Chest of Bone (The Afterworld Chronicles Book 1)

by Vicki Stiefel

  I approached the counter.

  From the back, a blonde with bee-stung lips and pneumatic breasts waltzed up to us wearing a black sheath skirt and a barely buttoned blouse. Her wide eyes glommed onto Larrimer, where they stuck like suckers. Cute.

  I cleared my throat, held up my FBI badge, and offered the woman my hand and an open smile.

  Hers appeared slowly, reminding me of yesterday’s snaky things. Her handshake was dry and assertive. Her vibes? Those reminded me of yesterday’s cobrathings, too, except she was hungry for Larrimer, not me.

  “How can I help you folks?” She produced a toothy grin.

  I placed the printout of the blood invitation on the counter. “I understand you did this work.”

  She glanced at it. “So? We print lotsa stuff. It’s what we do here.” She rested her head on her hands and winked at Larrimer.

  I cleared my throat. “We’d like to know who ordered and paid for the printing?”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s private.” Big smile again. I couldn’t see it, but I would bet Larrimer was smiling back.

  I offered my own big-ass smile. “We’d so appreciate it.”

  Her eyes frosted, and I caught the meanness in them. All for me. Yum.

  Larrimer stepped over, face dazzling with sexy intent. He smiled. Her chest surged.

  I was going to puke.

  He flashed his credentials.

  The woman froze, licked her lips. “You, uh, you got a warrant?”

  Larrimer withdrew it from the inside of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. Nice.

  She didn’t bother to read it, but slid off the stool showing lots of shapely leg. Her glance at Larrimer could have fried eggs. Minutes later, she returned clutching a file. She held it out—pointedly not to me.

  I swiped it out of her hand. “Thank you. Do you remember anything else about this print job?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Do try.”

  “Like I said, nope.” She leaned forward and slid a card toward Larrimer. “In case you think of any questions you’d like to ask me.”

  He slipped it into his pocket.

  I turned to him. “Time to go.”

  “Wait,” she said, a sharp note in her voice. “You can’t take that with you.”

  I grinned. “Oh, but we can.”

  Outside, I tried not to fume. “That was disgusting.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, right. You and that obviously sex-starved piranha.”

  He stepped closer, eyes half-lidded. “Catch more flies with honey.”

  I held my ground. “Careful. Your teeth might rot.”

  A spark in those Pacific blues. “Watching your slow burn was my fun.”

  Ten… nine… eight… gurrrr. “Oh, really.”

  His soft chuckle. “Babe, sometimes you’re tough as jerky, but sometimes you’re so easy, it hurts.”

  I would not rise to the bait. I would not.

  A text chimed.

  Come home now, please. Hurry. From Bernadette’s cellphone.

  Bernadette never texted and never said “please.”

  Something bad, something very bad was coming.

  I texted back, On my way.

  Ice momentarily stole Fern’s wheels, and I did a 180 at the top of the farm’s drive.

  “Jesus Christ, woman!”

  “Nothing to worry about.” I pulled the steering wheel and narrowly missed the left corner of the barn. I said thanks for small favors and hopped out.

  Larrimer was beside me in a flash.

  “I don’t see Bernadette’s Jeep,” I said. Time slowed.

  He notched his head toward the single-bay garage. “Maybe inside.”

  “No, she only parks there in a bad storm.”

  He cocked his head. “It’s too quiet.”

  No cluck of the girls. No bark of Grace. No birds at the feeders.

  I bit my cheek, checked the time. 4:00 p.m. The day was beginning to fail. Yet no lights glowed from inside the house.

  I slid my hand onto the solid presence of my Glock. If I lost one more loved one…

  We eased behind Fern as Larrimer pulled his gun.

  “You take the lead,” I said, the words out before I could think about them. Something unfamiliar settled deep inside me. Trust.

  Gun in hand, I followed him toward the house. The house. No. My senses screamed…

  “Wait,” I whispered. “The barn. Whatever it is, it’s in the barn.”

  He stood stone-still, nodded, and pressed a finger to his lips. “Let me clear the house. I’ll be fast.”

