by Jill Knowles
She’d been at it for several hours with no progress, when she looked up and saw Julie standing next to the table.
“Jeez, Julie, you scared the crap out of me,” Maggie said, hand against her chest. “I thought we were going to talk tomorrow, at work?”
“I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Charlie’s over helping Mark Valdez build a deck, and so I was home alone.” She sat at the table opposite Maggie. “You were concentrating pretty hard.” She looked around the kitchen. “And I see you’ve been concentrating on it a lot.”
Two days’ worth of unwashed dishes sat in the sink, and the drainer was full of dry dishes she hadn’t bothered to put away yet. The recycling overflowed from its blue plastic container, and there was a smear of peanut butter on the countertop. “Bite me. I’m not the best housekeeper in the world.” Maggie tossed her hair and gave an exaggerated sniff of disapproval. “Besides, this is more important. I’ll clean things up once I find the money to keep us going.”
Julie shook her head, a bitter smile on her face. “So, what you’re saying is that you’ll never clean again?”
“Hey, stop with the negative waves. We’ve made it this far. We’ll get through this slump.”
“It’s not a slump. It’s over, Maggie. Keily is a dying town, and the library is going to die with it.”
“Whoa, Julie. What’s wrong?” Maggie’s heart ached as she imagined the most obvious culprit. “Have your parents heard from the bank?” She sent a mental thanks out to her mother for the life insurance policy that had paid off the house and car after her death. Not having those bills gave Maggie much more financial freedom than she would have had otherwise.
“Yeah.” Julie shook her head, her eyes suspiciously bright. “They can’t get the loan. Too much of a risk.” She bit at her left thumbnail. “They can maybe hang on to the café for another couple of months, then their savings will be completely gone.”
“I’m sorry.” Maggie reached out and took Julie’s right hand. “I have some money saved. It’s not a lot, but I’ll loan it to them.” And she wouldn’t accept any interest. Evie and Tom Stevens were like her second set of parents. She’d give them the money free and clear if she thought they’d take it.
“For what?” Julie jerked her hand away, slapping it down on the table and scaring both cats from the room. “We can’t save the café, we can’t save the library, and we sure as hell can’t save the town.”
“Time out,” Maggie said, making the “T” symbol with her hands. “This isn’t about the café. You knew the loan was a long shot. What’s going on?”
Julie glared at her for a moment, then her lips trembled and she looked down at the table, tracing a knothole in the maple.
“Julie?”
“I’ve done something really horrible.” Julie’s voice was harsh with unshed tears.
“Tell me.”
“You’ll hate me for it.” Her best friend spoke without looking up.
“You’re my best friend. I could never hate you. Tell me, and we’ll try to fix it.”
“Pinky-swear?” Julie held out her hand, little finger outstretched.
“Pinky-swear.” Maggie linked her finger with her best friend’s.
“It’s bad.” Julie finally made eye contact.
Maggie’s shoulders tensed. Her friend -- who, even at thirty-five, still got carded in bars -- looked old. “Tell me.”
“I slept with Billy. Twice.”
Maggie felt the blood drain from her face. “How could you be so stupid?”
* * * * *
Dax perched on the boulder, wiping the blood from his forearm. He’d finally made it through the manzanita, but he’d paid dearly for every hard-won step. For nothing. There was no cave in the mini-ridge. There wasn’t even a rock fall. What had looked so promising was just a natural depression in the stone. He had splinters in all his fingers, his shoulders were on fire, he’d lost at least a pint of blood, and his tail still throbbed from the ant bite. And he was sure the squirrel was laughing at him. The burk-burks had changed to burk, burble, bur-ur-urs.
He pulled the map and a red pen from his backpack and marked out the area he’d searched. Tomorrow, he’d search farther west. He stuffed the map back into his pack and took a long drink of tepid water from his canteen.
For this, I turned down steady work in Torquil’s brothel. Groaning, he lay back on the sun-warmed rock, the heat feeling wonderful to his sore muscles. Right about now, the brothel sounded pretty good. He got a buzz from sex, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the one he got from causing chaos.
