Chapter 34: A Walk in the Woods

"We're going hunting," Victor barked at me over the phone.

"Again, a 'hello' first is normal procedure."

Victor's growl echoed over the line, "What the fuck is normal about us or what we do, Rogue?"

"Touché."

"Meet me in back of the Dockum's place in an hour. You can't miss it, it's the shittiest place on the block." He slammed down the phone.

As I pulled up to the Dockum residence, some 47 minutes later, I was forced to agree with Sabretooth. The beige, ranch style home was in clear decay, with paint that was visibly peeling, revealing a hideous chartreuse paint job underneath that could only have been justified in the 1970s. If ever. A rusted-out pick-up sat on concrete blocks next to a sedan that made my hunk of junk look like a luxury vehicle. The yard looked relatively well kept, especially in comparison to the house and the cars, with only recent indications of neglect. The frayed yellow police tape gave the home an air of depression and despondency that it well deserved.

I wandered past the home, skirting the chain-link fence that enclosed the back yard, and headed towards an area forested with a mixture of oaks and pines. There I spotted a massive figure with its back turned to me.

"You're right," I told Victor as I walked up to him, "it was the crummiest house on the street. And that's before the police tape. Those kind of hicks make hicks like me look bad."

He grunted, "I feel the same way about the runt."

"Runt?" I asked.

Victor's nose was up in the air, breathing in deeply, his eyes and ears both keenly observant. He ignored my question. His eyes shot wide-open and he told me "this way" as he started off into the woods at a brisk pace.

I had to jog to keep up. Victor was almost completely silent as he stalked through the underbrush, while my footsteps echoed on the stony clay soil.

"Why are we out here, Victor? What are we lookin' for?"

"Won't know till I find it."

"Thanks, Señor Snark. Now give me a real answer."

"Dockum's lived at that place for over two decades," he ducked under a branch that I doubt I could have touched even if I took a running jump at it, "while Steve Hanson and his family lived a half mile away."

I smiled knowing what he was getting at, "Straight though these woods?"

"Ya ain't as dumb as you look."

I ignored the insult. "So if Nate Dockum did kill Steve Hanson all those years ago, there might have been some evidence of it between the two homesteads. Great theory and all, but even if there had been evidence, it's been years. It's long gone by now."

"Guess you never absorbed someone with feral senses before."

"Oh contraire, I have. It's just . . ." I wracked my brain, trying to remember what it had been like the couple of times I had touched Logan. I remember that my senses had been bombarded that it had gotten to the point where they were completely overloaded: all the smells made me nauseous, all the noises gave me a headache, all the sensations made me want to curl into a ball till it all went away. "You can single out scents?" I asked him. "How are you able to do that? It all just drove me nuts."

"I've had a bit of practice," he said dryly.

"Really, how did you do it?"

"Focus and practice. It helps to be in a place like this. Natural. Calm." Sabretooth's pace slowed, then he stopped and sniffed the air. "We got some possibilities. Gonna take a while . . ." he muttered, presumably to himself.

In a flash he was standing in front of me, inches from my face. I gave a small gasp but resisted my instinct to back away from him. His eyes looked molten and his smile had twisted into something between a smirk and . . . something I couldn't define. Then he spoke, and I could define it from the tone of his voice. Lust. "Looks like it's your lucky day, girl."

And then he kissed me.

tx peppa: Bartenders are like low-cost psychologists. And Rogue really needs go get back to one of the real X-teams so she can have normal friendships again. The Wanda drama is stupid and exhausting.

wiccagirl-2005: Victor was off actually being a detective, figuring out where the Dockums and the Hansons lived.