  Fast wasn’t the half of it, then he hunkered close, and his warm breath licked my ear. “All clear, except for the kitten. She’s fine.”

  I swallowed. “Good.”

  We ran in a crouch toward the barn. Quiet. Too quiet.

  The pastures to my right were clear of animals. In the one on my left, two goats lounged. Larrimer slid inside the partially open barn door, and I followed.

  A foul aroma perfumed the cold air, the coppery smell of blood and feces. Ah, geesh.

  I moistened my lips, senses humming. Only the gray rays that filtered through the stalls leant any light. My eyes adjusted, and I moved forward.

  Larrimer’s arm jerked out, hand fisted.

  I stopped, then saw. Decapitated chickens lay scattered across the aisle. My girls! I counted. “Rosie and Rocket and Redeye.”

  I closed my eyes, just for a second, felt him in front of me. My eyes flew open. His back was to me, his gun at the ready, shielding me.

  “I’m okay,” I whispered.

  He moved away, and I sidestepped down one stall and peered into the girls’ winter coop. Four red hens hunkered down. Alive, but silent and afraid.

  Death awaited me further inside the barn. Heavy. Crushing.

  Larrimer signaled he would take the barn’s right side, while I took the left.

  My gut was so tight it ached. Clem whickered as I passed him.

  Claudia was asleep in her stall, puffs of hot breath stirring the air.

  Larrimer’s movements paralleled mine as he checked the opposite stalls, and we reached the back of the barn simultaneously. I peered up the stairs to the second floor. I sensed no one, but if I were wrong, whoever had done this would be up there.

  As I took the first step, Larrimer blocked me.

  “Wait,” he said, hushed. He pointed to the wooden crate near his feet, then the square opening to the hayloft above one of the empty stalls. I gave him a thumbs up. He tucked his gun in his waistband, carried the crate into the empty stall and set it on the ground. He climbed up, bent his knees and sprang, rocketing up to the opening, which he gripped with his hands. He pulled his torso up, just enough to peer around the floor of the hayloft. Then his body slowly disappeared from view.

  I stayed put, back to the barn wall, gun pointed downward alongside my leg. Long minutes drizzled by.

  He finally dropped down through the hayloft opening. “Clear. No one’s here. Not now.”

  A shiver of relief. “Good.” I holstered my gun and started back down the aisle.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “No. I need to see all my goats are safe.” Nanna and Balder, Odin and Freyja were now out in the pasture. I’d seen Thor and Sif in the other one.

  Larrimer moved, a blur in front of me, denying me access to Loki and Lofn’s stall.

  “What is this, some do-si-do?”

  He wrapped his hands around my upper arms.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “Move!” I pushed at the wall he’d made with his body.

  With a dragon-sized chuff of frustration, he stepped aside.

  unlatched the stall door and walked in.

  Red. All I could see was red, from their slit throats to their guts spread across the fresh straw.

  I fell to my knees.

  They lay on their sides, my gentle white fur babies, wearing giant red smiles, throats slit, blood splattered, eviscerated.
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  Those sweet, funny people, gone. I inhaled a sob, leaned against the stall wall, head bowed.

  I sensed him reach for me.

  I held up a hand and shook my head, again looked at the two bodies. Steam didn’t rise from the entrails or the bloodied bellies. They’d been dead a while.

  “Nott and Delling are fine,” he said.

  I gripped the wood, peered over the stall’s half-wall. The pair munched some hay, hanging out, but quiet, as if they knew one of their bleats would break me.

  Outside, the backfire of a truck. I flew to the barn doors.

  I prayed that it was the assassins, come to check on their grisly handiwork. My bloody dead animals, my girls, my goats, lay in heaps, robbed of life just because they were mine.

  Mine, you fuckers!

  Arrogant creeps. Didn’t they realize they’d offered us clues?

  My knowledge tasted bitter.

  Larrimer and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the barn entrance. The shriek of tires not finding purchase on the ice, and soon Bernadette’s dilapidated Jeep hoisted itself into view, as if using its last reserves of energy to land on a horizontal surface.

