The knife nicked Savannah’s chin. “Where is it?”
Savannah’s head throbbed as the smoke choked her brain. How had this woman known where to find her, and how did she know what she had taken from Ray-Ray? “Somewhere safe.”
The screaming died down, giving way to the piercing wail of a lost child. The meth-heads were dead or had fled, leaving the rug rat behind to fend for himself.
“Tell me where the shit is, and I’ll get the kid out of here. Scout’s honor.”
“Even if I tell you where it is, you’ll never be able to get your hands on it. It’s gone; better to forget about it.”
She wiggled the knife in front of Savannah’s eye. “I don’t think you get it. They’re offering big money and a place at the table for the lucky girl who brings that shit back home. I’m gonna be that girl, if I have to skin you alive to get what I want.”
“Why not just take me, instead? I’m what they’re really after, right?”
The woman grinned then poked the tip of her tongue through a gap in her blackened teeth. “You’ll get yours, but you don’t mean nothin’ to them right now.”
Thickening clouds of corrosive smoke scratched the back of Savannah’s throat. She coughed, loud and hacking, bending hard at the waist.
For a split second, the cough brought Savannah inside the woman’s reach, and the knife was behind her.
Savannah threw her weight into the woman, knocking her off her feet.
The woman swung her knife.
Savannah smashed her left shoulder into the woman’s arm, pinning it against a wall of the utility room.
The woman punched up at Savannah with her free hand, but there was not enough room between them to make the blows count.
The child choked and gagged, then went right back to wailing.
Savannah drew the revolver, then jammed the barrel against the woman’s throat.
The woman froze.
“Drop the knife.”
The woman stared at Savannah, her devil’s eye unblinking and brimming with tears of rage. She released the knife.
“My turn to ask questions.”
“Eat me! Got nothin’ to say to you.”
Savannah slapped the woman with the back of her hand. “Who are they?”
Savannah heard the stuttering whistle of the anhydrous tanks’ pressure release valves spurting poison steam.
“That kid doesn’t sound like he’s doing too good.”
The smoke gathered around them, raking at Savannah’s eyes and throat.
“Who wants the shit I took from Ray-Ray?” She could not take her eyes off the woman’s extra pupils. She was Savannah’s best lead – a direct tie to the people behind the conjured girls. All Savannah had to do was sweat her a little longer. The boy could wait.
“You better get that kid out of here. Be a shame if he died while you were busy threatening me.”
The boy coughed and wheezed in a strangled breath. He was fading fast.
“Last chance,” Savannah said, pressing the revolver hard against the woman’s throat.
“I don’t hear him crying anymore, Root Woman.”
Savannah smashed her elbow into the woman’s temple.
The woman’s eyes snapped shut.
The release valves on the anhydrous tanks let out solid teakettle shrieks.
Savannah crawled into the living room then worked her way around the edge. By the time she found the boy, it took her an extra second to remember what she was supposed to do. Her brain was starving for oxygen. She had to move quickly.
The boy did not weigh more than thirty pounds, but Savannah had to stop several times while dragging him over the filthy carpet and through the kitchen. Every time she stopped, every time she lay down to catch her breath, Savannah was sure she was living her last moment; that the fertilizer would explode and scatter her scorched bones across the meth farm’s back acreage.
“C’mon, kid,” she panted, dragging the boy into the utility room. The woman was gone. Savannah was too tired to care.
The boy stirred at the first taste of clean air that the fire sucked in through the back door. Savannah hauled them both through the open door and onto the splintered planks of the back porch.
An explosion tore the roof off the house. Savannah flattened herself on top of the boy.
She staggered to her feet, then grabbed the boy by one arm and one leg. She scurried down the porch steps, slinging the boy over her shoulders as she went. The shriek of the pressure release valves sounded like Death’s alarm clock to Savannah’s ears. Her choices were simple: haul ass or die.
She hauled ass.
The explosion threw Savannah forward, shoving her off her feet. She tumbled across the weedy ground.
The blue sky vanished beneath a veil of red smoke, and the world caught fire.
Thick fingers of black and red smoke blanketed the blue sky, casting long shadows across the land around the burning farm. Savannah lay flat on her back, watching the smoke crawl overhead. She stretched her jaw to relieve the pressure in her ears so she could hear something other than the ringing in her head.
A face thrust itself into her vision. It took a moment for Savannah to realize it was the boy from the fire. The boy’s eyes were wide and white in the mask of soot that covered the rest of his face. He moved his mouth as he pointed at something, but Savannah did not have the energy to figure it out. The boy was insistent, grabbing Savannah’s arm and digging in his heels, trying to pull the Root Woman.
Savannah sat up then blinked, trying to make sense of what she saw. Someone was coming.
Savannah saw a flash of silver. It was the woman with the knife, coming back to finish her off.
The woman homed in on Savannah, unerring, even through the thick smoke, as if she had some sixth sense pointing her straight to the Root Woman.
“Damn it,” Savannah said. She could not hear herself or the boy, who tugged on her arm.
