“No one’s going to see us,” Guy replied, the edge in his voice still there, but softening by the second. “I’ll pull over, use cash, and we’ll be on our way. Simple as that.”
“The cameras—”
“I’ll wear sunglasses.”
“The truck—”
“Isn’t the one we left Austin in.” Guy paused as I struggled to maintain control of my emotions as the panic attack began to take hold. “Everything’s going to be ok, babe. It’ll work out just fine.”
“How do you nuh… nuh… know—”
“Jason? What’s wrong?”
“Puh… panic—”
“Breathe, Jason.” He grabbed my thigh and squeezed as I fought to draw in a breath. “You’re only going to make it worse if you keep hyperventilating.”
“I’m truh-trying, dammit.” I leaned forward and put my head between my knees, pulling a breath in my nose and expelling it out my mouth only when I felt my lungs expand from the life-giving air. “It’s just… just—”
“Don’t say anything. With me now. Breathe.”
I listened for the sound of his breathing, but over the rain and chaos brewing in my mind, I couldn’t hear a thing. My ears buzzed with a thousand mosquitoes accompanied by the resounding and repetitive clang of a gong. Danger! Danger! Red and blue lights lit the inside of my eyes, and the voices of men shouting to get down, get down! reverberated in my ears. I bit my lip to try and pull myself back into the real world, but instead only felt tears burning my eyes.
This couldn’t be happening.
This couldn’t be real.
It was all a dream. Yeah. That was it. It was all a dream. We weren’t really out on the road, nearly six hours from where we’d first started and rapidly approaching the Louisiana border. We were still near Fredericksburg—at the ranch house, sleeping in a king-sized bed, dozing beneath a window that allowed the sun to fall perfectly upon our lower backs.
Except we weren’t near Fredericksburg, safe and offered asylum.
We were near Nacogdoches. And I… I was something unlike anything I could’ve ever—
A long, drawn-out moan echoed from my throat.
A hand fell across my back and began to knead the bundled muscles tightened around my shoulder blades. “Deep breaths,” Guy said. “Everything’s gonna be just fine.”
“Please tell me I’m dreaming,” I replied. “Pinch me. Throw water on me. Turn the radio on as loud as you can. Do something to let me know I’m not awake and that we don’t have to stop for gas.”
“You’re awake, Jason. And I’m sorry. We have to stop for gas.”
I lifted my head.
Through bleary, bloodshot eyes, a sign announcing Nacogdoches appeared before me.
“Get in the back seat,” Guy said. “Buckle up, pull a blanket over you, and pretend you’re sleeping. I’ll make this as fast as I can.”
It would’ve figured that the first gas station we’d pull into would only allow you to pay inside.
Everything’s going to be fine, Guy had said, slipping the sharp sunglasses over his eyes before casting a glance at the station’s panorama of windows. Just stay in here and don’t draw attention to yourself.
I couldn’t have moved if I tried.
I was frozen.
Everything’s going to be fine, Guy kept saying in my head. Everything’s going to be fine.
Paranoia threatened to send me over the edge. Cloistered in the back seat, I buried my face beneath a blanket and tried not to breathe as I counted down the minutes. One minute, two minute, three minute, four. It couldn’t take this long for him to pay inside. The place wasn’t busy—or, at least, hadn’t seemed that busy. Between fighting to remain coherent and calm, I hadn’t really looked at the number of cars at the pumps, but surely there wouldn’t be many people gassing up—not here, not in Nacogdoches.
The thought that Guy could’ve purposely been held up crossed my mind.
The breath caught in my throat.
No.
I couldn’t start panicking.
Guy would be fine. He was just waiting in line, getting drinks or taking a moment to use the restroom. And even if something had happened, he’d left the keys in the truck. All I’d have to do is crawl in the front seat, turn the key, and get the hell out of here. He’d understand. He’d figure something out. It wasn’t like we could be tracked, since he’d lost his card back at the den. And me? I’d figure something out. I was resourceful. He—
A knock came at the window.
Had I been breathing, I might’ve screamed. Instead, only a wheeze came out as I lowered the blanket and found Guy peering through the driver’s-side window, gesturing me to unlock the truck.
“Shit,” I breathed.
“What?” Guy asked. “Who else is gonna come up and wake a sleeping guy up?”
“Who fucking knows,” I said. I took hold of a plastic bag as he passed it in. “What’s in here?”
“Hotdogs. Soda. Chips. You’ve hardly eaten anything.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Well, try. The ‘dogs are warm.” He shut the door and turned toward the pump, only looking back once before he leaned forward to draw the nozzle.
My stomach grumbled, though whether it was from pent-up nerves or actual hunger I didn’t know. I could stand to eat, sure. Probably needed to, considering all I’d gone through, My mouth watered as the smell of relish and freshly-cooked meat wafted into my nose, but something about the thought of eating didn’t sit well with me—as if, by eating, I was committing atrocities unlike anything I could ever imagine.
