Pay Dirt by Chris Underwood

Author:Chris Underwood [Underwood, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-05-10T22:00:00+00:00

19

I stared at Stuckey. He had to be mistaken. I’d only seen him that one time, on that school trip, when I was one kid among three dozen. And that was years ago. There was no way he remembered me.

York strode past me into the room. Behind me, I could feel the sharp eyes of shotgun lady boring into the back of my head.

There was no menace in York’s face, but Stuckey shrank away from him anyway. He backed up until he hit the desk, then stood frozen as York approached.

“I didn’t catch that,” York said to Stuckey. “What did you say?”

Stuckey didn’t meet his eyes. “N…nothing.”

“Nothing,” York said flatly. He glanced toward the cultist leaning against the wall next to the cursed man. The cultist just shrugged.

York turned to me. “Ozzy?”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Stuckey trembling, but I kept my eyes fixed on York. “He said, ‘Who are you?’ Guess I don’t fit in with the rest of you folks.”

York’s milky eyes narrowed a fraction. He turned back to Stuckey.

“I’ll deal with you in a moment,” he said, before looking back at me. He gestured to the cursed man. “Well?”

I shot one last glance at Stuckey. Here he was. The answer to all my questions. If anyone knew where Holden was, if anyone knew who had killed Habi, it was Stuckey.

But I couldn’t talk to him. Not with York hovering over me. I ground my teeth in frustration.

I had to figure a way out of this mess. We were in a garment factory, not a prison. It couldn’t be that hard to escape. All I had to contend with was the mob of armed fanatics and their boss who could apparently walk through witch’s fire unharmed.

Piece of cake, right?

I turned my back on Stuckey and moved to the cursed man. His eyes flickered beneath his eyelids. Sweat beaded on his pallid flesh. Scratch marks from his own fingernails traced bright red lines across his cheeks. There were bite marks on his forearms above the oven mitts taped to his hands.

I glanced at York, wiggling my bound hands behind my back. “You mind?”

He paused. “If you try any heathen tricks—”

“Torture, death, etcetera,” I said. “I heard you the first time.”

“Just so we’re clear.”

He nodded at shotgun lady, who drew a disconcertingly large knife from somewhere. She grabbed my wrists roughly and sliced through the duct tape binding me. My fingers tingled as blood rushed back to them. I clenched and unclenched my fists a few times, then crouched down beside the cursed cultist.

Without my kit I wouldn’t be able to definitively diagnose the curse. But I had a pretty good idea what Early was and wasn’t capable of. As a general rule, the old man didn’t go around cursing people. It wasn’t really the cunning man way.

But Early wasn’t sloppy. When he did something, by God he did it right. This was no exception. This guy wasn’t going to be sleeping this curse off. This was a death curse.

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