Blood Ghost (The Hunting Tree Book 2) Read online

  She handed the hubcap to Alexa and walked a few more paces down the road.

  Alexa looked back towards the SUV and clutched the shiny side of the hubcap to her chest.

  “Your dad won’t even notice,” Alexa said. “Let’s go.”

  “Come on, Lex. Look,” Chelsea said. She pointed the flashlight back towards the SUV where the hazards still clink-clonked. The two wheels on their side looked dirty and naked. It was already an old, weathered car. Without the shiny caps, the car looked ragged.

  “Yeah, okay,” Alexa said. “But hurry up. It’s dark out here.”

  “The only thing out here to be worried about is your shitty boyfriend,” Chelsea said.

  “Shut up,” Alexa said. “You’re just mad because Jayden doesn’t like you.”

  “You should be mad because your boyfriend seems to care more about Jayden’s feelings than yours,” Chelsea said. “There it is!” She ran a few steps across the sandy shoulder of the road and picked up an old can. “Damn.”

  “Shhh!” Alexa said.

  “What?” Chelsea whispered. She pointed the flashlight at Alexa’s feet and looked at her friend’s scared face in the halo of light.

  “I heard something walking. Did you hear it?” Alexa asked. Her drunken slur seemed nearly gone. Chelsea wondered how much of that drunkenness had been an act.

  “I didn’t hear anything. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Brandon comes back.”

  As soon as Chelsea finished her prediction, they both heard something. They heard a chilling scream from down the road—the direction Brandon had walked. It started almost like a surprised, “Oh!” Then the intensity and terror of the voice rose and reached a crescendo that ended with a sad, mournful wail.

  Alexa’s hand shot out and gripped Chelsea’s arm. Chelsea slapped her free hand to her mouth to suppress a scream of her own.

  “Come on,” Alexa whispered.

  “Yeah, fuck the other hubcap,” Chelsea said.

  The girls ran for the car. Alexa still gripped Chelsea’s arm. The flashlight bobbed and swayed as they ran.

  They threw open the doors—Chelsea took the driver’s door and Alexa took the one to the back seat. They jumped in the car and slammed them shut almost simultaneously. Chelsea jammed her finger down on the button to lock them all. She put her foot on the brake and pulled back the gearshift lever, jumping past Drive and landing on low gear. She was about to accelerate when the bloody face appeared.

  It popped up in the passenger’s window. The face was a painted mask of blood. Two hands slapped the glass on either side, leaving bloody handprints. Alexa screamed. Chelsea exhaled.

  “It’s Brandon, Alexa,” Chelsea said. Alexa truncated her scream.

  “Jerk,” she said under her breath.

  “Hey,” Brandon said, slapping the glass. “Let me in.”

  “You’ll get blood everywhere,” Chelsea said.

  “Nah, I’m not even bleeding anymore. Come on.”

  “Okay, but don’t touch anything and get in back.”

  Chelsea hit the button to unlock the doors. She noticed the shift indicator and moved the lever back to D. The doors locked again. Brandon tugged at the door and then waited for her to hit the button again.

  “I said get in back,” Chelsea said as Brandon took the seat next to her.

  “No way,” he said. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “She bites.”

  “Shut up,” Alexa said. She whacked him on the shoulder with the hubcap and then tossed it to the seat.

  “Was that you moaning out there?” Chelsea asked.

  “Who, me? I wouldn’t do that,” Brandon said. He laughed.

  “You ass,” Alexa said.

  Chelsea put the vehicle in reverse and turned to watch over the seat as she backed up.

  “Where are you going?” Alexa asked.

  “I just want to see if the headlights will pick up the hubcap. Real quick before we go.”

  “Did you guys shit your pants when I jumped out, or what?” Brandon asked. He smiled a big, bloody, lopsided grin at Alexa.

  “You look terrible,” Alexa said. “You should put some ice on your lip or it will be huge tomorrow.”

  “Where am I going to get ice?”

  “I’m just saying,” Alexa said. “When you get home.”

