Prince of Shadows by Susan Krinard

The day dragged by. Once or twice Alex checked up on Lori, who regarded her with a barely concealed look of revulsion and suspicion. Almost as if she expects me to sprout fangs, Alex thought grimly. There was nothing else to do but listen to the tinny radio in her room and imagine scenarios that didn’t bear thinking about.

Kieran’s absence left her with an ache of yearning. She kept going over the previous night in her mind. Every touch, every whispered word, every moment of the miracle.

Only one revelation, one certainty, got her through the tense and tedious hours.

She loved him. Now she could say the words to herself, admit them fully. She opened her journal and wrote two brief lines, unable to keep the miracle to her self. She loved him. And if she had held back from speaking them aloud to Kieran, she knew it was only a matter of time.

Perhaps, one day, he could even return them. Alex dared to let herself hope: that there would be a future for them. That somehow the murders would be solved. That Kieran would find what he needed to find, and still have place left for her.

Whatever happens, we’ll be together.

She fell asleep repeating that litany of hope. When she woke again the clock on the bed table read after midnight. Voices seeped through the wall between her room and Lori’s. Two women—Lori’s sister had come, then. Alex sat up in bed and listened. The words were indistinct, but one of the voices rose in agitation and gradually fell silent again. Minutes later Alex heard the door close.

She moved to the window. The beams of a car’s head lights shone into the room, blinding her; she saw two figures get into the car, and with a faint screech of tires the car backed up and sped from the parking lot.

So. It was done. Alex pulled the curtains back together and sat in the chair next to the window. Now all she had to do was wait out the remaining hours until Kieran’s return. Their luck had been in after all. It will be all right, she told herself, closing her eyes. It has to be.

* * *

Joseph had passed through Falkirk over two hundred miles ago, and still there was no sign of them.

He’d cursed the foul weather that had slowed him through Manitoba and part of Saskatchewan, though he’d known it would delay his quarry as much as it had himself. By the time he reached Falkirk, the late winter storm had passed. He’d stopped in the town and asked about the ones he followed—at the local bar, at the tiny store, at the single gas station. And there he had had his first good fortune.

The attendant at the station had seen them. In an old, rusty truck of no particular color, with mud-splattered U.S. plates—a man, two women, and a child. Kieran fit the description the attendant had given him, and Alexandra Warrington one of the women. The other woman and the child had been locals. Why Kieran would take them on, Joseph didn’t know, but it spurred him to greater urgency.

They could still be a full day ahead of him. All he had to go on were their direction, expected route, and destination—the information the Indian woman had revealed on the phone in Merritt.

They were heading for a town called Lovell in British Columbia. Joseph dared not wait that long to find Kieran. The boy might kill again.

So he drove. The coming dawn promised to be brilliantly clear, but he didn’t notice. His clothing was rank with the smell of sweat, but he endured it, as he had endured so much else. His gaze swept the highway from side to side, noting all the places they might have stopped, the nondescript roadside towns. They had traveled into the storm heading west the night the attendant had seen them, and they couldn’t have gone far then. But since—

He pressed down on the accelerator and almost missed the lone woman walking toward him on the opposite side of the road. His mind acknowledged her presence and almost dismissed it. Until, in the first breaking of sunlight over the horizon, he saw the shaggy dark hair, black leggings, and glittering white boots the gas station attendant had described.

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