by J. K Harper
Her hands were shaking, but by some miracle, she still had her cell phone in her pocket. Why hadn’t she taken it out when she was in the vent? She guessed that she hadn’t wanted to make any noise, but she would’ve felt safer if she’d remembered that she had her phone and might be able to call for help.
She pressed the buttons.
Before she could press the third button, the phone went flying out of her hand.
She spun to see the panther of nightmares right beside her.
Then he began to shift. A moment later, a naked man was in front of her.
“Hello.”
Amani’s knees gave out. She landed on them, staring up at a tall, black-haired man with a light accent.
“What…how…” Amani didn’t know if she could form full sentences at the moment.
“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Amani turned and ran. She ran to the nearest major street, panting. At least this street had street lamps. She wished that she ran more often. She was out of shape. Her heart was pounding and her legs already hurt, but she couldn’t stop. She’d just seen something that she couldn’t explain — a panther that had murdered her attackers turning into a man — and she needed to get away. She was definitely not reporting anything that had happened tonight to the police.
Finally, her mind cleared enough to think about where she’d left her car. Unconsciously, she’d headed in the direction that she’d been walking when those creeps started to follow her. Now she was only a block away.
No more late night study meetings, that was for sure. She hoped that tonight was just a bad dream…or a bad trip, never mind that she didn’t do drugs.
By the time that she got to her car, the little sound that her locks made when she unlocked the car sounded like heaven. She slid inside, turned on the car, and locked her doors. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, but being inside of her own car made her feel a lot safer than she’d been a few minutes ago.
She pulled out of her parking space and headed home. She turned on the radio and sang along. Music always calmed her down, no matter what.
She didn’t notice the dark blue pick-up truck that followed her.
Following
Gerard
Gerard could’ve gotten her home address as soon as he had noted her license number. Instead, he texted it to someone that he used to search the DMV database for him and trailed her home. He wasn’t going to follow her in — she’d had enough shocks for one night — but he could make sure that she got home safely.
While he waited, he pulled on a shirt and shorts from his stash — no reason to get arrested for public indecency.
A soft chime said that they’d had a hit and knew everything about her — she only lived four miles away.
He pulled back, making sure that there were at least two cars between them. He didn’t want to spook her. He’d already murdered a bunch of people in front of her. He knew that he’d have to work past that. If he showed up at her door after she already thought she was safe, she’d freak out.
When she turned down her own road, Gerard quickly stopped and turned off his headlights.
He called HQ.
“What’s going on, boss?”
“Not much. Just found a person of interest, that’s all.”
“This have something to do with a case?”
“Nah. Well, tangentially, I guess.”
“Tangentially?”
“I was hunting some Sicarii scum when I saw that they were following a girl.”
“And?”
“I’m interested in her.”
Gerard heard a whole lot of silence.
“You…and a girl? I thought you were gay.”
Gerard choked. “You thought I was gay?”
“Well, I’ve never seen you with a woman, boss.”
“I’m busy,” Gerard shot back. He’d had some one-night stands now and then, but he hadn’t pursued anything serious. He’d focused on getting his private investigation business up and running. He could’ve sat back and relaxed, living off of his trust fund, but instead he’d pulled money from it to get started on his own business. He was living off of the money that he earned, which was a lot less than he’d have if he felt comfortable using his trust fund but still a lot more than the average American.
“Sure thing, boss. So she’s pretty?”
“Pretty?” Gerard had to think about it. To him, his mate was the most beautiful woman in the world, but he couldn’t really describe her.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I want to spend more time with her.”
“How about this? I’ll run a report on her. You’ll have it on your desk first thing in the morning.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“See ya.”
There was a short beep when the call was over. Gerard put his phone back into his pocket.
He didn’t know how to handle meeting his mate for the first time. It seemed crazy that he’d met her while he was out running around for an investigation, but he guessed that it was the only way that he would, considering how much he worked.
He turned his car back on and drove home, thinking of her smell. She smelled like freshly baked chocolate cake. When he got ready for bed, he shucked off his clothing. He closed his eyes when he remembered what it had been like to realize that his mate was right there in front of him.
He was hard. His hand wrapped around his shaft as he slowly went up and down. He imagined licking up her cream, her thighs parted by his shoulders. His hand sped up as he thought of kissing her, penetrating her mouth with his tongue in the same moment that he pushed inside of her body. Her hips would buck upward and take every inch of him until he was exhausted.
Gerard felt himself shooting. When he was done, he reached for a tissue from his Kleenex box on his nightstand.
He hoped that he could make his fantasy a reality sometime soon.
Waking Up
Amani
The next morning, Amani woke up in her bed. She’d had a very strange dream, almost real, but now she was ready to face another day.