  “I plan to be using my mouth before then,” Brandon said.

  “Gross,” Alexa said.

  Chelsea angled the vehicle to the side to cast the headlights into the tall grass across the road. It took her a couple of tries to get the direction right.

  “Hey!” Chelsea said. “I think I see it.”

  “You’re not going out there, are you? After what we heard?” Alexa said.

  “It was your douche boyfriend who made the noise,” Chelsea said.

  “Just pull us off the road so we don’t get hit by a passing car or anything while you look,” Brandon said. He squeezed between the seats and slithered into the back of the SUV. Alexa objected with shoves, but moved aside so he could join her.

  Chelsea did straighten out the vehicle, but only after making note of the landmarks around where she thought the hubcap was glimmering in the headlights. She hadn’t seen any cars on the road since they’d almost hit the dog, but she still looked both ways before pushing open her door and stepping back onto the dark road. She could hear Alexa protesting and giggling as Chelsea closed the door. She rolled her eyes for nobody and took her first few steps across the road.

  It seemed different out here than it had just seconds before—lonelier somehow. The car was right behind her, idling, shining headlights into the dark, and clink-clonking the song of the hazard lights, but she felt alone. Chelsea stepped across the double-yellow lines and glanced back at the safety of the car. From here, the crickets, and bullfrogs, and other sounds of the night seemed just as loud as car—as if she belonged equally to both worlds. Somewhere in the distance, a woman sang a soothing song. Chelsea felt more comfortable.

  She used the flashlight to locate the wildflower and fast-food bag she’d noted as landmarks and tried to find the angle where she’d seen the glint of the hubcap. It took a second, but she saw the glimmer. She ran forward and parted the grass. She found it standing upright in the weeds. Chelsea said, “Yes!” under her breath as she picked up the metal part. Her brain raced ahead to how she could bang them back into place when she got home. She didn’t want to try to mount them before that—they might be damaged. What good would all her searching do if she just lost them again while driving between Alexa’s house and her own? No, she would wait until she reached the end of her own driveway before she tried to puzzle out how to mount the part back on the car. That way they’d be there when her father came out in the morning. The driver’s side faced the front door, so he’d see everything was normal when he left the house. Then, if the hubcaps came off on the commute to work, he would just assume it was his own fault.

  Chelsea realized she was still standing on the side of the road.

  She also realized that she wasn’t alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Cousins

  “RIGHT THERE, BEFORE YOU stepped on it,” Morris said. He pointed at Roland’s feet.

  “How could you possibly see anything out here? It’s blacker than a bear’s back pocket in these damn woods.”

  “Because it’s how I make my living, isn’t it,” Morris said. When he was angry enough to talk, he tended to agree with himself at the end of his sentences. Of course, the only people who seemed to make him angry enough to talk were his cousins. With most people, Morris’s deep voice only made sporadic appearances.

  “I bet you’ve never tracked anything this strange in your life,” Roland said.

  “I’ve tracked stranger, and bigger, I have. I tracked a polar bear that was stealing meat from a logging camp up in Aroostook. Is that strange? I tracked a giant goddamn monster across half of Maine. Is that strange? I’m not some half-assed suburban poacher.”

  “Whoa, Jesus,
come on,” Merritt said. “Let’s keep it civil please.”

  “I’ll keep it civil when he keeps his goddamn feet off of the tracks I was just pointing out,” Morris said. “Now lift your foot, you oaf, and lets see if there’s anything left of it.”

  Roland put up his hands in a surrendering gesture and took two careful steps backwards. To anyone else, his steps might seem miraculously delicate. He stepped back into a carpet of dried leaves and made only the tiniest sound. Morris sighed exasperation as he knelt down.

  He took a tiny light—the kind you’d find on a keychain—from his pocket and pointed it at the ground. After plucking away a couple of smashed leaves, he said, “There.” His light showed the print of a small, bare foot. The outlines were faint. Deep nails had pierced holes into the ground at the toes.

  “These are from tonight and she was runnin’, wasn’t she,” Morris said. “Running after something, running away from something, or running home?”

