The lady had been there. She had spoken to me. I interacted with her.
But where did she come from and what did she want? I couldn’t have seen her. My imagination was good but it wasn’t that good. I had to keep going? I was just getting started?
And most intriguing of all—Dex and I needed each other? What could Dex ever need me for?
I was pondering that as the plane pulled away from the gate. All the feelings of excitement I had earlier about the show, about my future, were now compounded with an increasing sense of urgency and trepidation. I had so many questions now that needed to be answered. And quickly.
To get a handle on my thoughts, I looked out the window at the sunshine that was coming through the dark afternoon clouds. And as if fate knew exactly what I was thinking, I caught a glimpse of a figure standing by one of the windows.
It was Dex. Waving goodbye.
FOR A PREVIEW OF RED FOX,
BOOK #2 OF THE EXPERIMENT IN TERROR SERIES,
PLEASE TURN THE PAGE…
RED FOX
My eyes flickered open. Something had woken me. I froze and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I was still on my side, facing the wall. I wasn’t sure what time it was, or how long I had been asleep, but it must have been the middle of the night. I listened and heard Dex snoring lightly beside me. His back was to mine, his butt square against me. Good thing he was wearing pants after all.
Despite that warmth and contact, I felt scared. I often did when I woke up for no reason. I tried to remember the dreams I just had but they were flitting away from my memory. Something about an owl…Dex…rocks.
The rocks! I remembered what had happened earlier downstairs. Could the sound of rocks have woken me up? I listened again, harder. I couldn’t hear anything hitting the window or the roof.
But I felt something brush up against my foot.
My feet were underneath the covers but far away from Dex’s feet. It couldn’t have been him. My heart stopped. I felt icky. I had to roll over and see what it was but every instinct told me not to.
I took a deep breath and slowly turned over.
I felt the life being sucked out of me.
There was an animal sitting at the foot of the bed on top of my feet. As they turned over with the rest of me, I could feel my toes jabbing up into its soft bottom.
It was a fox. I couldn’t see it clearly but I knew that’s what it was. A fox about the size of a collie, sitting on its hindquarters, ears creating a pointy silhouette. It was looking right at me. Its eyes were a hazel color. They didn’t glow like most animal’s eyes did; instead they locked with mine with feverish intensity. It was like looking into the eyes of someone I knew.
Was this for real? Was this actually happening? I wanted to look at Dex but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. The more I stared into those knowing, harmful pupils, the more I felt entranced. My legs and arms were replaced by lead pipes. But I still felt the animal’s weight on my feet, which had to mean that what I was experiencing was real.
I don’t even know if I was breathing, I didn’t think I was. My heart was thumping away loudly in my chest, but even that was starting to slow down. It wasn’t like I was calming down in any way – in fact I could feel the terror slowly taking hold of my body – but my heart was slowing until the thumps were further and further apart. My thoughts became sluggish. All I could think about was how I needed to look away from those eyes.
Then the fox shifted onto its front feet, perfectly positioned between my calves. It was closer now and our eye contact had not been broken. I began to feel like I was drowning internally, my lungs were without air and I was too weak to gasp for it. The room started to spin, with the fox still front and center.
It took a step forward, mouth open. Was it smiling at me? Its eyes said the opposite. They said I was dead.
I tried to talk, to scream but nothing came out. Either I was going to wake up in a second or something horrifying was about to happen. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
It took another step, its tail waving subtly in the background. The eyes narrowed, as if it was glaring at me.
I felt Dex shift and a smattering of hope rushed through me. The fox didn’t break its stare but it paused at that.
Dex stirred again and rolled over. I couldn’t turn to look at him but I prayed for him to open his eyes.
I felt him shuffle back a bit in the bed and then stop. Pause. He saw.
“What the fuck?!” he yelled.
The fox leaped off of the bed and ran out the door. The door had been open the whole time.
Dex sprang out of the sheets and yelled for Will, “Will! There’s an animal in here!”
He followed the fox out the door, leaving me alone for a sickening second, then ran back to me. I still couldn’t move, I still couldn’t breathe. My eyes and body were locked down.
“Hey!” He jumped on the bed and shook both my shoulders. “Perry, are you OK?”
I tried to answer but couldn’t.
“Answer me! Perry, what happened? Perry?”
He kept shaking me, then took my head in his hands and physically moved my face until it faced his. His eyes – as crazy and worried as they were – brought me to a sense of reality. I felt my limbs coming back, hot flashes of nerves climbing up and down them.
Then my breath. I gasped loudly as if I had been underwater for the last five minutes. He held my face steady. “You’re going to be OK.”
There was a commotion in the hallway and a panicked-looking Will appeared at the door. “What happened, is she all right?”
“She’s fine,” Dex said quickly and gestured with his head, “the animal went downstairs.”
Will nodded and took off down the hall, the walls shaking from his lumbering run.
Dex looked back at me, my wide eyes searching his as all the fear came rushing in.
“Hey, you’re fine,” he said. I started to shake and he brought his hands to my arms and held me sternly. “You’re going to be OK. But we need to go find out what that was.”
I shook my head violently, still unable to speak.
