Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(58)

Harper hits the stairs, and the other person falls just below her with a thud. She pushes herself up, feeling pain all down one side of her chest, across her ribs. Her left forearm tingles as if electricity is coursing through it. But she manages to get up at the same time her attacker reveals himself.

His rapid breathing pushes the white cotton mask in, out, in, out. His eyes glare at her from the crude holes cut into the white material. The belt is around his neck. He is buck naked and cut all over from leaping through the wall at her. There is an axe at his feet, the blade covered in blood.

Harper backs off, coughing on the thick air. She glances to the right. Three steps up, her gun lies beneath the cascading dust. The killer sees it, too. As she makes a dive for it, he comes at her, snarling like an animal, his strong hands finding her skin and pinching so hard she thinks he’ll tear holes in her body. Harper screams, reaches out for the gun, her fingertips barely scraping the bottom of the handle.

The killer claws his way up to her, and when he’s close enough, she realizes there’s nothing else to do. She sinks her teeth into his chest. He screams, a high-pitched wail, and pushes himself off her, rolling away and hitting the banisters. Harper grabs her gun, aims it at him.

The man shoves Harper’s hand away as she fires, and it goes wide, the sound of it like thunder.

The killer wrestles with Harper for the gun, trying to tear it free from her hands, all the while managing to hold it far enough away from him. They end up lengthwise across the stairs, him on top of her. Harper uses what energy she can muster and shoves to the left. They tumble down the steps, the impact of each stair punching her straight in the ribs. She lands on top of him at the bottom and sees that Ida is watching from the front door.

The man thrusts upward with his hips and sends Harper rolling over him, landing in a heap against the wall. Grunting, he clambers up the stairs and grabs the handle of his axe.

He turns.

Ida blinks, backing off one step, then two. The killer cocks his head inquisitively from one side to the other as he takes her in.

“Ruby?”

Ida looks down at her feet. The gun has clattered along the hall to land next to her. Eyes on the man in front of her, she stoops down and picks it up.

He shakes his head. Reaches up, tears his mask away. Blood dribbles from one side of his mouth. The killer walks toward her, the axe dragging behind him, scraping on the floor.

“You killed my mamma.”

That makes him stop. Ida has never fired a weapon. The weight of it, held in front of her, clutched in both hands, is something completely alien to her. She points it at his chest, hoping that her aim won’t be too far off. Her finger caresses the trigger. It feels impossible to press down on it, releasing death.

“I loved her,” he says, coming for her. “I love ’em all.”

Ida looks at Stu’s body on the floor, at Harper watching her with one eye open, looking as though she’s not far from death’s door herself.

“You destroyed them,” Ida says. She pulls the trigger. The gun jumps in her hand, and the shot goes wild, punching a hole in the wall. The killer flinches away.

“Ida! Give me the gun!” Harper yells.

As the man rounds back on her, Ida skims the sidearm along the floor. Harper catches it neatly, leveling the weapon on the killer. She fires just as he turns to face her. The bullet strikes Lester square in the chest and he is blown back, landing against the bottom steps. The axe falls from his limp hand as he slides to a sitting position, attempts to move, then falls facedown on the floor, blood bubbling up from his nose.

Ida rushes to Harper’s side. Harper is trembling, the gun still clutched tight in her hand, pointed at Lester Simmons’s inert form.

Harper looks at her, panting—her breath coming in ragged gasps. “Ida . . . we need to teach you how to shoot a gun.”

In a daze, Ida looks back at the killer. “I don’t think I ever want to touch one again.”

“Maybe a good idea,” Harper says. “Next time you might shoot a hole in yourself.”

Ida stands, barely hearing her. “Keep an eye on him, sugar. Case he’s still got fight in him.”

Confusion clouds Harper’s face until she realizes what Ida is doing. “No! Don’t go near him, Ida! He’s still alive!”

Ida looks at her with fierce determination. “I have to do this. I have to know,” she says, crossing the landing and kneeling down next to him. The blood continues to bubble out of his nose. The fingers of one hand twitch sporadically.

Harper flops back, knowing the fight is lost. She aims the gun at Lester Simmons. “Don’t touch him . . .”

“I got no choice.”

Ida presses her hands down on Lester Simmons’s warm body, and she is taken away, carried on a hurricane of light and shadow, hot and cold. His fading heartbeat is the slowing rhythm of a cosmic metronome . . .

Lester’s mother rocking back and forth in her chair, knitting needles clicking as she speaks. “Your daddy hated them niggers. He was KKK through and through, yes sir.”

“Why did he hate ’em, Mama?”

“They ain’t to be trusted. Gettin’ ideas above their station, like they real folk. Cussing and drinking and havin’ they kids,” she says, rolling her words around in her mouth before spitting them out like poison.

Lester cocks his head to one side. He is just a boy. “What’f the KKK, Mama?”