an instant.

One look at the corpse and he knew he had to get her out of there. He also knew her car well enough by sight and knew a few other things that most people wouldn’t have known, like where her spare key was. She had a little magnetic box that was hidden in the well of her front bumper. Watching her dig for it one time had kept him focused on the shape of her derriere for almost a week. She was definitely as lovely from the back as she was from the front.

Ben shook that thought away. He was here to get his car.

She’d been quiet on the way back home, exhausted by whatever had overcome her. He’d been quiet, too, while his mind tried to take in the sight of her covered in blood and the fact that he’d come only inches away from running down two men who were too close to where she stood when he arrived.

Boyd and Holdstedter were decent enough guys, and he knew they had no love for Tom Pardue. But he still didn’t think they’d have let her walk away from the murder scene, and Ben knew he couldn’t allow them to arrest her. If they came after anyone, he preferred they come after him.

He was at least as guilty as Maggie: he’d killed Pardue a hundred times in his mind.

So far there had been no knock at his door. They seemed to have gotten away without incident.

Now he just had to get his car back where it belonged and avoid getting himself caught this late in the game.

Even from a block away, he could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles that surrounded the man’s house. That could be a problem, too. There might be an investigation into Pardue’s past. That investigation might bring up Maggie’s name.

He’d have to do something about that.