Hunting Lila

by Sarah Alderson

  She backed away from the door and flipped the light switch, collapsing the whole place into blackness, then headed behind the counter to gather up the trash bags. The sound of someone trying the door made her jump. She spun around, irritated. Couldn’t they read? They were closed.

  She saw a guy standing in front of the door looking in, staring directly at her. His hand was still on the door handle. He was about six feet tall and wearing a floor-length black leather coat. Evie took in the whole of him in one glance and felt something similar to a rock settle on her stomach. Something wasn’t right about him. In fact, something was most definitely off. Then she realised he was wearing sunglasses. Ray bans. In the middle of the night.

  ‘We’re closed,’ she mouthed, wondering whether he could even see her, shrouded in the shadows behind the counter.

  The boy didn’t respond or smile or act in any way as if he’d seen her, though his hand did drop from the door handle. He turned on his heel and strode back towards his car, coat flapping like a windsock behind him.

  Evie stood there a full minute, trash bags clutched in her hand, waiting for the sound of a car engine turning over and accelerating away. Nothing. The street stayed fathomlessly silent. She edged towards the door and peered through the glass. The cars were both still sitting there, empty as far as she could tell. The guy in the long trench coat was nowhere to be seen.

  A feeling of unease crept through her but she couldn’t stand there all night like a total wuss, hovering in the gloom. So she took the bags and walked to the back door and opened it, annoyed with herself for getting so freaked out over a boy who looked like he’d gotten lost on the way back from Comic Con.

  The back lot was empty except for the giant metal dumpster just to her right and her dusty old Ford parked a few metres to her left. There was a single light blazing above her head illuminating the door and the concrete step she was standing on. She headed straight towards the dumpster with the bags in one hand and a tin of coffee grinds in the other and that’s when she saw him, on the periphery of the shadow line, his coat splayed out behind him.

  The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. She drew in a breath and did a quick calculation of the distance between her, the boy and the door.

  But before she could figure out where to run to, the boy in the sunglasses stepped forward into the zone of light. She saw that he was a little bit older than her, maybe twenty or twenty-one. He was wearing black jeans and leather biker boots, and a black wrinkled t-shirt with some kind of slogan on it. A part of her brain registered that he looked ridiculous, like an extra from the Matrix, but the other part warned her not to tell him so.

  At least not yet.

  He stopped just in front of her.

  ‘Evie Tremain?’ he asked.

  She froze, her mouth falling open. How did he know her name? Who the hell was this guy? As she studied him she suddenly heard a voice in her head start screaming at her to run. She could hear her own heartbeat - it sounded like a horse smashing its hooves against a stable door. Her eyes darted instantly over the lot, looking for exits.

  ‘Evie Tremain?’ the boy asked again, impatient now.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Evie asked, buying time. The back door was about ten metres behind her or she could try to get around him and head down the side alley and out onto Main Street. She took a small step backwards. The diner was closer.

  ‘The Brotherhood,’ the boy replied tonelessly, closing the distance between them in a single stride.

  Evie couldn’t reign in the laughter that erupted out of her. ‘The Brotherhood?’ she snorted. ‘Seriously? What is that? The name of your Death Metal band? Because, you know, it sounds kind of lame.’

  The boy – whose face had been expressionless until then -suddenly frowned in confusion, as though he didn’t know how to answer her. The sound of crunching gravel broke the silence. Evie’s eyes flew to the far end of the lot, which was sunk in darkness. Was someone else there? The boy followed her gaze and looked over his shoulder too. Adrenaline pumped through Evie’s body in one giant surge. She dropped the trash bags and took a step back, twisting her body as she moved. She brought her arm up like her dad had taught her, fingers curled into a tight fist, and in the second that the boy turned back to face her, she smashed it into the side of his head.

  The boy’s head spun with the force of the punch, his sunglasses flying across the lot.

  Hit first, ask questions later, she murmured to herself. Her dad had always said it was better to be safe than sorry.

  She turned to run back towards the door but the boy lunged for her, shrieking. She raised her arm instinctively, ready to smash it into his face again, but then stumbled backwards letting out a cry. The boy’s eyes were inches from her own, his pupils fixed and dilated. And the thing that had stopped her, and made her stomach scrape the floor, was the colour of them. They were bright, carnation-red and totally unseeing.

  The boy flailed his head from left to right as though someone had thrown acid in his face, his outstretched hand groping blindly in her direction.

  He’s blind, Evie realised, her thoughts assuming some sense. He can’t see me.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a dark shape wavering behind the boy. It seemed to extend and stretch out, like a time-lapse sequence of a shadow lengthening. And then it coiled like a whip and lashed towards her.

  Evie dived. She threw herself hard to the left, out of the boy’s grip and out of the way of whatever was coming towards her. She heard a crack as it smashed into the tarmac and another frustrated shriek from the boy.

