It wasn’t a question, so I nodded my acknowledgment. “They never believe a damn thing I say,” I mumbled.

“So…who did you kill?” Kaci stood with her back to me and pulled the pink sweater over her head, as if my answer didn’t matter enough to interrupt her private fashion show. But I knew better. Her thin back was tense, her motions too stiff to ever pass for relaxed. My answers meant as much to her as hers would mean to me. She needed to know she could trust me. That I wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer.

I sighed, and my hands found each other in my lap. “I killed a man I knew in college. If I hadn’t, he would have killed me, and I wouldn’t be here talking to you now.”

Kaci considered that as she slid her arms through the sleeves of a silky red blouse. Then she turned to face me. “Do you ever think about it?”

“About killing him?” I asked, and she nodded solemnly. “I try not to, but sometimes…” Sometimes I see his face when I close my eyes. His cheeks pale, blood spurting from the hole in his neck. His eyes accusing me of betraying him. Again. “Sometimes I can’t not think about it.”

Kaci nodded, just the slightest bob of her head, but it was enough to send a jolt of understanding tingling down my spine to settle in my toes like pins and needles. She wasn’t trying to decide whether to trust me with her life. She was trying to decide whether to trust me with her secret.

The female hiker. If she’d infected the man, she’d probably at least seen the woman, and I knew from experience how quickly a confrontation with a human could go very, very wrong. I’d almost killed a hunter once, when I’d lost control of fear-induced bloodlust.

It was an accident, I told myself as she unbuttoned the blouse with her back to me. Whatever happened with Kaci and the hikers was an accident. They’d surprised her, or she’d surprised them, and all parties had acted on instinct. That was it. It had to be.

“What are they going to do to you?”

I shoved hair from my face, wondering how much of my answer she could possibly understand. Or should even hear. “They’re holding a hearing right now. It works kind of like the trials you see on TV, but I don’t get a lawyer, and there are three judges. And no jury.”

“That doesn’t sound fair.” Kaci leaned forward to grab a long-sleeved T-shirt from the bed I sat on. The front read Hands Off. I’d been tempted to buy one for myself.