How to Kill Yourself in a Small Town (31 page)

I
grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back against the wall. Tried to rip her
shorts and underwear off, but my hands were shaking too bad. She shoved my
hands out of the way and pulled them off for me while I got my jeans down. I
couldn’t think, I just knew Desty would take some of it away from me.

It
couldn’t have felt good for her—she wasn’t ready, and I didn’t even think of
getting a condom to make it warmer for her—but she didn’t try to stop me. She
just kept whispering in my ear and touching my face.

After
I came I was crying. Desty didn’t tell me to man the hell up or to stop
bawling. Half of what she said didn’t even make any sense. Stuff like how it
was okay, everything would be okay. Feeling the heat of her skin against me,
hearing her tell me the stupidest fucking lies anybody had ever made up…I don’t
know what you would call that feeling. Good? Seems like a shitty thing to get
to feel after you just killed your best friend. But that was me, right?
Vamp-Whore Drunk-Ass Murderer Tough Whitney—kill your best friend, fuck the
girlfriend you cheated on last night, and call it a day.

Thank
God Mom and Dad are dead.
Thinking that tore something way down deep
in my soul that I had figured was already long gone.

Somehow,
Desty got me up to the bedroom and held me some more. I didn’t fall asleep, but
I felt every part of me shut off at the same time.

Desty

I
combed my fingers through Tough’s hair again. He hadn’t moved in more than an hour
except to blink. His body was there, but he wasn’t. Even as hot as it was in
the room, I was starting to shiver from prolonged exposure to his cool skin. I
needed to move, but I didn’t want to. I just wanted to feel him next to me and
never, ever tell him that I’d come here to break up with him.

God,
he was like a drug. As soon as I got close to him, all I wanted was to stay. I
pushed my face against his. Felt my tears turn icy-cold when they hit his
cheek.

“I
can’t do this, Tough. You got the wrong twin.”

It
felt like something started bleeding in my chest. I couldn’t believe that this
was just now becoming obvious to me. Tough and I were like a bad joke somebody
had thought up while they were drunk. The coward and the badass. The doormat
and the rebel. Ha, ha, ha.

“This
isn’t about what happened to Jax,” I said because I thought he might need to
hear it, even though Jax’s death was just one more thing on the laundry list of
crap I couldn’t handle. When I closed my eyes, I could see Colt’s face with the
gun pressed to his temple, begging me to understand that he’d never wanted to
be a murderer. “I know you’re not a killer, Tough, not really. I know
that—that—”

That
what? That sometimes, some places there’s just nothing that can happen but
violence and death?

The
screen door downstairs opened.

“Tough
Whitney?” It was a man’s voice. “You here?”

“Check
the kitchen, I’ll check upstairs.” I knew that voice—Bailey, from the Witches’
Council.

The
footsteps on the stairs shocked me into action. I didn’t have any pants or
underwear on. I pushed Tough off of my chest and found a pair of boxer briefs
on the floor. The butt didn’t fit right because they were for a guy and the
empty front hung loose, but they were better than being naked.

“Anybody
up here?” Bailey called down the hall.

Tough
didn’t help me when I rolled him onto his back, then pulled up and buttoned his
jeans. I’d just gotten them zipped when Bailey stepped into the doorway. She
had a professional vamp-hunting stake in one hand and a little cheesecloth bag
in the other.

“In
here,” I said, a little breathless and a lot late.

“Yeah,
I see that,” Bailey said. She turned back and called down the hall, “Up here,
Brandt.”

Brandt—the
man who worked at the Council with Bailey and Raelyn. The three of them were
Jax’s protectors. Had been Jax’s protectors.

“You’re
here because of Jax,” I said.

Bailey
nodded.

“I’m
not going to let you stake him,” I said, backing closer to Tough. But I could
hear Brandt jogging up the stairs. I probably couldn’t take them both and I
didn’t have any sea salt or know any other ways to disarm a witch. I probably
shouldn’t have tried to bluff, but “So don’t try” came out before I could stop
it.

Bailey
held up the bag. “Garlic. The stake is just in case he doesn’t go peacefully.”

