The following is a preview of Westville Book 2, ‘Through The Skin’.
SPOILER WARNING!
Whereas the previous section shared of Book 2 ‘Through The Skin’ did not delve into any direct spoilers for Book 1, this next section certainly does.
You’ve been warned!
Part 2
Fair Play
1
The air was too thick for pretense.
It had been the kind of summer where the sweat never really left your skin, and it didn’t show signs of letting up.
Casey Benson knelt, the heat rising off the earth like breath and the sun pounding on the back of his uniform, the stench of manure and rot thick in his nostrils as he stared down at what remained of the livestock.
Chief Gordy Reynolds coughed, covering his mouth with the crook of his arm. “You ever seen anything like this?”
“Can’t say I have,” Casey said, the words coming slow and dry.
Unlike most of the kids he’d grown up with, Casey hadn’t come from a farming family—not even adjacent to one. Never hunted much, either. Nothing in the field, not in training. Just in the nightmares that had followed him through this past winter. And certainly not in daylight. The three cattle lay bloated and ruptured, their hides sagging, their bodies warped like overfilled balloons left too long in the sun. No gore. No spray. Just... collapse.
But in the corners of his mind, something hissed. The memory of bone under deer hide. Of antlers and stitched flesh, screeching in a whiteout. He shoved it back where it belonged.
He rose and circled the animals, boots sinking into the soft ground. A pair of longhorns, one red-and-white heifer, all reduced to skin tents stretched over ribcages. Flies should’ve been everywhere—but there was only silence and heat.
A truck door slammed near the roadside where the cruisers were parked. Jim Morgan approached, hands on his hips, wiping sweat from his head with a bandana already soaked through. These were his animals. The ones that had somehow gotten loose from the dairy, wandered out here, and died like this.
“If you boys’ve got theories, I’m all ears.”
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