Page 7 of Wraith

June stands up.

She says nothing dramatic. She doesn’t raise her voice. She just gets to her feet with this particular, terrifying calm and looks at me the way you’d look at something you’d already decided about, and she says, “I warned you.”

Then she picks up the lamp.

I freeze.

The part of my brain that has kept me alive through situations that would have killed smarter men sends up a very clear, very urgent signal that I should stop moving immediately, that I should go still, that the woman standing over me with the metal lamp is not bluffing and has already demonstrated, twice now, that her aim is better than it has any right to be.

I keep pulling at the dish towel.

Because she needs to listen. Because the Sons are coming. Because I did not survive what I survived and do what I did to end up tied to a radiator in a studio apartment being lectured by Guy Fieri while June Wilder decides whether to cave my skull in, and she needs to understand that, she needs to hear me; she needs to —

The lamp comes down.

Chapter Three

June

He’s out.

Really out. Deep breathing, mouth gaping, tongue lolling, spit drooling. I nudge him with my foot and say, “Hey, assface,” loudly, and the only response I get is from the TV, where Guy is eating a bowl of five-alarm chili in the back of a hardware store.

No movement. Nothing. Except for a gob of drool that slips out the corner of his mouth and dangles off his chin.

Now what?

I look around the room as if that will give me an answer, but all I get is Guy and an acute awareness of the fact that I am so ill-equipped to start my first night of responsible adulthood; I have nothing I’ll need to adequately restrain my abusive ex-boyfriend.

Seriously, June, how the hell do you expect to be an adult without some rope or handcuffs?

I take out my phone and look at it for a moment. Again, I think about calling Evan or someone else in the Devils — or Molly, even; I bet she’d know what to do, because I bet she’s done it all before — but I don’t. This is something I have to handle on my own. I’m tired of being June the problem, June the liability, June… the name you say with a sigh because you know whatever comes after my name in a sentence will not be good.

So I call a taxi, and while I wait for the car to arrive, I improvise a couple more ropes from torn towels and blankets and re-tighten the bindings on Wraith.

Then a horn honks from the parking lot, and I head out to hop into the taxi.

“Take me to the nearest hardware store, please,” I say. I’m proud of how steady I keep my voice. Like I’m just a normal person out running errands, and not a scared-shitless person dealing with her abuser breaking into her home.

“But, miss…”

I cut him off. “Look, I’m having a rough night and I really just want you to take me to the nearest hardware store. Can you do that, please? Without talking? I’m not trying to be rude, and I’m sorry if it’s coming across that way, but I just don’t have it in me to talk right now because I’m kind of dealing with an emergency.”

“Whatever you say,” he says as he pulls out of the parking lot.

I rest my head against the window, feeling tiredness flow through my body as I watch the late-night Ironwood Falls flow by.

He takes me to a hardware store that is obviously closed; the lights are off; the parking lot is empty except for a shopping cart that’s escaped its corral and is drifting slowly toward a concrete barrier with the patient inevitability of a ship that’s lost its rudder; the sign over the door is dark; there’s a little placard on the glass that I don’t need to read from here to know says something like STORE HOURS: 7AM - 9PM.

It is not between 7AM and 9PM.

“This is what I was trying to tell you,” the driver says. He’s watching me in the rearview mirror with the particular expression of a man who has earned the right to say I told you so and is deciding whether to use it. He uses it. “All the hardware stores are closed. It’s past midnight.”

I stare at the dark building.

“Right,” I say.

“So,” he says and lets the word sit there for a moment. “What kind of emergency are we talking about, exactly?”