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The red light faded from my fingertips. The driver emerged from the truck and dragged his passenger out after him. They were dazed and wobbly, but still alive, which had been the whole point.
“I told you. I’ll do whatever it takes to get your brother back. Now let’s get the hell out of here before they realize we’re just sitting here waiting for them.”
As Wilder put his helmet back on, I glanced once more at our would-be assailants. Standing on the opposite side of the highway, just outside the beams of their headlights, was a woman.
My heart leapt, and I almost told Wilder to wait, until I saw her form shift and shudder like a poorly edited movie frame. One minute she was whole, the next she was burnt pieces flying through the air. She came together and fell apart over and over, so quickly it was a like a trick of the eye. She’d found me, even here.
I blinked, and she was gone.
“Go,” I demanded. “Get us out of here.”
Chapter Sixteen
Franklinton was a dive.
It was so much worse than I’d expected. The recession could account for some of the town’s problems, but others were the fault of neglect and desertion.
Even in the early predawn hours it was obvious the place was damn near a ghost town. Their one gas station was closed with a For Sale sign in the window, and most of buildings on the main drag had similar displays.
It was the kind of place that made a person sad by proximity, like everyone there had unanimously decided to give up and abandon ship, but the town had been left behind to die alone.
On our way in I’d seen a few lit windows in trailers set just off the highway, but nothing to make Franklinton count as a town, not anymore. At best it might be called a hamlet these days.
Hand-drawn signs along the road told us the Church of Morning was a half mile away on the other side of town. Wilder stopped the motorcycle in front of an empty hardware store. The small Main Street was totally dark, with only one streetlight on halfway down the block.
Wilder turned the bike off, and we both sat in the silence for a moment drinking in the wrongness of the town around us. Finally I couldn’t bring myself to wait around any longer. I pulled off my helmet and got to my feet, placing the helmet on the seat I’d vacated. Even the air smelled off, a little rank, like the inside of a car that’d been sitting in the sun all day. I had spent years living in a swamp, and at the height of August I was used to this kind of heavy scent. I’d never experienced anything like it in a settled community.
The stillness of the place made my skin crawl. It was too quiet, too empty, more like an abandoned movie set than a place real people might live. Why would the church pick this as their home? If they wanted their doings to be public, why were they hiding where no one might stumble across them?
Wilder removed his own helmet and stood next to me. He sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose. “That’s rank.”
“Not quite right, is it?”
“Nothing about this is right.”
Took the words right out of my mouth. “You think we should scope it out before we charge in?”
“I figured that’s what you’d want to do.”
I smiled. “Less than a day and you’re already pretending to know what I want?” My laughter snagged in my throat when I glanced at him. The dim light from overhead caught his lashes, showing off how long they were. The kind of lashes Revlon and Maybelline used to sell mascara to women.
He blinked, and they grazed his cheeks. I glanced away. A pretty face was just a pretty face. I didn’t particularly like Wilder, so I needed to remember why we were here and get on with it.
He made that difficult by saying, “I think I could spend a hundred years with you and never know you any better than I do right now.”
“Sun will be up soon.” I turned the conversation back to business. “I think we should go scout out the church grounds when the place is deserted, see if we find any trace of Hank there, or anything that might tell us where he is. I want to know what we’re up against. And if we can get in and out of town without Deerling and his lackeys knowing we were here, all the better.”
He nodded. “We better get walking, then. It’s only a little ways up the road, and the bike makes a lot of noise when you consider there isn’t any.”
Anywhere else I would have laughed at this concern. His bike was relatively quiet after all. But given how barren the landscape was and how deafening the silence seemed to be, I understood why he wasn’t willing to take the ri
sk.
“Good thing you didn’t wear heels.” He smirked.
Heels?
Argh. This idiot was going to drive me crazy.