Sighing, he rubbed a hand through his hair. It would be so easy to join the paternal family business. Mayhem and slaughter wasn’t his thing, but fucking wasn’t bad. He stared up at a high, thin cloud, the only thing marring the vivid blue sky.
His parents certainly wanted him to give up his quest for chaos and settle down to something with a bit more stability. They’d never quite understood how the mating of a Fury and an Incubus could produce a demon of chaos. Then again, no one was exactly sure where chaos demons came from. Dax wasn’t sure he’d choose it, if it had been a choice. Too difficult, too misunderstood, too everything. His energy needs could be met with killing, and more reliably with sex, but both of them left him feeling ... empty. When he went too long without creating change, it was as if all the colors leached from the world. Scents lost their wonder, and music became Muzak, drained of everything that gave it life.
He understood his parents’ concerns. It had taken him some time to figure out how exactly to use his abilities. In the beginning, he’d simply wandered through life, releasing chaos energy randomly and drinking in the results. It had left him constantly on edge and ravenous, as if he were trying to get all the moisture he needed by holding his mouth open and hoping for rain.
After the fiasco with Gina in Reno, he’d sat down and taken a good hard look at his life and his heritage. The Fury side of him craved order. His Incubus nature demanded intense stimulation. So Dax had refined his chaotic impulses, concentrating on creating more ambitious, more profound changes. The kind that could stop millions of dollars worth of development, or save a dying town.
A red-tailed hawk soared into view. Dax watched it until it glided out of sight. It would survive if it lost the ability to fly -- and if someone hunted for it -- but it wouldn’t live. That’s how chaos was for him.
Wincing as each movement tormented his aching muscles, he sat up. Jumping down from the boulder, he gave it a fond pat and started back toward his Jeep. Living wasn’t easy, but merely existing wasn’t an option for him.
Chapter Four
Dax parked his Jeep in front of the library, next to a white Ford pickup. He opened the door and stepped out, rather than jumping out over the door like normal. Too sore. Way, way, too sore. Stupid manzanita.
“Hey, is that the real thing?”
Turning around, he looked up and into the face of a Keily police officer. The tall, solidly built man looked every inch the peace officer in his neat blue uniform.
“Nope, just pretend.” He patted the Jeep. “Bertha looks like she came straight from M.A.S.H., but it’s an illusion. There’s a heck of a car beneath this humble façade.” His friend Herbie had modified an old government surplus G-P body, but the rest of the Jeep was state-of-the art, and magically enhanced as only a techno-gremlin could make it.
“Still awful pretty.” The cop nodded at the roll of canvas on the Jeep’s back seat. “Soft shell?” The toothpaste-advertisement smile was warm and inviting, but the coffee-colored eyes were wary.
Dax inhaled deeply, enjoying the smell of leather and gun oil coming from the other man. “Yep.” Unable to resist showing off to another alpha male, Dax pushed the button on his key ring, and the shell popped up, settling easily into place.
“Cool.” The taller man held out a hand. “Junior Davis.”
“D.X. Hunter,” Dax said, shaking hands. He was impressed. Officer Davis’s handshake was firm and profess
ional, telegraphing that this man was strong and capable, without a hint of overbearing pressure. “Call me Dax.”
“D.X.?” Davis raised an eyebrow in inquiry.
“Junior?”
Wincing, Davis said, “Horace Oswald.”
Giving a soft hiss of understanding, Dax said, “Desmond-Angus Xavier.”
“Welcome to Keily, Dax. Relocating or just visiting?”
“Thanks, Junior.” Dax pulled his wallet from his pocket and gave his card to the police officer. “Just visiting. I’m a freelance writer, currently here on assignment for Wild Walks magazine.” He’d done several articles for them, seizing the opportunity to earn money and shake things up with his opinions.
“Oh?” Davis took the card, read it, and tucked it into his breast pocket. “Are you writing about anything specific? Or is it not okay to ask?”
