Chapter Thirteen
Jo found herself on the far side of the hospital bed, backing into the corner behind the bathroom door, instinct again putting Mom between her and the pain. Even if Mom wasn't really there, her bed and silent body still made a wall between Jo and Dad.
When Daddy smiled like that, he was thinking of ways to hurt. Sometimes it meant his belt across her back or bare butt, sometimes the fists pounding her body -- never her face where some stranger could see the bruises.
But she didn't have to be afraid anymore. She'd summoned the power of her blood, of the blood she bore from both her parents, and bound him with a curse out of the Summer Country. She was stronger now than he was.
"Now that's a piece of luck." Good luck or bad luck, he didn't specify. "Finding you here saves me an extra trip."
He closed the door behind him, setting the lock, putting another barrier between them and any help from people out in the halls of the nursing home. The nurses could open it, of course. No dead-bolts, and they had a passkey for emergencies. But locks gave the residents privacy from each other.
Jo shook the distractions out of her head. Pay attention to Dad. He's dangerous. Power of the Old Blood or no, he still was dangerous.
He was here. She'd hoped the curse would keep him away. She glanced at the nurse-call button, wondering if she could reach it before he did.
He was here, and he was smiling. "I'd planned to find you first, before coming to deal with your mother. But every time I called, I just got that pothead boyfriend of yours. Is he your pimp too, you little whore? Is that how you pay the rent, since you can't hold a real job?"
"You don't sound like a good man." It was the Naskeag woman, with her half-knitted scarf lying abandoned in her lap and a single long bare needle shining in one hand like a dagger. Jo had forgotten about her, staring at Dad's sadist smile and listening to his words as casually brutal as his fists.
"I don't think you sound like the kind of man who could be such a good girl's father. She comes here every day to talk to her momma, not like you. I think she's some other man's daughter. Some nicer man, who cared about her mother and his children."
The old Indian stared with her blind eyes, face aimed at a point just over Dad's shoulder. Jo wondered what she saw. A woman that old, living on the reservation, she'd have seen plenty of evil. Men like Dad. Poverty and drink and hopelessness brought out the worst in people.
"Shut up, old woman. Shut up and stay alive. This is family business."
He had a gun.
It appeared as if by magic, suddenly there. It sat small and shiny and blue in his hand but seemed to fill the room. Time froze around Jo. The steel-blue sights and black hole pointed straight at her heart. She could see shadows in the other chambers, lead-gray with copper rings and black centers, hollow-pointed slugs. Killer slugs.
"You put the curse on me, witch. You and your witch-Irish mother. Bad blood, old blood from under the hill. But I know how to break it. A curse dies with the witch who spoke it."
The old Naskeag moved, standing up big and round and bulky like a wave humping up to break on the shore, flowing forward with her knitting needle extended. It had become a knife in her hand, held low, with her other arm above it in a guard. The move looked like something she'd done a hundred times before. What kind of a life had she survived?
"The child put no curse on you, mister man. You wrote it on your own forehead. The child just read the words out loud. No woman ever dared do that before. Now you finally ran up against one strong enough."
His hand jerked away from Jo, the gun seeking closer danger and then flashing blue light streaked with orange, and the room echoed. The roar of the shot squeezed Jo's head. He turned back, snapping a shot point-blank into the helpless form on the bed, and her ears didn't register the sound. The muzzle rose back to her and found her and the hammer flashed again and she saw the red of burning powder blaze around a black shadow as it flew out of that short bore.
Jo shrank back hard against the wall. Plaster stung her cheek, blasted out of a sudden crater next to her left shoulder. He'd missed. Somehow he'd missed, at ten feet or less across the bed. No way he could miss twice at that range.
The hammer lifted again as he squeezed the trigger, aiming this time instead of a snap shot, taking no chances. His hand trembled and the hammer froze at half-cock. The muzzle turned away from Jo's heart, wavering, uncertain, traversing the empty wall above Mom's bed where blood pooled red and wet across white sheets.
Jo's ears still rang. She couldn't believe how loud a pistol was, in a small hard-walled room like this. And she couldn't believe she'd noticed that, when her father still held a loaded pistol and tried to aim it at her heart. But she'd moved beyond fear into that space of quiet rage she'd found when she'd called the curse down on her father.
Words formed in the shattered gun-smoke air, not Jo's voice this time. "You wrote the curse, little man." The Naskeag woman stood, a breaking wave frozen above the granite ledge, apparently unharmed. Her age and blind eyes gave her the aura of a priestess, untouchable unswerving voice of the gods.
"And since you wrote it in your own blood, you found that it was true. Tried to take another woman, did you? Planting Woman heard the words, and made your balls shrivel into
