Carefully, quietly, he cuffed the mouth of the bag, folding it back. Once, twice, until the bag was much shallower than it had been, until its wriggling contents brimmed within, and finally began to spill over the side.
A scorpion scuttled over Dan’s hand and dropped to the ground. Before another could make the trip, Dan drew back his arm as far as he could and flung the contents of the bag at the woman. Fistfuls of angry scorpions rained down on Kyra Damon.
Stingers lashed Kyra’s flesh, her clothes. Pain carved her scalp like a sculptor’s knife as the arachnids’ barbed tails twisted in her hair, wicked and poisonous as Medusa’s serpentine curls, stinging again and again and again as other scorpions burrowed under her collar, pricking the soft skin there, traveling the dull white hollow of her throat and the smooth curve of her breasts, marking their trails with angry welts as they descended her hips and thighs, spilling over her with exquisite slow agony, like boiling honey.
Or so it seemed. In reality, it all happened very quickly. So quickly that the darkest shadowed corner of Kyra’s soul could hardly enjoy the experience at all.
In a heartbeat, it was over. Gravity took charge. The diamond ring Dan Cody had bought for his lady love rang against the ground at Kyra’s feet, but she didn’t even hear the sound. Her skull was alive with pain. Poison seemed to pulse in her brain, and there was nothing she could do but surrender to the symphony that swelled within her.
The music of raw agony lashed Kyra’s throat as she screamed.
And then her pain was as real as the gun in her hand.
She had shared her pain with the world, but she would not surrender to it.
Instead, the pain fueled her. Made her stronger.
And she needed to be strong. Above, she heard a brittle caw. . . a sound as wounded and exultant as her own screams.
The Crow was coming for her.
Kyra bit her lips, steadied herself in the cold heart of pain. And she didn’t drop her gun. Instead, she held the pistol before her, firing again and again at the big black bird as it dived at her, raking its talons across her scalp and lacerating the flesh.
The bird’s scream tore the night as it climbed high in the sky, retreating.
It had all happened so fast. The scorpions had fallen, scorching Kyra’s flesh like acid rain, but the woman hadn’t even dropped her gun in face of their assault. Obviously, Dan hadn’t had a chance to pick it up, and now it didn’t matter because the gun was empty.
The woman ran a hand through her crimson-black hair, tossing one last scorpion to the blacktop. The arachnids scrambled across the parking lot. She turned toward Dan, and she actually managed a smile.
Dan swallowed hard. He knew scorpions, and he knew what they could do. He’d been stung himself countless times, and while it was true that the arachnids’ sting was in most cases on a par with a honeybee’s, it wasn’t the kind of injury you just shook off.
Especially when you’d been stung dozens of times, as the woman had.
Dan did the math. Multiplied the initial pain caused by a single sting by twenty . . . thirty . . . forty and fifty. But his calculations did him no good, for they didn’t match up with his reality.
That reality was a woman, and she was walking toward Dan.
And she was smiling.
Dan wasn’t smiling. Not at all. Uh-uh. No way this could be happening, no way the woman could be doing what she was quite obviously doing. Not with scorpion neurotoxins screaming through her nerve cells. Not with welts boiling red on her alabaster skin. In Dan Cody’s book the woman should have dropped to her knees by now, and she should have been wearing the expression of a woman who’d just been pounded with a clawhammer a couple dozen times, and she should have been screaming her fucking head off—
The pain had to be incredible—
Welts bloomed on the woman’s cheeks like angry roses, but she kept on smiling as if she were wrapped in a morphine kiss. “Nice try, amigo,” she said smoothly. “Normally, somebody pulled a stunt like that, I’d make sure they spent a long time dying. But today the gods are smiling on you. I’m not going to kill you. That wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. I’m just going to let you lie there and bleed awhile.”
“That’s right,” said the man in black leather as he walked toward the woman. “You’re gonna live to a ripe old age, cowboy. You ain’t gonna walk too good, though. Not on what’s left of your knee.”
