Dark Rain Read Free

this hour.
     
    Cray’s Lane was just an average little road – short, not even blacktop on it – out toward the bottom end of town. It was lined with wood-built, single story houses, maybe thirty of them, none of them in mint condition. There was crab grass on the front lawns, dandelions poking through the driveways. Rusty barbeques and swings out back. Most of the cars parked here were more than ten years old. Hardly a special street, in other words.
    A stork had made its nest on a rooftop, I took note. Somebody, presumably a teenage boy, had a bumper sticker that read: Lurv instructor – first lesson free . Otherwise, all totally unremarkable.
    Squad cars were blocking both ends of it, their lights casting red flashes across the entire scene. I couldn’t see any patrolmen though. They had to be indoors by this time. There was only Cass in view.
    She was waiting for me on the first lawn to the right. She’d parked her Harley by the curb, and had a flashlight in her grasp.
    Cass Mallory stands – in her thick-heeled, silver-buckled motorcycle boots – almost as tall as I do, and I’m six foot two. She was wearing her usual baggy, ripped jeans. A sleeveless white tee-shirt. And a Kevlar jacket over that she sometimes puts on and sometimes doesn’t. It’s not much use against magic, but defends against the claws and fangs that we occasionally find coming at us. She’d got the tattoos on her arms, a scorpion and a broken heart, back when she’d been a teenager. They were both faded now.
    You had to wonder why she’d gotten those so early on, vulnerability and deadly violence juxtaposed like that. But then, I knew a few things about her troubled past.
    Cass was fully kitted-out as usual, Glock 9mms strapped to both her hips. Fastened to the Harley were a Heckler & Koch assault carbine on one side, and a pump-action shotgun – a brutal looking Mossberg 590 – on the other. She’d inherited her detailed knowledge of ordnance from her pa, who had taught her to shoot at a very early age, back when he’d still been alive. I also knew there were a variety of blades concealed about her person. Not someone who took chances, then, when it came to dealing with the kind of trouble that we regularly address.
    She nodded to me as I walked toward her. Back when I first met her, she used to wear her jet black hair almost to her waist. But these days it’s cropped closely to her skull, emphasizing her cheeks and long, square jaw.
    Cass believes in going into situations hard and fast and keeping that momentum up until the thing’s resolved. Tells herself she’s doing it because … well, who else would? But the truth is, she’s pretty much like me.  She does it to stop thinking about past events. To try and make things right somehow.
    Because she’s lost people that she deeply loved to magic. So have I.
    Both of us shared the same dream as well. To bring the town’s curse to an end. That was another of the things that genuinely kept us going.
    Those eyes of hers – as black as her hair and burning fiercely – were fixed on mine, and were the only part of her that was moving. She could have been a statue, except statues never blink.
    “You took the bus?” she asked me, once I was in earshot. “With this going on?”
    She’d gotten over her initial shock, was trying to sound composed, and was making a half-assed job of it. There was too much stiff discomfort in her voice for her to sound in any way convincing.
    Now that I was closer to her, I could see she looked exhausted. And it wasn’t physical. Standing there in the dim light, she seemed mentally drained.
    “I wasn’t home.” I pulled a tight face at her. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. What’re we looking at here?”
    “A bloody mess, literally.” She had to pause before going on. “Almost all these houses had families in them. Moms, pops, even little kids.”
    She looked away from me a second, trying to hide the pain and anger in her gaze.
    “All of