Predator (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 1)

by Roxie Noir

  I’m pretty sure that’s Copper Mesa, Jules thought, driving up Seth’s long driveway, glancing at the dark, hulking mass that blocked the stars.

  Maybe it’s another one, though. This part of Utah’s lousy with the things, after all.

  In the dark she couldn’t tell how far away it was, a mile or fifty miles.

  The house wasn’t what she’d been expecting at all. It was big and old, most of the windows glowing with light inside. It needed some work — a paint job for sure — but it wasn’t shabby or falling apart.

  Someone built this place a long time ago, she thought. Probably before there was electricity. Someone worked really, really hard to build this house, and they really loved it.

  Seth waited on the porch, leaning against one of the columns, and when Jules pulled up he hopped down the stairs and crossed the driveway. Jules swallowed hard, just watching him walk. A tiny part of her thought that it had to be some kind of trick, or Seth would turn out to have a clown fetish or a collection of toenails, or something, because he was really too hot to be true.

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said, getting in and buckling up. Even in the dark, she could practically see his near-gold eyes flash.

  “Where to?” Jules asked, shifting the truck into reverse, making a three-point turn, and then heading back down the long driveway. To their right, the mesa still hulked, silent and a little menacing.

  Jules decided to not bring up the mine, not yet anyway. She could at least wait until she was sure about where it would be.

  “You like burgers and fries?” Seth asked.

  “Sure,” said Jules.

  “Good. After we hung up, it occurred to me that you might be vegetarian, and then I’d really be screwed.”

  Jules laughed.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Then we’re going to Big Mary’s, Obsidian’s best and only restaurant with table service.”

  “I’m really getting the VIP service,” Jules teased. “And then, bowling?”

  “If we can get a lane,” Seth confessed. “The High Desert Fun Factory only has three, so sometimes they’re full.”

  “I’m kind of surprised that you’ve got a bowling alley at all,” she said, turning onto the highway and picking up speed. “I mean, you’ve only got dialup internet.”

  “We’re getting cable!” said Seth. “They’re extending it down Lake Powell, and they’re putting a spur out to Obsidian and a couple other towns out here.”

  “You’ll come screaming into the twenty-first century,” Jules said. “Okay, where am I going?”

  “I thought you had a GPS and didn’t need directions,” Seth teased. “Two more blocks, and then it’s on the corner on your right. Just park wherever.”

  When they walked inside, Jules realized that something was off. The sign at the front simply said, “Please Seat Yourself,” but when she walked to a table by the windows, Seth made a face.

  “How about that booth?” he said, pointing.

  “It’s right by the kitchen,” she protested.

  “Humor me?” he said. Then he smiled and flashed his dimples.

  Jules gave in instantly. As they walked away, she glanced at the table behind Seth. The people sitting there were a perfectly normal family, but the two adults had stopped eating for a moment and gone still, their eyes watching Seth.

  As they walked across the room, she realized that as Seth walked past, conversations hushed. Grown adults tried and failed to pretend they weren’t staring.

  You’re definitely just making this up, she thought.

  But what if Seth did something terrible, and now everyone hates him?

  Well, at least we’re in public. For now.

  “I just like booths,” Seth said, sliding along the red vinyl and grabbing a menu. “This place makes their own cherry coke, with the syrup and everything. It’s really good.”

  Jules scanned the menu quickly. It had about ten items on it, not counting the drinks section, and eight were burgers.

  “Burgers seems like the thing to get,” she said.

  “I always get the one with cheese, bacon, and jalapenos,” said Seth. “Around here, jalapenos make something pretty exotic.”

  From the corner of her eye, Jules watched the waitress, a middle-aged woman with a ponytail and lipstick that wasn’t quite the right shade for her. Someone at the next table over made a joke and everyone laughed, the waitress slapping her thigh.

  “You’re a card, Jimmy,” she said, flipping a page over on her pad. Then she walked to where Jules and Seth were sitting, and as she came closer, her face totally changed, going from laughing to stony, her mouth forming a thin line.

  “Can I get you two something to drink?” she asked, her speech clipped and formal.

  “I’d like a cherry coke, please,” Jules asked, trying to sound as bright and bubbly as she could.

  “Same here,” said Seth.

  The waitress nodded curtly, then walked away. Moments later, Jules watched her smile at another customer, clearing his plate.

  Jules looked at Seth, her eyes narrowing just a little. By now, she was pretty sure that she wasn’t imagining it: the people in town really were being specifically unfriendly to them.

  “Are we in the beginning of a horror movie?” she asked, her voice low.

  “I hope not,” said Seth, raising his eyebrows.

  “You know, the part where a new person comes to town, and all the townspeople act shady, and then later when she’s walking somewhere alone she gets kidnapped, and it turns out that the townspeople have a monster that requires sacrifices or something?”

  Seth leaned over the table, getting closer to Jules, and she felt her heart go pitter-patter.

  “There is a story about a family who tried to cross the desert in the summer to get to California, only for the father to go crazy and eat his wife and children. They say he was found still gnawing on an arm bone.”

  Jules’s stomach lurched, and she looked down at the table, suddenly horrified.

