by Libby Sparks
The door to the women’s room wasn’t locked, and she went inside quickly, shutting it behind her, throwing the sliding lock into place.
She listened at the door and couldn’t hear Jake moving around. Maybe he was going to give her privacy to do her business, or he was still out guarding the front door. Nice of the guy that was holding her in a library against her will to give her space.
There were two stalls with green half-walls around them, and a sink and a baby-changing station. Looking quickly around her she found what she was looking for and stepped into the stall on the left. It was the one underneath the window.
Putting her sneakers on the black plastic seat she straddled the bowl and pushed herself up. The window was recessed, frosted, and hinged so that it would swing outward. And it wasn’t locked; just secured with a sliding latch.
It was no easy task pulling herself up quietly and shimmying through the elongated rectangle of the window, but she managed it. Suddenly she was through it and dropping the eight feet to the ground, landing badly on her left wrist. She heard and felt a small pop as that hand took her weight. The pain started instantly. It was a nasty pain that burned and itched at the same time, and she was afraid that it might be broken. However, it didn’t matter at the moment; she was out and away from Jake.
Time to run for it.
Chapter 6
Full night had fallen. The streetlights and the lights from inside the homes she passed gave her plenty of light to see by. Her hotel was on the main drive through Blue Earth, Route 169, so Brianna just kept going straight down whatever street this was until she saw the divided highway ahead. Traffic was steady at this hour, even though there were few people out and about. Once she’d found the highway it was just a matter of making a left turn and following the road up.
Her wrist was really throbbing now. It was swelling, too. She cradled it against her body as she went. Calling for an ambulance, or the police even, would be the smart thing to do, but her cell phone was still back in her hotel room. The businesses she saw were all closed. So she kept walking.
Two blocks up she found an all-night gas station. Six pumps out front stood silent under bright fluorescent lights. The small store was painted a garish purple with brown stripes. Neon signs for beer and lottery tickets flashed in the windows.
It was the same station she had stopped at on her way into Blue Earth.
She could see there was no one inside the store except for the lone worker behind the counter. The man was wearing the same ugly brown shirt. His stringy hair hung down over his face as he peered out the window, straight at her.
Damn it.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed her way through the door. She needed help and she couldn’t be picky just because it was the same creepy guy from before.
“Excuse me, please,” she said to him. “I need to use your phone.”
The man stared at her. Then he smiled slowly. “You’re hurt.”
His voice was raspy with phlegm and full of soft menace. She rubbed her wrist self-consciously. “Yes, I am. I need help.”
Her voice sounded small in her own ears. Everything that had happened to her today was finally catching up to her. She was tired, and hurt, and scared, and she just needed someone to help.
He chuckled. “I told you to stay away from him.”
Brianna’s eyes widened. Did he just say what she thought he did? “Stay away? From who?”
“I told you not to trust him.”
Jake. He was talking about Jake. Those were the words she had heard over the phone in her hotel room. The words she had heard through the static, which she had convinced herself weren’t really there to be heard. But it had been real. She knew that now, staring at this man’s leering grin.
And if that had been real…
Demons. Jake had told her there were demons after him.
Brianna took a step back. The guy leered at her still. She felt like running. Running, and hiding again.
But then she stopped. She swallowed back the lump in her throat and forced herself to stand her ground. She didn’t know what was going on here, and she didn’t care because right now she couldn’t afford to back down. She had lived her life backing down to what other people wanted or thought or did, but not now. She had to be strong.
“Look,” she said, hardening her voice, “I need help. I’m hurt. Are you going to let me call for help or not?”
“Well now,” the man said, stroking the side of his face with a finger. “There’s a little bit of a fire in you after all. No wonder he’s so attracted to you.”
Maybe this was a bad idea after all. There had to be somewhere else that was still open. Someone else that she could turn to for help. But this time, she forced herself to do what she needed to do for herself. “Mister, I need to use your phone.”
His dull gray eyes sparked with flashes of crimson. His smile stretched thinly, wider than any concept of normal, almost to the man’s ears. He hooked a thumb at the black phone on the wall behind him, hanging between the display racks of cigarettes and a sign that told customers to smile because they were on security camera. “Help yourself, darlin’.”
Brianna had reached the end of the small amount of self-confidence she had tapped into. “Um. Can you maybe hand it to me?”
The guy’s laugh was the hissing of snakes on a cold winter’s day. He took the handset off its cradle and handed it out to her. Brianna stared at it, reluctant to take it from him, not wanting to get even that close.
“Here, darlin’,” the guy taunted her, hefting the phone on his palm from where he stood behind the counter. “Take it. Make your call.”
She inched forward, keeping her eyes on the phone, not looking at the man at all. Just his hand, holding the phone out to her, his fingernails dirty and cracked, the phone held in a loose grip as she went forward a bit at a time, carefully reaching out with her good hand…
…and taking the phone from him.
