Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [53]
He smiled, his normal close-lipped, I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile. It didn’t always mean he knew something I didn’t. Sometimes he did it just to irritate. Like now. “I thought you said you’d kill me if I didn’t stop dating Donna.”
I rubbed my neck against the expensive seats and tried to ease a tension that was beginning at the base of my skull. Maybe I had been invited here to play Dear Abby, at least in part. Shit.
“You were right, Edward. You can’t just leave. It would screw up Becca for one thing. But you cannot keep dating Donna indefinitely. She’s going to start asking for a date for the wedding, and what are you going to say?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, neither do I, so let’s talk about the case. At least with that we’ve got a solid direction.”
“We do?” He glanced at me as he asked.
“We know we want the mutilations and murders to stop, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, that’s more than we know about Donna.”
“Are you saying you don’t want me to stop seeing her?” he asked, and that damn smile was back. Smug, he looked smug.
“I’m saying I don’t know what the hell I want you to do, let alone what you should do. So let’s leave it alone until I get some brilliant idea.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Great,” I said. “Now back to the question I asked. What haven’t you told me about the crimes that you think I should know, or rather that I think I should know?”
“I don’t read minds, Anita. I don’t know what you’ll want to know.”
“Don’t be coy, Edward. Just spill the beans. I don’t want any more surprises on this trip, not from you.”
He was quiet for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. So I prompted him, “Edward, I mean it.”
“I’m thinking,” he said. He moved in his seat, shoulders tightening and loosening as if he were trying to get rid of tension, too. I guess, even for him, this had been a stressful day. Odd to think of Edward letting anything truly stress him. I’d always thought he walked through life with the perfect Zen of the sociopath, so that nothing truly bothered him. I’d been wrong. Wrong about a lot of things.
I went back to watching the scenery. There were cows scattered close enough to the road that you could make out color and size. If it wasn’t a Jersey, a Guernsey, or a Black Angus, I didn’t know it. I watched the strange cows standing at impossible angles on the steep hillsides and waited for Edward to finish thinking. Twilight seemed to last a long time here, as if the light of day gave up the fight slowly, struggling to remain and keep the darkness at bay. Maybe it was just my mood, but I wasn’t looking forward to darkness. It was as if I could sense something out there in those desolate hills, something waiting for the night, something that could not move during the day. It could be just my own overactive imagination, or I could be right. That was the hard part about psychic abilities: sometimes you were right, and sometimes you weren’t. Sometimes your own anxiety or fear could poison your thinking and make you, almost, literally see ghosts where there were none.
There were, of course, ways to find out. “Is there a place where you can pull over out of sight of the main road?”
He looked at me. “Why?”
“I’m . . . sensing something, and I just want to make sure I’m not imagining it.”
He didn’t argue. When the next exit came up, he took it. We took a side road from the exit. It was dirt and gravel and full of huge dry potholes. The shocks on his Hummer took the road like silk flowing down hill, comfy. A soft roll of hills hid us from the main highway, but the road was very flat in front of us, giving a clear view of the road as it went almost straight towards a distant rise of hills. There were a handful of tiny houses on either side of the road, the major cluster some ways ahead with a small church sitting to one side by itself, as if it were part of the houses and not. The church had a steeple with a cross on top of it, and I assumed a bell inside of