  My spirits lifted when a slim, booted foot peeked out the open passenger door. Soon all of Lulu appeared. She opened the rear door for Grace, who tumbled out and bounded toward me, Lulu’s mutts not far behind.

  And there, Bernadette’s turban bobbed as she pushed open the driver’s door.

  So relieved. Yet it felt as if someone stood on my shoulders, pressing me deep into the earth.

  I ran to them—Bernadette and Grace and Lulu and Mutt and Jeff—skidded to a stop. Oh gods, they were safe. Safe.

  I hugged them all like crazy.

  They looked at me like I was knitting with one needle.

  Yeah, a part of me was.

  I waited for Larrimer in the mudroom with my smaller version of a tech kit and my Nikon DSLR. Outside, icicles draped at the edge of the barn roof like daggers.

  When I felt his presence, I turned. He stood there in fresh pair of jeans and a black t-shirt with golden leopard spots, holding his evidence kit. His hair was mussed, his face an impenetrable mask. He was beautiful. How had I ever thought him not a handsome man?

  “I’m sorry, babe,” he said. “Very sorry.”

  I raised a hand to his face, but he shook his head. “I’m not big on skin to skin.”

  “All right.”

  “When I checked out the hayloft,” he said, his voice sandpapered with razors, “I found the killer had rigged an old chair with filament. He’d trip-wired the steps and attached the chair to a shotgun aimed downward. I snipped the filament, emptied the shotgun of shells, including the chambered round meant for you. If you’d kneed it or stepped on the pressure point, the gun would have blasted you to a bloody pulp.”

  “Nice.” I chuckled. “I’m going to cut off their balls.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, I’m going to cut off their balls.” I smiled. “I’ll use a dull knife.”

  He crossed his arms. “I thank God I’m not the perpetrator.”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll process the scene.”

  I shook my head. “Not alone.”

  “You’ll be in the way,” he said, his tone cruel.

  His meanness froze me. He slipped into one of Tommy’s old barn jackets, lifted his kit, and reached for the door.

  And then I got it. Not cruel, no. He was trying to shield me from more pain.

  “I’m coming,” I said, voice soft. “I must.”

  The smell hit me, and I faltered, but just for a moment.

  “What they’ve done here.” He notched his chin toward the stairs. “They planned for you to be so distressed, you’d walk up those stairs and boom.”

  “So I’m a target, too. Big whoop. It doesn’t change anything.”

  “It should.”

  If he only knew about that thing at the cemetery. “Show me the shotgun setup.”

  Upstairs in the barn, while I took photographs, he examined and printed the scene, bagged the gun and other detritus.

  A shiny “something” glinted in my peripheral vision. “Shoot your flashlight over there, please.” I scooched down.

  His light illuminated a small silver lapel pin.

  “Strange-looking thing,” he said.

  “Not so much. It’s the Old Man of the Mountain. The rock formation’s gone, but we New Hampshirites still revere it. I’ve seen a lot of guys with these lapel pins. It’s awfully small, but maybe there’ll be prints on it.”

  “Maybe.”

  Downstairs, we processed the chickens next. My girls.

  He took samples, bagged and tagged those, while I again shot photos.

  Finally, we got to Loki and Lofn.

  After we processed them, today’s event a movie etched in my mind, I crouched down and said my farewells, petted each of their heads, their eyes no longer glowing with silver, but glazed with a milky film. So changed, so uninhabited. They hadn’t deserved this.

  I whispered words of love and thanks until I felt Larrimer’s living heat behind me, then a hint of warm breath on my neck.

  “We should finish,” Larrimer said.

  My strength failed. I couldn’t bag them, not the girls, nor Loki and Lofn. I walked to the barn doors while Larrimer took care of it. He said he’d arranged for their pickup. They’d go to the lab in Oregon, folded into the ongoing investigation.

  I watched as he carried them in bundles of plastic to the shed. The temps were so cold they’d stay preserved until retrieval.

  It was time to tell Lulu and Bernadette.

