He brought the Jeep to a sudden stop in front of the house. My seat belt caught, keeping my head from slamming against the dash. He was already out, coming around to my side, and opened the door as I unhooked my seatbelt.
“Come on,” he ordered, and started up the walkway without bothering to wait for me.
He acted like he owned the place. I slammed the door behind me, and scurried to catch up to him. I froze half way across the yard when he opened the front door and strode on in exactly like he owned the place.
Oh, Gran was going to love this. I couldn’t help but grin as I ran the rest of the way. I didn’t want to miss the look on his face when Gran got ahold of him. I couldn’t imagine what she would do, but I didn’t want to miss it.
The last thing I expected was for her to rise from her chair with a smile.
“Nathan,” she breathed as she rushed forward to greet him.
I hadn’t seen Gran move that fast, well, ever. So she knew him. And his name was Nathan? I made a face. That didn’t sound like such a bad ass name. For some reason, I had expected something tougher sounding.
As she pulled him in for a hug right in front of me, I realized I was the oddball in the room. And I had no idea what kind of screwed up world I had been living in all along.
They dove into a rapid discussion with words I had never heard of before. Stunned from the start, I had a hard time following. One thing was for certain. I had not been randomly dropped off with Gran six years ago. He had chosen her, and Gran had known about him all along. I looked back and forth between them as they talked around me, and tried to make sense of something. Anything. Nothing clicked into place.
He asked Gran about “the boy” I was with for the third time and that did it.
“His name is Alec,” I snapped, “and he didn’t do anything. You pulled a knife on him.”
They both turned to me. His eyes looked capable of cutting through steel. Gran’s were as soft as always. She offered me a sad smile before returning her attention to him.
“I never met him,” she said with a shake of her head. “I never thought...” She trailed off, visibly upset with herself.
“I was watching. He’s not one of us,” Nathan muttered.
I wanted to ask what Alec was then, but before I could turn the smart-ass-switch on, Nathan turned to me with another order. “Go pack a bag of some necessities, enough clothes for a few days.” He eyed my outfit critically. “You should probably change into something more practical, and comfortable shoes.”
Other than to fold my arms over my chest, I didn’t budge. I was starting to hate this guy as much as I hated being talked down to by him. This was my hero? The guy I have, literally, dreamt of my whole life? He was kind of a jerk. I glanced at Gran, who smiled warmly at me. Why couldn’t some of her sweetness rub off on him?
“Go on, honey. Pack quick,” she said, giving me a push in the direction of the stairs.
I glared at Nathan as I passed, making sure he understood it was Gran, and not him, that I was minding. From the look he returned, I doubted he cared—and maybe even found my blatant defiance amusing.
As I walked away, I heard Gran scold him for his behavior. As much as I wanted to hear his response—if he had one—I wanted a moment to myself more. I shut my bedroom door behind me, blocking out their voices.
I surveyed my room, and wondered where it had all gone wrong. The night had started off so wonderful. Night out with Callie, my first since the accident. Alec. The kiss. Then creepy-looking guys with scary eyes and one terrifying car ride later, I’m ordered to pack my bags. Not to mention my so-called hero ended up being an asshole.
Yeah, the night had definitely taken an unexpected turn for the worse.
Resolving to start somewhere before I was berated for taking too long, I picked my book bag off the floor and took out my books. My purple and yellow lily folder was the last to drop out. With a sad smile, I flipped it open to the inside cover, where in Alec’s choppy handwriting was scrawled the digits to his cell phone. He had written it there the day we met. “Need to make an emergency cracker run? Need a ride to school? Want someone to make you laugh? Anything. Call me. Anytime. I mean it,” he had told me with a wink. Never thought to add “crazy guy attacks us at knifepoint” to that list.
I dialed his number. His voice mail picked up, but I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t know what to say. How could I when I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on?