  “Why not just running?” Merritt asked.

  “Only pups run for fun. This one’s no pup,” Roland said. “And she doesn’t chase—she calls.”

  “Let’s walk her back trail and see if we can find what was chasing her. Could be she’s afraid of someone, or maybe just afraid of the sun, but I’d like to find out,” Morris said.

  Roland and Merritt followed their cousin through the woods. Morris walked at a slow pace, interrupted every few steps as he stopped to listen and smell the air. He moved quietly and without a flashlight. The moonlight was strong in spots, but where they stood not much of it made it past the leaves overhead.

  “Are you still on the trail?” Roland asked.

  “Shut it,” Morris said. He walked a few more steps and then dropped to one knee. He cast his tiny light on the forest floor again. “She stood here. See?”

  Merritt and Roland huddled around the spot of light. They saw several tiny footprints in dirt and leaves.

  “Why would she stand here?” Roland asked.

  “There’s a house that way,” Morris said. “Can’t you hear it?”

  Roland turned his head slowly, exposing either ear to the direction Morris pointed.

  “No, I don’t hear anything,” Roland said.

  “I hear it,” Merritt said.

  “There’s a house. She waited here for someone to come out, she did,” Morris said.

  “Why? When she visited me, she just came right up to the window,” Merritt said.

  “Maybe there’s someone inside she’s afraid of,” Morris said. “She waits for her boyfriend to come out because she’s afraid of Daddy.”

  “So she waits here and then she runs?” Roland asked.

  “Maybe the wrong person came out of the house,” Morris said.

  Merritt picked up the speculation. “And so where would she run to? She would run away to evade, but she’d still have to find somewhere to get her blood for the night. Can we keep following her trail back to where she lays her head during the day?” Merritt asked.

  “I don’t see anything of where she’s from, just where she went, and that trail dried up. I don’t have the slightest clue how she got here,” Morris said.

  “Took off her skin and flew here, is likely,” Roland said. Morris looked up and studied Roland’s face in the dim light.

  “We could just watch this spot and wait for her to come back,” Merritt said. “Or set up a trap here.”

  “She’s old, so she must be cunning,” Morris said. “I don’t think that would work. We’d have better luck tracking whomever lives in that house. That person’s probably not old nor cunning. They’re just food. You hear that?”

  “I hear something,” Merritt said. “Sounds like singing.”

  Roland’s eyes moved back and forth from Morris to Merritt. Roland’s hearing was terrible—he’d worked around loud machines and listened to loud music—so he didn’t hear the singing, or the sounds from the nearby house, or anything except the crickets. His brother and cousin, on the other hand, seemed almost entranced by what they heard.

  “Hey,” Roland said. “Snap out of it.” He shoved Morris, who leaned into Merritt. The two men regained their senses. “She’s cunning all right. She almost had you two asleep on your feet.”

  Morris dug in his pocket and pulled out bright pink earplugs—the kind he used when he went shooting. She handed a pair to Merritt.

  “These clean?” Merritt asked.

  “Not so you’d notice,” Morris said.

  The men rolled the foam into narrow tubes and shoved them in their ears.

  “Try not to yell,” Morris yelled to Merritt. His cousin nodded. “Let’s watch the house from over here.”

  # # # #

  The men moved with the wind—always staying in sight but downwind of the house. They sat in the dark for hours. One man watched the front of the house, another watched the back, and a third man watched the woods, making sure nobody came up behind them. They rotated positions occasionally.

  Merritt was watching the back door when the young man emerged from the woods into the yard’s waning moonlight. He sensed Morris approach and settle next him. The guy wore only pants. The white skin of his torso nearly shone in the moonlight. His gait was strange. He didn’t so much step as glide across the grass—sliding one foot out in front of him, parallel to the ground, before putting his weight on it. A dog followed behind.

  The half-naked man slid open the door to the house and let the dog go first. Then he closed the door behind himself. Morris and Merritt watched the house for a few minutes. No lights came on inside.