The man placed a heavy boot on Dan’s injured leg and pressed down hard. A gristly crack sounded as Dan’s ankle snapped like a willow branch. He almost blacked out. It would have been a relief to black out. But he didn’t. Dan clenched his teeth, fighting the agony that burned straight through him, and the man stared down, marveling at Dan’s pain, grinning like a satanic jack-o’-lantern.
“They’ll be a real pair, huh, Ky?” the man said. “Cavalry Man with his gimpy leg, and Pocahontas with both eyes carved out of her head. Talk about the blind leadin’ the lame. Or is that the lame leadin’ the blind?”
The woman just shrugged and reached under her leather coat, pulling out a wicked-looking knife. Dan recognized it immediately—a Mountain Clan Crow blade in a leather sheath tanned to a dull sheen with willow bark and birch oil. It had come from the Spirit Song Trading Post.
Kyra slipped the knife free and ran a thumb over the long, curved blade. “Sorry about your sweetheart, cowboy,” she said. “But that little girl’s got a couple things I need. They’re blue. They’re pretty. And right now they don’t see a thing.”
Dan stared up at the strangers. The three words he’d wanted to say to Leti were trapped inside his heart like burning coals, and there was no way he could get them out. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Only one word crossed his lips now: “Why?"
“That’s the same thing your girlfriend asked.” The woman laughed. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told her—your girl’s an Indian, right?”
“Yes. But what difference does that make—?”
“I’ll save you the trouble of asking, stud: no, we’re not on some kind of trans-American ethnic-cleansing road trip, like your girlfriend thought. You see, I knew your woman’s bloodlines before I ever got here. Fact is, it was a shrunken head who led me to the doorstep of Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. She’s just what I need. Her daddy was a white Irish-American, and her mama was a full-blooded Mountain Clan Crow. And when those two got together . . . bang! A blue-eyed Crow!”
“Do we have the luck of the Irish or what?” The man called Johnny laughed. “Turns out that a blue-eyed Crow is just what the witch doctor ordered.”
Crazy, Dan thought. They're goddamned maniacs—
Behind them, Dan heard a sudden movement.
Footsteps on broken glass.
Kyra whipped around, gun in hand, but her pistol was empty. “Get away from him,” Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin said over a raised shotgun barrel, “and drop your motherfucking guns before I blow both your heads clean off”
Church stared. The little Crow bitch with the blue eyes stood in the doorway of the Spirit Song Trading Post, a sawed-off pump action shotgun with a pistol grip clutched tightly in her hands. Damned if she didn’t look like she knew how to use it, too.
Church grit his teeth. The bitch shouldn’t even have been conscious. The way he’d clocked her, he’d pretty much written her off. But here she was. Eyes wild, blood-matted hair gleaming on the side of her head . . . and with a shotgun.
He glanced at Kyra.
She nodded slightly.
“Okay,” Kyra said. “You win.”
She made a show of tossing her pistol. It arced through the night sky, a flash in the dark, then skidded across the pavement like a stone skipping across an asphalt sea.
The sound of steel scraping pavement distracted Leticia for a split second—only a second. But it turned out that one second was all that Johnny Church—the man with the perfect reflexes and perfect smile—required.
In that second, Church raised his .357 and squeezed
the trigger.
The Magnum recoiled in his hand, spitting its own special brand of venom.
He blew Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin right out of her moccasins.
“I didn’t want her dead," Kyra said.
“I didn’t see much choice.” Church scratched his blond crew cut with the barrel of his .357. “Looked like a her or us kinda situation to me.”
Kyra stood there ... a silent, indecisive moment beneath cold white shards of moonlight. Then: “You’re right, Johnny. But alive would have made this a lot easier. Now we have to worry about the Crow getting its claws on her.”
“Can’t you drop some mojo on her body or somethin’?” Church asked. “I mean, you got the power, right?”
Kyra sighed, threw her head back, closed her eyes, and let that cold white moonlight seep into her. She stood that way for a long moment, until the light slashed to her core and set her at ease.
