Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) by Nevada Barr

nothing.
    “I have to go back,” came the breath of an answer.
    “No,” Anna hissed because she dared not wail. “Come here,” she begged. If she could get hold of Elizabeth, she wouldn’t be going anywhere Anna didn’t want her to go.
    “They will kill Mom. You don’t know him, the dude. He will.”
    The thread of sound was thicker. Elizabeth was moving back toward where Anna hid, to the camp. “Yes. Yes, he will kill your mother. He will kill her. Then he will kill you,” Anna said. “They will kill you all. Stay with me and live. Heath wants you to live.”
    “I’m over here,” Elizabeth said loudly. “I’m coming.”
    Anna rubbed her eyes with both fists, squeezing out water and flecks of rotted wood, desperate to clear her sight.
    “No!” Heath screamed. “Don’t you dare. Run, God damn you! Ru—” The voice was cut off with a thud.
    Anna peeked between the roots. Through a watery veil she could see that all eyes were on Elizabeth as, straight-backed as any Englishman who ever faced a firing squad, she marched into the clearing. Through the prismatic lens of tears and rotten dust, Anna saw the dude holding Heath at arm’s length by her hair, knees inches from the ground. She showed no more life than a sack of laundry. He cast her aside with an indifference that offended Anna more than the cruelty.
    A prop in the theater of the absurd, Leah still stood between the pulling shafts of her creation, as unmoving as a statue, eyes blanked by reflections on the lenses of her glasses.
    Slowly, with dignity, Elizabeth walked around the fire toward the bluff.
    Heath pushed herself to her elbows. Her face was a mask of pain. “Damn you, Elizabeth. Damn you.” The words were slurred. Forgetting all she’d learned about effective self-locomotion, Heath hurled herself forward, an outflung hand closing around the dude’s ankle.
    “It was me, it was my fault,” Heath said, the words coming so fast they were hard to understand. “I will do anything. Kill me. Let me lick your boots. Wash your feet. All I have, all I will ever have, I beg you…”
    Pleas tumbled from her tongue like the toads from the mouth of the cursed fairy-tale princess. Anna understood. Pride was not worth the life of a single human being. If she could have traded hers for Elizabeth’s life, she wouldn’t have hesitated either.
    “I’m sorry, Mom,” Elizabeth said. She stopped in front of the dude.
    Fear poured out of the clearing. It boiled off of Heath, pulsed from Elizabeth, and bent Katie’s little rat shoulders. This blast of horror altered Anna’s view of the dude. Firelight played over the planes of his face. His eyes fell away into tar pits of unfathomable depths. Flat cheeks and broad brow shifted like continental plates, as he assumed the size and indestructibility of a hellacious mountain range.
    The thugs, the women, the forest, even the sky receded. The dude was all that remained.
    “Kneel,” the dude said in the voice of a dead god.
    Elizabeth knelt.
    Anna found herself praying that he would only force her to give him a blow job. A woman could survive a blow job. A woman could bite off the penis of the enforcer. There would be possibilities.
    The dude’s hand shot out with remarkable speed and closed around Elizabeth’s throat.
    The mountain that fear built began to heave, great shoulders hunching into dark hills against the underlit canopy as the dude closed the fingers of a hand as big and heavy as an anvil.
    “No!” Heath screamed.
    The anvil slammed into Elizabeth’s chest.
    It struck Anna’s mind with equal force. She fell into the burst of roots.
    “No!” she heard Heath scream again. She went on screaming as, with the unstoppable regularity of a pile driver, the fist pounded her daughter.
    Anna counted seven blows before she heard Elizabeth fall to the ground.

 
    SIXTEEN
     
    Heath was no longer screaming on the outside. Inside, every nerve shrieked, an internal cacophony that scrambled thought.