Without bothering to put on clothes, she went to her kitchen and did the most important thing that she’d do all day. She started her coffeemaker.
When she could hear it start, she went into the shower and washed up, careful not to get her hair wet. She turned off the water, toweled off, and tied her hair up. She went to the kitchen to get her first cup of divine caffeine. She was addicted to coffee, she admitted it freely, and she loved the first cup of the day.
She drank one cup, then two, then three as she flicked through the news on her phone. Google News knew what she wanted to see. Another day, another political snarl.
She might work for the federal government, but craziness didn’t mean much to her. When the top people switched in an out every few years, you learned to keep your head down and just do your job.
It was nice to work from home, though. She had a telework arrangement since she’d been diagnosed with anxiety, which meant no commute! Hurray. She didn’t miss driving to work, fighting crazy drivers, and frantically trying to find a parking space at the other end. She wished that she lived close enough to a metro stop to use it, but she was far out in Virginia, too far for the metro to reach.
Even though she didn’t have to commute, she liked to get dressed for her workday. It was a psychological trick that prevented her from simply sitting in her apartment in her pajamas all day.
She started up remote desktop and started going through her email. Most of it was boring department-wide stuff, but there was a handful of stuff that she needed to actually deal with. There were some professors who were insisting on FOIA-mandated disclosures of their scoring. The lowest person on the totem pole got to deal with FOIA requests.
Guess who that was?
Amani might grumble about it, but she didn’t really mind. She just had to go through the paperwork, redact anything sensitive, and then send off the documents that they were asking for. Ea
sy as pie.
Amani hummed to herself as she pulled together the necessary information. Really, there wasn’t much accountability. She could and did redact anything even remotely sensitive. When she’d mangled the documents appropriately, she sent them off, a smile on her face. It was certainly fine for the American public to request government documents, but half of the time, you could just claim that certain things were important for national security.
With that off of her plate, Amani sat back and delved into her research project on mass homicides in the US. Her department was putting together a package about it. There was ongoing research on it, since it’d been a hot topic in the media, and the DOJ didn’t slack since there were so many people who were highly interested in the subject.
Some of the research turned Amani’s stomach, but it had to be done. She tried to distance herself from the horrible stories, but there was only so much distance she could have from the horror.
Amani typed up the gists of each research paper until she felt her stomach grumble. It was time for lunch.
Amani closed her laptop and stretched. She really needed to get out of her apartment and meet some people. She liked her own company, but she also needed a little human interaction.
She headed downstairs to go to the Potbelly Sandwich Shop across the street. They were both fast and reasonably nutritious. Her favorite was the mushroom melt, which was heaven in a sandwich. Yes, all that cheese probably wasn’t healthy, but it was delicious.
She wandered back inside and ate her sandwich, flipping her laptop open to continue working while she ate. She worked ten hours per day, four days a week. Fridays were her own, unless there was some sort of meeting. She loved having three-day weekends every week, and she’d been careful to maintain a standard of quality in her work so that they wouldn’t take away her flexible work schedule and try to end her medical telework.
The next time that she was conscious of the time, the sun was setting. Her sandwich was long gone.
She logged off of her computer and shut it down for the night. Her stomach reminded her that it had been several hours since lunchtime.
Chinese? Italian? How lazy was she? Because if she bought enough food to pig out, then she could hit the delivery minimum for Chinese. If she actually wanted to walk outside, she could go to the little Italian place on the corner and pick up spaghetti carbonara.
Laziness won. She picked up the phone, ordered sesame chicken and vegetable fried rice, and told the delivery guy to call when he arrived. She technically had some sort of connection to the intercom system that went outside, but she hadn’t figured out how to connect her phone to it so it didn’t really work for her.
So he called her when he finally arrived, and she tipped him 5% extra on top of her normal tip, because he’d made the effort.
Yes, she felt some guilt about the vast quantity of fried food that she was eating. Yes, it was also delicious enough to ease the guilt.
It was the perfect thing to distract her from thoughts of last night. She knew that something had happened, but her memories were too crazy to be real. Probably it was some sort of post-traumatic stress that made her hallucinate.
Yup.
That’s when she heard the knock on her balcony door.
Balcony
Amani
Amani screamed as she saw the suit-clad figure on her balcony.
“Shh!” he nearly shouted. “Quiet down! And let me in.”
“No way!” Amani had no problem shouting back at him. “Who are you? I thought you were a dream!”
“I’m the man of your dreams. Nice to know.” He ran his hand through his hair and gave her a smooth smile with a glint of white teeth.
“More like my nightmares,” she mumbled, but she unlocked her balcony door and let him in. He’d saved her life last night, though she also remembered him scaring her and somehow turning into a panther. Well, probably. She could at least get him something to drink.
