When Devils Sing(61)

Jack’s offer of a mutually beneficial relationship rang clear in her head as she eventually drifted off to sleep.



* * *



THE NEXT MORNING, Sam woke slowly. Her eyelids heavy. She crawled out of bed, shifted the nightstand from in front of her door, and stepped into the hallway, stumbling into the bathroom. Once she was done, she returned to her room. Yawning and stretching like a cat.

It was then, as she tilted her palms upward, she realized she felt no pain in her left wrist. She turned her hand every which way, poking and prodding her skin. There were no bruises, nothing swollen or abnormal. The doctor had said it would take several months for the fracture to heal. But it had only been a few weeks, and there it was, as clear as day: her mended wrist. It was as if there had been no fracture at all.

Sam padded over to her window, hesitant. The curtains swayed slightly, blowing gently in the morning breeze. A bluebird sat on the tree branch outside her window, putting on a show for the sunrise. Her lock of red hair was gone. In its place on the windowsill sat something else.

A small, bloodied bone picked clean of flesh.

She examined the bone but knew little of anatomy to understand what she was looking at. She couldn’t even confidently say it wasn’t human.

“What the fuck!” Clayton’s voice rang from outside, followed by Bailey’s high-pitched scream.

Sam scurried out of her room and outside. She found her roommates standing in front of the hickory tree that stood before their single-wide. Warm, bright sunlight filtered through the branches of the tree, casting the land in a soft glow.

“Who’s fucking with me?” Clayton questioned, his masculine bravado faltering. His thick fingers wound through his light brown hair, while Bailey covered her face with her hands. They were looking at something dangling from the hickory’s branches, but Sam couldn’t see from the porch.

“What’s going on?” she asked as she took the steps by two.

Bailey turned toward Sam, her face fixed in a grimace. She collapsed into Sam, still in her pajamas, and threw her arms around her neck. “It’s awful, Sammie. It’s so awful.”

Sam pushed Bailey’s bleached hair out of her face, looking past Clayton’s glaring expression. Dangling from their fully grown hickory tree was a gruesome sight. It took Sam a breath to understand what she was looking at—a bloodied raccoon trapped within the grip of a swollen cottonmouth viper. Both animals were dead, arranged in a deliberate display of gore from the tree branch.

Untangling herself from Bailey’s grip, Sam stepped closer, trying to make sense of it all. It was as if the animals had been frozen in place, the raccoon half-eaten by the snake, and hung from the tree. Dark, nearly black blood dripped from the raccoon in a steady rhythm on the grass, pooling beneath.

Then, Sam realized the raccoon’s left wrist was missing, the bone cut clean off from the rest of its arm. The same bone that now sat on her bedroom windowsill.





CHAPTER 24NEERA





Neera woke to a phone call from Isaiah. With the dusty curtains drawn tight in Room 4, she had no sense of the time of day. Darkness hung heavy in the room like a physical thing. Fumbling for her phone on the nightstand, she realized it was barely past seven in the morning. It’d only been a matter of hours since she made the deal with Crow to better her life—to better all their lives.

And it was only a matter of hours until the Cicada’s Song. Their fates would be sealed by how she fared onstage that evening.

On the twin bed across from her, Kiran ground her teeth in her sleep. The sound was anxious and grating against Neera’s fried nerves. Tiptoeing into the bathroom, she shut the door and answered the call.

“Hey, Isaiah,” she croaked. Despite brushing her teeth until her gums were raw the night before, her mouth still tasted of dirt and the faint memory of blood. “What’s up?”

“I looked into Blind Bucks last night,” Isaiah said on the other end. There was a noticeable absence of cheer in his tone. “You up for a little field trip?”

Half an hour later, Neera was safely buckled in the passenger seat of Isaiah’s BMW. He pulled onto Highway 40 and passed her a manila folder. “Everything I found on your family, all at the firm.”

The folder wasn’t substantial by any means, yet Neera was a little afraid of what was inside. She flipped through the first few pages, finding documents filled with dense legal jargon within. “Wanna walk me through it, future attorney?” She studied the planes of his face. “That’s still the plan, right?”

“Yeah.” Isaiah offered her a small smile, then a shrug. “Well, I’m not sure. There’s some soul-searching I need to do this summer before I can confidently answer that.”

“I get it,” Neera said, suppressing a dry laugh at his choice of words.

Isaiah input an address into his car’s GPS. “So, this place, Blind Bucks, was originally in Ajay’s name with your grandfather as the cosigner. I found they borrowed a significant amount of money from a trust called Second Sons Inc. to fund it. Sound familiar?”

“Second Sons?” Neera repeated, flipping through the folder. “Doesn’t ring a bell.” She found the page with the loan amount written clear as day. There were too many zeros to wrap her mind around. “Who’s behind the trust?”