Banishing the Dark (The Arcadia Bell series) (22 page)

“One, two . . .”

The first swing only cracked the colored glass. The second busted out Sophia’s legs. By the fifth or six—I lost count and just started pounding at it—half the glass was gone. So was half the chair. I used the back of it to knock out a few more pieces before I tossed it out through the hole I’d made. Then I looked outside.

Not stormy anymore. It was night. I’d been locked up here since . . . early afternoon?

A few pieces of broken glass tinkled to the ground below. The utility cart that had been parked here earlier was gone, its tires having left trails in the damp sand. God, it was farther down than I’d thought. And jumping into broken glass wasn’t my idea of good smarts. But I forgot all about that when a distant shout ripped through the dark desert landscape.

Lon!

No more waffling. I kicked away glass with my shoe and leaped out the window. Glass smashed under my feet as I hit the ground. The impact
reverberated through my calves. I lost my balance and had to throw my arms out to stop myself from face-planting. Broken glass bit into my palms. I cried out and surged to my feet, wiping my bloodied hands on my jeans.

Lights twinkled from the bungalows across the canyon. There. That was the direction of Lon’s shout. Wasn’t it? Sound did funny things in the canyon. But it was where the tire tracks led, so I took off toward the main house. Chilly night air whipped my hair behind me as I raced over the rocky land, moonlight aiding my steps. The compound seemed twice as far as when we’d walked out to the temple. Adrenaline and anger pushed me to quicken my pace.

I sprinted until I thought my lungs would burst. And when I was a few yards away, I slowed to a jog so I could better hear my environment. Where did Payne have Lon? Inside the main house? Lights shone through the breezeway out back. More lights in the carport on the far side. And inside the enclosed pool. And in one of the bungalows. Too many lights, and I couldn’t hear anything but the blood pounding in my temples.

Inside the main house—that seemed to be the logical place. But I needed a weapon before I stormed in there. If Payne had taken my phone, he’d certainly confiscated Lon’s gun and grabbed his own shotgun out of his Jeep. Gasping for breath, I surveyed the area, looking for something I could use. A board, a pipe, a shovel—anything at all.

Splash.

What the hell was that? I swiveled on a heel to track the source of the noise. My gaze lit on the wood fencing penning the pool. I quieted my heavy breathing and listened harder.

Splish. Plop.

The hair on my arms rose. Was Lon inside the fence? A familiar scent wafted past my face. Acrid. Funky. Gamey. And something else. Something I’d smelled once when I was a kid living in Florida. Memories of a school trip flashed inside my head. St. Augustine. The horrible musky smell of an alligator farm.

I circled the wooden fence until I spotted the pool’s entrance. Closed but not locked. Heart racing, I lifted the latch. Rusted hinges creaked as I slowly opened the gate and peered inside. A single kerosene lantern sitting on a round table lit the kidney-shaped pool. Old 1950s-looking chaise longues and patio chairs were haphazardly stacked in one corner, a tangled heap of metal legs surrounded by empty white plastic buckets. Empty beer bottles lined the fencing near the gate.

“Good of you to join us,” a voice called across the pool. Payne. I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him.

I snatched up one of the empty beer bottles and wielded it like a dagger as I searched the shadows at the other end of the pool. “Where’s Lon?”

“Right here,” Payne called out. “Would you like to say any final words? He’s got a minute or so left, I’d say.”

“Lon!” I shouted.

Payne’s dark silhouette shifted behind the diving board. “He’s lost control over his vocal cords, I’m sorry to say. The Eden boa’s venom paralyzes within a minute, so don’t feel too bad about getting here in time. He was a goner the minute you smashed my window.”

A lighter shape dragged behind Payne’s dark figure. And when he stepped out of the shadows, I saw what was happening.

