by Evelyn Glass
“Stay here,” she begged, and I did as I was told. Addison looked up to the source of the sound, his face white. I think he knew as well as we did who was up there. Elijah went to the window, striding purposefully. He pulled back the curtain, and his face dropped when he saw it.
“The car that was following us, it’s out there,” he confirmed. “He’s here. Or at least, someone is.”
“What the fuck do we do?” Mona asked, her voice small with terror. I hated hearing her that way—and suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. The combination of the photographs and the fear and the way that this guy made the people I loved feel, it overwhelmed me. I went for the door and threw it back, pursued by Elijah and Mona. Addison hung back. He probably knew better than anyone what his brother was capable of.
Standing behind the door, was Ian. How long had it been since I’d been face-to-face with this motherfucker? He was skinnier than before, leaner, but he still had those shark-like dead eyes that seemed to gleam dully in the midday light. He was holding a long, slender fire poker, and swung it at me in a desperate motion. I leapt back, spreading my arms to push Elijah and Mona with me.
“Jesus!” I shouted, glancing over at Addison. I kicked the door shut, and just as I did so, the fire poker punctured the thin wood between us. I waited for Ian to burst through the door, but he didn’t. That gave us some time to strategize.
“Addison,” I turned to him desperately, “is there another way out of here?”
“No.” Addison shook his head. He seemed oddly calm, as though resigned to his fate. “The windows are reinforced, and the only way out is through that door.”
I put my head in my hands briefly, then pulled myself upright. Well, I guess I had no choice but to go out there.
“Mona,” I turned to her and gripped her shoulders tightly, “run out once I have him out of the way, okay? You and Elijah go back to the precinct and get Ella somewhere safe. I’ll find you.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, but I pressed a kiss against her lips to stop any protest. I let go of her and strode towards the door, hesitating for a moment before I opened it. I needed to keep him out of the room—that was all that mattered. Back him far enough away that he couldn’t get too close to Mona.
I pulled the door open, and found Ian standing about ten feet away—he looked terrified, maybe more than I felt. As soon as he laid eyes on me, he began to charge, coming at me fast. His breath was ragged and painful—that was all I could hear as he closed the gap between us. On instinct, I stepped out of the way—and let him straight into the room where the rest of them were hiding.
“Fuck!” I muttered to myself—but before I could tackle Ian to the ground, he had swung the poker above his head and brought it crashing down on the person standing nearest to him. Elijah.
Elijah rocked back and forth on his feet for a second, eyes blurring, before he crashed to the floor in a heap. Mona stared at him, one hand clapped over her mouth—he looked dead. I reached for her hand, adrenaline pumping through my system, and pulled her from the room. Addison would have to fend for himself—hell, I wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t been involved in setting us up in this whole mess somehow.
We made for the stairs, and found Ian in hot pursuit—I glanced over my shoulder when I heard a clatter, and saw that he had dropped the poker. We arrived at the top of the steps, and glanced around—a cold breeze rolled in from the window Ian had smashed to get in, and I pulled Mona in that direction. Tears were silently streaming down her face, but she was alive—for now.
Ian took the stairs two at a time as he chased us, and moments later, he arrived at the door of the room we were in—and he reached into the inside of his jacket. I knew that movement—I could suddenly make out the shape beneath his clothes, short and metallic and snout-nosed. A gun.
I had less than a second to put the pieces together in my head before he drew that thing and killed one or both of us—and at that range, there was no doubt the kind of damage he was going to do. I wrapped an arm around Mona’s waist, and dove for the window.
I heard the gunshot ripple through the air behind us as we landed in a heap in the bushes below. I craned my head to look up at the window and see if he was there—but there was nothing. I heard the sound of sirens in the distance, and realized Addison must have called the police and the ambulance. Ian would be on the run now—I prayed they would catch him before he had a chance to flee, but he had probably planned for this somewhere down the line.
I turned to Mona, and caught her face in my hands. “Are you okay?” I asked, examining her closely. She had a few cuts from where the glass had caught her on our way out, and a couple of bruises from the landing, but other than that, she looked okay. Her eyes met mine, big and glassy and stunned by everything that had happened. The tears had stopped for now, and I wondered just how much her mind had been twisted up by seeing something like this.
“I’m okay,” she replied, her voice small and quiet. I wrapped my arms around her and held her tight, ignoring the bumps and bruises her embrace brought out on my own body. We were alive—and for now, that was a start.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I was never sure how people put their lives back together until I had to.
I mean, what had happened at Addison’s house, that wasn’t the kind of stuff you just…got over. Even though what had happened had only taken a matter of minutes to play out, it had imprinted itself on my memory in a way I couldn’t make sense of.
Elijah was in a coma, and had been for the month since the incident had happened. I prayed for him every night—I wasn’t much of a religion person, and I was sure he wasn’t either, but I had to do something. If he hadn’t become involved in this, it never would have happened. I was the one who had to call up Scott, and tell him that the man he’d looked up to for years and years was fighting for his life. I knew that every second he spent unconscious was another where making a full and complete recovery was less and less likely.
