Soultaker (25 page)

A thought struck him. His hand came away from the gearshift. He was suddenly sure he should talk with her, if
only long enough to allay any suspicions he might be planning something that could piss off Lamia. He pressed a button and the window lowered a few inches.

Cindy’s smile brightened again. “Hello, Mr. Slater.”

Raymond cleared his throat. “Hello, Cindy. What—” He stopped, realizing he’d been about to ask why she wasn’t in school. Stupid. He knew the answer to that. Instead, he settled for the next obvious question. “What are you doing here?”

Still smiling, she said, “Following you.”

Raymond gulped. His gaze flicked to the gearshift. “I, uh…”

Cindy’s expression turned solemn. “Don’t.” A note of pleading entered her voice. “Listen to me, okay? I need to talk to you about Myra Lewis. I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I think she’s planning to hurt a lot of people. We need to do something to stop her.”

For a moment, Raymond felt something that might have been hope. More than anything, he didn’t want to do this alone. He touched the button again and the window lowered another few inches. He leaned toward Cindy and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I have a plan. It’s not much, but it’s better than—”

He let out a startled shriek as Cindy stuck her head through the newly widened opening and wriggled in to her waist. Her right hand went for the key ring dangling from the ignition, but he batted it away. She laughed and reached for the keys again. Raymond knew he had to do something drastic or risk losing his chance at salvation. He backhanded her with a tight, hard blow, knocking the sunglasses off her face. Cindy howled in agony and started screaming about her nose. Raymond unclipped his seat belt, twisted in his seat, and braced his palms against the top of her head. The fleeting thought that her soft, conditioned hair felt nice against his fingers whistled through his mind like a bottle rocket; then he gave her a mighty shove and she fell back through the opening. She staggered backward, wobbling on high
heels for a moment, then fell hard on her ass. He saw that she was dressed in a tiny halter and a tight black miniskirt. They made her look like a cheap hooker. Nothing at all like the effervescent, brainy head cheerleader he’d known for four years. Seeing her lying there on parched asphalt with her long, shapely legs splayed open triggered a spark of crazy lust.

He gave his head a hard shake and put the Lexus in gear.

Cindy began the laborious process of getting to her feet.

Slater backed up the Lexus and executed a quick three-point turn. Then he stomped the gas pedal down and the car shot to the edge of the parking lot.

He hit the brakes and let out a scream of frustration. An 18-wheeler was blocking his way, slowing down as it neared the intersection. Raymond glanced at the rearview mirror. Cindy still wasn’t upright. The older gun-shop clerk was at her side, offering his assistance. A knife appeared in her hand. The blade flashed in the morning sunlight before she stuck it in the man’s throat. Raymond whimpered and whipped his head back toward the street. The 18-wheeler was rolling slowly through the three-way stop. He heaved a sigh of relief and let his foot off the brake, allowing the Lexus to roll closer to the edge of the street.

Then Cindy was there again, screaming and launching herself through the halfway-open driver side window. Raymond might have cursed his stupid failure to close the window had he been capable of coherent thought in that moment. Instead he matched Cindy’s scream with an impressive one of his own as he dodged the bloody blade in her hand. Then he looked in front of him and saw that the street was clear again. He hit the gas and the Lexus surged into the street, straight toward the brick wall of a building on the opposite side. He spun the wheel hard to the left and the car swerved back to the street.

There was a massive thump and Cindy loosed a scream of sheer agony. Raymond realized two things in the next moment.

One, the lower half of the psychotic cheerleader’s body had struck a telephone pole with extraordinary force.

And two, the Lexus was still speeding down the street.

He pulled his leaden foot off the accelerator and hit the brake. Then he twisted the steering wheel and ducked down an alley, dragging Cindy Wells’s now very limp body along with him. He slammed the gearshift to the park position and sat there struggling not to hyperventilate for several moments. After he had calmed down some, he forced himself to look at Cindy. She was very still and at first he was sure she was dead. Then he looked at her throat and saw the slow throb of a weak pulse.

