Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3) by Susan Fanetti Read Free Book Online

But Pilar was feeling some kind of lack all of a sudden. It was perverse.
     
    After a night spent wrestling those dark thoughts, Pilar nearly threw her phone out the window when the alarm chimed at five-thirty in the morning. She was tempted to pull a pillow over her head and try to sleep in, but she knew the danger in that. Screwing with her sleep schedule on her off hours only made her slow on her on hours. So up she got on this last off day, her mood dark and stormy.
     
    As usual, she jumped up and grabbed the pull-up bar she had installed in her bedroom doorway. She did her fifty, and then, feeling more awake if no more content, she headed to her bathroom to get her morning started.
     
     
    ~oOo~
     
     
    Her phone rang as she was towel-drying her hair. Draping the towel over her shoulders, she walked nude into the kitchen and checked the screen. Her grandmother. Pilar knew she’d leave a message if it was something important, so she stood at the counter, in the beam of the sun streaming through the bare windows, and waited.
     
    When the alert came up, she checked her voice mail. Call me, mija . Hugo didn’t come home last night.
     
    Fuck. Hugo was her younger brother. Their grandmother called him a troubled soul. Sure, that was one way to put it. Half the slim piece of life she didn’t spend at the barn she spent bailing her brother out of trouble.
     
    Pilar returned the call, and her grandmother answered immediately. “Oh, thank goodness.”
     
    “What’s up, Nana?” She put the phone on speaker and poured herself a glass of tomato juice.
     
    “I’m worried, mija. He didn’t come home, and he’s not answering his phone. He came home from work last night and barely said anything to me. Just changed his clothes and left again.”
     
    Hugo worked in at a distribution center for an online retailer, loading boxes onto trucks. It was a decent job, and with his long history of short time on jobs, he’d been lucky to get it. Their grandmother had pulled some favors. Pilar expected Hugo to shit on that soon enough. He took obnoxious advantage of their grandmother, and he had from the time he was just little.
     
    Renata Salazar was their mother’s mother. Pilar and Hugo had different fathers, both of them bangers, and both of them dead. When, twenty years ago, the drive-by shooting that killed Hugo’s father also killed their mother, Renata had gathered up her grandchildren and moved them to Madrone. She’d worked three jobs to put them in a decent house in a safe neighborhood and keep them fed and clothed. Consequently, Pilar had done a lot of the raising of Hugo.
     
    And she’d done a piss-poor job of it.
     
    He was twenty-five, five years younger than she. Despite the move they’d made to get them clear of the gangs, and despite their grandmother’s hard work and strong will, Hugo was constantly on the precipice of repeating the mistakes of a father he barely even remembered. He hated to work, he loved to party, and he was always scamming for the easy buck, the easy high. He was buddies with some of the younger bangers in their fathers’ gang, the Aztec Assassins. He wasn’t a member, but it was a standing question whether he would be.
     
    By the time he got through high school, actually managing to graduate and still not in the Assassins, they had both thought they’d gotten him through the tough part. But they’d been wrong. It was forever going to be the tough part for Hugo.
     
    She drank down her juice and sighed. “Okay. I’ll check around for him. You know if he’s been talking to any of his asshole buddies in particular lately?”
     
    “Don’t swear, mija .”
     
    “Sorry, Nana.” Pilar rolled her eyes. “Has he been?”
     
    “No. He’s been doing good lately—just going to work and staying home with me. I don’t know what happened yesterday.”
     
    It could be any of a number of things—somebody he owed had come looking for payment, he’d fought with his boss, he’d