Page 75 of Hideaway Whirlwind
He shucks the water off his face. “She hurt our family. No one gets away with hurting our family.” Then, almost as if he fears being rejected, he hesitantly claps Elliott twice on his shoulder. When Elliott doesn’t roll his joint to dislodgeRussell’s hand, Russell pulls him into a hug, and the brothers beat each other’s backs, murmuring something to each other that the rest of us can’t hear.
Storm licks my hand when I uncurl my talons and drop my gun. She spins a circle and sits before me as if on guard in case Mezzarx should rise from the dead, and I scratch her behind the ears. “Good girl, Storm.” She really is the goodest good girl in the whole widerealworld. She wags her tail, splashing more mud across my feet.
I suck in a breath when a small hand slips into mine on the right, then another on my left, Dustin and Sydney standing wet but calm beside me, each with a puppy at their heels. I study them from the corners of my eyes, their faces stoic, and I squeeze their hands.
Perhaps there is a grain of truth to what Mom said. The evil that has infected me. Am I not infecting my children? Nurturing that same evil within them?
“I love you, Mommy,” Sydney says, tipping her head against my arm, water dripping from the ends of her braids.
“Me too,” says Dustin, turning and putting his arms around me.
Kendall squeals from behind, and when I turn sharply to find her in Cora’s arms on the deck, my sweet little girl claps her hands with delight like we’re playing a game.
Fuck it. Serial killer or not, I’m still a better mother than the crazy bitch who raised me.
Elliott
The relentless buzzing and static I’ve fought for decades is curiously absent as Birdie and I hold hands, our bodies aching and filthy, taking a moment of silence after we finish tamping down the dirt over her mother’s grave. I was the one who fished the body out of the water, but Birdie is the one who picked her final burial site, right in the center of where we plan to start building the race track as soon as the ground dries out. Mezzarx’s spirit, if she has one, will never know a moment’s peace.
“Do you feel that?” Birdie asks with a whisper, squeezing my hand that’s gone blistered and raw from the hard work of digging out the dense, waterlogged soil.
“Feel what?”
“The calm. It’s so quiet in here.” She taps her temple.
“Yeah, I do.” I take a deep breath, the rain abated, the land cleansed of what happened tonight.
“I think…I think it’s over. We really found it this time.”
“Found what?”
She turns into my chest, resting her chin on my upper abdomen as she looks up. “Freedom.”
“We did,” I say, carefully cupping her cheeks, smearing a little blood across her soft skin.
“You too?”
I nod, kissing her softly when she rolls up onto her tiptoes.
“I can’t wait to marry you. Just the five of us in a private ceremony.”
“Six,” I say, pushing a hand between us to palm her baby bump beneath her soggy flannel. “What about the reception?”
She smiles. “I was thinking maybe we could have a do-overof the welcome party since the first one didn’t turn out so well.”
I slide my hands down to her thighs, marking her skin with more of my blood, and lift her. “I can think of at least one thing that turned out well that night.”
Though her eyes are hooded with desire in the early dawn light, I start hiking toward the cabin, both of us keen to be home with our babies and clean the filth of this night from our skin and minds before settling back into bed, renewed. We’ll save having sex on the grave for another night.
Chapter 28
Teagan
Partially obscured by the trees bordering the southwest side of Russell’s property, Russell and Elliott finally find a dilapidated car three days later. It’s one Elliott recognizes best, having nearly collided with it head-on the night he left Goldie’s house after everything fell apart. We suspect it’s a stolen vehicle, its Nevada license plates bent in such a way to perhaps avoid being captured on camera. A late-nineties model amalgamation of different parts, we’re all surprised it held together long enough to make the drive to Texas.
Mom must have been living in it for who knows how long, sleeping on a crusty pillow and what’s left of a thin comforter, their original factory colors unidentifiable. They look like they were dug out of a dumpster, while she barely subsisted on a few putrid open pouches of tuna and what’s left of a loaf of stale, moldy bread. Even more surprising is the evidence of her surviving a serious infection, half the comforter torn into strips for makeshift bandages, all of which are covered in blood and pus. I’ve never smelled anything so foul in my life. Considering the compound’s restrooms were nothing morethan movable tin shacks with latrines crudely dug into the sand, that’s saying something.
“Maybe this is why she came at us directly instead of waiting for a better opportunity to snatch Sydney,” Elliott says, picking up one particularly smelly, soiled strip by the very corner of the fabric. “She was running out of time.”
