AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I sighed, turned my back, and dropped the robe. “Someone shot at me as I was leaving a party earlier.”
“Why would someone shoot at you?” he demanded, roughly pulling me closer to inspect my healing skin. “Normal bullets wouldn’t be enough to kill you.”
“No, but it annoyed the bejesus out of me,” I grumbled, yanking my robe back together. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you about some things that have happened around here lately. Someone ’s been hanging around outside my house at night.
Someone used deer blood to paint insults on my car. They tried to poison Fitz with antifreeze. And then, obviously, tonight someone shot me. Again.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft. “Jane, if anything happened to you…”
“I hoped it would just go away. I thought maybe it was some weirdo antivamp crazy who wanted to make me uncomfortable. But now, this combined with Walter’s being set on fire, I think the guy who shot me the first time, Bud McElray, is trying to scare me or finish the job or something. I don’t know what to do. Can I complain to the human authorities? Do I go to Ophelia and tell on him—” I saw Gabriel’s face grow tense at the mention of Bud’s name. “What?”
Gabriel grimaced. “You haven’t read your paper lately, have you?”
“Besides want ads? Not really,” I admitted. “Why?”
He went into my kitchen and shuffled through the old Half-Moon Herald s in my recycling bin until he found what he wanted.
He handed the news section to me.
“Half-Moon Resident Killed in Hunting Mishap,” I read aloud from a front page dated two weeks before. “Half-Moon Hollow native Bud McElray died Tuesday when the deer stand he was climbing collapsed, bringing a thirty -two-foot oak tree down on top of him. Coroner Don Purdue described the cause of death as multiple blunt-trauma injuries, including a broken spine, fractured skull, and massive internal bleeding. Purdue added that several empty beer bottles were found around the fallen tree. He said it would take several weeks for toxicology tests to determine whether there were drugs or alcohol present in McElray ’s system.”
Let’s see, the man who mortally wounded me with a hunting rifle while drunk was killed in a freak accident on a deer stand that he was too drunk to climb. That wasn’t suspicious.
“Jane, Bud McElray can’t be the person who shot you, and he’s not the one who’s been harassing you. He’s been dead for weeks.”
“I swear I didn’t do it,” I said, dropping the paper. “It wasn’t me.”
“Of course, it wasn’t you. Trees fall. Mr. McElray had the bad luck of standing under it at the time.”
“And that doesn’t strike you as…convenient?” I asked.
“No.” He snorted. “It was a terrible inconvenience to push a very heavy tree on top of Mr. McElray.”
I gaped at him, the salty-sweet gorge of faux blood rising in my throat. “You killed him,” I whispered.
He sat there, still as stone, as he stared at me. Looking back, this may have been Gabriel’s way of saying, “Duh!”
“Say something!” I yelled. “You can’t just tell me how inconvenient it was to shove a tree on top of a living human being and then not say anything. Please tell me—just say something.”
“He hurt you,” Gabriel said, his eyes flashing silver even in the dim light. “He left you to die like some animal and just went on living his life.”
“He thought I was an animal! How could you do that? You weren’t trying to feed or to defend yourself.” I whimpered, shrinking away. “You murdered him.”o;Why not? If you’re not going to let me see you naked, we might as well be girlfriends.”
“You’re a twisted little man.”
“Come on, Stretch, share with the class.”
“No!” I laughed.
“Prude.”
“Perv.”
“Schoolmarm.”
“Some other word that essentially means perv.”
We were laughing when Missy decided to join us out on the porch. “I figured I’d find you two out here together,” she said brightly. “Jane, you have to promise you’re going to come to my next mixer. Everybody wants to know if you’re coming. You’re like the vampire Jessica Simpson! They can’t understand why they’re interested in you, but they can’t stand not knowing what you are going to do next. You have some serious buzz going in there. I bet you start getting all kinds of business at your little shop.”
