Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [811]
None of this made any sense in the reality of the world as she wanted to view it.
From the direction of her plane, she heard her cell phone ringing, accompanied by the airless crackle of the Beaver’s radio as an agitated male voice squawked for her to report in.
“Alex, goddamn it! Do you copy? Alex!”
Glad for the distraction, she picked up her rifle and ran back to the plane, Luna keeping pace at her side like the canine bodyguard she truly was.
“Alex!” Zach Tucker shouted her name over the airwaves again. “If you can hear me, Alex, pick up now!”
She bent in over the seat and grabbed the radio. “I’m here,” she said, breathless and shaking. “I’m here, Zach, and they’re all dead. Pop Toms. Teddy. Everyone.”
Zach swore a harshly whispered oath. “What about you? Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she murmured. “Oh, my God. Zach, how could this happen?”
“I’m gonna take care of it,” he told her. “Right now, I need you to tell me what you can about what you see, okay? Did you notice any weapons, any explanation for what might have gone on out there?”
Alex shot a miserable look back over at the carnage of the settlement. The lives cut short so violently. The blood that she could taste on the icy wind.
“Alex? Do you have any idea how these folks might have been killed?”
She squeezed her eyes shut against the barrage of memories that assailed her—the screams of her mother and her little brother, the anguished cries of her father as he grabbed nine-year-old Alex up into his arms and fled with her into the night before the monsters had a chance to kill them all.
Alex shook her head, trying desperately to dislodge that awful recollection … and to deny to herself that the killings here last night were stamped with the same kind of unthinkable horror.
“Talk to me,” Zach coaxed her. “Help me understand what happened if you can, Alex.”
The words would not come to her tongue. They remained trapped in her throat, swallowed up by the knot of ice-cold dread that had opened in the center of her chest.
“I don’t know,” she answered, her voice sounding detached and wooden in the silence of the empty, frozen bush. “I can’t tell you what could have done this. I can’t …”
“That’s okay, Alex. I know you must be upset. Just come on back home now. I’ve already got a call in to Roger Bemis out at the airstrip. He’s going to fly me out there within the hour and we’re gonna take care of the Tomses, all right?”
“Okay,” she murmured.
“Everything’s going to be okay now, I promise.”
“Okay,” she repeated, feeling another tear spill down her cold cheek.
Her father had said the same words to her all those years ago—a promise that everything would be all right. She hadn’t believed him. After what she had seen here today, the sense she had that something evil was closing in on her once more, Alex wondered if anything would ever truly be all right again.
Skeeter Arnold took a long drag off a fat joint as he kicked back in a battered baby blue velvet recliner, the finest piece of furniture he had in the shithole apartment he kept in the back of his mother’s house in Harmony. Holding the smoke deep in his lungs, he closed his eyes and listened to the yammering of the shortwave radio on the kitchen counter. The way Skeeter saw it, the kind of enterprise he was in, it just made good business sense to keep a handle not only on the Staties but also the local yokels too stupid to keep their asses out of trouble.
And yeah, maybe he liked to listen to the dispatches partly because he got a perverted amount of enjoyment out of other people’s misery, as well. Nice to be reminded sometimes that he wasn’t the biggest loser in the whole state of Alaska, no matter what his bitch of a mother told him on a regular basis. Skeeter exhaled slowly, thin smoke curling around the curse he mumbled when he heard the creak and groan of the old floorboards as the perpetual pain in his ass came stomping down