Night Falls on the Wicked - By Sharie Kohler Page 0,6
worlds. Forever alone.
THREE
After work the following day, Darby regretted not squeezing in her much-needed trip to the grocery store on her day off. She glanced at her watch as she left the diner. The store closed in another half hour. Barely enough time, but she was low on milk. Since she didn’t particularly enjoy dry cereal, she figured she’d just have to postpone her run. This wasn’t a big city where the store kept late hours. Family-owned, it pretty much shut down right at eight.
Halfway down the block from the diner, she hesitated for a moment. A crowd was gathered at the end of the street in front of the grocery store. She didn’t do crowds. Not if she could help it. She never knew what might trigger a vision, but she knew that more people around her seemed to increase the odds.
Hovering there, she stomped her boots on the sidewalk, shaking snow loose, trying to pretend there was a reason for her standing in the middle of the sidewalk as she tried to make up her mind about whether to brave the crowd or not.
Things had been smooth lately, better than expected actually. Isolating herself, keeping a low profile was working apparently. She hadn’t suffered a vision in over a year, but that didn’t mean she was free. She’d never be free. She could never return home and she wouldn’t be so naïve as to think that she could.
Staring down the crowd with narrowed eyes, she clenched her jaw and strode forward with hard steps. She’d given up enough already. She wasn’t going to go hungry—even for one night. Nor was she going to go back to the diner and eat one of Sam’s greasy burgers either. One for lunch had been enough. Tonight she planned on enjoying a little pasta with basil and a glass of wine. She sighed in pleasure, almost as though she could taste it now.
Besides, it wasn’t like she was going to hang around and rub elbows with the lot of them. She’d be in and out in a flash. She’d walk directly past the crowd into the store, buy what she needed and be gone. With a decisive nod, she stepped forward.
As she neared the store, she saw everyone grouped around a beat-up old pickup truck, peering inside the back. A man stood in the truck bed wearing full camouflage.
“No thanks needed!” he called out with a wide wave to the crowd. “Every once in a while someone needs to show the wild beasts of the world that we’re masters of this land!”
The nape of her neck tingled in warning as he bent down with a grunt, and she knew something was coming that she wasn’t going to like. She told herself to turn, to walk away and not look, not watch what was unfolding, but her feet were rooted to the earth.
She gasped when he came back up with a grunt, hefting the carcass of a wolf. He showed off his trophy with pride to the crowd. Blood stained the brown and gray fur. The animal’s dead eyes stared out lifelessly—like inanimate marbles.
Clapping and hoots of approval erupted from the crowd. Darby looked away, unwilling to stare too long into the creature’s frozen eyes. She’d seen enough in that one glimpse. It was there, locked in the wolf’s expression, that last moment of life when he realized it was all over. She read the fear, the panic still mirrored there that begged for more time—for life.
More cheering exploded. She risked another glance only to see a second wolf hoisted for display.
She almost imagined she could feel the tattoo on her shoulder tingling with a kindred connection … an awareness of sorts. Crazy, she knew. She’d gotten the tat a few years ago, after leaving Seattle, leaving her aunts and cousins—after she’d said good-bye to Jonah.
Jonah. She sighed at the memory of him. He’d been her friend—a demon slayer made a particularly good friend to have. She hadn’t thought of him in a while. She missed him—hoped he was happy with Sorcha. It took Darby only a glimpse of them together to see that Jonah would never be hers … that her feelings for him would never be returned. They would only ever be friends.
He’d taught her a valuable lesson though—that not everything was what it appeared to be. It was a lesson she never forgot. Jonah should have been something feared and reviled, something as evil as the very things that hunted