She realized her revolver was gone. She stood up, drawing the knife she took from Junie Hanes back at the bar. Savannah held it in a reverse grip, with the tip jutting down from her clenched fist.
The boy tugged at Savannah’s arm again. The Root Woman gave him a gentle shove. The woman with the knife was twenty feet away and closing fast, her arms and legs pumping as she ran through raging flames.
“Get out of here, li’l boy!”
Savannah felt her legs wobble. Her balance was off. Something was wrong with her ears. She did not like her chances in this fight.
The boy threw himself against Savannah’s knees, driving the Root Woman off her feet. Savannah cursed then tried to kick the boy away, but he was already on her back. Savannah could see the woman coming at her, leaping into the air with the knife clenched in both hands above her head.
Savannah did not want her last sight to be of the meth-head who wanted to kill her. She closed her eyes and thought of Rashad; of Lashey and Carter. She remembered the way Rashad’s hands felt on her scalp and shoulders; the sting of the needle and tug of the thread passing through her flesh as he stitched her closed. She felt Lashey’s slight weight in her arms and Carter’s firm handshake.
Something wet and heavy hit Savannah’s abdomen then splattered onto her face and chest. She had been stabbed before; it did not feel like a knife wound.
Savannah opened her eyes. A pair of pale severed legs lay across her own. She looked a bit farther down and saw the woman’s face poking out from under the top half of a charred and ruptured propane tank. Savannah flopped back then stared up at the sky. Sometimes, she could almost believe the ancestors were looking out for her.
“Miss lady—” the boy’s voice managed to cut through the ringing at last. Savannah turned her head and found the boy squatting in the scorched weeds next to her head.
“Thanks, li’l man; you saved me from eating the other half of that propane tank!”
“Can you take me to see my daddy?” The boy sat on his haunches, hugging his knees. He did not have a shirt.
Savannah could see he had a fawn-brown complexion.
A little black boy among a bunch of white meth-heads? Interesting.
Tears gathered in the corners of the boy’s eyes.
“Are you going to cry?” Savannah sat up, watching the boy’s eyes fill up with tears. “Don’t. Chill with all that.”
The boy nodded then scrubbed his eyes with his hands before the tears could spill down his cheeks.
Savannah nodded back then hopped to her feet, yawning wide to relieve the pressure in her ears. Something popped inside her head, and the ringing subsided. She took a look at the crazy, torn apart woman, then shook her head. One of the propane tanks had exploded and cut her clean in half. Savannah walked over to the woman, then took the horn-handled knife out of her bloody fingers. Savannah slid it into her belt along with the knife she took from Junie then walked back over to the boy.
“Who’s your old man?” Savannah asked.
“Milton Davis.” The boy looked up at Savannah with a mixture of hope and fear stamped on his face.
Savannah looked back at where the farmhouse had been. Now all that was left was a shallow crater surrounded by flattened debris, burning weeds, blackened bodies, and screaming meth-heads. Savannah wondered how many were still in the house when it went up, how many others had been killed by explosions or flying shrapnel. “Never heard of your daddy,” Savannah said.
“He’s tall, short ‘fro.” The boy mimed a little cloud of hair around his own short cut. “Only three fingers on one hand.”
Savannah watched the road for any sign of the police or the fire department. Nothing so far. “No idea.”
“You gotta know him. Ya’ll got the same knife.” The boy pointed at Savannah’s waist. “Only the special folks got them knives.”
“Yeah?” Savannah nodded toward the bisected woman. “The fools I took them from didn’t seem too special.”
“They are. Only people who go up to the place with them sticker briars can get ‘em.”
Savannah tapped the knives on her belt. A Porter had tried to kill Savannah with a knife like this. Junie had tried to do the same back at the bar. And now this crazy woman. “Where’d you say the knives come from?”
“That place with the sticker briars all over. Hard to drive up to the place, ‘cause them sticker briars all over the road, scrapin’ up stuff. I mean, you been there, right?”
Savannah nodded. She knew exactly where the boy was talking about and wanted to kick herself for not putting it together at the club. It might have saved a bunch of lives. “Mitchell Manor.”
The boy’s eyes widened. He clapped his hands together. “Yep, that’s it! Daddy’s up there today; he left me down here with his girlfriend.”
“I’m not taking you up there.” Savannah poked around in the brush for her revolver. She needed to get out of there before the law showed up and she had to spend the rest of the day explaining just how the house had gotten blown up, but she was not leaving without that gun. She was pretty sure she would need it soon.
“Why not?” The boy got up then poked around in the bushes, too, mimicking Savannah. “What’re we looking for?”
“My gun.” Savannah stopped, then gave the boy a hard look. “Do NOT touch it.”
“I got a gun.”
“Sure.” Savannah found the revolver hidden among a smoldering clump of leaves. She fished it out.
“My daddy’s got a bunch of rifles and shotguns.” The boy said. “So, why’d you kill those people back there?” He followed Savannah across the blasted acreage.
Savannah walked back toward the house. She crossed her fingers in the hope that her SUV had not been blown up. “They were bad people.”
