by Libby Sparks
Silence. No bullets. No talking. Nothing moving.
“Is it over?” Brianna asked hopefully.
“Not by a long shot.”
“You could have lied to me to make me feel better,” she grumbled.
He looked down at her, reached a hand out to her cheek. “No. I don’t think I could.”
His touch again made her briefly forget the danger that was assaulting them. It felt like every skin particle on her cheek was suddenly in tune with the touch of his fingers
The little bell above the entrance dinged and jolted her back the reality of the situation.
“Oh, hell,” Jake swore, peeking up over the counter quickly before covering her body with his. “Get down!”
Fire rushed in a thick sheet over their heads, bright orange with black plumes streaking through it. Brianna screamed as the flames struck the walls above her and around her and clung wetly, burning into everything it touched.
“My God,” she breathed.
Flames dripped down the walls to the floor. Some of them landed very closely to her. Jake went berserk when he saw them, growling incoherently and tramping on the errant little tufts of fire with his boots until they went out.
“We need to get out of this building,” he said in a near shout, over the roar of the burning fires.
“Well, since the building’s on fire, I’d say so!”
“You don’t understand! This isn’t regular fire. This is Hellfire!”
Which, Brianna assumed, was a far worse kind of fire than regular fire. Either way, she was inside a burning building. Time to go.
She was struggling to get up, but her right arm hug limply now and she still couldn’t bear any weight on her left. Jake slid his arm around her waist and pulled her on her feet. Together they went further into the store, away from the demons standing outside the front. More silent impacts struck the walls and display racks near them as they moved; bullets coming way too close for Brianna’s comfort.
“Where are we going?” she breathed out between huffs. Her heart was pounding so hard that the raging fire sounded more distant and her vision began to narrow. She vaguely remembered hearing that adrenaline had this effect on people. Somehow it didn’t sound quite so dramatic before, but now that she was experiencing it, it was extremely overwhelming.
“I’m going to put you in the beer cooler until its safe. The cooler should be lined with metal. Good enough place as any to keep you safe from a fire.”
“And what are you going to do?”
They found the lever-handled door of the cooler inside a back office, and Jake opened it, putting her down gently on boxes of wine coolers and light beers. “Stay here.” He whispered lightly in her ear.
“Wait, Jake!” She leaned against the metal-lined wall, soaking in the welcome coolness. “You didn’t answer me. What are you going to do?”
He stood, the door half-closed. “I’m going to stop them.”
He shut the door behind him, and the overhead light went out. She was alone in the dark cooler. “I can’t even see to find a decent bottle of beer.”
She couldn’t even laugh at her bad joke as she sat there, scared and waiting in the dark, fighting the urge to open the door to see what was going on. He had told her to stay here, that she would be safe here, but she didn’t feel safe. Confined spaced bothered her, and so did the dark.
The cooler rocked violently. Boxes fell over, bottles breaking and splashing alcohol everywhere. She was bounced to the cold, hard floor and left wondering what had just happened as her shoulder screamed in pain.
Complete silence fell. There was no sound except her own rapid breathing and the rushing of blood in her ears. She listened for anything else. But there was nothing.
She rolled up onto her knees, and from there she used the wall of the cooler as leverage to push herself to her feet. The door opened from this side by pushing a plunger in. She found it in the dark and rammed her hip against it. The door swung farther outward
Brianna couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
There wasn’t much left of the store. The front of it had been ripped open, jagged pieces of wall and ceiling surrounding a gaping hole, debris strewn everywhere, wood and steel and roofing tiles mixing with bags of chips and canned goods. Back here where she stood, the place had fared better, with the display racks still standing and a soda fountain still in place.
Everything was on fire.
Flames licked at everything. The walls, the ceiling, the coolers of milk, the soda, and the energy drinks. She picked her way carefully to the front of the store. What was left of it, anyway.
“Jake?” she called out. “Jake!”
Then she stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh my God.”
The parking lot was a seething, living mass of fire. Orange and red flames stood tall and bright against the night; burning everything. The gas pumps were blown apart, so much twisted metal and melted plastic. The overhang above the pumps was crumpled over to one side, burning along with everything else. A charred skeleton of the black sedan had been tossed several dozen feet from where she had seen it last and landed on its side. Flames danced along its remains.
In the middle of the fires stood Jake Valcour.
As she got as close as she dared, he turned toward her. He was standing in the flames themselves, but he was not burned. His skin was untouched. His black hair blew wildly in the hot winds of the fire that parted and coiled around him. His arms were outstretched, as though he was welcoming the conflagration, supporting it, inviting it to him. His clothes weren’t even singed.
But his eyes were very changed. They were no longer the pale green with streaks of gold. Now they burned brightly, gold throughout, from corner to corner. Even the whites blazed gold as they reflected the harsh light of the burning flames. The visual effect was stunning and terrifying at the same time.
“You should not be here,” he said to her, in a voice not his own.
“Jake? Oh, Jake. What did you do?”
