by Erin Hayes
She squeezed back more tears and watched a hawk hang glide far above her, its wingtips idling on the breeze. She hadn’t worked this hard for nothing. Whatever it took, she would get out of here. She drew her lips together and mustered another shallow breath. “Is anybody there?”
For a moment there was no response, and then a floating sensation startled her as powerful arms gripped her from behind and raised her off the ground. Her heart beat faster. She tried to speak, but her throat seized up. Why was this person lifting her like this with her injuries? She hadn’t even heard an ambulance siren. A leaden terror filled her heart as they suddenly soared full tilt through the air toward the freewheeling bird. The hawk squawked, flapped its wings and veered off out of the ravine. Fear detonated in Kyra’s head as they flew higher, their synchronized movements weaving a hypnotic effect, her body abandoned to weightlessness. A barrage of images battered her brain; the red truck that had vanished over the guardrail, the shadow walking in front of her car on the freeway, the figure that had fled the flames, and now this. Maybe she was dying after all, experiencing her brain’s last impulses.
They crested the ravine and reached the edge of the freeway, drifting out into the center lane of oncoming traffic. She swayed in sync with the stranger, disconnected from her senses. No stench of gas, no sting of gravel flung from spinning tires on the hot asphalt that tapered into the distance. A silent movie of vehicles whipped by her, the drivers gripping their wheels, sipping coffee, jawing on their phones, oblivious to her presence.
Her head spun, orbiting an axis between life and something beyond it. She flinched when the stranger’s voice washed over her. Holding her breath, she strained to catch the words that whooshed from behind her.
“The end is coming. Beware the Soul Stalkers—”
The voice melted softly into silence as they wheeled upward, shadow skating through the air. Kyra opened her eyes wider as they glided back over the embankment and dropped down into the ravine, circling above her vehicle’s smoking remains.
“—we have snatched you from their hands.” The words, now deep and urgent, whirled around her like a rotating column of air, resonating through the ravine.
Not far from the battered wreck lay a familiar figure in a tattered Chanel suit, long blond hair pasted to the dirt, arms and legs splayed like a broken mannequin. Kyra stared down at her shattered body. Her breath froze in her lungs.
I’m dead!
The stranger’s lyrics vibrated in her ear, but she was past making sense of any of it. Her head slumped to the side, and everything went black.
Chapter Two
“Ma’am, can you hear me?”
A rich, baritone voice collided with her senses.
“Ma’am?”
Memories of the accident streamed in, dragging her back to reality: the SUV flipping, the plummet into the ravine, the shadow in the flames, the mysterious stranger. Her mind scrambled for a foothold, registering alarm.
This must be him!
She ran her tongue over her chapped lips and made a muffled sound at the back of her throat. Grit clung to the inside of her mouth, and her breath smelt musty and old.
Her eyelids quivered at the image in front of her, weaving and trailing a wake of yellow light. She blinked away the film from her eyes, and the jiggling chinstrap of a firefighter’s helmet hovered into focus.
She gasped in relief and scrounged up a trickle of saliva below her tongue. “Thank you.”
The firefighter nodded as he responded to a garbled voice coming over his walkie-talkie.
Beyond him, black-rubber boots passed in and out of her line of vision. She was still in the ravine. And she was alive! But how was that possible? She furrowed her brow, foraging through her mind for answers. She had just looked down on her crushed body, sprawled in the dirt. She squinted at a flickering shaft of sunlight and studied the flurry of action around her. Maybe it had been some kind of near-death experience. That vague sensation of floating like a spirit above her wrecked SUV. The accident replayed without mercy in her mind but what happened next was a blur. She must have blacked out and imagined it all, hovering in the trenches between life and death.
Angling her head to see past the rescue workers, she caught a glimpse of her charred SUV. Her heart struck several erratic beats. She’d driven her three-year-old Lexus off the lot only two months earlier.
“Can you tell me your name, ma’am?” The firefighter’s creased face peered over her.
She opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came to mind. She raced through the alphabet, her pulse picking up pace as she pictured her office on the ground floor at Buffington & Associates Advertising, the cherry blossoms on Elk Avenue where she’d bought a bungalow last spring, her financier boyfriend, Brian, her younger sister, Bridget, her father, Greg, her mother, Janis—the long-gone Janis, one memory that never bleached out no matter how hard she tried to rid her life of the stain. It was all right there. Except for her own name. A ripple of nausea spread through her.
She scrunched her eyes tighter. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
The firefighter gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, it’ll come back to you.”
“How long was I out?”
He adjusted the rim of his helmet. “I can’t say for sure, ma’am. Took us twenty minutes to find you, but you’re safe now.”
Time enough for her strange flight to have happened. But she couldn’t be sure it had. It was all so confusing. Two paramedics maneuvered her onto a spine board and secured her head and limbs.
“You’re good to go,” The firefighter’s expression softened as he leaned over her. “We’ll take you up the fire road to the ambulance now.”
She swallowed to level the emotion in her voice. “What about the truck driver?”
A puzzled look flitted across the firefighter’s face. “There were no other vehicles involved.”
“Yes there was—a red semi-truck. It flew over my car at the last second and went into the ravine.”
“Only your tire tracks up there. It’s normal to be confused. Trust me, it’ll pass.” He gave her a lopsided grin. “You had me tagged as an angel at first. Happens me sometimes, in the line of duty.”
She blinked, trying to untangle her thoughts. Was it possible the firefighter was the powerful stranger who had lifted her?
Doubt sparked in her brain like drunken fireflies. Even before the accident happened, things didn’t add up. Like the shadow out in the rain on the freeway. She hadn’t slept well the previous night, she was running on adrenalin and a bucketload of caffein. The shadow in the wreckage could have been an illusion created by the flames. But the eighteen-wheeler was real. She was wide-awake when that truck came at her.
She closed her eyes, picturing the steel grille of the eighteen-wheeler hurtling toward her like a missile locked on its target, the thunderous jolt when it clipped her Lexus. There had to be tire tracks, skid marks, some trace of the eighteen-wheeler. It didn’t make sense. And there was something else about the truck that didn’t fit, a detail that gnawed at her like a lodged splinter she couldn’t get at.
“You’re in good hands now, ma’am.” The firefighter’s black and yellow helmet dipped in her direction as the emergency vehicle doors slammed shut. Sirens blaring, the ambulance pulled out and merged onto the I-94.
“I need to check your vitals again,” said the paramedic, leaning over her. “Just relax and breathe normally.”
She watched as he Velcroed a blood pressure cuff over her arm. Despite being “in good hands” as the firefighter had reassured her, she was leery of trusting anyone until she could figure out exactly what was going on. The claustrophobic array of high-tech equipment jostled around her, caging her in. She was helpless, trapped. A feeling of unease built inside her. It was almost as if she were being watched by someone other than the paramedic—stalked even.
Beware the Soul Stalkers! Her blood froze as the words came rushing back to mind. That’s not the firefighter�
��s voice. Panic erupted again inside her head. Someone had lifted her before the firefighters arrived. Someone who knew she was in danger. Heart pounding, she drove her fingernails deep into her palms. Were the shifting shadows the Soul Stalkers?
The burning pang in her palms hit hard and she gasped. She flexed her fists and wriggled her toes, giddy with relief. The shock must have temporarily paralyzed her.
“Are you okay, ma’am? Take a deep breath for me,” instructed the paramedic, already busy with his dispatch. “…twenty-nine-year-old female accident victim, spine precautions, CO2 of thirty-four percent …”
She exhaled a long, shallow breath, and stared up at the yellow grip bar that ran the length of the van. A huge burden had just lifted from her shoulders. She wanted to believe everything was going to be all right now, but she couldn’t shake a lingering sense of foreboding. Someone, or something, had forced her off the road. Whatever deadly game had begun today, she wanted out.
