Fierce Wanderer by Liza Street Page B

here?” she asked. If she kept him talking, Blake would have a chance to figure out something was wrong and come find her.
    He smirked. “I knew you’d come back to the ranch. You didn’t have a truck or anything. You’d have to get supplies somehow. So we just looped around on the highway and beat you to it. The ranch was deserted, so once it got light, we started hiking toward the crash site. I knew our paths would cross.”
    Hera heard rustling nearby. She prayed it was Blake, but two men emerged. One of them worked with Tobin; she’d seen him before. The other she recognized from some of the photos in her duffel. “We can’t find him or any photos,” one of them said.
    Tobin spat. “He’ll come if the whore screams for him.”
    He took aim.
    “If you kill me, why would he come?” Hera asked.
    “I don’t plan on killing you yet,” Tobin said. “You can’t scream when you’re dead. But a blown knee-cap, well. That’ll get you to holler.”
    He lowered his arm slightly, taking aim at her legs.
    “No,” Hera said. “No, don’t do this.” She hated the panic that laced her words, that crept up her throat and threatened to choke her.
    A mountain lion jumped out from the brush behind them, snarling. It landed on Tobin. Hera screamed, and a shot rang out. One of the men standing next to Tobin fell, a look of shock on his face as blood pulsed from a wound in his neck. He lay motionless.
    Tobin screamed in terror and pain. The lion mauled him, tearing him apart with his claws and teeth.
    The other man backed away and found a long pine branch. He held it for a moment, as if trying to decide whether he should hit the lion with it to free Tobin.
    But Tobin’s screams had turned to weak gurgles, and the lion turned its blood-stained face to that last remaining man. The man backed away slowly, brandishing his stick. The lion lunged at him. He screamed, dropped the stick, and ran.
    The lion gave the corpses next to him a look of pure disgust and loped over to the stream. He dipped his head into the water, washing away the blood.
    Hera stood frozen in place, too much in shock to move. “Blake?” she whispered.
    Once the blood was washed away, the lion in front of her began to change form. He shimmered as joints popped and fur diminished, until a naked man crouched in the lion’s place.
    She was shivering. He retrieved her jeans and helped her put them on. “We can’t stay here,” he finally said. “It smells like death.”
    Flies had already come circling around the corpses. Hera shuddered.
    “Are you okay?” he asked, picking her up and carrying her from the stream.
    “Yes, I…I think so. I can’t believe it’s over. It’s really over. He’s gone.”
    “He is. You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”

Chapter Eighteen
    Blake put his brother’s Range Rover in park and watched Hera as she stirred from her sleep. All along the windy roads back from Reno she’d napped, her head lolling one way or the other with every turn. It sure as hell didn’t look comfortable, but she was exhausted. She’d insisted on doing her own hiking back to the ranch.
    He’d hated that. Not because she was slow. No, he didn’t care at all how long she took, because it meant more time together. He’d hated watching her struggle and watching her falter when she’d inevitably gotten blisters. He’d hated it that she wouldn’t let him help her more than a hand up over fallen trees.
    She didn’t seem to want him to touch her, and that hurt.
    He looked past her sleeping face, silhouetted from the lights of his ranch home.
    They’d anonymously dropped off the folder of photographs, with Hera’s pre-typed note about Tobin and his crimes. After that, they drove around Reno for a little while. She’d expected to connect with her friend, but her friend wasn’t at home and wasn’t answering Hera’s calls.
    Without anywhere else to go, she’d agreed to come back here, to Blake’s place.
    He reached out a