Standing close in front of this powerful figure, looking into his dark eyes, she was overwhelmed with images flooding through her mind. Scene after scene of him murdering people flashed past her mind’s eye at lightning speed, each one gruesome, each person she saw in the grip of horror under this ruthless monster.
And then those scenes rushing past started to slow. They came to a stop on her grandparents.
Angela stood frozen, her eyes wide, as she stared up into this man’s eyes, stared into the vision of him with Vito and Gabriella on their knees, facing away from him. Angela saw Cassiel step forward and shoot her grandfather in the back of the head. As simple as that, the man that had meant so much to her was dead. He collapsed into the tall, dusty weeds beside the road.
Her grandmother was on her knees beside him. She was weeping silently. Her head was bowed and her hands were together in prayer. Cassiel put the barrel of his gun to the base of her skull and pulled the trigger. There was a bang and a flash. She fell beside her beloved husband.
Cassiel had been in a hurry. For that reason only he hadn’t made their death as grisly as most of the others. He had simply wanted to dispatch family members of people with the vision to recognize killers. It was not mercy. He was in a hurry to go rape a young woman he had tied up in a basement in a nearby town. It was all he could think about. He kept getting an erection every time he thought about her and what he was going to do to her. But first, he wanted to eliminate these two members of the Constantine family.
In that instant, Angela’s grandparents had ceased to exist. Their light went out of her world. Her whole life had been cast into darkness.
Angela could feel tears running down her face.
“ ‘Dark Angel,’ ” Cassiel said in a mean, gravelly voice as he read the tattoo across her throat. He reached out and gently took hold of her left nipple between a thumb and finger. He could see in her eyes that she recognized him as a killer. “I knew that those four fools wouldn’t be able to kill a woman like you. It takes a man like me to do that. And I knew that a woman like you would be living in this remote place your grandparents built.”
Terror shredded her ability to think. She couldn’t make herself move as he stood towering over her, rolling her nipple in his fingers, smiling, imagining all the things he would do with her before he killed her.
“I have at last come back for you, my little angel.”
Angela finally began to form thoughts. She realized that she had to do something or she was going to die a long and agonizing death.
Her boots with her knife were on the other side of him, at the foot of the bed, so she abruptly turned to dive for the gun she kept on her nightstand. The gun wasn’t there. He must have taken it.
He slammed into her from behind. His big arms wrapped her in a bear hug. He lifted her from her feet.
As panic brought her fully awake, she remembered Nate’s lessons.
She knew she had three seconds to live.
The bear of a man bent her forward, his feet spread as he walked her toward the bed, toward her death.
Bent forward, Angela shifted her hips to the left, reached back with her right hand, and forcefully grabbed his genitals. She gritted her teeth and abruptly twisted them with every fiber of her strength.
He might have been big and strong, but he was no less vulnerable down there.
Cassiel let out a surprised cry as he reflexively released the bear hug to break away from the source of sudden pain. As soon as he did, Angela spun around and with a backhanded swing hit him on the side of his bull neck as hard as she could, shocking his carotid artery.
It stunned him momentarily. He staggered back, drunkenly, his knees nearly buckling. It gave her just enough time and space to dart past him and out through the bedroom doorway before he fully recovered.
She had plenty more guns in the basement, but she kept the basement door locked. But even if she did manage to unlock the door in time, those guns were all new and none of them were loaded. There was no way to load one of them before he would be on her.
She briefly considered running into the kitchen to grab a knife. But if Cassiel had her gun from the nightstand he would simply shoot her. He was an expert shot. He would undoubtedly shoot to cripple so she couldn’t get away. Then he could start in on her with his sick desires.
Even if he didn’t have a gun, he was experienced at knife fights. Using a knife was his preferred way to murder people, so he was deadly with an edged weapon. So was Angela, but it would be a risky gamble to grab a knife from the kitchen and get into a knife fight with someone that big, powerful, and experienced. If he got the knife away from her she would be dead, but not quickly.
The keys to her truck were back in the bedroom. Even if she had them, she didn’t think there would be any way to unlock it, get in, and get it started before Cassiel was able to stop her.
Angela rejected all those options in a fraction of a second and instead bolted out the back door. She snatched a quick look over her shoulder as she leaped down onto the hard ground and saw him coming out of the house right behind her. In the light of the full moon she could see that he had a knife in his fist. His jaw was clenched in rage. She told herself that at least it wasn’t a gun.
Angela only had on panties. Her feet were bare. Running outside barefooted was risky.
She didn’t have a choice. She was committed.
SIXTY
Angela knew that her only chance was to somehow even the odds. As she ran, she glanced up at the twin mountains rising up in the moonlight. Before the trail split, she quickly made her choice and raced up the trail to the right, up Grandfather Mountain.
She’d climbed that trail so often she could probably do it in the dark. The moonlight certainly helped. But running was different. She had to make split-second decisions as she raced into the night. Being barefoot made each of those split-second decisions potentially fatal.
