by Libby Sparks
VALCOUR
Hunted by Hellfire
By Libby Sparks
Copyright 2013 by Principis Publishing LLCAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from this publisher.
www.principispublishing.com
Introduction
Brianna Maitland is driving home to her mother's funeral in New York. In the past, Brianna's life has been placid and unremarkable. But when she stops for the night, a chilling, cryptic, and mysterious phone call made from a disconnected phone, ratchets her with fear beyond the limits of sanity.
Heeding the caller's warning would have granted her safe passage home, but Brianna finds the alluring mystery of dark, anti-hero stranger named Jake Valcour too much to resist. Before too long, in a surprising twist of fate, events change. She and the handsome man are traveling alone together to New York.
But a drastic turn for the worst plunges Brianna and her new companion into danger. Are their pursuers the greatest threat, or is Jake? Suddenly, Brianna is forced to run for her life, and when she is forced to confront her pursuer(s), she wishes she had never learned the truth about them.
Chapter 1
Brianna Maitland listened to the tires droning on the pavement as she drove east on Interstate 90. She hadn’t been out this way in more than a year, but she remembered the loneliness of it now, the whoosh of passing cars and transport trucks. I-90 was one long stretch of nothingness along this part of the Minnesota-Iowa border. Just one long, divided four-lane highway. Not much to see other than cars, grass, and stretches of sickly-looking trees. It gave her time to think.
She reached out and snapped on the radio. Brianna really didn’t want to think right now.
A song by the latest American Idol product was on. She made a face and changed the song. That guy was cute enough, if you were into that kind of thing. But he sounded like a chicken caught in an auto-tuner. She found a station playing older soft rock songs and settled in to an Evan and Jaron tune.
This was not a trip she had been looking forward to. Sooner or later, everyone ends up going home. Brianna just hadn’t expected it to be this soon for her. She had planned on staying in the Art Institute in Seattle for the rest of this semester at least. Maybe even finding an apartment out there permanently. She was doing well there and enjoying life on the West Coast. Her friends were there, her life was there.
Except for her parents, who were still back in New York. And her mom had just died.
Brianna let out a long sigh, trying to keep the tears from starting up again. Mom had been young, just into her forties, and full of life on top of that. Her death hadn’t just been a surprise. It had been a shock. When her father had called to tell her about it, he had been practically incoherent. That had been just last week, and the pain was still fresh for Brianna.
She resettled her sunglasses against her face. The sun was too bright. The music on the radio sucked. Her back hurt from being in the car for hours. Everything bothered her. It was just all too much at once.
Wet tears fell down her cheeks in spite of her best efforts. She finally threw the sunglasses onto the passenger seat next to her and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. She needed a break. She’d left Seattle yesterday morning after a couple of last-minute goodbyes, caught a hotel in Billings, and then driven all day today and she was just done with it. It was late in the afternoon now anyway and she was hungry and tired and she really should pull over and find somewhere to spend the night. New York was a long way away still.
Ahead she caught sight of a big green highway sign for an exit. Exit one-nineteen. Mankato and Blue Earth. Brianna had never heard of either one. But right now she just wanted off this highway and wanted a reason to not have to think about life for awhile.
She pulled off the gentle curving exit and onto a state road that led her south. Not even a mile off the Interstate, the yellow gas pump light on her Altima’s dashboard lit up with a soft ding. She checked her gauge and saw the little needle pointing squarely at the E to tell her the tank was empty.
“Gee, thanks for the heads up,” she mumbled. Now, on top of everything else, she had to find a gas station.
There hadn’t been any signs to indicate there would be gas at this exit. Or maybe there had been. She really hadn’t been paying attention, but now she scanned both sides of the road frantically. The last thing she needed was to be stranded in the middle of Minnesota with no gas and no one to call on for help.
“God damn it,” she swore.
The state road narrowed down to two lanes as it connected with surface streets. A big sign read “Welcome to the City of Blue Earth. Dream Big.” Brianna snorted at that. Little places like this in the Midwest always had these grand slogans. Like anything was ever going to happen in a dust mote of a place like this.
Unassuming houses crowded right next to businesses up and down the streets as far as Brianna could see. Traffic was light this time of day in Blue Earth. Most of the intersections didn’t even have traffic lights. In fact, she wasn’t even sure this place deserved to be called a city. It wasn’t anything like Seattle had been. No skyscrapers. No rush of people and vehicles. Just small-town America.
Up past a Family Dollar store, she finally saw a gas station. Six pumps, and a little convenience store on one side of the parking lot, painted a garish purple with brown stripes. Perfect. She could get the Altima gassed up and grab a soda. Maybe even get directions to a hotel.
After pumping forty dollars worth of gas to put the tank at three-quarters full, Brianna parked in a space next to the building. She saw a sign for restrooms around the side and suddenly really felt the need to pee. She’d used the bathrooms in places like this before. Not by choice. But when you had to go, you had to go.