“Why?” The boy followed Savannah past a cluster of cowering meth-heads, who poked and prodded at one another’s wounds, trying to figure out who was hurt the worst.
“They do very bad things. That makes them bad people.”
Savannah picked her way through the worst of the wreckage around the crater and was relieved to find her SUV more or less unscathed where she left it.
“I knew some of ‘em. They’d give me Sour Patch Kids sometimes.” The boy chewed at the inside of his lip. “Guess most of ‘em are dead now. But they was my daddy’s friends.”
“You say your daddy had a knife like this?” Savannah leaned against her SUV, patting the knives in her belt. She kept an eye on the scattered addicts. They watched her with wary eyes, but no one seemed like they had the guts to cause any trouble.
The boy nodded then sat in the gravel in front of Savannah. He plucked up little rocks then threw them at the horizon. “They gave him one after he helped ‘em down at that restaurant.”
Savannah felt a twinge of guilt in her gut. There she was, pumping the boy for information; a child she was going to turn into an orphan sometime later that afternoon if everything went right. “Down at Hotlanta Wings?”
The boy nodded. “My daddy drove her down there. She was tired and sick. They made her well again. He told me all about it.”
Savannah crouched down to bring her eyes closer to the boy’s face. “You saw that girl?”
The boy shook his head. “Nah, just heard about it. They said we’d make her better, and she’d help us out.”
“That’s wrong.” Savannah gripped the boy’s shoulder and held it tightly. “That girl is going to wreck everything if I don’t stop her.”
The boy shrugged. “Why?”
“She’s like a mosquito.”
The boy pursed his lips and gave Savannah a skeptical glance. “Ain’t ‘fraid of no skeeto.”
“She’s like a mosquito with a big sucker, and she’ll stick it right in this city’s heart and suck it dry.” Savannah had figured them out. The conjured girls changed the world – made it more to the liking of their master, at the expense of everyone and everything else around them. They were evil jinn, just waiting for some fool to rub their lamp and make a wish. Savannah shuddered to think of the kind of stupid crap a bunch of junkies would want and what cost it would carry for the rest of the SWATS. If she did not stop them, all of the SWATS would soon look like the wreckage of the farm.
“Daddy says that she’s here to help out. Gonna put things back the way they used to be in the old days.”
Savannah stood up. “That’s one way to look at it. I gotta go, kid.”
“You won’t take me up to see my daddy? Jenny was supposed to take me up there, but…” The boy looked around at the wreckage and gave a little hitch of his shoulders. “Pretty sure she’s dead. You could take me. Maybe we could see that girl, and she’d make everything all better.”
Savannah unlocked the truck then yanked the door open. She took a last look at the boy. She wanted to tell him to run and get as far from the SWATS as he could. She wanted to shake the boy and tell him that his daddy was an evil bastard who was willing to kill everyone he knew to make his own life a little bit better. She wanted to tell the boy she was sorry, but she was going up to Mitchell Manor to put a slug through his old man’s forehead.
“That girl’s a monster, son.” Savannah said. “What your daddy did makes her stronger and lets her bring some more of her friends over to play.”
The boy grinned up at Savannah. “That’s what they said. They said they were gonna have a big ol’ party and all her family was comin’ over to play. They said it was gonna be a new world, real soon.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mitchell Manor was a big old house owned by a once-rich family that had fallen hard into the pit of poverty that had swallowed all of the SWATS.
In the early days, back when the SWATS was still a jumping hub of Black affluence and culture, the Mitchell clan had run three clothing stores and a movie theater. The profits they amassed had built them a home with room for generations of Mitchells. But the businesses ran dry, and the patriarch, old Mitchell Mitchell – called “Mitchell Squared” by many – caught “the sugar.” These misfortunes had sucked the coins out of the family’s pu
rse in less than a generation.
Once upon a time, their own private road had run all the way up to Mitchell Manor. Now, that smooth lane was pocked with craters, and the asphalt had shrunken down to a few scabs of faded black amid a stream of gray gravel. Blackberry bushes, nearly ten feet tall, crowded the road, the rich juice of their berries staining the edges of the road like spilled wine.
The Root Woman’s SUV stank of Ray-Ray’s blood. Savannah’s clothes and hair were heavy with the scent of gunpowder and ash. Every breath drew the stench deeper inside her, filling her lungs with bits of those she had killed and those she watched die as fire cooked them down to bones.
Savannah exited the truck. The weight of her revolver was reassuring against her hip. She tossed her gris-gris bag – a worn canvas satchel – over her shoulder. The bullets, holy water and obsidian knives inside the bag made a clinking din with each step.
The hill up to Mitchell Manor was steeper and taller than she remembered. The blackberry bushes had spread through the brush all over the hill, and sticker briars clutched at her face and arms, scoring bloody scratches in her flesh. Savannah ignored the pain and pressed on.
The hill got steeper. Savannah’s heart pounded against her ribs. She was not as spry as she had once been; even the Mayor could not keep a bad heart or weak lungs from taking her down if it was her time.
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 18