Covet (Clann)

You’re going to break the seat belt!”
    I blinked a few times, turned toward the voice, found Anne biting her lower lip as she tugged at my hands, which were still scrabbling at my seat belt buckle.
    “Whew! When did you get such a temper? I thought I was the one who needed anger management courses around here.” She grinned.
    I stared at her. “Did he just say that he was responsible for Tristan’s accident tonight, or was I hearing things?”
    Her smile faded. “I think he was just messing with you about that. He’s a piss-ant, nothing more. He’s not smart enough to attempt murder without killing himself in the process. Can you see him even figuring out where the brake lines on a truck are? He’d probably wind up rolling the truck over himself if he even tried looking for them.”
    “But he did threaten to hurt you,” I said. “You heard him say that at least, right?”
    She rolled her eyes. “Oh please. He’s all talk and no bite. Besides, if he did try to come after me, I’d just shoot him with my new bow and arrows.”
    Did I hear her right? “Uh, bow and arrows?”
    “Yeah. My grandpa sent me the newest pro series Firestorm compound bow for turkey season. I’ve been dying to try it out.”
    “Since when did you take up bow hunting?”
    “Since I was five. It’s a family thing. My grandpa owns a company that manufactures them. Don’t you remember me talking about it? I must have mentioned it at least a thousand times by now.”
    I vaguely remembered her grossing us all out at lunch with stories about deer hunting every November with her uncle. I definitely remembered her mentioning that deer hunting included dousing herself in deer urine. But I sure didn’t remember her ever mentioning what kind of weapons they used. “I knew you like to hunt, just not with bows and arrows. Isn’t that kind of…old-fashioned? Why not just use a gun?”
    She took a long, deep breath. “Oh dear lord. Promise me you’ll never say that again. First off, no one goes hunting with a gun. Guns are for hunting people . Rifles are for hunting animals . And secondly, my grandpa would skin me alive if he ever heard I was using anything other than a compound bow made by his company. Besides, compound bows are more fun to use than a rifle and a heck of a lot harder to shoot yourself with.” Her face wrinkled into a frown. “Though I guess if you were a complete idiot you might accidentally shoot yourself in the foot. Or if you had the worst luck on the planet, a crappy shaft could explode and stab you through the hand. And of course you have to use proper technique so you don’t derail the string and kill your arm or take out an eyeball or something…”
    Before she could get any further on a roll here, I jumped in while I still could. “Has your grandpa’s company been making bows a long time?”
    “Yep, going on forty years now. Want to see some pictures?” Before I could answer, she dove across the seat, opened the glove compartment and rooted around until she found a catalog. “Check out my new Firestorm.” She jabbed a finger at a page. “Isn’t it awesome? Mine’s black, though. I’m gonna call it the Black Widow. I can’t wait to take it on night hunts for wild hog.”
    She had to be joking. “Er…wild hogs?”
    She nodded quickly several times, her eyes round. “The durn things are taking over everywhere! They’re a total menace, which is why you can hunt them all year round without a license. Uncle Danny and I already went on a couple of hunts this year, mainly just to scout out the local population, and nearly got ourselves killed the first time out. Those hogs are crazy aggressive.”
    I studied the complicated-looking device in the catalog. Compound bows weren’t anything like what I’d expected a bow to look like, consisting of a futuristic design with a lot of holes for the main part. At each end of the main section were even stranger looking pulleys and not one but three strings stretching between them. It looked like something out of an Aliens movie. How did one even go about shooting this thing?
    I flipped through a few pages and had to stop as the color of one particular design leapt off the catalog page. “They make them in pink camo?”
    She grinned. “Yep, that’s one of the Rookie models. I had one kind of like that for my first bow.”
    I tried to visualize a preschool aged Anne running through a field with a giant hot pink compound bow and shooting arrows as Dylan