Highway to Hell (3 page)

“So what
do
we want to do?” Lisa asked, arms folded, hip cocked to the side. “Besides get out of this dead spot in the road.”

The guy snuck an up-and-down look at her, which she neither missed nor appreciated. The corners of her mouth tucked in displeasure, but I thought it served her right. Not to mention, I should hold up so well to scrutiny. Lisa was tall and slim, and with her long chestnut hair pulled back, you could see her pretty face and unusual gray eyes.

I'm not saying I'm a dog. I'm short, and with my pointed chin and turned-up nose, I suppose pixie comparisons are inevitable. I get called cute a lot, which isn't a bad thing to be. I prefer to think of my beauty as idiosyncratic, like my personality.

Our knight in shining denim answered Lisa's question
without acknowledging her sarcasm. “Why don't I take you to Dulcina. You can get a room for what's left of the night. Your Jeep is already off on the shoulder. We'll call the state troopers and report the accident, and you can get Buck out here first thing in the morning.”

This was an extremely sensible plan, except for the get-into-a-car-with-a-perfect-stranger part. But fortunately I was equipped to deal with that.

“Thanks.” I wiped my fingers on my shorts to make sure there wasn't any more cow blood on them. “I'm Maggie, by the way.”

“I'm Zeke.” He stepped forward and grasped my offered hand without hesitation.

Zeke was the smell of hay and the sweat of hard work, the silky coat of a dog with one brown eye and one blue, the tang of beer with lime, and spicy enchiladas every Sunday with his grandmother.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said, unable to stop a smile.

“No problem.” He glanced at Lisa expectantly. She stopped goggling at me long enough to supply her name, too. “Nice to meet you both. Why don't you get whatever you need out of your car, lock it up, and I'll see what I can do about this.”

Our eyes followed his gesture to the bovine remains. “What are you going to do?” asked Lisa. “It's too late for anything but a barbecue.”

He didn't quite laugh. “I can't leave her in the middle of the road for the next car to run into. You two were lucky you weren't killed.”

Lisa responded on a droll note. “Yeah. We live a charmed life.” She grabbed my good arm and tugged me toward the Jeep. “Come on, Mags.”

“Stop pulling,” I hissed, letting the diesel engine of Zeke's truck cover our voices.

“What is wrong with you?” Lisa's voice was a harsh whisper. “Did you learn
nothing
from the cow?”

“But you said—”

“I was joking!”

I shrugged. “I figured if anything happened, you could turn him into a frog.”

“Very funny.”

Maybe not. But I didn't get to yank her chain very often. By the time I'd taken Zeke's hand, I'd felt pretty certain he wasn't a threat. Opening myself up to the psychic slideshow had been confirmation.

It's not the same thing as reading minds. The hyper-intuition isn't an exact science, and neither is the touchy-vision thing. It's really more like a compass heading than a road map. But I'm pretty good at getting a read on someone's nature—what my best friend, in her D&D Lisa days, would call alignment: good, neutral, or evil.

Unlike role-playing characters, most human beings are a mix of all these things—weighted, maybe, to one side or the other. I couldn't tell if Zeke was the kind of guy to cheat on his girlfriend, but I
could
see he wasn't the type to chop us into bits and feed us to his dog. So the situation wasn't as dire as it could be.

A horrible scraping noise and the throaty roar of a diesel engine made me turn, as Zeke used the pickup to drag Old Bessie off the road and onto the shoulder, leaving a gory smear across the asphalt.

Not that dire for us, anyway.

T
he blaring of my cell jolted me out of a deep sleep. Fumbling for the phone on the nightstand, I flipped it open without checking the caller ID. “Hey, Justin.”

“You were supposed to text me when you got in.” The thin mobile connection didn't do justice to his voice, which was normally a warm and congenial baritone. It was neither of those things at the moment.

“What?” My brain felt thick and gummy inside, which meant I'd been dreaming, even if I couldn't remember it yet. Slowly, the unfamiliar room, sandpaper sheets, and stale motel air worked their way through the fog.