“I burned them. I sent them back to the Hell where they came from.”
His voice was booming and forceful, yet melodic. It captivated her and held her in place. She wasn’t sure if she stood frozen out of awe or out of fear. Every syllable was crisp and powerful. In that moment, as she saw him like this, her understanding of him changed. He was something more than what she had known him as. Something amazing. Something undefinable.
He was extraordinary, in every sense of the word.
He was beautiful.
She watched him come back to himself with a sigh and a hard shake of his head. His whole body began to visibly shake and for a moment it seemed as though he would pass out as he lowered his arms and hung his head for a brief moment. Stepping toward her, away from the roaring flames, he slowly made his way over. The fires parted from his steps, and another shake took the gold tint out of his eyes. When he reached her side, he was Jake again. Brianna could not help but feel relieved to have him back. In his other form, she was more afraid of him than the fire or the demons.
Brianna looked around once more at the devastation, at the destruction of this place. The two men or demons or whatever they had been were nowhere to be seen. They were simply gone as if they had never existed.
Brianna knew they must be dead, or some form of dead. She didn’t know if demons could even die or not.
“But…how?” she asked him.
“They were going to kill you,” he answered.
“Okay. I…I understand that. But, Jake…how?”
He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, holding the breath for a moment before blowing it out. As he did, a streamer of flame followed the exhalation from his mouth.
His eyes opened, and he was looking straight at her.
“Simple,” he answered her. “Because I am a demon, too.”
“No. Oh, no. No no no,” she whispered. It couldn’t be. Demons were evil. They were nasty. They were…well, they were ugly. Jake wasn’t any of those things. S
he knew he was not human, of course. But somehow she expected him to be some sort of angel or something, not a demon.
“I told you I’m complicated.” He looked around them, at what he had done, and winced. Brianna didn’t understand his reaction at first. But then she got it.
He was embarrassed and probably afraid she would take off running again.
“Jake, I—”
“No. It’s all right, Brianna. I understand. Believe me, I do. I’m a lot of things. At heart, I’m not a bad guy. But I am what I was born as. I am a demon. I wanted you to know. I just wish I could have told you some other way; preferably one that did not involve destroying everything, locking you in a cooler, and scaring the wits out of you.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. If she hadn’t been standing where she was right now, hurt, shot, and surrounded by the remains of a burning building, she would have labeled Jake as a man to run from without a second thought.
But knowing what she knew now, having seen all of this, she knew Jake wasn’t crazy. And that left only one possibility. The truth.
Jake was a demon.
Did that mean he was evil? Brianna realized that she really knew nothing about demons, and the stories she had heard probably weren’t even close to the truth. For example, Jake had said that the two creepy twin demons could “hear” them. That was something she’d never heard of before. Obviously she had a lot to learn, and she found herself eager to do so against her better judgment.
He nodded as he took in the mix of emotions that crossed her face. Fear. Pain. Wonder. Shock. After observing her, he offered her his hand. “Come with me.”
It had been more of a question than a demand, and it certainly hadn’t been one of his attempts to mind rape her. It had been an offer of help. From a friend. Being asked, rather than told, to go with him somehow helped diminish some of the anxiety she was feeling about letting herself trust him.
Brianna was ready and willing to accept his help.
He smiled back at her as she stepped closer and let him slip an arm around her waist. Turning, he held his hand out in a straight line from his body. The fires around them peeled away from where they stood, creating a path for them to the edge of the street where the flames had stopped as if obeying Jake’s every command. In fact, looking now, Brianna saw that the fires were contained to the square bit of land that the gas station and store had sat on. They hadn’t spread to any of the nearby buildings or anywhere else at all.
She’d call it a miracle, except she didn’t think demons did miracles.
Looking around at the destruction again, she thought she might have to revise her way of thinking. Completely.
Jake led her carefully through the path and away. She wasn’t afraid to be alone with him now. They had a lot to talk about before they could get started on their trip to New York.
Brianna had already decided she was going to bring Jake with her.
Chapter 8
“Checking out of room four-oh-three, please.”
It was the morning after the events of last night, and the desk clerks had changed shifts. It wasn’t Mary who took Brianna’s room keys. Instead a young guy, younger looking than Brianna even, with pimples across his forehead and cheeks, smiled at her and checked the hotel’s computer records. “Thank you, ma’am. You’re all set. Hope everything was all right?”
Brianna took the printed paper receipt he handed her with her left hand, and hiked her duffle bag higher up her right shoulder. “Yes. Everything was fine.”
“Except for the big explosion down the street, am I right?” he said to her with an excited grin. His pale red eyebrows lifted up to his hairline, his eyes wide. “Don’t usually have that kind of excitement in Blue Earth.”
“Um, yeah,” she said. “I don’t usually have that kind of excitement in my life either.”
After escaping through the flames of the burnt-out gas station and convenience store, Jake had walked them back to her hotel room. No one they passed even looked their way once. All the attention was on the horrendous blaze and the thick black smoke roiling up from the center of their main street and the screaming fire trucks.
