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WITHOUT MERCY

KENSINGTON BOOKS

Chapter One

Her heartbeat pounding in her eardrums, Jules Farentino, barefoot and wearing only a nightgown, made her way toward the den where a fluttering blue light was barely visible through the sheers on the French doors.

"Hurry ... there isn't much time...."

She wanted to call out but held her tongue. The feeling that something was wrong here-something dark and evil-caused her to creep silently along the icy floors.

Slowly, she pushed open the door to the den and peered inside. The L-shaped couch and a recliner were illuminated by the weird, flickering light of the muted television.

Michael Jackson's voice sang about Billie Jean through the speakers.

Above the melody:

Drip. Drip. Drip.

So loud.

Like rolling thunder in her aching head.

Liquid warmth splashed on the tops of her bare feet, and she looked down quickly. Her eyes rounded as she saw the blood dripping from the long blade of the knife in her hand, the red stain spreading into a pool.

What!

No!

She tried to scream but couldn't, and as she looked toward the open French doors, she saw her father lying on the floor near the coffee table.

"Help me, Jules," he said, lips barely moving. He stared up at her, eyes unblinking, a jagged gash on his forehead, a stain spreading on the front of his rumpled white shirt.

Blood gurgled from the corner of Rip Delaney's mouth as he stared up at her, whispering in a wet rasp, "Why?"

Transfixed, her hand now sticky with blood, she started to scream-

"Seven forty-five in the morning. It's a chilly thirty-seven now. That's only five degrees above freezing, you know, but temperatures will climb until midafternoon, topping out near fifty. It's going to be a cold, wet one today, a major storm expected to roll in later this morning. Now for the traffic report ..."

Jules awoke with a jerk.

Her heart was pounding, her head splitting, the radio announcer's voice an irritant. She slapped off the alarm and shivered. Her bedroom was freezing, her window open a crack, wind rushing inside, rain beating a steady tattoo against the roof.

"Damn," she whispered, wiping her face, the vestiges of her ever-recurring dream slipping back to the dark corners of her mind. She glanced at the clock and groaned, realizing with a sinking feeling that she'd forgotten to reset her alarm.

Rolling off the bed, she disturbed her cat that had been sleeping in a ball on the second pillow. He lifted his gray head and stretched, yawning to show off his needle-sharp teeth as she snagged her bathrobe from the foot of the bed and threw it on. She didn't have time for a shower, much less a jog.

Instead, she threw water over her face, tossed a couple of extra-strength Excedrin into her mouth, and washed them down by tilting her head under the faucet. After yanking on jeans and an oversized sweatshirt, she found an old Trail Blazers cap. Then she searched for her keys, scrounging in her purse and in the pockets of the jacket she'd worn the day before.

Her cell phone rang, and she found it plugged in to the charger on the floor near her bed.

Flipping it open, she saw Shay's face on the small LED screen.

"Where are you?" her sister demanded.

"I'm on my way."

"It's too late. We're almost there!"

"Already?" Jules tugged on one sneaker as she glanced back at the clock. "I thought you were leaving at nine."

"The pilot called. There's a storm or something. I don't know. He has to fly out earlier."

"Oh, no! Make him wait."

"I can't! Don't you get it? She's really doing it, Jules," Shay said, and some of the toughness in her voice disappeared. "Edie's getting rid of me."

That was a little overly dramatic, but so was Shay, through and through.

Jules finished lacing her running shoes. "Then tell her to wait."

"You tell her," Shay said, and a second later Jules heard her mother's voice say, "Look, Julia, there's no reason to argue with me; this is beyond my control. I told Shaylee that she has to go whenever the pilot can fly her safely to the school, and he says they need to go earlier because of the storm."

"No, Mom, wait. You can't just send her to-"

"I damned well can. She's underage. I'm her guardian. And she's got a court order. We've had this conversation before. Let's not rehash it."

"But-"

"It's either this or juvenile detention again. This is her last chance, Julia! The judge ordered her to make a choice, and she, smart as she is, took the school. It was also her choice to hang out with that criminal and take part in a crime. Her boyfriend wasn't so fortunate; he didn't have a rich father to get him a lawyer. Dawg will be going to prison for a long time, so your sister should count herself lucky!"

"Just wait!"

The connection was severed, leaving Jules to worry from the middle of her messy bedroom. She couldn't believe her mother was actually shipping Shaylee off to a distant school for troubled teens, one that was in the middle of no-damned-where. She flew out of her condo and waved to Mrs. Dixon, her neighbor, as the woman carried her wet newspaper into her unit.

Once inside her old Volvo, she drove toward Lake Washington and the address she'd gotten from Edie earlier, the spot from which Shaylee was to be picked up by seaplane for her ride to Blue Rock Academy in southern Oregon. Edie had given Jules the address the day before.

Jules floored it.

However, the freeway was a parking lot, and the latest traffic report blaring from Jules's radio didn't make her feel any better. Apparently everyone who owned a car in the state of Washington was sitting on the I-5 freeway in the drizzling rain, as evidenced by the line of blazing taillights stretching ahead of her Volvo. Jules peered wearily past the slapping windshield wiper as the traffic crawled north. Still fighting a headache, she drummed her fingers on her steering wheel and wished she knew a faster way to get to Lake Washington.

She'd battled rush hour down in Portland, Oregon, when she'd worked at Bateman High, but since losing her teaching job last June, she'd been spared the annoyance of rush hour. In her current position as a waitress at 101, a high-end restaurant on the waterfront, she covered the night shift and usually avoided traffic. One of the few perks of the job.

The radio did little to calm her nerves, and the windshield wipers slapping away the rain only added to her case of jitters. Jules was too late. Shay was going to fly off without a good-bye, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even Edie could fix this. A judge had ruled that Shay was to be sent away for rehabilitation.

She tuned the radio to a station where songs from the eighties were peppered with rapid-fire traffic updates from Brenda, the serious reporter who rattled off trouble spots on the freeway system so fast it was hard to keep up.

Not that it helped.

Basically, it seemed, every freeway was a snarled mess this miserable February morning.

"Come on, come on," Jules muttered, glancing at the clock on the dash of her twenty-year-old sedan. Eight-seventeen. The...