“Oh, my dear God, Dad! Are you and Mom-”
“We're fine! It blew, they're telling us, about twenty minutes ago. Had we not been delayed at baggage…"
Meredyth felt a creeping finger trace the nape of her neck and run along her spine-Lauralie's icy touch extending from the grave. Her fingerprints were all over this attempt to murder Paul and Caroline Sanger, to leave Meredyth without her parents. It was to have been Lauralie's final blow, and it nearly came to fruition.
"Before you go out to the ranch, Dad, you need to meet me at County General where-"
"We don't need medical attention, dear! We're shaken up, of course. Who wouldn't be. It's a shock, but we really don't need medical-"
"You don't understand, Dad. I'm stuck here at the hospital, but I need to talk to you guys before you go out to the ranch. So much to catch you up on, Dad.”
“You're in the hospital?"
"Hospital?" Again her mother's crying erupted, commingling with the sound of fire trucks coming over the line. "No, not me. Dad. It's Lucas! He's-”
“That detective you used to date?”
“He's in a coma, fighting for his life, Dad, and it's all my fault, and he may die, and I–I can't leave him, Dad. I love him."
"We're on our way, baby. Stay on the line."
"…saved my life, Dad, and he's in a coma. I can't leave him. I need you guys."
She heard him shouting for the cabbie to get them to County General. In a moment, her father was on the line again. "We're coming straight there, Mere, honey. Don't you worry."
Meredyth was crying into the phone now. "I'm afraid he's going to die. All because of a sick woman who stalked us to the ranch…and because I couldn't get to him in time."
"Stalked you?"
"Yes."
"An old girlfriend of Stonecoat's?"
"No, it wasn't like that."
"That one from the reservation? Her name wouldn't be Lauralie, would it?"
"Well…yes, I mean no…but how'd you get her name?"
"Seems she got into the house saying she was our daughter!"
"No wonder Mom was in tears."
"They told us our daughter might be in the rubble of the house! The way it's shaping up, a Colony Security fellow named Mike was interested in our daughter-Lauralie from out of towns-and came sniffing around. No pun intended."
"An unintended result," she muttered, pacing Lucas's small comer of the critical care unit. People checking on his vital signs every fifteen minutes. No windows, no light save for the artificial dim glow of soft blue that made the place look the perdition it was.
"The security fellow was just a kid, a year outta high school. Got more than he bargained for. Sounds like this Lauralie came onto him, and he went looking to close the deal on a date or some such thing."
I don't want to know his name or any more details about anyone she harmed in her mad obsession to harm me, she thought. "No more about it now, Dad. I can't take any more."
"Sure, baby…sure. Good news is they think she's dead in the rubble out here at the house."
"She is dead, but her body's in the HPD morgue, Dad. I killed her, Dad, out at the ranch house…I killed her. Now, please, come to me."
"My God, baby. We're on our way, Mere. Hold on there."
EPILOGUE
Dawson, Alaska, five months later
Lucas sat stiffly against the Aurora Nights Inn bed, his bandaged body still making the occasional complaint-a sudden lightning attack of pain about his ribs, like a knife jab. The painkillers hardly touched it, and so he had begun to self-medicate with the old herbal solution- peyote. The room had filled with the smoke and tangy odor.
Meredyth breezed in from outside, a rattling ice bucket in her hands. She poured him wine to go with sliced cheese. After chilling the wine and handing it to him, she toasted with her own plastic cup. 'To roughing it. From Skagway to Dawson at last."
'To this trip's not finishing me off," he grumpily responded.
"You're getting stronger every day, Lucas. Come on!" She yanked at him, and he gasped at the jolt of pain it caused in his upper torso. "Sorry, but the lights are running wild again tonight. You were right about them getting better as the week goes by. You've got to come out and see, Lucas. They're beautiful. Alaska is beautiful."
"You're beautiful, especially when you're happy."
She pulled at him, and he froze up a moment, fighting down the pain. "All right, but let me get up under my own steam and in my own good time."
"But you're missing the show." She rushed to the window and tried to see all that was possible from there. "There're chairs on the roof tonight for the viewing. Come on! You promised, remember?"
"I promised to bring you to Alaska to-"
"And you have!"
"— to see the northern lights a-runnin' wild. I didn't say I'd be sitting on the roof of a hotel with a moon pie in one hand and a plastic cup filled with wine in another."
She kissed and held him. "God, when I think how close I came to losing you, I could just… just…"
"Don't, don't!" he warned. "No more tears. You promised, remember?"
Lucas recalled nothing of his time in a coma or in critical care, but he recalled hearing her voice. "Gotta live. Gotta make plans…go to Alaska, remember? We've got a lotta living to do. Stay with me. Draw on your inner wolf, damn you! Come back to me."
He recalled seeing his grandfather before he had gone into the coma, the kind and gentle medicine man holding his palms open to Lucas in the universal gesture of welcoming. It had been while Meredyth had held him in her arms there at the cabin home on Lake Madera.
When he came out of the coma, Meredyth was there, her head lying over him where she sat alongside his bed, having fallen asleep, her hand around his. He ran his fingers through her hair, and dry-throated, he muttered her name and added, "Wanna see…the lights… with you."
She came awake, her eyes filling with happiness and tears. She grabbed him about the neck and hugged, and she called for the doctors. He'd had a full recovery, but he had a lot of healing yet to do. She had argued it was too soon for him to travel, but he'd stubbornly refused to listen, telling her it was their reward for surviving.
During his two-month-long stay in the hospital, she came daily, and each day she told him more and more about the final moments leading up to Lauralie Blodgett's death, and the details that Chang and Nielsen had learned from the crime scenes and how Lauralie had dispatched her various final victims. She told him about the near murder of her parents, and the death of the young security guard whose worst crime had been gullibility and a too affable nature thai led him to suspect nothing untoward about the vampire girl he had literally opened the door to. Lauralie had booby-trapped the house, somehow learning of the day Paul and Caroline Sanger were due home. Regardless of her fate, death or arrest, execution or incarceration, Lauralie Blodgett had meant to leave Meredyth Sanger with no one.
Once Lucas had been brought up to date, and after a parade of visitors had come and gone (the Tebos, Jana North, Captain Lincoln, Chang, Nielsen, Stan Kelton, and others), Stonecoat told Meredyth, "I gotta go to Manitoba with Maurice Remo, and from there we, that is you and I, we could zip over to Alaska to see the northern lights together."
"Forget about Manitoba. Jana North's going to Manitoba with Remo. It's all been taken care of. Lincoln's footing the bill. They'll get that creep Lyle Eaton for you."
"There're some things a man's got to do himself, Mere."
"You're in no shape, Lucas, to go anywhere right now, and Lyle Eaton's time is up in a week. You have no choice."
"Remo's not even a cop anymore. I mean, he's not on the force."