Dax smiled. “Perfectly okay to ask. My editor has heard of a new thing called ‘saturation hiking,’ wanted me to try it out and write an article.”
“Okay, I have to ask, what on earth is ‘saturation hiking?’”
Dax’s smile widened into a full-fledged grin. “Yeah, I’d never heard of it either.” Bouncing slightly in place, he continued. “Apparently, the goal is to find a rugged place where there is some eyesore or problem that prevents people from going there, then spend a week camping and hiking all over the area near the whatever-it-is, looking for cool stuff.”
Junior looked puzzled. “What?”
“I’m concentrating on the area around the Red Queen mine.”
The police officer whistled. “Not exactly a tourist Mecca.”
“Precisely. No one wants to be around a flooded uranium mine. So I’m going to hike the vicinity and see if I can’t find something -- I don’t know -- beautiful in the area.” He shrugged. “Sounds weird, I know, but what the heck, it’s a job.” And a lucrative one at that. He’d be paid a dollar a word for an article that would probably be around thirty-five hundred words long. And all his expenses were covered, as well.
“Weird is right.” Davis hesitated a moment. “Listen, the mine is fenced for a good reason. If someone were to climb the fence so they could get right up to the pond that sits over the mouth of the mine, well, it’s not safe to drink the water.”
“People actually drink the water? I’ve seen that fence, and the signs hanging on it warn about radiation contamination.” And he’d climbed the fence, as well. The area around the pond looked like a moonscape, with nothing growing for at least fifty feet in every direction. He could smell sulfur and heavy metals in the water and the surrounding soil.
“The water looks so clean and pure, people think it’s okay. It doesn’t occur to them that the pond looks pretty because nothing will grow in it.” Junior looked around as a souped-up Mercury Cougar rumbled past and screeched into one of the few handicapped spaces in front of the local drugstore. “It’s not the uranium that gets you -- it’s so low-quality, a ton of it couldn’t power a microwave. The problem is that arsenic was used to leach the uranium from the rock, and so the pretty, clear water is full of poison.” He shook his head. “It won’t kill you right away, but if you drink it for long enough, it’s fatal.”
“I never much liked climbing fences.” He winked at the taller man.
“Good.” Davis offered his hand again. “Nice to meet you, Dax. Enjoy your stay in Keily.”
“Thanks, Junior.”
Davis ambled toward the Mercury, ticket pad out and ready. Dax watched as the police officer started writing out the ticket, then shrugged and went into the library. He had a librarian to seduce.
* * * * *
Maggie nearly groaned aloud when D.X. Hunter walked in the front door. Please don’t say anything about Saturday night. She breathed a sigh of relief when he smiled at her and continued past to the reference section. So far, this was not a good day, and it was only -- she glanced up at the clock -- ten forty-seven. Thank heavens they hadn’t had many customers yet. Monday mornings tended to be slow, especially this early in the summer. The adults were all back at work, there were no groups meeting, and summer vacation was still too new for the kids to be bored with the freedom of being outdoors all day.
Scooping up an armful of returned books, she went to the brightly painted children’s section. She had always loved this part of the library. Maggie still remembered coming here with her father, before he’d left town with his secretary. He’d been a self-absorbed, cheating bastard, but he’d loved reading and had passed that on to the daughter he’d so callously abandoned.
As she shelved the books, she let her mind drift. The day her father left, Maggie’s mother had given her eleven year-old daughter the best piece of advice, ever. Maggie had carried the books Papa had given her out to the front porch, intending to dump them in the trash. Mom had stopped her, saying, “Honey, it isn’t the books’ fault that your father is a jerk. It’s okay to be angry, but point that anger in the right direction.”
Maggie had taken the advice to heart, and the books back to her room. She eventually forgave her father, and she never stopped loving books. It had been good advice when her mother gave it to her, and had saved her sanity when she was fifteen.
Her shelving finished, she sat at one of the small tables in the children’s area. It was the same one that had been here when she was little. The word “shit” was still there, gouged deeply into the pale blonde finish in crudely formed letters. She’d dared John Kelso to do it just after Christmas when they were eleven. Tracing it with one finger, she pondered the mess with Julie.
