Read Texas Gothic for Free Online Page B

with the job.
    The thought made me hurry as I tried to outrace my nerves. Unease had knotted tight under my ribs when Phin had mentioned F5 arcane tornados, and it hadn’t loosened.
    Phin’s talk of ghosts shouldn’t have bothered me so much. I’d grown up around Uncle Burt, and my cousin Daisy had been dealing with the dead as long as any of us could remember. But tonight I could not push away images of cold, silty water and slimy rocks, and thin, pale hands reaching—
    The breeze lifted my damp hair and carried the rosemary scent of the shampoo, clearing my thoughts and bringing memory into sharp focus. I knew exactly what had mystomach in knots, why carefully latched mental doors were rattling their hinges. It was partly the argument with Ben McCulloch, but mostly Phin bringing up La Llorona.
    The weeping woman. Another spook, another river. A camping trip to Goliad, a flashlight, two preteens with a really bad idea. Phin was twelve and I was eleven and we had snuck out of our rented travel trailer and gone looking for the veiled woman who, legend said, wept by the river for her drowned babies. The stories of her luring living children to their deaths didn’t frighten us enough to make us waste the opportunity to investigate. Jeez, we were stupid.
    I remembered nightmare snatches. The shadowed veil, the ashen skin of her clawed hands. Water closing over my head. But I didn’t remember exactly what had happened at the river, or how Phin and I had gotten away.
    I recalled vividly what happened after, though. Dad had flipped his lid when he found his wet, bedraggled daughters after a frantic midnight search. He’d driven home growling things like “your crazy mother” and “encouraging this BS.” And scarier things like “court” and “judge” and “custody.” Much scarier to me than La Llorona.
    It had shaken even Mom. Since they had never married, I wasn’t sure what his chances would be of getting custody. But even at eleven years old, I didn’t need psychic powers to see the way things would go if Phin started telling a judge about magic and spells in the Goodnight household. Not after La Llorona had almost made us victims of our own idiocy.
    I didn’t ever want to see that look of fear and loss on Mom’s face again. Trying to get anyone else to change waspointless, especially Phin. I could only change myself. So that night in Goliad was the last time I’d ever spoken of ghosts or magic to anyone outside the family. Until today.
    I didn’t know what that meant, except that La Llorona was, in a weird sort of way, on my mind even before Phin brought her up. I had broken my rule when I’d talked ghosts with Ben McCulloch, right when I most needed to put up a good front.
    A sound dropped me back into the present. I froze, one hand on the breaker box, and listened intently to the cricket-filled night. Had it come from the McCulloch place? The noise was otherworldly, the pitch so low I’d almost felt it rather than heard it. It was a visceral sort of
whump
, like the subwoofer on a stereo, overscored by a high, thin thread—
    No, that was the bats. The dark shapes that had been swooping in a bug-hunting ballet now wheeled in unnatural and panicked chaos, as if someone had put a magnet on their internal compass. As I watched, two of them collided and plummeted to the ground. They hit with muted thumps and the leathery flop of wings, and then silence.
    My throat clenched around my held breath. Just feet from me, their small black bodies lay unmoving in the circle of my flashlight. Had they knocked themselves out?
    I edged closer, and when neither moved, I touched one with the toe of my boot.
    Not stunned. Dead.
    The practical part of me said I would need to get a shovel and bury them deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig themup. Or maybe I needed to call Animal Control so they could be tested for rabies. Wasn’t erratic behavior a sign of that?
    The other side, the Goodnight side, knew that rabies didn’t