Bad Company (Avery's Crossing: Gage and Nova Book 1) Read online

  It wasn’t just the drugs. At least, I didn’t think so. There was something else going on, some shift in my mind.

  Everyone in the room, including me, looked hollow. Not because I could see inside them, but because they didn’t seem to have anything inside. They were emptier and flimsier than cracker boxes with all the crackers gone.

  Most of them had known Jer, at least a little. Had they forgotten him already? Didn’t they remember how he’d died? But it didn’t matter to them. The only thing they cared about was getting their next fix.

  Violet tottered after me as I walked my hollow ass through the drug-addled crowd in the living room. She was chattering about giving me the time of my life. I ignored her, heading for the bedrooms.

  They’d given me my own room, but when I got there I found a guy and two girls, a blonde and a brunette, in the middle of my king-sized bed. Naked. They made a kind of erotic pretzel, all twined together.

  My detachment vanished in an instant, replaced by rage.

  Two naked females twined together was the kind of sight that would once have turned me on. Now it just made me fucking furious. They were in my private room, for fuck’s sake.

  One of the girls lifted her bleached blond head and smiled, her eyes glazed and unfocused. She was definitely on something. “Hey, Gage. Wanna join us?”

  “No. Get out of my room.”

  The guy glared at me over his shoulder. “We’re in the middle of something here.”

  “Get the fuck out of my room.”

  He buried his head between the brunette’s thighs, making her giggle loudly. I growled and kicked the bed frame.

  “What’s your fucking problem, bro?” the guy snarled.

  “You’re not my bro. Now get out of my room!” I gave the bed another kick for emphasis.

  “Jesus. All right. Just chill out.” He levered himself off the bed. “Come on, girls. We’ll find another room.”

  I glowered at them until they’d hauled their naked asses off my bed and exited the room. Guess I could’ve packed up while they were getting each other off, but it was the principle of the thing. They had no business taking over my room for their fuck party.

  I grabbed my overnight bag from the closet floor and started stuffing laundry in it. Most of my shit was still in the bag because I hadn’t bothered unpacking. It made for a nice, quick exit.

  “Gage?” Violet minced over to me and got down on her knees in front of me, reaching up to stroke my dick through my jeans.

  I flinched back. “Knock it off.”

  “But don’t you want me to? I’d love to make you feel good.”

  “Violet, do us both a favor and get away from me. I’m not in the mood for this today.”

  She pouted again. Maybe she thought it looked seductive. It didn’t.

  “I’m starting to think you don’t like me,” she whined, clambering awkwardly to her feet.

  Bingo.

  I carried my bag into the bathroom. “Just having a bad day.”

  “But I could make it better.”

  She could never make anything better. Not for me. There was zero chance of him taking Violet.

  “Vi, I’m trying to be patient, but I’m running out. Don’t push me or you’re going to see a side of me you won’t like.” I shoveled my shaving kit stuff into my bag loose, letting the shaving cream and razor and toothbrush and all the other related junk land randomly on top of the wads of dirty clothes inside.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “Away.” I stalked past her, through the bedroom and into the hallway.

  Nobody else seemed to notice when I walked out the front door. My bodyguards were probably in the kitchen, where they’d hung out for most of this party. They didn’t see me leave and I wasn’t about to tell them I was going. I wanted to be alone.

  I’d rented a red Porsche. It was sitting off to the side of the driveway at the end so I wouldn’t get blocked in by all the other guests.

  Driving high as I was could not be a good idea. Oh fucking well. I was going, high or not. I tossed my bag in the back and slid into the driver’s side. Just as I shut my door, Violet staggered out of the house.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, gunning the engine.

  I backed out and peeled off without acknowledging her. It was best not to encourage her. She’d probably try to invite herself into the car with me, and I didn’t think I could take several hours trapped in a sports car with Violet. One of us would end up dead.