Fifteen and full of herself, Maggie had snuck out of the house to go to a party with twenty-two year-old Billy Wenzel. She gotten drunk, thrown up, and passed out. When she awakened in one of the bedrooms, she was half-drunk, sick, and naked from the waist down, the victim of too many tequila slammers, the Rohypnol of the eighties. She was also no longer a virgin, with no memory of what had happened. And she was still bleeding. In shock, she found her clothes and limped to the bathroom, sticky, hurting, and horrified. She’d walked home and thrown her clothes in the fireplace, and then showered, scrubbing until her skin was raw.
The next day, Billy had called her, thanking her for showing him such a good time, and asking her out again. When she asked if they’d done anything the night before, he’d laughed and said that even though she was inexperienced and “kind of drunk,” she’d done just fine. She’d hung up and barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting.
Julie had been the first person she’d told, and it was Julie who’d used the word rape.
Maggie hadn’t dated for the next two years. Then, she fell head over heels for Kevin Taylor. Determined not to let her only sexual experience control her life, she’d told Kevin about the rape and asked him to be patient with her. To her surprise, he’d admitted to being a virgin, and suggested they learn together. And they had. By the time their romance had faded from love to friendship, Maggie’s fears of physical intimacy had also withered away to nothing.
Billy Wenzel had never been brought to justice for raping her, but Maggie made sure all her friends knew he was a creep, and they’d spread the word throughout the school.
And now Julie had slept with him. The man who’d been willing to screw a young girl who was unconscious and unable to consent to anything. Maggie had promised not to hate her best friend, had even pinky-sworn, but she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive Julie for such a horrible betrayal. How could she? How could Julie possibly be intimate with the predator that had raped her best friend?
“Maggie?”
Speak of the devil. “I can’t talk about this yet.” She kept her gaze on the table.
“Are we going to be okay?” Julie’s voice was hoarse with unshed tears.
Maggie looked up, seeing the dark circles under her friend’s eyes. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Julie nodded and walked away without saying another word.
“Bad time?”
Maggie looked up
and into dark blue eyes surrounded by lashes women would kill for.
“Kind of.”
“I won’t bother you, then,” Mr. Hunter said, backing away.
“Wait.” She took a deep breath and put on her “helpful librarian” face. “Can I help you, Mr. Hunter?”
He searched her face for a moment, then smiled at her, his expression mild, eyes kind. “Dax, please. I’m doing some research on the area around the Red Queen mine. I understand you’ve got copies of historic mineralogical and vegetation surveys.” His right shoulder lifted in a graceful half-shrug. The long-sleeved, black t-shirt he wore was form-fitting, showing off surprisingly broad shoulders. “I just can’t seem to find them.”
Dax. Interesting name. I wonder if it’s a nickname or his real name. “We do have them, but they’re in storage in the basement. They’re quite fragile, and we simply don’t have the resources to preserve them properly.”
Sighing, he ran a hand through his short hair. “Damn.”
“I grew up in this area; maybe I can help point you to another resource. Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
He bit his lower lip. Maggie noticed that he had nice lips. Well-shaped, full, and inclined to smile easily, showing off a mouth full of white, even teeth. They were the kind of lips she most liked to kiss; lush and soft and made for long, hot make-out sessions.
“You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but I’m looking for anything unusual in the area. Not necessarily anything to do with the mine, just something unique around there.”
“Okay.” She shook her head at the convoluted explanation.
“Freelance writer, working on a story.”
“Ah, say no more.” The writers she’d met were always on the lookout for the unusual. She motioned him over to their collection of local topography maps. “You may think I’m crazy, but there might be something you can use.” She pulled the heavy book from the shelf, and carried it to a nearby podium-height table. Flipping the oversized book open, she found the right page. “Here,” she said, pointing to a small ridgeline about a mile and a half due east of the Red Queen mine.
