Demonic Dreams

by Hadena James

  My leg was finally starting to throb, the result of standing and walking through the woods on mostly uneven ground. It wasn’t like walking on different height boulders, just a slope here and there to the ground that made the calf muscle work a little harder. I vaguely remembered after getting burned and started walking again on that leg how much more a simple, small incline was noticeable to me. I imagined the same would be true of this incident. When I had time to sit and think about it, the pain would probably drive me a little nuts. I took one of the pills and just swallowed without anything to drink. It left a slightly bitter residue on my tongue, but I hadn’t wanted to get a bottle of water or a can of soda out of the pack that Gabriel had thought to fill and bring.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Gabriel told me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I feel like if we sit, we need to build a fire, but that gives away our location and judging by the fact that you just dry swallowed a pain pill, you could use a break from walking and I can tell you are starting to feel a chill because you’ve started to shuffle your feet and you only do that when you get cold and don’t want to pick them up.”

  We’d walked far enough that I couldn’t see the disturbed earth where the explosions had gone off a while ago. The trees were thick, growing close together in this part of the woods. So far, we hadn’t come across anymore traps and I wondered if the worst was behind us. We weren’t on a trail, either, and that might have made a difference. Earlier, we’d been walking along a game trail, an obvious path that cut through the woods and was worn down by the feet of wildlife walking towards food, water, or mates. Gabriel had decided after we found the buried explosives that sticking to a trail was probably not a good idea. I had agreed, and we had veered into the woods, using the compass on his phone to keep us heading in the right direction. Conversation had been sparse as we walked simply because neither us ever felt the need to fill the silence. For me, it was a survival mechanism. It might have been for Gabriel too, I wasn’t sure. He’d grown up spending time in dense wooded areas. There were a lot of smells and noises in the forest if you opened yourself up to them. It was those smells and noises that could keep you alive.

  “If I sit on this ground, the cold is going to seep into my bones enough that I am going to hurt just sitting, so if we stop and rest, a fire is definitely going to be necessary. I can’t tell if Raphael is currently following us, and we should be able to hear as well as smell him if he comes up on us.”

  “You might be able to smell him, but I won’t.” Gabriel told me.

  “No, but you’ll hear him before I do simply because you know woodland noises better than me. I would have thought we would have run into Malachi and the rest of them by now.” I commented.

  “I haven’t had a signal on my phone for a little while, and since we don’t seem to be encountering anything dangerous, maybe I was wrong and most of the traps and things are farther away from the bunker than I anticipated, which could be slowing their progress down.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  LIKE GABRIEL, I WAS unsure what to do. Some part of me wanted to keep going until we were safely back with the rest of the SCTU. My brain kept telling me there was safety in numbers and there was just Gabriel and I right now while the rest of our team was wandering through a dense, shadowy forest looking for us.

  However, just like my brain kept telling me there was safety in numbers, it was determined to remind me that it was probably a large expanse of woods and Gabriel and I could easily miss Xavier and Lucas because of the proliferation of trees. Plus, as darkness descended, we would be more likely to miss important things like trip wires especially since there wasn’t much of a moon tonight, plus it was getting colder and I had taken a pain pill that might or might not turn me into a lunatic depending on whether the bottle contained what was on the label.

  “I think we’ll just have to take shifts staying awake,” Gabriel told me as he bent down and picked up some twigs and a handful of dead leaves. With his hands full he wiped at the ground with one of his feet, clearing a spot. I began to look for rocks and started gathering them. It would be safer on the leafy forest floor if our fire was ringed by rocks. I hadn’t heard of forest fires in Maine before, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk it.

  It turned out Gabriel wasn’t a boy scout and the fire took us over an hour to build and get going well enough that it put out heat. We’d discovered a downed tree, which had helped. Our fire was now next to the tree trunk and I was sitting on a slightly curved part of the fallen log, keeping my butt and legs off the frozen ground. We had also been cutting off the dead branches to use as fuel. My knife was going to need to be sharpened when I returned to civilization, thankfully, it was wide enough that it worked as a chopper without the blade warping.