“When you got to South Padre.” At my befuddled silence Justin continued impatiently. “You were expecting to get there in time for breakfast? And you were going to let me know that your insane drive-all-night plan had not, against all probability, resulted in disaster?”

Memory sharpened to a painful point between my eyes. The road, the cow, the wreck. My vision of flashing teeth, and the sharp-sweet tang of blood, thick in the air. The dream that had only confused me more.

I sat up, head pounding. “What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty. You sound awful.”

“Headache.”

“Where are you now?”

I glanced around the motel room. Sunlight edged the drapes—a brown, orange, and gold floral hideousness that matched the bedspreads—and when I finally managed to focus on the second of the double beds, I found it empty. The bathroom door stood open. No sign of Lisa but her rumpled covers and open suitcase.

“A town called Dulcina.”

“Where is that?”

“The edge of the world, I think.” I rubbed my forehead with my left hand, trying to massage out the ache. “You have to promise not to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

A pause, so prolonged that I thought the call might have dropped. Finally he spoke, worry and displeasure vibrating through the network. “Just tell me what happened.”

I told the abbreviated version: deserted highway, dead cow, wrecked Jeep, handsome stranger, cranky night manager at the Artesian Manor. Of course, I may have left out the word
handsome
, along with the details of the gore-o-vision.

He didn't say anything about our getting in a stranger's car, blah blah blah serial killer, but cut to the important question. “So did you get a vibe on anything … weird?”

Squeezing the bridge of my nose, I willed my thoughts into line. “Zeke—the rancher that rescued us—said a couple of coyotes could bring down a calf.”

“But a full-grown cow?”

I sighed, knowing I was at the end of my self-deception. “I don't know.”

“Did you dream last night?” I'm the psychic one, but Justin has got decent intuition himself. We're a good team, because he's also as intellectual as Lisa, but not nearly as clinical.

“Yeah. The details are still vague.” I sat up, swung my legs over the edge of the bed. No wonder I itched; my legs were polka-dotted with mosquito bites. “Maybe I'll remember more after I shower.”

Justin made a grumbling sound. “Are you sure you're not hiding something from me?”

“What could I be hiding? I don't know anything.” My reply was snappish, but psychic hangovers coupled with physical misery tend to make me a little cranky. “Sorry. You know how this works. I don't get all the answers. Just more questions.”

Justin's sigh was deep, and not with contentment. “So, what are you going to do?”

“Get the Jeep towed back here, I guess. Call the insurance people. Figure out what to tell my parents.”

“I suggest the truth.”

“Yeah. That'll be fun.” I changed the subject. “First I have to go find Lisa.”

“Okay. Henry and I will be knocking around the campus, so I may not have my phone on. Just text me or leave a voice mail. I'll check messages.”

“I'll keep you posted.” I knew I should let him go, but I felt the distance between us keenly, and wanted to hold on a moment longer. “So, how is the monastery?”

“Seminary. Henry's only a pre-theology student.”

“I was joking.” It depressed me that he didn't realize that, but then, phone connections don't transmit smart-aleck very well.

“Oh.” He laughed, more at himself than at my questionable wit. “We went to an all-boys boarding school. This isn't that different, except that the conversation in the dorm isn't all about sports and girls. Not as much, anyway.”

Justin's parents were doctors who had died overseas while working for a Catholic relief organization. The only other family he ever talked about—besides his best friend, Henry—was the bishop who became his guardian. Justin didn't discuss the details, but apparently it wasn't as Oliver Twist as it sounded. His parents had a good insurance policy, and the boarding school had given him a scholarship so he could save the money for college. But even so, losing your parents would suck.

“Henry was glad to see you?”

“Yeah.” There was a funny note to his laugh, sort of nostalgic, sort of not. “Seminary hasn't changed him as much as I thought it would.”

“That's good, right?”

“It is to me. Not sure how the Church will feel about it.”