As she plunged into the woods, Cassiel was right behind her. He wasn’t quite close enough to grab her, but he was right there if she faltered for even a second. He yelled at her to stop, promising to slice to her throat for a quick end rather than a night of the worst he could do.
She knew from the visions when she had looked into his eyes what kinds of things he liked to do. That made her run faster.
She used outcroppings that she knew rose from the forest floor, jumping from one to the next, avoiding as much as possible running across ground littered with everything from pine needles to sticks to pinecones. She put her thoughts about the man chasing her out of her mind and focused on the task at hand. She had climbed this trail more times than she could remember. She knew every rock, every tree so well she would have been able to run it through her mind without forgetting an inch of the trail.
She let her conscious thoughts go and instead let her inner mind take over. The trail had long ago been indelibly imprinted there. She tried not to think of where she had to step. Instead, she raced along the trail, putting every foot in the exact right place without being aware she was doing it. As the trail began to climb, she knew ahead of time which foot she needed to use in each spot so as not to get crossed up.
Cassiel didn’t know the trail, and since he was running he couldn’t see where he was going very well. He stumbled a few times, but recovered quickly. As Angela ran past a balsam fir, she grabbed a bough that hung across the path. She pulled it with her, then let it go to spring back and smack him in the face. He growled in rage as he slashed his arms to get past it.
She had to run up a stream for a brief distance to get to the trail on the opposite side. Ordinarily she would have danced across the dry rocks sticking up out of the water, jumping from one to another, but with a killer right behind her there was no time to pick those places to step.
The water was only six to eight inches deep, but it was freezing cold, and in places smooth rock ledge under the water was slimy and slippery. She lost her footing and went to one knee on one of those smooth, slippery sp
ots, but kept her balance and immediately got up and kept going. Cassiel slipped and fell on his ass. That gained her a few precious seconds.
When she reached the trail on the far side of the stream, she jumped up out of the water onto the mossy bank and ran into the forest on a trail that was mostly a cushion of pine needles. The trail was also littered with small bits of branches and sticks. They hurt when her feet landed on them. She had no choice but to ignore the pain.
She knew where there were tree roots across the path. She had to be careful lest she trip over one and fall. When she reached a wet, low-lying area where there were too many roots to miss, she danced over the tops of fatter roots worn smooth from the countless times she had done the same thing while wearing boots.
Her grandfather had first taken her on this trail when she had been a little girl. She’d often climbed one of the two mountains with her grandmother to have a picnic at the top while enjoying a view out on the world. The man chasing her had murdered them both.
In the moonlight Angela saw familiar landmarks of rock formations and the curving limb of an oak that let her know which way the trail was going to turn before she even got there. That helped her stay ahead of the big man in boots pursuing her. They might as well have been the only two people in the world. There was no one anywhere near enough to hear her call for help. If he caught her and started cutting on her with that knife, only Grandfather Mountain would hear her screams.
When she reached the maple with a low limb that dipped down and stuck out over the trail, she knew she had to make a sharp left up the trail as it climbed more sharply over rock formations. Her grandfather had been the one who had scouted and built the trail, long before she had even been born. Now she was using his trail up the mountain to try to escape a killer.
She knew that the rock configuration of broken granite close to the left side of the trail meant she was rapidly approaching a fork. The fork to the left continued to the top. The one to the right was a gentler trail that circled both mountains down lower, going past small ponds.
She took the one to the left. It was a hard climb. She hoped that her experience could outpace his easier time with boots. Since he was somewhat older, possibly in his late forties, she was also hoping to get him winded with the climb. If she could lose him, she could go down the back side of the mountain and then take a smaller side trail that led back to the house, where she could get a gun.
In the dark, he might not be able to follow that trail. Although, there was a full moon high overhead. Even with the full moon, though, the woods occasionally fell darker in denser areas.
Angela scrambled along a narrow ledge, staying close to the wall that rose vertically on her left. To her right the tops of trees rose from far below. It was a dangerous place to be careless. When she reached the far side of the wall of rock, the trail made a sharp left, following the granite formations.
When she rounded the corner, she spotted a length of dead limb. It was a little bigger around than her wrist and maybe five feet long. Cassiel was only seconds behind her. Angela knew it might be her only chance. She snatched up the deadwood, turned, and cocked her arm back.
As Cassiel rushed around the corner into view, Angela took a mighty swing. He hadn’t expected her to be standing right there in front of him. Angela grunted as she put all her power behind the swing. The dead limb caught him square across the face. The wood was partially rotten, so it splintered and broke in half across his face.
Even so, it was still strong enough to break his nose and crush the bone around his left eye socket. A four-inch splinter speared into his right eye. He put his hands up to his face as he screamed in pain and rage.
Even as she was still in the follow-through of her swing, he had come to a dead stop as his hands went to his injured face. Angela didn’t waste the opportunity. As she came around she side-kicked him in the knee of one leg. The kick wasn’t powerful enough or at the right angle to break his knee, but it was enough to knock that leg out from under him.
