Also from Terry Goodkind
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Nest
Copyright © 2018 by Terry Goodkind
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goodkind, Terry, author.
Title: The girl in the moon / Terry Goodkind.
Description: New York : Skyhorse Publishing, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002635 (print) | LCCN 2018002674 (ebook) | ISBN
9781510736429 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781510736412 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal fiction. | Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3557.O5826 (ebook) | LCC PS3557.O5826 G57 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002635
Cover design by Rob Anderson
Printed in the United States of the America
To my dear friend, Jeffrey Cheng,
who always reminds me to take some time to come out and play.
ONE
When Angela glanced up and saw him out in the parking lot beyond the neon beer sign hung in the bar’s small front window, her first thought was to wonder if this was the night she was going to die.
The unexpected storm of emotion drove other thoughts from her mind. She wondered if this might be why she had just that morning changed the color of her hair from a bright violet to platinum blond that down the length gradually changed to pale pink that became darker until it was a vivid red at the tips, as if her hair had been dipped in blood. Signs sometimes came to her in such subtle ways.
Under the lone streetlight, she could see that the man was wearing a hooded, camo rain slicker. He paused momentarily to glance around in the drizzly darkness. The rain slicker gave him a hulking appearance. His gaze went from the bar’s sign, BARRY’S PLACE, to the neon beer sign, and then to the door.
She suspected he wanted a drink in the hopes of keeping a high from fading as the distance of days dulled the rapture.
They sometimes did that.
His indecision was brief. When he came through the doorway, his dark shape made it seem as if he were dragging the night in with him.
Seeing him standing in the dim light inside as he paused to glance around at the patrons, Angela felt a sickening mix of hot revulsion and icy fear laced with a heady rush of lust. She let the feeling wash over her, euphoric that she could feel something, even this.
It had been too long since she had felt anything.
Her hand with the towel slowed to a stop at drying a glass as she waited to see how long it would take him to notice her—her fear hoping he didn’t, her inner need hoping he did.
That dark, awakening desire won out.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched as he started toward the bar. Slowly rotating flecks of colored light from the ceiling fixture played over his camouflaged form, almost making him look like part of the room. Behind him, out beyond the window, the headlights of a passing car illuminated the murky drizzle. Fog was moving in. It was going to be a nasty night to be out in the mountains.
Other than a couple of older local men down at the end of the bar arguing baseball, and four Mexicans she had never seen before at a table near the front chattering in Spanish over their beers, the bar was empty. Barry, the bar’s owner, was in back checking stock and paperwork.
The man pushed his hood back as his gaze took in her platinum-blond hair tipped in red, her black fingernail polish, the row of rings piercing the back of her right ear, the glitter on her dark eye shadow, and her bare midriff. As he hoisted himself up on a stool, his gaze played over her low-rise cutoff shorts and down the length of her long legs to the laced brown suede boots that came up almost to her knees.
Barry, the owner, liked her to wear cutoff shorts because it brought in men and kept them longer to buy more drinks. It made her better tips as well. When she’d cut the legs as short as possible, she left the pockets so she would have a place to put her tips. They hung down below the frayed bottoms of the legs. But, with the late hour, there weren’t many customers left or tips to be had.
And then, for a fleeting second when he lifted his face and looked up into her eyes, she stopped breathing.
In that instant, looking into his dark, wide-set eyes, she saw everything. Every horrific detail. The flood of it all was momentarily overwhelming. She thought her knees might buckle.
Angela finally leaned in on the bar to steady herself and so that she could be heard over the pounding beat of the rock music. “What can I get you?”
“A beer,” he called back over the music.
He was youngish although older than her, maybe in his late twenties, with shaggy hair and scraggly stubble on his doughy face. She noted that he looked strong. When he took off his dripping wet slicker and tossed it over the next stool she saw that she had underestimated how powerfully he was built—not bodybuilder strong, but sloppy, stocky strong, the kind of man who didn’t know his own strength until it was too late.
To others his features might appear ordinary, but Angela now knew for certain that this man was anything but ordinary.
After she drew the beer, she set it on the bar in front of him. She licked foam that had run over the glass off the back of her hand and then from her red lipstick as she glanced past him to the clock on the wood-paneled wall to the right. It was less than an hour to closing. Not much time. She pulled a bowl of corn chips from under the counter and set it beside his beer.
“Thanks,” he said as he took a chip.
She turned back to drying glasses, but not so far as to let him think she was spurning his obvious interest in her. “If you want more just ask,” she said without looking at him, giving him the opportunity to stare down the length of her body.
