Chapter 13
An ambulance was called, but Mama Wedgefield was beyond saving. The instant Manea had snapped her fingers it had been too late. And now Savannah was gone. Vanished without a trace.
Jasper’s heart rammed against his ribcage. The cops had grilled him for the past two hours, long after the paramedics had carted off Mama to the hospital morgue. All the rodeo workers had surrounded him with confused, scared, and suspicious looks. Their boss lady was dead. The woman might not have been overly kind to her road hands, but her large presence had left a hole in their lives, and livelihoods. And now their darling rodeo clown was missing. He didn’t begrudge them their suspicions. However, he was desperate to get onto Savannah’s trail. He’d lost too much time already. Soon the trail would be completely cold, and she would be lost to him forever.
To make matters worse, about half a dozen cowboys wasted no time accusing him outright of killing Mama and kidnapping Savannah, but the burly, balding foreman with a belt buckle the size of his beefy hand stepped in to intervene before things became violent.
“Can’t you boys see he’s just as distraught—if not more so—than the rest of us? He ain’t got nothing to hide. Besides, we got work to do and shouting at each other ain’t gonna get it done.” He then turned to Jasper. “Son, I don’t know what happened here. None of us do. We’re in a panic and grieving. But that’s no excuse to take our frustrations out on you.” The foreman’s weary eyes squinted at him, attempting to judge for himself if Jasper did indeed pose a problem. The man then turned to the crowd around them, barking orders to the men to organize a search party for “their girl.”
One blond cowboy—who could not have been more than eighteen years old didn’t seem content to let things go so easily. He flung back over his shoulder, “Yeah, but ain’t it kinda funny all the shit that’s been happening around here since he arrived.” There was a low murmur from a couple of the men, but no one dared to confront Jasper in front of the foreman. They also didn’t ask him to help with the search.
The entire state could come out to hunt for Savannah and it would do no good. Manea could have jetted off anywhere. Up until now, he’d had no idea a goddess could teleport in a human body. They could be over the hill at the creek fishing for all he knew. Or they could be in Timbuktu or even another dimension. He prayed not, but no cards were off the table just yet.
Hell, he didn’t even know where to start searching, either. That knowledge drove him to his knees, right there in the middle of the pasture turned rodeo parking lot. The red dust swirled around him, making him cough and bringing tears to his stinging eyes.
That’s not the dust, dumbass. That’s your fucking heart breaking in two.
How had he let it happen? He was a guardian angel. He should have protected her better. Instead—for all he knew—Savannah had been targeted by a vengeful goddess because of him. And now, at this very moment, she could be paying the final price for his weakness.
He should never have allowed his guard down with her. God, he knew better than that. Casual sex, sure. Love? Never. No one that had lived as long as he had believed in love at first sight. Hell, he didn’t really believe in love, did he? He damned himself for not seeing it sooner.
From the second he’d laid eyes on her in the middle of the arena on top of her horse like a prevailing warrioress returned from battle—that moment had altered his reality. Now, he was a believer.
Cursing himself under his breath, he fumbled in his back jeans pocket for his phone. Another handful of texts from Thomas about Greylyn’s abrupt vanishing act. Something he just could not deal with right now. His guardian protégée could manage herself just fine. Besides, if she was in real trouble, he’d feel it. They shared a telepathic connection. He’d know it in every fiber of his being whether she wanted him to or not.
Regardless, he punched the callback number for Thomas. The former Aussie rugby-player-turned-occult-professor answered on the first ring and immediately started rambling all his worst imaginings of what could have happened to Greylyn.
Jasper silenced him with a forceful, “Shut the fuck up. She’s fine. Let it be. But I need your help now!”
A quick summation of recent events emphasized the stakes of finding Savannah to the professor. Thomas blew out a long whistle between his teeth. “Dude, I don’t even know where to start locating a rogue goddess wearing a human meat suit.”
Jasper snarled at him through the phone. He wanted to punch the bastard for referring to the woman he was in love with in such a crude manner. “Just do it!”