“We have to,” he implored. “And I am not leaving you here by yourself.”
He was right. I wouldn’t be able to sleep not knowing what was going on but going downstairs didn’t seem like a good option either.
“Will has his baseball bat, whatever it was, was small, we’ll be OK.”
He climbed out of the bed and walked around to my side. He looked down at me, smiled, and proceeded to pick me up in his arms.
I tried to protest but couldn’t. Despite his slight frame and my rather dumpy one, he picked me up with ease. He carried me past the bed, stooping down to pick up his camera from the dresser and then we were out of the room and into the hall. Will’s door was open, as was Sarah’s. They must have been downstairs.
We made it to the bottom of the stairs when I felt fine enough to walk.
“Please put me down,” I croaked in a pathetic whisper.
He stopped and lowered me. My legs felt like jelly but at least they felt like my own again. He held the camera with one hand and gripped my hand with the other. We walked slowly through the downstairs area. The lights were still all off, the shadows more deceptive.
“It was a fox,” I said thickly as we peeked around into the empty living room.
“What the fuck was it doing?” he asked.
I shook my head.
We flicked on the lights and saw neither a fox, nor Will or Sarah in the living room, dining room or kitchen. A breeze rustled in through the holes in the glass. The clock on the microwave said three a.m.
The front door was wide open, so we walked over to it and peeked outside. I couldn’t see them but I could hear Will, Sarah and Miguel all talking excitedly about the animal. I didn’t want to step outside into the cold New Mexico night so I stuck my neck out further and peered around the doorframe to see where they were.
WHOOSH!
A huge white owl f
lapped in front of me, mere inches from my face.
I screamed and ducked as Dex stuck his arm out and thwacked it. He hit the owl square in the chest.
I peered up, my hands around my head. The owl squawked and flew off into the night. I looked up at Dex. He took back his clenched fist and let out a low breath. He was just as freaked out as I was. He looked down at me and offered his hand.
“What a hoot,” he joked but his voice was pinched with nerves.
Seconds later, Will, Sarah and Miguel came around the corner to see what happened. I explained as much as I could. The owl part of the story paled in comparison to the fox. It turns out that they hadn’t seen either creature. Out of all three of them, I knew Will was the one who believed me whole-heartedly. Sarah had only a few choice words and a couple of poignant sighs but for the most part she didn’t argue with what I said too much. I knew she didn’t want us there at all but I saw that she did (finally) believe something was going on. And Miguel, well Miguel was a sneering, sniveling son of a bitch. But even he walked back to his quarters looking more wary than before.
And that was the end of the night for me. I wasn’t about to go to sleep again and neither was Dex. So we stayed up, sitting on top of the bed and playing games with a bunch of cards we found in one of the bedroom drawers. We stayed up until the sun began its quick rise above the mountain tops and the fears of the night were washed away by the desert light. Only then was I able to close my eyes for a few minutes.
FOR A PREVIEW OF The Devil’s Metal
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About The Devil’s Metal:
It’s the summer of 1974 and 21-year old Dawn Emerson has only three things she wants to do: compete one last time in the Ellensburg Rodeo, win back her ex-boyfriend Ryan, and become the best damn music journalist at Central Washington University. But all her plans are left in the dust when she’s contacted by Creem magazine to go on the road with one of her favorite groups, the up-and-coming metal band, Hybrid.
At first the assignment reads like a dream come true. Not only will Dawn land some much-needed credibility as a female music journalist, but she’ll finally get to experience life from the other side of the stage, and maybe crack the drunken, enigmatic code that is guitarist Sage Knightly. Instead, Dawn finds herself on an aging tour bus filled with ego-maniacs, band politics and a whole lot of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. When monsters start showing up in dressing rooms and some of Sage’s groupies become increasingly strange and dangerous, Dawn discovers the band is not only going places – they’re going straight to Hell.
And Dawn has a backstage pass.
The Devil’s Metal
When I returned, Sage had sucked two bottles dry and brought his acoustic guitar out of the case. I put the glass of ice on his bedside table and plunked my butt down on my bed. I motioned to the guitar strap with the Mexican pattern.
“You haven’t shunned everything about your heritage,” I pointed out.
He strummed a few chords. They gave off a melancholy air that filled the room. “I decided I wanted to be myself while I still had the chance.”
“I think we always have a chance,” I said.
He gazed at me. His eyes were slanted down at the corners, a sign he was getting drunker. “Tomorrow is one of the many things you can’t count on.”
I wrapped my arms around my legs. “Boy, you really are Mr. Optimistic, aren’t you?”
My attempt to make light of things didn’t work. He ignored me and began to play a song. It was something haunting and beautiful, a waltz. I had never heard it before and I was caught up in a swirl of emotions as the sad melody wrapped around me.
He sung in a low, bourbon-soaked voice that made the hairs on my neck stand up and my insides melt into putty.
I sat there listening as she strangely cried
Her eyes were bleeding, her hair was on fire
I felt it calling me
When he finished, I was momentarily speechless.
“That was beautiful, Sage,” I gushed when I found the words. “What is that? A new song?”
