Nevermore Bookstore (Townsend Harbor Book 1)

Hermit

[HÛR′MĬT] NOUN. A PERSON WHO HAS WITHDRAWN TO A SOLITARY PLACE

Trapped.

No, hostage.

Fox’s heavy limbs strained against the bonds cutting into his skin with such animalistic frenzy that his veins bulged as large as ropes.

The only part of him left unrestrained?

His rage.

A bell jangled in the distance, doing the same to his nerves.

A phone? His heart threw itself against its cage in the direction of the sound.

She’d never called him before.

The bells again. Not a phone. What the motherfuck was that sound?

Santa?

“They call you Fox, but you are not so hard to hunt.” A smooth, accented voice slid into his ear like a venomous serpent, slithering down his spine until his veins turned into writhing, foreign invaders. It was all he could do not to peel off his own flesh.

The frenzy became something else. Something even darker. Driven by the presence of a sensation so foreign and yet…recently familiar. All he knew was he needed to escape it. His senses sharpened, and yet he could see and hear nothing but the sounds of his struggles echoing off the walls.

Walls too close. Too low. Pressing down. Down. And on all sides. Trapping his arms. Squeezing the air from his lungs. Stealing the space his ribs needed to expand. Kicking his heart and sweat glands into overdrive.

The sensation had a name.

Terror.

An odd hiss struck his sensitive ears as he peeled his eyes open, only to be assaulted with brilliant white light. Struggles turned to flails as his bonds, astonishingly, loosened enough for him to bend his elbows, then his wrists. Kick out with his legs.

The hiss grew louder, more insistent. Rhythmic, even, as he fought his way out of some clinging substance shaped like a coffin. Forcing blinks against the light, he leapt to his feet and gyrated like his sister Rochelle that one time he’d tossed a jumping spider in her hair. He ripped off the shirt that sweat had molded to his skin. Kicked heavy bindings away from his legs.

The sole of his foot landed on something burning hot, and he leapt in the opposite direction, careening into a gritty wall and slipping on something satiny.

Catching himself on one knee, he exploded forward like a sprinter, escaping the walls.

Fucking figures. A disassociated auditory snarl in his own voice echoed in the contorted, half-conscious shit-soup between his ears. I knew I was headed toward the Light sooner rather than later.

A brutal chill ripped into him like a blade, cutting through to his marrow. This time, the cold burned his bare feet. Stumbling, he scrambled to regain his balance, claiming enough of his wits to sink into a fighting stance and identify the direction of his adversary.

One of them was about to die.

The air turned to ice crystals in his lungs as brilliant sunlight reflected off the first late-autumn snow and punched from above and from the reflection below into stubborn pupils refusing to contract.

He stood in front of the only shape that wasn’t either tree or stone and bared his teeth. “Let’s do this, motherfucker.”

It wouldn’t be his first bare-handed kill, but it would be the first with his dick swinging in the breeze.

Unutterably gentle doe-brown eyes dispelled the vestiges of his recurring nightmare, yanking him from the gnarled, clawing fingers of sleep and back into full consciousness.

Literal deer eyes.

Fox and the doe stood like that for a moment as sweat froze to his exposed flesh. They stared at each other as their hasty, heaving breaths made matching clouds in the crisp morning air.

She was a young adult. Less than a handful of years. On the small side, like they all were in this area of Washington state’s Olympic Mountains range, easy for navigating the dense forests and uneven terrain.

The bell sounded again. This time from behind him.

His creature alarm.

Whirling, he caught sight of a teenaged fawn as it frolicked toward one of the bells hanging from the rope he’d surrounded his den with. Completely unbothered by the six-foot-three nude man separating her from her mother, she booped the bell with her nose and jump-twisted away with playful excitement at the sound.

A breath he hadn’t known he was holding exploded from his aching chest.

The dream wasn’t real.

He wasn’t there.

He was here.

Here: the Pacific Northwest lovingly referred to as the PNW. The other side of the country from where he was born, high in the Olympic Mountains, above where most women his age had once been children who believed sparkly vampires and indigenous werewolves resided nearby.