She knocked at the shabby red door marked “women” and when there was no answer she turned the knob. Inside there was a small room with two stalls and two sinks and a garbage can that looked like it hadn’t been emptied in a week or more. Brianna wrinkled her nose. It stank like all public restrooms stink, of disinfectant and stale urine. Still, the toilets were clean, she saw as she sat down to do her business.
The liquid hand soap smelled like oranges. She used a little bit of it to scrub her face after she’d washed her hands. In the mirror, she studied herself.
“Yup. There I am.”
She was just twenty, last month, but the woman she saw in the mirror looked much older. There were dark circles under her crystal blue eyes. Lips that usually always held a trace of a smile were firmly set in a frown now. It was all the stress she was carrying, she knew. At least that’s what she wanted to blame it on. Leaving school, having to drive across the country by herself, having to face her father again. Her mom’s death.
She ran her hands through her short blonde hair, sweeping it back from her temples. Strands of it fell mischievously across her eyes again anyway. Brianna blew at them a couple of times and rolled her eyes at herself. Her black t-shirt and jeans were mussed from sitting in the car so long. She smoothed them down against her body, trim and defined by a regimen of running and cardio, but the wrinkles persisted. Finally she gave up. She could care less, really. It wasn’t like she had anyone to impress here.
She went into the store and smiled at the clerk standing behind the counter, an older man in a rumpled brown shirt with stringy brown hair hanging off a balding head. The man watched her with gray, washed-out eyes. He did not return her smile. She bi
t her lip and looked away from him.
At the back of the store, she took a soda from the coolers. The clerk was still staring at her, she realized with a little twitch of surprise. Didn’t he have anything better to do?
“Hello,” she tried. The man didn’t answer her, just took her soda and scanned it in. Brianna passed him a five-dollar bill; he gathered the change and handed it to her, all without taking his eyes off her once.
“Um. Thanks.”
She opened the bottle as she turned away; stopping at the door to look back.
He was still staring.
“Okay... Creepy much?” she whispered, letting the little bell ring as the door closed behind her.
Brianna stood on the short sidewalk in front of the store for a while, just looking around at the city of Blue Earth. Seeing it now, she adjusted her opinion a little. This place was small, and crowded, but somehow it had an open feeling to it, too. Instead of the tall skyscrapers and rundown buildings she had become used to in Seattle, here there were strip malls and homes and lazy intersections. Something about it felt almost relaxing to her. She took in a deep breath and let it slowly out. Thinking about it, she realized this was the first breather she’d taken for herself since rushing out of college to head home.
The sun that had seemed too bright for her when she was driving, but now it seemed dull and grey behind a bare overcast of thin clouds. She figured it was going to rain. When she had been in Seattle it had been cloudy most of the time, just like in those Twilight movies; only without the gorgeous vampires who sparkled and broke your furniture when they made out with you.
She smirked at her little joke and sipped at the soda. Okay, so life wasn’t all that bad. Only mostly bad.
Maybe she should stop here for the night, she thought. Get a hotel room and just relax. Then again, her dad was expecting her. He needed her home. And she could get a few more hours of driving in before she actually had to stop. Maybe even make the next state. She took another sip of the soda as she thought about what she should do.
“Hello.”
Brianna hadn’t noticed the guy walk up to stand next to her. But there he was, in a dark blue t-shirt that stretched over a muscular torso and a grey sweater with Abercrombie and Finch’s logo on it zippered open down the front. His jeans were ripped across his left knee. His short black hair was curly and wavy and had lighter, almost blond highlights in it. High cheekbones. Prominent Adam’s apple.
Cute. Very cute.
But it was his eyes that caught her attention. They were a pale green, with thin lines of copper or maybe gold radiating through them, like rays of light around the black sun of his pupils. They sparked and faded as they caught the light around them. He smiled at her now and tilted his head to the side a little.
“Um. Hello?” he said again.
“Uh…hello.” Really? That was the best she could come up with? She thought she felt warmth touching her cheeks and hoped she wasn’t blushing in front of this guy. Not that it should matter. She had just met him. Well, not really met him. But…
She closed her eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them again, returning his smile with one of her own. “Hi.”
There. That was better.
“Hi.” He laughed. She liked his laugh. “Sorry if I startled you. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but I saw your New York license plates. That cherry red Altima? That’s you, right?”
She blinked. “You’re the first one to get the color right.” She had ordered her Altima special from the dealership. It had been a going-away present from her parents when she left for college. But even her dad couldn’t get the color right. He was always calling it strawberry. The car was still registered in New York, and her gold-colored license plates stood out among all the blue Iowa and Minnesota plates around her.
“So, are you from New York?”
Brianna had a moment of clarity when she knew she should be worried about a stranger in a city she’d never set foot in before coming up to her and asking questions like this. But then she shrugged it off. She was standing in front of a gas station, on a public street, in a city, in the middle of the day. What was the worst that could happen?
