Field of Blood by Wilson, Eric (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📕

sorrow upon sorrow, grief upon grief.

The Concealed Ones, they could not hide from that.

Somewhere, already, the Nistarim were feeling the pain.

Chattanooga

Gina collapsed to her knees in the employee bathroom, spine bowed, shoulders sagging, while the weight of the world seemed to fall across her back.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

“Just one game of chess, Jed.”

“Why waste my time? You always beat me.”

“C’mon. It helps me relax.”

Although the day’s anguish had subsided, Gina was still sore around her ribs, still sensitive to rapid movement or bright light. She needed some-thing to ease her unspoken concerns and assure her of a world unfazed by her earlier illness. Since girlhood, she’d found chess to be a glue that held her fragmented days together.

“Help you relax?” Jed said. “By beating me into the dirt? You’re more twisted than I thought.”

Even in jest, the accusation poked at something tender in Gina’s mind. She began setting out the chess figurines on blond and black squares, banging down each one, a woman stamping her denial onto pardon papers.

“How’d it go at work today?” Jed asked.

Bang, stamp, bang . . .

“That good, huh? ”

Stamp, bang . . .

“Great.” He hit the Off button on the remote. “I’m gonna get my butt kicked.”

“Want me to play blindfolded?” Gina said. “Then you might have a chance.”

“Okay, now you’re asking for it.” Jed unfolded himself from the couch, grabbed a Pabst Blue Ribbon from the fridge, and joined her at the chess table beneath the black-framed Kurt Cobain poster. “Time to deliver the pain.”

“Not on this—” She paused. “Not on this night, buddy boy.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“I just saw you wince.”

“I did no such thing,” she said.

“Did too. Look at you, Gina. You’re gritting your teeth.”

The discomfort was nothing she couldn’t handle. A short stab.

From behind her back, she offered two closed fists. “Choose your color. Not that it’ll make any difference.”

Blue eyes studied her over thick-rimmed glasses. He touched her right hand, and she opened it to reveal a light-colored pawn.

“You’re white,” Gina said. Then, playfully, under her breath: “And getting whiter by the day, sitting in that office at the Chamber of Commerce.”

“Hey.”

“Joke.”

“Sweetheart, you know I hate making the first move.”

“Control the center of the board,” she instructed. “Advance a few pawns, back them up with your knights and bishops, then castle quickly. That’s it. Easy.”

He sighed. Shoved his king’s pawn forward two squares.

“There you go. Wasn’t so hard, was it?” Gina’s fingers played with her choker, then swung the queen’s bishop pawn two squares ahead.

“What’s that?”

“The Sicilian Defense.”

“So now you’re going all Mafia on me, huh?”

She whipped her dagger from its sheath. “Gonna feed you to the fishes.”

“Not if I can help it.” His knight jumped into the attack.

Gina, after pushing her queen pawn one space, went into the kitchen to grill cheese sandwiches. Jed called out each time he made a move, his thinking time increasing between turns even as his volume decreased. She responded to his attempts with constrictive maneuvers that set up a sud-den counterattack.

He sipped his PBR and surveyed the battlefield. Realizing his imminent doom, he wrung his mop of brown hair while she poured tomato soup into mugs.

“I suck,” he mumbled.

“Strange.” Gina shrugged. “I’m starting to feel all peaceful.”

“You suck.”

“You, buddy boy, are a sore loser.”

“Maybe,” Jed said, “you should kiss me and make me feel better.”

She sneered, bumped into him with her hip, then set mugs and small plates beside his measly trio of captive pawns. Her side of the table offered little space due to the number of slain chess pieces. She almost felt bad for annihilating him like this. Almost.

The perplexing thing, as always, was the ease with which she played the game. She knew that somewhere in her past she had received instruction, but she had no distinct memory of such.

She drank down the tomato soup, let the heat soothe her raw throat.

“Your mom hasn’t called much, has she?” Jed said. “Since you showed her the angel.”

Gina stared out the window.

“I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of the tattoo? You, breaking free?”

“You know what?” Gina said. “I bet if she’d had a choice, Nikki would’ve never had me in the first place. Birth control was banned in Romania back then—so that way all good communist women could add numbers to the workforce, I guess. Born anywhere else I would’ve been a goner, guaranteed.”

Jed thumped his chest with his thumb. “I’m glad you’re here.”

She met his blue eyes. Rewarded him with a half smile.

“Don’t let that mother-daughter thing get to you,” he said. “Here’s a thought for you. What if we started saving up for a move to Florida, or Montana, or—”

“What about Seattle?”

“You serious? I’ve got an uncle named Vince, lives in the Pacific Northwest. He’s a police sergeant, and he’s always saying how it won’t stop raining there, just year-round liquid sunshine. But he swears it’s more majestic than you can imagine.”

Gina bit into her sandwich, used fingers to remove dangling melted cheese. She had no idea where the Seattle idea had come from. She’d seen pictures, sure. Watched the Seahawks play on TV, listened to grunge. Something about the place appealed to her; more accurately, it called to something within her.

She changed the subject. “Did you get that project done?”

“For Mr. Carrington? Yeah, he seems stoked about it, so that’s a good thing.” Jed slurped from his mug. “What about you? How’d it go down in the salt mines?”

She’d fought off onslaughts of nausea most of the day, but she skipped over that tidbit. Instead she rattled off some of the silly questions she’d received from tourists and told about a woman’s ear-piercing shriek as bats swooped by.

On the final tour of her shift, deep inside the mountain, Gina had basked near the plummeting crescendo of the falls, in the cool kisses of its artificially lit, ruby-red mist. While her group oohed and ahhed and took photos, she stood off to the side and closed her eyes. It felt safe there, underground. A cocoon.

It also brought back primal