A Cup Full of Midnight by Jaden Terrell Page A

“My brother and I used to hunt.”
    “Yeah? What’d you hunt?”
    “Mostly rabbits and squirrels. The occasional quail.”
    “Any deer?”
    “No. Never really got the chance. You?”
    He gave me a hard flat stare that said a man who’d never killed a deer had no right to call himself a hunter. “Sure. In season.”
    “How long you been doing it? Hunting, I mean?”
    “Got my first buck when I was twelve.”
    “Impressive.”
    “Not really.” He nodded toward his companion. “Elgin was ten.”
    Elgin grinned, his pale eyes hard and feral.
    I said to Hewitt, “You were hunting when Razor was killed. Where was Elgin?”
    Hewitt gave a startled laugh and glanced sharply at Elgin, who took a long draw from his beer bottle and gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Come back with a warrant,” Elgin said, “and maybe I’ll tell you.”
    “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m relying on the goodness of your hearts.”
    Hewitt said, “They tell you that son of a bitch gave my dog antifreeze?”
    “They said they suspected he had.”
    “So I’ll admit it. I hated the guy’s guts. But I didn’t kill him.” He turned back and bent over the engine again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta get to this alternator.”
    “You dress your own deer, Mr. Hewitt?” I asked.
    There was a pause before he answered. “Doesn’t everybody?”
    I kept my voice light when I asked my next question. Too light. I knew that in itself would call attention to it. I wanted it to. “What kind of knife do you use?”
    Hewitt’s back stiffened. Then he placed his palms flat on the front of the engine housing and took a long, deep breath. “You ought to go now, Mister,” he said softly.
    Elgin pushed his hips away from the car and shook the tension from his neck and shoulders. I took a step back, out of arm’s reach.
    “You have a good afternoon, Mr. Hewitt,” I said. “And thanks for the beer.”
    “Take it with you,” he said. “And go to Hell.”

CHAPTER TWELVE
    S ince Hell was low on the list of places I wanted to go, I stopped by the bookstore at Opry Mills instead and picked up copies of the books on Absinthe’s list. Crossing the parking lot, green bookstore bag in one hand, I flipped open the cover of my cell phone with the other and tapped in Josh’s number with my thumb. “Anything about that game we talked about?”
    He couldn’t disguise the excitement in his voice. “There’s one Friday night at seven. Dad didn’t want to let me go, but my therapist said it would give me closure, plus she doesn’t think the game’s a big deal. So Mom said okay.”
    “Josh, your dad—”
    “Wait, that’s what I’m saying. They had a talk, and Dad finally said I could go.” He sounded happy. It had been a long time since I’d heard that in his voice.
    I rang off and dialed Alan Keating. He was booked for the week, he said, but could squeeze me in during lunch the next afternoon. He sounded annoyed to hear from me, but maybe that was only my imagination.
    Jay’s door was closed when I got home, so I took care of the horses, wolfed down a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich, then went upstairs and crawled into bed with the player’s handbook for the vampire game. Lots of complicated pen and ink artwork, from the grotesque to the glamorous. A woman with a punk hairstyle opened her mouth to show elongated canines. A hairless vampire with bulging eyes sipped from the throat of a woman wearing little but a dazed expression. Dracula meets Heavy Metal.
    The rules for the game were punctuated by fictional journal entries and profiles of character archetypes. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was a hell of a lot more complicated than Chinese Checkers.
    After awhile, I closed the books and went online. Googled Goth and vampire , and spent the next few hours lurking in chat rooms and surfing the web. It was a different world, a world of shadings and subgroups—artists and poets, stylers,