“Yes,” she answered him, turning the soda bottle between her hands. “I’m from New York. I’m on my way there now.”
“Just what I was hoping to hear. You wouldn’t be interested in a passenger, would you?”
Okay, that was a bit too much, even for a cute guy in a public place. “Um, I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Oh?” He put his hands into the pockets of his sweater. His smile slipped a bit. “Why’s that?”
“Well…” Damn, his eyes were amazing. “I don’t know you, is the main reason, I guess. You know what I mean? A girl has to be careful. I really don’t want to end up dead in a ditch somewhere. Not that I think you’re an evil stalker killer person, or anything.”
“No,” he said with a sigh. “Definitely not a stalker killer.”
“Oh, but you are evil?” Was she flirting with him? Stop it, Brianna, she said to herself.
He didn’t answer her for the space of several heartbeats, just stood there and looked directly into her eyes. Then he put his smile back in place, and taking his right hand out of his pocket, reached it out to her. “Let’s start over. Hi. My name is Jake Valcour. Pleased to meet ya.”
Brianna shifted her feet and considered. New guy. New place. Stranger danger. Headlines with her photo that screamed “New York girl found murdered off I-90.”
Then she shrugged. What were the chances anything would happen here in a public parking lot? If she needed to, she could just tell him to get lost and drive away.
Besides, nothing exciting every happened in her life.
She took her hand with his. His handshake was strong and warm. “Hi Jake. I’m Brianna Maitland. Nice to meet you, too.”
She let him hold on to her hand longer than he needed to. When she took her hand back, she did so slowly, letting her fingers trail along his. Dear God, she was flirting with him.
And the look in his eyes told her that he wasn’t hating it.
“So, Brianna, now that we know each other and all, how about that lift? I promise I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
She thought about it. She really did. She was going home for something she really didn’t want to face up to. She was dreading the whole trip. Some company might actually make it better. And if she had to be approached by a stranger in the middle of the Midwest, she could do a whole lot worse than Jake Valcour.
But her mom hadn’t raised her to be stupid. Brianna imagined her mom looking down at her now, watching over her, whispering the same words of advice that she had grown up with. She didn’t want to be going home to tend to things after her mom’s death. But she didn’t need to put herself in danger because of that, either.
So in the end, cute guy would have to fend for himself.
“Sorry, Jake, really.” She saw the way the coppery bits of his eyes dimmed, the way his smile faded. “Look, I’m not going to have someone I don’t know share my car with me for a couple of days. No offense?”
He shrugged, his hands fisted into his hoodie again. “No problem. I figured it was worth a shot. Maybe I’ll see you down the road somewhere.”
He turned and started walking across the parking lot. Her eyes were drawn to the backside of his jeans and the way his ass filled them out as he walked.
Stop it, Brianna. But her eyes wouldn’t listen to her. Well, there was no sin in looking, right?
Jake went over to a couple in a car that was parked at the pumps, the driver out filling his blue hatchback’s tank. Brianna saw Jake stop and talk to the guy pumping gas, a thin little man with huge glasses. She guessed that Jake was asking this guy the same thing he had just asked her. And it looked like he was having the same kind of luck, because the guy in the glasses was shaking his head no.
She frowned at herself and took another long drink of her soda before cap
ping it tightly. Sometimes she was just too reasonable for her own good.
She happened to look back into the convenience store through the tall front glass windows. The clerk was still watching her.
In her car again, she locked all of her doors and started out into Blue Earth, looking for a hotel.
Chapter 2
It was early evening when she settled into a room at the Holiday Inn. One bed, half a bath, and a television awaited her for the night. She kicked her shoes off, sending them across the room. Then she threw herself down on the bed, stretched out her arms, and stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain in the stucco up there, its irregular edges old and brown.
“At least it’s not over the bed.”
She had this habit of talking to herself when she was alone. It helped her think, and kept her sane, as her mother used to say. But most of all, it dispelled the silence that seemed to follow her through her life. Even in college, surrounded by her new friends, she had felt alone. It wasn’t like she didn’t go out, do things, or have fun. But then she would come back to her dorm room, and be alone again.
And then today, when a good-looking guy had asked to share a ride with her, she’d turned him down. Sensible, right?
“Sensible girls die alone,” she said to the room.
Whatever. Her concern right now shouldn’t be herself. It should be her dad, back home, feeling lost with the death of his wife and needing someone else to take care of things for awhile until he could get back on his feet. Needing her, more specifically.
She rolled over onto her stomach on the bed and stared at the room’s beige-colored phone on the nightstand. She reached over and took the handset off its hook. The coil of the phone cord was tangled and knotted as she put it up to her ear to listen for the dial tone. It was expensive to call long distance on a hotel phone. But she had packed her cell phone in her luggage and, truthfully, she was just too tired to get it out right now.