Bitter Moon (The Huntress/FBI Thrillers Book 4)

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Where she was grabbed by strong, desperate hands, pulled inside the kitchen doorway. And for the second time in her life she felt a knife at her neck.

  She was very still, containing her terror at the feeling of the metal on her skin.

  “What do you want?” he growled. Black eyes fierce in the darkness.

  “I want to go,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady.

  “Go where?”

  “With you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” The knife pressed tighter against her flesh.

  “I want you to take me. I want you to teach me.”

  He didn’t ask her what she meant. “You’re a kid.”

  “I can still tell.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’ll tell right now.” She didn’t want to, but she meant it. If you’re going to threaten someone, you have to mean it.

  His eyes darted to the dark corridor behind them. “You’re going to fuck me up.”

  “You’re the one who keeps talking,” she whispered.

  They stood in the dark, with only the sound of their breathing.

  And so it began.

  He would put the Chevy in neutral and they’d push the car away from the house before starting it up.

  He had a key. He’d managed to steal it from the foster father and make a copy. But he would also teach her that you didn’t need a key. As long as you knew the right colors of wires, sometimes all you needed were scissors or a screwdriver, and the right make of car.

  She was a fast learner.

  She had been watching this for years, every time she had been in a car, every time there was driving on the screen of a television. How the driver shifts the gear and works the pedals with her feet. The right one to go, the left one to stop. Turn the wheel right to go right, left to go left.

  She had to sit on his coat, folded up, to see over the steering wheel. But from the moment she grasped the wheel, she knew she was home.

  She kept her hands tight on the wheel, her body tense in the seat, and she watched the road and she listened as the boy gave terse orders.

  And she pressed the gas pedal down and the car shot forward and she felt a rush of savage exhilaration. She felt alive.

  The night. The road stretching out in front of her, a satin ribbon, lit by the moon. The power of the machine under her hands, enclosing her body. The speed of it.

  A car is freedom. A car is power. A car is escape.

  It is the best memory she has of the time since The Night. Open desert roads, pushing the pedal down to the floor. Screeching around corners.

  The first time she was on guard the whole time, as she always was with older boys. But he never looked at her that way, never reached to grope her or worse. They would drive half the night, sometimes, fast as the wind, under the stars. Lowering all the windows so the wind rushed through the car, the roar filling up their ears.

  Not talking, practically ever. Talking would spoil it.

  Once, with the windows down, he screamed, and kept screaming for what seemed like an hour, until his voice was so ragged he could only cough. He didn’t say why and she didn’t ask. Whatever was in his mind, whatever had happened to him, whatever he was wrestling with—he drove it out, night after night.

  It was only a matter of time before they’d be caught, they both knew it, but they couldn’t stop.

  One morning she woke up and he was gone.

  He had not given her the signal the night before. Had shaken his head, a barely perceptible movement when she looked at him across the long, crowded dinner table.

  But he had gone, himself.

  The next day, the foster father stomped around looking betrayed. The mother looked martyred.

  He’d been caught near the Arizona border. Sent away. Grand theft auto.

  Houston, they’d called him. Or maybe it was Huston. She never knew for sure. Someone called him Eric, once. She never asked where he was sent. There was nothing to be done. The system had swallowed him.

  It has been two years since Eric and their midnight rides, but the feel of the car around her, the wheel in her hands, is instant relief. It takes coordination but there is no one on the road, no one for miles. She drives slowly at first, practicing slowing and speeding up. She remembers everything; her body knows what to do.

  The temptation is strong to push the pedal down, to go fast, far, as far and fast as she can. Out into the desert, past the desert, out of the state, just to drive and never stop.

  But there will be police out on the road and she must not attract attention.

  She knows what happens to girls and also to boys who run away. She is fourteen. No one will hire her except to make her do the thing she will die before doing. She will steal what she has to and she will avoid people as much as she can. There will be no more prison. That she has decided long ago. She will not go back. She will not be taken again. They will have to kill her or she will do it herself.

  She can do that. If she needs to do it, she will.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Thirty

  Roarke stood beside his Rover, parked on the highway outside the mobile home park, feeling no real desire to get into it.

  Drive back to Las Piedras? Find a hotel here? Neither option appealed.

  You could go back to the bar and get shit-faced drunk.

  Tempting. But probably not the best plan, either.

  So he walked.

  He had his parka, he had his Maglite, though the moon was bright enough he didn’t actually need it.

  The highway was deserted, and up ahead was a sign for a trailhead that read: Revelation Point. So he took it.

  The breeze was cool and dry on his skin and he could still feel the trapped heat of the day rising from the sand as he walked, a pleasingly sensual mix of sensations. He breathed in the silence of the desert, and looked up at the ocean of stars.

  As always, his eyes were drawn to the constellation of Cassiopeia. For some reason, it reminded him of her.

  You can disappear out there, Cara. You can be free. Let it go. It’s time for you to rest.

  The dome of sky was vast, the landscape like an alien planet, the towering shadows of the mountains silent giants. He seemed so alone that at first he thought the music was in his mind, a faint memory.