Like I was eating—
I unwrapped the foil the hotdog was wrapped in.
The pale meat entered my vision.
My stomach lurched.
I was only just able to open the door before I started dry-heaving.
“Jason?” Guy asked. “Are you all right?”
I retched, chest heaving as something struggled to come out.
By the time I finished, Guy had just opened the door and was sliding into the driver’s seat. “What happened?” he asked.
I steadied myself on the partially-open door, waiting to see if the spell had passed, before pulling the door shut. “Got sick,” I said.
“From what?”
“That.” I pointed.
His eyes fell. “The hotdog?” I nodded. “You haven’t even taken a bite out of it.”
“I just took one look and…”
“What?” he continued.
I didn’t respond. Still in his shades, I couldn’t meet Guy’s eyes, but I could still feel the unbearable weight of his gaze.
“Jason,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” I said, securing the seatbelt over my chest. “Let’s just go. I don’t want to draw any more attention.”
“You’re not telling me something.”
“Guy—”
“What is it?”
“Can we just forget about it? Please?”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I ate him!” I cried.
“Who?”
“The camper.” Another wave of nausea passed over me.
“Oh God,” Guy said, wiping a hand down his face.
“I just took one look at it and thought—”
“You have to eat something.” Guy rummaged through the bag until he retrieved a tube of peanuts. “Here. Eat these. You’re not allergic to nuts, are you?”
“I think we’ve already proven I’m not.”
He smirked. I made every move to avert my gaze as I grabbed the plastic package and turned away from the rest of the food.
“It isn’t going to make you sick if I eat this, is it?”
“No,” I said. “I just won’t look.”
I popped a peanut in my mouth and chewed.
The sound of crinkling foil filled the inside of the cab as Guy rearranged his purchase. A short moment later, he turned the key and the truck revved to life, signalin
g our blessed departure.
As the vehicle started moving, all I could think of was bones.
It took all my will power not to hurl.
The further we drove from Nacogdoches the harder it rained.
Bleak clouds clustered across the sky, darkening the horizon and drawing down the wrath of the gods. Bursts of lightning lit the distance. Thunder rolled across the east. The wipers worked at full speed and I shivered in my seat—not cold, but not comfortable in the least.
“You want me to turn the heat up?” Guy asked.
“It won’t do any good,” I said. I traced the subtle lump of scarred tissue along my arm and grimaced as an arc of lightning shattered the sky.
Guy didn’t respond. Rather than press the matter further, he adjusted the knobs upon the dashboard and fingered the radio until it finally turned on, during which time a man’s deep baritone echoed through the cab and vibrated through the speakers.
“So, all this stuff going on out west,” the voice said. “What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s a darn shame,” a second man’s voice replied. “I mean… think about it. Texas has seen enough in the past few weeks. All these fires, that earthquake, the plant exploding. Wasn’t that long ago that Bastrop basically burned to the ground. You’d think we’d get a break, but then we’ve got these serial murders in Austin and now a camper’s just turned up with half of his guts hanging out of—”
“Sorry,” Guy said as he turned the radio off.
“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. I brought my knees to my chest just in time for my stomach to start grumbling. I should’ve eaten the hotdog, even if it made my insides twist with some devilish sense of destruction.
The sigh that passed from Guy’s lips drew me from my thoughts. “About what happened,” he said.
I waited—all ears, attention set exclusively on him.
He pulled the sunglasses off his face and ran a hand through his hair. “For starters,” he said, “I’m sorry I left without giving you any say in the matter.”
“That was a dick move,” I admitted.
“And secondly, I’m sorry about what happened back… there.”
The glass case, within which was a man—
The wound flaring within my arm.
The pain.
The torture.
The primal instinct—
His touch of ice as he tried to still the monster within.
I blinked in an effort to push the images away, though whether or not Guy noticed or had been paying attention I couldn’t be sure. His eyes were on the road—his gaze unaffected, his lips pursed.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and pressed a hand against his arm, surprised to find the muscles beneath tense. “Guy,” I said. “Did you… well… did you know what would happen if you… ya know—”
“No.” He shook his head. “Growing up, you learn about the Wendigo and think it’s some far-off prophecy—something your grandpa made up a long time ago to make sure us Kaldr didn’t try to associate with werewolves. We were civilized. Or at least we were supposed to be. Peaceful. Benevolent. Beyond the animals that the Howlers were. So hearing that cohabitation would bring about the end of the world was a good enough reason to stay away from them.”
“And the Kelda? What did she say?”
“Not a whole lot. Honestly… I sometimes wonder if she didn’t believe it either.”
I didn’t reply.
Guy expelled the air from his lungs and reached down to run a hand along my thigh. “I thought it was going to be for the best,” he said. “I’d get out there, try and figure something out, come back, maybe see if you wanted to come with me. Jason… if you hadn’t come… I’d be dead by now. You know that, right?”
“My dad always said being stubborn could be a good thing,” I chuckled.
Guy smiled.
“So,” I said, scooting closer to him. “You have any idea where we’re going?”
