Heart of Venom

Chapter Twenty-five

A splash of sunlight on my face woke me early the next morning.

I squinted against the warm, golden glow. The fire was cold, but Owen must have covered me with the sleeping bag sometime during the night, because the fabric was tucked in all around me, making me feel like a mummy.

Even though I could have easily drifted back to sleep, I untucked one corner of the sleeping bag, threw the silky material aside, and sat up. I blinked a few times, trying to throw off the last comfortable, drowsy dregs of sleep.

“Owen?” I called out.

He didn’t answer me, and I finally realized that he was nowhere in sight. Not sleeping behind me, not crouched over the remains of the fire, not stretching his legs by walking back and forth in front of the rocky outcropping that I was still lying under.

For a moment, I was confused, wondering if perhaps I’d just dreamed that he was here the night before, but then I spotted his backpack, and I realized that he must be around somewhere. Maybe he’d gone to get some fresh water from the river, so we’d have something to drink on our hike back to the parking lot. Either way, I needed to answer the call of nature, so to speak, so I got to my feet—and then wished that I hadn’t.

I was bruised, battered, and sore from head to toe.

Blues, greens, purples, and yellows had blossomed like flowers overnight on my arms, mottling my skin from my shoulders all the way down to my fingertips. Given the stiffness in my muscles, I imagined that I had even more bruises on my back, chest, and legs, not to mention the burns and blisters from Grimes’s and Hazel’s Fire magic, which pulsed with tight, throbbing pain. Rolling down the river hadn’t been my best idea, but it had gotten me away from Grimes, which was all that really mattered.

I gingerly touched the bandage over the gunshot wound in my shoulder. Lucky for me, it was a through— and-through, and Owen had rubbed plenty of Jo-Jo’s healing salve on it. The wound was tender to the touch, but it wasn’t bleeding, and it didn’t have the hot, aching feel of infection. Maybe if cooper was up to it, I’d get him to heal me when we got to his house.

Because the sooner I was better, the sooner I could kill Harley Grimes, Hazel, and every other person on this damn mountain.

With that cheery thought in mind, I staggered away from our camp, found a private spot behind a tree, and did my lady business. When I was finished, I went back to the camp, but I didn’t hunker down under the rocks and curl back up on the sleeping bag. Instead, I stood by the remains of the fire and did some slow, careful stretches, trying to loosen up my stiff, sore muscles and get some blood flowing to them. Because it was still a long trek down the mountain, and we could still run into some more of Grimes’s men—

Thwack.

The distinctive sound of flesh cracking against flesh made me stop in mid-stretch.

“Where the hell is she?” a man’s voice growled.

Silence. Then—

Thwack.

“I asked you a question,” the man growled again, his voice much louder and angrier than before. “I suggest that you answer me.”

“Forget it,” Owen snarled back. “I’m not telling you a damn thing.”

Looked like Grimes’s men had come looking for me after all—and they’d found Owen instead.

I scanned the ground around our camp, searching for one very specific item, but all I saw were Owen’s backpack, a couple of empty tins of salve, and several crumpled, dirty rags that he’d used to wipe some of the blood and grime off me. No weapons.

“c’mon, c’mon,” I muttered, dropping to my hands and knees and crawling around the fire ring. “Where did you put it, Owen? Where did you put it—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a piece of gray fabric sticking out from beneath the sleeping bag.

I stretched out my hand, grabbed the edge of the fabric, and pulled my vest out into the light.

It looked worse for wear, just like I did. The whole thing was covered with blood, mud, and grass stains, while jagged cuts crisscrossed the gray material, exposing the gleaming silverstone underneath. But I shrugged into it anyway, even though the motion caused even more pain to unspool through my muscles, especially the two holes in my left shoulder, and ripple down my arms.

I zipped the bloody vest up over my chest, then hurried over to the fire ring. Most of the wood had been burned away, but I spotted one stick that hadn’t been consumed by the flames, the one that Owen had been using to stir up the fire the night before. It was about a foot long and as wide as three of my fingers. The end wasn’t as sharp as

I would have liked, but I’d made do with worse before.

I also picked up one of the rocks from the fire ring itself and hefted it in my hands. Smooth, round, and heavy.

Perfect. crude weapons in my hands, I got to my feet and headed toward the sounds of Owen and his attackers.

I found them about two minutes later. They were definitely Grimes’s men—three guys with guns, all dressed in brown boots, old-fashioned suits, and fedoras. Two of them held Owen up against a tree, while the third used his fists on him. They must have surprised Owen as he was coming back from the river, because I saw a couple of full water bottles that had been kicked to one side of the tree.

If they’d walked fifty feet more to the west, they would have easily discovered our campsite. They might have even come upon us while we were sleeping this morning and put a couple of bullets in our skulls where we lay. Too bad for them that they hadn’t, because they weren’t going to walk away from this spot.

The guy drove his fist into Owen’s face, then hit him with a brutal one-two combo to his ribs. Owen hissed with pain, but he didn’t give the guy the satisfaction of screaming.

“I’ll ask you again, where is the woman?” the leader demanded. “Tell us where she is, and we might let you live.”

By this point, Owen’s face was bruised and bloody, but he gave the guy hitting him a haughty smirk. “Is that all you’ve got? My sister can hit harder than that.”

“A wise guy, huh?” the leader snarled. “Have it your way. She can’t have gotten far. Not after taking a plunge like that. We’ll just find her ourselves. Who knows?

Maybe we’ll have a little fun with her before we drag her back to Grimes. Maybe we’ll even let you watch.”

The men laughed. Owen surged forward, but together the two men were stronger than he was, and they held him tight.

The leader chuckled at Owen’s struggles, then drew back his fist for another blow. I hefted the rock in one of my hands and the stick of wood in the other, positioning them just so, then strolled out where they could see me.

“Are you boys looking for me?” I drawled. “Well, here I am.”

Before they could react, I threw the rock from the fire ring at the leader. The stone zipped through the air and beaned him in the head like a baseball, leaving a bloody welt behind. Even as he stumbled away from Owen, I was already racing forward.

One of the men holding Owen turned to face me and yanked his gun out of the holster on his belt. I stabbed my stick into his hand, knocking the weapon away. The guy growled and lunged at me, but I stepped up and head-butted him in the face, crunching his nose with my forehead. The second his head snapped back, I raised my stick and drove it into his throat. It didn’t sink all the way in, not like one of my knives would have, but it did enough damage, especially when I yanked it back out.

The guy fell to the ground, gasping for air, and I fell on top of his back. I ground his face into the dirt and leaves until he quit fighting, and I knew that he was dead.

Owen had turned on the final man, pulled the guy’s gun from his holster, and shot him in the chest three times with it, dropping him.

That left the leader, who had finally quit staggering around like a drunk. He gaped at Owen and me and backed up, as if to turn and run. I grabbed the second man’s gun from the ground, and a couple of bullets solved that problem.

I got to my feet and scanned the forest, in case there were any more of Grimes’s men lurking around who might come running at the cracks of gunfire. But a minute passed, then another one, with no signs or sounds of anyone heading our way. Those three must have been all that were in the area. So I shuffled over to Owen, who had his hands on his knees, trying to get his breath back.

“Are you okay?”

He wiped a bit of blood off his face, winced, and straightened up. “Yeah. Although now I think I know how you felt getting tossed around in the river yesterday.”

I grinned at his black humor, but I still kept looking and listening at the woods around us. Just because no one had immediately appeared didn’t mean that they weren’t headed in our direction.

“c’mon,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get off this damn mountain.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Owen quipped.