Page 41 of Burn

Bile surged up my throat. I’d heard a leg break before. It was not a sound you forgot. The echo of it lingering in the air before the pain hit.

“I’ll take that.” Voodoo’s voice was like a gift. “Good night.” Then another thump drifted up to me.

“All clear, Firecracker.”

I poked my head over to see him standing over two downed men. One guy was flat on his back, his sightless gaze staring straight up at me.

That was the guy I tased.

He was dead.

The other was down, blood trickling down his face.

“You did good, now come on down. Let’s get you back in the car and on our way.”

“What about them?” Did I care about them? They wanted to capture me and kill Voodoo. These men were not my friends. “They said they were tracking me.”

The cold reality of that sliced through me.

“It’s going to be fine,” Voodoo said. He had put away his guns and he was working zip-ties around the downed man’s wrists and feet. “Trust me.”

I was still at the top of the ladder. What I’d just told him had not remotely been a surprise.

“You knew.” An ugly uncomfortable feeling unfolded inside of me.

“I suspected,” he said, glancing up at me. “Now I know. So do you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My chest hurt. “And how are they tracking me?”

“Because why would I scare you if it was nothing?” Voodoo straightened. “You coming down or do you need me to come up there and carry you down.”

I blinked. “You’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I’d rather you came down on your own. We can’t stay here too long.”

“I’m not done arguing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. Heart still in my throat, I climbed down the ladder. An arm locked around my middle before I could step off and Voodoo lifted me clean over the body laying at the base.

He set me down and then gave me a visual once over. “All good?”

“I think so.” I glanced at the dead man, but Voodoo stepped between us.

“Nothing for you to see there, Firecracker. Hang on to the taser and back in the car. I just want to pack up this guy and his gear.”

“Pack him up?” Did that mean we were taking them with us?

“Getting him ready for transpo.” He had a phone in his hand. “Car, go on. Eat some sugar from the bag and drink some water. I don’t want you getting shocky again.”

I didn’t think I was going into shock, but I was definitely off kilter. Not looking at the corpse, I studied the third man. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck. I couldn’t make out much of it. He also had tats on his hands.

At the Jeep, I opened the passenger door and glanced down the aisle to where Voodoo snapped pictures of the guys on the ground. That was?—

Weird.

The whole thing had completely blown past any normal metric I might have been familiar with. Voodoo was still armed. The shotgun was under one arm and the rifle across his back.The handgun was back in its holster. He was still wearing the bullet proof vest.

He also didn’t have a scratch on him that I could see. I didn’t even think his hair was messed up. He stripped a bag off the third man and went through it, then he pulled out a tablet and a phone.

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