Mercury Retrograde by Bickle Laura

Author:Bickle, Laura [Bickle, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE UNDERWORLD

The Sisters of Serpens were going to kill him. Cal was convinced of it. Or worse. They could come up with much worse things to do to him. They seemed to have no issues with killing, and they liked to be creative about it. That was a bad combination, in Cal’s experience.

Cal clung to the back of Bel’s motorcycle like a flea on a wolf. Wind tore through his hair, and he buried his face against her back. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see the trees zinging past at crazy speeds and close angles—this off-roading was worse than the land speeder chases in The Return of the Jedi. Cal had had a dirt bike once upon a time, and he thought that he was kind of cool because of it. Now, he realized that he’d been riding like someone who actually treasured his existence. A June bug hit him in the throat, and it felt like he’d been shot. Branches and leaves whipped past his face and slashed through his clothes.

Well, they weren’t the clothes that he’d ripped off from the uniform truck. They’d re-dressed him in one of the dead guy’s clothes. He was wearing the dead dude’s boots and his leather jacket that smelled like bad aftershave, and Cal wanted to vomit. He was acutely aware that the clothes’ original owner and his friends were currently crumpled up like broken dolls in the Sisters’ luggage.

If that didn’t make him want to barf, the ride sure did. But Cal wasn’t sure what would happen if he hurled the entirety of his four-course chuck wagon meal down Bel’s neck. If he did that, he was pretty darn sure that the hour of his demise would hasten to . . . immediately.

Not that any of this shit mattered. Bel had made it clear that he was on her magical leash. If he was beyond the reach of her pacifying power, this hypnosis, whatever the fuck she did to him, he was as good as dead.

Bel seemed to be guiding them by her own woo-woo internal compass. She would stop without warning, sit on the ground and meditate for what felt like hours, then get back up again to lead. She sure acted like she knew where they were going, and where they were going had run out of road. She led them into the wilderness, across dry creek gullies, through valleys, and among the pine trees of the deep forest of the backcountry. The park was crawling with rangers; more than once, she’d double back and take a different route to avoid the law. When they stopped to rest or eat, she’d be watching the horizon with a thousand-yard stare. Wherever they were going to meet the snake, only she knew.

Bel finally stopped at the edges of a forest, dismounting, and seeming as if she were listening to some supersonic sound that only bats and certain comic book heroes could hear.

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