Payne had stripped to the waist. His grizzled torso was darkly tanned and covered in hundreds of tiny white scars. And held up a few feet from his body was a massive, golden yellow snake. Longer than him and fatter than my thigh, it hung from a long pole, a set of metal tongs encircling the scaly flesh behind its head. The bottom half of its length was wrapped around a second piece of piping that extended from the tongs.

Payne’s scarred stomach became sunken with every labored breath, and it looked as if his scraggly frame might collapse from the weight of it. “Eden boa,” he said in a strained voice. “Named for the bright red apple shape on the back of its head. One of the rarest snakes in the world, and terribly venomous. I’m afraid she’s taken a nip out of your friend.”

My knees weakened.

It couldn’t be true. Payne was lying. Lon was—

On the diving board. I saw the gold in his halo glinting like glitter. He’d been laid out on the board,
his arms dangling limply over the pool. His body jerked once, as if he was convulsing. Then . . . nothing.

For a moment, I forgot everything else and made a move to race toward him. Then I remembered Payne’s knack. Hard to save someone when you’re hypnotized. And I had no idea how far his range extended, but from my recent years of experience facing dozens of knacks in my demon-friendly bar, I’d guess that it didn’t extend this far.

“Come closer, child,” Payne said. “How can you tell this poor man good-bye from all the way over there? Don’t worry, I won’t let her bite you, too. You can say your last words in peace. It’s clear that you must care for each other in some manner or other, because he called for you before the venom took hold.”

“You’re insane!” I shouted, pacing along my side of the pool as I tried to decide what to do. Then I looked down. The pool was half filled with dank water, the source of the musky stink. Dark shapes rippled on the surface.

“Mind the edge,” Payne said. “Cottonmouth water vipers from Florida. They’ve got a nasty bite that will cause you to lose large chunks of flesh. They say fatalities are rare, but everyone I’ve ever thrown in there has proven otherwise.”

This couldn’t be happening. I didn’t give a shit about his pool of vipers—I was too busy panicking about Lon. Could this all be a sham? Was Lon just hypnotized and Payne only screwing with me to get me closer?

But I’d heard Lon shout. All the way across the canyon, I’d heard it. Lon doesn’t shout. Hell, Lon barely forms complete sentences some days. And was I going blind, or was his halo fading? I thought so, but I wasn’t sure. I just wasn’t sure!

And yet.

Even without those fragments of evidence, no way was I risking his life on an
if
.

Better to risk mine instead.

I exhaled a fast breath, calling out to the so-called abomination inside. Sound warped, and the landscape fell away. Magical current shifted under my skin as the transmutation began: the cool rush of scales, the prickly nudge of my rows of horns, and the slithering weight of my tail busting its way through the back pocket of my jeans.

No protective circle to keep my mom at bay. I paused for a moment to listen, remembering how it was back before my hospital stay, when she would tap into me. But I heard no strange whispering. No French-accented voice calling my name. At least, for the moment. Better take advantage of it while I could.

I blinked, and my surroundings returned. A sea of silver dusted the pool and the desert beyond. But it was the look on Payne’s face that held my attention. Absolute disbelief.

It wouldn’t last long, and I wasn’t immune to his knack in this form. So if I was going to get closer to Lon, I needed to take Payne down first. I knew this. But power coursed through me, from my fingertips to
the agitated slap of my tail against the cement. And I didn’t know if it was the heat of the moment or if what had happened between Lon and me earlier was affecting my good sense, but I was done with being careful.

I tossed the beer bottle and heard it crash somewhere behind me as I stalked around the viper pit. What a foul fucking mess. What was the matter with people? I was sick to death of crazies who had zero respect for anything outside their own selfish motivations: Dare, my mother, the owner of the reptile shop, and now this lunatic.

But if he thought he was taking Lon away from me, he could think again.

“Get thee back!” Payne shouted, thrusting the golden snake in front of him like a shield.

“Oh, but I thought you liked serpents. You want to slice open my belly and eat me, too?”

Payne gulped for air and then began chanting something low and quiet. And just as I had in the temple, I felt that same
whoosh
of sleepiness. No way in hell was I going down again.

