“I need you to eat, drink, take care of yourself while I fix
this,” I told her, holding her tight. “I need you back enough that you’ll do
that, okay?”
I took my necklace off and placed it on her, sending every bit of
energy I could into it. The second it touched her skin, she got up, kinda like
a robot and went over to the bathroom stall. I was thankful for the partition.
The cell that I’d been in had no such luxury. Dignity was one of those funny
things that could get you through most situations and a loss of it could be a
nail in any chance you had at surviving. She deserved dignity.
She stepped out of the stall and went back to sitting on the bed,
staring at the wall. I sat beside her and noticed something in her hand. The
napkin eagle I’d made was snug in her palm. The sight of it made it hard to
swallow.
“That’s it. Hold on. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix everything.” I leaned
my head to hers as we waited for the sheriff. I hoped that wherever she was,
she could sense me being near.
“You aren’t meant to be in there.” McKinley’s tone was blunt and
considering I’d saved his leg, not to mention his life, his attitude stank.
“She ain’t been eating or drinking,” I snapped. “You know you
gotta call in the doctor when a prisoner is like that.”
Procedures involving mentally unstable folks were an expert
subject.
“She’s fine.” He sounded like an arrogant ass.
“No, she ain’t.” I glared at him. “And your gratitude sucks.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Excuse me?”
So he thought he was better than me ’cause he wore a damn badge.
Where had I seen that before? It didn’t work for my father and there was no way
this fool was getting away with it.
“You heard. You and I both know that stomach of yours is feeling a
load better since I fixed your leg.”
His eyes flickered along with his aura. He was freaked. I damn
well wanted him to be.
“I give you another chance at living and you repay me by
neglecting the one person I care about most?”
He tried shaking off my comment and rested his hands on his gun
belt. “Thought
she
was a doctor.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think she is or isn’t.” I stood up
to my full height. He looked like he wanted to hide. “She’s a human being and
you are a crappy man.”
He had the good grace to lower his eyes. Yeah, he’d been wandering
around in a bitter, terrified state for heaven knows how long but he was fine
now, and there were no more excuses.
“I get that you been through hell,” I said. “I get that you faced
how human you are.”
“Alright . . .” He held up his hands. “Alright . . . I’m sorry.”
“Martha is gonna bring her food from now on,” I told him. “We’re
gonna make sure she’s okay. I’m gonna prove to you that she had a very good
reason for shooting that guy.”
He sighed. “Doubt that you will. I saw the smirk on the guy’s face
before she shot him.” He shrugged. “And Brad pretty much said that she was
shooting at him.”
“At him?” I was pumping with fury. The guy needed to be pummeled
with something large and spiky.
“Yeah. He
was
standing behind him. It’s not like they have
been friendly.”
I snorted out my exasperation through my nose. “Are you freaking
kidding me?” My voice filled the cell and my temper was close behind. “She
proved her point to him the night before by cracking his wrist. Why the hell
would she go and shoot him?”
McKinley didn’t know what to say but I did.
“You always listen to the bullies in your town?”
His eyes locked on mine. A flash of anger rippled through them. I
stepped forward. The fury and worry mixed into something potent. “You think
it’s okay for a man to touch a woman who don’t want him to?”
“No.”
I took another step. His anger changed to fear. “No? Are you sure?
’Cause I didn’t see nobody having a quiet word with him for
his
actions.”
McKinley scowled. “Look here—”
“Treat her like the hero she is.” There was gonna be no messing on
this. “Martha will bring her food between my visits.” I fixed him with a glare.
“
I’m
gonna go see Brad Jewel and if I so much as get a sniff off you or
your deputies, you’ll get why you
really
don’t wanna see me mad.”
With that I planted a kiss on Renee’s forehead. “I’ll be back,
promise . . . don’t leave me . . . please,” I whispered to her.
I turned and marched out of the cell. Brad Jewel had better hope
he could apologize faster than he could run because I was all set to impale him
on something sharp.
IT WASN’T HARD to find Brad. He was nursing a beer at the bar in
The Ice Cooler. Not surprising, the dimly lit place was his. Pictures of barely
dressed women were on the walls. Old fashioned and on tin or something. Sports
gear was next to truck memorabilia. A large TV screen hung from the ceiling at
one end of the wooden bar and I spotted Brad glued to some sports show. The guy
on the door tried to put his arm out to stop me but I was in too bad a mood to
let him bar my way. He ended up rubbing his yanked arm as I stormed over to the
sneering piece of crap.
“You want to join your friend in the cells?” he asked.
I grabbed hold of the back of his stool and spun him around so
hard he gripped the wooden bar just to stop from flying off. I could smell the
stale beer on his breath and it only made me want to wring his neck more. The
barman fled. The swinging door behind the bar clattering in his wake.
“You been lying about her,” I growled. “You think it’s funny to go
around targeting women?”
Something in my brain said, “Uh oh.” I still had issues from my
experience back in Oppidum and right now they were not only roaring to the
surface, they were threatening to break free. Thing was, I
never
got
mad. I was just not one of those people who possessed a short fuse. It took
something pretty damn crappy to get me raging but when I did, it was not
something most folk liked to witness.
“Where will it stop?” I asked, seeing his pupils shrink as his
fear billowed from him. “Next time a lady doesn’t want to look at your sorry
ass—”
“Leave it!” a voice called.
I glared at Simon as he and Mark stepped into the bar.
“You ain’t nothing but a coward,” I snapped at him. “You can’t
even admit that you seen everything.”
