The Beast

“Rhage?”

He shook himself. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Do you want me to get you some food?”

“Nah. I’m still full.” He retucked her in against him. “I could use a whole lot more of this, though.”

Mary snuggled up close, stretching her arm around his shoulders as far as it would go. “You got it.”

I tried to kill myself last night, he said to her in his head. And I have no idea why.

Yup. It was official.

He’d lost his mind.

FOURTEEN

“It’s up here.”

Jo Early eased off on the accelerator of her Volkswagen piece of crap. “Yeah, I know where it is, Dougie.”

“Right here—”

“I know.”

There was no reason to hit the directional signal. At seven in the morning, there were no other cars around, nobody to care as she went through the off-kilter, paint-flaking iron gates of the old prep school her mother had gone to a million years ago.

Wow. The Brownswick School for Girls had seen better days.

Her mother would so not approve of this landscaping at all. Or lack thereof.

Then again, the woman could throw an aneurysm over a single dandelion head in her five-acre lawn.

Driving down the pitted asphalt lane, Jo steered around holes that were big enough to eat her little Golf, and dodged fallen tree limbs—some of which were old enough to rot.

“God, my head hurts.”

She glanced over at her roommate. Dougie Keefer was Shaggy from Scooby Doo—without the talking Great Dane. And yes, his nickname was Reefer for good reason.

“I told you to go to a doc in the box. When you passed out here last night—”

“I was hit on the head!”

“—you probably got a concussion.”

Although any neuro consult on the guy would be tough to read because he was usually seeing double. And numbness and tingling was a lifestyle choice in his eyes.

Dougie cracked his knuckles one by one. “I’ll be fine.”

“Then stop complaining. Besides, half of the problem is that you’re sobering up. It’s called a hangover.”

As they went further into the campus, buildings appeared, and she imagined them with clean, unbroken windows and freshly painted trim and doors that didn’t hang at bad angles. She could absolutely see her mother here, with her sweater sets and her pearls, gunning for her MRS. degree already even though this had just been a prep school, not a college.

Twenty-first century mores aside, things had gotten time capsuled in the nineteen fifties for her mother. And the woman had the matching shoes and handbags to prove it.

And people wondered why Jo had moved away?

“You’re not ready for this, Jo. I’m telling you.”

“Whatever. I need to get to work.”

“It’s going to blow your mind.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dougie turned to her, the seat belt cutting into his chest. “You saw the video.”

“I don’t know what I was looking at. It was dark—and before you keep arguing, remember April Fool’s this year?”

“Okay, it’s October, for one thing.” The chuckle he tossed out was so him. “And yeah, that was a good one.”

“Not for me it wasn’t.”

Dougie had decided it would be fun to borrow her car for the day and then send her a photoshopped picture of the thing wrapped around a tree. How he’d managed to focus long enough to get the optical con job done had been a mystery—but it had looked so real, she’d even called her insurance company.

As well as had a breakdown in the bathroom at work as she’d wondered how in the hell she was going to cover her deductible.

That was the thing about leaving your rich parents in the rearview. A five-hundred-dollar, unbudgeted hit could make eating difficult.

With a frown, she leaned into the steering wheel. “What is tha—oh, crap.”

Hitting the brakes, she stopped in front of an entire tree that had fallen across the lane. Quick check of the clock and she cursed. Even though time was passing, she was not four-by-fouring in the Golf and running the risk of having to call AAA and paying for a tow truck.

“If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to walk.”

“Go around it.”

“And get stuck in the mud? It rained late last night.” She cut the engine and snagged her car key. “Come on. You want to show me, you’d better start hoofing it. Otherwise I’m turning us around.”

Dougie was still bitching as they set off on foot, stepping over the downed maple and continuing down the lane. The morning was bitterly cold, and surprisingly so—the kind of thing that made you glad you’d taken your parka on a whim, and pissed that you’d left your hat and gloves behind because in your mind it was “only October.”

“Now I know why I don’t get up before noon,” Dougie muttered.

Jo glanced up at the bare limbs above. She hated being a pessimist, but she had to wonder whether any of the suckers were going to go into a free fall and kill her. “Why did I let you talk me into this?”

He put his arm around her shoulders. “Because you loooooove me.”

“Nope.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “That’s definitely not it.”

And yet it kinda of was. She’d met Dougie and his stoner troop through an acquaintance, and they’d taken her in when she’d been in desperate need of a place to crash. The arrangement was supposed to have been a couch-crashing temporary, but then a bedroom had opened up in their apartment, and a year later, she was living in the mid-twenties version of a frat house. With a bunch of recalcitrant man-boys. Who she seemed to be in charge of.