  Chapter 5

  The Road

  Gage:

  I needed not only to get away from that crappy house party but to get somewhere I could spend the night. No way did I want to sleep all crammed into the Porsche, so I needed to make good time and get my ass into Eugene, the little Willamette Valley town which had the closest real airport.

  The highway climbed rapidly into the Cascades and with the change in elevation the landscape became wetter and greener. When I crossed the pass and descended the western slopes of the range, the air went from dry enough to desiccate the inside of your nasal passages to moist and fragrant with the scent of the forest. I’d entered another world where evergreen trees so dark they were almost black pressed thickly against the edges of the road and underbrush—ferns, grass, bushes I couldn’t identify—completely hid the ground.

  A gloomy forest that even the bright whiteness of the new snow couldn’t lighten. In my ugly mood, the terrain seemed ominous. Haunted.

  It went right along with the haunted atmosphere inside the car. You wouldn’t think a Porsche could feel that way, would you? Well, it can. Something invisible had hitched a ride in my passenger seat. And I didn’t know how to kick it out.

  I snagged the bottle of Scotch from the passenger seat—it was sitting on my invisible guest’s lap—and tipped it to my mouth. Yeah, I know. Drinking and driving. All I can say is my brain was partially off-line due to lack of sleep and all the shit I’d already put in my body.

  I was making one stupid decision after another.

  The booze put a warm glow back into me, a mellow haze that further distorted my thinking. I felt looser, more relaxed, not so pissed off about the party. The Porsche swooped around the curves of the road like a bright red bird, and in my mind I was flying. When I hit a patch of ice and spun sideways, I just threw back my head and laughed. The green-black forest whirled around me as my car did a one-eighty in the middle of the highway.

  I was lucky there weren’t any other cars on the road that day.

  I pointed the car in the right direction again and drove off, a bit more slowly. Didn’t want to end up at the bottom of a cliff, after all. Even if my haunting friend wished I would.

  Fuck him. I wasn’t going to make this easy for him.

  My stomach started to ache. Normally I don’t get stomach pain with alcohol unless I drink myself into oblivion, and I wasn’t that drunk. Maybe I was just hungry. There weren’t many places to stop for food on this lonely mountain road, though, and I hadn’t brought anything with me.

  A few flakes whirled out of the sky and hit my windshield. Then a few more. They grew fatter, faster, closer together. The Porsche had no snow tires, but that was okay. I was a good driver and I felt fine except for the nausea building in my stomach.

  I really needed to stop somewhere and get something to eat.

  Up ahead and to my right was a big wooden sign directing me to Mountain Magic Lodge and Cabins. Painfully corny name, but they’d have food at a lodge, right? I swerved into the narrow drive, the car fishtailing as I headed down a steep hill.

  The car slid all the way down the slope and into a smallish parking lot, where it performed a gentle one-eighty. An empty parking lot. The log-cabin style lodge, which turned out to be kind of small and run down, looked empty too, its windows dark. A handful of shabby cottages clustered around it like they were huddling in for shelter.

  I cut the engine and got out of the car, swinging the Scotch bottle by its neck. A thin layer of unbroken s
now, marred only by my tire tracks, covered the lot. Nobody had been here for a few days at least.

  Crunching through the fresh snow, I wandered across the open lot and around the side of the lodge building with the vague idea that someone might be hanging out in the back. All I found back there was a sad little concrete patio that overlooked a gray and angry looking river. There wasn’t a lot of space between the patio and the river, which made me wonder how often it flooded in the spring.

  The patio, I mean. Did the river water rise high enough to flood that postage-stamp patio?

  It wasn’t flooded at the moment, though, and I had a drunken desire to get a closer look at the water. Plus my bladder was yelling at me to take a piss and I didn’t want to make yellow snow right here at the back door of the lodge. That would be in serious bad taste.

  I took another slug of Scotch before wending my way through some stiff evergreen ferns to the water’s edge. Boy, that water looked cold and fast. It would probably get a lot higher before summer came.