  “Really?” she muttered, not feeling terribly well.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” said Seth. “I just made that up on the spot, it didn’t happen.”

  Jules looked up at him askance.

  “Swear to god,” said Seth.

  “Cannibalism makes me queasy,” Jules said.

  “Nothing has ever happened in Obsidian besides puppies and rainbows,” he said. With his forefinger, he drew an X over his chest. “Cross my heart.”

  “I definitely don’t believe that,” she said. “But thanks for trying.”

  Seth glanced around the room, his face darkening just a little.

  “It’s not you,” he finally said, his voice quiet. “It’s me.”

  “Did you kill all their dogs?” Jules asked.

  “It’s weirder, and you’re not going to believe me,” he told her.

  The waitress came back, face as cold as ever, and they ordered.

  “Try me,” said Jules. “Unless it’s cannibalism. If it’s cannibalism, please lie.”

  “There’s a legend that my great-great-great...” he paused, like he was trying to remember how many greats. “...Great grandfather made a deal with the devil.”

  Jules took a sip of her coke, her eyes going wide.

  “What kind of deal?” she asked.

  Seth shrugged, jabbing his straw at the ice in his drink.

  “For a good harvest,” he said. “His crops tended to do better than other peoples’, but it’s because he had the land along the Elk River.”

  “That’s behind your house?” Jules asked, a little afraid to know the answer.

  Seth nodded. “It’s a ways back, but that was all his.”

  Then he frowned, like he was thinking of something else, and he paused for a beat.

  Shit, she thought. The mine is going in his back yard. Does he know I’m working on the mine? That’s not why he asked me out, is it?

  “Anyway, legend also has it that he and all his descendan
ts can turn into golden eagles at will, and that at night we wreak havoc on the townspeople.”

  “Well?” asked Jules. “Do you?”

  “Only sometimes,” Seth said, laughing. “You know, when Billy Bob’s chickens are looking really tasty.”

  “So people don’t like you because your ancestor had better luck than their ancestors,” Jules summarized. “They can’t possibly believe that you turn into an eagle.”

  Seth shrugged.

  “Who knows,” he said. “People have believed weirder things, and there really are golden eagles here, and they really do steal chickens. And disliking us is mostly habit by now. Gives the people of Obsidian something to do.”

  “I bet you can’t wait until you get cable internet,” Jules said. “That should give people some new hobbies.”

  “That would be nice,” Seth admitted. “Right now it takes all night just to download a movie. We’ve still got a movie rental store, though.”

  The silent, surly waitress came back bearing burgers and fries and put them on the table without a word. Then she took out the check and put it on the table between them.

  “Pay at the register whenever you’re ready,” she said, and left again.

  Jules had to fight the urge to flip her off.

  Family establishment, she told herself.

  Seth nabbed the check off the table and put it on the bench next to himself, then gave Jules a look that practically dared her to protest.

  “I’m going to insist, so don’t bother,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Jules.

  Chapter Five

  Seth

  The bowling alley wasn’t much different. The guy at the shoe counter went suddenly robotic when Seth stepped up, despite laughing and talking with someone else not thirty seconds before. As he handed over two sets of bowling shoes, utterly stone-faced, Seth and Jules looked at each other, then Jules rolled her eyes and Seth shrugged.

  She probably still thinks that I’ve murdered everyone’s pets, Seth thought. He’d gotten used to the unfriendliness from the other townspeople over the years, but it pissed him off that she was getting dragged into it.

  As they walked to the only empty lane, Jules looked over at Seth, then at the counter behind them, screwing her face up a little.

  “They don’t do bumper lanes for adults, do they?” she asked.

  Seth laughed out loud.

  “Come on,” Jules said, laughing along. “I’m pretty bad at this.”

  “I don’t think they have bumper lanes for kids,” said Seth. “It’s the pioneer spirit to never make anything easy on children, you know.”

  “Right, because then they’ll never make anything of themselves,” Jules said, a note of bitterness creeping into her tone. “Bootstraps and all that.”

  Seth sat on the hard plastic chair, loosening the laces on a pair of shoes.

  “So you grew up poor too?” he asked.

  “West Virginia,” she answered. “Huntsberg, this little town in the mountains. First it was a mining town, and then it was a rust belt town, but then all the factories closed and now there’s still one mine open, but the biggest industry is probably meth,” she said. “Everyone’s poor, so at least I didn’t realize that’s what we were.”

  “But you got out?”

  Jules nodded, tugging the laces on her shoes.

  “I got lucky,” she said. “I realized that the only way I’d have a life different from the one my parents or grandparents had was if I got someone else to pay for me to go to college, so I buckled down and got a scholarship.”

  And now you work for the company that wants to put a huge mine in my back yard, Seth thought.

  Then he pushed the thought away. It hadn’t been her idea, obviously. She wasn’t in charge. At best, she was testing soil samples or something, and might not know a thing about the project beyond the ground’s pH levels.

  Plus, her nose crinkled when she laughed in a way that made him feel really funny inside, like all he wanted to do for the rest of his life was make her happy.