I did my best not to linger on those thoughts—after all, it hadn’t been me who’d brought that poker down on to his head—but sometimes I had dreams where I was the one swinging it. The blood-curdling crack it had made when it came into contact with his skull haunted me. I couldn’t get him out of my head, and couldn’t convince myself that I had done enough to stop what had happened. I went in to visit when I could, but I tried to avoid his family—I was probably the last person they wanted to see.
And beyond Elijah, I had my own injuries to attend to. Not just physical—no, those scars seemed to even themselves out soon enough. But the ones that spun around my head only seemed to get worse as time went on.
I knew I should have been over it by then. Nothing had really happened to me, after all—it had just been a matter of making a quick escape and hiding out until we knew that the police had secured the area. For all Jazz’s talk of the police not liking to work with people like him, they had done their level best to get us to safety after all of that went down. Jazz kept his head down and didn’t reveal anything about himself to them, but I still found myself thankful they were there at all. I wondered if they hated us too—if they felt as though we’d taken one of their own from them. Judging by the cards and flowers on Elijah’s bedside table at the hospital, he had been well-liked by almost everyone he’d ever met. And now, I had no idea if he was even going to wake up at all.
Ian. This had all come down to Ian. I had never seen him before that day—in fact, Jazz hadn’t even described him to me. I supposed I had the image of this great beast of a man, a terrifying specter more like the monsters Ella and I came up with than a real human being. So when we saw him—lean and skinny and tall, his eyes too big for his head and his teeth too big for his mouth—the reality of the situation came into focus.
I still remembered the feeling I got when he looked at me, the exact same one I had had when I’d first seen the photographs—that sensation of wanting to tear my skin from my bones, to make myself look as unappealin
g as possible just to get his eyes off of me. His eyes were so dark they were almost black, and looking into them felt like staring deep into some void that I knew I would never find the bottom too. It made my soul ache to think of him. I might have felt sorry for him, once upon a time, might have wondered what made him this way, reached out to see if there was anything I could do to help. But now, all I wanted was him gone. I found myself looking over my shoulder at every opportunity, double-bolting doors and glancing in the rear view mirror to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I felt like this paranoia was consuming my life.
I had moved in with Jazz more or less completely after it happened. The thought of being separated from him and Ella was just too much to bear. We stayed up at the safe house—the thought of going back to that place where Ian had spent so long watching us was unthinkable. We holed up there and made it our home—even though every day we spent there reminded me what Elijah had done for us, and what he had gotten in thanks.
We drove Ella to school every day, trying to keep some form of normality; the school had been informed of what was going on, and they seemed nervous around the three of us. We were there right as the bell rang for the end of the day, scooping her up and taking her home—there was no going around to her friends’ houses, no visits, no trips, no nothing. We needed to know where she was at any given second of the day. I hated having to exert this kind of control over her, but we needed her safe. We needed her away from Ian.
I had started feeling ill, too—not constantly, but not long after I woke up and often far into the day. I was too busy with Ella and what little work I was still able to do given the situation to really give it much thought, but it was there, gnawing away at me all the way through the mornings. I knew I should have got it checked out, but I was too scared to go to any of the places I used to frequent, and that included my doctor.
It was late one evening when the call came through—the phone buzzed as I was reading with Ella, and I practically leapt out of my skin. I was jumpy now, jumpier than I’d ever been before. What had started out as some intriguing mystery-adventure had ended up practically stealing my life from me. I hated myself for letting it get to me like this, but what else was I supposed to do? Put myself in danger for the sake of pretending that my life was still even remotely normal? I continued to read to Ella, but I watched Jazz carefully.
“Hello?” He left the room with the phone pinned between his ear and his shoulder. He was making dinner, and his hands were otherwise engaged.
I tried my best to keep reading and to listen in, but I couldn’t do both at once; Jazz’s voice continued to nag at me through the wall as he spoke. But he didn’t sound angry or upset—no, if I could read his tone at all, it was…happy? That wasn’t something I’d heard in a long time.
Jazz and I were officially together by then. Of course we were. I adored him in ways I had never adored a man before, and he returned all my feelings without reservation. But I couldn’t help but think about how unfair it was that we’d had to conduct the honeymoon phase of our relationship amongst all this horror and destruction.
Where we should have been getting to know each other, slowly moving towards living together as a family—we were thrown together, skipping out on all the sweetness and lightness. It felt like we were doing it backwards—moving in and getting serious in the hopes that things would lighten up later and we could start dating properly. I was falling for him, but this whole thing was confusing and messy and not exactly how I would have done it had I had a choice in the matter. Still, that didn’t stop my heart flipping whenever he casually pulled me in for a kiss while he was cooking. I mean, this was still Jazz, after all.
