Bad Moon Rising - Paranormal Romance (4 page)

Every time she moved, it felt as if someone were sticking an ice pick into her body. Blocking out the pain, she forced herself into a sitting position. The medication took the edge off, but it still hurt like hell to move.

She was in a one of those sterile white rooms; the type of place that you couldn’t mistake for anything but a hospital. It smelled strongly of antiseptic, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. They had an IV stuck in her arm, adding to the aches and pains that had claimed most of her body.

Donny was dozing in a recliner next to her bed, but as soon as he heard her moving around he was wide-awake. “Feeling better?” he asked.

“Sorry about the car.” She tried to give him a contrite smile, but the effort was too much.

He waved away her words. “You’re okay, and that’s what matters. Lucky you were wearing a seatbelt. All you got out of it was a slight concussion and a lot of bruises, but you did lose a lot of blood.”

Mya was shaking her head, still confused about what exactly happened. “I was driving and I saw this deer in the road. That’s all I remember.”

“You rolled the car,” he told her. “You must have tried to avoid the deer and took the wheels too far off the shoulder.”

Mya brought her hands up to rub at her eyes. “It’s all a blur after I saw the deer … except for the guy that helped me,” she said, suddenly remembering the biker.

“I need to get out of here and get back to work,” Mya told him. Her face twisted into a painful grimace as she tried to push the blanket from her.

“Whoa … hold on there. You are not leaving the hospital until the doctor releases you,” Donny gently pushed her back down. “You do realize that I’m not completely helpless without you?”

Just then a smiling orderly knocked on the open door to her room. The young girl was carrying two vases. One was full of blue and white daisies; the other was a beautiful bouquet of white roses. “Are you Mya Reynolds?”

Even before she looked at the card, Mya knew that at least one of them would be from her mom and Steve, but she wasn’t sure about the other.

“Who sent these?” Mya asked, trying to lean over the side of the bed so she could look at the cards.

“I’ll check,” Donny offered, reaching from his chair to the table with the vases.

He looked at the card on the Daisies. “These are from your mom and Steve.” He then searched for a card on the roses, but there was none. “This one doesn’t have a card.”

It wasn’t until after he was gone that she remembered what Trent Metzger had said about his brother’s murderer. She would have to find an opportunity to talk with Donny about it, but figured it would be best to do it when she was home so they wouldn’t be interrupted.

* * *

For the umpteenth time since noon, Mya crawled out of bed and looked out the little window at Donny’s mobile home. It was only about fifty feet from the fifth wheel she was staying in on her step uncle’s property. If he’d been home, she would have been able to see a patrol car parked in front, but there was still only her Nova.

It was getting late and he should be home anytime. Mya had made her mind up to talk to him about what Trent had told her, and also about the guy on the motorcycle. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that it had been him that helped her that night. Though she was convinced it hadn’t been a hallucination, she couldn’t understand why he’d left before the ambulance got there. It was almost as if he didn’t want anyone to know that he’d helped her.

She’d been down in bed since getting out of the hospital the day before and was really starting to feel claustrophobic. The dark paneling that covered the walls of her fifth wheel didn’t help much. She had never much liked paneling. It made a room feel too dark and closed in. It was an old trailer though, and back in the seventies when it was manufactured, paneling had been the big thing.

Too restless to stay in bed any longer, she decided a shower would help her feel better. Besides, maybe Donny would be home by the time she got out. There hadn’t been any time to talk with him the day before. Almost as soon as they’d arrived home from the hospital, he’d received an emergency call and had to leave.

She was determined to talk to him today. After getting out of the shower, Mya felt a hundred times better. With a quick peek out her kitchen window, she saw the patrol car. Mya quickly dressed and walked the short distance to Donny’s place.

As soon as she was through the doorway, he motioned toward the little kitchen table. His table was more of a booth, surrounding a table that had been bolted to the floor. He’d bought it as salvage when a local restaurant went out of business.

“Have a seat,” he told her. “I was just getting ready to have some fry bread and coffee.”

Mya sat down and waited while he warmed fry bread in the microwave and poured them both a cup of coffee.

Once he was seated at the table, she broached the subject of Trent and the investigation. “When I talked to Trent Metzger, he wouldn’t give me any information. He admitted to knowing more than he was telling, but also said the police had the same information.”

Donny didn’t respond. The only indication that he’d even heard her was the deep scowl that crossed his features.