  Nobody said much at first, our group solemn. Bernadette loved my animals as much as her own, and her red eyes and tight lips betrayed her grief, as did the petting of the pearl handle of her beloved double-barreled derringer. It didn’t take a psychic to know what she was thinking.

  The text wasn’t from her. She had no clue how to text. She’d lost her cell phone, wasn’t sure where. Possibly Barlow’s, where they’d eaten lunch. Stolen, more likely.

  With Larrimer’s man watching them, the theft had been clever.

  No dummy, Lulu shot me a look of pure fear.

  Larrimer took up the slack. “In a twisted way, Lulu, this will help us find your dad’s killer.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “The more they do, the more they show their hand, the more we learn about them. The better to track them.”

  She twirled a lock of copper hair around and around. “Were they after me, do you think? When they killed the animals?

  I’d heated some of Bernadette’s onion soup for everyone, and placed the bowls on the coffee table. “I don’t believe the barn killers were after you, Lulu.”

  “You don’t?” she asked, her voice rice-paper thin.

  “Why’s that, cookie?” Bernadette’s was stiff with concern.

  “Larrimer here believes this was aimed straight at me. I’m forced to agree. Whoever’s after you, Lulu, doesn’t want me involved.”

  She smiled. “Because you’re baaaad.”

  I snorted a laugh.

  Bernadette harrumphed, her unibrow scrunched.

  “They need Lulu alive.” Larrimer lasered the girl with a sharp look. “The question is why.”

  Lulu’s chest puffed. “I don’t know!” Her eyes blazed, then dropped. “I don’t know anything!”

  And I’d caught Lulu’s lie. She reeked of it. Lulu, indeed, knew something, and had no intention of telling us what it was.

  Like the bread Bernadette was so fond of making, I’d let her rest some before I started kneading.

  Larrimer took a deep breath. “We’ll relocate you two temporarily.”

  Bernadette snorted. “I’m going nowhere.”

  “What about Lulu?” I asked. “You want to stay here while she goes somewhere else with an outsider to protect her?”

  Lulu offered a hormonal fifteen-year-old’s smirk. “I’m n
ot going anywhere, either.”

  “Christ in a crapshoot.” Larrimer raked a hand through his hair, his frustration palpable. He turned to Bernadette. “You can have my shotgun. I’d lay money you know how to use it.”

  Bernadette’s eyes glowed. “Don’t need yours, sonny boy. Got my own.”

  He chuckled, which did funny things to my body.

  “We’re partners, Lulu,” Bernadette said. “Right?”

  “Right!” Lulu said, then giggled.

  Great. I’d lost complete control of the people under my care. Just great.

  The following day, I sat on my bed and tried to look objectively at the shitstorm that was our lives. One attack was all woo woo, the other, too real. They felt disconnected. Two attacks in two days? Lady Luck might be fickle, but the grain-store shooter had been right. The shit had hit.

  That vision I’d had of my Da. He’d said the magical and the mundane were, what was it? Retwining. So how were my animals’ apparently non-magical deaths connected to my magical snake-creature opponent? And what did either have to do with Dave’s homicide?

  Damned if I had a clue.

  What was Dave’s connection to all this? I’d lay money that he was trying to track the same bastards we were. So how had he insinuated himself into their organization? Offered to sell them some seed?

  That line of thought got me nowhere, as did my review of the Bronze Printing paperwork or my Internet searches. All dead ends, except for the invitation. Possibly. Talk about vague.

  My phone chirped. Ronan Miloszewski.

  “Ms. Reese,” he said.

  “Clea, please.”

  “Ma’am, I, um, I’m sorry about your animals. Lulu told me. People like that. They’re evil.”

  “I agree, Ronan. Thanks for your kind words. What’s up?”

  “I’ve been talking to Lulu. A lot. She, um, wants to go back to school.”

  Why hadn’t Lulu said something? “I’d like that, but—”

  “I’ll pick her up and drop her off.”

  “What about practice?”

  “Yeah, but, um, if I can’t, I’ll have somebody else watch her, like on the bus. I’ll make sure she’s not alone.”

  A smart, caring boy. I was tempted. “I don’t know if it’s time yet, Ronan.”