“I hate the smelly cats,” Alessandro vowed, and Drina thought she heard a shudder in his voice. “They smell like-Like that!” he cried, as the smell apparently reached him. “Make her to go away, Teddy!”
“How the hell am I supposed to make it go away, Alessandro?”
“Throw the ball of the snow at it,” Alessandro said, and Drina nodded. It was exactly what she’d suggested.
“He can’t do that, dear,” Leonora said soothingly.
“Why not?” Alessandro demanded.
“Because the damned thing has nowhere to go,” Teddy snapped. “Drina’s in the way. It’s trapped in the corner of the garden. Throwing snowballs at it will just piss it off and make it spray again, and I have no intention of getting sprayed.”
“Then you must to get the bella Alexandrina out of the way,” Alessandro said with distress. “We must to get the smelly cat to go away.”
“Drina, pull yourself toward my voice a few feet. I can help you up and out of its way then,” Teddy called.
“Pull myself?” she asked with disbelief, and then demanded, “Come here and help me. I can’t even see.”
“I can’t. You’re too close to the skunk,” Teddy explained. “Just pull yourself this way.”
“Where the hell is Mr. Big Brave Police Chief who was willing to take on a rabid rogue?” she asked dryly. “A rabid rogue, by the way, who could twist you into pretzel shapes and laugh while he did it?”
“Rabid rogues are one thing, skunks are another entirely,” Teddy said dryly. “Just pull yourself over here and-”
He fell silent as the sound of smashing glass sounded.
“What was that?” Drina asked sharply.
“It came from the back of the house,” Teddy said sharply, and then she heard Harper shout and Stephanie scream, and Teddy barked, “Wait here.”
“What? Wait!” she cried, then cursed and forced her hands from her eyes to try to see as she heard his footsteps rush away. She could hear Leonora and Alessandro moving away as well but couldn’t see a damned thing. Opening her eyes merely brought on the pain again and forced her to close them once more. Though she thought this time they hurt a little less. Maybe.
Adrenaline rushing through her, Drina started to roll onto her stomach to get up, ignoring the growl the action immediately caused from the corner of the yard. Worried sick about Harper and Stephanie, she merely snarled, “Go ahead and spray me again, bitch! My eyes are closed, and I can’t smell any worse than I do now.”
Drina staggered to her feet and stumbled blindly toward where she thought Leonora’s and Alessandro’s voices had been coming from earlier. She’d only taken a couple of steps when she stumbled into what felt like a snow-covered boulder and fell face-first in the snow. Releasing a string of curses she’d learned while a pirate, Drina started to scramble back to her feet, then froze as a faint waft of smoke reached her nose. Lifting her head, she sniffed the air, but whatever she’d smelled was gone. All she could smell was some horrible combination of rotten eggs, burning rubber, and very strong garlic. She could hear the hungry rush of flames, though, coming from what she thought was the side of the house.
Gritting her teeth, Drina didn’t bother trying to get up and risk running into something else but began to crawl forward on her hands and knees. She’d only moved a foot or so when her senses made her pause and stiffen.
Drina’s head rose like a deer scenting the air for danger though she apparently had no sense of smell at the moment, and it was sound she was testing the air for. Someone was there. She knew it. She could feel their presence in the prickling along her spine.
Her first instinct was to go for her gun, but she no longer had that. She must have dropped it when she’d fallen back after being sprayed, Drina realized. Christ, she was a blind idiot, crawling around in the dark without a damned weapon, she thought bitterly, and then recalled the crossbow hanging from her shoulder. Not that it would be much use since she was presently blind. She might as well be wearing a stupid nightie and wailing please don’t kill me.
“Screw that,” Drina muttered, and immediately fell back to sit in the snow, reaching back to snatch an arrow from the quiver and slinging the crossbow around at the same time. She was practiced enough at the task that even blind she managed to arm the crossbow in a heartbeat. The problem then became where to aim the damned thing, but she lifted the weapon and strained to hear any sound that would give away the person’s location.
When Drina turned in the general direction of the side of the house, or what she thought was the side of the house where the cornered skunk had been or still was, there was a sudden flurry of sound that definitely wasn’t the skunk. Whatever made it was big, human-sized big, judging by the thud of footsteps as they fled in what she thought was the direction of the gate.
Drina followed the sound with her crossbow, and when her instincts screamed to release it, loosed her arrow. She heard a grunt, but the footsteps didn’t slow, and she cursed under her breath, suspecting she’d only winged whoever it was.
Drina sighed, but rearmed the crossbow just in case and listened blindly for another moment before she heard approaching sirens.
“Fire trucks,” she muttered, beginning to shuffle backward on her butt in the direction she thought the stairs were, using one hand and her legs to move herself. The entire time, she continued to point her crossbow blindly in the general direction of where she thought the yard’s front gate was.
“Well, they put out the fire,” Teddy Brunswick announced wearily, stomping his feet on the mat as he entered his kitchen and began to remove his coat.
Drina glanced to him from the stool Anders had silently set beside the back door for her. . as far from his own position at the far end of the attached dining room as he could get her without sticking her outside. Her vision was still blurry, but she could see well enough to make out the way the police chief’s nose wrinkled as he caught her scent. She also didn’t miss how quickly he scooted out of the kitchen and into the dining room, straight across the room to the desk against the far wall, where Anders was busily punching away at Teddy’s computer keyboard. He was searching the Internet for suggestions to remove skunk spray from a person.
Sighing miserably, Drina glanced toward the ceiling, wondering how Harper and Stephanie were. They had been placed in one of the two bedrooms upstairs in this tiny, two-floor house of Teddy’s. Dawn, Leonora, and Alessandro were tending to them. Tiny had been moved to the second bedroom, with Mirabeau and Edward continuing to oversee his turning.
Teddy had arranged to have them brought here to his home while the fire trucks were still working on putting out the fire at Casey Cottage. It had taken two ambulances and his deputy’s car to transport them. Everyone else had gone in the ambulances, and Drina had been the only one in the police car. While she hadn’t yet been able to see at that point, she was sure she’d heard the deputy making muffled sounds that could have been either gagging or weeping. Either was possible considering how she smelled, and the fact that the deputy had been in such a rush to get her where he had to take her that he hadn’t thought to put anything down on his seats before ushering her quickly into the back of his car. His car could very well carry that horrible smell forever for all she knew. Drina could certainly understand if he’d been sobbing over that.
It turned out the sound of breaking glass they’d heard had been a rock crashing through one of the windows in the second-floor porch. It had been followed by a Molotov cocktail that had shattered just inches from the blanket. The fuel inside had splashed across the blankets, pillows, and Harper and Stephanie. The two had apparently come staggering out of the room in flames.
Edward and Anders had heard their shouts and were the first to reach them, with Teddy, Leonora, and Alessandro hard on their heels. They’d somehow doused the flames eating away at Harper and Stephanie, and then-afraid the fire would move through the entire house-had gotten everyone out, along with as much blood as they could grab.
Drina had been the last one anyone had thought of, which she didn’t mind since she wasn’t seriously hurt or anything, but the whole thing had been incredibly frustrating and frightening. She’d been worried sick about Stephanie and Harper and as useless as a baby as she dragged herself to the front porch and inside. It was the firemen, charging into the house, who had found her using the door frame to pull herself to her feet in the foyer, shouting frantically for Harper and Stephanie. One of the men had led her through the house to the back door and
