gas stations, tourist hotels, and fast-food joints. Then on the far side of all that quick, cheap, and easy, things started to get expensive. Grand houses, the kind that were set back on lawns that looked like carpets, began to crop up, their low, loose stone walls quaintly crumbling at the sides of the road. She bypassed all of the estates, however, finally pulling over into the parking lot of a little park that had a river view.
Just as she got out, he drove right by her, his head turning in her direction, measuring her.
A hundred yards later, out of sight from where she was, Assail stopped his car on the shoulder of the road, emerged into the biting wind, and did up the buttons on his double-breasted coat. His loafers were not ideal for tracking through the snow, but he didn't care. His feet would put up with the cold and the wet, and he had a dozen more pairs waiting for him in his closet at home.
As her vehicle, not her body, had the tracking device on it, he kept his eyes on her. Sure enough, she was putting those cross-countries on, and then, with a white ski mask over her head and the pale camos covering her lithe body, she all but disappeared into the blue-washed winter landscape.
He stayed right with her.
Flashing out ahead at clips of fifteen to twenty yards, he found pines to shield himself behind as she progressed back toward the mansions, her skis eating up the snow-covered ground.
She was going to go to one of those big houses, he thought as he kept pace with her, anticipating her direction and, for the most part, guessing correctly.
Every time she went by him without knowing he was there, his body wanted to jump out at her. Take her down. Bite her.
For some reason, this human made him hungry.
And cat and mouse was very erotic, especially if only the cat knew the game was afoot.
The property she eventually infiltrated was nearly a mile away, but in spite of the distance, her blistering pace on those skis didn't lag in the slightest. She entered at the front right corner of the lawn, stepping up on the perennial low wall, and then resuming her course.
This made no sense. If she were compromised, she was an extra distance away from her car. Surely the nearer edge would have made more sense? After all, and in either case, she was exposed now, no trees to offer cover, no possible defense against trespassing available to her if she were sighted.
Unless she knew the owner. In which case, why hide yourself and sneak up at night?
The seven- or eight-acre lawn gradually rose toward a fifteen- to twenty-thousand-square-foot stone house, modernist sculptures sitting like blind, shiny sentries on the approach, the gardens sprawling out in the back. The whole time, she stuck close to that wall, and watching her from seventy-five feet up ahead, he found himself feeling impressed by her. Against the snow, she moved as a breeze would, invisible and quick, her shadow thrown against the gray stone wall such that it seemed to disappear -
Ahhhhhhh.
She'd chosen the route specifically for that, hadn't she.
Yes, indeed, the angle of the moonlight placed her shadow exactly on the stones, effectively creating further camouflage.
An odd tingle went through him.
Smart.
Assail flashed forward, finding a hiding place in and among the plantings at the side of the house. Up close, he saw that the grand manse was not new, although not ancient, either - then again, in the New World, it was rare to run into anything constructed earlier than the eighteenth century. Lots of lead-paned windows. And porches. And terraces.
All in all? Wealth and distinction.
That was no doubt protected by plenty of alarms.
It seemed unlikely she was simply going to spy on the property as she had on his own. For one, there was a ring of forested growth on the far side of that stone wall she'd traversed. She could have jettisoned the skis, negotiated that stretch of ten- to twenty-foot-high bramble, and gotten plenty of view shed to the house. For another? In that case, she wouldn't need whatever was in the backpack she'd slung onto her shoulders.
The thing was nearly big enough to carry a body in, and it was full.
As if on cue, she stopped, got out her binoculars and surveyed the property, staying stock-still, only her head subtly moving. And then she started across the lawn proper, moving even