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

She examined Brian’s wound with numb, almost clinical detachment. The bullet had torn a chunk of meat from his neck, severing an artery in the process. Blood flowed from the wound, so much of it. The heart stopped pumping when you died, so the blood flow should stop soon, too, right? She wondered how long it would take. A minute or two? Longer?

She felt something warm flowing down her face. At first she thought some of Brian’s blood had hit her, but when she reached up to touch her face with her free hand, her fingers came away wet but not red.

You’re crying, she thought.

People were still screaming and shouting, running away from the ridiculous play area in all directions. She heard footsteps approaching her, the stride slow and deliberate. She looked up and saw the cop walking toward her. The woman held her gun in her right hand, down at her side, and the expression on her face was one of puzzlement and, perhaps, some small portion of regret.

As soon as Reeny saw the woman, she knew she was the shooter. There never had been anyone else. She’d killed her son and now she was going to kill her. Good. The horrible reality of Brian’s death hadn’t fully hit her yet, but it would, and soon. She didn’t think she could survive that kind of pain, and she wanted to die before she could experience it.

The cop stopped when she reached Reeny. She looked at her, then at Brian, then back to her.

“I have a message for you,” she said. “Actually, it’s for your sister.” She paused and frowned, as if trying to recall the words, wanting to get them just right.

“Confess and atone.”

She raised her gun, but instead of pointing it at Reeny, as she hoped, the cop placed the muzzle against the underside of her jaw and pulled the trigger. There was blood of course, and this time a fair amount splattered onto Reeny, much of it on her face where it mingled with her tears. The cop went down and hit the floor with a dull thud. She too was only meat now.

The bitch had cheated Reeny out of her own death, and she’d escaped without ever having to face justice for what she’d done, killing not only Brian but the others that she’d shot before him. Reeny wanted to scream at the staggering unfairness of it all, was on the verge of doing so, when she felt Brian’s small hand grip hers. Startled, she looked down and saw that his eyes once more gleamed with life and awareness, and his mouth stretched into a wide grin, displaying flecks of blood on his teeth.

“Or suffer,” he said.

It took her a second to realize he was finishing the cop’s message.

He sat up. Blood ran down the side of his face, on to his neck, soaked into the collar of his shirt. He continued holding onto Reeny’s hand, his grip tightening to the point of being painful.

“Let’s go see Aunt Lorlee,” Brian said. “We need to give her the message.”

“Yes,” Reeny said thoughtfully. Then stronger, anger in her voice. “Yes.”

* * *

Driving on the Nightway was beyond surreal. There was the monotony of moving through a world of unvarying blackness, a realm where the only things that were real were what the headlights of your vehicle touched, as if the light solidified the darkness, forced it to coalesce so that you’d have something to drive on. She wondered what would happen if she turned off her headlights. Would the surface of the road suddenly become insubstantial, would her car plummet downward through an endless void, tumbling end over end forever? It was not a theory she wanted to test.

Without markings to delineate the sides of the Nightway, Lori had to drive more slowly than she’d have preferred – thirty-five, forty miles an hour – to ensure she didn’t veer off the road into whatever lay beyond. She had the heater blowing full blast, but the air that emerged from the vents was barely warm, as if the Nightway refused to let those who traveled it get too comfortable. The blanket she had wrapped around her body helped somewhat, but she still shivered from time to time. Why she couldn’t have entered this world wearing her clothes, she didn’t know. Then again, considering they’d been soaked from her standing outside in the rain at the cemetery, maybe it was a good thing her clothes hadn’t come through with her. She’d be freezing if she’d had to wear those wet things. She supposed that was one thing to be grateful for – along with escaping the shadow creatures, of course. She hurt, too. The wounds she’d suffered at the hands of the Cabal, wounds which hadn’t followed her into the real world, had returned to her body the instant she appeared on the Nightway. None of them were life threatening – she hoped – but the pain was distracting.

She wished she’d gassed up her car recently. She had only a quarter of a tank, and while she was in no danger of running out of gas any time soon, the fuel wouldn’t last forever. She didn’t relish the idea of being stranded on the Nightway, gas tank bone dry, sitting behind the wheel, and wondering what the hell to do next. Her best defense in this place was to keep moving, and when she could no longer do that, who knew what would find her – and what it would do to her when it did.

The landscape around her wasn’t completely featureless, and she wasn’t entirely alone on the Nightway. She’d see shapes on either side of the road sometimes, things that looked as if they might be natural features – hills, perhaps, maybe trees too, although it was difficult to tell for certain. Occasionally she’d pass an artificial structure like the Vermilion Tower, something that had been created by the hands of whatever beings dwelled in this place. Sometimes