It was true. She did have power. She knew many secrets, wanted to know many more. She had sacrificed for the knowledge she had gained. She had pushed herself to the brink of human endurance and beyond, past the point where scorpion venom was a danger, past the point where any kind of pain was a negative, but she wasn’t satisfied, nowhere close to it, because she knew there was more out there waiting for her, power others didn’t dare dream about—
“Ky?” Johnny said. “Did you hear me? I mean, you can handle this, can’t you?”
Kyra sighed. Sometimes Johnny drove her crazy. Sometimes he seemed like a kid’s action figure. All muscle, no mentality. But she didn’t have time for complaints. Not now. Composing herself, she opened her eyes and stared at Johnny Church.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got more than a little mojo. And I will work up something. I don’t know what the fuck I’ll work up, but I’ll work it up. I didn’t want any complications tonight, though. I just wanted to get what we came for and hit the open highway.”
“So let’s do it.”
“It’s not that easy,” Kyra said. “It’s not like I’m Buffy the fucking Vampire Slayer or Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I can’t just wiggle my nose. These things . . . take time. Energy. A subtle alignment of supernatural forces. A certain quietude of surroundings—”
“Yeah, well, quietude of surroundings—or whatever the fuck they call it on those New Age meditation tapes of yours—is a little luxury we don’t have, Ky. This place may seem like a secluded piece of nowhere, but I’ll tell you this: in the desert, sound travels for miles. Screams travel, too. So do gunshots. You can bet your boots that the local Eastwood will hop on his horse and slap leather mighty quick, little missy.”
Kyra stared down at the knife. Johnny Church may not have been right about a lot, but he was right about this. There was no time to attend to the Crow bitch now.
“We got us a job to do,” Johnny said. “We’re burning moonlight.”
Kyra didn’t say a word.
After all, they did have a job to do.
“Shit, would you look at Hopalong Cassidy?” Johnny said with an amused snort. “Appears our cowboy’s still got some giddyup, after all.”
Kyra stared at Dan Cody. She had to hand it to the bastard. While she and Johnny were talking, the wounded man had started crawling toward his raggedy-ass Jeep.
The cowboy didn’t have a whole lot of give up in him.
Kyra thought it over while the man bellied across the parking lot. No question about it—they’d have to locate an undisturbed place where Kyra could cast a spell of protection on the woman’s corpse. That meant they’d have to take the Injun bitch’s body with them, in order to prevent the Crow from resurrecting the dead woman.
Kyra smiled, realizing that a spell for two wasn’t any more difficult than a spell for one. The cowboy could come along for the ride, no problemo. The Merc’s trunk was big. Plenty of room for two in there.
Kind of a sweet little ending for these star-crossed lovers, actually. Kind of romantic, death and fate and heartaches of the eternal variety. Just like Romeo and Juliet, if Shakespeare could be believed. . . .
At that moment a sparkle of reflected moonlight caught Kyra’s eyes, and she noticed the wedding ring on the pavement at her feet.
She bent low, scooped it up, and showed it to Johnny.
“Our cowboy’s sure no big spender,” Johnny scoffed. “Hell, I’ve got tongue studs that cost more than that ring.”
Kyra nodded. The tiny diamonds embedded in the ring sure didn’t look like stars fallen from the night sky. But something told her that she should keep the wedding band, and she slipped it in the pocket of her leather coat.
“Well?” Johnny asked. “What’s the plan?”
Kyra pursed her black lips. “I see it this way—the girl’s dead, and we can’t have a wedding just for one, can we?”
Johnny grinned. “That just wouldn’t be Christian.”
“So I reckon we’d better do the Christian thing, then.”
“What’s that?”
“Bury them . . . together.”
Johnny Church raised the .357 and set his sights on the cowboy’s back.
“You wouldn’t shoot a cowboy in the back,” Kyra said. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Johnny?”
“Forget all that code of the West bullshit, babe,” Johnny said. He cocked his pistol.
“Welcome to the new millennium, buckaroo.”
A second later a shot rang out, and the echo was lost in the wide silence of the desert.