Chapter Three
The ambulance doors swung open, daylight jerking her out of a shallow sleep. She snapped her eyes open, her thoughts scrambling to find some foothold in her confusion as the medics wheeled her through the emergency room doors and into a triage station.
“I’m Dr. Harrigan and I’ll be taking care of you,” said a thin, balding man. He gave a few directions to the trauma team and leaned over her gurney. “Can you tell me your name?”
She studied the embroidered title on the doctor’s coat. Unease descended again like a cold bank of fog as she tried in vain to remember her name.
She made an attempt to shake her head, but her neck brace didn’t budge. “I don’t remember.” She studied the doctor’s reaction, swallowing back her trepidation. “Is it temporary—the amnesia?”
“It’s normal enough under these circumstances,” he said, scribbling something on her chart. “You’ve been through an extremely traumatic event. You can expect to experience some confusion, anxiety even, over the next forty-eight hours.”
Kyra frowned. How about the crushing fear that someone tried to kill me? If only she could believe the shadows were harmless specters of her imagination. If the stranger’s warning had any merit, she should be very afraid. The end is coming. Beware the Soul Stalkers. There was a warrant out for her life, and it hadn’t been issued by a flesh and blood municipality.
The doctor drew his brows together. “Your vitals check out great. You probably just have a mild concussion, but we’ll run some more tests to be safe.” He exited the room, and an ER nurse pushed a saline drip trolley alongside her bed. “Your father’s outside. I’ll let him in when I’m done here.”
Moments later, a familiar six-foot-two frame hunkered over her bed. “Kyra!” Her father leaned down, his face lanced with concern, and kissed her forehead. “Honey, are you okay?”
Kyra! Of course! Kyra Williams. How could she have forgotten? It was so obvious, so familiar. She let out a low, relieved breath and smiled up at her dad. “I’m fine.” She gave the neck brace a tug. “No injuries. It’s just a precaution.”
“What happened?”
She looked away, feigning a moment of reflection. There was no easy way to explain what had gone down without sounding crazy.
“I guess I lost control. I … don’t know.” She slid him a sheepish glance. “It all happened so quickly.”
“You’re safe. That’s all that matters. Good thing no one else was involved.”
She flashed him an empty smile. But someone else was involved. Someone had run her off the freeway and almost killed her.
“Do you want me to call Brian?”
“No, he’s in Europe on business. How did you know I was here?”
“The hospital got my number from your phone.”
“They found my purse?”
“Yes, but it’s not pretty,” he said, handing it to her.
Kyra caught her breath as she reached for her Louis Vuitton handbag. The once-flawless Italian leather was a leprous membrane of nicks. Below the brass clasp gaped a four-inch gash. “Investment piece,” the sales clerk in the consignment shop had called it when she had rung up the staggering total. Kyra ran her fingers over the disfigured leather. “At least the car’s insured.”
The loss ate at her more than she cared to let on. The soft, expensive leather had eased an ache inside her, that insatiable hankering to be good enough, to be somebody. The Louis Vuitton had been a pledge of faith in her lucrative future, as Buffington’s first female Vice President of Marketing. And that would just be the start.
Kyra slipped her finger through the gash in the leather. That scumbag trucker deserved to rot. He had ruined everything. She’d missed her chance to close the most important deal of her life this morning. Besides the bonus she’d been counting on netting from the deal, her promotion was at stake.
Gripping her purse, she flinched as a dark, intrusive energy coiled around her thoughts. He does deserve to rot, doesn’t he? The thought twisted inside her. She stared down at the scripted logo gleaming from the clasp of her Louis Vuitton, and froze. The intertwined “L” and “V” on the clasp of the bag had transposed itself into the glinting, calligraphic letters “SS.”
