He stood near the store entrance where you went to buy tickets for a tour of the caves. He watched us, not even moving a muscle. Just watching. I didn’t like his eyes at all. They kept secrets. They were thinking about something that wasn’t nice and it involved us.
Then, as we started across the parking lot to where he stood, a girl came out of the store and stood next to him. She slipped her arm around his waist and leaned on him. He didn’t do much, just let her. He was still watching us, too busy to think of the girl.
She had on real short shorts, cut-off blue jean shorts, and her legs were long and brown, like an Indian’s. Her hair was long too, the color of wheat that goes dry in the fields. It hung straight down around her shoulders all the way to her waist. I thought she was way too pretty to like a skinny guy like Crow, but you could tell she really did like him. She was whispering in his ear when we got to the store and passed them by.
When we got closer, I didn’t think the girl pretty anymore. She had something wrong with her mouth. One side of it pulled down so that she talked out the other side. Like old people, when they get sick and sit in wheelchairs and they can’t lift one of their arms or move one of their legs. Only the girl could move her arms and legs. Her mouth was just funny. Almost scary, like a dream that’s all crooked and doesn’t make any sense, but you know it means something if you could only figure it out.
Mama and Daddy paid them no mind, but I stared at them hard. I did that because Crow had been staring at us and it’s not polite to stare. He smelled like swamp water, though I might have been the only one to notice. He smelled like water sitting still in dark shade, with worms wiggling in it and dead frogs floating on top.
I think he hissed when we went through the door, but no one heard it but me. I might have imagined that too, the same as the smells. And I thought I heard him whisper, “They’re the ones.”
Or maybe he didn’t say it; I just read his mind. I don’t . . . you know . . . expect you’ll understand this—or believe me. But it’s true. I just seem to know what people are thinking. I’ve never figured out why other people don’t know how to do it because it seems easy. You just look someone in the eye and you can nearly tell what’s in his head. Even when a person doesn’t want you to know.
Kids’ minds are better at surprising you than grown-ups’. I almost always know what grown-ups are really thinking. Kids think crazy stuff so you can’t figure them out that easy. Their thoughts leapfrog all over the place and hardly make any good sense at all.
As soon as I heard Crow say we were the ones, I looked up at Daddy to see if he heard, and I knew he hadn’t, that maybe Crow hadn’t said it out loud. I should tell him, that’s what I thought, I need to tell him the boy and the girl at the door want something from us. But Daddy’s mouth was in that tight line it gets when he’s still mad. And Mama was already off to the souvenir counter, looking at silver bracelets and earrings with dangling feathers and rings with turquoise chips in them. She liked stuff like that. She wore a turquoise pinkie ring she’d gotten in Tennessee. Daddy had never really bought her nice jewelry—you know, the gold kind with diamonds and all—couldn’t afford it, he said.
Maybe if I’d told Daddy about Crow, if I’d taken the chance on Daddy getting mad and yelling at me, nothing ever would have happened. Daddy had his service revolver along in the car. He had his badge in his wallet.
He could have arrested them. For something. For staring like that. For wanting to use us that way. At least he would have been ready for what happened when we came out of the cave tour.
And I wouldn’t be here now having to tell you how all the bad things happened.
And I wouldn’t have to listen to this noise, I thought, watching the nice detective now instead of the ceiling. Because I wouldn’t be here in a big border city police station, all alone, so awfully all alone.
* * * * *
“They’re the ones,” Crow said. “Got a nice car. They come out of the tour, we’ll take the keys.”
Heddy glanced from beneath her silvery blond lashes at the sun beating down on the parking lot. It seemed to her it was pouring like hot lava over the cars. She frowned, feeling a trickle of sweat start down her spine. She really hated getting all sweaty and smelling like a crate of dead fish.