  He dropped his head and stared out through the cactus and dunes. Now he could make out the shimmering flames of a bonfire, and the dark shapes of people against it. The music was coming from there.

  As he walked out toward the lights, the music became clearer, rippling through the night with a slow, stoned reverb. It was one of those gatherings this area was famous for, a generator party. A desert rock band was playing to a small crowd of people. Some had built nests of blankets and pillows in the sand beside the fire, and gasoline-powered generators provided the electricity for the instruments.

  Roarke stopped on a dune, looking down at the show. It seemed out of another time, a gypsy caravan, a troupe of medieval players.

  Stoned hipsters, glassy-eyed and swaying. Long-haired young women in flowing multicolored batik wear and fringe. People drinking, dancing, smoking, passing large bottles of water. Beyond the crowd, one reveler was on his knees, throwing up beside a Joshua tree, sure sign of psychedelics kicking in. But there was nothing threatening or violent about the scene, it was instead almost dreamlike.

  The music had a hypnotic intensity, and the guitarist was on fire, with a commanding stage presence, enhanced by his look: a muscular build on a slim body, high cheekbones and sleek black hair that hinted at Native American blood.

  Roarke stood at the edge of the crowd, listening, relaxing into the music. It was capturing something about the wind, the road, the vastness of open, uncivilized space. The kind of freedom he felt when he was driving.

  He began to notice details of the crowd, the symbols and mandalas the young people wore in their clothing, their jewelry, their complicated body art. Native American images, and Mexican ones. The mysticism of the
desert, so like the Haight Ashbury mysticism that seemed to draw Cara.

  A pretty young woman smiled at him and he smiled back.

  Another few songs later, he was sitting on a dune, feeling the music pulsing through the sand beneath him. Someone nearby offered him a Navajo blanket and he started to shake his head, but when the young man held it out again, Roarke took it and settled in.

  The night got later and the music got spacier and the crowd started passing around a bottle of tea. Roarke had no illusions about what might be in it, and when his neighbor offered it, he raised a hand to decline. The Bureau had strict rules about drugs.

  But you’re not in the Bureau anymore, are you? Do you want out for good? Here’s your chance, right here. No going back . . .

  But after a moment, he passed it on without drinking.

  He sat back, and he looked up at the stars, and let the music take him.

  CARA

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The speed is exhilarating. She jams her foot down on the gas pedal, lowers all the car windows. The cold rush of air takes her breath away, makes her gasp, sends her pulse spinning.

  She does not know where she will end up. But that itself is freedom. So many roads all over the country. So many places to disappear. Traveling makes you invisible. The roads have names and numbers, and you follow the signs. Highway 371 will take her through the Anza corridor, through the Indian reservations, Cahuilla, Santa Rosa . . . over the Mount San Jacinto mountain range and over to the 10, then far out into the desert.

  The moon is so bright she can see as if it is daylight. Dry arroyos and luminous vistas. Boulders as big as houses. Snakelike ocotillo. Paloverde trees, psychedelically bright acid-green in the moonlight amongst the duller green of sage. Bright white trumpet vine.

  The scenery is constantly shifting and the remoteness is exhilarating. It cannot possibly find her here.

  Perhaps she does not need to die.

  Even through the rush of driving, she is careful to watch the gas gauge. The indicator was low when she began, but she has driven almost an hour with no gas station in sight. Then around a mountain curve there is salvation: a wood-framed general store with a couple of pumps outside it. She pulls the car to a jerky stop at the concrete island, stares out the windshield into the dark, assessing.

  The station store is closed, deserted. Prayer flags flutter on the roof of the shack behind it. A carved, standing wooden bear guards the door and a rusted metal dinosaur snarls from the top of the roof. In a fenced-off patio there are battered picnic tables under the oaks, a barbeque grill and unlit neon beer signs. She can see no one.

  She unclips the battery lead from the ignition lead to kill the engine.

  The wind is strong, rocking the car; she has to push back against it to wrest the driver’s door open. She leans into the gusts as she walks around the car to open the gas hatch.

  The old-fashioned pump is locked, but she can pick the padlock—she has done it with Eric, and on a hundred locks since. She does it quickly with her pen-clasp pick, feels the hasp pop open in her hand. She sticks the nozzle into the hole to fill the tank. The smell of gas is familiar. She inhales deeply and the memory is a rush in her ears and in her stomach. Excitement. She could drink it.

  She looks up into the vast blackness of the sky. The wind swirls the stars.

  The gas nozzle jerks in her hand, clicking off the flow. She replaces it in its cradle and re-locks the padlock. Then she takes a ten from the cash she stole from Aunt Joan’s bag and walks to the front of the store, stoops to slide the bill underneath the door.

  Something stirs in the darkness and she freezes, heart suddenly racing, eyes searching the shadows.

  The wind rustles through dry grass . . . Then she sees him.

  A man, slumped on the sidewalk at the side of the station store, wrapped in a dirty blanket, a bottle in a paper bag at his side. His stringy hair is long, gray and black, tied in a ponytail, and he stinks of vomit and piss and alcohol. Asleep or dead, it’s hard to tell.

