Read Online Shadow Season by Tom Piccirilli - Free Book Online

only a half inch from his nose, so intense and demanding that he rears his chin back. Fuck. He forgets how quickly she reverts to the woman she used to be, the one working all the action.
    “Was it Vi?”
    “I told you, it wasn’t Vi.”
    “Jesus, another one?”
    “Nothing like that. A holler girl. Twelve or thirteen. She was hurt. I found her unconscious in the graveyard.”
    “God damn it, Finn—”
    “You listening? She was hurt.”
    “What were you doing back there? You know you shouldn’t go walking on your own with a storm breaking.”
    As they often do, they talk at cross-purposes. Five years they’ve been together, and they’ve never been able to get through a conversation without heading off on some kind of fucked-up tangent. “Forget that, Roz. Her name is Harley Moon.”
    “What’s that?” Her breath squeezes from her. “Moon?”
    He relates everything that Harley said to him. What she told him and what she implied. He knows he’s not doing a good job of showing how concerned he is because Roz is tsking now. It’s a trait she’s picked up from Judith, and it really crawls up his ass. He’s just not getting his point across.
    “What was she doing out there?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Who hit her?”
    “I told you, I don’t know.”
    She tosses the empty wine bottle in the trash. “Well, she couldn’t have been too bad off if she left on her own. Did she make a play for you?”
    “Not every teenage girl has a crush on me.”
    “That’s a precarious position to take, Finn. Okay, I’ll rephrase the question. Did you touch her?”
    “I carried her inside.”
    “Did you touch her?”
    He knows he deserves this, but Jesus Christ.
    “No. This girl was hurt and scared.”
    The answer actually seems to calm Roz a bit. “But she didn’t say why.”
    “No.”
    “Maybe she was running away from some aggressive boy.”
    “Maybe.”
    “Or she didn’t want to catch a beating from her father. You know how these holler families are.”
    “Yeah. But she didn’t want me to call the cops, and she didn’t want to come to the school to get in from out of the blizzard or get her head looked at.”
    The tsking again, hard and flat. “They don’t trust the police any more than city street kids do, and they don’t trust outsiders like us, no matter how long we live in their backyard.”
    “I know, you’re right,” he says, and closes his lips on any further response. “She calls this place the Hotel.”
    “They all do. They always have.”
    “They’ve got long memories.”
    “Everyone does.”
    Maybe she’s talking about him, or herself. Either way it’s true.
    “She knew about us,” he says. “That we’re together.”
    “So what? We’ve been up here in the sticks for three years. We’re sort of an open secret.”
    “Even to the townspeople?”
    “Sure, I suppose. Why not? They don’t care enough one way or the other.”
    “Not like we move in the same social circles. I’ve never said more than two sentences to any of them.”
    “You’ve never said more than two sentences to just about anybody, Finn.”
    Roz reaches out and runs a hand through his hair, brushing his curls back, covering his scars again. She rests her palm on the side of his face and rubs, like she’s trying to scour lipstick smears away. She’s telling him something in that touch but he has no idea what. He knows it’ll come to him, later, when he least expects it, in the night or in the middle of class. Something will click and it’ll all come together, and he’ll think, That’s what it meant.
    He should let it go, but he can’t. The girl has stirred the cop in him, gotten him buzzing. “Harley said someone’s thinking bad thoughts about us.”
    “Bad thoughts? About us?”
    “An ill will, she said.”
    “What’s that even mean?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Does it even matter? They’re all fucking nuts out here. Crystal meth has taken over this valley in a big bad way. Could she have