Garlic?
Instant vamp-paralytic. All you had to do was put it in the vamp’s mouth.

Brandt
made it to the room and I was officially outnumbered. I raised my fists and
tried to stand like Coach C had showed us in PE/Self-Defense.

Brandt
put up his hands to show he wasn’t a threat.

“Tough
has to appear before Kathan,” he said. His voice was soft, sure, and safe. I
wanted to hear more. “Legally, we can’t exact revenge for Jax, but we can
petition Kathan to put down a problem vamp. You’ve got to let us take him to
the Dark Mansion to stand trial.”

Brandt
took a step closer, but he wasn’t going to hurt Tough, so I didn’t move. By the
time I realized he was using a pacification spell on me, it was too late.

“Good
job, sweetheart,” Brandt said, his voice still warm and comforting. “Now put
your fists down. You’re safe.”

If
it had been Tempie, she would’ve kicked Brandt in the balls for trying to
pacify her, roused Tough somehow, disarmed Bailey, and walked out, throwing
some smart remark over her shoulder.

All
I did was let Brandt zip-tie-cuff my hands behind me and hate myself.

Bailey
stepped around me, but I couldn’t turn to see what she was doing.

“Tough,
wake up,” I said. I couldn’t raise my voice or even make it sound urgent.
“Please, Tough, help me.”

It
sounded like the world’s shortest struggle—sudden onset, suddenly over.

Bailey
stood back and nodded at Brandt. He took a cell phone out of his pocket and
pushed the call button. “The Whitney kid’s immobilized. Bring in the coffin.”

I
let Bailey lead me down to the front room. I watched Raelyn bring in a pine box
on a dolly. The pacification was fading. I wanted to start screaming—especially
when Bailey and Brandt carried Tough’s paralyzed body downstairs. Except for
his open eyes, Tough looked like a corpse who had choked to death on that
little bag of garlic. His arms and legs hung limp and his head lolled on his
shoulders as they loaded him into the coffin.

Bailey
shut the lid and latched it.

 ”You’re
taking him to the Dark Mansion?” I asked. Holy crap, the pacification had worn
off and I still sounded calm—almost disinterested. They were loading Tough up
like a dead guy on his way to the graveyard and I was just talking. Not
screaming or freaking out or anything. “Do I have to go, too? I wasn’t here
when he killed Jax, so I wouldn’t be much good as a witness.”

They
looked back and forth at each other for a few seconds.

“Guess
you’ve got a little self-preservation in you after all,” Bailey said. Raelyn handed
her a Swiss army knife and Bailey cut the zip-tie cuffs off my wrists in two
sharp yanks. “You’re smarter than Jax was. Go.”

As
I left, I grabbed Tough’s John Deere hat and my shorts off the floor. I skirted
the white contractor van backed up to the porch and ran for Tough’s truck.

Tiffani

The
lull before the lunch rush. I leaned on the counter, looking at the third empty
booth from the door and planned for tomorrow. Maybe I would make cinnamon
rolls.

Yeah,
and then maybe I should watch some of Colt’s favorite
X-Files
episodes,
and later go hang out near Lonely’s Tattoo Parlor where I could smell the ink.
I shook my head and went back to wash some dishes while there weren’t any
customers. What I needed to do was wait out the sun and go eat someone.

Mitzi’s
connection opened and I looked at the clock.

What’re
you doing up?
I asked.
It’s not even noon yet.

All
this traveling is playing hell with my circadian rhythm,
she
said.

You’ve
been in Nashville for almost two months.

Well,
now we’re headed back to Halo.
She sounded pissed.
Your
stupid little experiment’s running amok and Jason wants to get to him before he
gets us.

I
put my hands under the hot water.
Experiment?

Tough
Whitney, Loaded Gun,
she said.
He found out that Carpenter kid
helped Jason steal his voice and then he killed him. Snapped his neck, Jason
said.

Damn
it.
This
was exactly the sort of thing I should’ve seen coming before I made Tough, but
I’d been so caught up in the idea that he could get Colt away from Mikal.

