BUT THE TRUCK DIDN’T MOVE.
I waited, shivering in Kaz’s arms, for the engine to turn over. Off to the west of the office park I saw a bobbing, flickering light. Someone had had the sense to find a flashlight before running. Good for them-they’d be glad to have it when the moon went behind a cloud.
After several long moments, the passenger door opened and Prairie got out, carrying Chub. He was sleeping soundly, loose as a rag doll in her arms.
“Get out, hurry,” she said. “I need you to hold him.”
“What about-”
“Rattler’s taken care of.” Prairie cut me off, flashing me a quick, humorless smile. “Come on, Hailey, that trick you pulled with Maynard?”
“What-”
“You’re not the only girl in town who can do that,” Prairie added. “Only I did it with a kiss.”
I imagined how it had gone: Rattler, alone with his love at last, Chub sleeping between them. Rattler, unable to wait, stealing a kiss before he took her home to start his new empire.
The determination and loathing I’d glimpsed, which she’d kept coiled and hidden all through her ordeal, bursting free, coursing through her body into his. Intensified by the blood bond between them, the eternal attraction of the Banished.
“Hurry,” Prairie urged, and Kaz and I scrambled out of the truck bed. I took Chub from her and hitched him up on my shoulder as she leaned back into the truck and rooted around behind the seat.
When she straightened, she was holding one of Rattler’s guns-the smaller one, which still seemed plenty big to me. It looked at home in her hand and I realized that I’d never asked her if she knew how to shoot.
She seemed to read my mind as she gestured at Rattler with the gun. He was slumped over the steering wheel, his arms limp at his sides. “Who do you think taught me?” she asked, her voice as hard and cold as steel. “Him and Dun Acey. First it was BB guns in the woods. Didn’t take long to move on from there.”
She took aim and I almost stopped her, because I was remembering the photo in the room Rattler had prepared for her: two skinny kids playing in the creek. The look of longing on his face as she sparkled and danced in the sun. He’d been a dangerous and reckless child; he’d grown into a dangerous and twisted man. But he had loved her always and that love refused to die.
He was my father, but he’d never loved me. Only one woman would ever shine for him, and every terrible thing he’d done since I met him, he’d done for her.
That was my last thought before she shot him.