Tempted by Blood. Laurie London

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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER TWO

      INTERVIEWING BLAKE AND HIS brother had been a colossal waste of time and now Arianna was late picking up her cousin. She should’ve insisted on meeting Blake at the Devil’s Backbone rather than his house. But because the site was difficult to find and was surrounded by private property, you had to know someone to take you in. Instead, she’d spent the evening trying to pry verbal information from a couple of boys who clearly were better at texting than talking in person.

      She glanced at the glowing hands of the clock on the Caddy’s dashboard. Almost midnight.

      “Come on, Krystal,” she mumbled to herself as she waited in the car parked outside the apartment building. What kind of teenager studied on a Friday night, anyway?

      Warily, she watched the fog advancing off the sound a few blocks away as it searched for low-lying spots in which to settle. In the light from the overhead streetlamps, it took on a gray-green color and, if you blinked once or twice, it was suddenly thicker. There hadn’t been a trace of fog over at Blake’s house. She worried if she had to wait too much longer, visibility would be so bad that she’d have to drive away inch by inch because her piece-of-crap car didn’t have working fog lights.

      The two-story apartment building sat at the end of a long narrow driveway less than a mile from where Arianna lived—too far for her cousin to walk home, though she did try to convince Arianna it was no big deal. Maybe Krystal’s mother would’ve been okay with that, but this wasn’t a tiny farm town in eastern Washington and Arianna didn’t have substance-abuse problems. This was the big city and no one walked home in the dark around here.

      Her fingers twitched with the urge to blast the horn, but the neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate that. She definitely wanted to avoid running up to the door—shadows were everywhere. Along the shrubs at the base of the windows, underneath the spindly birch tree in the front yard, next to the minivan parked in the driveway. In an argument repeated for years, her sensible self said this fear was unreasonable, but the memories of her five-year-old self were ingrained too deeply to forget. Most of the time, she was able to push past it—you couldn’t exactly be afraid of the dark and run a blog like Paranormalish. But tonight she felt on edge for some reason.

      She texted Krystal again: I’m still waiting. Where are you?

      Comingggggg.

      U said that already. Hurry. I’m tired.

      K. Grabbing backpack now.

      Yeah, right. Krystal texted that ten minutes ago, too.

      To kill time, Arianna opened her camera phone and flipped through the pictures she’d taken at Blake’s. Two teenage boys sitting on a couch with their grandmother’s colorful afghan behind them. Blake looking scared. His brother looking confused. She deleted some, keeping only a few of the best ones to post on her blog. Then she watched part of the video she’d taken. One boy talking. The other boy listening. Arianna asking questions off camera. Boring with a capital B. The whole interview was. So much for interesting blog content.

      She hit Delete and was about to set the phone down, when she remembered that videos were automatically saved to her cloud account, too. Carter had set it up for her in order to save memory on her phone and make them easier for her to access later. Once, when she’d been having all sorts of technical trouble with her website that she attributed to OSPRA, she took a chance and asked for Carter’s help. Since he was always bitching about Xtark—sometimes she wondered why he even stayed on with the company—she’d turned to him, trusting that he wouldn’t rat her out to corporate, and he didn’t.

      “Don’t let these bastards dictate your personal life,” he’d said. “You need to maintain some sort of control. If you want to keep something private, then you shouldn’t have to feel you’ve got to turn over your passwords or tell them about your blog.”

      “But I don’t want to lose my job.”

      He’d rolled his eyes. “Please.”

      “Carter, if they find out, I’m toast. And I kinda need this job. My bank account needs this job.”

      “Don’t worry, you won’t lose it.”

      Then he’d set up something called a proxy account, which supposedly hid her identity from snoops, as well as a cloud account. Thanks to him, she didn’t have to worry about running out of memory any longer.

      From her phone, she accessed the cloud online and deleted the boring pictures and video there, as well. With that housekeeping done, she settled back in her seat, again wishing they had explored the sanitarium, instead. Although the charred remains of the building were almost completely hidden, supposedly the ravine where they dumped the bodies of residents who had mysteriously died was haunted. Thirteen steps were carved into the side of the hill, leading to the bottom, thus the Devil’s Backbone. That place would’ve given her plenty of interesting images. Local legend said that when you got to the bottom and turned around, you could see straight into hell. Now, that would’ve been something interesting to post. But at the last minute, Blake had freaked out and didn’t want to go back.

      What did that leave her with? Zilch.

      When she met Blake, she couldn’t help noticing that he looked a lot like that kid on YouTube who’d signed a big record deal recently. Maybe she could leverage that. Tag the singer’s name, or something. She pictured the blog title: Friend of Tai Simmons Look-alike Gone Missing. That’d garner a few hits on an otherwise boring post, wouldn’t it?

      “Ari,” she said to herself, “you’re really stretching it this time.”

      She was about to set the phone down when two sets of lights blazed in her eyes, illuminating the interior of the Caddy for a moment, virtually blinding her. She held a hand up to block the light. A jacked-up vehicle with its high beams on, including large yellow fog lights, had just turned onto the street. The driver probably had no clue how obnoxious that was. Or maybe he did. Guys who drove rigs like that dug the attention—good and bad. It was swagger on wheels.

      Something darted out in front of her car. A cat. It paused in the middle of the road, staring at the oncoming vehicle.

      “Move, little kitty.”

      But it didn’t. Not one inch. The poor thing was paralyzed in place, its body a dark silhouette against the lights.

       Oh, no, the fog’s too thick.

      The Jeep probably couldn’t see it. She jumped out of the car to shoo the cat away, but before she could, the vehicle seemed to speed up, its engine revving louder. At the last moment, the cat shot into the bushes at the side of the road, narrowly avoiding becoming roadkill.

      Anger surged inside her. Clearly, those jerks had seen the cat. What kind of idiot would purposely try to run over an animal? She glared into the windows of the Jeep as it drove past, wishing her eyes were daggers. She expected to see a car full of joyriding losers—hats turned backward, liquor bottles being guzzled, but instead she saw two guys in the front seat wearing sunglasses—what the hell?—and staring straight ahead.

      They even looked like assholes. Identical ones. There should be a law against trying to run over someone’s pet. She should report them to … to … someone. Remembering the camera phone in her hand, she took a few pictures as the vehicle’s red taillights disappeared into the fog. Like that would make any difference.

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