Shooting a look of amusement at us, Wesley asked, “Do you want us to wave them around like we just don’t care, too?”
“Say ho-oh!” Jackson sang, a burst of laughter coming out of him. To anyone else it might look like he genuinely meant it, but his eyes were heated and he wasn’t in the slightest bit amused at that moment.
Gaping at us and our failure to comply with her demands, she screeched, “Hands in the air, I’ve got a fucking gun.”
“So do I, lady,” Elijah shouted. “In fact, we’ve all got them. But I’m taking it from how badly your hands are shaking that you don’t know how to use one.”
In the weeks to come, as I went over tonight’s events for the millionth time, I’d think about how we reacted at this moment and realize how stupid we’d been. Whether you believe it’s truly dangerous, a gun being waved around isn’t anything to laugh at regardless of whether or not you’re armed. But right then we were running on anger – and probably arrogance, too – so we didn’t give her what she wanted.
Just as he’d said the last word she fired, narrowly missing my head and splintering the wood behind it, pissing us all off even more.
“I told him to make sure he did it when none of you would notice. I told him a thousand times, but he wouldn’t listen. Kept taking his drugs and asking if he’d still have his job. Like a doctor can do their job when they’re high, the lawsuits would be astronomical and we’d end up broke. But he wouldn’t come home without her, so this was the only way to do it. Then I was going to kill him. She’s not even mine so what do I care what he does with her, but I won’t lose my job and everything I’ve worked for because of him,” she ranted, swinging the gun between all of us. “She’s just like Ed, a liability, but the world expects you to get married, expects you to have kids. If I wasn’t a family woman, they’d have given the job to someone who was. I’ve been through too much to fail now.”
“Cool story, bro,” Jackson yelled to her, still acting unaffected by it. “But it’s cold, I need to piss, and I’ve got cramp in my ass. Wanna get to the point?”
Another shot rang out, this one skimming his arm and making him growl under his breath as the skin opened up.
“Shut up,” she screeched, making us all wince involuntarily at the pitch of it.
“She’s a fucking whack job,” Elijah muttered, unnecessarily telling us something we could all see.
Wesley wasn’t close enough to hear it but he turned when Elijah said the words and grinned at us, and then looked back at her. “Are you going to deafen us, or kill us?”
Pointing it at his head this time, she sneered at him. “What do you think? My gun’s pointing at your face…”
A large hand appeared over her shoulder, plucking the gun out of hers before she even realized what was happening. And then, in the worst Australian accent I’d ever heard, my cousin Marcus – Jackson’s twin – scoffed, “That’s not a gun, this is a gun.” And, walking around in front of her, he held up a Taurus 513. “They call it the Raging Judge, but I prefer the Glock 19 that’s in my car.”
“You said it all wrong,” Jackson called out as the woman’s eyes darted between them, no doubt confused why she was seeing double. “It’s meant to be a knife. In Crocodile Dundee, Mick says that when he shows the dude his knife.”
I didn’t care if he’d given out the winning lottery numbers, I just wanted to get Charlotte to hospital. Fortunately, Noah and Madix joined us just then, both of them riding an ATV and looking surprised by the appearance of Lottie’s mom as well as our other cousin. Even though neither of them questioned it until much later on.
Pushing Raquel Rose down on the ground next to the whimpering shit stain Eric, both Marcus and Wesley stood watching them while we got ready to move Lottie onto the ATV. It was going to be complicated, but we had to make it work. There was no other option.
At least there wasn’t until Connor and Barron turned up. Apparently, Noah had texted our dad to let him know exactly where we were, and after they’d cuffed Kari in their vehicle Tate had brought them to us.
Making sure both Raquel and Eric were now unarmed, they radioed through to the EMTs who were waiting for the all clear to approach the area. This meant that we were able to put her onto a stretcher with her neck properly immobilized, before taking her to where the ambulance was.