Wicked Prayer by Norman Partridge Read Free Book Online

like I’m Buffy the fucking Vampire Slayer or Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I can’t just wiggle my nose. These things . . . take time. Energy. A subtle alignment of supernatural forces. A certain quietude of surroundings—”
    “Yeah, well, quietude of surroundings —or whatever the fuck they call it on those New Age meditation tapes of yours—is a little luxury we don’t have, Ky. This place may seem like a secluded piece of nowhere, but I’ll tell you this: in the desert, sound travels for miles. Screams travel, too. So do gunshots. You can bet your boots that the local Eastwood will hop on his horse and slap leather mighty quick, little missy.”
    Kyra stared down at the knife. Johnny Church may not have been right about a lot, but he was right about this. There was no time to attend to the Crow bitch now.
    “We got us a job to do,” Johnny said. “We’re burning moonlight.”
    Kyra didn’t say a word.
    After all, they did have a job to do.
    “Shit, would you look at Hopalong Cassidy?” Johnny said with an amused snort. “Appears our cowboy’s still got some giddyup, after all.”
    Kyra stared at Dan Cody. She had to hand it to the bastard. While she and Johnny were talking, the wounded man had started crawling toward his raggedy-ass Jeep.
    The cowboy didn’t have a whole lot of give up in him.
    Kyra thought it over while the man bellied across the parking lot. No question about it—they’d have to locate an undisturbed place where Kyra could cast a spell of protection on the woman’s corpse. That meant they’d have to take the Injun bitch’s body with them, in order to prevent the Crow from resurrecting the dead woman.
    Kyra smiled, realizing that a spell for two wasn’t any more difficult than a spell for one. The cowboy could come along for the ride, no problemo. The Merc’s trunk was big. Plenty of room for two in there.
    Kind of a sweet little ending for these star-crossed lovers, actually. Kind of romantic, death and fate and heartaches of the eternal variety. Just like Romeo and Juliet, if Shakespeare could be believed. . . .
    At that moment a sparkle of reflected moonlight caught Kyra’s eyes, and she noticed the wedding ring on the pavement at her feet.
    She bent low, scooped it up, and showed it to Johnny.
    “Our cowboy’s sure no big spender,” Johnny scoffed. “Hell, I’ve got tongue studs that cost more than that ring.”
    Kyra nodded. The tiny diamonds embedded in the ring sure didn’t look like stars fallen from the night sky. But something told her that she should keep the wedding band, and she slipped it in the pocket of her leather coat.
    “Well?” Johnny asked. “What’s the plan?”
    Kyra pursed her black lips. “I see it this way—the girl’s dead, and we can’t have a wedding just for one, can we?”
    Johnny grinned. “That just wouldn’t be Christian.”
    “So I reckon we’d better do the Christian thing, then.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Bury them . . . together.”
    Johnny Church raised the .357 and set his sights on the cowboy’s back.
    “You wouldn’t shoot a cowboy in the back,” Kyra said. “You wouldn’t do that, would you, Johnny?”
    “Forget all that code of the West bullshit, babe,” Johnny said. He cocked his pistol.
    “Welcome to the new millennium, buckaroo.”
    A second later a shot rang out, and the echo was lost in the wide silence of the desert.
    Dan Cody never saw death coming.
    It was better that way.
    Better that he died while inching painfully toward life, even if he was crawling on his belly.
    And there was the end to a dream, summed up just like that.
    It might have ended this way, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere.
    It might have ended this way, except for one thing—a Crow that circled high in a midnight expanse pierced with gleaming stars. Not at all patient, that Crow, but silent ... its mournful caw trapped in the hollow bones of its chest like the three words that had been locked in a dead cowboy’s