  The invisible guest watched me from some distance away. Don’t ask me how I knew this. I could feel it. He was somewhere behind me, not too close, not within reaching distance. Just watching. I would have flipped him off, but pissing seemed more important at the moment.

  I started unbuttoning my jeans, but I fumbled, my fingers refusing to cooperate. For some reason, they seemed kind of stiff and uncooperative. Or maybe they were too loose. I couldn’t make up my mind.

  Either way, they couldn’t seem to get a grip on my pants.

  I stared down at the metal button for a moment, looking at it through the white clouds of my breath. It seemed strangely far away for the waistband button of a pair of jeans. Almost like it belonged to someone else. The ground beneath my feet seemed to waver and slide away from me, tilting unpredictably. No wonder I couldn’t get my pants open, with the ground moving like that.

  Carefully I bent down and set the bottle in the snow. My vision gave this weird lurch, as if the whole world had tried to up-end itself. I straightened even more carefully, trying to keep the dizziness under control, and wrestled the button out of its hole. Good job. Now the zipper. Zippers were easy. No prob. Just a straight shot down the fly.

  I shifted my weight. Something about the movement made me pitch forward. I flailed, throwing my arms out to catch myself. But the ground under my feet gave way, sliding down and forward into the water. My hand slapped against the icy trunk of a young tree and slid, scraping my palm without giving me any purchase.

  Fuck.

  I had only an instant to register what was happening. The water hit me like a blow, the cold stealing my breath. It closed over my head.

  I bobbed up again, broke the surface, tried to get a look at the bank. All I could see was tossing gray water, spinning gray sky. I captured a lung full of air and then the water swallowed me again.

  Something slammed into my skull. The shock reverberated all the way down my spine. Everything went black and I disappeared.

  Chapter 6

  The River

  Nova:

  Winter was here already. I glanced out the window and confirmed that—yep—it was really snowing. Most of the stuff falling from the dull gray sky was rain, but there were snowflakes sprinkled in for a bit of variety.

  What did they call that stuff? Sleet, I thought. Snow mixed with rain.

  We’d had some snow already, but most of it hadn’t stuck. It melted as soon as it hit the ground, or maybe lasted overnight and disappeared by noon the next day. Only an inch or so had stuck around so far. But I had a feeling this stuff was going to be here for a while. Good thing I had plenty of well-seasoned firewood to last me through the winter.

  Speaking of, I needed to make a quick trip to the woodpile.

  A few minutes later, I’d put on a scarf and gloves and a hat to keep the sleet out of my eyes. I didn’t have any fancy carriers for the wood, so there would be multiple trips to and from the woodpile before I’d stocked up the house.

  I opened the back door. A man stood there, watching the door as if he were waiting for me. I jumped, stumbling back a step.

  He was tall and skinny. He wore a flannel shirt but no jacket and no hat. His dark blond hair was long and lank, but it wasn’t stuck to his head with wet, so he couldn’t have been outside for very long.

  “I’m sorry if I scared you,” he said, his voice pleasant and respectful. “I need your help.”

  This was weird. I lived on a narrow side road that wasn’t especially easy to see from the highway. It wasn’t the kind of place people found by accident, so how had he ended up here?

  I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. “What for?”

  “My friend fell in the river. I need your help to pull him out.” He pointed through the trees toward the McKenzie.

  “I’m not that strong,” I said. “Maybe I should call someone to help you.”

  “A call would be a good idea,” he said. “But you need to go down and pull him out right now. He’s almost gone.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. It could be some kind of trick designed to get me to let down my guard. Maybe draw me away from the house for whatever nefarious plan he might have. On the other hand, what if his friend really had fallen in the water? In this weather, he’d only have a few minutes before hypothermia killed him.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said to the blond.

