Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta Read Free Book Online Page B

saying end of discussion. Even if it means the same thing.”
    “I love you,” he repeated.
    She leaned down and kissed him, then rested her forehead against his, and her lips grazed him when she spoke.
    “I’ll let it go. I won’t speak of it again. You don’t need it, and Lord knows, I don’t need to beat my head on the chunk of granite that you like to call your opinion. ”
    “Nasty tone, Miss Montana.”
    “Don’t call me that.”
    “Sorry. I know you were only the runner-up.”
    Usually he could get a rise out of her with this, could turn anger to laughter. This afternoon, though, she was silent. He took her in his arms, pulled her on top of him, and still something was wrong. Tensed muscles where loose ones belonged. He put his hands on her sides and pushed her back, and now it was his turn to search for eye contact in the darkness.
    “What’s wrong?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to worry about him. Whichever one he is. But it’s more than that. I just…something doesn’t feel right. I’ve been restless. Uneasy. Like something’s on the way.”
    He laughed at her then, something that he would recall over and over in the days to come, the serious weight of her warning and how melodramatic it had sounded to him there in the darkened bedroom with her body pressed to his and the cabin full of warmth and wood smoke.
    “You’ve been back to the folklore books?” he said. They were a favorite of hers, and she’d spoken countless times of her envy of those with the gift of premonitions, which was always a source of amusement to him, both that she believed in it and that she desired it. “What do you see, baby? Shade of the moon, shadow of a spider, the way the cat holds his tail?”
    “No,” she said. Her voice soft. “Nothing like that. But I feel it, all the same.”
    “I haven’t gotten killed in these mountains yet,” he said. “And it won’t happen this year.”
    She was silent.
    “Baby?” he said. “It…won’t…happen.”
    “All right,” she said. “All right.” But her tone was still heavy and somber. He touched the side of her face gently and she kissed his palm and said it a third time. “All right, Ethan.”
    He meant to ask her more then, because she was so serious. Not that she would have had answers for a feeling that rose from someplace inexplicable or primal or, hell, maybe mystical, for all he knew. She slid her hands down his chest and over his stomach and found him, though, and then any questions that were on his lips faded, first within her cool palm and then within her warmth, and later she was asleep on his chest and he didn’t want to disturb her, but he had to be out at the fire to meet the boys, so he slipped out quietly.
    They did not speak of her unease again before he entered the mountains.

6
    J ace Wilson was dead.
    He’d perished in a quarry, and Connor Reynolds needed to keep that in mind. The hardest part of the new name wasn’t remembering to identify himself by it; it was reacting when other people called him by it.
    “Connor? Yo? Connor? You, like, coherent, dude?”
    They were on the first trail day when the loud kid, Marco, started talking to him, and Jace was focused on the countryside around them, in awe of the sheer size of it. The distances were staggering. He’d hiked a lot in Indiana and thought he was familiar enough with the idea. There, though, you’d come up over a ridge and look ahead to the next point in the trail and then it would be maybe five, ten minutes until you were there. Up here it would be an hour, an exhausting, sweating-and-gasping hour, and you’d stop for a water break, turn around, and realize you could still see the place you’d started from. It looked like you weren’t gaining any ground at all.
    They were walking in a shallow gulch with mountains looming high on each side, and he didn’t mind looking at the