Just a dream,she reminded herself. But she’d felt the bullet rip through her chest, saw the smoking gun in Lahn’s hand drop to hang beside her swollen belly. Witnessed her parents’ disappointment and disgust as they looked at her dying and wished her dead. Derrick, her Derrick, had pulled Lahn into his arms as her heart had leaked blood. The world darkened.The dark consumed everything and everyone except Lahn and Derrick. As it crept over Derrick, it transformed him, and in his place was Sheriff Stillwater, looming. As the darkness erased Lahn, the sheriff took the gun from her, raised it, and shot Lauren in the head.
She’d jerked awake upon impact. It was just a dream, yet she still wanted to scream in despair. That emotion didn’t recede into the darkness, didn’t burn away in the soft morning light, it wove poisonous thorny vines around her heart and squeezed every time she remembered her family, every time she thought about wanting love. She felt it, felt the poison, felt her heart dying.
Peeling the sheets off her damp body, she stood as rage and bitterness flowed through her.
Maybe nightmare Derrick was right, maybe she was simply not built to be loved the way she saw others being loved; maybe the way she loved fiercely was too much.
For no rational reason, her eyes teared up again. She yanked her bonnet off her head and tossed it onto the nightstand.
It was okay to be alone in this world. It was okay to be the disposable one when she had the fucking strength to handle whatever came her way. She didn’t want to believe that the very family who’d encouraged and praised her for being strong would consciously wait for the right moment to come along, then show her how weak she truly was.
How could they hate her so much?
What had she ever done but love them and be there for them?
Looking around a bedroom that wasn’t hers, she grew more pissed. They’d reduced her to being homeless, rootless, in a small town with a stereotypically incompetent sheriff who had the unmitigatedgallto throw her over his shoulder like a sack of feed and lock her in jail.
She’d acted to protect herself, yes, but she wasn’t the one who was in the wrong. She wasn’t the one who’d endangered the well-being of others. No, that person got to move on with her life untouched by consequences, uncaring of the hurt she caused.
She began to choke up again.
“I wasn’t the one to do anything wrong,” she resolved, fighting tears. They thought she should just accept their betrayals; and that old White lady and asshole sheriff wanted to make her feel like she was the problem and should just go gently into the night.
Fuck that. Mess with her and she was messing with them right the fuck back.
Stomping over to the window, she lifted the blind to see if the pig of a sheriff was still out there trying to intimidate her. She wished it was medieval East London, and she had a chamber pot of her own piss to throw out the window onto his head. And when he arrested her, this time she’d go willingly, satisfied that he’d be wearing the stench of her hot piss.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t there.
Of course he wasn’t there, he was probably somewhere having breakfast with the mayor after kissing the powdery ass of Veronica Archer.
Sighing, she scanned up and down the street. Black wrought iron lamp posts still had flames flickering inside their glass. A last dance before the sun took its rightful place.
Shrouded Lake was quaint, if you overlooked the signs of wear and tear. Some buildings looked abandoned, while others, like the bed and breakfast, were well maintained. This place was stuck between realms, between decay and rebirth. She’d be long gone by the time it determined its destiny, but looking up at the fog enshrouded mountains, she felt a calm that reminded her that there was beauty here, that there was something bigger than the inhumanity of people.
A sheriff’s car passed the bed and breakfast, and though Sheriff Stillwater wasn’t in the car, a surge of anger burned away what little peace she’d reached out for. She was done being the bigger person, at least for a few more hours, she promised herself, walking toward the bathroom. Before she left Shrouded Lake, she was going to find a way to make a certain law enforcement officer regreteversmacking his heavy-handed fingers against her ass.
Santiago jolted awake sensing he was in acute danger.
He cocked his head, listened for anything out of place, anything that signified a threat. For two minutes he held. Silence and solitude cajoled him into believing he was safe, and he relaxed. Flopping back on his mattress, he rubbed coarse palms over his face.
What the hell was that?
Memory fragment, tail end of a nightmare, someone breaching the veil, trying to coax him to the opposite side of life again?
He sighed.Hell, could’ve been anything.
Just like he’d learned to manage the chaos of his early life through militaristic examples of discipline; in the last two years of civilian life, he’d learned how to diminish the effects of the unrelenting demons he’d brought home after decades of combat. He was learning that if he couldn’t solve or erase a problem in real time, he did it through ritual and ceremony, or through the portal that was his dreams.
Other than that, he didn’t have time to worry about shit he didn’t have control over. If a problem presented itself, he dealt with it. A certain thick-assed shrew was a prime example of thatfact…even if his way of dealing with her was outside his normal character.
He’d driven around town longer than he’d intended last night, just to get the hellion out of his mind. He ended up joining his deputies in breaking up a brawl in the parking lot of Wild Ridge Bar, but inevitably, when he was alone, his thoughts always returned to her allegations of incompetence and unfair treatment toward Veronica Archer.
Just like with the grandmother, Santiago had let Andy Archer go with a citation and order to appear. Except for Clyde Mason, he’d allowed all the other combatants to go back into the bar to do whatever the hell they did in there or go home, because getting into a fistfight was a regular Friday night activity at Wild Ridge Bar. Clyde though, the little shit, chose to pull a gun instead of taking a few punches like everyone else. Now he was cooling his heels in the jail.
Santi stretched and winced.
There was a time when wading into battle was an adrenaline rush. When pain followed, it was embraced as a testament to one’s ability to survive another day. Sitting up in bed—muscles stiff, joints creaky, head throbbing...because who the fuck punched him upside the head—all he wanted was an easy day, a calm day, a day where he could check in with his staff, catch up on paperwork, and if the spirits found him worthy of a blessing, have an afternoon nap.