“Louisiana,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have an old friend there. I think she might be able to help us,” Guy replied. “And if she can’t… well… then at least we’ll have distance between us.”
A bitter thought rang through my conscience.
Though the realization was slow to come, its impact was no less.
The further from Fredericksburg we got, the further from Amadeo we became.
That sickly rage burned through my chest.
I balled my hands into fists.
“We’re here,” I said.
Guy only nodded.
You didn’t need a sign to know when you’d entered Louisiana. Somewhere along the border—either directly before or shortly after passing over it—the air shifted and instantly sparked your senses and sent every hair on your arms on end. Maybe it was the weather—the humidity was molasses thick here—or maybe it was just the notion you were finally leaving Texas. Either way, the moment you saw the fleur-de-lis, you knew that things had changed.
The wooded areas were thick—home, undoubtedly, to monsters of every kind.
For one of the first times since departing Fredericksburg, I leaned forward to adjust the air conditioning and sighed as cool air blew across my face. Though the storm had already passed, its residual influence reigned in force. The suffocating allergens threatened to drive me insane as what felt like a thousand insects crawled across my skin.
“Take an antihistamine,” Guy said, pawing at the bag between us. “I made sure to pick up a few before we left.”
“This doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
“I’m fully-acclimated. You’re still… changing.” Guy handed me the packet of pills
The word didn’t sit well. Even from Guy’s lips it sounded wrong—perverse in every way possible. I only nodded while opening the pills, then popping the soda and bringing the can to my lips to swallow the pill down.
He was right.
I couldn’t keep denying it.
Eventually he’d have to school me on the transformation—from A to Z, one, two, three.
The parting clouds made way for near-blinding dapples of sunlight.
“How far are we going anyway?” I asked.
“Just outside Shreveport,” Guy said. “That’s where we’ll hopefully stop and settle down for a while.”
“Hopefully?”
“I don’t think she takes well to company.”
“And you don’t think dropping in on her unexpectedly will be any better?”
“I don’t think she’ll mind,” Guy said, though the tone of his voice didn’t sound completely sincere. “Look—I’m just going with what I’ve got here, ok? I’d rather go for what I know than shoot blindly in the dark.”
“Who is this contact of yours anyway?” I asked, popping a can of chips and sliding one into my mouth.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“After all I’ve been through? Try me.”
“She’s a demon hunter.” Guy smirked as I bit into a chip with an audible crunch.
“You mean like Buffy?” I asked.
“Well. Yeah. I guess. But without the whole setup. You know—fate, destiny, having Giles show up to explain everything.”
“If only we all had that,” I mumbled.
“Anyway,” Guy continued. “Story is, her family tried to commit her as a teenager after she ran out into the street screaming a vampire had killed her mother. Cops show up and what do they find? Nothing. And given she’s black in a small town, what do they do? They assume she’s on drugs. So they lock her in a psych ward—completely disregarding the fact that a teenage girl witnessed, at the very least, what could have been her mother’s abduction.”
“What happened after?”
“She got out of the hospital. Had some man… or… thing, I guess you could say… wipe the cameras and the memories of all the employees that night. The rest is history. She’s been out ever since—on the run, laying low, making right all the things she thinks
wrong.”
“Did she ever find the thing that killed her mother?”
“It isn’t something she likes to talk about. Moral of the story is—”
“The world’s a lot stranger than you think it is?”
“Yeah,” Guy said. “It is.”
I looked out at the lush greenery and endless expanse of trees and wondered what I wasn’t seeing.
Were there monsters lying in wait? Or was it just a lie—a fantasy imagined to compensate for the nightmares of reality?
I didn’t know.
And sooner, rather than later, I would be immersed in the dark underbelly of the world, whether I liked it or not.
Vampires, Werewolves, Kaldr—
They were real.
Who’s to say demons weren’t?
The world was a strange place.
And I was quickly becoming a part of it.
Later that afternoon—after a long and meandering detour off the main road through a thickly-wooded section of land—we passed under the hanging vines of a weeping willow and pulled up before a log cabin that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere.
“Well,” Guy said, drumming his fingers along the wheel. “This is it.”
It didn’t seem real. So far removed from modern conveniences, it appeared like something out of a fairy tale—the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel or the dignified shack of one Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A garden in plain view, a clothes rack suspended from the rafters outside, a fire pit arranged out front—all around, weeping willows stood to shroud the home from view, a primeval home in a state of constant twilight. A screened-in front porch offered no glimpse of the inhabitants inside.
Had I stumbled across it, I wouldn’t know what to think.
To live out here—in Louisiana, with no air conditioning or even a car to get around…
I swallowed the lump in my throat and only turned my head when Guy killed the ignition and popped the door open. “Wait here,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Like I said… she doesn’t take well to company. It’s… been a while.”
I didn’t reply as he slipped out of the truck. I only noticed he’d left the keys behind after he started making his way toward the house.
His Kiss of Darkness Page 2