I moved fast after that to keep my mind off Alec. I changed into jeans, a t-shirt, and my gym shoes; threw the necessities—a few pants, shirts, socks, and changes of underwear—into my book bag. I moved to the bathroom, and packed my toothbrush and toothpaste, but left the shampoo and body wash. Most hotels would have the little complimentary bottles, and it wasn’t like we would be gone for long.
After all, I had school on Monday.
CHAPTER 5
The first clue that there was a problem was the sound of shattering glass downstairs. The second was the angry unfamiliar voices. I ignored the one in my head that told me to stay put, and was half way down the steps before I realized what I was walking in to.
In the kitchen, to my left, Nathan was squaring off with the three guys from the parking lot. In front of me, between the kitchen and the living room, Gran held off another two with a butcher knife in one hand, a fire poker in the other. I recognized them as two of the boys who had been with Alec at the party earlier. The ones he had told Callie and me to stay away from.
He must have known something. But what? Who were they? And, more importantly—where was Alec?
A flurry of activity in the kitchen reclaimed my attention. Two of the three that had Nathan cornered rushed him from opposing sides. Backed against the counter, he didn’t have many options. I was a heartbeat away from jumping in to help him, though I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to realize my intervention was not going to be necessary.
Nathan leaned his arms onto the counter behind him, raised his legs, and landed a kick to the gut of the poor sucker to reach him first. The impact sent the guy feet over head on his way to the floor, where he landed with a resounding thud. Nathan stunned the second one with an uppercut to the jaw, dropped his shoulder, and flipped the guy UFC-style to the floor beside the first one. He kept coming, knife in hand, and speared the third one in the stomach.
My jaw dropped, the scream of horror caught in my throat. Catching a glimpse of me over the man’s shoulder, Nathan frantically motioned for me to retreat upstairs.
I only had time to withdraw one step before freak number one clambered to his feet, fixed his eyes on me, and charged. Freak number two followed close behind.
I was vaguely aware of the two in the living room turning to me at around the same time. Distantly, I was aware of one of them falling to the floor, and Gran standing over him with the fire poker. My ears picked up what sounded like Nathan finishing off the one in the kitchen with the knife.
Death all around me. Three of them coming at me now. And, boy, were they fast.
Half way up the stairs, icy fingers gripped my ankles and jerked my feet out from under me. My face slammed into the edge of a step, and then was dragged across the coarse carpet as I was hauled back down the stairs. I dug my nails in, reached for anything to hold on to, but came up empty. Three sets of hands were on me, tearing at my clothes, pulling my hair, and scratching my skin in their frantic attempt to get to me. My legs flailed wildly, and I thought I connected with someone’s face before a pair of hands restrained my legs to prevent me from doing further damage. Another set grabbed my arms and maneuvered them behind my back. I looked over my shoulder at the culprit, just as another body moved into my line of sight behind him.
A formidable Nathan threw himself at the one who had my arms restrained, wrestled him off me. Next, the weight on my legs lifted, leaving me to scrap one on one with the last one.
I wiggled out from under him enough to scrambl
e up two steps. I turned as he lunged for me, kicked, and connected with his nose. It was a hard kick, but his lips merely twisted into an angry snarl as he leveled his gaze on me. His eyes shone a dark shade of gold—empty, with nothing behind them—like tiny portals straight into hell.
Behind him, Nathan impaled the one he had tackled, twisting the knife into his chest, where his heart should be. I screamed and looked away. Too late. The vision was etched into my mind forever—another one for the nightmares. I pushed through the psychological trauma, pulled it together, and prepared to battle with the golden eyed freak on top of me again.
Only I didn’t have to.
Nathan stepped behind him, hoisted him off me, and plunged the knife into his back. Blood dripped toward me in a steady red stream as I frantically tried to crawl out from under it, and then...poof. The body disintegrated into a cloud of vapor. And that evaporated into...nothing.
