by Emme DeWitt
“We’re heading out now,” Brendan said into his phone, staring at his feet scuffing the ground. “With morning traffic, it’ll be another few hours. I’ll call again once we’ve made it.”
I presented myself and my bounty in front of him, and he hung up immediately. His hands reached out instinctively to steady me as I slipped on a small patch of ice.
“Got you,” he said, a reassuring smile illuminating his features against the dull grey morning sky.
“Thanks,” I said, handing over a coffee and offering my armload of pastries for his inspection. He picked his coffee from my extended hand, and scooping up the slipping packets of snacks effortlessly.
“Let me get these,” he said, leaving me to cradle my coffee in both hands.
A big yawn escaped him, contorting his face for several seconds. He shook it off, but I looked him over again. His eyes were puffy, and dark circles were forming after only one night of poor sleep. His energy seemed off as well as he tried to rally after moments of exhaustion.
“Did you sleep okay?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I’m good. Once we get back on the road, it’ll be better.” Brendan nodded, another yawn stalling him once again.
“Why don’t I drive the rest of the way?” I offered. “I slept just fine, and the navigation system will guide me through all the highways and construction.”
“I’m fine,” Brendan said, standing up straight. “I promise.”
I gave him a scathing look.
“Driving tired is stupid. Get in the car,” I said, directing a nice mental push his way. He was already on the other side of the car before he could argue. “Keys.”
He threw them over, and I yelped as I moved to catch them, holding the coffee out delicately so it wouldn’t spill or burn my hand. I managed to catch them before they fell into an icy puddle, and my hand remained coffee free. I took a big draw from the tiny cup in celebration.
“Are you all right?” Brendan asked, his body sagging with guilt and exhaustion.
“Perfecto,” I called out, hopping into the driver’s seat and securing my precious caffeine in its cupholder. Brendan got in and settled himself long before I was done adjusting the seat and the mirrors. I scooted the seat all the way forward, even adjusting the back to get me closer to the wheel.
A dry chuckle escaped from Brendan’s half-asleep form.
“I see you got your mother’s height,” he muttered. His seat was already extended and reclined to cradle his long frame comfortably.
“Thank you for that novel discovery,” I said. “Now, eat your breakfast and go to sleep. I’ll wake you once we get to Tio’s.”
“I’ll just sleep for a little bit. Then we can switch back,” Brendan said, the words becoming one long muddy phrase as he lost the battle to remain conscious. My soothing energy was guilty of his immediate descent into sleep, but honestly, he didn’t need much of a push. A light snore escaped from his nose, which was pressed against the plastic wall piece protecting his seat belt retractor.
I grabbed the vending machine packets and stashed them in the center console, not wanting them to slip where I couldn’t reach them while driving. I checked the navigation system to make sure it was loud enough and set it to Tio’s address once again. We were off before rush hour began, but I had a feeling would hit traffic regardless as we got closer to Chicago.
I left the music off, enjoying the peaceful hum of ambient road noise and Brendan’s sleeping murmurs. It was almost as quiet as my room back at the institution, but there was something more lively about it. It might have been because I was going seventy miles an hour on a highway in the complete opposite direction of my captors. Probably.
All too soon, my coffee cup was empty and I wished I could stop for another cup. I promised myself I would only stop if I had to pee, mostly because any stop would wake Brendan, who would immediately demand to drive again. He was so peaceful when he slept, and I knew he needed to rest more than I needed coffee.
Congestion started to build when the LED signs warned of impending construction. We hadn’t lost a lane yet, but knowing the orange barrels were coming must have caused the other drivers to slow down in anticipation. I toyed with the idea of impressing upon them to get out of my way, but I was nervous they might wreck themselves if I had too little control over them. The horrific images of what could go wrong filled my head, and I shook them loose, resolving to deal with the traffic like everybody else.
The navigation system piped up, telling me in a few miles I was going to have to exit to a different highway. The system was filled with outdated information, though, and I almost missed the exit. They had created a new lane much earlier than suggested, and I almost hadn’t made it over in time. Once I was in the correct lane, my eyes darted to Brendan, hoping the careening of the car as it scooted over three lanes in quick succession hadn’t woken him. He was still dozing, completely unaware.
I sighed, checking my mirrors again that no great massacre had occurred with my aggressive movements. Not many folks were heading in this direction during the morning rush, so it seemed like I was on my own.
I looked ahead on the exit ramp and noticed the van in front of me slowly drifting toward the edge of the curve, getting alarmingly close to the embankment between the highway and our merging lane. A partition resumed closer to the highway, so if the driver didn’t correct enough, the van would hit the concrete blocks even if it missed the embankment.
The driver didn’t seem to be correcting the van, and I opened my tightly shuttered mind, sensing three people inside the doomed vehicle. They didn’t feel right, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but they weren’t in a normal state, panicked or otherwise.
I didn’t have time to investigate further.
The van continued to drift, the momentum of the vehicle on the curved plane sending it speeding even faster toward the very solid partition. My eyes bounced back and forth, analyzing the speed and trajectory. My stomach dropped, along with my jaw.
Without a doubt, I knew they were going to die.
