Wicked Prayer Read Online Free PDF

between five hand-cast layers of rock-hard crystalline resin—surely have been crushed to death in a woman’s fist.

     
    Dan couldn’t wait to see the glimmer in Leti’s eyes when he handed her the roses.
    He wouldn’t have to say a word. She’d know what they meant.
    Maybe she’d say something, maybe she wouldn’t. It wouldn’t matter.
    Because she’d slip her hand into his, and he’d put his arm around her shoulders, and together they’d go to the work room. Dan would dump the scorpions into the terrarium. Then Leti, arms full of the moist, fragrant red flowers, would look down into the writhing mass of arachnids and spot a little something extra gleaming there.
    A wedding ring.
    By the time she turned to him, forgotten roses falling from her arms in a perfumed red rain, he’d have his answer. He wouldn’t need to hear it from her lips. He’d see it there, shining in her blue eyes.
    And then . . .
    Then he didn’t know what. He hadn’t been able to finish the dream.
    Alone all his life, he’d never been one for words. But he imagined that he should think of something to say. Think of it now, while he could think.
    He’d tell Leti what she meant to him. Tell her how much he loved her.
    Love. The word made Dan’s mouth as dry as a dead riverbed. He parted his lips, tried to add a few words to that most dangerous of words. Two more words. Just three words, all together, but they were all the words anyone ever needed.
    I love you.
    Dan said the words, whispered them under his breath, and they sounded small and strange and inadequate in that empty desert place with the cold light of the moon overhead and the night wrapping around him like the big black wings of that rasping bird. Dan wanted to laugh at himself; at the fear that welled up in his heart when the words spilled through his lips like thick red blood drawn by rose thorns:
    I love you.
    “I love you,” Dan said aloud, and overhead he heard the circling black bird caw back.
    “Not you, shithead,” he called up to it, and this time he did laugh. But though the laugh brought him relief from the tension, it was a false relief Because his heart was full of old wounds and scars, and painful longings and long nights, and strange new thoughts and strange new emotions, and plain disbelief that anyone, anyone, could have gotten to him like this, when everyone— everyone — knew that Dan Cody walked alone.
    She’s just a woman, Dan, he reminded himself He paused, staring at the dark windows of the Spirit Song Trading Post. It’s not like you’ve never had women before.
    And then a smaller, deeper voice rang through him like a blade on solid stone: But you’ve never loved one, have you?
    The truth was, Dan Cody had never loved anyone. Not in twenty-five years spent walking a world of barren, sun-scalded plains. A world where the only voices he heard were the wail of the wind and the howl of the coyote, where his only companions were the hollow echoes of his solitary footsteps, where the only language he knew and understood was the language of self-preservation.
    He saw himself as kin to those tortured trees that grew out in the desert, roots eternally thirsty, backs beaten down to desolate stumps by endless years in the driving sun.
    For twenty-five years Dan had learned the lessons of that desert sun. He learned from hard experience that the sun took, and took, and took, and never gave back. It warped and twisted everything it touched with its hard white eye, and it claimed everything for its own.
    But it never gave back.
    Until now.
    For it had been in the desert that Dan Cody had found Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin. And it had been in the desert, under the heat of that hard, white eye, that Dan Cody had discovered love.
    “I love you,” he whispered, and the wind took his breath with the scent of lush red roses and carried the words into the deepening night.
    “I love you, Leticia Dreams the Truth Hardin,” Dan said, and this time the words