He thought about taking her to a hospital, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Doing that would doom everything and Cindy would probably die anyway.

Frustration made Raymond pound the steering wheel again. “Fuck!”

His breath hitched and a sob worked its way out of his throat. A series of progressively more wrenching sobs followed. This lasted until it hit him that he was living down to Lamia’s worst assumptions about him. He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked at the rearview mirror. There was no one behind him. A glance through the windshield confirmed that the opposite end of the alley was also deserted. But it wouldn’t be for long.

He got out of the car. The sight of Cindy’s badly mangled legs made him gag. They were twisted and broken, though he saw no compound fractures, no shards of bone sticking through punctured flesh. In that regard only she’d been lucky. Not that it mattered. Cindy’s limited future remained very bleak. Raymond choked down bile and forced himself to act quickly. He extracted the girl from the shattered window and dragged her to the rear of the Lexus. She whimpered softly, but did not regain consciousness. Raymond opened the trunk, hoisted her up, and dropped her inside. He hesitated a moment, his hand poised on the trunk lid, ready to slam it
down. By all rights, the broken girl should no longer pose much of a threat, but he knew he shouldn’t take that for granted. With this much weirdness in the air, that would be the height of arrogance.

He removed his GUN CITY USA purchases from the trunk and stowed them in the backseat.

Then he slammed the trunk and got the hell out of there.

Trey McAllister sat at the chintzy little kitchen table in his mother’s house and stared at his fists, feeling sick as he remembered how his brother had fallen beneath the force of his punches. A sickness surpassed only by the guilt he felt at the memory of the shock and betrayal he’d seen in Jake’s eyes.

He told himself it had been necessary. That he’d done it only to protect his brother. Once again he reviewed the morning and laughed bitterly. He recalled the lies he’d spewed to drive Jake away and laughed again, and this time he felt a sting of tears. It had been the performance of a lifetime. Real Oscar-caliber work. If by some miracle he managed to make it to tomorrow alive, he would have to give some serious thought to pursuing an acting career.

The thought of surviving triggered yet another round of that numb laughter.

That wasn’t going to happen.

He was a walking dead man and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Which was kind of okay. He’d been through a lot. Had seen a lot of awful things. Had been made to do things so gruesome and deranged that the thought of living with the memories horrified him nearly as much as the acts themselves.

So, yeah, dying—preferably sooner rather than later—would probably be for the best.

He thought of the hopelessness of his predicament some more and laughed one last time.

“What’s so funny, child?”

Trey’s breath caught in his throat at the sound of her voice. He clenched his fists tighter as he struggled not to scream.

The voice turned colder. “I asked you a question. I expect an answer.”

Trey consciously reminded himself to breathe. He exhaled slowly and unclenched his fists with great deliberation. Then he turned to look at Myra. And he did the only thing possible. He told the truth. He couldn’t lie to her. There would be no point even if he could. “I was just thinking about everything. About my brother. About how much I hate you. And about how fucked up this all is.” The depth of his despair came through in his voice. He made no attempt to hide it. “And I was thinking about how there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.”

Myra was nude save for a tiny black thong. He looked at her slim, pale body and tried to feel even a ghost of the overpowering lust he’d felt for her just days ago. But there was nothing. It made sense. The compact little body he’d once found so enticing was only a facade.

She smirked. “You’re right about that. But you’re wrong about the other thing. I could make you feel lust for me again if I really wanted.”

Trey felt a chill. She was still inside his head. Still knew his every thought. It was a violation. A mental rape of sorts. And just one more thing he could do nothing about. “I know. But it wouldn’t be any more real than the girl I’m looking at.”

Myra ran a hand slowly down one side of her sleek body. “Oh? I could alter my appearance, you know. Change my shape, make it more pleasing.”

Trey shook his head. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“I suppose I do, at that.”

She stared at him for several long, exceedingly uncomfortable moments, her dark, glittering eyes boring into his skull like
lasers, making him squirm. Then she turned away from him and opened a cutlery drawer. Trey heard a clank of steel as she sorted through the contents. He sucked in a breath when she turned toward him again. The gleaming carving knife looked impossibly big in her little hand. She approached the table with a slow roll of her hips and set the knife down before him.

