Page 21 of Brimstone Hollow

I’m sorry. I love you but I just can’t do this anymore. Take care of Annie.

Rochelle

I stare at the note in my hand. Read it again. And then again.

I love you but I just can’t do this anymore.

I stand there, holding her message, my heart thumping in my ears.

What will he do when he finds this?I think.What will he do?

I consider throwing the note in the trash. Or tearing it up and flushing it. Or taking it outside and burning it. But then I feel a sudden, sharp, screaming pain in my hand. I look down and the note is gone. In its place is a snake, its fangs sunk into the soft flesh of my wrist. It hangs, heavy, from my arm, refusing to let go.

The rattle goeskssshhhhhhh.

I open my mouth to scream but, instead, I wake with a start, gasping, my heart thudding.

My arm is dead asleep, completely numb. I’d been lying on it, apparently, and cut off my own blood supply. Pins and needles quickly set in as I shake it out, and I’m looking around, blinking at my unfamiliar surroundings, when my phone buzzes inside my jacket pocket.

“Annie,” Leo’s voice says, soft as velvet, rich as wine. I smile at the sound of it, even as tears come to my eyes again, the image of Honey’s wrecked body suddenly fresh in my mind.

“Leo,” I answer.

I met Leo when I was in the Air Force. After I’d been reprimanded in Security Forces for poking my nose in where it didn’t belong, Leo gave me a job poking my nose in professionally. I’d served the rest of my Air Force career as part of his team of special investigators. Now he runs a private security firm while I do my own thing, which apparently includes walking back to run-down motel rooms in the middle of both the night and nowhere.

“Nightmares?” he asks. He knows. He always knows.

We’d grown close during our time in the Air Force together. And closer still once we were both out.

“Yeah,” I say. “Not bad, just… annoying.”

I sit up with a groan and put Leo on speaker. I glance at the old bedside clock radio and find that it’s 6:21. I always wake up at dawn. Whether thecurtains are pulled or not, my circadian rhythm is apparently unshakable and, unless Leo’s working somewhere that phones aren’t an option, he calls every morning at dawn.Mydawn. No matter where he is.

“You working?” Leo asks.

“Yeah.”

I hear the sounds of the city around him. Traffic and honking horns and, farther away, a jackhammer, people shouting. Leo lives a lot of his life in Manhattan, but I’ve always hated it there. The noise and the rush are bad enough, but the endless canyons of buildings also make me claustrophobic.

“I thought you were gonna go to some holiday shindig at Tina’s today. Where are you?”

“Mount Zion, Kentucky,” I say. I lie back on the bed and tell him about how Honey and I went off the road last night.

“Shit,” he breathes. And I hear the sudden urgency and worry in his voice. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Barked my knee. And my ribs are a little sore but I’m all right.”

“And Honey?”

I let out a long, shaky breath and start telling him how bad she is before I have to clamp my jaw shut to keep from crying.

“Damn,” he says. The world around him goes quiet and I assume he’s stepped into an alcove or a building lobby. “You think someone screwed with her brakes?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I won’t know until Tina gets here. I didn’t want to call the locals until I knew for sure.”

“You call me,” he says. “If you need me there.”

I smile to myself.