He took a long drink along with the long look and then made a satisfied sound. “That hits the spot.”
“You live in the area?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder.
“Not really.”
She turned toward him. “What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been staying just up the road at the Riley Motel.” He deliberately glanced down at her legs. “But I may stay for a while longer, find some work.”
The Riley Motel wasn’t the kind of place tourists visiting the upper reaches of the Appalachian Mountains or the Finger Lakes region would likely stay. The Riley was used mostly by the hour by prostitutes and by the week by transients.
“Oh yeah? What kind of work? What do you do?”
He shrugged. “Whatever needs doing that pays the bills.”
Angela poured a shot and set it down in front of him. “On me—for a first-time new customer who may be staying for a while.”
He made an appreciative face and tossed back the shot. As he plunked the shot glass down on the bar, his gaze again drifted down the length of her.
“Kind of a dumpy place for a girl like y
ou.”
“It pays the bills.” She had to deliberately slow her breathing. “What’s your name?”
He held her gaze as he took another corn chip. “Owen.”
She had trouble looking away from his eyes and all that they told her.
“And yours?”
“Angela. My grandparents were Italian. Angela means ‘angel’ in Italian.” With a flick of her head, she tossed a disorderly shock of red-tipped hair back over her shoulder. “My mother named me Angela because when she was pregnant with me my grandmother said that God was sending her a little angel.”
Angela’s grandfather told her once that the meaning of the name Angel was “messenger from God,” and that while the messenger had come, Angela’s mother clearly hadn’t gotten the message.
Owen’s gaze moved from her eyes to the tattoo across her throat. “Is that some kind of joke?”
Angela flashed him a cryptic smile. “Maybe sometime you’ll have the opportunity to answer that question yourself.”
His expression darkened. “You fucking with me?”
She leaned in on an elbow so no one else would hear over the music and looked at him from under her brow. “Believe me, Owen, if I ever start fucking with you, you’ll know it.”
He didn’t quite know what to make of her answer, so he drank the rest of the beer. It was obvious that he was more interested in leering at her legs than trying to figure out what she’d meant.
Rather than wait for him to order another as he set down the empty glass, she set a fresh beer in front of him. She took the empty away and put it in the bar sink.
“Attentive little thing, aren’t you?”
She put on a flirty smile. “Someone needs to take care of a man like you,” she said as she poured another shot and dropped it in the beer.
He returned a grin and drank it all down, almost as if showing off.
“Maybe,” he said as he set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, “you could take even better care of me? What do you say?”
Her smile turned empty. “Sorry. You’re not my type.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
She placed both hands wide on the edge of the bar as she leaned in and spoke intimately. “I like dangerous guys who take what they want and don’t take no for an answer. Know what I mean?”
He frowned. “No. What do you mean?”
She paused for only an instant to invent a story. “I started going with my last boyfriend after he killed a guy.”
“Killed a guy? Straight-up killed him?”
“Well,” she drawled, “not like murdered him for the rush of doing it. I don’t think he had the balls for that. He killed the guy in a fight.” She gestured to the door. “Some drunk jumped him out in the parking lot when he left here. He broke the guy’s neck.” She winked as her smile returned. “Turned me on no end, know what I mean?”
“Sounds like a badass.”
“He was.” She shrugged as she pulled back. “That’s my kind of man. You don’t have what it takes.”
He weighed her words as he studied her face, her wild shock of red-tipped hair, the tattoo across her throat, the piercings. “I have my rough side.”
Angela huffed a laugh to dismiss his claim before turning to reach in and replace the whiskey bottle on a shelf in front of the smoked mirror on the back wall.
In the mirror she could see him looking at her ass.
She knew what he was thinking.
In a million years he would never be able to guess what she was thinking.
TWO
As Angela crossed the room with a tray of beers for the table of Hispanic men, the two older men passed her on their way out. They cast disapproving glances her way as they went by. Despite their silent scorn, they usually came in on the nights she worked and sat down at the end of the bar, nursing a beer or two as they talked sports and stared at her cutoff shorts over the tops of their beers.
They may have considered her dress and decorum improper for a young woman, but they couldn’t help being drawn by her raw femininity. She noted the irony but it didn’t really matter to her. Nothing much mattered to Angela.
Except men like Owen.
The four Hispanics had all fallen silent as she approached—not that she could have understood a word of what they were saying anyway. Spanish wasn’t all that common around Milford Falls. It struck her that they didn’t want to be overheard, even if they didn’t think she could speak their language.