Dan Cody never saw death coming.
It was better that way.
Better that he died while inching painfully toward life, even if he was crawling on his belly.
And there was the end to a dream, summed up just like that.
It might have ended this way, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.
It might have ended this way, except for one thing—a Crow that circled high in a midnight expanse pierced with gleaming stars. Not at all patient, that Crow, but silent ... its mournful caw trapped in the hollow bones of its chest like the three words that had been locked in a dead cowboy’s head.
It was too late, now, for avian warnings from above. But like Dan Cody, and like Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, the Crow didn’t have a whole lot of give up in him.
The bird circled lower as Kyra Damon went about her nasty business with the Mountain Clan Crow knife. Its dark eyes gleamed like tiny black diamonds as it saw all there was to see, and then some.
The Crow watched as the remorse-challenged killers piled the bodies of Dan Cody and Leticia Hardin into the trunk of the cherried- out ’49 Merc. It watched as the killers tossed a blood-soaked bouquet of roses on top of the corpses and laughed.
It watched as Johnny Church slammed the trunk and picked up the resin-encased scorpion that Leticia Hardin had thrown through the trading post window, and it watched as Church thunked that scorpion paperweight on top of the Merc’s dashboard like some obscene souvenir.
And it watched as demon taillights flared alive, and exhaust coughed up a phlegm of brimstone, and the death car roared away from the silent parking lot and into the desert night.
Not much was left behind to tell the tale.
Bloodstained cement, and broken glass, and broken dreams,
Sand scorpions.
They crawled over gravel and cracked asphalt, scurrying like a fistful of shadows.
The Crow swept down and trapped a shiny black arachnid in its talons. The scorpion squirmed and stung, but the Crow was impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Swiftly, efficiently, the Crow crunched through the tiny predator’s chitinous exoskeleton, sucking dark poison as if it were vintage bordeaux.
The poison tasted good.
It tasted like vengeance.
Three miles north of Scorpion Flats, Arizona
The ’49 Mercury didn’t look like a hearse. Not at all. But with two corpses locked in a trunk painted the color of spilled lamb’s blood, that’s exactly what it was.
Kyra Damon knew that. After all, she’d helped Johnny Church put the corpses in the trunk. Now the cowboy and his little Crow maiden rested beneath a gleaming shroud of Detroit steel, two corpses curled atop a plastic drop cloth that prevented their all-too- human blood from leaking onto the spare whitewall tire.
Lovers locked in death’s own embrace. A man and a woman, baptized in each other’s blood, their cooling lips separated by an impossibly long inch.
Those lips would never touch again. Not if Kyra Damon had anything to say about it. But the Crow was another story. Kyra knew all too well that the bloody tableau locked within the Mercury’s trunk was the Crow’s favorite meal. The bird fed on carrion. It drew sustenance from the death of the innocent, the fucking scavenger. Kyra and Johnny had played right into the black bird’s twisted little claws when they’d killed the cowboy and the Indian at the Spirit Song Trading Post.
Johnny had pulled the trigger, but that didn’t matter. Kyra was the brains of the outfit. She knew that, even if Johnny was a little unclear on the concept.
She was the one who had messed up, and messed up good. I might as well have set the two lovers on a checkered tablecloth for the Crow’s midnight picnic, she told herself sarcastically. Tossed in some candles and a bottle of sacramental wine, while I was at it.
And then there was dessert; the wedding ring the cowboy had bought for his lady. A real unfulfilled promise. The perfect motivation for vengeance . . . and resurrection.
Kyra sighed. Yeah, it was a full-course meal, all right, but there was no use crying over spilt blood. There was no way to turn back the hands of time and play the game again. What was was. Fate had forced Kyra’s hand, and the same eternal commodity had forced the death of both Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin and Dan Cody. The way Kyra saw it, in hard black and white, she’d had no real choice in the matter.
If she were to fulfill her vision and steal the Crow’s power, then she had to have Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin’s eyes.
The eyes of a blue-eyed Crow . . .
Wicked Prayer Page 4