Panic erupted from me in a loud subsonic boom. My exclamation point warning was directed at the people in the van, but no miracle happened. They did not correct course or bail out of the out of control vehicle.
I looked at Brendan, still peacefully asleep, and I swallowed hard. I sent a small apology his way, but I had to act fast.
Speeding up, I raced to be alongside the van. It was tough with the curve, but I managed to meet the front of my car with the back of theirs. They were drifting, but not fast enough. So I gave them a nudge. With Brendan’s car.
My body jolted with the contact of the cars, and I turned the wheel with all my might. The van wiggled, as if something else was trying to correct the change in direction my car was providing. I clenched my jaw and accelerated, sending my will along with the physics of my car to guide the van into the shallow snowed-in valley of grass prior to the concrete partition.
The van slid into the snow, and I watched it stall out, a whoosh of noise and vibration echoing back. I slammed on the brakes in a series of frantic kicks and put on my hazard lights. I slid to a full stop just over the rumble strips, parking in front of the partition I had been trying to save the van from.
I opened the car door, leaving it ajar as I sprinted toward the van. I slid down the embankment, my legs getting soaked immediately with the snowmelt and grunge of turned-up grass and dirt from the path of the van. The resistance of the snow and my short stature made the trip stretch out in what seemed like half time, my breath ragged in my ears as I tried to get enough oxygen to power me to the crash victims. The hood of the van was smoking.
The slippery mud and snow sent me crashing into the backside of the van, and I clawed my way around to the driver’s side. I had felt three people inside, and I was determined to get them out before the van had any other funny ideas. I peered in to assess the passengers, but the windows were heavily tinted. I tried the handle of the sliding door
, but it wouldn’t give.
I flung open the driver’s side door without much resistance, and I stared at the impossible.
The seat was empty.
I climbed up onto the driver’s seat to peer inside and found nothing but rags and a few personal items strewn about the cabin. My ragged breathing sent out billowing clouds of mist in the chilly morning air. Every time it cleared, the empty seats stared back at me.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice said behind me.
I turned to find the owner of the voice. Stepping down from the van, I faced outward, noticing the trail of smoke from the engine quickly getting darker and thicker. My eyes blinked away tears as the smoke choked my throat and field of vision.
A form came forward in the thickening cloud, and my anxiety spiked again when I realized yet again this person was not quite right. I slammed my mental barriers up fully, double barricading my mind from this stranger, whose rage caused their aura to flicker like a flame. An aura tinged with pure white, which could only mean one thing.
The empty van was the least of my problems.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” the voice said again. My body buckled from the level of anger emanating from the approaching form. I was halfway into a protective ball before my logical brain told me that was not a good idea.
My face tingled, and I reeled as if I had been slapped. I blinked furiously, trying to clear my sight. I reached out mentally again, trying to poke around for anything that could help me. Beyond knowing the stranger was supernatural, I was getting a surprisingly low level of information off their emotional state. I had encountered people before that I couldn’t quite read or could read only the foremost feeling they had. But I hadn’t met a supernatural, other than the Dean, who could block the flow of information so well.
My stomach was almost in my throat, the tension and the fear building in a tidal wave of bile. Puking from my anxiety was not really a great strategy at this point either, so I swallowed it down.
“Hard to say,” I choked out. I hoped I could gain a better understanding of what exactly was going on here from the mysterious person’s words since I was striking out with the emotions. “Why don’t you tell me? We can see who’s right.”
“You ruined a perfectly good fake death for a battered wife and her two children, you idiot,” the voice said, its nebulous form remaining just out of reach as the smoke cloud thickened. “Way to go.”
“Sorry,” I said, coughing. “To be honest, it didn’t seem fake to me. I was just trying to help.”
A snort echoed from the cloud. I could no longer see in front of me at all. Belatedly, I realized I should really get away from whatever was about to blow up.
“Just get out of the way. Luckily, Plan B is about to clean up your mess. Unless you plan on dying today, I’d recommend you begin running. Like, now,” the voice said, pressing forward toward me.
I gasped in surprise and was promptly rewarded by another round of coughing. A hand grabbed my upper arm and yanked me off my feet. I was dragged back through the snow, following the path the van had taken once it exited the highway. Just as we cleared the noxious cloud, a large crack rang through the air. I tried to look back, but my head was jerked violently forward, choosing the path of least resistance from the person dragging me away at a fast clip.
The voice spoke again, this time, clearly directed at someone else. “Requesting transport. Yeah, I’m aware. Thank you,” the voice said, a snort escaping easily even with the slight jogging pace. “Tits up, as you like to say. Can you just come get me now? I have a passenger.”
We stopped suddenly, and I finally looked up at my captor.
“Well I can’t just leave her here,” the young woman said, her face contorted with frustration. She blew away a stray chunk of white blonde hair, but it fell right back in place, continuing to obscure her face. “She’s got some explaining to do anyway. You’ve got ten seconds before I call him directly. Old fashioned is much messier.”
I tried to wriggle out of the woman’s vice-like grip on my arm. I could no longer feel my fingertips.
