Darkness Falls (Darkness Series Book 3) by J.L. Drake Page B

another table. “I won’t even burn a candle at home.”
    “Pussy,” Riggs said and grinned with a greasy mouth.
    “You’re scared of mascots, Riggs,” Riley pointed out. “We all saw it at the hockey game a few months back.”
    Riggs dropped his burger, then stuck a finger in his direction. “It’s not right having an abnormally large head.” The table broke into a loud roar. “It’s unnecessary to be that disproportioned.” He made an exaggerated quiver sound and went back to his burger.
    “Okay, so you wouldn’t have a mascot hanging around your house?” Riggs gave Riley a look. “Right, so no candle, no fire, no barbecue death for me.”
    “Oh, speaking of barbecues…” I caught the table’s attention. “My place, Friday, seven.”
    Riley shook his head. “That was so wrong, dude.”
    “Holy shit,” Campbell hissed toward the front door just as Avery headed to our table. “What happened to you?”
    Avery sat in an open chair and signaled at the waitress to bring him a beer. Both of his eyes were black, and his nose appeared to be fractured. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
    “Well, that explains why you weren’t there this morning.” Riley pushed his plate away. I could see he and Avery had some issues with working together. It wasn’t easy filling the shoes of a dead partner.
    “What happened?” Campbell asked quietly.
    Avery thanked the waitress, who looked a little startled. “Took a shortcut home, walked up on a drug deal, they weren’t too pleased. Anyway, a few punches later, they backed off.”
    “You get a good look at them?” I asked and wondered where this went down. Avery didn’t live that far from us.
    “Not really.” He downed half his beer. “But if I see them again, I’ll deal with them.”
    I looked at the rest of the guys. “Yeah, we all will.”
     
    ***
     
    Avery
     
    The bottle sat in front of me, half empty. I squinted through the colored glass, and the TV flickered behind it. My face pounded with my heartbeat. I let myself go back over how I dealt with my face. I sought out a few dealers, pretended I wanted to buy some coke, and then ran off with it. I turned left, though I knew it was a dead end. I waited for them to approach, then let them beat my face in. When I had enough, I took out my pent-up anger on them. One probably wouldn’t be able to walk again, but whatever.
    I looked at my phone to check the time, then stared for a while at the picture I kept for show on the lock screen of my computer. It was of me and Matthews at the Triangle. There was a small part of me that missed him; he always had my back. I should have known he wouldn’t have been able to handle Jims and his crazy ways. When Jims caught sight of Emily and moved his attention there, Matthews really flipped out. He couldn’t do that to Seth, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, after he met Emily, things went south. I thought he was going to be able to work it out, but that night he followed me to Jims’s cabin and saw the basement where Jims was going to keep her, I knew it was over. Matthews just didn’t have it in him, and his constant moral battles with himself had to end.
    My eyes started to close.
     
    “Hey.” Matthews opened the door and moved aside to let me in. “You want a drink?”
    “Sure.” I locked the door behind me and slowly closed the blinds. “You here by yourself?”
    “Yeah, Mom came for dinner, but she left about an hour ago.” He handed me a beer and poured himself a rye and Coke, his favorite. “Cheers.” He nodded at the couch. “You hungry?” I waited for him to set his glass down on the table.
    “Yeah, I kind of am. You have any leftovers?”
    Matthews headed for the kitchen, and when he rounded the corner, I pulled out a baggie of crushed painkillers. I poured the seven pills’ worth of white dust into his glass and stirred it with my finger. It quickly swirled and disappeared in the glass.
    “Meatloaf all right?” He handed me the plate and