by J. S. Bailey
He stiffened as anxiety flooded his veins. Images of blood flashed through his mind like a grisly slide show. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
“But our stuff,” Carly said. “It isn’t packed.”
“We don’t have time.” Bobby’s sense of urgency had him scrambling toward the back door. “Let’s go out this way so no one sees us.”
“Who’s going to see?” Kaori asked, already on her feet.
“I don’t know. Let’s just scram.”
Bobby pulled open the back door and stepped out onto the wooden deck overlooking the tiny yard. He held a finger to his lips, and Matt, the last one out, let the door click into place as quietly as possible.
“Now what?” Carly whispered.
Bobby pointed toward the split rail fence dividing the back of the yard from a neighbor’s yard one street over, where a shed sat beside a dead garden. “We go that way.”
Praying that whoever would have nabbed him had they gone out the front wouldn’t wise up and come around the back, Bobby leapt the fence and rounded the side of the shed, positioning himself so the shed sat between him and Charlotte’s house.
His three companions joined him. Kaori and Matt watched him as if awaiting orders.
“We’ve got to get to your car somehow,” Bobby panted, his illness eating away at his strength. “We can go out this street here and then loop around. Whoever’s after us will hopefully stay in the house and not look out the front window.”
Carly gave a light cough. “We may have a small problem.”
“What’s that?”
“My purse is in the house.”
“You’ll have to leave it.”
“It’s sort of got some important stuff in it. You know, like my dad’s bank card.”
Bobby let out a curse. “Do you two have enough money for four plane tickets?” he asked Kaori and Matt.
“There’s a reason we drive everywhere,” Kaori said. “We only spend the big bucks when we absolutely have to.”
“Great.” Help us, please, Bobby prayed.
Police, the Spirit whispered.
Of course. “I’m calling the cops,” Bobby said.
He pulled out his phone, then remembered he hadn’t memorized the Eleanor police dispatch number like he’d done back in Autumn Ridge.
“Do any of you have a smartphone on you?” he asked, hoping to find the number through a quick internet search.
“It’s also in my purse,” Carly said.
“Well, this is just fabulous.” Fully regretting what he was about to do, Bobby called 911.
“HEY BUDDY, you all right?”
The voice came from far away, as if from the end of a long tunnel. Phil opened his eyes and regarded amorphous shapes that started to resolve into furniture if he squinted hard enough.
A figure stood beside him—male, based on the voice. Phil couldn’t see him clearly enough to tell if he’d met the man before.
“Where am I?” Phil coughed, wondering why it felt so hot in this place. Felt like a sauna.
He realized he lay on a couch, and he started to pull a thick blanket off of himself when the man said, “I wouldn’t do that. You need to warm up.”
“I am warm.” Phil made to sit up, but the man shoved him back down with a hand the size of a plate. Frankie? No, this wasn’t Frankie. Frankie’s voice was much deeper. “Who are you?”
“Vance Peterson. I saw you crawling around out in the snow, so I brought you in here to thaw out. What happened?”
“I don’t really remember. I—I think I woke up in a cave the first time. Are there any caves around here?”
Vance tilted his head in thought. “Not that I know of. Could be you were hallucinating. I’ve got some hot tea if you want some.”
“I’ll take it. Thank you.”
Vance disappeared from the room, and Phil could hear clinking around in what he supposed was the kitchen. He squinted as hard as he could to make out his surroundings. A fireplace crackled several yards from the couch, filling the room with a pleasant smoky smell, and a grandfather clock ticked away the time against a wall.
If Phil hadn’t misplaced his glasses, he’d have been able to tell the time.
Vance returned moments later and thrust a mug into Phil’s hands. “You’re lucky I have basic first aid training,” Vance said. “You could have been dead already otherwise.”
“Thanks for the reminder.” Phil moved into a more upright position so he wouldn’t slosh tea all over himself and realized that his shirt had been removed, and rightly so—if he’d been out in the snow for long, his clothes would have been soaked, increasing the danger of hypothermia. “Did you happen to see a pair of glasses lying anywhere near me?”
“Nope, but I wasn’t looking. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Phil Mason. I—”
“You’re Phil?”
Phil squinted again. From what he could tell, Vance was a few years older than him and roughly a foot taller. No wonder he’d mistaken him for Frankie at first. “You know me?” he asked.
“Oh, not at all. How much can you see?”
“Not much.”
“Hang on, I’ll lend you my pair for right now. I only wear them in the evening after I’ve taken my contacts out.”
Vance disappeared again. Phil’s nerves prickled. Why had he been crawling around in the snow? The last thing he could properly remember was seeing Allison in the hospital.
His heart skipped a beat. Allison! She would want to know where he’d gone. Ashley, too, because Phil had left her behind with Randy so he could—
“Here you go,” Vance said, handing Phil a pair of thin-framed glasses of an older style than his. Phil slipped them on and grimaced at the marginal improvement in his vision. “How is it?”
“It’s better than total blindness, but I won’t be doing any driving with these on.” He wouldn’t be able to see past the windshield.
