The Forge of Darkness (Darkness After Series Book 3) Read Free Page B

just before all the unexpected commotion, Benny had been about ready to call off their search for the day and go back home. Heavier rain was coming, and it was getting late. He’d told the girls they probably wouldn’t find the tree they were looking for until tomorrow, even though Stacy was sure they already had a half hour earlier:  
    “This one is the perfect shape! Look at how even it is all the way around!”
    Benny had just laughed. “We couldn’t even get that one through the door without cutting it half in two! And that’s if we could even drag it back to the house. That thing’s nearly fifteen feet tall!”  
    “But it’s so pretty!”
    “Yeah, but it is big, Stacy,” Lisa said. “I think Uncle Benny’s right. It probably won’t fit.”  
    “I know it won’t fit,” Benny said. “The ceilings in that house ain’t but eight feet high. Besides that, the doorway’s only three feet wide and that thing’s got a spread of seven or eight feet at the base! We’ll find a smaller one just like it. We just gotta keep looking.”
    It was a pretty cedar all right, shaped just the way a Christmas tree was supposed to be, but it was simply too big to work. Looking for a Christmas tree was about the last thing Benny Evans ever expected to be doing again, especially after everything that happened in the last few months. Even before, when Betsy was still alive, the two of them had stopped making a fuss over holiday decorations. Betsy had a small artificial tree they still set up in front of the living room window every year, along with a plastic holly wreath they hung on the door, but that was about it. He couldn’t recall how many years it had been since he’d last cut down a live cedar for a Christmas tree, but he figured it was when Tommy was a young boy, certainly no older than these two fourteen-year-old girls. Tommy was forty now, so that had been a little while. Regardless of that, Benny was just delighted that the girls wanted to spend time with him and that they both were already calling him “Uncle Benny” even though he’d only known them a few weeks.
    Benny still couldn’t believe the good fortune that had befallen him and his son since the day he’d found April Gibbs and her child tied up in that canoe under a steep bank on Black Creek. The man who’d left them that way had tried to kill his boy with an arrow, but his aim had been off enough that the broadhead cut through Tommy’s upper arm instead of the middle of his back. Benny had sent that bastard straight to hell with a blast of double-aught buck from his 12-gauge, but it had been a real close call. Now, thanks to April, he and Tommy practically had a new family along with a real place to call home. Benny was a woodsman at heart and had taught his boy all he knew, but living out of a canoe for seven months straight, always on the move and always in hiding in the deep woods had gotten pretty old. The truth was, Benny himself had gotten older than he wanted to admit. He was doing okay for nearly 70, but living outside like that was hard, even on a young man. Things were a lot easier here on the Henley farm, even if they were still harder than life before all this happened.
    Benny was mighty grateful that Mitch had agreed to take him and Tommy in, but Mitch had assured him he was just as thankful for what they’d done for April. Despite all that, Benny and Tommy both were determined to earn their keep around the place. And today, that meant finding whoever had fired those rifle shots and making sure they didn’t do anything else to threaten the security of everyone living there. He whispered a last warning to Lisa and Stacy before they got started:
    “I want you both to stay back several yards behind me while we’re sneaking up there. If you see me stop, you stop! Don’t move, don’t talk and don’t do nothin’ until I do.” Benny knew the girls would follow his orders. They knew how to be quiet, and the soft rain would help,