  After sitting for a few minutes, Gabriel pulled the backpack he’d found in the bunker in front of him and unzipped it. I wasn’t sure where it had been because I hadn’t seen it until we left. Meaning he had found it and packed it without my knowledge. I felt like I was still losing time, which was a possibility. We had left in a hurry, and my brain had still been a little foggy from whatever Raphael had done to me. Gabriel rummaged for a bit, then pulled something out and handed it to me, it was a Mt. Dew. I took it. The can echoed when I pushed the aluminum tab down; the snap of it sounded not unlike a gunshot in the woods. I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint the location of the sound if I hadn’t been watching it as I opened it. The echo made it seem like it was coming from everywhere at once.

  Next from the magic bag, he handed me a small fleece lap blanket. I curled it around my legs at the thighs since my legs were the area I was coldest at the moment. I wished I had gloves, but I didn’t. So, I put my soda on the ground and stuck my hands in the large hand muffler on the front of the hoody, because that was what that pocket that went all the way across a hoody was for, it was a hand muffler meant to hold hands, not keys and any other belongings you wanted to put in it. For his next trick, Gabriel pulled out a couple of bags of potato chips and handed two of them to me. He also held out a granola bar, which I took along with the cheese and French Onion SunChips. Chips and a granola bar didn’t really constitute a meal, but it contained enough calories to keep me going especially with the soda. We couldn’t always eat healthy with as much as we traveled, we tried, but it was impossible between the long car rides and time spent on airplanes and then running from crime scene to crime scene and working out of places like conference rooms.

  The only thing that saved all of us was we worked out almost every day we were home and sometimes in hotel gyms if we had one and our bodies were used to the crap we put in them as fuel. Since joining the SCTU, I had gained about five pounds, but it wasn’t anywhere that showed or caused my jeans to be tighter. I wasn’t sure it was muscle I had gained, but I had gained a little weight in the last two or three years. I wasn’t even sure how long I had worked for the US Marshals. It felt like forever, probably because we weren’t getting a lot of days off even though we were supposed to be.

  It was the days off that kept all of our lips sealed when the powers that be had decided to give Malachi a SCTU team. We all had concerns about the power Malachi now wielded. It would have been different if it had been Caleb, but it hadn’t been Caleb they had put in charge, it had been Malachi. I knew Peter West thought Malachi would be fine with his newfound power, but Peter was Malachi’s cousin and an optimist. Despite the reservations we all had, it was going to be nice to get a few days off now and then. Maybe I could travel a little again. It was ironic that I now had the money to travel, but not the time. It had been one of Nyleena and I’s favorite things to do together, but a lot of our trips she had paid for and I had run a tab with her because I didn’t have the money she had. She had never asked me to pay her back for any of it, she was generous like that. Plus, she had really wanted to go to these places, too, and her and I just traveled well together.

  For the most part, I wasn’t sure wh
at I would do with days off, binge watching tv and playing video games seems most likely. I wasn’t sure either of those were constructive ways to use days off, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to do besides travel and with Nyleena, and having taken several months off recently, she wouldn’t be able to travel much further than a day trip for a while. I was used to working pretty much every day, it was weird when I was suspended because I had become used to seeing my team every day and they had been working while I had been on the sidelines at home, trying to entertain myself and being annoyed that they were working, and I wasn’t.

  Gabriel was chewing loudly as we sat in the woods watching the fire burn and waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak. By now, Raphael should have been out of the ventilation system and trying to find us, and we had a giant homing beacon in front of us. Most of the wood was wet and billowed dark smoke into the cold night air as a result. Malachi had texted us some time ago to tell us that his search party was bedding down for the night and to remind us that one of us needed to stay awake and watch for Raphael. As if we hadn’t already known that he posed a threat to us.