“You don’t need to be doing any driving yet, anyway. You were nearly frozen to death.”
“Could I borrow your phone? I need to let my family know I’m okay.”
Vance crossed his arms. From what Phil could tell through the man’s weak glasses, Vance had brown hair thinning at the top. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee. No, Phil definitely hadn’t seen him before, though something about his voice was starting to hold a note of familiarity.
“I think you need to rest awhile longer first,” Vance said. “You could have been out there freezing for hours.”
“Does that matter? They’re going to be worried about me.” Phil stood, letting the blanket fall to the couch, and noticed that his khakis had been removed as well. Being a nurse, he understood why it had to be done, but it still made him far too uncomfortable to be in only his socks and underwear in the home of a stranger.
“It doesn’t change the fact that you seem to be fine. Let them worry a bit. They’ll get over it.”
Phil squinted toward the fireplace. His shirt and pants had been draped over a chair beside it to dry. He wondered if he’d been here long enough for the heat to make a difference.
“Your clothes should be dry soon,” Vance said, following Phil’s line of sight. “I’m sorry if I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Phil said. “I’m a nurse; you did the right thing. Now can I please make a phone call?”
“No.”
That single word chilled him far more than the winter air had done. “Excuse me?”
Vance put his hands on his hips. “I don’t trust you. You came here to my employers’ property in the middle of the night to do God only knows what, and then you showed up outside my cottage out of your mind. John and Shirley said they never saw you. So what were you doing?”
“They’re lying.” Phil tightened his grip on the mug. “I spoke to John in his study, and then Shirley came in and…” He broke off. “They must have done this to me. Attacked me and threw me outside.”
Vance l
aughed. “Do you expect me to believe that? They’re in their sixties. Nice folks. They wouldn’t hurt a mouse if it crawled in. And why did you say you came to talk about Nathaniel?”
It occurred to Phil that this was the man who’d been monitoring the driveway last night—the one who’d spoken to him through the speaker outside the gate at the edge of the driveway. “Because Nate—he calls himself Thane now, if you didn’t know—is a monster who’s been trying to kill off everyone I care about.”
“Even if that were true,” Vance said evenly, “what would speaking to his parents accomplish?”
“I was hoping they could use their parental influence to make him back off.” Even as he said it, Phil knew the plan had been a foolish one. From what he knew, Thane loathed his parents. He wouldn’t have listened to them even if they’d come to him on hands and knees begging for forgiveness.
Still, he thought it had been worth a shot.
“You realize that Nate has been paralyzed for twenty years,” Vance said.
“I’m aware of the fact.”
“Then how could he be hurting anyone? Maybe your little stint out in the snow has made you more confused than you realize.”
Phil glared at him, but it was hard to glare properly when he couldn’t even see right. “I’m leaving now,” he said, rising and moving toward his drying clothes. What did he care if they were still damp? He needed to get out of here, and fast.
“Is that so?” Vance asked as Phil slipped on his pants, which were dryer than he’d anticipated. “How are you going to see to drive?”
“I’ll just have to look for my own glasses first.” Phil pulled his shirt over his head and tucked it in, then put on his shoes. “I’ll give these back to you once I’ve found them.”
“Good luck with that.”
“You’re not going to stop me?”
Vance gestured toward the door with a flourish. “There’s the door. Here, you can even borrow my coat since you seem to have misplaced yours.” Vance strode to a row of pegs on the wall beside the door and snatched off a long, olive-green trench coat that smelled of chewing tobacco and something musty when he thrust it into Phil’s hands.
“Thanks.” Phil narrowed his eyes and pulled on the coat, noting that it almost dragged the floor when draped over his short frame. “I’ll try not to take long.”
He stomped out the door and into the bright morning—at least Phil thought it was still morning. He must have been crawling around delirious for hours, though he couldn’t figure how he hadn’t died from exposure. He shivered just thinking about it. Perhaps that had been Thane’s plan—to have his parents attack Phil and leave him for dead.
Once outside, Phil turned and looked behind him. Vance’s “cottage” had two floors and a sharply peaked roof and was decorated in the same colors as the main house, unseen from his current position. Trees lined a blacktopped lane that curved out of sight to the left.
If he’d been in possession of his own glasses, he could have followed the lane out to the main house, hopped in his car, and left this place in his dust.
Instead, he rounded the back of the house and found unusual depressions in the snow indicating where he’d been crawling. A set of footprints led from the back of the cottage, met the depressions, and turned back toward the house.
Squaring his shoulders, Phil set off in the direction from which he’d crawled.
The land led uphill a short distance. His markings in the shallow snow zigzagged around like the path of a drunkard. An eerie sensation rose within him as he saw where he’d been, having no memory of being there. All he could really remember was the cave that Vance claimed didn’t exist.
So if it wasn’t a cave, what had it been? A dream?
The trees grew thicker, then thinned again. The land sloped even steeper now, and as Phil squinted through inadequate lenses to find his own pair that would allow him to leave, he caught sight of a dark, rocky opening in the wooded hillside.
So there was a cave. Why had Vance lied? To cover up something he wanted to remain hidden, or something else?
