Wicked Prayer (5 page)

I love you.

Dan said the words, whispered them under his breath, and they sounded small and strange and inadequate in that empty desert place with the cold light of the moon overhead and the night wrapping
around him like the big black wings of that rasping bird. Dan wanted to laugh at himself; at the fear that welled up in his heart when the words spilled through his lips like thick red blood drawn by rose thorns:

I love you.

“I love you,” Dan said aloud, and overhead he heard the circling black bird caw back.

“Not you, shithead,” he called up to it, and this time he
did
laugh. But though the laugh brought him relief from the tension, it was a false relief Because his heart was full of old wounds and scars, and painful longings and long nights, and strange new thoughts and strange new emotions, and plain disbelief that anyone,
anyone,
could have gotten to him like this, when everyone—
everyone
— knew that Dan Cody walked alone.

She’s just a woman, Dan,
he reminded himself He paused, staring at the dark windows of the Spirit Song Trading Post.
It’s not like you’ve never had women before.

And then a smaller, deeper voice rang through him like a blade on solid stone:
But you’ve never loved one, have you?

The truth was, Dan Cody had never loved
anyone.
Not in twenty-five years spent walking a world of barren, sun-scalded plains. A world where the only voices he heard were the wail of the wind and the howl of the coyote, where his only companions were the hollow echoes of his solitary footsteps, where the only language he knew and understood was the language of
self-preservation.

He saw himself as kin to those tortured trees that grew out in the desert, roots eternally thirsty, backs beaten down to desolate stumps by endless years in the driving sun.

For twenty-five years Dan had learned the lessons of that desert sun. He learned from hard experience that the sun took, and took, and took, and never gave back. It warped and twisted everything it touched with its hard white eye, and it claimed everything for its own.

But it never gave back.

Until now.

For it had been in the desert that Dan Cody had found Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. And it had been in the desert, under the heat of that hard, white eye, that Dan Cody had discovered love.

“I love you,” he whispered, and the wind took his breath with the scent of lush red roses and carried the words into the deepening night.

“I love you, Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin,” Dan said, and this time the words were solid. Strong. Right.

Fifteen feet in front of him, the glass door shattered.

Leticia’s scream from inside the building: “Dan! Watch out!”

Before Cody could move, or even
think,
he saw another woman facing him through the front window. She was stained turquoise and orange in the reflected neon glow of the trading post sign, and she was raising a gun, and as she fired the front window exploded and neon- painted glass rained down in a brittle avalanche and for one perfect moment Dan thought the woman was shattering like a smashed mosaic, silver moonlight and neon flesh splintering in a bloodred rain.

But that was only an illusion. The woman was a rock-solid reality.

She lowered her weapon just slightly, smiling at Dan with cruel black lips.

“I won’t miss again,” she said.

Her black-nailed fingers squeezed the trigger

A second bullet sang through the night.

From above, the Crow screamed as the slug slammed into Dan Cody’s shoulder He was punched backward by the impact, the breath knocked out of him, roses flying from his hand in a scarlet arc like the hot spray of blood that gushed from his wound.

Cody, still on his feet but just barely, gripped his blasted shoulder with a hand that rapidly filled with blood. The woman came toward him almost leisurely, glass shrapnel crunching under her boots, the smile still writhing on her face. Her pistol dipped lower, and Dan’s eyes traced the next bullet’s trajectory before the woman pulled the trigger:

Left kneecap, dead center

Dan tried to move. If he could just get out of the way . . . just run ... if he could get to the Jeep, grab his shotgun . . .

Overhead, the Crow clawed the air, screamed a warning—

Dan barely heard it, wouldn’t have understood it if he had.

The woman fired again, and Dan’s left knee exploded in an agonizing torrent of bone and blood and smashed cartilage.

The damaged leg buckled instantly, uselessly, beneath him.

Dan hit the ground hard. The woman kept coming, pistol gripped in her hand. In a fraction of a second Dan saw everything: Leti inside the store, screaming his name over and over until her cries sounded like the caw of the Crow. Dan’s true love struggled in the cold embrace of a muscular man sheathed in black leather Leti’s long black hair whipped the man’s face like the barbed tail of a scorpion as she kicked, bit, tore, fought like a wild animal. . . but her struggles were in vain.

The man jerked back Leti’s head by a fistful of hair. Then he raised his gun hand and slammed a pistol butt against her skull. Instantly the screaming stopped, and the sudden silence that swelled in its wake was far, far worse.

Dan watched Leti fall like something dead, her head smacking the hardwood floor with a sickening thud. The big man turned, satisfied with his work, and stepped over the motionless body. Leticia Hardin’s hot blood gleamed wetly on his raised pistol barrel as he walked to the open doorway.

Dan gasped. Wincing, he tried to get up, but there was no way he could stand. His destroyed knee was a seeping red mess of smashed bone and severed ligaments, and he might as well have tried to climb Mount Everest.

“Goddamn!” Dan said, because all the sweet words in the world were now gone from his memory.
“Goddamn son of a bitch!"

He’d been shot twice by the woman with the cold green eyes, and now a bullet-headed man with features that might have been carved from tombstone granite was coming to join in the slaughter Dan knew there was no way he could turn the tide. He’d never make it to his feet, let alone get to the Jeep fifty feet behind him, let alone get the shotgun he’d left behind in the backseat for an armful of flowers that now lay scattered across the blacktop like so many drops of blood.

In a split second, he’d lost everything.

All the remained was the bag of scorpions, still twisted around his right shoulder

Maybe, just maybe, that would be enough.

Dan tried to reach for the bag, but his shoulder was a mess. He couldn’t get his arm to work.