  I had agreed to take the first shift watching and waiting for Raphael because I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. My adrenaline was on overload. I could tell because even though I was sitting on a log in the woods, my leg was bouncing up and down on the pad of my foot, Nyleena referred to it as leg jiggling, and it drove her nuts. I didn’t do it often, just when my adrenaline was running high and there was nothing I could do to use it, like now. Every noise was causing my body to pump more of it into my system. Adrenaline helped with survival, but it could also be the enemy causing a natural high that wasn’t unlike methamphetamine use; high and bursting with unused energy that could cause mistakes.

  Gabriel leaned against the log, pulled his legs up to his chest, and rested his head against them with his arms crossed over the back of them. I scooted closer and helped cover him with as much of the lap blanket as I could stand to give up. Gabriel didn’t get cold like I did. In that area I was a freak or felt like it more often than not. A few doctors including Xavier had told me I wasn’t a freak, it was the result of nerve damage and I had a lot of nerve damage in this body that felt much older than it was. I was almost positive that if a serial killer didn’t actually manage to kill me that one day I’d lay down to sleep and just not wake up, my body would give out without the adrenaline that seemed to flood it constantly. Malachi was used to the sensation by now, but I wasn’t yet. One day I might be, but until then there were times I thought it was the only thing that was keeping me going.

  Within a few minutes, Gabriel was quietly snoring. He was able to sleep just about anywhere. My parents hadn’t been big on camping and outdoors stuff, so sleeping outdoors bothered me a bit. It made me feel exposed. Something small scurried across the dead leaves that filled the forest and I hoped it was a squirrel or rabbit. I didn’t know the habits of either of these creatures, but I did know mice and rats were nocturnal and I hoped it wasn’t either of those things. I wasn’t afraid of rats and mice like Lucas was, but they weren’t my favorite animals either. Their curiosity was stronger than their fear most of the time and they could carry a plethora of deadly diseases.

  Something large began to stir in the darkness behind me. It didn’t sound large enough for a person and there were more footfalls, meaning it had four legs. I stared into the dark and wondered for the first-time what kinds of nocturnal animals lived in Maine, especially the not so heavily inhabited parts. I was sure there were moose and deer, but I was also pretty sure neither of these animals were nocturnal. Black bears were probably a good candidate, they seemed to be everywhere there weren’t people. Even Missouri had black bears, cougars, coyotes, and bobcats, so it didn’t seem like a stretch for them to exist in Maine.

  What little I knew about bobcats had come from Nadine who was practically running a wild life center out of her house because her Great Danes seemed to have biological clocks that had started ticking when Kenzie Reynolds had gotten pregnant. I knew less about the other predators on my mental list, probably because I had never felt a need to learn about them. They were animals and did animal like things and I had my hands full with human predators. I got Gabriel’s phone and texted Lucas, asking about cougars in Maine and what I should do if one came out of the dark to examine us. He responded that he wasn’t a zoologist and I should Google it. I responded by pointing out that he was a psychiatrist that had spent a great deal of time studying predators and that maybe he should expand his knowledge beyond human ones. He sent me an emoji as a response and I searched Gabriel’s phone for an emoji of a giant middle finger. I didn’t find one, so I put the phone down and went back to listening. With the echo in the forest, I couldn’t tell if the predator was getting closer or farther away.

  Gabriel touched the back of my knee and moved his head, pointing to just outside the light cast by our fire. There was a cat with tufts of hair around it’s ears that didn’t look like a bobcat or a mountain lion. I didn’t have a clue what it was, but Gabriel seemed to be able to identify it. It investigated us from the darkness for a few minutes, walking a large circle around us, always staying out of the brightest spots caused by our fire.

  It was too big to be a domesticated cat or even a feral domesticated cat and it moved with a graceful quietness that I knew meant business. This was not an animal I wanted to tangle with. At least if it had been a bear, I would have had some clue what to do. You were supposed to make yourself as small as possible and protect your head with bears, but I wasn’t sure what to do with wild cats. As I was debating this, it slinked off into the darkness and I could finally hear it getting farther away from us.

  “Lynx,” Gabriel told me.

  “I thought a lynx was a bobcat,” I told him.