Yeah,
great job,
Mitzi said.
Now Jason’s got it in his head that he
needs to get up there and stake Tough before Tough kills him. Naturally, I
couldn’t stay in the ‘Ville and get some fucking sleep, I have to come do
Jason’s heavy lifting because Tiffani the Genius—who, if you’ll remember, swore
she was never going to make anybody, ever—picked the one kid who’d been kicked
around the playground for too long and sent him to school with a machinegun.

I
had to work not to grind my teeth.
If we’re throwing blame around, how about
the vamp who couldn’t just say, “I don’t love you, Tough?” You had to be a
bitch about it.

I
told him the truth,
she said.
If Tough couldn’t handle just
being a sex toy, he never acted like it.

Don’t
bullshit me, Mitzi, I watched.
It still pissed me off to
think of Tough sitting there on her bed, his cheekbones flushing dark red while
he tried not to cry and Mitzi told him he could get the hell over it and do his
job or he could get out and she and Jason could find another desperate piece of
shit who needed their protection.

I’m
surprised you can even hear me from way up there on your high horse,
Mitzi
said.
Saint Lover-boy would’ve jumped you in a heartbeat, but you kept
stringing him along, fucking vamp-groupies and dreaming about Bible-thumper
tattoos.

A
plate snapped in my fingers. Mitzi thought that was hilarious.

Maybe
you should look him up now, Tiff. After a month with Mikal, he probably knows
more kinky shit than I do.

I
stopped myself from yelling at her over the connection. Remembered that Mitzi
looked half my age, but she was at least twice as old a vamp as me. She had
enough control over her speed and strength to make me look like a newborn.
Taking me out would be nothing to her and I wasn’t ready to rot in Hell yet.
Not when I’d just gotten a second chance with Colt.

I
fished the broken pieces of the plate out of the sink and threw them in the
trash. Shutting off emotion was something I had perfected long before I got
made. Over the years, only two people had gotten close enough to trip me up and
Mitzi wasn’t either of them.

I
could feel Mitzi rolling her eyes at me.

You’re
no fun anymore, Tiffani.

I
never was.
I turned the water off and hung the washrag over the edge
of the sink.

Damn
Tough and Jax. This was what happened when kids played around with powers they
didn’t know how to use—they stirred up shit kids shouldn’t be messing with. I
dried my hands.

What
time do you think you guys will get in?
I asked Mitzi.

We
left Nashville an hour ago.
She let me look through her eyes, but all
I could see was the velvet-cushioned custom interior of the trunk of Mitzi’s
car.
Sundown. Maybe a little later.

Let
me know when you get to town,
I said.

Are
you going to warn my prey, Tiffani?

Probably.

Good,
Mitzi
said.
I like a challenge.

Colt

Solid
blackness. I couldn’t move or breathe. Screaming was coming from everywhere, a
lost, raw sound. In the darkness, at the edge of the screaming, something was
waiting. I felt myself start to panic. I needed Mikal. If I did or said the
right thing, she would stop this. She would let me out of here.

“Shit.
Really?” Ryder. “Wake your lazy ass up, Colt.”

My
eyes came open and my lungs started working again. The screaming faded to a
tolerable level and I realized it had been coming from the holes Mikal’s
essence left in my brain.

I
was laying on the floor with the .45 by my hand. No magazine.

Ryder
was sitting on the coffee table, twirling the bottle of Southern Comfort around
by its neck the way he always used to when he was drinking.

“Did
I pass out?” I asked.

He
blew out a disgusted breath.

“Figures,”
he said. “I get stuck being the fucking external hard drive for a computer that
don’t even stay on.”

I
pushed myself up. I wasn’t hung over. Didn’t feel like I’d been knocked out.
There was a towel on the floor, so I’d taken a shower and then…then what?

“Dammit,”
Ryder yelled. “We’re getting nowhere like this. You can’t even fucking remember
the last six hours? How the fuck am I supposed to work with that?”

“Bitch
about it some more,” I said, standing up. “That should help.”

He
snorted.

“Dickwad,”
he said.