She was in severe pain the whole way. Her wrist throbbed. Her shoulder ached. She still couldn’t use her right arm. Her whole body was shaking. Halfway there she had to tell him to stop so she could lean over a row of low bushes and barf out the contents of her queasy stomach. But Jake held her as she did, and supported her the rest of the way back to the hotel.
In her room, he had her lay on the bed. She didn’t argue, but she did eye him with a look that made him smile and promise he wasn’t that kind of guy. That made her laugh, but then wonder if a demon could even do that sort of thing.
He laid his hands on her wrist first, just like he had done back in the convenience store. Then he did something similar to her right shoulder. Cold ice seeped through her flesh, turning her injuries numb, and then tingly. Then there was an odd crawling sensation that made her think of a hundred butterflies crawling across her skin.
Jake told her to lie still, and as she did what he asked she could slowly begin to feel her injured arms again. The sensation wasn’t scary, wasn’t painful, it was just like waking up, almost. After a short while she raised her left arm experimentally and rotated her wrist a few times. No swelling, no redness, no pain. She did the same with her right arm, flexing the shoulder, feeling no trace of the bullet that had pierced her body.
Demons might not work miracles, but Jake had done something damn close.
A voice bidding her farewell brought her out of her reverie and she smiled at the hotel clerk now with his bushy red hair as she turned to walk away. It was time to head out to the parking lot where her car waited for her. It was time to start for home again.
“Oh, Miss Maitland?” the clerk said to her suddenly. “We have a message here for you.”
Brianna stopped. She’d had enough of messages and strange things popping up out of nowhere. “A message from who?” Her stomach began to tighten.
The clerk scanned the little pink piece of paper the message had been written on. “I’m sorry, there’s no name. It came in last night and the night clerk said she didn’t want to disturb you while you were sleeping. Here.”
The fact that there wasn’t any name on the message didn’t even surprise her. She took it from him and read it quickly. Then she stuffed it in her pocket and walked away.
Brianna had changed her clothes this morning, throwing out the t-shirt from yesterday with the bullet hole torn through the shoulder. She was wearing a blue blousy shirt now, one of her better ones, and had opted for a comfortable pair of khakis. She had transferred her pocket change and thumb drive and other things from her jeans, along with the item she felt in her pocket now. She had forgotten it was even there.
As she walked distractedly out to the car, Brianna did another mental tally of her belongings. She had everything of hers from the room already packed in her duffle bag, and she’d checked the room over several times to make sure that nothing was left behind.
Her Altima waited for her in the same spot she had parked it in yesterday, near the back of the lot. She popped the trunk with the key fob and set her duffle bag in among her other suitcases and things, then closed the trunk again. It popped back open. Sometimes it stuck open like this and she had to slam it down to get it closed. There.
In the driver’s seat, she adjusted the mirror and took a quick look at herself. Yesterday, she had thought she looked much older than her twenty years. Today, the lines around her eyes were less noticeable, and there was an unidentifiable quality to her expression that she had trouble naming at first.
Then it hit her. She looked happy, which make her laugh to herself. Happy is the last thing that any normal person should be feeling when seated next to a demon.
“You ready to go?” Jake asked her from the front passenger seat.
“Almost,” she answered, adjusting the mirror back. “You ever been to New York?”
“I have. It’s been a while, but I’ve been there. Big buildings, lots of people, cops on horseback. Just like in the movies.”
She laughed, a sudden and explosive sound that made him turn and stare at her with his mouth partly open, and the way he looked made her laugh harder, and then he was laughing with her even though he couldn’t know why.
“I’m not from that part of New York,” she said to him. “I’m from rural, small-town, northern New York. Think trees and farms and highways that lead pretty much nowhere.”
“Really? Huh. Can’t wait to see it.”
She started the engine, shaking her head. When she had started out for home two days ago, this trip sucked. Her mom had died, her dad needed her help, she’d had to drop out of school almost at the end of the semester. All of that. Not to mention being inside a building when it blew up, and having demons chasing her.
But she never would have met Jake if she hadn’t been here, in this small city in Minnesota. Being with him, knowing he’d be with her for the rest of her trip, gave her a different perspective on everything
Maybe exciting things did happen to her, after all.
“Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering. She leaned back to push her hand into her hip pocket and noticed the way his eyes followed the line of her body as she did. “Down, boy.”
He smirked and tilted his head briefly to the side. “Sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m really not.”
Her fingers caught the chain and she pulled out the gold necklace, the spiral designs catching the morning sun through the windshield. She put it on over her head now and turned it so she could look at the pendant. “I wanted to say thanks for this. It’s pretty. Is it old?”
Jake was staring at it, eyes wide and unblinking.
“Jake? Um, hello?”
His eyes flicked up at her then back at the necklace again. “Where did you get that?”
“I got it in the package you sent me, doofus. I appreciate the gift. Only wish the rest of our date hadn’t been, you know, all about running for our lives.”
“Brianna, I didn’t give you that.”