“There,” he said with a wink. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
She swallowed a couple more times before she worked up enough moisture in her mouth to mumble a thank you. She pushed the green “talk” button to turn the phone on, and went to dial 911.
“You just remember one thing, darlin’,” the man said from over her left shoulder.
She squeaked in a very un-brave way and stumbled forward, dropping the phone to the floor with a clatter. He had just appeared behind her. She never saw him move. There was no way he could have done that. The store was too crowded with metal shelves full of chips and candy bars and jars of vegetables and baked beans. He couldn’t have gotten around her without her noticing.
Yet, there he was, smiling that awful grin at her.
“You just remember,” he continued, leaning in to whisper. “I told you to stay away from him.”
Keeping his eyes locked on hers, he turned sideways towards the exit door. And disappeared.
Brianna blinked and shook her head. Stupidly, she looked all around the store. There was no way she had lost sight of a man who had been standing not even two feet away from her. But the man was nowhere. He was gone.
Disappeared.
Her hands had started to shake. She had no idea what was happening here. She couldn’t make any of it make sense in her head. It was like all of the pieces were there, in front of her, but she couldn’t make the edges fit together because they kept changing shape. All Brianna wanted was for things to go back to the way they were before all this. If there really was a supernatural world, she did not want to know about it.
Her left hand pulsed with a spike of agony to remind her why she had come in here in the first place. She bent down to where the phone had fallen and picked it up.
“Before you call anyone, let me explain.”
The voice scared her so much that she jumped and spun, a shriek escaping her lips, the phone held out defensively. Not much of a weapon, but all she had against whoever it was that had snuck up on her this time.
>
Jake.
He stood there with hands in his sweater pockets, a half smile on his face.
“Jake!” she yelled at him, beating the phone against his chest. “Don’t do that! Stay the hell away from me. I thought I left you back at the library.”
“You did. I followed you.”
“You what?”
“Oh, come on, Brianna. I knew you weren’t going to the bathroom. I can tell when someone’s lying. I come from a family of liars.”
“And so you followed me here?” She stepped back. Her fingers felt over the phone’s number pad as she held it behind herself. The buttons were raised, with a little dot on the five in the middle. She could read it like braille and knew exactly where all of the numbers were.
She found the nine.
“Yes, I followed you.” Jake shifted his weight from foot to foot. “I told you, you’re still in danger. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Seems to me if I don’t want anything to happen to me, I just need to stay away from you.”
One.
“We need to get out of town, Brianna. Trust me on this. Please.”
“Oh,” she said, “you’re asking me to trust you? You’re not going to use your little mind games on me this time?
One.
He sighed heavily. “Brianna. I can…do certain things. I can make you do what I want, up to a point. I can make you believe night is day and day is night. Well, usually I can with most people. But you… You shrugged me off twice. No one has ever done that before. With you, it’s like you see right through me. You have a strength inside of you that I can feel, and no matter how hard I try to pretend you’re just another girl in another lonely town along my way, I know better. You aren’t just another girl.”
Brianna held the phone out a little. She’d dialed 911. Hopefully someone had picked up.
Jake lifted his face and those eyes, those special eyes of his with their lines of gold fire, caught and held hers. “You,” he said, “are something special.”
She heard the emotion in his voice. He was being serious with her. No deception. No mind raping. They stood there in silence for a while. She didn’t know how long. She had become lost in his eyes.
“Hey, I’m kind of baring my soul to you here,” he said to her. “This is the part where you say something.”
“My hand hurts.”
It was the first thing that came to her mind. She felt like a total idiot for saying it, but anything else was just too complicated right now. Did she trust him? She didn’t know. Was he being serious about demons chasing him? God help her, but she thought he probably was. Even the creepy man at the gas station seemed to confirm that there was something out of the ordinary going on.
And then there was the fact that she was so inexplicably attracted to Jake. Was he one of the most gorgeous men she’d ever seen? Well, that part she was sure about. But where did it fit in with the rest of it all? Whether she was attracted to him or not, he was obviously dangerous.
He looked down at her hand now, crooked against her abdomen, and before she could think to tell him no he was reaching out and gingerly feeling around her swollen wrist. “Ow,” she said.
“Sorry. I think this is broken.”
She was holding the phone so tightly that her arm was shaking. “Thanks for that diagnosis, doc.”
“I can make it feel better.”
“Oh you can, huh? More mind tricks?” A grin was tugging at left corner of her mouth.
Was she flirting with him again? Wasn’t she still mad at him?
No, she realized. Not really. She was just…confused.
“Mind tricks?” he said with his eyes sparkling in amusement. “Something like that. Do you trust me?”
She looked up at him. Did she trust him? “As long as you ask me, like, actually ask me and not force me to do it?”
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she found the end button on the phone, and disconnected the call. “Yeah. I think I do.”