  Shutting the door on him, I locked it and went for the pistol my dad had given me. From now on, I was wearing it in the waistband of my pants. Just in case. I’d carry it openly at the moment, though, so Mystery Man knew he couldn’t screw with me.

  Armed, I reopened the door. The blond guy was standing right where I’d left him, like he hadn’t moved a quarter inch. He glanced at the gun in my hand, but said nothing. All he did was turn on his heel and walk toward the river.

  The water was already high, even though it was early in the season, not even officially winter yet. We’d had an extremely wet fall this year. The river, sweetly refreshing in the summer, seemed resentful now as it bullied its way through stands of pussy willow, wild currant, and salmonberry that were high and dry in June.

  The blond pointed toward the water. “There he is. See him?”

  I peered through naked branches. There was something floating in the water, some large and bright red object that seemed to be caught on a partially submerged sapling. I wouldn’t have picked it out as a human form if this guy hadn’t told me it was his friend. From here, it looked like a vague lump that could just as easily have been a chunk of garbage someone had tossed into the current so they wouldn’t have to pay to take it to a dump.

  But as I drew closer, I could see it wasn’t garbage. It was a man.

  He floated face up in the gray current, his dark brown hair swirling restlessly in the restless water. His skin looked so pale it was almost blue, and that made me shiver. There was something unreal about the sight of him, like it belonged in a movie instead of my boring real life.

  He wore a red jacket and blue jeans. How long had he been in the water? He might be dead already.

  My guide had dropped back as I got closer to the bank. I turned to ask him how his friend had fallen in, but he was gone.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Aren’t you going to help me get him out?”

  The only answer I got was the barely audible shushing sound of the increasingly thick snowfall. Where had the guy gone? I couldn’t even see his tracks in the snow, although mine were clear. My whole scalp prickled as I stared around myself in bafflement. He couldn’t have simply disappeared.

  Yet that seemed to be exactly what he’d done.

  I checked the safety to make sure it was on and stuck my pistol into my coat pocket. Wherever he’d gone, I still had his nearly drowned friend on my hands and no-one to help me rescue him. Taking a deep breath, I plunged into the icy water of the river.

  Holy hell, it was cold. The kind of cold that stops your lungs and sends a burning ache right int
o your bones. I gritted my teeth and waded through the thigh-deep water toward the man.

  His right sleeve had caught on a branch of that partly drowned sapling, and that was what had saved him from being drawn back out into the main current. Instead he was floating in this tiny backwater behind my cabin, looking almost peaceful, his features starkly beautiful, like those of a statue. Or maybe he just looked dead.

  I swallowed heavily as I reached for him. If he was dead, it would be the first time I’d ever touched a corpse. I probably would have been a lot more scared if it weren’t for the unbelievable cold of the river and the urgent hope that I could save this guy I’d never seen before.

  My hand met his face. It was almost as cold as the water. I didn’t have time to check for a pulse, so I grabbed his arm and tried to yank the sleeve free of the branch that had taken it hostage. The thin fabric of his jacket tore. His body began to drift out toward the center of the river.

  “Shit! Don’t do that,” I said. As if he could hear me.

  I grabbed his arm with both hands and pulled him toward the bank, leaning and using all the strength in my body to guide him against the force of the current. And praying all the while that he was still alive and I wasn’t dragging a corpse.

  We reached the shallow water at the bank’s edge and I walked backward onto solid ground. My body instantly felt about a hundred pounds heavier without the buoyancy of the water. How was I going to get this guy, who looked to be at least six feet tall, up the slope to the cabin?

  In a desperate burst of energy, I hauled him out of the river. He lay on the muddy snow of the bank with his face up to the falling flakes, which settled on his pale skin and melted. At least they weren’t sticking. Didn’t that mean his skin still had a little warmth in it? Or maybe it was only the river water clinging to him that was melting the snow.

  I pressed my fingers lightly to the side of his neck, trying to find a pulse from his carotid artery. There it was, faint and frighteningly slow, but steady. He was still alive.