Bennett wet her lips, eyes fixed on the pouch. The need inside her was so strong she didn’t trust herself to speak or move. She wanted a hit so bad she could hardly stand the thought. Just a little, she was thinking. Just this one time. Penny was right. She was all twisted up inside, fighting to stay straight and not really believing there was any hope for it.
It wouldn’t hurt anything. I’ve used before and kept going. Besides, Harper will be all right, no matter what. Nest is here. Nest is looking after her, probably better than me. Harper likes Nest. She doesn’t need me. Anyway, doing a little coke would probably give me some focus. Just a little. I can take as much as I want and stop. I’ve always been able to do that. I can quit anytime. Anytime I want.
Oh, God, she thought, and squeezed her eyes shut until it hurt. No. No. She folded her thin arms against her body and looked back at the toboggan slide. “You keep it.”
Penny kept looking at her for a minute, then tucked the pouch back into her coat pocket. She glanced up at the platform, where Nest and the others were climbing onto the sled.
Her smile was a red slash on her pale face. “Better get back with your friends, take another ride down the chute,” she said. She smiled in a dark sort of way, giving Bennett a look that whispered of bad feelings and hard thoughts.
Then she walked over to the edge of the rise and looked down at the bayou. “Be a good mom, why don’t you? Keep your kid company.” She reached into her pocket, brought out a flashlight, pointed it downhill, and clicked it on and off twice.
She turned back to Bennett, stone-faced. “Maybe later, girlfriend,” she said. “There’s always later.”
She waved casually over her shoulder as she walked off.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Standing in the shelter of the big oaks and scrub birch bordering the bayou’s edge, back where the lights from the toboggan run didn’t penetrate, Findo Cask watched Penny Dreadful’s flashlight blink twice from the top of the rise and smiled. Time to start demonstrating to Nest Freemark the consequences of engaging in uncooperative behavior. He’d wasted enough time on her, and he wasn’t inclined to waste any more.
He stepped from the shadows to walk down to the water’s edge. The water was all ice just now, of course. But everything was subject to change. It was just a matter of knowing how to apply the right sort of pressure. It was a lesson that Nest Freemark would have done well to learn before it was too late.
Garbed in his black frock coat and flat-brimmed hat, he might have been a preacher come to the river to baptize the newly converted. But the demon had something more permanent in mind than a cleansing of the soul. Baptism wasn’t really up his alley in any case. Burial was more his style.
Aware of the clutch of feeders creeping hungrily out of the shadows to be close to him, he knelt beside the ice. Feeders were fond of Findo Gask; they could always depend on him for a good meal. He saw no reason to disappoint them now.
He reached down and touched the ice with his fingers, eyes closing in concentration. Slowly, a crack in the surface appeared, broadened and spread, then angled off into the darkness toward the clearing on the ice where the sleds usually ended their runs, close to where the levee that supported the railroad tracks rose like a black wall. He lifted his hand away from the ice and listened carefully. Out in the darkness where the crack had gone, dispatched by his magic, he could hear snapping and splintering, then the soft slosh of water.
A nice surprise would be waiting for Nest Freemark and her friends when they came down this time.
He stood up in time to catch a glimpse of a large bird streaking out of the trees behind him, bolting from cover toward the slide.
Atop the loading platform, the locking lever released.
-=O=-***-=O=-
The toboggan slid out of the starting gate with a crunching of ice crystals under wood runners, easing down the chute, quickly picking up speed. There were only five of them riding the sled now, Robert in front, gloved hands fastened on the steering ropes, Kyle behind him, Harper and Little John next, and Nest in the rear. Hunched close against each other, legs looped over hips and around waists, arms clasped about shoulders, and heads bent against the rush of wind and cold and snow, they watched the landscape of dark trees and hazy trail lights gradually begin to blur and lose shape.