Nathan stood over me, the man’s blood on his clothes, his face, and his hands. No body. At the foot of the stairs, the body that should have been there was also gone.
He’d been stabbed in the heart, I was sure of it. So where was he?
My eyes met Nathan’s briefly before he turned to assist Gran. Together, they easily took down the last one, and he joined his buddies in their vaporized states. Or whatever it was that I had just witnessed.
I choked back the bile that rose in my throat and looked for something to lean against before I toppled over. As an afterthought, I opted to climb down the stairs first, before I fell down them.
Nathan stood over the body Gran had left on the living room floor. I had thought he was dead. He wasn’t. Not yet. Same with the first one Nathan had stabbed in the stomach. He was alive and groaning loudly from the kitchen floor.
Scary men, dead and vanished. Others left bleeding to death on the floor. I felt like I was in a Hitchcock film. There was no way this was happening. People didn’t just vaporize. I shut my eyes and counted to five before opening them again. The two bodies were still there; the other three were still gone.
I sat numbly on the bottom step, my legs too wobbly to support me any longer. Maybe I was going crazy? This had been the last straw. My brain simply couldn’t handle anymore death, and I snapped.
And started seeing things that weren’t really happening?
Gran came to my side and I looked up at her appreciatively. In my periphery, I saw Nathan plunge the knife into the chest of the man on the floor in the living room. Too late, I closed my eyes, trying to block it out. Gran’s hand rested on my shoulder, silently encouraging me to keep them shut as Nathan’s footsteps moved across the room. A moment later, the moaning in the kitchen stopped. I finally opened my eyes and wasn’t surprised to see that both bodies were now gone. Other than two pools of blood on the floor, and smeared all over us, no signs remained of the five men that had been in the house.
I couldn’t have imagined it. Even though I kind of wished I had. Even if that meant I was crazy.
Nathan looked a little concerned as he approached me where I rocked on the steps, my knees pulled up against my chest in a sort of seated fetal position. After what I had just witnessed, he probably expected that I would need a strait jacket and a padded room.
He crouched in front of me, and used a kitchen towel to wipe away the blood on my face. I let him, in too much of a shock to care what he did. When he was done there, he moved to my hands. That was when I saw the blood all over them. I snatched the towel from him and scrubbed my hands until they hurt. My vision blurry from unshed tears, I couldn’t tell if I was making any progress. I scrubbed harder, faster, desperate to get it off of me.
Finally, Nathan placed his hand over mine to stop me. “You got it.” He withdrew the towel from my trembling fingers. “You okay?”
I lifted my eyes to his and nodded numbly. I didn’t think he believed me, but we didn’t exactly have time to nurture my mental health at the moment.
He turned to Gran. “We’ve got to go,” he said, and what little concern I thought I had seen on his face for me a second ago vanished.
I was vaguely aware of his voice in the distance as he spoke to Gran. I swayed back and forth, not listening to either of them. Five guys—the three creepy ones from the parking lot and the two that had been at the party with Alec—were dead and gone in a matter of minutes. Where did Alec fit in? Where did I? And where in the hell did they go?
Had Alec been here too? Or...had he not been here because he was already gone, killed on that dark narrow trail?
My heart lurched as if a cold hand had reached down my throat and gripped it. I lifted my eyes, widened with terror, to the man I knew nothing about as he wiped his bloodied knife with the towel. Perhaps feeling my gaze on him, he looked at me, his face blank.
“Did you kill Alec too?” The words stuck in my throat, and I nearly choked on them.
Nathan stared at me for a long time, then scoffed and turned away without an answer.
I took that as a yes and sprung off the steps, launching myself at his back like a feral cat. He spun around with lightening quick reflexes and caught me mid-leap. It was pathetic, really, how easily he swatted me off him. I regrouped and flew into him again, connecting a fist with his chest before his hands clamped around my wrists and froze my poorly planned assault. I shoved against him as hard as I could, but barely budged him.