“He sounds like an interesting guy.”

I said it offhand, without meaning anything by it. He answered the same way. “You'll meet him eventually.”

“Great.” And then there wasn't anything else to say. My stomach was rumbling, but I waited in awkward silence, because I didn't know how to end the call. I'd never said the
L
word to Justin, not even casually. But the accident and the miles between us somehow made “See ya! Bye!” a little too cavalier. And “Care about ya! Bye!” was just ridiculous.

“Maggie?” Justin's voice dropped to the warm rumble I knew well. “I'm really glad you weren't hurt.”

I smiled and sat on the edge of the bed. My headache almost disappeared. Because his mouth might be saying, “I'm glad you're all right,” but everything else was saying those three little words.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Me too.”

The wallpaper on my phone was of Justin, sitting on his sofa with a book in his lap, wearing worn jeans and a faded T-shirt. Normal college-guy uniform. His brown hair was short over his ears, his face clean-cut, but he had a crooked, roguish smile that took him from boy-next-door to boy-next-door-who-you-want-to-watch-mowing-the-yard-without-his-shirt-on-every-Saturday.

Snapping the cell closed, I tossed it on the pillow. I needed coffee before my thoughts got really sappy.

Hot water would help me think through my dream. Not to mention get rid of any lingering cow cooties. Only exhaustion had kept me from taking a shower when we'd checked in.

Scratching absently at a mosquito bite, I looked for a note
from Lisa, found none, and decided that she couldn't have traveled far without a car. Maybe she'd gone to find some breakfast. My stomach growled again at the thought.

I grabbed my toiletry bag and some clean underwear out of my suitcase and headed for the bathroom, only to recoil when I saw my reflection in the vanity mirror. My hair stood up like a tornado had hit it, the dark brown against my pale skin making me look even more washed out than normal. Bloodshot eyes only enhanced my undead chic. Nice.

The bathroom was more humid than old pipes and the Gulf Coast humidity could account for; Lisa must have showered before she disappeared. A pleasant citrus scent hung in the air; my head cleared a little more, and the weight of the almost sleepless night began to fall from my shoulders.

A brown plastic bottle sat on the edge of the tub, like a cough syrup bottle with no label. I unscrewed the lid and smelled lemon and ginger and early spring mornings after a good night's rest.

Lisa was studying international finance at school, but if world domination didn't work out for her, she could make a fortune bottling that stuff for Bath & Body Works. No aromatherapy had ever worked quite like that.

Strange, the things that tempt you. A little magic to make the morning easier. I put the bottle aside and grabbed my own body wash. Maybe I was being a hypocrite. Lisa's arcane studies had saved my life, but sorcery had also put some of my favorite people in the hospital. So yeah, I was unreasonably squirrelly about it. Besides, I had enough freakish trouble without picking up more voluntarily.

As I'd predicted to Justin, the details of my dream
solidified as I worked up a lather of shampoo. I still didn't know what it meant, but at least I had a linear story to tell.

I had dreamed I was at a crossroads, standing under a sky of silver velvet, stars competing against the full moon. In all directions was the mesquite savanna of South Texas; a moist and salty wind rustled the dry grass and leaves like music.

A flash of red grabbed my attention; taillights retreated down the one-lane farm road that crossed the highway. I'd followed them in an effortless run—definite proof that I was dreaming—until the gravel road ran out and I found myself in a field, with a barbed wire fence blocking my way.

It extended in both directions, as far as I could see. The bright metal wire glowed with captured starlight, concentrating it to points at the twisted, sharpened barbs. I reached cautiously toward one of those shining spikes, and felt a tingle as though I'd put my hand near an electrical field. The damaged nerves of my arm began to sting in warning, and I prudently pulled my hand back.

The dream settled one matter. Whatever had killed the cow by the road, this fence was …
something.
The barrier didn't have to be literal. It could be a figurative construct. The question was, what did it keep in? Or, for that matter, out?