By their furtive glances and whispers, it was clear that for some reason they didn’t approve of her any more than the two older men did. It was a different kind of disapproval, though, somehow more visceral, more vicious, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Even so, it didn’t matter to her any more than the scorn of the two older men.
There was something about all their eyes that bothered her. They weren’t like Owen’s eyes, but still, she knew that she didn’t like what she saw. But she couldn’t concern herself with it. She had something else on the front burner.
“This is going to have to be your last round,” she told them as she set down the beers. “It’s closing time.”
She could just read part of a receipt sticking up from the shirt pocket of one of the men. It was for the Riley Motel. She wondered which kind of guest they were, the by-the-hour kind, or by-the-week.
One of the men closest to her, the one who’d spoken for them whenever they’d ordered drinks, had dozens of moles all over his face. Some were large black lumps, while many more were as tiny as grains of sand. The largest number were clustered around his dark eyes. They made it hard for her not to stare at him.
As she set a beer down in front of each man, Mole-face smiled up at her. It wasn’t a friendly, or even polite, smile. It was a creepy, confrontational smile.
As she reached out with her free hand to take the ten- and five-dollar bills he was offering her, he ran his other hand all the way up the back of her thigh.
Before he could grab her ass, Angela stepped back, breaking the contact. At the same time, she snatched the two bills from between his extended first two fingers.
All four men laughed uproariously, as if it had been the punch line to an inside joke. She could only imagine what they must have been saying.
Mole-face grinned. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Now I can finally buy that bar of soap I’ve been wanting and wash my leg.”
Three of the four men laughed. Mole-face didn’t. She noted that they understood English well enough. She also noted that up to that point they had acted as if they didn’t. She couldn’t imagine what difference it made, except that maybe it allowed them to play ignorant and eavesdrop.
Angela was rarely rude to customers, even the ones who occasionally got lewd or grabby, but there was something about the looks of these four men that she didn’t like.
Mole-face said something in Spanish and they all laughed again.
“Problem?” Barry called from behind the bar.
“I was just telling them it was their last round for the night,” Angela said on her way back.
“How about you,” Barry said as he gestured to Owen. “Last call. You want another?”
Owen lifted a hand to turn down the offer. Apparently, he was not as eager to take a beer from Barry as he had been to take the drinks Angela had offered. He slid off the stool, unsteady on his feet, his fist pulling his camo slicker off the seat next to him.
As he turned to leave, Owen smiled at Angela. She could read the message in that big grin and deliberately didn’t return it. She briefly glanced at his eyes before openly ignoring him. She walked around the bar, put the tray away, then put the ten and five in the register. She didn’t take her tip from the two bills. She didn’t want any money from those four.
Owen paused in the doorway to look back. She could feel his eyes on her but she didn’t turn to look at him. She already knew what was in those eyes.
She w
anted him to get the impression she had dismissed him and had no further interest in or use for him, that he had been no more than a customer, a source of a tip. She knew that the simple rebuff of indifference would be enough to take him from a simmer to a low boil. He finally turned and went out the door.
After the other four men left, Barry turned off the music and the rotating light, breaking the spell, leaving the barroom simply old and rather decrepit, smelling of spilled beer, sweat, cigarette butts, and the urine on the floor of the men’s room. The quiet, at least, was a relief.
Angela dumped out the ashtrays and washed them along with the glasses in the bar sink while Barry counted the money from the till. After wiping down the bar, she did a quick job of sweeping the floor.
“Been pretty slow this week,” Barry told her as he handed her some folded bills. “Sorry it isn’t more, Angela. I know you could use the money to help your mother and all …”
“I know. Not your fault.”
No one and nothing could help her mother. Nothing ever could. As far as the money, she usually made good money at the bar, so she couldn’t complain about an occasional slow week.
“The other girls already blocked in on the schedule are enough to handle the place for the rest of this week.”
“Sure,” she said. “I understand.”
He hesitated, thinking of how to fill the silence, before he pushed the register closed. “Why don’t you come in next Friday and see if we can use you? Okay? Hopefully things will pick up soon and then we’ll get you back to your usual hours.”
Angela didn’t count the money he’d handed her. She knew that with as few hours as Barry had her working it wouldn’t be much. She nodded as she stuffed the bills in the front right pocket of her shorts along with her tips. They didn’t amount to much, either, and she’d paid for the drinks she gave Owen out of them. They were usually respectable, but with business being slow her tips had slowed down as well.
On her way to the door Barry called her name. She turned back.
“Be sure to wear some of those shorts next time you come back in to work. I think they were the only thing that kept that last guy buying drinks. They may have been the only thing that kept me in the black tonight.”