I swore under my breath, slid across the seat and put boots to dust.It was time to pick a few flowers.
And when Lula noticed, oh, the smile she gave me.
With our hands full of asters, we walked back to the truck.
Wildflowers were everywhere now, in Lu’s hair, woven in a chain around her slender wrist, hanging bundled from the rearview mirror.
It was late morning and warm enough, I was trying not to nod off.
“It stinks here.”Abbi wriggled, her elbows digging into my thigh and arm as she propped up on her knees.
I grunted.
She sniffed at the dashboard and the muggy air pushing through the vent.“Do you smell it?The stink?”
I yawned and brushed my fingers across Lula’s bare shoulder, her skin a wonder of silk.I had spent too many years un-bodied as a spirit, unable to touch her, to not want to touch her now I was solid again.
Lu glanced over, a rise of eyebrow.
“I don’t smell anything,” I said.“Just New Mexico in September.”
Abbi shifted, and Hado, currently sleeping across her shoulders, mewled.
Lorde, our black chow chow shepherd, propped her head on my knee.
I scrubbed behind her ear, and she made a happy growly sound.
“It’s not New Mexico,” Abbi said.
“It is,” Lula said.
Route 66 meandered across yellow grassy plains dotted with lava rocks and short, sturdy juniper trees.Sandstone outcroppings scalloped the blue sky uninterrupted by clouds.
“Iknowwhere we are but the smell...”She sniffed and wrinkled her nose.“Something I don’t like.”
“Is it a healthy vegetable?”I asked.
Now the wrinkled nose was pointed my way.
“No, it’s...”
A wall of darkness screamed across the horizon, rushing toward us with avalanche force.
“Hell,” I said.“Lu?—”
“—God!”
That was all the time we had.
CHAPTERTWO
The darkness grew impossibly large, swallowing the road, the land, the state, and us in one gulp.
Lu must have stopped the truck, slammed on the brakes.She must have killed the engine because I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t feel any motion.
We weren’t driving.We couldn’t be.
The darkness barreled past us, trapping us in a tunnel of black, a massive, endless undulating serpent.