He smiled gently. It made his eyes dance. “Actually, it’s a very old song. I wrote it before I joined the band.”
“You were so young!”
He looked bashful for a second, then reached for his drink. “I was a dramatic kid. It’s hokey.”
“It’s really not,” I told him, watching as he poured two more mini bottles into the glass and downed it. I felt a trickle of unease at the amount he was packing away. He was a large man, but we’d drunk a lot all day, and it was now dusk and he was showing no signs of stopping. I regretted giving him so many bottles.
“You’re not drinking,” he said to me, slurring a bit. He took off his guitar and laid it on the bed beside him, handling it like a baby.
“I’m pretty drunk as it is,” I said, but the clarity in my words betrayed me.
He shot me an annoyed look. “You’re judging me.”
I shook my head. “I’m not doing anything, Sage.”
“Exactly. So give me whatever is left in there.” He nodded at the fridge.
I shook my head again. “We’ve had a rough few days, we should probably take a break.”
It happened in the blink of an eye. He lunged across the gap and pushed me down onto the bed by my shoulders, his incredible weight on my body, hips crushing into my hips. He pinned my arms above my head. His face was inches from mine, lips curled angrily, wired eyes searching my wide ones.
“You say that so easily,” he growled near my lips. “A rough few days. Is that what you think this is? Just a rough few days?”
“N-no,” I stammered. I didn’t fear Sage. But I feared men when they had too much to drink.
“I thought you were different, Dawn. The only one on this tour left with a heart and soul.” His eyes flared with indignation.
“I am different,” I protested, so conscious of the proximity of his mouth to mine. I stopped squirming and let his hands hold my arms to the bed. If he wanted to feel powerful, I was going to let him. But I was going to get what I wanted too.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” he told me. His demeanor softened and his grip on my wrists loosened. He still kept his face as close as possible.
“I have some idea. But I’d like it if you could tell me the rest.”
“Are you here to make me feel? Is that part of the plan?” he sneered delicately.
I blinked at him. Feel? Feel what?
“I don’t know why I’m here, Sage,” I admitted, getting angry. “And that’s the god damn fucking truth. I’m here because Jacob wanted me here. Jacob wanted someone to cover your band going down in history. Well guess what, it is going down in history. For fuck’s sake, people are dying and losing their minds and I’m losing my own damn mind every day I’m here. And I know you keep telling me to leave, and maybe I’ll end up doing that. But while you’re questioning my motives, I’m wondering what the hell it is that you’re not telling me. Or any of us. Because none of this is normal, Sage. It’s not even close, and I know, I know, that you know a hell of a lot more about what’s going on than any of us. If there is a plan in all this fuckery, Sage Knightly is the one behind it.”
I was so angry, I almost spat in his face. He balked a bit at my rush of words, then frowned, thinking it through. He was still so close and I was just at that point where I was going to do something really stupid, like kiss him, just to get him to stop staring at me.
His gaze dropped to my lips. His own parted slightly, his lower lip full. I bet it was soft and easy to suck on. My breath became slower and labored, my body tense, not knowing what was going to happen next. The air was thick and buzzed around us, like it too was waiting for movement.
“Tell me what you know,” I whispered. The tip of his nose brushed against the tip of mine. I felt his very hard erection press firmly into my thigh.
He closed his eyes, his lashes long and black against his golden skin. I closed mine, inchin
g my lips closer to his. They barely touched, just a hint of sensitive, wanting skin on skin. I was about to arch my back and press my lips firmly against his, invite his tongue to play with mine, when he suddenly got off me.
I sat up in surprise and watched him as he walked over to the window. He leaned against it, watching the sky fade from light gray to dark purple.
Did that all really happen? I put my fingers to my lips. I was so close to kissing him. I felt him, how large he was, how much he wanted me. Now he was across the room, miles of distance between us, his focus elsewhere.
I sat there for a minute, swallowed by awkwardness and the ugly bedspread. Then I brushed off the rejection and went to the fridge. Screw everything I had just said. I was getting drunk.
I cracked open a can of Pepsi and a mini bottle of rum and made myself a quick drink. I was just taking my first sip when Sage spoke.
“Have you wanted something so badly that you would have done anything to get it?” he mumbled, his muscley back still to me. “Like, the kind of want that leaves you on your knees and asking for someone, anyone, to answer your prayers?”
I took in a deep breath. “No.”
But the truth was, after my mother had died and my dad was waking up in vomit every morning and Eric was coming home with shiners, stuttering and crying his eyes out, I did fall to my knees and pray. It wasn’t even to God in particular. I was out in the field behind the barn, walking and wishing for something better than what we had. It was such a violent, desperate need that I was shaking as I asked for my mother to come back, for my father to stop drinking, for Eric to lose his Tourette’s. I wanted to be someone, someone important. I wanted to be revered, I wanted to be respected, I wanted to be loved. I wanted it all so much that I remember thinking I would do anything for it. I would give anything for it.
The next thing I remembered was waking up in the field just as the sun was coming up.
“Do you know the story of that song Crossroads?” Sage went on. His voice was flat.
Destiny's Dark Fantasy Boxed Set (Eight Book Bundle) Page 155