“Asshole.”
I went to the bathroom, grabbed my jeans off the back of the toilet, pulled
them on, and came back. I nodded at the SoCo bottle. “So, you going to drink
that whole thing yourself?”

Ryder
picked it up and stared at the label for almost a full minute.

“Fuck
it,” he said.

Then
he tossed me the bottle.

Suddenly
I was at the head of our army with Tough and Sissy, leaning on Ryder for
support. Not twenty feet away the farmhouse was burning. I could hear the fire,
smell wood smoke and burning plastic. Sweat soaked through my shirt, but I
couldn’t feel the heat. Blood rolled down my leg from the bullet hole above the
knee—the reason I had to lean on Ryder—but I didn’t feel the pain. The whole
day had been too surreal to feel anything. Four years of fighting over with in
less than an hour. The angels had just come in and ended it. How the hell did
you even get your brain around something like that?

Movement
in my peripheral forced me to look away from fire. A foot soldier kicked Dad to
his knees in front of Kathan.

Kathan
was going to execute Dad, but Dad just looked relieved. Like he was going to
Mom, so there wasn’t anything to worry about anymore. Not even us kids.

I
could feel the black noise in my throat, swimming up my spine into my brain. I
wanted to scream for Dad not to leave, to fight, to do something so he could
stay and help me—somehow he had always helped Mom—but what if I started
screaming and I couldn’t stop?

“Shh,”
Sissy whispered, even though Tough wasn’t making any noise. She had him tight
against her side and she kept rubbing his arm. “Shh.”

Then
Mikal appeared beside Kathan and the lines did, too. Differently colored halos
surrounding NPs and strings stretching between them or arching up and out of
sight. Kathan glowed like a black light, but Mikal’s power was the most
spread-out—a bloody web connecting red spheres. She reached into the sphere at
her hip and pulled out the flaming sword.

I
tried to tell Ryder about the lines, but he grabbed the back of my neck and
banged his forehead against mine.

“Get
your shit together, Colt.” His whisper was so sharp that it shocked the black
noise into silence. “You’re scaring Tough worse and if they see that you’re—”
Ryder choked on whatever he was going to say. Squeezed my neck with both hands
like he wanted to strangle me. Then he let go and he tried to smile. “Come on,
Sunshine. I fucking swear I’ll make it up to you, just keep your shit together
until this is over.”

Then
it was night. I was starting a fire while Sissy and Tough set up camp. When
they finished, Tough dropped onto his pallet as if he was dead. Just one more
decapitated corpse.

Sissy
quit moving. The breath whistled through her broken nose. She was going to cry.

“Um—”
She pointed over her shoulder. “Perimeter.”

I
nodded, but she was already going.

I
rolled up my pants leg and pulled the makeshift bandage away from my knee—the
hole was finally clotting. I covered it back up.

For
the longest time the only thing I could do was stare into the fire, trying to
remember the words to one of Mom’s songs. Something something,
I
need
this
done, I need some help, I need a gun,
Something something,
I
want to fight, I want to die, Find some light—

When
Ryder came back to camp, he was whistling. Never mind the dirt and blood and
ashes on his clothes from dragging Dad’s body out from under the pile of what
used to be our army and digging a grave all by himself. He held up the
bottle—Southern Comfort.

“Who
came through for you, Sunshine?” Ryder said. “This motherfucker right here.”

Then
he tossed it to me.

The
SoCo smacked the back of my fingers and rolled under the coffee table. I was in
the cabin again.

Ryder
snorted.

“Nice
catch,” he said.

“Where’d
you get it?”

Ryder
stared at me with his mouth open for a second. Then he straightened up and
rubbed his hands together.

“Hot
damn hallelujah,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

“That
first night,” I said. “Where’d the booze come from?”

“A
little birdy gave it to me when I went back for Dad’s body,” Ryder said. “Mikal
heard you before I could get you to shut the hell up. She told me it would
help.” He looked like he wanted to apologize, but he just shrugged. “It was
still sealed, but I figured even if she had poisoned it somehow…well, fuck, at
least it would kill us.”

