Page 56

Mariano

H ouse of horrors for people who were not prepared to see what Jack had to show us.

Another old barn was wedged between Jack’s land and the Green Ranch.

So, of fucking course, it was theirs. It was filled with glass tanks.

Tanks and tanks of poisonous snakes. The barn was stuffy, even though the wind was chilled, and instead of the smoky tinge of fall, a musky scent filled the air.

My eyes met Marciano’s and Angelo’s when we passed the rows. The tanks were filled with macabre body parts. Whether animal or human, some of them were hard to tell. Such as the black viper slithering between two eyeballs. Fresh by the looks of them.

Faustis thrived in darkness. This was all scare tactics from boys who played with their dicks for fun. Got hard off the fact they were scaring something smaller than them—women—not recognizing the power a woman held.

A woman held the power to haunt a man for the rest of his life. Maybe not in big ways, but in small ways. Small ways that added up to the moment when he took his last breath, and her spirit stood over him, about to steal the last moment of peace from him.

Our faces might be the last these fuckers saw, but it would be my wife, and Atta, who worked through our hands, stealing the one thing these motherfuckers had going for them.

The air in their lungs.

Something moved behind me, and I turned my eyes away from the tanks to make sure we weren’t being ambushed.

Jack held a shotgun, and when our eyes met, he nodded.

He was standing guard at the door. Dolly kept barking, but Jack said she was just upset she couldn’t get out with us.

He’d made her stay in the truck because of what could potentially be underfoot. Slithering landmines.

“Fuck.” Marciano wiped sweat from his brow. “Those baskets.” He nodded toward them. “Dens? The wicker, or whatever the fuck they’re made of, is moving.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what that is.”

“Sick,” Angelo said, and he shivered.

Yeah, I couldn’t have fucking agreed more.

“This place.” Angelo wiped his forehead. “It paints a clear picture of that night.”

My fists tightened. I had to stop myself from breaking every tank with my knuckles. My mind wandered back to the night Jack had described. “Atta is already there—did they take her?” I questioned out loud.

Jack cleared his throat. “Rattler isn’t an ugly guy, by looks alone,” he said. “Has that dangerous vibe to him. Was older. Young girls.” He shrugged. “They see the opposite of what their parents are tellin’ ’em.”

That was a delicate way of saying Atta had probably accepted Rattler’s invitation for a date.

Angelo was hard before, but after Jack’s words, he was about to fucking lose it.

It wasn’t the time. One of those snakes got loose, even Fausti blood couldn’t cure venom, not in the fucking literal sense.

I gave him the order to stand down, but he was so far gone inside of his own violence, Marciano took a step closer to him.

Ready to intervene if he went to lash out.

I cleared my throat. “We don’t know how long Atta’s there before Sistine is. Did Sistine sense something was off? If it was close to a blizzard, something made her leave the comfort of home. Maybe Atta called her? They forced Atta to?”

Jack shook his head. “Reception is still crap around these parts.” He blinked. “Until recently. Not that it matters. In a storm of that size, she couldn’t have made the call.”

“That confirms my theory,” I said, my eyes on Marciano and Angelo. “Sistine left to check on Atta.” My jaw clenched even at the thought of saying what I was going to next. “The dead men frightened our women with snakes. To fucking break them.”

Jack nodded. “That’s about the speed of it.

The bison saved them. Unexplainable too.

And if it wasn’t for them probably thinking Ash’s herd got loose, they would have kept to the barn, most likely.

The one time the herd got loose before, Ash brought all the boys out to the snake barn and beat them senseless.

That’s something not even a boy forgets. ”

“Call Remo,” I said to Marciano. “Have him find someone in the family to come and get these fucking things.”

Marciano nodded, pulled out his phone, and went to dial. He put the phone to his ear. His eyes met mine and he shook his head.

“No service.”

“Didn’t think there would be any. I haven’t been out this way in a while, as you can see why.

” Jack waved a hand toward the tanks. He looked at one of the baskets and shivered.

“Dens. Something about that just don’t sit right with me.

Like they’re all cozied up, warming each other, their rattlers moving in pleasure.

Ach .” He rubbed his arms. “So damn sinister.” He made the sign of the cross, and so did Marciano.

“I’d never go out of my way to hurt one, but put one in front of me…

Like I was sayin’. Too far out for service.

Even with the new reach we suddenly developed when you men came to town. ”

A cold hand seemed to seize my throat. My breath was cut off. The line to my wife.

“We’ll call him as soon as service is restored,” I said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

In the span of a breath, Jack’s tan leathered face turned white, before he lifted the gun and pointed it at me.