Better them than the monsters living in his nightmares.

They were real…and they did unthinkable things.

An entirely different noise chuffed from behind him, and he glanced over his shoulder to see the mother pawing at the ground, looking from him to her offspring with naked fear.

Only when he unclenched his teeth to speak did he realize he’d been grinding his molars to dust.

“Don’t worry, Mama.” His unused voice sounded like sandstone and razorblades. Turning back toward the den, he cleared his throat. “I didn’t know it was you.”

They’d crossed paths before. He recognized the white blaze beneath her throat. Early spring, her fawn had been the height of a golden retriever and just as bouncy. Probably the first birth for the young doe.

Even if he took his bow out later, he’d starve before bothering with those two.

He didn’t kill children. Or their mothers.

His difficult swallow landed in the abysmal void in his chest as he strode back toward the coal bed of last night’s fire. He stepped on one of the stones he’d laid around the fire just beyond the ingress in the smooth rock.

He slept here when the weather turned, though he preferred to stare up at the moon. This was the next best thing, however, as he could at least see the sky, the dense woods, and was still protected from the worst of the weather by the cliff face.

Mostly. So long as the wind didn’t shift in a very specific way.

He identified his camo winter sleeping bag as his perceived captor, the fabric the source of the strange hiss he’d perceived in semiconsciousness.

Fuck. What if he was getting worse? If the sleeping bag became more confining? If the nightmares drove him out of it…

Then what?

Though Fox had selected the PNW for the fact that it was forty-five to eighty-five degrees basically always, a changing climate was beginning to cause the summer to kiss a hundred. On the other side of that, winter would bring significant exposure hazards.

He’d been able to survive thus far. But if it got much colder…it would be shelter or die.

And at this point, Fox wasn’t certain he’d bother with the shelter.

If he wandered east of Seattle, he’d be in fire season country until he cleared the Rocky Mountains. Same if he went south, with the added complications of higher population densities and less hunting and fresh water, all the way down to Mexico.

Fox followed the limp path of clothes he’d torn off his body, snatching them up along the way.

The nightmare lingered in here, too, smelling of dank, damp stone and stale fear.

His skin reeked of it.

His body thrummed with it.

Digging his palms against his eyes, he dragged his hands down his face and a beard Thor might have been proud of.

He was almost warm and dry when the tremors set in. Almost ready for a late breakfast when the nausea and vertigo nearly drove him to his knees. His bones were held together by crepe paper and glass, rather than connective tissue and hard-earned muscle.

He needed to run. He needed to hunt and climb and push until he’d exhausted the adrenaline coursing through him.

Or…

His eyes swung to his satellite phone. His one link to the world.

Programmed with the one number he ever called.

The one voice he wanted to hear from the one person he could fucking stand.

No. No. Things had become much worse than that. He longed for the sweet husk of her animated voice. So much so that he denied himself all contact except for Thursdays.

Thursdays belonged to Cadence Bloomquist.

“Cady.”

He didn’t realize he’d said the name aloud until it landed south of his belly button, and he had to turn from the fire to avoid a wiener roast.

Checking the tick marks on the stone wall, he cursed and stomped about the den like a bear awoken early from hibernation as he gathered his gear.

Fucking Monday.

Three more nights of this, he reminded himself. Three nights before I can sleep with her voice caressing my dreams.

He often didn’t have the nightmare on Thursdays.

Which was why he shouldn’t call her more often.

Attachments were dangerous. Furthermore, no one should be burdened with his specific flavor of fuckery.

Heaving a breath, Fox braced for the cold day’s work ahead. The routine never altered. He’d check his traps and treat and store the food and pelts. He’d track the three small herds of deer in the area and pick an old-timer to sacrifice to his winter stores of jerky. He’d do target practice. He’d do pull-ups on the oak by the lake. He’d exhaust himself so his body forced him back to sleep.

And he wouldn’t call Cadence Bloomquist for three more nights.

Until then… He looked out toward the lake dusted with a scrim of frost. Time to take God’s own cold shower.