“I didn’t see a thing,” he protested but his aura jumped a mile.
“I swear.”
“Aeron . . .” Mark began.
“No,” I said, turning back to Brad. “I ain’t done.
He
is saying
that she tried to shoot him.”
“What?” Mark sounded as angry as I felt. “Brad?”
“So,” Brad said.
He laughed in my face.
Not clever.
I leaned over him.
He stopped. “She asked for it. Besides, I was right there next to
the guy.”
“No you weren’t,” Mark snapped. “You were nowhere near.”
Brad went to push me out of the way. He was a lot weaker than me
but his hand touched my arm . . .
Stupid dumb bitch thinks that she can do that to me. She’s lucky
that I looked at her, stupid, ungrateful—
“Hey, you going to the bar?”
Simon, you smell like fish all the time. What do you wash your
crap in?
“Yeah, where else.” Not like there’s a lot going on in this stupid
place.
“Mark, you coming?”
Mr. Perfect? Drink in the day, oh come on, the guy is wetter than
my mother.
“Nah, heading to the café though.”
Oh, look. It’s the ungrateful bitch. “Hey Ice Queen, where’s your
knight?” If it weren’t for the freak, I would have taught your pretty face a
lesson.
Bang.
Bang.
Save me! Oh God, I don’t want to die, please save me . . . I
promise I won’t gamble anymore, I promise . . . Where’s the gun? . . . Help!
My roaring laughter made Brad yank his hand away. The guy was
pathetic.
“You scared of a little gunfire . . .
Braddy
.”
He glared at me for using the name his beloved, overbearing mother
called him.
I leaned in, gripped him by his collar, and glared into his eyes.
“The freak here will rip your head off the next time you say a damn thing about
her.”
He nodded. I shoved him back. His fear so clear to everyone now
that Mark’s grin lit across his face even though he was trying to stop it.
“I know now,” I said, leaning in to glare at him. “Not. Another.
Damn. Word.”
With that, I turned on my heels and stomped out of the bar,
heading for the café. Putting one Jewel in his place made me feel better but I
hoped Martha could help me look after Renee until I figured out if the guy
really
had
a gun like a few people thought. What had
really
happened and who was this guy anyway?
I GOT TO the café, and it seemed like a few folks had already
gotten word about my threatening Brad. It was funny how news in such a small
place travelled so fast, even faster than it had taken me to walk the distance
from the bar.
The culprit of the gossip was the barman who must have gone into
the café to get Mark and Simon, and I was pretty sure, by my experiences in
Oppidum that by now, there was probably a fire breathing dragon involved.
Martha hurried over to me with her eyebrows so knitted together
that I was sure her brow would permanently crease that way.
“What happened? I heard you punched Sheriff McKinley and
threatened to kill Brad?”
Small town assumption vindicated.
“Nope,” I said. “But I told him that I weren’t too happy with his
treatment of . . . well . . . Serena.”
Martha nodded, her gaze glued to my face as if I would crack and
tell her that I really
did
punch McKinley. “She’s not good?”
“She ain’t been eating or drinking nothin’ and they just left her
like it.” I flexed my hand, still feeling the anger thudding right to my
fingertips. “I told him she deserves better and that she needs proper feeding.”
“I’m happy to help there.”
All I could do was blink at her for a second. I wanted to wrap the
woman in another bear hug. “I was hoping you’d say that. It’ll help her, if she
knows there’s somebody there.” I tried to return the smile that Martha was
shooting my way but I felt tired all of a sudden. “She ain’t talking, she ain’t
responding but if you feed her . . . help her . . . she’ll take it.”
“You can count on me—”
“Who do you think you are?”
I felt Grace Teller’s anger before I heard her voice. Her aura was
a yucky green. I pretty much knew she didn’t like me all that much before but
now . . . Wow, the cold coming from her was worse than outside.
“You have no right to come in here and threaten people!”
“Grace—” Martha started.
Grace shook her off. “It’s not James’s fault
that your friend is
. . . is a . . . a
nutcase
.”
I folded my arms. Who was this James? Her anger should have made
me angrier, should have made me lose it but something odd happened instead, I
laughed. “Nutcase? Is that the best you can come up with?”
Grace took a moment and blinked a couple of times as I continued
to chuckle at her. As vicious put-downs went, that was the dumbest I’d heard.
“Assaulting people is funny to you?” she demanded, opening up the
conversation to the rest of the fixated café. “Who will you attack next, huh?”
Now that was almost like being back home.
“Get a life.” Whatever her motives, I really didn’t care and so I
turned back to Martha. “Will you be able to take . . . Serena . . . her
favorite?”
“Of course—”
“I’m talking to you!”
Thud.
Grace kicked me in the back of the leg. She had on those heavy
snow boots.
The doorbell jingled. Simon and Mark. They froze, as the entire
café did. The doctor dribbled coffee down himself.
I clenched my jaw and turned, slowly, to look at the wide-eyed
woman cowering from me.
“You want to tell her, Mark?” My voice was eerily calm.
“Grace,” Mark said in the kind of tone that parents used to speak
to children who were being dumb. “Aeron went to see Brad because he’s spouting
a load of lies, like always.”
I noticed the irritation in his voice and wondered how many other
people in the town felt the same way.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Grace protested, arms folded, pout on her
glossy lips and a scowl that made her scraped back hair shift on top of her
head.
She was dumber than I thought.
Mark sighed and shot a glance at Simon. “Grace, he’ll tell you
whatever he can to get you.”