A few minutes later, Jazz emerged from the bedroom and slowly put the phone back in its cradle. He wore an unreadable expression, and I patted Ella on the head and got to my feet.
“I’ll be back in a second, okay sweetie?” I glanced over at her, but she was already buried in her book. She was a line to sanity in all of this—as a kid, she could adapt to anything as the new normal without a second thought. I wished I could be as fluid as she was.
“Who was that?” I nodded towards the phone, and Jazz turned back to the cooker. He shot a look over at Ella, lowered his voice, and then spoke.
“It was Scott,” he began. “He said…he said they caught Ian.”
“What the hell?” I leaned forward, my heart pounding in my chest. “When? Where? How?”
“At the halfway house,” he went on. “An hour or so ago. He was stalking around there, they think to try and figure out where we were after we left the house.”
“And they arrested him?”
“Addison spotted him and called the cops, and they managed to get him this time.” His eyes were wide, and I could tell that this was all still sinking in—that it didn’t feel real quite yet. “He’s in custody. He’s…he’s gone.”
“Are you serious,” I breathed, but it wasn’t a question. I knew Jazz wouldn’t joke around about shit as serious as this, and I knew Scott wouldn’t either. My head was spinning, and I gripped the counter for support. “Does this mean we can go back?” I looked up at him. I missed my apartment, and the thought of a night in my own bed was tantalizing. The thought of a night in bed with Jazz, even more so. In fact, my brain was already ticking over with the possibilities of what we could get up to now that the constant, nagging fear of the last few weeks had finally lifted.
“I…I think so.” Finally, a grin broke over his face. He closed his eyes and let his head drop back, relief oozing off of him in waves. He caught my hand in his, and brought it to his lips, planting a kiss at the center of my palm carefully, as though I was something delicate that he didn’t want to break. Then, he pulled me into a hug before striding over to see Ella. He picked her up in one swift motion and pulled her in close—she seemed surprised, but happily hugged him back.
“Honey,” he murmured into her hair, “I think we’re going home.”
Ella smiled at him, and I knew she couldn’t really grasp the seriousness of what he’d just said. As far as she was concerned, the three of us had just been taking a little holiday away—that we could have gone back at any time if we wanted to. She didn’t understand how profound this was.
Jazz put her down again, and turned back to the food, dialing quickly and tucking the phone under his ear as he had done earlier.
“Who are you calling?”
“The cops,” he replied absently. “Just going to let them know that we’ll help out any way we can. Anything to get that…”
He trailed off, and glanced over at Ella, an almost comically guilty expression on his face. Of course, he couldn’t say what he really felt in front of her. Mainly because how he really felt would be riddled with curse words and insults so nasty that I wasn’t sure even I would have heard all of them. I would have argued that she’d heard way worse coming from the Marauders, but then, I saw the way they treated her—if someone cursed in front of their little mascot, I had the feeling that they would break their nose where they stood.
Jazz had hidden all this from them, at least so far—he’d still been attending meetings once in a while, just enough to keep them from questioning things too closely. But I could tell that the fear of everything Ian might do if he found us was creeping into every aspect of his life—who was he to say that Ian hadn’t got one of them on his side and was gleaning information at every turn? Not to mention the fact that they would likely hunt Ian down and tear him apart themselves if they found out what was going on. It was safer this way, although Jazz had admitted that he felt guilty about hiding something this enormous from them.
Jazz called around—the cops, the motorcycle club, everyone—to catch up on everything that had happened and let everyone know that things were going to be okay. His face seemed to open up over the course of the next hour—I hadn’t noticed the tension he’d been carrying in his forehead or his jaw until it fell away. He was all smiles, taking long strides around the kitchen as thou
gh he owned the place. I had never seen him this happy in all the time I’d known him—but then, this was the first time since we’d met that this had all been put to bed.
We were free from the horror of whatever had been pursuing us. Now it was just us, this little ramshackle family, left to put all the pieces back together at our own pace. I knew it would take a long time to bounce back from, that it would be months until I stopped checking over my shoulder every time there was a noise I didn’t recognize, but I would get there. Ian was done with. That was all that mattered.
Jazz continued with dinner while Ella and I began to pack up—it didn’t take long, but I wanted to make sure that we had everything before we left. There was no way I wanted to come back here—yes, it had been our home for a while, but it had almost been temporary, with the promise of something real and homey hanging over it.
We ate dinner together around the small table that sat against the far wall of the living room; we would usually crash in front of the TV, exhausted from another day of worry. But this time, we took our places around the table and ate together, talking about Ella’s day and what we were going to do when we returned back to the house. For the first time since the incident at Addison’s house, I felt myself relax completely. Jazz squeezed my knee under the table a couple of times, a reassurance that we were still on, that we hadn’t solely been based on the drama. I covered his hand with mine and squeezed back. This all felt so right—I had been worried that when everything fell away, we’d be left with nothing to keep us together, but I had been wrong.
