Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

They say you are what you eat, Melinda thought. In Katie’s case, it seemed to be you become what you eat.

“You want me to take the rest of her out back to the dumpster?” Katie asked. There was a soft, fluttering hum to her voice, almost a purr.

“I don’t think so. Her corpse livens up the place – so to speak. No, you and I are going to take a little trip to pick up a new friend.”

She felt her braid quiver against her back. It was excited, ready and raring to go. She reached around to the back of her head and stroked the base of the braid.

In a moment, she thought. Be patient.

“Okay,” Katie said. “But can we maybe stop and get some snacks along the way? I’m starving.”

Melinda smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”

* * *

It was beginning to rain by the time Lori pulled into Woodlawn Cemetery. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was steady, and Lori activated her windshield wipers. What a cliché, she thought. Rain in a cemetery. She might’ve thought the Cabal had arranged the rain in order to provide a suitably gloomy atmosphere for her, but from what she’d experienced so far, the Cabal wasn’t this unoriginal.

If I have to be stalked and harassed by fiendish otherworldly mystics, at least they’re creative ones, she thought.

She hadn’t been here in almost fifteen years, but she remembered the way so well, she thought she could drive it with her eyes closed. Woodlawn was one of only a handful of cemeteries in town, and it was smaller than the others. It was enclosed by orange brick walls all the way around, and its only entry and exit point was through a pair of black wrought-iron gates, which were left unlocked and open every day from nine a.m. to nine p.m. The ground here rose and fell in modest hills and dips, and there were few trees. Those that were present were young, with thin trunks and even thinner branches, leaves still mostly green, but some edging toward fall colors. She remembered more trees, much older and larger than these, and she wondered if they’d been cut down and replaced by younger ones since the last time she’d been here. Probably. Cemeteries were depressing enough as it was. Who wanted to be greeted by a bunch of dead and dying trees?

A narrow access road wound through the cemetery grounds, the asphalt old and cracked. They’d replaced the trees but couldn’t be bothered to repair the road? Cheap-ass bastards. The road was only wide enough for one car to drive on, but there was no one else in the cemetery – at least, she couldn’t see any other vehicles – so she didn’t have to worry about having to pull off to the side so another car could pass. More importantly, she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing her here. No one would know who she was or why she’d come, but she still didn’t want any eyes on her. This was going to be hard enough as it was. She didn’t need a goddamned audience.

The headstones were of different sizes and fashioned from different colors of stone. Most were in the typical rectangular shape, but some were shaped like larger obelisks or spires, and others were more stylized in design, carved to resemble a heart or – in one extremely depressing case – a cradle. The headstone she was looking for was a modest one. No pictures of angels carved onto its face, no sentiments like Always in our hearts or Gone to be with the Lord. Just gray rock with simple letters and numbers etched in its surface.

And there it was.

Up to this point, Lori hadn’t felt much of anything. She’d been numb, operating on autopilot, desperately trying not to think about Katie holding the mutilated body of the dead cat out to her.

Want some?

But now that the grave – Aashrita’s grave – was in sight, she felt a lance of pain behind her right eye. The first sign of a stress-induced migraine, she thought. The rain wasn’t helping either. It always played hell with her sinuses.

She parked her car and got out, leaving her purse on the passenger seat. She had a small umbrella in the glove box, but she left it where it was. The rain wasn’t coming down that hard, and it was cool but not cold out. She had a red windbreaker in the back seat, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with that color right now, so she left it, too. As rain hit her – especially her uncovered head and bare arms – she hoped the sensation would provide a kind of buffer that would insulate her from her emotions. So many awful things had happened to her since Goat-Eyes had first approached her in the grocery store, but none of them was worse than this was going to be.

She stepped onto the grass, careful to avoid walking across people’s graves as she made her way to Aashrita’s headstone. She did this out of a quasi-superstitious politeness more than from any actual belief she would be disrespecting the spirits of the dead by tramping on their graves. But given everything she’d experienced since last night, she figured better safe than sorry.

Her bad knee always ached when it rained, and it throbbed now, buckling a little with every step. She was grateful for this pain, too. It was an old friend, and as such was – in a weird way – a comfort to her now. The pain wouldn’t serve as a distraction from her thoughts about Aashrita, though. How could it, considering Aashrita had been there when she’d sustained the injury responsible for that pain?

She was surprised to see one of the new, skinny trees had been planted close to Aashrita’s grave. Too close, she thought. The base of the trunk was less than a yard from the headstone.