  Morris took out one of his earplugs and Merritt did the same.

  “Follow his tracks?” Morris asked.

  Merritt nodded. He tossed a stick at Roland and then motioned for him to come along.

  The young man’s tracks were easy to find. His sliding steps stirred up a lot of leaves and left a dark trail across the forest floor. Morris took the lead and they moved fast. When he stopped, the men unplugged their ears again.

  “Uncle used to call this House Rock,” Merritt said. “Because it’s as big as a house.”

  “No, it was because it looked like a house,” Roland said.

  “Same thing,” Merritt said. “He stopped here?”

  “For a bit, yes,” Morris said. “Tracks stopped there and picked up again here. I don’t know how he got from over there to here, but that’s what I see.”

  “That would be a hell of a leap. Must be fifteen feet between those spots,” Roland said. “Any tracks of her?”

  “Nope, nothing at all except dog and man,” Morris said. “This dog steps lightly. He pisses a lot though.” Morris knelt by a tree, examining a wet spot.

  “So the man and dog show up here,” Merritt said, pointing to the spot where the tracks ended. “The dog pees, the she-thing visits, and then the man’s over there and he walks home? I don’t understand why she’s acting so different from when she used to visit me. She’d just show up at the trailer, once a week, we’d do our thing and she’d go. There wasn’t any of this sneaking around in the woods nonsense.”

  “I thought we already figured it out—she’s afraid of someone in the house where the guy lives,” Morris said.

  “She was afraid of me. Used to hiss at me if I’d see her out in the yard,” Roland said. “Should have been afraid, too. If I could, I would have shot her. I never could get a good look though. She was too fast.”

  “No sense in debating out here in the dark. I’m through tracking. Let’s go back to Gus’s and start planning,” Morris said.

  # # # #

  The two brothers and their cousin leaned over a table where they’d spread a green and white USGS topographic map. Morris held a pencil.

  “So Gus’s trailer is about here,” Morris said.

  “Not Gus’s trailer—my trailer,” Roland said.

  “Whatever,” Morris said. “And this is where the young man and dog live.” He circled a black square on the map. “House Rock is about here and Lady
’s tracks went this way. The man went this way.” He sketched light lines on the map. “Where’d you say that other kid lived? The one who died?”

  “Right here,” Merritt said, pointing at another black dot.

  Morris circled that dot as well.

  “So she’s working a pretty small territory at the moment. If we knew how to trap her, I’d say we could set up a line between here and here and have a pretty good shot of getting something.”

  “The only thing I’ve heard about is salt,” Roland said. “I talked to Uncle Hubie and he said that salt would do it.”

  “How do you mean? What do we do with this salt?” Morris asked.

  “You put it on her skin,” Roland said.

  “So we see this thing, which is too fast to shoot, and we tell it to hold still while we shake some salt on it?” Morris asked. “That old man has no sense.”

  “She doesn’t have to be wearing the skin,” Roland said. “You can find a skin that she’s shed, assuming that she’s coming back to it. The salt will hold her when she returns.”

  “Oh, well I withdraw my objection then. That sounds perfectly reasonable,” Morris said.

  Merritt laughed.

  “It’s easier than that,” Merritt said. “All we have to do is get the guy to put salt on her when she’s taking his blood. Or we have to catch her in the act. She doesn’t care about anything else when she’s taking blood.”

  “That’s right,” Roland said. “I grabbed her by the neck when she was muckled onto you one time. I could have thrown salt on her then, if I’d known.”

  “So then we get the salt on her and what happens?” Morris asked.

  “Hubie didn’t say. Just said it would catch her,” Roland said.

  “Well, what do you have for salt?” Morris asked.

  “Not much. I’ll pick some up,” Roland said.

  “Get a bunch. We’ll go out tomorrow night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Chelsea

  CHELSEA’S FLASHLIGHT WAS REFLECTED by a pair of eyes in the tall grass by the side of the road. With her body frozen, she turned just her hand until her flashlight illuminated the shape of the dog.