It was the middle of the week, not many tourists at the caverns. Only three vehicles were parked out front. Two of them looked too old and beat up to make it to the state line. She felt a lust start up in her heart for the shiny new Buick Riviera the family owned. Leather seats . . . cold blasts of air conditioning . . . power windows . . . stereo speakers . . . They must have money. What could it be like to have money like that? The car cost more than any house Heddy had ever lived in. Just about any new car today cost more than the shacks she’d had to call home. Right now her mom lived in a green and white thirty-four-foot trailer that she’d picked up for five hundred bucks and a blowjob she gave the crippled owner who said he was dying anyway, take the damn trailer, what the hell good was it to him? It was shabby and full of termites, but it was probably the best “house” Heddy had ever stayed in.
“We can wait for those people to come out of the caverns if the search party doesn’t find us first,” she said now, forcibly bringing her attention back to the problem at hand.
“You think they’re this close?” Crow shivered a little, as if the fear he’d kept at bay for hours when they’d been on the run had returned, crawling up his back to sink pinchers into the base of his neck.
Heddy seemed to be reading the clouds. She hugged his waist tighter, snuggling her shoulder into his armpit. He didn’t smell good, particularly, but he smelled like a man and she loved the smell of men, no matter how sweaty. “It only took us an hour to get here by foot. They’ll find the car, and then they’ll head here, just like we did. If they can follow us across the state, they can follow us here. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Crow swung his large black leather satchel bag around to the front of him and patted it. “Where’d you get the piece?”
“Bandy. He said it shot good. The one I have shoots good too.”
“Well, we know they shoot good, don’t we? You pay him?”
Heddy squirmed away and picked at a line of freckles that marched up her left arm.
“I said, did you pay him? I guess no answer means you paid him on your fucking back. I never trusted Bandy. He’d steal gold from a dead man’s teeth.”
“What’s it matter how I paid him, we got the guns, didn’t we? And I was waiting when you skipped, wasn’t I? Who’s your baby? Who’s always there for you?”
Crow smiled a rare smile, this one dripping with the lust he felt for the girl. “Yeah, you’re my baby. I’d still be back in that cell, wasn’t for you.”
She snuggled into his arm again, breathing deeply and smiling all inside just to be in the circle of his scent. “We have to take that family with us. That’s what we have to do.”
“Why the hell would we want to do that?” He glared down at her, his black brows knitting together. He knew she was smarter than he was, but it still burned him up when she came up with stuff he hadn’t thought of. She knew that, but there wasn’t much she could change about the arrangement. She made the plans. She called the shots. That’s how it had to be.
“We just grab the car, we won’t make it to the line. They’ll tell, Crow. They saw us. They can describe us. Then the cops will know what kind of car we’re driving. On the other hand, if we grab the mom, pop, and kid, they’re insurance. We can drop them off somewhere, after we’re far away from here. I don’t want you put back in prison. We can’t take chances, no chances. I’ve got you now, I don’t want them taking you away again.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Hell. Company. I didn’t really want company around. Who’s gonna drive?”
She kissed him, nibbling softly on his bottom lip. She said, “I will. You sit in back with the gun on the kid. Everything will be fine. We’ll be on the other side of Missouri by dark.”
“God.” He sucked in her lip, then covered her whole mouth, twirling his tongue around hers until she felt the beginning of his erection. She gently disengaged, pushing him back. He was breathing hard. “I don’t know if I can wait,” he said.
She reached down, patted the bulge in the crotch of his jeans. “Yes, you can. You’ve waited for four years already.”
###
Thank You For Reading! This is the first book of the Vampire Nations Chronicles. Please look for RISE OF THE LEGEND and HUNTER OF THE DEAD.
If you have enjoyed this digital book, please visit Billie Sue Mosiman’s website at http://www.billiesuemosiman.weebly.com to browse more digital titles or visit the Kindle Store for more of this Edgar and Stoker Nominated author’s novels. And if you enjoyed this work, please leave a review for the author on Kindle.com.
LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) Page 29