The woman came toward him. Her boots crunched over broken glass, the sound like footsteps on the wings of hard-shelled beetles. “Take it easy, cowboy,” she said as she passed him by. “I’m way past done with you.”

She stopped short, about five feet from the spot where Dan lay. She raised her gun and aimed at the Crow.

Circling above, the bird saw her, cawed in anger “Lookit the black bastard, Kyra!” the bullet-headed man shouted from the doorway. “He doesn’t
even
know what to do! He’s scared of you!”

The woman opened fire.

“Get out of here, you bastard!” she screamed. “No one here is going to die!”

Dan stared at the two strangers, one on either side of him, both watching the black bird. This was his chance. He reached for the drawstring that sealed the scorpion bag. Willed his wounded arm to work, even though it felt like a block of lead—

Come on, Cody,
he told himself
Come on, come on...

Dan held his breath, working the knotted drawstring with numb fingers. Then he bit at it, loosening the knot with his teeth, pulling at the snakelike length of rope that squirmed free of his mouth as if it had a will of its own.

The woman called Kyra screamed at the bird, which was circling high above the trading post. “We’re playing the game
my
way tonight, and there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it!”

One careful tug and the knot uncoiled, and Dan tore the drawstring free.

A black mouth opened up in the canvas.

The gunman wasn’t looking at Dan. Neither was the woman. She was only five feet away. If he could get her to drop her gun . . . and if he could manage to grab it. . .

It was a long shot, but it was Dan’s only chance.

Carefully, quietly, he cuffed the mouth of the bag, folding it back. Once, twice, until the bag was much shallower than it had been, until its wriggling contents brimmed within, and finally began to spill over the side.

A scorpion scuttled over Dan’s hand and dropped to the ground. Before another could make the trip, Dan drew back his arm as far as he could and flung the contents of the bag at the woman. Fistfuls of angry scorpions rained down on Kyra Damon.

Stingers lashed Kyra’s flesh, her clothes. Pain carved her scalp like a sculptor’s knife as the arachnids’ barbed tails twisted in her hair, wicked and poisonous as Medusa’s serpentine curls, stinging again and again and again as other scorpions burrowed under her collar, pricking the soft skin there, traveling the dull white hollow of her throat and the smooth curve of her breasts, marking their trails with angry welts as they descended her hips and thighs, spilling over her with exquisite slow agony, like boiling honey.

Or so it seemed. In reality, it all happened very quickly. So quickly that the darkest shadowed corner of Kyra’s soul could hardly enjoy the experience at all.

In a heartbeat, it was over. Gravity took charge. The diamond ring Dan Cody had bought for his lady love rang against the ground at Kyra’s feet, but she didn’t even hear the sound. Her skull was alive with pain. Poison seemed to pulse in her brain, and there was nothing she could do but surrender to the symphony that swelled within her.

The music of raw agony lashed Kyra’s throat as she screamed.

And then her pain was as real as the gun in her hand.

She had shared her pain with the world, but she would not surrender to it.

Instead, the pain fueled her. Made her stronger.

And she needed to be strong. Above, she heard a brittle caw. . . a sound as wounded and exultant as her own screams.

The Crow was coming for her.

Kyra bit her lips, steadied herself in the cold heart of pain. And she didn’t drop her gun. Instead, she held the pistol before her, firing again and again at the big black bird as it dived at her, raking its talons across her scalp and lacerating the flesh.

The bird’s scream tore the night as it climbed high in the sky, retreating.

It had all happened so fast. The scorpions had fallen, scorching Kyra’s flesh like acid rain, but the woman hadn’t even dropped her gun in face of their assault. Obviously, Dan hadn’t had a chance to pick it up, and now it didn’t matter because the gun was empty.

The woman ran a hand through her crimson-black hair, tossing one last scorpion to the blacktop. The arachnids scrambled across the parking lot. She turned toward Dan, and she actually managed a smile.

Dan swallowed hard. He knew scorpions, and he knew what they could do. He’d been stung himself countless times, and while it was true that the arachnids’ sting was in most cases on a par with a honeybee’s, it wasn’t the kind of injury you just shook off.

Especially when you’d been stung dozens of times, as the woman had.

Dan did the math. Multiplied the initial pain caused by a single sting by twenty . . . thirty . . . forty and fifty. But his calculations did him no good, for they didn’t match up with his reality.

That reality was a woman, and she was walking toward Dan.

And she was
smiling.

Dan wasn’t smiling. Not at all. Uh-uh. No way this could be happening, no way the woman could be doing what she was quite obviously doing. Not with scorpion neurotoxins screaming through her nerve cells. Not with welts boiling red on her alabaster skin. In Dan Cody’s book the woman should have dropped to her knees by now, and she should have been wearing the expression of a woman who’d just been pounded with a clawhammer a couple dozen times, and she should have been screaming her fucking head off—

The pain had to be incredible—

Welts bloomed on the woman’s cheeks like angry roses, but she kept on smiling as if she were wrapped in a morphine kiss. “Nice try, amigo,” she said smoothly. “Normally, somebody pulled a stunt like that, I’d make sure they spent a long time dying. But today the gods are smiling on you. I’m not going to kill you. That wouldn’t be the smart thing to do. I’m just going to let you lie there and bleed awhile.”

“That’s right,” said the man in black leather as he walked toward
t
he woman. “You’re gonna live to a ripe old age, cowboy. You ain’t gonna walk too good, though. Not on what’s left of your knee.”

The man placed a heavy boot on Dan’s injured leg and pressed down hard. A gristly
crack
sounded as Dan’s ankle snapped like a willow branch. He almost blacked out. It would have been a relief to black out. But he didn’t. Dan clenched his teeth, fighting the agony that burned straight through him, and the man stared down, marveling at Dan’s pain, grinning like a satanic jack-o’-lantern.