Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory #2) - Lauren Gilley Page 0,41
worse the guilt, and the more she didn’t want his kindness because she hadn’t done a thing to deserve it.
Then there was the issue of his…looks.
In a life that hadn’t involved Beck, she would have thought Lance very handsome. She thought that anyway, because he was – but she was always comparing. Beck had been so lithe and lean, while Lance was broader, and more obviously muscled: the big shoulders, the big biceps; thighs and ass that gave evidence to his devotion to leg day in the training room. Beck had been a dancer, and Lance was built like a brawler, down to the big hands with their broad palms and blunt fingers. He had a square-jawed, masculine face, but open, brown eyes. He could look angry, could look furious, but it was never the low-lidded, sharp gaze that Beck had slid across the library in the firelight.
Rose had shaped her whole conception of sex and attraction around Beck; she gritted her teeth and fought against her imagination’s efforts to reshape it now – or to at least make room for attraction of another variety.
She had dreams, though. Woke sometimes in a sweat, her skin humming, her pulse throbbing between her legs. And sometimes, when she let herself look at him, she found herself imagining the rough grain of his stubble against her palm; watched his hand flex around the grip of a gun, and wondered what it would feel like to have his fingers fitted to the spaces between her ribs.
Only natural, only animal, she told herself. It had been a while.
But tension had a way of coming to a head.
The helo shuddered as another sharp updraft hit it, and the pilot wrestled with the controls. Rain spattered in through the open hatches, freckling their faces with cold droplets.
Rose touched the collar of her tac jacket, zipped to her throat, and the small, hard shapes of her pendants beneath. Her crown and her rose; her lucky talismans.
Lance met each of their gazes in turn. Above the chop and whine of the rotors beating overhead, he shouted, “Stick to the plan. Everybody, stick to the plan. If you go off script, and get your other arm cut off” – this for Gallo, whose cheeks reddened – “you’re not getting another fancy conduit-made one. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” they all chorused.
He nodded, leaned out to snap his carabiner to the line, and dropped out of the helo and out of sight, toward their target destination.
Rose attached her harness to the second line, and followed.
The city into which they rappelled was more of a town – a mining town. It had been years ago, before the pre-Rift environmental movement had closed it. The town had all but faded into obscurity, all but the oldest and most stubborn residents packing up and searching for work and lives elsewhere. But when the First Rift devastated…everything…coal mining rebounded. It flourished still.
Rose caught a glimpse of the landscape as she descended, an impression of squat, ash-dusted cottages, and muddy yards; shotgun houses along a wide gravel lane that led to the yawning maw of the main mine shaft. A grand, tumbledown house sat at the opposite end of the clearing, a place where the foreman or mayor or some such important person must live; light blazed yellow through the windows, energy wasting bulbs that should have been swapped out long ago.
The rain stung her face, and she dropped her head to watch the ground rush up to meet her. She landed lightly, disengaged, and stepped clear so that Gallo could land behind her.
A man waited for them, dressed in plain, dirty clothes, an ivy cap crammed down on his head and doing little to keep the rain out of his eyes. “Are you the Gold Company?”
“We are,” Lance confirmed, as the helo winged away overhead, retreating until their scheduled rendezvous.
He nodded. “Mayor Bixby wants to talk to you first.”
The big house was a mayor’s mansion, then. Up close, Rose could see the way leafless brown vines and lichen choked the red brick, soot-streaked in the places where it showed through, like bloody scabs on necrotic flesh. The windows bore thick coats of grime, the light behind it greasy and blurred.
The inside was better, but only a little. Floorboards cupped and warped from the damp; mold crawling up the wallpaper, and creeping along the edges of bookshelves that held canned goods rather than books. She smelled the rain, and felt a breeze where a window or bit of roof