Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

rocks on the ridgetop. Like three men standing—leaning drunkenly, if you want the truth—the stones huddled at the base of a much bigger, much taller sandstone cliff that ran for several miles along a tiny creek.
    Back when he had first moved here, he had poked around the ragged cliff face. He found old broken pottery, fallen-down walls, and mounds of stones that had once been houses. But he didn’t go prowling anymore. It was hard getting around, and the ghosts in those places had nothing to tell him that he didn’t already know.
    People died. No one cared.

Chapter 8
    Sedona
    November 1
    Very early
    G rateful for the bright moon, Cherelle followed the old man’s footsteps. Her white clothes shimmered in the moonlight. The skirt and loose blouse lifted and swirled and billowed at the least hint of movement. Nice and atmospheric for the dumbs, but the clothes didn’t give her nearly enough warmth for predawn in the high cedar scrub forest around Sedona.
    She had been going for angelic with her costume but had landed closer to winding sheets and goblins. God knew she felt cold enough to be a corpse. Her skin had roughened like the hair along a junkyard dog’s spine at the sight of a thief. Cursing silently, she rubbed her palms over her arms and wondered if Tim had remembered to bring a jacket. She doubted it. He was worse than a kid. If she didn’t think of it, it didn’t get done.
    She was fed up with being mama-chick to every pretty baby-chick she stumbled over.
    Silently she reminded herself that being poor wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later she would make the big ol’ score that was waiting for her. She didn’t know what it would be, she just knew that it had to be. She wasn’t going to spend her whole life one bad break away from turning tricks again. She had too many brains for that.
    She was the one who had figured out that there was money in the channeling gig after Tim came back from an all-expenses-paid sex holiday in Sedona with a fistfull of cash and a lot of lame one-liners about talking to ghosts. It had taken a year and more work than either of them liked, but she and her pretty boy-chick had put together a channeling business. Not a great one. Not a lousy one. Just a business.
    Everything had been going okay until Tim’s old jailhouse buddy had showed up. Socks was a real pain in the ass. He kept wanting Tim to play when there was work to be done.
    Not that she blamed Tim. This working all the time was for the dumbs. What kept her at it was the belief that someday soon one of the morons who came to Sedona looking for a vortex thrill would be a man rich enough to take care of her and young enough to still get it up. When that happened, Tim and the stupid channeling con were history. Or maybe Tim would get lucky first and find himself a nice rich old lady who believed in talking to Thunderballs or whoever the flavor of the day was. Then Cherelle could live off Tim while she looked over the old lady’s rich male friends.
    Thinking of that day was almost as good as doing crack cocaine. Both made her feel like she could fly. One day she would. She’d just step off the edge and fly and fly and fly.
    Smiling, dreaming, Cherelle bumped into Virgil. She would have fallen against him if one of his thin, surprisingly strong hands hadn’t clamped around her arm to steady her. Even with that help she had to brace herself on one palm against the cold surface of a man-high stone. Instantly she snatched back her hand as though she had touched a live rattlesnake. She hated those stones with a passion that came straight from fear.
    “Thank you,” she said in a low voice. “The energy is so strong here that I forget about the normal world.” Goddamn path could use a few lights, too . But she kept that nonvortex insight to herself.
    Tim came up behind her. “Everything okay?”
    “Everything is perfect,” she said, shivering and lying through her locked teeth.
    She couldn’t dream away the clenching of her stomach any longer, or ignore the cold slide of sweat down her spine. She had nearly peed her pants in raw kindergarten terror the first time Virgil had led her to this place. She didn’t know what waited in the shadows between the three stones, but she knew to the bottom of her feet that she didn’t want any part of it.
    She watched Tim go over and lean against one of the big stones, waiting for her to get on with the act. He no more felt anything than the rock did. Less,