Something
in my chest tried to expand, tried to tell me that Mikal had given Ryder the
SoCo because she’d been worried about me, because she had loved me even back
then and she didn’t want me to suffer, but that wasn’t right. I could feel that
it wasn’t.

“What’d
that castoff say?” I had been coming out of the tattoo parlor when I walked
right into a castoff taking swigs from a gas can. “He said something like,
‘Broken minds can see the lines.’ He looked right at me and said it like he
knew I could see them.”

Ryder
nodded. “Now, back to the booze. Mom didn’t drink. Start there.”

Mom
hadn’t drank since before she left her band. Something to do with a close call.
An overdose? Or maybe alcohol poisoning…

“Wrong
way, Sunshine,” Ryder said. “Try again.”

Mom
didn’t drink, but I did—every single night starting with that very first one by
the fire—because at around two shots in, the black noise backed off and the
glowing lines got dim. At fall-down drunk they disappeared altogether.

“Mom
heard the black noise, too,” I said. “She could see the lines, but she didn’t
drink, so she couldn’t shut it off. That’s why Mikal killed her—because she
could see the lines.”

Why
were the lines so damn important?

 “Colt!”
Someone rattled the cabin door, then backed up and put their weight into it.

I
got to the kitchen just as Grace tripped into the table. A pair of black boxers
stuck out of the left leg of her jean shorts.

“They’re
taking Tough to the Dark Mansion—I’m sorry about this morning, Colt—I’m so
sorry—but he killed Jax—and I tried to drive up here, but the truck died in the
creek bed and—”

I
grabbed Grace’s shoulders and made her stand up straight so she could catch her
breath.

“Slow
down,” I said. “Someone killed Jax?”

“Tough.”
She took a long, ragged breath and let it out. “The Witches’ Council is taking
him to Kathan. They want to stake him—stake Tough. Please help.”

“Stake
him? Tough’s a vamp?”

Grace
looked confused.

“Yeah,”
she said. “He wanted to get you away from Mikal, so he—”

“Shit!”
I kicked one of the chairs and it clotheslined itself on the table. Tough was a
vamp, damned to Hell for eternity because of me.

“Leave
it to that dumbass to pick the only fucking wrong way to do it,” Ryder said.

“Son
of a bitch.”

“Colt.”
Grace grabbed my hand and made me look into her eyes. “I need you to stay with
me right now. They want Kathan to stake Tough because he killed Jax. He needs
your help.”

I
blew out a long breath and nodded. “Yeah, okay. Let me get a shirt.”

Grace
waited while I grabbed my Lucky shirt, put on my shoes, and grabbed the .45.
The magazine was on the floor—full, so I hadn’t shot anybody while I was
blacked out. I tapped the mag twice on the grip, then slid it in.

Ryder
laughed.

“I
forgot you did that OCD shit,” he said.

“Me,
too.” I shoved the .45 in the waistband of my jeans.

Grace
followed me out of the cabin and headed for the creek. I jogged down to the
shed.

“Where’re
you going?” she yelled. “Colt!”

Ammo.
Backup magazines. Semtex. Timers. Det-caps. What else?

Grace
was standing behind me.

I
nodded at the arsenal.

“Do
you know how to use anything?” I asked her.

“No.”
Then she stopped. “Well—” She held up her fists. “—I can do self-defense
stuff.”

Not
if she thought that was how you made a fist.

“It’s
okay,” I said. “New plan. Go get the truck. Put it in first and ease it up the
bank. Don’t gun it and don’t shift, even if you start sliding. When you get up
here, back it up to the shed.”

Grace
took off running.

I
was forgetting something. I could feel it. My “Resist or Serve” tattoo burned
like someone had dragged dry ice across my chest. I tried rubbing it, but it
still stung like hell.

“It’s
going to be bad, Sunshine.” Ryder was sitting on the Semtex crate. “I can’t
help you once you’re inside the Dark Mansion. If you go back to that bitch, you
ain’t ever going to be right in the head again.”

“Yeah,”
I said. “Because I’m the picture of mental health right now.”