  She staggered backwards, her eyes on the space that had opened up between her and the guy in the coat. The whip or a rope or whatever it was was lashing rapidly back and forth between them. Evie’s brain refused to process the possibility that what her eyes were actually looking at was neither a rope nor a whip but a tail. There were scales on it and it moved like a rattlesnake. Ropes didn’t look like that.

  The boy dropped to the floor now, and started scrabbling around on the ground for something. His glasses, Evie thought, spying them lying cracked in half on the asphalt by her car.

  ‘Need some help, Caleb?’ A girl’s voice called out from the edge of the darkness.

  The boy with blood-red eyes swore at her in reply.

  ‘If you want help you need to put your tail away and ask nicely,’ the girl added.

  The word punctured Evie’s brain like a poison dart. Tail. She tripped backwards, trying to feel for the door behind her. She stumbled on the step, and felt herself bump up against something solid. It wasn’t the door.

  She spun around and found herself stepping on the toes of a white-faced boy. A girl in a neon pink mini-dress stood next to him, smiling surrrrprise.

  Evie skittered backwards, letting out a yelp. How many of these freaks were there?

  These two weren’t wearing sunglasses and their eyes weren’t red. The boy was dressed in scruffy jeans, bashed-up Converse and a Nix cap. The girl was tall with long black hair and the bright pink of her dress clashed with the green tinge of her skin.

  ‘We’ve got this, Caleb,’ the girl in the pink dress called out to the one with the tail, not taking her eyes off Evie.

  ‘Well, hurry up, would you, I don’t want to be here all night,’ another boy’s voice answered from the darkness.

  So there were more of them over there, Evie thought, panic starting to weave its tentacles around her limbs. How many did that make? Four or five at least. What the hell were they all doing looking for her?

  ‘What do you want?’ Evie asked desperately, spinning around to face the girl and boy blocking the back door.

  ‘We want you, Evie Tremain,’ the girl in pink said, striding forward. She put her hand on Evie’s arm and Evie looked down, as her skin began to burn intensely.

  She screamed and, with a final injection of adrenaline and anger, swung the tin of coffee grinds she was still holding at the girl’s head. It wasn’t a powerful swing but t
he girl let go of her instantly and started yelling.

  Evie skittered back out of her way, skidding towards her car, dodging around the boy on the ground with the tail.

  With a tail! Her brain screamed at her as though it wanted her to pause and figure it out. But her arm was still burning as though the bone itself had caught alight and the skin was blistering and it was all she could do not to faint right there and then. She started fumbling with her one good hand for her car key, buried in the pocket of her jeans, and felt the sob start to crescendo in her chest.

  The boy in the Nix cap was bent double, pointing and laughing at the girl Evie had hit. And the sound of it, the childish hysteria of it, was like a shucking knife opening Evie up. She glanced upwards even as she scrambled for her keys. The girl was holding the side of her head, screaming and trying to scrape wet coffee grinds off her face, she spat a gloop of saliva and glared furiously at Evie.

  At last Evie’s fingers closed on her keys. She yanked them from her pocket, watching as the girl and boy moved in on her. She was just prey, she realised. She was completely cornered. There was no way out.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you:

  John, for your belief in outrageous potential and the three weeks alone on a beach in Goa to just write. I stole your eyes and a lot more than that and gave them to Alex, I hope you don’t mind.

  Vic and Nic, for being the best friends and best readers a girl could hope for – I only finished this book because you were both cheering me on.

  Tom, for your endless support and for being the kind of big brother Jacks are made of.

  Sara, for that first phone call letting me know I could write.

  Tara – Goan roomie and American editor – I owe you big time for explaining the difference between a vest and a tank top (and a few million other things like that).

  All my blog readers – the kindness of strangers never ceases to amaze and inspire me.

  Laurie, my very great friend, with whom I first road-tripped California before this story was even a twinkle in my eye and with whom I hope to do many more road trips in the future.

  Amanda, agent extraordinaire, for loving Lila and Alex as much as I do (I was worried for a time that we wouldn’t want to share Alex but thank goodness we got over that).

  And finally to Venetia and the team at Simon & Schuster, for showing such faith in a debut writer. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it – well, I could, but it would mean writing a whole other book and we need to get on with editing the sequel to this one.

  About the Author

  Having spent most of her life in London, apart from university in Bristol and a year living in Italy, Sarah quit her job in 2009 and took off on a round-the-world trip with her husband and daughter, on a mission to find a new place to call home. After almost a year of travels that took them through India, Singapore, Australia and the US, they settled in Bali where Sarah now spends her days writing and drinking coconuts. Hunting Lila is her first novel and she is currently working on the sequel.