Relief passed over his features and brightened the shadows that had settled at the corners of his eyes. “Good. I’m glad.”
He held her hand in one of his, while he gently stroked her wrist with the fingertips of his other hand. It hurt, and she sucked in a harsh breath, but it was a cool pain, like ice through her veins, almost like he was numbing the injury somehow.
“So,” she asked as the cold sensation spread, “what else can you do?”
Jake took in a breath to answer her. Then he stopped, his whole body going still.
Outside of the store, in the bright lights of the gas pumps and the street lamps, a black sedan pulled up with a screeching stop. Jake spun toward the sound, his hands slipping and sending a shocking jolt of pain up through her arm.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said as she gasped and bent over her arm. “I’m sorry. There’s someone here.”
Brianna was still gripping the phone in her hand. She had forgotten what she’d done. “Jake. I, um, well. It’s the police.”
He turned back to her slowly, a panicked look on his face.
“Look, I thought you were going to hurt me and as it was I needed help anyway and I didn’t know what else to do so I called 911. But it’s all right,” she added quickly. “I can just tell them it was a mistake and I’m fine. Okay? Except for my wrist, I mean. They’ll take me to a hospital and they can help you with—”
Glass shattered as one of the front windows exploded inward. A small dot of fire burned its way across her right shoulder and pushed her backward off her feet hard enough that she fell on her ass with a hard thump.
She was dazed, trying to make sense of what had just happened, when Jake grabbed her under her armpits and pulled her around behind the counter.
“Stay here,” he said to her, popping his head up over their makeshift cover only to duck again as red dots buzzed swiftly through the air and into the cigarette display above him. Multicolored packs of cigarettes exploded and showered down around them.
“But, it’s the police,” Brianna said, confused, dazed. She thought she might be going into shock. “Why would the police be shooting at us?”
“Because,” he answered, “they aren’t the police.”
Chapter 7
Behind the counter where she and Jake were hiding there was a small television screen displaying four shots from security cameras around the business. Three of them were views from inside the store. She could see her and Jake in one of them that was pointed at the register. The fourth view was from outside, centered on the gas pumps.
The sedan had stopped at a sharp angle in front of the pumps. Two men got out of the front, one from each side. And, although the grainy black-and-white security image wasn’t the greatest, Brianna could tell that the men were the same two that had chased them into the library.
Brianna tried to look down at her right shoulder, where a dull ache was growing into an intense pain even worse than the one in her left wrist. “Did they shoot me?”
“Yes, they did.” Jake risked another look over the counter.
“With a bullet? Seriously? Demons use bullets?” She could feel beads of perspiration standing out on her forehead and running down the back of her neck.
“You’d be surprised how effective bullets can be.”
Brianna had no argument about how effective this one had been. Jake took his sweater off and wrapped it around her shoulder, under her armpit and up again, using the sleeves to tie it tightly in place as a make-shift tourniquet. Under his sweater, his black t-shirt hugged his muscles like a second skin.
“You’re bleeding,” he said to her. “This should stop it. But even if it does, we need to get out of here as soon as possible.”
She laughed, but it turned into a choke. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
“Jake Valcour!” the deep, resonant voice she remembered from the library called out to them now. “We know it is Jake now, yes? Or did you change your name again?”
Brian
na looked up at Jake, questions in her eyes. He leaned his head against the side of the counter. “There’s a lot to explain, Brianna. Add that one to the list.”
She did. It was a long list, growing longer by the second. But on the top of the list right now was how they were going to get out of here.
“Where’s the clerk?” Jake asked suddenly. “There should be someone working here, right? Are they in the back or something?”
“They…stepped out,” she said. Easier to say that, than to say the guy disappeared.
“Jake Valcour!” The man called again. Or maybe it was the other one this time. Hard to tell, with the twin thing they had going on. “We would like you to step out, Jake. Please do not make it necessary for us come in for you.”
The very politely framed question was punctuated by several small objects zipping around the store. More glass broke, items on shelves exploded and fell to the floor, and bottles of soda blew up spreading dark liquid everywhere. More bullets, Brianna realized, and she watched the men shooting from the edge of the security image they starred in. But she couldn’t hear the shots, just the damage that the bullets were doing when they struck.
“Silencers,” Jake answered her unspoken question. “And just to let you know, these will be very special bullets. The one that hit you looks like it grazed through the top of your shoulder. You’re lucky. If it had stayed in your body, it would have started eating your flesh from the inside.”
She grimaced. What a pleasant picture.
“If you wish to make this tough on yourself, then so be it. But why make the girl suffer?”
The muscles in Jake’s jaw flexed. She could see the anger rising in him. But still he squatted defensively over her, and said nothing.
“Then so be it,” both men said at once, a stereo of identical voices. Brianna watched the men outside on the monitor. They walked toward the building, moving out of the camera’s angle.