  That would be a pretty good fate, he thought, watching her concentrate on the slip of paper for scoring.

  It’s your first date, he told himself. Save naming your children for date number three or four, okay?

  Not that you’ll get that many dates. Maybe one more before she leaves if you’re lucky.

  He didn’t think for a moment she’d ever be back in Obsidian. She’d clearly decided that the small-town life wasn’t for her, and as much as Seth loved his wild, desert home, he could understand why someone might not.

  “Okay, I think I get it,” Jules said, tapping the tiny pencil on the score card.

  “It’s not rocket science,” Seth teased.

  “I’ve never had to score on paper before,” Jules protested. “For all its failings, the Huntsberg Bowl-O-Rama was automated.”

  “I bet you’ve got cable internet, too.”

  “We’ve even got a McDonald’s,” said Jules

  “You bowl first, fancy pants,” Seth told her.

  She took a bright orange ball from the stand and hefted it, like she was doing some sort of calculation before finally standing up straight, assuming the position, and heaving the ball down the lane, her back to Seth the whole time.

  He didn’t mind the view at all.

  The ball went straight into the gutter, and Jules watched it roll all the way down, hands on hips.

  “Shit,” she said.

  In the next lane, a little boy looked at her, wide-eyed.

  “Sorry,” she said, then wrinkled her nose at Seth, grabbing another ball.

  This time she got two pins, and her hair bounced up and down when she jumped for joy. Seth couldn’t help but smile.

  “Beat that,” she said, and winked.

  Seth felt that wink tingle all the way down into his toes.

  “I’ll give it a shot,” he said, and winked back.

  Seth won both games, which didn’t surprise either of them. The whole time, he wondered whether he should show her how to bowl, holding her from behind, their bodies moving together in concert, but he didn’t.

  After all, there were kids in the next lane, and he wasn’t about to make guarantees about what could happen next. Plus, she knew how to bowl. The concept wasn’t hard.

  She was just really bad at it.

  At 7:45, a voice crackled over the PA system in the bowling alley. It was totally incomprehensible, but Seth knew it meant they were closing soon. He ticked off the second-to-last box in Jules’s score sheet — she’d gotten an amazing-for-her seven pins — and tried to think of anything else they could do in town. Obsidian didn’t even have a bar. If it had been in any other state, it probably would have, but not Utah.

  Vatican City probably has more liberal liquor laws than the state of Utah, Seth thought.

  Jules walked back to where Seth was sitting.

  “I’m feeling good about this game,” she said, grinning. “I bet I’m crushing you.”

  Together, they glanced at the score card, and Jules burst out laughing.

  “Go bowl,” she said. “Put me out of my misery.”

  A few minutes later, they were walking to Jules’s truck in the gravel parking lot. Seth felt the back of his hand brush against Jules’s, and his heart practically flipped over in his chest. Something about her made him feel like he was thirteen again and had a crush on a girl for the very first time, as if no one in the history of humanity had ever felt quite like this.

  “Where next?” she asked, jingling the keys.

  “Remember how I said that everything closed early?” Seth said. They stopped next to the truck, by the driver’s side door. She was so close that he could smell her scent, spicy and earthy all at once, like a pine forest after a hard rain.

  “It’s only eight,” Jules said.

  Seth just shrugged, helplessly.

  “There’s a gas station convenience store that might still be open, though I wouldn’t
count on it,” he said. “Otherwise, we could go back to my house. I don’t think my brother’s home from school yet.”

  Her facial expression was mixed, like she wanted to say yes but wasn’t quite sure.

  “We can sit on the front porch and look at the stars over the Mesa,” he said. “I’d say we could have a drink but the closest place that sells alcohol is two hours away.”

  He felt a slight twinge as he said mesa, and reminded himself that it wasn’t her fault.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say this date was planned last-minute,” she said, her hazel eyes sparkling up at him, her body moving just a hint closer.

  “It was,” he confessed, putting a single finger on the point of her shoulder, feeling her warmth through her shirt. “But not because I wasn’t excited.”

  Her lips were perfect, just barely parted, and Seth looked into her eyes and had the sudden sensation that he was flying high over the earth, looking down into some lush paradise.

  Just as he bent down to kiss her, headlights blinked on from twenty feet away, blinding them both.

  “Bowling alley’s closed!” shouted a gruff voice.

  Are you fucking kidding me, thought Seth.

  “Sorry!” shouted Jules, her cheeks turning bright pink in the strong light. “Your place?” she asked Seth.

  “You live with your brother?” Jules asked as she drove them out of town.

  “My youngest brother. Zach,” Seth said.

  “How many do you have?” she asked.

  “Just two. Zach’s the one I live with, and Garrett leaves us voicemails sometimes. I even get to talk to him about once a year.”

  This isn’t the time to get into your relationship with Garrett, Seth told himself.

  “The house is beautiful,” Jules offered. “Is it old?”

  Seth nodded in the dark.

  “Remember Hiram, who made the deal with the devil?” he asked.

  “I could never forget Hiram,” Jules said.

  “He built it, and it’s been in my family ever since. I grew up there, my mom grew up there. All the way back.”