He took three steps closer to the opening and flailed when something vaguely familiar fluttered past his head like a demented moth. He peered around wildly to see what it had been—a bat? A bird?—but could spot nothing unusual amid the branches above him.
Strange, but stranger things had been happening to him during the past twenty-four hours. At least the black shape from his old nightmares hadn’t come back to make mockery of him.
He pressed onward.
The great fluttering thing dive-bombed him the moment he reached the jagged mouth of the cave. Red-hot pain seared across the back of Phil’s left hand as he brought it up to protect his face.
Once again, the creature had disappeared by the time Phil tried to spot it. Cursing, he studied his throbbing hand. Blood—too much of it—trickled over his torn skin in rivulets.
Not particularly caring if he got blood on Vance’s coat—not now that he knew the man couldn’t be trusted—he wiped his hand down his front and then examined the fresh wound that the creature had given him. Three claws or talons had raked across the back of his hand, leaving quarter-inch-deep gashes that would need to see medical attention before they became infected.
Too bad he’d left the zippered tote containing his portable medical kit in the car. Now he’d have to go get that, patch up his hand, and then go back to find his glasses.
Staring up toward the sky to make sure he wasn’t about to be subject to another attack, Phil retraced his steps, passed Vance’s cottage, and walked toward the blacktopped lane to find the main house and his car, wishing all the while that he hadn’t left his gun at home.
As he passed the cottage, he spotted Vance standing in one of the windows with folded arms, smiling.
THANE DIDN’T care that Bobby would have a premonition based on his current course of action. His plans hadn’t exactly been going right, anyway: he’d hoped to lure Bobby to his parents’ estate where Thane would have the upper hand, then convince his parents to kill the young man and have them arrested for murder.
Now he only cared that the boy and his new allies should be stopped before they made a move to stop him.
“What are you doing?” Mia cried as he threw open the door.
He ignored her and made sure not to listen just in case she told him to stop. He raced out onto the porch and across the street, narrowly dodging a rusty sedan that he’d been too distracted to notice, and stormed inside the Roland home with only murder on his mind.
It took him five seconds to register the fact that the kitchen was empty of the four people he’d detected sitting in it just a minute ago.
Mia burst in behind him with flushed cheeks, panting. “Are you out of your mind? This is too risky!”
Thane made no reply and instead sent out his thoughts, picking up Bobby and Company scrambling through another yard behind this one.
Well, then. He’d just have to send them some obstructions that would hinder their escape.
One by one he planted images he thought would suffice.
He only wished he could see their faces. This would be so beautiful.
DESPITE THE oddness of the situation, Kaori found herself smiling as she and the others made a beeline down the sidewalk along the street running parallel to Bobby’s. This was so much more exciting than dealing with Gerald and his inept cronies back in Delaware because this time, she had no idea what was going on, and being confronted with the unknown thrilled her. She hadn’t met anyone with a clairvoyant gift before, either. What other surprises would this day hold?
Kaori fixed her gaze on the stop sign at an approaching intersection, knowing she should hang a right and keep running until she made it to relative safety. Her swiftness had left the others in her wake, but they had to rely on themselves to catch up. She needed to get to her car before some crook did. Luckily she still had her keys.
She rounded the corner and saw the sign for Glade Street a tent
h of a mile away. She put on another burst of speed, and suddenly she was running not on the sidewalk in a small Ohio River town, but through a dense forest she hadn’t seen in years.
She leapt over fallen logs and dodged thorn bushes, wanting but fearing to look back. She had to get away from him. She had to believe she could escape.
“You can’t outrun me, Kaori!” cried her pursuer, his voice much too close for her comfort. He was practically on her heels. Fortunately Kaori had a small frame and the advantage of youth, so she pushed her legs to the limit to increase the distance between her and the one chasing her.
Kaori just started to pull away when her shoelace caught on a stick and she landed hard on her hands and knees. Tears in her eyes, she tried to regain her feet, but it was too late.
He grabbed her up by the hair and yanked her around to face him, the charming man with blue eyes and dazzling teeth. Before she could speak, he slammed his right fist into her jaw, making a sickening crunch.
Kaori tasted blood.
Rage gleamed in the man’s eyes—the look of one intending not only to harm, but to kill. “How many times have I told you to mind your own goddamn business?” he screamed three inches from her face. “Do you think I enjoy doing what I do?”
Kaori knew it was best not to answer, so she remained silent. He gripped her hair so tightly she could feel it being ripped from her head root by tender root.
He gave her hair an extra tug as if to remind her that he was the one currently in control. “I’d say this is a warning and that if I ever catch you snooping through my barn again I’ll kill you, but I can’t take that chance. You should have stayed away.”
He reached his free hand into his pocket and brought forth a switchblade knife. Kaori saw it all as if in slow motion. The gleam of the sunlight on the blade, the smooth arc as he brought it up to slash her throat…
Kaori blinked as the scenery changed. She’d returned to the sidewalk in Eleanor, Ohio, seemingly in the same place where she’d been when the vision started, but she was no longer running.
