The Darkest Embrace Read Free

that she stifled at the sight.
    “Max, what happened?”
    “It’s nothing. Just a flesh wound,” he joked, knowing she’d get the reference to Monty Python. They’d watched it on one of their first dates.
    She took his hand and looked at it, not even wincing at the sight of blood. She frowned. “No, it’s not. That’s pretty deep. What did you cut it on?”
    “Wine bottle.” He used his chin to show her the broken bottles inside, the dark wine splashed all over the rest of the groceries.
    “Well,” she said with a grin, “that’s too bad, isn’t it?”
    A second later, though, she was frowning again in concern, his hand cupped in hers, her thumb pressing the wound to stanch the blood. “You need stitches. Or at least a bandage. C’mon, I’m sure they have something inside. Go wash your hands in the bathroom. I’ll see what’s in the store.”
    He wanted to protest, reassure her that he was fine. Manly enough to handle just a little flesh wound. The truth was, the cut was already throbbing, the blood flow slowing but caked into his skin, and the way the skin gaped was making his stomach hurt.
    Jessie closed her hands over his, gently cupping his wounded thumb. “Go.”
    In the restroom, he used a paper towel to turn the hot water faucet until a trickle of first lukewarm, then scalding water shot out and splashed his front. Max did the best he could to clean it, but it was starting to hurt a lot more and he muttered a particularly creative string of curses.
    Turning from the sink, he caught sight of the advertised shower, a narrow stall with a sagging, mildewed curtain shielding what looked like equally moldy tiles behind it and a steadily dripping showerhead. You’d have to pay him a helluva lot more than the five bucks they wanted to charge to get naked in that thing. On impulse, he twitched the curtain aside and stepped back at once with a stifled shout.
    It looked like an abattoir.
    Summers growing up as a kid, Max had spent a lot of time on his uncle’s farm. Uncle Rick and Aunt Lori had raised a few dairy cows, kept a bull, a coop of chickens, one or two pigs. They kept animals for food, not profit, and definitely not for pets. Max had learned that the hard way after he’d adopted a spindle-legged calf named Doey. Years later, when he watched the film version of The Silence of the Lambs, the scene in which Clarice described the sound of the lambs screaming had sent him from the theater faster than any of Hannibal Lecter’s tooth-sucking comments about fava beans. To this day, he couldn’t eat veal.
    The barn had looked like this shower stall the day he’d found them slaughtering Doey.
    Max backed up so fast that the heel of his boot caught on a ridge of tile. To catch himself from falling, he flung out his injured hand. Fresh pain, bright and wide and thick, covered him, and he let out a yelp that echoed in the dimly lit room. He could smell it now, he thought. The stink of old, dried blood. And hear the soft buzz of flies battering themselves against the small window set high in the wall.
    Shit and blood, that’s what Uncle Rick had always said brought flies. Shit and blood.
    Outside in the late-afternoon sunshine, the scene in the restroom seemed surreal. When he came around the corner, he found Jessie talking to the old woman/man sitting in the rocker on the front porch. Rather, the ancient lump of wrinkles and raggedy clothes was talking. Jessie seemed to be just listening.
    “Stay out of the woods,” the old person was saying.
    Jessie glanced up at him, her expression so carefully neutral that he could tell she was trying hard not to laugh. “Thanks, Mrs. Romero.”
    “Who this?”
    Jessie reached for Max’s good hand to pull him closer. “This is Max, my boyfriend.”
    It wasn’t the first time she’d called him that, but it was still so new the word tied knots in his gut. “Hi.”
    Mrs. Romero tipped her wizened face toward his, her eyes asquint, mouth still sucking greedily on