When no one appears, she grabs my arm again and pulls me toward the corner, her eyes darting everywhere.
“Are we about to get murdered?” I ask.
She nods. “Maybe. We’ve got to get somewhere safe. Now.”
“Shelby. Stop. What the hell is going on?”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot child. “The turkeys are coming.”
16.
“The…turkeys?”I ask.
But then I remember Nick saying something about them—
It’s the turkeys you will learn to fear.
As if on cue, I hear the distinctive sound of a turkey gobble. The big birds round the corner with the confidence and lethality of a phalanx of mafia bosses. One huge tom turkey, two more husky gobblers that seriously look like his lieutenants, and at least twenty gurgling ladies.
I have only ever encountered turkeys wrapped in plastic and removed from the freezer to defrost in an aluminum pan. But let me tell you now that a male turkey is about four feet tall and four feet wide, and when his eyes lock on you and his face furiously engorges with blood and he runs right at you with his wings flapping madly, your brain will tell you you’re living in the velociraptor scene ofJurassic Park.
“What do we do?” I shout, because it seems like a reasonable time to shout.
“Run!” Shelby shouts back, and then two grown women arehauling ass to escape a bunch of bloodthirsty gobbling brown dinosaurs.
I can hear them clucking and calling, hear theclickingof their awful talons, imagine the rasp of their beaks as they charge behind us.
“Faster!” Maggie shrieks from the backpack, which really gets me moving. A turkey might hurt me a little, but one could outright kill her. This could be the beginning of the world’s most expensive and tragic turducken.
We’re almost to the street corner when the passenger-side door of a parked truck flies open, blocking the sidewalk.
“Get in!” someone says, and Shelby doesn’t hesitate. She pushes me up into the waiting truck, and I don’t even think about who or what is inside it. I dive in and scoot over with the backpack in my lap, only to find myself on a bench seat, pressed up against…
Hunter Blakely.
Shelby slams the door, and something hot and wet slurps up the side of my face and into my ear. It’s the black Lab I noticed when Hunter was driving away from the alley, and I can already hear his tail thumping.
“Hello to you, too,” I say, reaching back to rub the dog’s sleek black head.
“Bongo, c’mon,” Hunter says. “Give the poor girl a break.”
The dog immediately backs off, although I can hear his feet tapping excitedly on the black leather back seat.
I’m turning back to thank Hunter when something splats against the window—a turkey, trying to get inside. Then another and another, battering the door with their massive bodies.
“They’re aggressive re-nesters—it’s like a second matingseason for the hormonally imbalanced,” Hunter explains, as if this excuses it.
“Those dang Coves wouldn’t let us in at the toy store,” Shelby complains, fixing her hair in the mirror.
A turkey jumps up on the hood of the truck—one of the smaller females, thank goodness. Another one lands in the bed. Hunter turns and reaches past me to slide the back window shut, and my face is smashed nearly into his armpit. It’s not nearly as horrible as it sounds. His deodorant smells like rain in a forest, and once the window is closed, he leaves his arm along the back of the seat, almost sort of around me. Our eyes meet for a brief, electric moment, and my heartbeat kicks up as I fight the urge to snuggle into him.
“Gotta be careful,” he says, resettling—but not moving his arm. “Some of the smaller ones might actually make it inside, and I wouldn’t want you to get pecked to death.”
At the wordpeck,I can only think about his lips. They’re so close—
“Get out of this truck right now!” Maggie screeches from the backpack in my lap. “You will not consort with Blakelys!”
“There are worse ways to go,” I murmur, leaning into him.
