LITMIR.BIZ

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term for someone she’d never met. Their two houses were the only ones on either side of the woods, and they were miles from town. No one ever casually strolled near her place.

      Josie rubbed her eyes. The man must be Hayes. His property lay to the west of the woods and north of Angel Bay, the town. The dogs had to be his. No one else’s. She scuffed her toes in the dirt as she sorted through her confused memories of the past few months.

      Seven or eight months ago, she didn’t know exactly when, he’d returned to the old house that backed onto the Angel River where it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. She hadn’t seen him.

      Until now. She was dead certain that intense, solitary figure was Ryder Hayes, those terrifying dogs his. Keeping her gaze on the woods, she backed up. She wouldn’t let him get away with letting his pets—pets! she thought, outraged—roam uncollared and uncontrolled.

      God knew what those beasts were capable of.

      What if she’d been a child?

      Sweaty and shaky, Josie shivered as the memory of those yellow eyes glazed her burning skin with ice. “You and your damned dogs can all go to hell, Ryder Hayes.” Alarm still whipping through her, she clasped her arms around her waist and swore, the words shocking her with their violence.

      She hadn’t imagined the feral calculation in the dogs’ gaze. No. Despite everything she’d been through in the past seven months, she was firmly in command of her imagination. She jammed her hands deeper into her pockets, closing her fingers around the fragment of rippled green glass.

      Unlike her emotions, the touch of the weathered-smooth glass caused no pain. Christmas Eve, Mellie had handed her the lumpy package wrapped in a piece of the Sunday comics. “Magic, Mommy,” her six-year-old had said, blue eyes solemn but still not hiding her excitement. “From the woods.” She’d waved her arm vaguely toward the trees and then stuck her thumb into her mouth, her eyes growing wide, her bowed pink mouth becoming an upside-down U.

      Mellie wasn’t supposed to go into the woods by herself. Ever.

      Christmas.

      January.

      And now this hellish July.

      The shard of glass was cool against her palm, as cool as the translucent watery green of its tint.

      A blue jay chattered angrily. In that instant when sounds rushed in, anger battered at her, anger at a world that no longer made sense, anger at the animals that had reduced her to a quivering heap in her garden.

      That image of herself wasn’t one she liked at all. She’d be damned if she’d stay cowering inside because of a pack of animals. She didn’t like being helpless. Being a victim.

      Damn Ryder Hayes. His animals could—

      Fury gave her the strength to turn her back on the trees and shadows and tear into her house, the screen door of the porch slamming behind her. She’d rip a piece off Hayes’s hide, she would. She wasn’t going to let him get away with that kind of carelessness.

      But she wouldn’t face Ryder Hayes’s dogs without some kind of protection. Wild, spooky as hell, they were only animals, after all. Nothing more. She could deal with them.

      Yanking open the drawer in the kitchen, she pulled out a key chain with a silver cylinder of capsaicin attached to it. She needed something else. Staring wildly at her kitchen cabinets, she threw open a door and whirled the carousel of spices so hard that a bottle of cinnamon flew off. She snatched the can of black pepper and stuffed it into her shorts pocket with the silver capsule. On her way down the sagging back steps, she grabbed her garden hoe. Silt from her morning weeding still caked its metal edges.

      The whang of the slamming door echoed in her ears as she left her yard.

      Skirting the southern edge of the woods, she went up the west approach, following the faint path in the low brush. Even with her arsenal, she lacked the nerve to take the shortcut through the woods.

      In January, though, she’d run screaming like a mad-woman through the moss-shrouded pine trees, the palmetto bushes, and wax myrtle. She hadn’t gone into the woods since.

      January.

      Mellie.

      And the six other missing children, the latest a nine-year-old boy.

      And only five bodies.

      Oh, Mellie, Josie thought, and her throat closed tight. She scrubbed her face hard with her fists, a desolation beyond words cramping her breathing.

      Looking down at the dirt path, she realized for the first time that she’d left her house barefoot. She was so used to going without shoes, she hadn’t even thought of them in the flush of anger. Stupid. Anger had propelled her down this path. Driven by the hot rage that boiled through her as hard as fear had earlier, she hadn’t thought clearly.

      She’d had only one idea in her mind. Hayes’s beasts might be responsible for—

      Off to her right, the woods had grown silent again as she neared Hayes’s mansion. Eerie, that sense of a gathering intelligence. Half expecting to see one of the animals, Josie raised the hoe and looked behind her. Whirling, she stumbled as she looked up into one of the live-oak trees a few feet into the woods.

      Narrowing her eyes, she realized the tree was dead, leafless. What she’d taken for leaves was a thick colony of birds. Every branch of the tree was covered with silent, watching grackles, their black plumage blending into the shadows, their bluish purple heads turned in her direction.

      Her heart fluttered against her ribs as she squinted at the tree. She was close enough to see the bronze necks and throats, the yellow irises of their eyes.

      Not a wing fluttered. Not one bird made a sound as she took another step down the path, but their yellow eyes followed her every movement.

      “Scat, you stupid birds! Leave me alone, you devils!” Spinning in a huge circle, she waved the hoe in their direction, her voice shrill. In a huge, dark cloud, the birds rose, silent as ever, their wings beating as one. Wheeling left, they spread out, their shapes black Vs against the bleached white sky.

      Then, as if directed by one mind, they hovered over the treetops, above her.

      Josie shuddered. “Go away!” she shouted, waving the hoe toward the sky. “Shoo!”

      And still they floated over her shoulder, their presence up there in the sky following her, the silent sweep of their wings drifting across the white-hot sun.

      There was something chilling about the sight of the heavy clump of birds moving as one. Unnerved by their silent passage but not understanding why, she broke into a run. Even Ryder Hayes was preferable to this storm cloud of grackles. Gasping for breath in the heat, she came to the turn in the path that led either to Angel Bay or to the Hayes property.

      The sickly-sweet branches of a drought-pinched oleander whipped against her shoulder as she pushed them aside and came to the shell drive leading to the Hayes house. Her breath rasping deep in her lungs, she paused. The edges of the crushed shells were sharp against the sole of her foot as she hesitated.

      Tilted closed, the louvers of the wooden shutters gave the house a hostile, secretive appearance. In the smothering heat, the house seemed to shimmer in front of her, illusive.

      Someone was watching her.

      The hairs on the back of her neck rose.

      She spun around.

      The grackles had flown away.

      Nothing behind her but the path.

      No dogs there.

      No one, in fact, merely that sense of being observed. She looked around and saw nothing, no one.

      To her left, the distant curve of Angel River.

      And in front of her, the house.

      She hadn’t seen it in years. The paint on the tall white columns flaked to gray underneath,

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