Read Online Something Magic This Way Comes by Sarah A. Hoyt - Free Book Online Page B

of country boys from Carolina—
    Charlotte, that is—vacationing on the wrong coast. An ocean’s an ocean, right? The waves at Myrtle Beach can get pretty nasty, too. How much different could it be out here? Ten-Speed’d been coming to Orygun (that’s how the locals say it) every damn year since he was a kid. And he knew how to surf better’n anyone.
    My beer was empty, too, so I flung it toward the sound of the surf and hopped up to grab another. The beer was cheap and tasted a bit rancid, but there was lots of it, so why not? Ten-Speed always said that part of the fun of vacations in Oregon was that you could drive out onto the beach and get drunk off your ass.
    Maybe not at every beach, but at least at Sea Cove, you could. And Ten-Speed was the Oregon guy, right?
    So there we were, three good ole boys getting drunk off their asses.
    The beach was empty except for us, ’cause it was two, three in the damn morning, and nobody else with a lick of sense was out there. The shore was a good hundred feet away—or at least Ten-Speed said it was.
    The moon went missing, so I couldn’t see shit out that way. Something big and black loomed there, slinging enough salt into the air that it stung my throat and made me thirsty just taking a deep breath. Whether it was the damn ocean or Bigfoot, I had no idea.
    Ten-Speed’s daddy’s ’74 Ford Bronco with the cutoff top idled nearby, spitting sparks out the tailpipe every five minutes like clockwork, just after it made a weird choking sound, stalled and sputtered for a few seconds before catching again all by itself. Like a damn possessed car.
    As I snagged another cold one off the ice chest on the open tailgate, the Bronco started to stall again, right on time, and the lights flickered off, throwing the homeys into the dark—again—and then the headlights blazed, blinding everyone but me, and the Bronco idled normally—again. Burning oil wafted along behind me as I trudged back to the group, dripping freezing water on my salt-sticky legs as I went.
    We sat on a couple of huge, rough logs, each one about four feet thick and filled with enough chewedup sharp edges to make a guy start singing like a choir boy. They were stuck in the damn beach javelin-like, angled up into the air like huge tent stakes that’d been left behind after the Jolly Green Giant got done camping here. If we’d been thinking, we’d’ve wondered how they got there.
    “Shit,” Jimmy Teeth said, spitting in the sand and flashing his famous overbite. “Ain’t no lighthouse, Speed.”
    Jimmy Teeth wore denim cut-offs and sandals, nothing else. His high school varsity letter days still showed in his muscles, which he took every opportunity to flex, so nobody’d notice his teeth. He had short blond hair and beady little blue eyes—and these huge front teeth, like a damn rabbit, about as white as you could get without glowing in the dark, and the worst overbite his dentist’d ever seen. Even after two tries at correcting it, Teeth still had an overbite any rabbit’d envy.
    Ten-Speed launched a half-full can of beer at Jimmy’s head. “It’s freakin’ there,” he yelled, beer spewing out the back to soak Ten-Speed’s throwing arm, but barely spattering Jimmy as the can sailed over his ducked head and plonked into the sand behind us.
    Ten-Speed looked mad, which in the dimming lights from the Bronco, was damn scary. Speed was already going bald at nineteen, and his forehead was looking bigger than ever. His dark red hair started way up at the top of his head—well above his hard, green eyes— and continued way down the back, past his shoulders.
    He always wore a muscle shirt everywhere, even at home, always in the water (he claimed he burned crispy in the sun), even though he didn’t have the damn muscles to fill it out. We were on the beach, so he had on long swim trunks, the kind the California boys wore when they weren’t surfing. Black and white high tops dangled from his bare toes as he