Darkness Bound by Stella Cameron Page B

huge.” It had to be twenty feet long and twelve feet high. “How did you get it in here?”
    “I had help,” Sally said airily. “I’ve been expecting a request for this, you know. But I knew it wouldn’t happen until you came. What do you think?”
    To analyze every comment Sally made would be a big mistake, but Leigh couldn’t ignore the little references to knowing what she would be doing before she knewherself. Leigh had to step back to try reading oversized three-dimensional letters. The metal board was polished to a sheen but the letters were clear plastic like the rim of the board. She couldn’t make out a word, and didn’t know what to say. “Um,” was all she could manage.
    “Silly me,” Sally said. “You can’t see it like that.” She grabbed a plug hanging from a cord on one side and stuck it into a socket strip.
    The effect was dizzying. The sign itself appeared more pewter than steel or aluminum, and blood red light ran through the letters in an endless stream that stopped for a few seconds then flashed each time the entire sign was illuminated.
     
Stop!
Turn In Here For Gabriel’s Place
Eat Drink And Be Merry
For Tomorrow We Die(T)
     

chapter
TEN
     
    N ILES LOOKED at his cell for a long minute then slammed it back to his ear. “You do know there’s a woman missing, VanDoren?” Niles said, pacing back and forth near the trees that shielded the doctor’s house from Gulliver Lane.
    “Rose,” VanDoren said, still sounding as if he would rather be taking a nap. “I’m aware of that.”
    “Look, are you sure I can’t come in? I’d really like to talk to you about this.”
    “We are talking about it. I try to save a few hours in every twenty-four for myself.”
    Saul VanDoren hadn’t answered his door, even though his medical offices were right there in his house. Niles tried calling him on a whim and the guy had refused to see him.
    “Okay.” Damn the man’s attitude. “No progress has been made in finding Rose. The search parties are still going out from the cops in Langley. I only want to know if you’ve heard anything about her, any talk of someonehit by a car… anything.” Niles knew he was grasping at straws. Not one comment had been made about Rose since Sally disappeared with the body the night before.
    His hounds had joined the search today, and they had been looking for the woman’s body on their own for days. He could keep the secret of her murder to avoid starting a panic, but he couldn’t allow her body to simply be lost.
    “I would have reported anything of the kind to the police,” VanDoren said.
    “Did Rose come to you for any reason recently?”
    VanDoren didn’t comment.
    “You still there?” Niles said.
    “Uh huh. And no, she didn’t.”
    Niles’s eyes smarted and he blinked. He was sweating along his hairline and the feeling he hated had started in the pit of his stomach. Anger mixing everything up. This still happened sometimes, intense irritation set him on the track back to when he’d lost Gary in that hellhole of a desert. He almost felt as if his dead brother hound were riding on his back.
    He took a deep breath. “Okay, Doc. Thanks. By the way, I understand you were real good to Innes when he got hurt. It’s nice for all of us around here to know we have a good man to come to.”
    “I’m always here for an emergency,” the other man said, sounding less uninterested.
    Niles wanted to ask about the blood sample the doctor had taken from Innes. All Innes had been told was that there was no sign of abnormality, yet it shouldn’t be possible to examine a werehound’s blood and not find something
really
abnormal. VanDoren’s silence on the subject was almost worse than if he’d asked awkward questions.
    “Are we done?”
    Niles gritted his teeth and wiped a finger along his brow. “Thanks, Doc.”
For nothing.
“So long.”
    The phone went dead and Niles walked slowly through the trees to the street. VanDoren was a convenient target