Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves by Quinn Connor

Author:Quinn Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

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Nothing good usually came to the door after midnight, but someone pounded on the door again, urgently, and Mitch staggered to it. He heaved at the knob. Cassie looked ready to set fire to the world, her dark eyes wide and wild like two screaming mouths. She must have stumbled through their woods to get here, crashing down the hill from the RV to the Grand Destiny and his small house behind it. “What is it?” he asked anxiously. Her hair billowed around her in fretful, undone ribbons. Her pale nightgown glowed under the lights from the Destiny sign, rippling around her knees. She wore a pair of unlaced boots underneath. “Your mother? Or—” Bolt? What brought a bee from her hive in the darkness?

She braced a hand on the doorframe. “I don’t know what to do,” she managed.

Mitch wrapped an arm around her. She felt as hard and brittle as quartz. “Here.” He led her inside before pausing to watch the night for a moment. The dim lights of the closed motel shone in front of him, but the air around his house was still. He went in after her, locking the door carefully.

She shook her head and stared at him, eyes welling with sudden tears. She’d carried a whiff of smoke inside with her. “My bees.”

“Your bees?” Mitch forced himself still. “Tell me.”

“I don’t know why I live here,” she snapped, stumbling into the kitchen. “I don’t know why anyone lives here.” She crumpled at the tiny rickety table that never wanted to stop wobbling, no matter how many times he fixed it. The light overhead barely reached beyond her.

Mitch joined her at the table he miniaturized with his presence. There was a reason he always had his coffee standing in front of his linoleum counter. Cassie dug her hands in the grain of the table, her shoulders trembling minutely. He felt his hands tremble in time. “Cassie…” Bees grew sick; hives fell to disease all the time. But somehow, he knew that wasn’t it. “What happened?”

“Two of my hives were destroyed.” She wrapped her arms around herself, face raw with pain. “Blown up.”

Fury blew through him. “It was those teenagers,” he growled. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice. They’d been dancing with fire all summer, and now the red water had got in them somehow and driven them to it. “The lake does this to people. These damned kids. Damn it!” He braced himself against the refrigerator, trying to rein his emotions in. Chiding himself. This was selfish. This anger was easier than feeling the devastation rolling off Cassie in waves. He took several long, slow breaths.

Cassie covered her face, shoulders heaving when she breathed. “I spent so many years trying to make something good here, and I don’t know why. It’s not a good place, nothing good can grow here.”

Mitch couldn’t quite speak. She had seen something when she was young. What Cassie hadn’t told him herself, Mitch had heard from the circle of mothers gossiping in the school office all those years ago.

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