“Can I get you something? Tea? Orange juice? Water?”
“Water is fine.”
Amani hustled to the kitchen to get him a glass of water. He sank into her couch.
“I think your couch is broken.”
“Yep.” Amani didn’t bother to think about it, since she so infrequently had guests. “There’s not a lot of support under the middle cushion.”
“That’s putting it mildly. I feel like a sinkhole just opened up under me.”
Amani handed him a glass of ice water, which he took a sip of before carefully putting it down on one of her cute Simpsons coasters.
She sat down on one of her chairs. “Who are you? How did you find me? What do you want?”
He held his hands up, palms facing her. “Okay, hold on.”
“First of all, I want to know your name.”
“I’m Gerard. And you’re Amani.”
Amani pressed her lips together, annoyed that he knew her name — probably her full name — and her address, while she knew basically nothing about him.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of time.” She crossed her arms and leaned back against the soft cushion behind her.
He sighed and then took another sip of water.
“Have you heard of the Sicarii?”
“The sick? What? What are you saying?”
“The dagger-men.”
“No.”
“Okay…well, it’s Latin. Back in the day, it referred to a certain sect of extremists. A sicarius is a dagger, and they’re named for them. Nowadays, the Sicarii aren’t part of any kind of religious order.”
“And what does this have to do with me? I’ve never even heard the term before.”
He took another sip of water.
“They’re hunting you.”
“What?” Amani choked out. “Why would they want to look for me?”
“They knew that their men were pursuing a female last night. Then the three of them died.”
“But that was all you — if I’d been alone, I would’ve been at their mercy.”
“The Sicarii don’t know that. All they know is that some of their men disappeared in close proximity to you.”
“But I’m not even scary.”
“Have you ever heard of an eye for an eye?”
“Yes.”
“Well, these guys believe in that principle. If they catch you, they’ll put you in a cage with a big cat. They probably think that you set a cat on them.”
“How would I get a cat on a rooftop? I’d never even been in that building before I ran from them.”
Gerard just shrugged. “Do you think that I know the answers? All I can tell you is that you’re being hunted. Have you left your home today?”
“I got lunch, but I had dinner delivered.”
“Good. That helps.”
Gerard stood and took a little tour of Amani’s tiny apartment. She had a lot of space for a single person, but she wasn’t the neatest person ever. She felt really self-conscious when he looked into her bathroom and saw the huge jumble of hair products that she had to use to make her hair behave itself.
“I’d like to take you to a safe house.”
“Safe house?” Amani asked, her heart rate picking up. “Why would I need to go to one of those?”
“Because your apartment, while charming, isn’t going to be very challenging for the Sicarii to get into. If I can get to your balcony, so can they.”
“But I had to let you in.”
He snorted quietly. “That’s because I didn’t want you to have to pay to replace your door. I could’ve easily shattered the glass and gotten in by myself. You’re a single woman. You live alone. By the time that help came through your door, you could be dead.”
Amani swallowed hard. “What do you think I should do?”
“I’d say to take some sick leave. You have some stored up?”
“Uh, I’m on medical telework right now, actually.”
“Perfect.” He spun slowly, looking around her apartment. “I want you to pack anything that you think you would need for a week-long trip.”
“You think that he’ll only be around for a week?” Amani’s spirits lifted.
“No.” He shook his head.
And now her spirits were crushed. Why couldn’t he politely lie?
Amani knew that it was for the best. He’d had ample opportunity to hurt her at this point. Yeah, she could look up more information on this group, but you couldn’t trust everything on the Internet. His voice sounded like he was telling her the truth. She was scared of having an apartment with a balcony now.
“Can I work?”
“I’ll make sure that you have a steady Internet connection, I promise.”
“Sounds good to me. Excuse me while I pack.”
Amani went to her room and pulled together the essentials. She stuck to dresses, which were simple to keep track of.
Her cosmetics and hair care supplies took up most of her suitcase. When she was done, she was ready for a week on the go.
“Ready to leave?” Gerard asked.
Target
Amani
“Yup.”
Amani looked around her apartment. She hoped that when she came home, it’d still be in good shape.
Gerard opened the door to her apartment and held it for her. She walked through, lugging her suitcase.
“Let me get that for you.” He pulled her suitcase. His eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “What did you put in here? Lead boots?”
“Just the essentials,” she sniffed, smiling. They got into the elevator as Gerard shook his head. Obviously he didn’t understand how much stuff women needed just to survive.
The elevator ride was otherwise quiet. Finally, they got to the ground floor. There was a black SUV waiting by the curb.
“Up you go.”
Amani was used to jumping into big trucks, but Gerard’s huge hand on her back pushed her all the way up into the middle seat. In another second, he’d pulled her suitcase up as he slid into the car beside her.
