Page 16 of Tourist Season
“Hi, Maya,” Harper squeaks out.
Maya glances up, her obsidian eyes narrowing behind gold-rimmed glasses as they dart down to the head and back up to Harper’s face. “You’re entering the gravity races this year?”
“Ha … yeah. I guess so.” Harper’s smile is too bright. Too forced. Her eyes move too quickly when she looks down at the head she clutches to her chest before refocusing on her unexpected guest. “Thought I’d … you know”—she pats the top of the head—“throw my hat in the ring.”
She cringes at her own terrible joke, and Maya tilts her head as though she’s trying to work Harper out. But Harper Starling is dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous than I could have imagined that night when I lay on the road, struggling to stay conscious as she drove away from the lives she’d forever ruined. She could kill this woman easily, if she wanted to. Maya is diminutive, her frame nearly frail, long black braids trailing down her back all the way to her hips, the scent of orange and hibiscus a sweet halo around her.
But another realization seems to scuttle through my brain like an unwelcome intruder. As much as I need to protect Maya from Harper, I need to protect Harper from harm too, no matter how much of a danger she might be. I can’t let her be taken from me before I’ve gotten what I came all this way and waited so long for. And that thought is the one that forces me a step closer.
“Good thing the fake blood is water soluble,” I say. Maya turns to face me and I withdraw the severed hands from behind my back, brandishing them with nonchalance. “I’m Nolan. I’d shake your hand, but this stuff makes a bit of a mess. Hopefully it’ll be worth it for the style points at the race. I’m not sure my soapbox race car–building skills are really up to snuff, you know?”
Maya looks down at the hands and pushes her glasses up hernose with the end of her pen. “Did you get the blood from Craft-A-Corpse?”
“Sure did.”
She tilts her chin up and, for a moment, I wonder if I’ve caught myself in a lie. When I refocus on Harper, she doesn’t give me any clues. She paints a ridiculous picture, with a decapitated head clutched to her chest and her full lips pressed into a tense line and her eyes wide with alarm. She’sobviouslya terrible person and completely unhinged. And Ione hundred percentdo not find her in any way adorable.Absolutely not.
“The Craft-A-Corpse blood can still stain,” Maya says, snapping me out of my efforts to kill any intrusive thoughts of Harper Starling’s attractiveness. I’m grateful for the distraction, and I make every effort to pin all my attention to the woman standing between me and my sworn enemy. I try to ignore that it feels a lot harder to do than it should. “I make a stain remover that’ll get it out. You can buy it from my shop on Main Street. Maya’s Magical Mixtures. And I sell better-quality fake blood too. It’s even edible—you can put it on cake, in drinks. Strawberry and raspberry flavors available. Drizzle it on the whipped cream in A Shipwrecked Bean’s chili hot chocolate and it’ll change your life.”
Maya pulls a business card from between the last pages of her book and walks forward to slide it into my shirt pocket, giving my chest a pat before she turns back to Harper. “Speaking of which, I need some strawberries. Got any?”
“Umm.” Harper clears her throat and tries to force a smile, but it ends up being more of a grimace, the tension climbing into her cheeks to keep the light from reaching her eyes. “Sure, help yourself.”
“Thanks.” With a nod to each of us, Maya pulls a cloth bagfrom her shoulder and walks away toward the gate along the garden’s back wall before disappearing into the vegetable garden.
Harper stares at me. I glare back. And then, to my surprise, she marches right up to me, not stopping until she’s inches from my face, the scents of death and citrus and aromatic herbs drifting from her skin.
“Leave,” she snarls.
“I’m not done building a corpse.”
“Go reconstruct it elsewhere. And take this with you.” She shoves the head into my chest, but I don’t pull it from her grasp.
“Hang on to it,” I say, pushing it back toward her with Jake’s severed hands. “Consider it a gift.”
“A parting gift? As in, you’re fucking off out of here, never to return?”
A smile creeps onto my lips, one Harper watches as it lights with a deadly vow. I feel her, like a current. A hum. A tingle in my flesh. My fingers tense around the wrists still clutched in my grip, leaving imprints on the cool skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I expect the threat to spook her. I want to sense the terror in her. To see it in the way her pupils narrow to a pinprick, or to catch it on a scent. But it isn’t there. I only hear defiance when she says, “Neither am I.”
“Good. Don’t waste your energy. Because you could leave Cape Carnage, but you’ll never escape me.”
“Harper?” Maya calls from the other side of the wall. “Do you have any of the Sweet Kiss strawberries this year?”
“Sure do. I’ll come give you a hand.”
I think I catch the slightest whisper of fear flicker across Harper’s face. But just as quickly as it appears, she buries it, hiding it behind a vicious smirk. She knows I won’t make a move with Maya here.But what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. And I’m not here to rush my plans along.
I’m here to savor them.
“No matter where you go. No matter how long it takes,” I whisper. I lean a little closer. There’s only an inch or two of space between us. My glare fuses with hers and doesn’t let go. And Harper stares me down in reply. “If you run, I will find you. You can hide in the farthest reaches of the deepest hell, and I will still drag you out. Even the devil can’t save you from me.”
I drop the severed hands on the ground between us.
And then I turn and walk away.
RAKING FIREHarper