Chapter Four
By all outward appearances, Martina Doyle’s work day had started out like any other. Collision One Body Shop was in full swing. The pneumatic hammering of the production crew dissecting a new batch of wrecks vibrated across the workshop floor, while the paint technicians misted their magic on the previous week’s rebuilds in the spray booths.
Martina had already started the coffee, restocked the bathrooms, and pulled the jobs that were going home that day. Now she sat hunched over her reception desk, her armpits sticky with fear. She rehearsed each step of her plan in her head one more time. She had to stay strong. For her son’s sake, she had to go through with this.
Heart pounding, she threw one last glance over her shoulder and logged in to the shop’s accounts. Her fingers shook as she scrolled to the money market transfer dropbox. She stabbed at the blur of characters on her keyboard. It was all over in a couple of clicks. Nineteen hundred dollars—transferred from the shop’s money market account into her checking account. All wrong on so many levels.
Eddie Garcia had been her boss for eleven years; she’d be hard pressed to find a better man to work for. But, she was desperate. With the money she’d taken from him, she could leave Hal and get Taggert out from under his deadbeat father’s fists. Start a whole new life. She let out a heavy sigh. Maybe then her rocky relationship with her son would have a fighting chance.
Easing back in her office chair, she stared at her flush new bank balance and waited for judgment to strike. Her forehead felt clammy and cold, as if her soul had already been condemned. She tightened her lips in resolve and exited out of the screen. For several agonizing minutes, she went through the motions of processing the day’s repair orders, then chanced a glance over her left shoulder toward the back of the office. The estimator was busy with a customer, and Eddie was at his desk, phone tucked under his ear, his knobby fingers twisting a pen as he talked.
From somewhere inside Martina’s purse, her cell phone’s muffled ring sliced into her thoughts. She rummaged through her bag, her heart doing triple time when Hal’s number came up on the screen. She should have left her husband years ago, but, even now, she wasn’t entirely sure she had what it took to go through with it. Truth was, she wasn’t sure she had a right to a better life. Maybe Hal really was all she deserved.
“I’m outta beer,” he barked. “Pick me up a couple of six packs on your way home.”
Martina listened stiff-backed, the phone clamped against her ear as he ranted on. The only emotion he ever generated in her was fear, the kind that paralyzed its prey and turned it to mush before devouring it. Eddie, on the other hand—She bit her bottom lip. Eddie hadn’t ever raised his voice to her in all the years she’d worked for him. And here she was robbing him blind right in front of him and cashing in on his kindness l
ike the low-life she was. She’d listened to the voices egging her on, whispering lies into her ear to justify her actions. Her jaw quivered. She was no better than Hal. Maybe worse. At least he didn’t pretend to be anything he wasn’t.
“You listening or what?”
Her heart slugged against her chest. “I gotcha, Hal.” She moved the phone several inches from her ear, repulsed by his coughing fit on the other end. He rattled and choked like a carburetor running rough, gassing up on his rage. Pity it hadn’t taken him out. A thousand times she’d wished him dead, but she could never go through with it. Easier to bottle up her pain and play by Hal’s rules, at least it had been. Until now.
Finding pot in Taggert’s backpack had changed everything. She’d searched her soul long and hard through several sleepless nights and finally made the decision to take the money. The voices in her head had praised her reasoning. After all, her son was on the fast track to nowhere, and if she didn’t make a move, no one else was going to intervene.
“Where’s them blue pants at? I can’t find nothin’ in this hole.”
“I’ll look for them when I get home, Hal.”
“I ain’t got all day. You better have ’em washed or there’ll be hell to pay.” He let loose with a few profanities and hung up without as much as a good-bye. Martina sat frozen in her chair, the din of Hal cussing ringing in her ears. Could she actually go through with this? If Hal ever caught up with her, he’d beat her to a pulp. She ran trembling fingers over the ridged scar on her arm where he’d stabbed her with a steak knife last Christmas. She could still transfer the money back and Eddie would be none the wiser. But there was Taggert to think about. At all costs she had to save her son.