“Metzger said to talk to you … that you already had a good idea who killed his brother,” Mya blurted out before she lost her nerve.

Instead of addressing the accusation, he took a drink of his coffee. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket he wiped beads of perspiration from his forehead. “Sure looking like it’s going to be a hot summer this year.”

“Uncle Donny … what is he talking about?” Mya persisted.

“We’ll talk more when we are done with our meal,” he told her.

Suddenly Mya remembered that he hated to talk about business during a meal. In her rush to find out what Trent had been talking about, she’d completely forgotten. Adapting to a new culture hadn’t been easy, but everyday she was learning more about them. If she could just adapt to their way of life, she knew that it would make her job with the tribal police a whole lot easier.

Finally Donny left the table and started cleaning up. Mya jumped to her feet, intending to help him, but he waved at her to sit down. “I’ve got it. Why don’t you tell me more about your conversation with Trent?”

While Donny was loading the dishwasher and wiping down the counters, Mya told him about her visit with Trent Metzger, though she decided to withhold the fact that she’d gotten completely freaked out on the drive out of Red Canyon.

“Like I said … there is no proof. Even if we had any proof, actually prosecuting one of these guys would be nearly impossible, at least in Indian country.”

“What do you mean?”

Mya was confused and it showed on her face. Whenever she thought she had a handle on things, something like this would come up and she’d feel completely lost again.

Well for one thing … trying to arrest them and bring them in would be like chasing phantoms,” he tried to explain. “And like I said … you wouldn’t get a jury to convict them anyway.”

He shrugged. “I told my brother that an internship here probably wouldn’t be much use to you. What you learn here will be little help to you out there … beyond the boundaries of the reservation.”

“I know how to do my job,” Mya rolled her eyes, deeply annoyed with his attitude.

Donny’s brows came together in an angry scowl. “Girl … you need to listen up and quit being such a numskull before you get yourself killed. Detroit may have more murders and there might be a lot more drugs in the streets of L.A, but here we have things that are a lot worse. We have the devil’s highway … dark magic and skinwalkers.”

“You can’t seriously believe that!” Mya shook her head in disbelief.

A cryptic smile crossed Donny’s face. “Well if you are around here long enough … I’m sure you’ll find out for yourself.”

Realizing that he was avoiding an answer, Mya decided on another approach and changed the subject, at least temporarily. “I’m curious about the guys we saw that day … the guys on the motorcycles. Who are they?”

Instantly his features became unreadable. “I’d just as soon not talk about them,” he told her.

Frustrated, Mya jumped to her feet. “If you are going to keep secrets, it doesn’t make any sense for me to even be here. I won’t learn anything.”

Mya would never have believed Donny could be a dirty cop, but she was no longer so sure. There were too many things he didn’t want to talk about?

At first she was too stunned to say anything. All she could do was sit there and gape at him. For some reason she didn’t want to believe what he was telling her. She didn’t want to believe that the guy that had saved her life could be responsible for killing anyone.

“Who are they,” she asked again, forcing the words passed the lump that had formed in her throat.

“Who they are is not as important as what they are. You’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that they could be behind the deaths of those men.”

Mya shook her head in confusion. “Is that what they call their gang … phantoms? I’m just not getting this. Was there trouble between Ben Metzger and this gang? I mean what makes them suspects?”

“It all has to do with skinwalkers?”

Mya braced herself for another round of nonsense. She still couldn’t believe that she was hearing it from a senior officer - a detective.

“Well it is rumored that the Metzgers are skinwalkers. That would be the motive for these guys to kill Ben,” Donny informed her.

“So you are saying that he was killed over some weird belief that he was a witch?” Mya was more than just a little shocked. She couldn’t believe that these days, people would still commit murder over these types of bizarre beliefs.

Donny smiled. He appeared amused by her lack of understanding. “Skinwalkers are witches, but they are more than that. They are dark spirits that inhabit human bodies, but they could just as well be shadows, coyotes, whatever they want. They kill people and cause sickness. If a skinwalker comes after you, it means big trouble,” he explained.

“I don’t believe in witches,” she admitted. “But if the people around here believed that the Metzgers were skinwalkers, I guess it makes sense that someone might want to kill them.”

“Oh the skinwalkers are real enough,” he assured her.

Though Mya still didn’t believe it, she didn’t want to get into a debate with Donny about it. He was a traditional and had probably believed in such things his entire life; her opinion wouldn’t sway his beliefs.