I moved a breath before the gun rose and blasted over my head.

The tanks were stacked in rows, two high with some space between.

We had to bend down to see the bottom tank, the others were mostly eye level.

One of the snakes must have gotten loose and was right behind my head. I got a glimpse of it before Jack blew it to smithereens. In doing so, though, the other tanks were compromised too.

“Snakes on the loose!” Jack roared. His hearing had been impaired by the blast.

My ears were ringing like I’d been caught off guard by one of Marciano’s fists.

“Oh, fuck no!” Marciano roared.

Jack was the first out, followed by Marciano, Angelo, and me. I shut the door to the barn so most of them could be contained. At that fucking point, the entire place should be torched. Some of these snakes didn’t belong in Wyoming, but other parts of the world.

Dolly stuck her head out of the truck cab, flapping her ears and still hollering. Or I fucking thought she was. I could barely hear. Jack refusing to allow her to get out when we’d first arrived was a good fucking call.

Jack jumped in his truck a second before my crew loaded up in mine.

Marciano was patting himself down, like he was looking for holes, and not of the bullet variety.

We all did. I started the truck once we all found ourselves whole and pulled up next to Jack.

Dolly was looking at me as if to say, what now?

“I’ll follow you!” I screamed toward him.

He nodded and took off as if the devil was chasing him. Rocks and debris hit the windshield, and a dust cloud swallowed the truck whole.

“What’s that smell?” Marciano set his nose in the air, sniffing.

“It smells like roasting meat,” Angelo said, doing the same thing with his nose.

I slammed on the brakes when Jack’s truck suddenly stalled out. He punched the side of his truck and then looked at me through the rearview mirror. We both seemed to step out at the same time. We looked over his truck, and it was quickly lowering.

“My tires,” he said, squinting at them.

“Nails,” I said.

“Mariano,” Angelo called. “Looks like we have hit nails too.”

“Fuck,” I said. “We’ll just ride on the rims until we reach town.”

“My truck is stalled,” Jack said. “It won’t go any further.”

“You’ll load Dolly up and ride with us,” I said.

“All right.” He nodded. “I’m going to carry her, though.” His eyes searched the land, but it was vast and wide open.

“Get in the truck, Jack,” I said. “I’ll get her.”

Dolly was whining at me when I reached the truck, her tail wagging as if I saved her life. I picked her up, and she let out a humungous fart. It smelled like fucking regurgitated chili.

Jack gave me an apologetic smile. “She’s an older lady. She don’t care about social etiquette no more.” Dolly licked him all over the face when he took her in his arms and cradled her, almost like a baby. “That’s my good Dolly. Good girl. Oh, my good girl.” Her tail thumped against Angelo’s face.

“Where are you going, Mariano?” Marciano asked as I started back for Jack’s truck.

I lifted a hand. “To grab Jack’s keys.” And to find out what that smell was coming from Jack’s truck before Dolly almost knocked me unconscious with that foul miasma from her ass. I grabbed Jack’s keys and sniffed inside of his truck.

“That’s fucking sick, Mari,” Marciano said, his entire face scrunched up.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“That’s where Dolly had to release her toxic gas. And you’re fucking sniffing it?”

“Get the fuck outta here.” I waved him back. “Do you smell that?”

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?—”

“It smells like our truck, motherfucker.”

“Oh.” His face shutdown, before he took a cleansing inhale, then another. “Yeah, it does. Roasting meat.”

I bypassed him and went to the steering wheel area.

I popped the hood from the lever. Marciano got to the open hood first. The top half of his body reared back like someone stuck something offensive in his face.

I put a hand to my brother’s chest and pushed him back when I realized what the problem was.

Snakes underneath the hood. One of them had been barbecued by the heat of the motor.

The twisting creatures were hissing and slithering around, moving slow, either looking for a way out or being hypnotized by the warmth.

A new fucking den.

“That’s why Dolly has gas. She’s nervous.

” Marciano shook his head. “We can’t even look for the problem to fix it.

We need those tongs, or snake wranglers, or whatever the fuck they’re called.

I saw a few of them in that should be condemned barn.

We need them to bypass this level of fucking hell.

Jack’s right. Look at them. Besides the fried one, they look like they’re canoodling. ”

My brother, Marciano Leone Fausti, the word specialist. Leave it to Marci to use the fucking word “canoodling” regarding snakes.

Angelo stepped up to us, a grim look on his face. “It is not the motor, Cugini, ” he said, “the dead men have stolen our gas.”

Marciano raised his eyebrows. “Dolly wasn’t throwing a tantrum then. She was trying to warn us.”

Yeah, if we’d only fucking listened.