  “Bobcats are a type of lynx, but that was a Canadian Lynx, they are a little bigger and rarer, they are also considered large cats despite being smaller than a mountain lion,” he told me.

  “Yes, but large or small is based on the noise they make not on size,” I told him which expended all my knowledge about wild predatory cats.

  “Well you just joined a very exclusive club, lynxes of all kinds, including bobcats, are rarely seen by humans in the wild. This is only my second time and I spent a lot of time outdoors at night in an area that has a huge population of them,” Gabriel told me.

  “I’ll be sure to remember that next time someone asks me if there is anything special about me,” I told him.

  “You should definitely put it in your diary when you get home because it’s been theorized that the reason they are rarely seen by people is because their hearing is so good they can hear us breathe, so for some reason, that lynx wasn’t threatened enough by our presence to ignore his curiosity. You are more likely to see a polar bear than a lynx, even in Maine.” Gabriel said.

  “Pretty sure they don’t have polar bears in Maine.” I answered.

  “They don’t, that’s why you are more likely to see a polar bear than a lynx. Lynxes are more elusive than tigers even though there are more of them.”

  “You seem to know a lot about them.” I told him.

  “Once upon a time, when I was a kid, and once I stopped trying to be Indiana Jones, I wanted to be a zoologist. It was prompted by my first ever sighting of a lynx in the wild,” Gabriel told me. “When you were a kid what did you want to be?”

  “Before Callow? I wanted to be an archeologist. After Callow, I wanted to be a cop like my dad. Then I realized that being a cop was a pretty sure way to get killed and decided to go back to something history related, which has a longer life expectancy.”

  “And now you are in the woods with a psychotic killer roaming around somewhere unknown and you’ve just seen a lynx.” Gabriel tutted at the end of the sentence.

  “Yeah, turns out being a historian did not increase my life expectancy and I still ended up being a cop too.” I told him.

  “You have good instincts, very
cop-like,” he told me. “I imagine in a lot of ways, you are very much like your father there.”

  “That’s why I haven’t seen Isabelle’s kids since she died,” I told him. “My brother-in-law would agree with you that I have very specialized skills that make me good as a police officer, but not good as an aunt.”

  “You don’t talk about any of your nieces and nephews, not really, not even the ones I’ve met.”

  “You don’t talk about the fact that you respect and fear Turkish Jack, I’m guessing because you don’t want to, same goes for me with the kids. I don’t see them and I’m not a good influence on them, so I don’t talk about them.”

  “Turkish Jack,” Gabriel tutted again. “I do both fear and respect Turkish Jack. He did something most psychopaths wouldn’t have done, he cut out his own tongue to keep himself from talking too much. I’m not sure if he just has that much self-control or that little faith in himself, but after seeing him cut off his own tongue, it’s hard not to fear and respect him, and now that I know he’s involved with your brother and Apex, I do trust him to some degree, but I still can’t reconcile that trust with my fear and respect.”

  “That would be very complicated,” I agreed.

  “It is,” Gabriel said solemnly looking at his hands. “I have learned that I have to trust some of the psychopaths we deal with, which is not my natural instinct and goes against what my own fear and trauma tells me. Hell, it was hard to trust you at first, even with the cover story that you were just a garden variety sociopath. It didn’t help that you were a little flippant the first time we met.” Gabriel said. “However, when we were in Alaska and Dr. Ericson asked to meet you alone and you agreed without batting an eyelash, I realized that I had to work on me a little bit because you weren’t going to change simply because you weren’t the most user-friendly person I had ever met. As that case went forward and I watched as Xavier and Lucas both trusted you, without reservation, I decided if they could do it so could I and I began to trust you based on the fact that they trusted you. The same is true of Turkish Jack, you trust Eric and Eric trusts Turkish Jack, and I don’t think either of you are prone to being trustful, so to some degree I have to trust Eric and Turkish Jack simply because you guys trust him. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t scare the hell out of me, it just means I have come to appreciate your judgment enough that if you trust someone, I can trust them as well.”