One moment I was striding toward him. The next I flew like an loosened arrow. I didn’t even feel the cement beneath my shoes, just the slice of cold wind through my clothes, and I was in his face. The flattened head of the golden snake reared back. I knocked the metal contraption from Payne’s hands. Both it and the snake sailed through air and struck the wooden fencing, which collapsed under the
weight and toppled backward as if it had been struck by a wrecking ball.

“Aeyyhhhh!”

Payne stumbled a step, shouting hysterically as his eyes widened in terror. And I might have almost felt sorry for the old bastard had I not caught a glimpse of Lon’s limp body on the diving board. And that just sent me into a rage.

“Holy Light Bringer,” he prayed to the night sky, “protect me from this monstrosity—”

I clamped a hand around his throat and squeezed.

He reached behind his back and pulled out Lon’s gun. The cold muzzle slammed against my forehead. Half a second, and I’d be dead. But half a second was all I needed to jerk my head around and knock it away with my horns.

The shot exploded over my shoulder.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw the gun swinging back around. I didn’t even think about it. I just let go of his neck and pushed with my mind.

The gun dropped. And Payne sailed backward . . . and backward, until he was flailing in midair over the pool. His disbelieving eyes met mine one last time.

And I dropped him.

The descending scream was muffled by the eruption of snake-filled water that shot several feet up into the air when his body hit the surface.

Let his ill-kept vipers do what they wanted. I
frankly didn’t care if the crazy asshole lived or died. All I cared about was wrapping my arms around Lon’s legs and tugging him back to safety. Back to me, where he belonged. But God, he felt so heavy as I pulled him onto the wet cement. So heavy. Not moving.

I barely heard Payne flailing around in the viper pit. Barely heard his gurgling screams. Because I was too busy listening for Lon’s breath. Lon’s heartbeat. It wasn’t there. And something much worse: his halo had faded away.

No breath. No heartbeat. No halo.

And still, my mind fought it.

Lon couldn’t be dead. This wasn’t happening. It was a trick of Payne’s knack. Never mind that I’d never seen a knack do this. Maybe he’d amped it up somehow, with something like Dare’s bionic drug.

And even as my panic-fueled mind was trying to rationalize all this, the frantic splashing in the pool had slowed and finally stopped. Payne was dead. His knack would stop working on Lon.

Which meant . . .

The golden snake
had
bitten Lon.

But where? Not on his face or neck. Not his hands. I lifted his shirt and saw nothing there. Legs. Arms—

Arm. There. Two ragged holes in his thin leather jacket, just above his left elbow. The pale brown leather was stained with blood.

The jacket was too tight to remove without effort. I reached inside his jeans pocket and fished out his
pocketknife, right where he always kept it, next to his car keys. Guess Payne hadn’t bothered to confiscate Lon’s stuff as he had mine. I supposed he’d counted on Lon being too paralyzed to be a threat.

Dare had once thought that about me.

Never assume.

I used the pocketknife to saw open the cuff of his jacket and sliced up the sleeve, splaying open the leather. Jesus. No wonder I couldn’t get the jacket off—the bite was already swelling. Okay, think, Bell. Think. What did I know about snakebites? Only that you were supposed to cut them open and suck out the venom. But what if the venom had already stopped a man’s heart? Removing the venom wasn’t going to help that.

CPR. I could do that. Kar Yee and I had both learned it for the bar. After dropping the pocketknife, I pinched his nose and puffed air into his mouth. Once. Twice. Then I tried compressions on his heart. One, two, three—

What the hell was I doing? Screw CPR, I had something better.

Tapping into Payne’s electricity, I found a fat pocket of current nearby and reeled it into my body. It surged and sank inside me like the tide rising over a dry beach. I held it for a moment, letting it kindle my Heka. Then I pressed my palms over Lon’s heart and zapped him.

Electric pain shot through my arms as Lon’s chest seized.