Blood & Dust (Lonesome Ridge Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

She could go back. She could try again.
    Her lips pressed together. She would try again.

 
     
    CHAPTER 6
     
     
     
    “Don’t look too big from here,” Jeremiah observed as he leaned against a thin tree on a small knoll overlooking an even smaller settlement. It was bigger than the one they had attacked a few days before, with the handful of houses and outbuildings, but not by much. “Matter o’ fact, I think I been here before with Jed awhile back. Was just a few families who settled down together, built themselves a little town. Maybe a couple dozen people, if that.”
    “That sounds like the perfect place, then. We’ll wait until the sun goes down and hit them while they’re asleep. Much safer for us that way. I don’t want another fiasco like we had at Lonesome Ridge.” Her face was set into a hard mask as she glared at the town below them. Despite her renewed enthusiasm for building a kingdom of her own, that battle had left an unpleasant taste in her mouth that she never wanted to know again. She had been too cocky, too sure of herself, and she overestimated the abilities of her fellow undead. It was a mistake she would not make again. She would be safe and sure of victory before she would attack.
    Charity glanced around at the people milling behind her. That’s always how she thought of their movements when they weren’t attacking or eating. Milling, like cattle. They were her herd and she was their master. Her lips curled into something that wasn’t a smile or a snarl. It was more of a grimace. “A herd,” she mumbled and the word was bile on her tongue. Not exactly a kingdom.
    “What was that?” Jeremiah chewed on a small bone and raised his eyebrows at her.
    “Nothing,” she said with a bit more bite than she intended. “I was just thinking out loud to myself.”
    Jeremiah’s eyebrows twitched again, but all he said was “Ah.”
    Charity’s jaw clenched and she shot a glare at him, but his face was turned back toward the town. Ever since they hit the little Mormon settlement, Jeremiah had been aloof, annoyingly so. “What do you mean ‘ah’?” she snapped.
    He turned to look at her. His eyes were wide and his mouth sagged open to reveal his tobacco-stained teeth. “I dunno,” he said with a confused shrug. “I was just sayin’ ‘ah’. Didn’t know what else to say.” He shrugged again and his puppy-dog face made Charity sigh.
    “Well, stop,” she said, this time keeping her voice soft and even. “It’s irritating.”
    Jeremiah’s mouth worked a couple times, but in the end, he just shrugged and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
    Charity pressed her lips together as he turned back toward the town. She wanted to yell at him again, to curse him out and tell him to stop doing what he was doing, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was that he was doing that made her so mad. Instead, she growled softly and walked back down the hill behind them to stand under a thick tree to wait for the night to come. She had been doing a lot of waiting lately, it seemed. And that was making her even madder. They couldn’t move around much in the sun. It burned them, dried them out and made their skin crack. It sucked the energy from them. The night was much better. They could walk without fear in the blackest part of the night, when nearly all other creatures were hiding. This disease, or whatever it was, let them see better in the dark. It seemed to favor the night.
    A girl barely fifteen wandered over and stood beside Charity. She stared out at the expanse of land before them, the land they had just crossed from her home where her family had been slaughtered and abandoned.
    “What?” Charity growled at her.
    The girl turned her gray eyes to Charity and stared at her with the same blank expression all the others had. She cocked her head to the side and looked at her like she expected Charity to say something.
    “Go away,” was all Charity offered.
    The girl turned and wandered back