“What—”

“I’m giving you a chance to take yourself out of the equation, but I’m leaving it all up to you, darling.” She grinned at his thunderstruck expression. “You can live for a while or die right now. If you choose the latter, you can do the job with that easily enough. It’ll hurt, of course, horribly, but that won’t last long. Well, not
too
long.”

Trey looked at the knife and thought about it.

And thought about another possibility or two.

Myra snorted. “Yeah, right. Try and I’ll pop a vessel in your brain before you even get the fucking thing off the table. Now put that idiot thought away before I take this choice away from you. You’ll want to think about this very carefully, Trey. It’s the last time you’ll ever have any say in what happens to you.”

Trey stared at the knife another long moment, then pushed it away with a sigh. “I…can’t.”

“Because you’re a coward.”

Another sigh, then, very quietly: “Yes.”

Her laughter was smug and very satisfied.

Trey hated himself more than ever in that moment.

“What’s going on in here?”

Trey turned his head away from Myra’s hateful face and cringed at the sight of his mother sauntering into the kitchen. She wore only a grimy white T-shirt and a pair of lacy pink panties. She winked at Trey and patted Myra on the ass on her way to the refrigerator. She took a can of Old Milwaukee from the fridge and popped the tab.

She took a long swallow from the can, made a sound of almost sexual satisfaction. “Got-damn. Tell you what, ain’t nothin’ hits the spot like a beer after getting laid.”

Trey struggled not to throw up.

Myra had elected to stay inside and out of sight during the confrontation with Jake. She was not yet ready to reveal herself to the older McAllister boy for some reason. After Jake and his girl left, Trey and Jolene came back inside. Myra had been very pleased with the way the whole thing had played out. And she had chosen to show her pleasure by dragging Jolene into one of the tiny home’s two bedrooms. Trey had retreated to the kitchen at the sound of the first orgasmic squeals.

And now here they were again. Utterly shameless. Making no attempt to disguise what they had been doing. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Jolene finished off the beer and tossed the crumpled can into the overflowing sink. Then she sidled up next to Myra and slipped an arm around the girl’s waist. Keeping her eyes on Trey, Myra smiled and leaned into the embrace. Jolene slipped a thumb beneath the band of Myra’s thong and gave it a snap. “Mmm…your girl’s primo stuff, boy. Knows her way around a woman’s body better than any
man
I ever knew, that’s for goddamn sure. If I’d known that, I never would’ve given you so much fuckin’ grief about her.”

“She’s not my girl.”

Jolene ran a finger along the delicate line of Myra’s jaw and made a purring sound. “You mean I can have this fine piece all to myself?”

“Be my guest.”

Jolene made that purring sound again and said, “Oh, I think I will.”

Trey stared at his hands and tried to make his mind a blank while they noisily made out for several minutes. But the effort was doomed. There was too much to think about. Too many awful things had happened. And there was the prospect of a near future awash in blood and violence to consider. So his mind wandered. He thought about Lamia. He understood in a general way her need to harvest souls and replenish her energy for another long stretch of years. And to some degree he understood some of the machinations necessary to put all the right pieces in place and arrange a successful harvest. He
was less sure about why she did so many other things that seemed unnecessary. All the random murder and mind games. And she had some kind of fixation on Jake. Some kind of connection she refused to clarify. Trey didn’t have much left that mattered to him, but his brother did matter. He wished he could talk to him, convince him to head out of town, to run like a mad bastard, and keep running until he was hundreds or thousands of miles away.

He felt like crying now.

Because he knew it wasn’t possible. He knew that Jake was just as doomed as he was.

“You’re right about that.”

Trey flinched. He looked up and saw that Jolene had left the kitchen. Myra had moved closer to him while his mind was elsewhere. She stared down at him, her dark eyes cold as ever but also amused. “You can’t warn him. And he won’t escape. He was always meant to be here at harvest time.”