With the call ended, he ran back to Mama’s camper to look for clues. He prayed the cops hadn’t made a mess of things. He hadn’t seen them bag up any evidence except for her walking cane with the stone handle now missing. Hopefully, nothing was disturbed, and a perfect clue was sitting there just waiting for him to find it.
Shouts and the roar of truck engines springing to life momentarily took his attention away from his destination.
“You coming with us, boy?” The foreman hollered.
“You guys go ahead. I’m gonna recheck the camper for clues and catch up with you later.”
The foreman seemed okay with that excuse, tipping his tattered cowboy hat to him. More billows of red dust from the trucks racing in all directions blinded him to everything except the angry glares from the cowboys as they drove past him on the way to the back pasture.
Jasper searched up, down, inside, and outside of the camper. He found nothing except oddly…his dagger tucked neatly away behind Mama’s extensive trove of romance novels. The same one he’d lost at the lake earlier with Savannah. What the hell was it doing in Mama’s camper? Securing it behind his back, he slammed the RV door in frustration.
His instincts pulled him toward the rodeo arena—a tickling at the base of his neck warned of something that could be of interest. He walked through the archway into the main arena. Nothing. He even searched in trash cans strewn about the bleachers. Nothing but garbage. He checked the horse stables, the steer barn, the equipment shed, and the hay loft. Still nothing.
All that was left was the rodeo boss lady’s makeshift office. As he neared his destination, the tiny hairs on Jasper’s neck and arms bristled. A deep cold abyss spread from his heart to his outer limbs. Yes, he was on the right track.
Everyone except the young man who served as Mama Wedgefield’s lackey had joined the hunt for Savannah. Billy had stayed behind to tend to the animals. Or he’d been left behind to keep an eye on him. At least, that was Jasper’s guess when he first saw the scrawny boy perched in the boss lady’s chair and rummaging through papers scattered across the desk.
Jasper’s gut knotted. Something wasn’t right here. As inner alarm bells echoed in his skull, he knew the lanky, seemingly naive man-child in front of him was neither innocent nor naive.
“Hey, there, Billy. What ya looking for?”
The boy nearly fell out of the chair, clutching a wad of papers in one hand. He pulled his other hand from under the desk—the hand that held a revolver, which he wasted no time pointing straight at Jasper.
“Whoa, kid. Put the gun down. I mean you no harm.” Jasper raised his hands in the air. “I’m not armed.”
A wide grin broke out on the boy’s face, followed by a cackle that turned Jasper’s blood cold. It was the laugh of someone not even remotely in their right mind.
“It’s too late. You’re too late, guardian.” Instead of the squeaky voice of a teenage boy coming out, it was more like the hissing of an evil, animated snake. In Jasper’s head, he saw the villain snake from The Jungle Book as it slithered around Mowgli.
Swallowing the lump in his throat at the thought he’d have to hurt a kid to save Savannah, Jasper took a small step forward. “Too late for what, Billy? Too late to save Mama? Yes. Too late to salvage the rodeo from all the damage you’ve caused? Maybe. But I swear to you, it better not be too late to save Savannah. Or you’ll face vengeance like you’ve never imagined possible.”
Another spine-chilling cackle erupted from the kid. It was clear the boy was no longer in control of himself. Billy wasn’t evil, but the thing possessing him was evil personified. It wasn’t Manea, though. Of that, he was certain. She gave a certain sultry, yet terrifying vibe. This was more masculine, more deranged. The goddess might be a bitch. She might be the goddess of spirits, chaos, and madness. But Manea herself could never be accused of being insane.
However, her counterpart in the underworld, Mantus? He was a different story. Neither deity could ever be reported to be nice in any sense of the word. Mantus had been designated as the God of the Dead, and his identity had escaped the claim of madness. Manea had been accused of being the mad one, demanding sacrifices of young boys to satiate her wrath.
Myth and history had gotten the two descriptions mixed up.
Staring at him with such a mixture of delight, fury, and derangement through the eyes of the young possessed Billy was none other than the epitome of insanity—Mantus.