Cassiel slipped, did an ungainly pirouette on his other leg, and toppled over the side of the rock face.
Angela stepped carefully forward to peer over the edge to see him drop maybe thirty feet and then tumble down a broken boulder field from granite that had sheared off the cliff over the millennia. The rocks of that boulder field were sharp.
It was hard to tell for sure because all the trees were shading the moonlight, but she thought she saw him sprawled near the lower trail that went around the mountain. He was moving, but he didn’t seem able to get up.
Angela knew she could probably make it back to the cabin well ahead of him if he did manage to get up. But it was possible that he could still see and that he might get up and cut her off. This might be her one and only chance.
In that moment of hesitation, she again saw in her mind’s eye her grandparents kneeling in the dusty weeds at the side of the road as he shot them both in the back of the head.
Her rage overtook everything else and made up her mind for her. She raced back down the trail to the fork and then took the lower trail. All she could think about was that she finally had the man who had killed them.
When she made it down the trail and found Cassiel, he had obviously broken both legs, and by the way he twisted his upper body, possibly his spine. One leg was broken below the knee. A splintered tibia jutted through his bloody pant leg. His other foot was bent back at an impossible angle. He was on his back, writhing in pain, his face covered in blood. Once she saw him she realized he couldn’t see anything.
Angela picked up a jagged, heavy chunk of granite and leaped onto him, straddling his chest. He let out a grunt as she landed. He waved his arms, blindly trying to protect himself from what he couldn’t see.
When his waving arms swung wide open, Angela saw her opening and struck. She slammed the heavy rock down into his face. The chunk of granite was big enough that the weight and her strength behind the blow caved in the center of his face. Blood shot out to either side. A groan of pain gurgled out as his arms dropped wide apart and he went still.
Angela had always wanted to have the man who had killed her grandparents down in the basement for days and days while she extracted vengeance.
But now that she had downed him, her blind rage took over. She couldn’t think of anything else but how much she hated this man, how he had come into her life to destroy the only two people she had ever truly loved.
She used both hands to lift the rock and smash it down on his head. The rock was heavy, but she was glad to have the weight to help her smash his big, solid head.
After the third hit, his jawbone skewed off to one side. She could see his teeth sticking up amid a mass of bloody pulp. She brought the rock down again, breaking those teeth from his jaw, breaking the jaw.
She cried in fury as she lifted the rock over and over, crashing it down on him. Tears streamed down her face as she used that rock to crush the head of the monster who had killed her grandparents and so many other innocent people.
She didn’t know how long she straddled the man who had haunted her for years, the man she had fantasized about killing for years. She wept as vengeance carried her away and she pounded away at his skull.
Eventually, sobbing with emotion, she stopped.
This man, of all men, belonged down the hell hole her grand-father had found and built his cabin over, the cabin that he and Angela’s grandmother had left to her. The place they wanted her to have.
She stared down at what was left of Cassiel’s misshapen head. His face was unrecognizable. The rock had split his skull open. Jagged white bone stuck out through the scalp in places. Through those gaps, she could see his brain.
Angela pushed her fingers down into the hot mess to grip the bone. She cried out with the effort of pulling his skull the rest of the way open. The bone made cracking noises as it came apart. She reached in and pushed the brain to one side, and then with her other hand she gripped the spinal cord to help rip the brain from
it so she could lift it out.
Angela sat there, straddling his still, barrel chest, holding up the brain, the nerve center, of the monster she had bested. Cranial fluid and coagulating blood dripped in warm globs off her hands. Some of it ran down her arms to hang off her elbows in long strings.
As she sat there, holding his brain in her hands, staring at it, an unexpected flow of visions, his visions, raced through that connection with her hands and into her own mind.
Angela sat, unblinking, as images flooded through her consciousness. They were unlike the visions she got from looking into a killer’s eyes, those visions of savage acts of murder.
A person’s eyes, she had heard it said, were a window into their soul. That was what it felt like when she looked into their eyes—like looking into their dark souls and seeing the black marks that killing had left on those souls.
This was completely different. These were not conscious thoughts of conscious acts. She sat transfixed at these images. It was unlike anything she had experienced before.
In her own mind she was witnessing a stream of subconscious impressions. She knew she was not seeing visions, but memories.
The strongest of those images were the most recent memories. They flooded through her mind, unending, disjointed, unbidden, desperate. They were jammed together, memory on top of memory, image on top of image, sensation on top of sensation. She was seeing the final dying thoughts of a human brain as it grasped the inevitable and tried to claw back memories, as if gathering them up to try to save itself from the approaching black abyss.
She was experiencing a mind dying. She could sense the profound desperation. The wish to live. The anger. The fear.
The memories dimmed, held together by connecting threads of thought that started coming apart like wet tissue.
The last visions—leaving a stolen car over a mile away and walking through fields and woods to reach her house, coming inside, seeing her asleep by the light of a small flashlight, and finally the sensation of falling from the cliff—faded away until they were unrecognizable snatches of thoughts.
The Girl in the Moon Page 38