  She starts to back up, carefully, silently. The man on the sidewalk lifts his head. A cratered face; eyes like agate, like black flint. The dry wind blows around them.

  He says an Indian word: “Naayéé’ neizghání.”

  The voice is crusty, but nothing compared to the crustiness of the man who speaks. He looks thousands of years old. Proud and sad and desiccated. The road map of a lost continent is on his face.

  She backs away from him, runs for the car, wrestles the door open, drops inside and locks the door. She fumbles for the starter clip and touches it to the other clips, holding her breath as she does it, willing the connection. The engine sparks to life; she feels the power.

  In the rearview mirror, she sees the man still watching her as she guns the car, accelerating into the night.

  Behind her, the dinosaur on the roof of the store leaps off and hits the ground with a heavy thud, then clomps off into the desert darkness.

  She slams her foot down on the gas pedal, racing the car up the mountain road.

  ROARKE

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  All around Roarke people are dancing, a whole crowd writhing to the sinuous music.

  He sees a girl in a vest with an image of a wolf howling at the moon. Another wears a skull mask.

  Santa Muerte. Of course she’s here.

  The music swirls around Roarke, taking on layers: layers of sound, layers of feeling, layers of color. His vision seems suddenly sharper, twenty-twenty dialed up to twenty-ten.

  He’d passed on the tea, but he still feels high. The music is like a speeding car . . . blasting down the desert roads, taking him far, far away. Freedom.

  The sand seems to be breathing and flowing, as if the whole earth is alive.

  He looks up, and sees shooting stars raining down through the constellations. Cassiopeia and Orion, dancing together, melding into one.

  The music pulses and pounds, an earthquake of sound, the ground shaking underneath him. In the center pit, the fire leaps up, higher and higher . . .

  Fire.

  He stares into it, feeling the heat on his face. And suddenly he sees a girl writhing in the flames. Her body blackened, convulsing in agony.

  Burning.

  No . . .

  He staggers to his feet, staring into the bonfire.

  The girl is gone. Only logs burn in the flames.

  He breathes shallowly against the nausea roiling in his stomach. Then his gaze fixes on the sand beyond the campfire and the horror rises again.

  There are girls standing in the sand. Rows and rows of burned girls. Dozens of them. Blackened bodies, arms reaching out, begging.

  So many of them.

  Help them. Have to help them.

  He stumbles forward . . . but is stopped, as someone gently grasps his shoulders from behind.

  “Easy, man. It’s cool.”

  I’m not high, he wants to say. Just seeing visions. Dreaming awake.

  He looks out toward the burned girls, and sees only Joshua trees.

  Slowly he sits back down on the blanket on the sand. He looks up at the stars, the jeweled stars hanging above him, shooting in wild arcs.

  His heart races, and the music pulses on.

  CARA

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Her heart is pounding and her body is flooded with sensations. As she speeds around the curves of the foothills, she seems to be driving through the creases and folds of the earth, a million years in the past. The night is alive with sound. The cries of warring native tribes. The snarling and trumpeting of dinosaurs. Time layered over time.

  A stagecoach speeds past her on the road, horses kicking up clouds of dust.

  She stares at it in wonder, and on some level she is aware that her brain is too overloaded to drive.

  She turns her face back forward to the road, and the moon is blinding in her eyes.

  The moon . . .

  The moon is making her high.

  She s
lows, pulls the car over on the shoulder, and sits still, clutching the wheel, gasping for breath.

  Beside her, beyond the road, is a stretch of pure desert: huge clusters of boulders, the size of small houses. An ocean of Joshua trees, with their pitchfork silhouettes, the spiky branches.

  She gets out of the car, shakily. The moon is enormous, pulsing and trembling. Standing makes her dizzy.

  But the wind is wild, blowing at her, blowing through her, making her clean. She takes great gulps of it, lifts her arms and spins in it, swirling in an ocean of shadows of Joshua Trees. She is free . . .

  She stops dead, midspin, as a long shadow steps from behind a boulder. All her blood turns to ice.

  It is here. It has come for her. Here, in the middle of nowhere, under the moon, It will eat her as it ate her sister, her brothers, her mother and father . . .

  A scream rises in her throat . . .

  The shadow moves out of the dark, and in the light of the moon she sees the Indian from the service station. Not drunk now, but tall and regal.

  “Girl,” he says, but she doesn’t know if it is him speaking or the moon. “You cannot run.”

  In the moment, it is literally true. She is frozen with terror. She cannot move.

  He looks at her with obsidian-black eyes, says a phrase she does not understand: “Naayéé’ neizghání.” But it is his next sentence that rivets her. It is in the same alien language, but she understands every word.

  “You have been scratched by evil.”

  Scratched. The word gives her a full-body chill, and her hand goes to her throat. How can he know precisely what happened to her?

  The old man’s gaze is relentless. “You must go into the darkness. You must become the darkness.”

  She has no idea if this is really happening. But she knows it is true. “How?” she asks, not knowing if she has spoken aloud, or in what language she speaks.