“Be still,” she said, glaring down at me, the speaker of the phone directed away from her words. “Or I will incapacitate you, and I will be very happy about it.”
Another crack was released through the air, and the woman sighed as I jumped in response.
“Any day, now, Niko,” she barked into the phone, hanging up.
Suddenly, a man appeared in front of me, and I screamed. His large frame blocked my view of the exit ramp and my car. I considered sending out an SOS to Brendan, but I worried he’d try to act like a hero. Everything was all happening too quickly anyway.
The large man raised his eyebrow at me, giving no other indication that he was surprised that I was surprised he appeared out of thin air.
“Finally,” the woman growled. A faint spike of amusement rolled off the man, but he was similarly unreadable and returned to a faint hum of calm almost immediately.
Before the woman could rip into him any further, the van behind us exploded. I could feel the heat running to meet us, and my eyes widened in shock. We were not far enough away. I was going to be burned alive. The sudden realization pushed my input overload to the max, making me go numb with terror.
I felt another hand on my shoulder, and then everything went black.
I blinked hard, trying to clear my eyes.
This couldn’t be right. It made no sense.
I was in an alleyway. My eyes grazed over the graffitied brick facade of the surrounding buildings, noted the trash strewn in, on, and everywhere except for the dumpsters that lined the small alley. I could clearly read the warning sticker on the side of the dumpster on how to best avoid pests, realizing the words repeated in French immediately below. Most of the trash on the ground seemed frosted over, clumping together in various random piles. Where was I?
“Just because you can transport at a moment’s notice does not mean you have to wait for the absolute last possible moment to do so!” the woman shrieked, jarring me away from my intense scrutiny of the dumpster.
The pair stood near a rusted metal door, clearly picking up where they had left off in an argument that felt like one of many reincarnations of the same conversation. The man’s blank features clued me in that this was not an uncommon occurrence.
“Well, maybe if you would stick to the plan, I wouldn’t have to drop everything I was doing to come save your ass at the very last moment,” the man said, his voice thick and stilted, his accent causing him to enunciate much more clearly than a native speaker. It made him sound more formal, and I cocked my head at the pair’s dynamics. I felt like I was interrupting a private moment, so I stood quietly, taking in the scene. I would have averted my eyes, but I was too invested in seeing how this played out.
Suddenly the man nodded in my direction. “Better grab the little mouse before she runs,” he said, opening the door and leaving me to the seething woman. A bolt of anger shot off from the woman and followed the man, Niko the woman had said, inside as he rudely disengaged from their conversation. Turning her attention to me, she growled, grabbing me again by my upper arm and frog marching me through the same back entrance.
“If I promise I won’t run, would you let go of my arm? I can’t feel my fingers again,” I said, the words escaping in a rush before I lost my resolve. The pain in my shoulder was nothing compared to the look I got, but the woman let me go, shoving me in front of her.
“Left,” she directed, up a narrow staircase that glowed red. We were out onto the next floor before I could decide if the red was from the paint or the lighting. The close proximity of the narrow hallways made me sweat, and the aftershocks of anger permeated the small space enough for me to have trouble breathing.
“Left,” she said again. Her breath was hot on my neck, and I really did feel like a mouse, trapped in a maze I could never escape.
If I wasn’t so afraid of her reaction, I would have attempted to send out a calm wave
to lessen the assault on my senses. I took a chance and glanced back, trying to formulate a plan. One second of eye contact from the woman made me discard my brilliant idea almost before I could complete it.
“In,” was all she said, reaching around me to open a door, shoving me through the opening.
The ominous bang of the door shutting behind me made my whole body cringe. It took me a moment to realize she had not followed me inside, and a wave of relief flooded my frame.
I felt a different presence nearby, and I tensed again. I slowly lowered my barriers, just enough to recon the room. It was dim, not quite dark, but I could see the outline of chairs in the distance and a bar along the far wall. The ceiling seemed abnormally high, and the chill of such an empty space sent a shiver down my spine. Only one other person was in the large space with me, but my barriers slammed back up as soon as I felt him.
He was a void.
But he was normal.
My heart raced ahead in a stuttering sprint, the pounding so loud in my ears I could hardly think. Every half formed thought was interrupted by another. My brain could not put the pieces together.
What on earth was going on?
If he had been a supernatural, I would have assumed he was along the same lines as the Dean. Either he was considered a Commander, just like Tomas had been, or he was able to shield so well that he had to be somewhere on the sentient plane like I was. Like Adair.
Another shiver ran down my spine.
Maybe now wasn’t the time to remember Adair.
But all that didn’t really seem to matter. This guy was human. Normal as normal could be, as far as I could tell. If he wasn’t Elevated, that lack of emotional pulse pointed to the only logical conclusion.
The man was a sociopath.
I shoved my clenched fists into my jeans, trying to contain the variety of panic waves circling my mind. My whole body was shaking. I longed to put up the hood of my jacket, but indoors that made no sense, even in such a cavernous room. Whoever I was about to meet would not be deterred by a hood on a petite young woman who barely hit the five foot marker. My eyes tracked along the furniture, but in the limited lighting, I couldn’t find a strategic hiding spot.
