Wicked Prayer by Norman Partridge Read Free Book Online Page A

head.
    It was too late, now, for avian warnings from above. But like Dan Cody, and like Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin, the Crow didn’t have a whole lot of give up in him.
    The bird circled lower as Kyra Damon went about her nasty business with the Mountain Clan Crow knife. Its dark eyes gleamed like tiny black diamonds as it saw all there was to see, and then some.
    The Crow watched as the remorse-challenged killers piled the bodies of Dan Cody and Leticia Hardin into the trunk of the cherried- out ’49 Merc. It watched as the killers tossed a blood-soaked bouquet of roses on top of the corpses and laughed.
    It watched as Johnny Church slammed the trunk and picked up the resin-encased scorpion that Leticia Hardin had thrown through the trading post window, and it watched as Church thunked that scorpion paperweight on top of the Merc’s dashboard like some obscene souvenir.
    And it watched as demon taillights flared alive, and exhaust coughed up a phlegm of brimstone, and the death car roared away from the silent parking lot and into the desert night.
    Not much was left behind to tell the tale.
    Bloodstained cement, and broken glass, and broken dreams,
    Sand scorpions.
    They crawled over gravel and cracked asphalt, scurrying like a fistful of shadows.
    The Crow swept down and trapped a shiny black arachnid in its talons. The scorpion squirmed and stung, but the Crow was impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
    Swiftly, efficiently, the Crow crunched through the tiny predator’s chitinous exoskeleton, sucking dark poison as if it were vintage bordeaux.
    The poison tasted good.
    It tasted like vengeance.

 

     

     
    Three miles north of Scorpion Flats, Arizona

     
    The ’49 Mercury didn’t look like a hearse. Not at all. But with two corpses locked in a trunk painted the color of spilled lamb’s blood, that’s exactly what it was.
    Kyra Damon knew that. After all, she’d helped Johnny Church put the corpses in the trunk. Now the cowboy and his little Crow maiden rested beneath a gleaming shroud of Detroit steel, two corpses curled atop a plastic drop cloth that prevented their all-too- human blood from leaking onto the spare whitewall tire.
    Lovers locked in death’s own embrace. A man and a woman, baptized in each other’s blood, their cooling lips separated by an impossibly long inch.
    Those lips would never touch again. Not if Kyra Damon had anything to say about it. But the Crow was another story. Kyra knew all too well that the bloody tableau locked within the Mercury’s trunk was the Crow’s favorite meal. The bird fed on carrion. It drew sustenance from the death of the innocent, the fucking scavenger. Kyra and Johnny had played right into the black bird’s twisted little claws when they’d killed the cowboy and the Indian at the Spirit Song Trading Post.
    Johnny had pulled the trigger, but that didn’t matter. Kyra was the brains of the outfit. She knew that, even if Johnny was a little unclear on the concept.
    She was the one who had messed up, and messed up good. I might as well have set the two lovers on a checkered tablecloth for the Crow’s midnight picnic, she told herself sarcastically. Tossed in some candles and a bottle of sacramental wine, while I was at it.
    And then there was dessert; the wedding ring the cowboy had bought for his lady. A real unfulfilled promise. The perfect motivation for vengeance . . . and resurrection.
    Kyra sighed. Yeah, it was a full-course meal, all right, but there was no use crying over spilt blood. There was no way to turn back the hands of time and play the game again. What was was. Fate had forced Kyra’s hand, and the same eternal commodity had forced the death of both Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin and Dan Cody. The way Kyra saw it, in hard black and white, she’d had no real choice in the matter.
    If she were to fulfill her vision and steal the Crow’s power, then she had to have Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin’s eyes.
    The eyes