Vile Blood by Max Wilde

and his son’s sleeping face came to him, all he had left of the woman he’d loved with such a consuming passion that when he lost her he’d become unhinged.
    Gene sighed away these memories and returned to the doorway of Lavender’s room. The old woman looked up at Gene as she calibrated the morphine dripping into the sheriff’s shrunken arm. Gene had exchanged nothing more than nods and grunts with her in the week since she’d stepped from the rear of the ambulance that had ferried Lavender home to die from the hospital in the state capital up north, but he found her constant, mute, presence reassuring.
    He nodded again and she may have dipped her head in reply. He retrieved his hat from the stand by the front door, hanging beside Lavender’s finger-shaped old Stetson. Gene took just a moment to set his hat in the glass of a faded family portrait and let himself out, unconsciously adjusting the hang of his sidearm as he walked across to the cruiser, ready to face the thing he’d once called his sister. 
     
    For the first few miles it was demonic energy that drove Skye across the desert, her eyes unnaturally sharp, her enhanced night vision turning the rutted landscape to a silvery version of daylight. Then, as she ran off The Other, she felt fatigue and slowed her pace until she was walking, darkness crowding her, taking care with her footing on the rocky plain.
      But enough of The Other still coursed through her veins to allow Timmy to come her. Not in a memory, not in her imagination. He was there, with her, screaming and calling her name.
    Adrenaline kicked in and Skye ran through her fatigue, toward the double row of streetlights that flanked the dirt road like a landing strip, leading her home. Late in the last century their ranch was subdivided and sold off to developers for a suburb that had died on the drawing board, the bankrupt speculators disappearing before Gene saw a dime, these fizzing and blinking lampposts all that remained.
    She got home at the same time as her brother did, parking his cruiser under the basketball hoop, staring at her as she came up the driveway sweating and panting, his eyes on her torn T-shirt.
    “Is Timmy okay?” she asked, standing with her hands on her knees, drinking air.
    “Sure. I spoke to Maria a few minutes ago. Why?”
    “I need to check,” she said, heading toward the front door.
    “Stay here,” he said, blocking her with an outstretched arm, and she knew it wasn’t because he was protecting her from any danger. He was protecting his son from her.
    Gene ran for the stairs and Skye stood in the living room as Maria gathered her knitting and her DVDs, not hearing a word of the girl’s chatter . Only knew the babysitter had gone when the room was quiet. Skye caught her reflection in the ornate mirror that hung above the fireplace, her hair was wild and she had a smear of something that could only be blood on her cheek.
    Hearing Gene’s boots on the stairs she rubbed at her face with the hem of her T-shirt, hoping, as she turned to him, that the blood was gone.
    “He’s fine. Sleeping,” Gene said. “What got you so panicked?”
    She shook her head. “Just a feeling. Nothing. I was being stupid.”
    He stared at her, then nodded and sat down on one of the blue and white striped chairs his wife had bought not long after they were married.
    “Sit,” he said.
    She sat facing him. His eyes were sunken in his head, the creases in his face deeper than she had ever seen them. He looked nearer fifty than thirty.
    “What happened last night, with those men?” he said.
    “I told you.”
    He shook his head. “This is no time for your lies.”
    “I’m not lying, Gene.”
     “You know what I was doing with Dellbert Drum earlier?” She didn’t reply. “He was at that crime scene last night. He found your eyeglasses.”
    She felt as if she was about to choke. Forced herself to breathe. “What’s he going to do with them?”
    “Nothing. If I