“Did you kill Alec?” There was an audible tremor in my voice this time.
He looked at me and, even if only briefly, I saw a flash of compassion in his eyes.
No. No way. I must have imagined it. I shoved against him again. “Did you?”
His answer was stiff. “No.”
I didn’t know if I believed him, but then I had no way to find out one way or the other. With no choice but to take his word for it, I twisted my hands out of his grasp. He could have held me there all night if he wanted to, but he let me go and left me to rub my wrists as he crossed the room to grab my book bag off the floor. He turned for the door without another look at me.
Gran called after him. “Nathan, wait.”
He stopped and turned, my book bag flung over his shoulder like he was about to walk to the bus stop. For a moment, it made him look less hostile. If I didn’t dislike him so much, I might have even found it cute.
He was nice looking. I couldn’t deny that.
Nor could I deny the fluttering in my stomach the look on Gran’s face was causing. She was up to something I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like. She turned to me, her face solemn.
“Go with Nathan, sweetie,” she said. “He’ll take care of you.”
Gran wasn’t coming with us? Oh, no. No, no, no.
“I’m not going anywhere with him!” I jabbed a finger in Nathan’s direction without bothering to look at him. I stared pleadingly at Gran. “Not if you’re not coming.”
“You can trust Nathan.” Her eyes shot over my shoulder and rested on him. “You’re in good hands with him. You always have been.”
“Gran?” This time it was Nathan. He entered the small intimate space Gran and I shared and stood beside me, close enough that our shoulders grazed. I resisted the urge to jerk my arm away. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. That and he made me feel...secure, safer just by standing beside me. Why did he have to have that effect on me?
Why did he have to be such a jerk?
Gran turned her eyes, gleaming with stubborn determination, to him. “More will be coming.”
“I know,” he returned quickly. “That’s why we have to go now.”
“Oh, Nathan,” she groaned. “I’m retired. I’m old, I’m worn-out. I’ll only slow you down.”
“No…” He started to protest and, for once, I agreed with him.
Gran shut him down with a fierce glare and a sharp shake of her head. The look on her face was a warning I recognized. Next would be a tongue-lashing on not disrespecting your elders if he kept it up. I’d heard that lecture a few times and recognized the signs of it coming. Nat
han had apparently learned what that look meant too. He shut his mouth with a reluctant sigh.
Gran cupped my face in her hands tenderly, but spoke to Nathan. “She’s important, that much is clear.”
She couldn’t be talking about me, could she? I glanced behind her and caught Nathan’s gaze as he surveyed me like I was a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Finally, he seemed to have reached some conclusion about me, though I was sure I would never know what it was. He didn’t strike me as the sharing type.
When he finally released me from the visual hold he had on me to address Gran, I nearly sighed in relief. “Do you have—”
“Of course I do,” she interrupted, sounding displeased with his uncertainty. Without another word, she turned and descended the steps to the lowest level of the house. For what, only Gran knew. I wondered if Nathan was as confused as I was.
“You think there are more of those guys coming here?” I asked him in a hushed voice.
He nodded without looking at me.
“She has to come with us then. You have to make her come.”
He turned to me. “You ever try to make her do something she doesn’t want to do?”
I refused to let him know he had a good point. “Well, she can’t stay here…”
“Of course I can, dear,” Gran called from the bottom of the stairs.
Nathan and I watched as Gran ascended with an armful of weapons. The sight of her small frame carrying such a large stack of guns and ammunition—so many that most of her head was obstructed from my view—was almost comical. We stepped back to let her by and she gently set the stack down on the couch. She handed a silver pistol to Nathan.
He inspected it, opened the thing where the bullets were kept, and closed it again with a snap of his wrist. He seemed to know what he was doing, like he’d been doing it for a long time. A memory of him, looking exactly as he did now, fourteen years ago, flashed into my head. He has been doing it for a long time. Only I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, aside from rescuing me.
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