Fall into Fire (Shamans of the Divide, Book 2)

Chapter Eight

Leonard loved his dually quad-cab pickup truck almost as much as he loved his wife, Billie. So when I saw the chromed out black beast of a rig smashed into a tree with smoke billowing out from the hood, I was almost too scared to look for Leonard. If he'd survived the head on brush with Mother Nature, he'd be insane with grief over his Dodge Ram.

Billie and I found him sitting up against the property fence, holding a handkerchief to his forehead. A couple ranch hands milled about, looking from their boss to his broken truck and then back again.

"Oh, dear lord," I heard Billie suck in a breath when she saw the driver's side. It was worse than the passenger's side. "What happened to you, Leonard?"

Leonard looked up at Billie and gave her a very slight shake of his head. I watched Billie give an almost-imperceptible nod back.

"Not now," the headshake told her.

"Understood," the nod had replied.

Had that been Renn and me, I would have managed to ask six or seven more questions before he finally got the point across to me. He was bad at giving messages and I was terrible at receiving them.

An older man reached down and helped Leonard up.

"Need an ambulance, boss?"

"Nah," Leonard said, dabbing at the small cut on his forehead. "I'm fine. Call a tow truck for me will ya?"

The man disappeared with his cell phone in hand. Billie took Leonard by the hand and walked with him back to the Gator we'd ridden out on. Cody, who'd ridden out with us, stayed behind with the ranch hands to wait on the tow truck.

Billie had the good sense to wait until we were on the long gravel drive before making Leonard tell her what happened.

"Well?"

Leonard looked around before speaking. Was he looking for someone? Or something? The way he looked along the empty driveway made me a little nervous.

"I heard something," he said quietly. "It was a woman's voice and it was awful."

Billie kept her eyes ahead of her, but I could see the frown on her face from where I sat in the back.

"Someone was on our property?"

Leonard shook his head.

"No," he said. "She was in my head. I heard a woman in my head."

I thought about the creepy little girl in Shades who'd invaded my thoughts with her obsessive love for Skye a few weeks ago. It had been terrifying and I'm sure I would have crashed a giant truck into a tree if Skye hadn't been driving at the time.

Leonard turned in his seat to look at me.

"It happened to you, didn't it?"

"In Shades," I said. "The little girl ghost, but she wasn't angry. She helped us."

Turning back in his seat, Leonard ran his hand through his silver hair.

"This wasn't a helpful voice," he said quietly. If I didn't know better, I would have thought his voice was shaking a little. Whatever, or whoever, this was, it had spooked him a little.

"What did she say?" Billie asked as we pulled up to the house. The writing group was gathered outside the house on the benches and Billie let them know she'd be with them in a minute.

Once safely inside the house, we grabbed chairs around the kitchen table.

Leonard had been driving home from a department meeting at the college.