Bad shit was coming down. Nick was the world’s greatest expert on bad shit. He had a sixth sense for it, and right now his Bad-Shit-O-Meter was way, way over into the red zone. And Charity was right in the middle of it, whatever was going to happen.

He took another swig, a long one this time.

Charity, in danger. The thought made his skin crawl, burned his throat, squeezed his chest until he thought he’d choke.

Nick tipped the bottle up, chugged. But there wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to drown out the image of Charity hurt, wounded or—God! — dead.

Charity, with her pale, delicate skin. She’d once told him that her family had lived in Parker’s Ridge for over two hundred years. Nick believed it, absolutely. It would take at least two hundred years of breeding to get that perfect skin—smooth as porcelain, except no porcelain on earth had that pearly sheen. Every time he touched her, he was scared shitless he’d bruise her. After a while, after he touched her gingerly, she’d laugh and put his hand on her breast. Or pull it down between her legs.

Nick lay back on the filthy bedspread, naked, half drunk from the bad whiskey and the good memories.

Charity was soft all over, but she was softest between her legs, with the sweetest little cunt he’d ever fucked.

Nick groaned, looked down at himself through slitted eyes. He was hard as a pike, with nowhere to go with it.

This was new for him. He rarely beat the meat. He didn’t have to. When he was on a mission he was too busy trying to save his ass to think about sex. And when he wasn’t on a mission, well, half the world was female, after all, most with all the right plumbing. Lop off the under eighteens and over fifties, then lop off the dogs and you were still left with a world full of women to fuck.

Right now, for instance, he could be in bed with the waitress in the dingy diner where he’d eaten a cheeseburger. Or the checkout girl where he’d bought the whiskey.

He could have more or less any woman he wanted. He could dress and drive down to the tavern he’d seen five miles down the road. Half an hour after walking through the doors, he’d have company for the night, guaranteed.

He didn’t want anyone else, though. Just Charity.

His hand dropped down, fisted around his cock.

He sucked in his breath between his teeth and thought of her. He gave an experimental pull with his fist, then opened his hand immediately. His hand was calloused, rough. The exact opposite of the softness of Charity. His cock refused his hand, simply rebelled. He didn’t even try another stroke, just let himself go and lay on his back, naked, hard, and aching.

He didn’t want to be here, in this musty room smelling of hundreds of traveling salesmen jacking off and two bit whores selling twenty-five-dollar blow jobs.

He knew where he wanted to be. With Charity. In her lovely little house that smelled of lavender and lemon polish and the scented candles she continually lit.

He wanted—so fiercely he thought his heart would beat its way out of his chest—to turn the clock back.

He lay on the bed until gray light started to fill the room, then got up and dressed. He’d worn the same clothes for three days running now. They were rumpled and smelled of sweat.

He walked down the stairs to the lobby. Basic tradecraft: take the stairs if you’re undercover. Fewer people will see you and you won’t be trapped.

He’d paid the night before in cash, so he could walk right out without being stopped. He waited until the guy behind the desk was busy checking in a family of five, then slipped out the front door.

It was a cold day—gray and sleety. The cheap nylon parka he had on barely mitigated the cold. He felt chilled down to his bones and not just because of the weather.

When he was behind the wheel, Nick started the engine and drove to the feed road into the interstate where he’d been yesterday, braked, and idled.

If he turned left, he’d start the journey back to D.C., where he was already in a world of trouble for not showing up. Right was back to Parker’s Ridge. It would be crazy to go back to Parker’s Ridge, of course. If anyone recognized him, he’d blow the mission. Instant FUBAR.

Nick sat in the car, watching the exhaust rise like smoke in the rearview mirror. Even wasting this much time was criminal, a career buster.

Fuck it.

He gunned the engine and headed right, straight for Parker’s Ridge.

Parker’s Ridge

November 29

Charity lifted her head when she heard a car drive up the street outside her house, the sudden movement making her nauseous. She swallowed the tickle of bile, knowing from experience that bile was the only thing she could throw up. The only things she’d been able to choke down—half a dozen crackers, a glass of milk, half a peach—had come right back up again.

That she couldn’t eat didn’t surprise her. She could barely breathe. Sleep was almost a forgotten concept, which was for the best. When she did manage to nod off, she would wake up immediately in a cold sweat. Her dreams were filled with images of flaming cars flying off a mountain, explosions, and charred bones. Her nightmares were incredibly vivid, down to the smell, which would remain a part of her forever.

Charity had insisted on going to the coroner’s office to identify Nick. The sheriff and the coroner both had told her that visual identification was impossible and so she was exonerated from viewing the body. What remained of the body.

Something, some Prewitt concept of honor, made her insist on seeing the remains, overriding the sheriff’s and coroner’s wishes. At one level, she wished with all her heart that she’d listened to them. Nick’s charred remains had been enough to make even the coroner wince.

What had been laid out on the autopsy table bore no relationship to a human being—it was simply a collection of blackened bones, some cracked open to the marrow, laid out in a terrible facsimile of a human shape.

Blackened skull on top, the flesh burned away, baring Nick’s mouth of perfect teeth in a macabre grin. The coroner had arranged all the bones in the anatomically correct positions, except for the right tibia, which had never been recovered. It left a blank spot in the sooty sketch of what had once been a human being.

The sheriff clutched her elbow, hard, in case she fainted.

Prewitts were made of sterner stuff than that, though. She didn’t faint and she didn’t break down. Whatever she felt was to be saved for the privacy of her own home. As she gazed at Nick’s remains, she could feel her own face, stiff and expressionless.

She’d stepped forward, away from the sheriff’s hand, and approached the table.

The sheriff had said that it wasn’t necessary to view the body, but it was necessary.

She had to stand witness for Nick, let him leave this life under a loving gaze. She was his family. He had no parents and no siblings, just like her. They were each other’s family and this was the last thing she could do for him.

Fate had stopped her from bearing witness for her parents. She never saw them again after the night of the fire, not their bodies, not their coffins. She didn’t attend their funeral. By the time she woke up from her coma, her parents had been in the ground for two weeks.

So she was determined that she would stand by Nick in the only way she could. If his spirit lingered anywhere near his broken, burned body, he would know that she stood steadfast by his side, no matter the cost to her.

She didn’t regret it, not once, though what she’d seen would, she knew, forever color her nightmares.

And until the end of time, on her deathbed, she would smell that terrible stench of charred bones and burnt flesh.