Devil's Throat (The River Book 6) Read Online Free

Steven said, shaking his
fist open, trying to dispel the pain. “Then we can torture him.”
    “We’re not going to torture him,” Roy said. “It won’t work
with him. You’re lucky he didn’t see the punch coming, or he would have
defended himself in a way that was worse than the way your hand is feeling
right now. I don’t want to be around him when he comes to.”
    “What are we going to do?” Steven said. “Leave Jason here, under
his control?”
    “Do you want to risk hurting Jason by moving him?” Roy said.
    “Is that really true? Could moving him really hurt him, or is
Michael full of shit?” Steven resisted the temptation to kick Michael as he lay
on the ground.
    “Who knows?” Roy said. “Maybe he’s bullshitting, maybe he’s
not. We’ve got to learn more before we do anything. That’s our next step, not
torturing this asshole. He’s more dangerous than you think, and he’s already
angry enough to just go ahead and kill Jason. Let’s let him think that what
he’s doing to Jason right now is the worst he could do to hurt you. That at
least keeps Jason alive while we investigate.”
    He’s right, Steven thought. He’s almost always right. Playing this
any other way right now would be stupid and risky. For a moment he
regretted punching Michael, concerned that it might come back on Jason, but the
concern was fleeting when he thought of how good it felt to connect his fist
with Michael’s left cheek.
    “Alright,” Steven said. “What do we do? Clear out?”
    “We’re gonna walk down to the motel office,” Roy said, “and
get our own rooms in this dump. Then I want to make a few calls and see if we
can get some help.”
    Steven stood aside so Roy could walk out of the motel room.
He turned to look at Jason lying on the bed, and his heart fell in his chest.
Here was Jason, just feet away, and there was nothing he could do to help. Some
father I am, he thought. Roy was right, I shouldn’t have ignored him. If
he ever recovers from this, I’ll never ignore him again.

Chapter Three
     
     
     
    Twenty minutes later, Steven and Roy were moving their bags
from the car into their own set of adjoining rooms, ten doors down from Jason
and Michael’s. Michael will wake up and be pissed, Steven thought, and
he’ll find out we’re still here. As long as he thinks what he’s doing to Jason
will hurt me, he’ll keep doing it. And Jason stays alive in the meantime.
    Once settled in their rooms, Roy asked Steven to call Dixon
and then Eliza. He asked each of them if they knew of anyone in the area who
might be able to help. Dixon, normally a fount of information when it came to expert
contacts in various locales, came up dry. Eliza said she thought she might know
someone, but it was through a friend and she’d need to contact the friend first
to get their name and info. She promised to call right back as soon as she got
it.
    “In the meantime, the book,” Steven said, referring to the
family book Roy brought with them. It was a hand-bound book with several
sections, each part having been added by another generation of gifted Halls.
The first section was written by Roy’s great-great-grandfather Thomas. He’d
passed it down to his son Thomas Jr., then to Charles, and Charles had given it
to David, Roy’s father. Each of them added to the book in their own way,
tacking on a new section that was a slightly different shape and binding than
the one before it. It made for a hodge-podge of a book that always looked one
step from falling apart.
    Roy was much better at understanding what was in it since he
had more experience than Steven, and the book’s meanings only revealed
themselves once the reader brought some personal context to their reading. For
Steven, much of the book was impenetrable. It read like English, but any given
sentence seemed like jumbled words. That is, until he developed some experience
of the subject the words were written to explain – then the words became