The Sinners of Saint Amos - Logan Fox Page 0,78

damn cautious you’d think he was simple.

I light another cigarette. Cass lights a joint. We pass them to each other as Rube gets up. Trinity takes a hurried step back when he looms over her, but then he grabs the back of her neck and hauls her back.

He slides his hand down her shoulder, her arm, and over to her hip. Then he takes her waist in both hands and swivels her hips in a figure eight.

“Loosen up,” he grumbles in his deep voice.

“I’m trying,” she mutters back, staring up at him like she’s wondering when he plans on snapping her neck.

“Close your eyes, if it helps,” he suggests calmly. “Pretend I’m one of those boy band idiots you girls are always crushing on.”

I’m smiling full out now, and it has nothing to do with the whiskey-and-weed concoction wreaking havoc on my brain.

Reuben and Cass were the only two of us that had something resembling a normal childhood after we escaped the Ghost House. I’d fought to keep us together, but we were all from different states. Rube and Cass went to foster homes in West Virginia and Georgia, Apollo back to North Carolina, and I stayed behind in Virginia.

It took years for me to find them again.

Reuben ended up in a foster home with three other girls, which we’ll never let him live down, especially seeing as he never fucked any of them. Although I doubt it ever crossed his mind. He became their big brother, and that’s the persona he stuck with. And he did such a good job, that foster family almost ended up adopting him.

It was practically a done deal until something triggered an episode of psychosis. He destroyed that family’s home and badly injured two of his foster sisters before the police arrived to restrain him. He landed in juvie for a year before being spat back into the foster system. Months went by before I could track him down. A lot of money exchanged hands before I finally got him relocated to Saint Amos.

Times like that, I honestly wished I’d had parents I could turn to. Having legal guardians to sign off on legit paperwork would have been so much easier than all the palm-greasing I did. But my parents were long dead, and after we escaped from the Ghost House, I no longer trusted anyone except my brothers.

Luckily, money can buy just about anything.

“Good,” Reuben says. “Now your shoulders. You have to dance with your whole body.”

“It’s really hard without music.”

“You don’t need music,” Rube says.

On cue, I tap my thumb against the back of the seat.

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Rube glances up at me, and gives me a ghostly smile. “All you need is a rhythm.”

Cass and Apollo pick up the beat, Apollo with one of his rings against his glass, Cass tapping the back of the tin he keeps his weed in.

And Trinity starts to dance.

Her hips sway, and her shoulders undulate to the slow, steady beat we create.

“That’s it,” Rube murmurs. His head hangs low, his lips brushing the top of her head. “Do you feel it?”

I expect Cass to make a snide comment—he’s got a fifth-grader’s sense of humor—but when I look over at them all I see is a most familiar hunger.

That’s how our Ghosts would look at us, a sinister voice hisses.

My jaw clenches.

No. This isn’t the same. That was a sick, contaminated lust. This is pure and natural.

That’s what he said about us. That’s what we were.

Pure. Innocent. We were the cure for our Ghost’s perversions. Our lot in life was to ease their suffering—a sacrificial offering to appease their depraved hedonism.

And they accepted us time and time again.

I falter on the beat, but Cass and Apollo don’t even notice. Taking my cigarette with me, I stalk into the bedroom.

There the darkness swallows me, shields me, comforts me.

But my respite is brief and bittersweet.

That’s what she is. Pure. Innocent. Is she our cure?

I try to block the voice, but clapping my hands over my ears does nothing.

You know what you have to do, don’t you? To her, to them.

I go to the back of the room and lift up the corner of a mattress.

Killing Gabriel won’t make the pain go away, Mason.

Not for you, not for them, not for her.

When I don’t find what I’m looking for, I clamp my lips over the filter of my cigarette and shove both hands into that cool dark as smoke burns my eyes.

“Looking for something?” Cass asks, sinuous as a fucking serpent.

I rock