Read Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) for Free Online

on one small, unarmed girlfriend. Heath couldn’t help but hope: Anna was smart; she was resourceful, with a couple of miracles and a lot of luck … Anyway, Heath was careful not to raise her eyes to the woods, listen too intently for the soft fall of moccasins on leaves, or otherwise telegraph Anna’s presence. She prayed that Leah, Elizabeth, and Katie would have the good sense to do the same.
    A sensible person would have hopped in the canoe and paddled for help, but Heath knew Anna hadn’t. She couldn’t, no more than Heath could shut off her fear for Elizabeth. Anna was out there. As long as the four jackasses of the apocalypse didn’t realize that, there was a chance.
    Elizabeth wouldn’t give Anna away. Heath could count on her. Trauma had not destroyed E, it had made her wiser than her years. Leah might be the smartest human being on the planet, but Heath had no idea what the scientist would do when she and her daughter were the lab rats. If Heath, who’d once made her living leading difficult climbs, had very possibly pissed herself in terror, what must an otherworldly brainiac be suffering?
    Leah didn’t share her inner self with the world, not even, apparently, with her sole offspring. Docile as a robot with the power switched off, she was watching the potbellied scumbag retie Katie’s wrists with plastic ties. Shock, Heath told herself. Leah was wasn’t used to not being in control.
    After a day and a half with Katie, Heath guessed Katie would offer Jesus Christ up to the Romans if she thought it would get her an extra hour of TV a night. Katie would give up Anna in a heartbeat if she saw any profit in it. Then again, if there was nothing to be gained, Katie might keep the secret to her grave just to spite the riffraff who dared handle her so roughly.
    Putting her lips so close to E’s ear she could smell the wood smoke in her hair, Heath whispered, “Elizabeth?” Beneath her cheek Elizabeth’s head nodded fractionally.
    “Play dead.” Foolish as it might be, E flat to the ground, not moving, not looking in the direction of the men, made Heath less afraid for her. Rather like pulling the covers over your head so the monster in the closet won’t eat you, she mocked herself.
    “Get up,” the dude said in a voice so conversational, so easy, it bored a hole in Heath’s mind that sucked the sane universe through into a place where water ran uphill and the sun set in the east.
    “What do you guys want?” Heath demanded. “What in the hell do you want from us? Whatever it is, take it and go.” The thug, Sean, laughed an ugly grunting laugh.
    The dude said nothing. He stepped closer, melding in with the dark canopy of leaves, as tall and unknowable as a giant redwood. Nostrils flared black. Cavernous eyes were deep behind cheekbones sharp as knives. Heath was seeing not the man but the skull under the flesh. Nothing shone behind the eye sockets, nothing. Windows to the soul opening onto a room inhabited by cobwebs and cockroaches. The dude would shoot her and Elizabeth where they lay rather than repeat himself.
    He nudged Elizabeth’s shoulder with the toe of his boot.
    Heath swatted his foot away. “Let me,” she said, glad to have a reason to turn her eyes from his face as she shook E’s shoulder gently. “E, wake up. Get up. Seriously rotten ice. Get up.”
    Rotten ice was what caused the fall that crippled Heath. “Rotten ice” was the phrase they used when something was deadly serious. Not that E wouldn’t realize armed men appearing out of nowhere and killing the family dog was a serious situation; Heath said it to cancel out her previous order to play dead.
    Elizabeth got to her hands and knees, then wavered to a standing position. Grace and agility gone, she moved like an old drunk. Weaving, she found her feet. Blood dripped from her nose to her upper lip. The bastard had hit her so hard it made her nose bleed. Furious, Heath wanted to fly at the dude and rip him to pieces. She