by Ava Benton
And the eyes that went from deep and dark to blood red. I couldn’t have been imagining that. But it wasn’t possible, so I must have been.
Hysteria. That was all.
I guessed a person could imagine just about anything when they were as frantic and terrified as I was.
I closed my eyes.
It would never stop, would it? As long as he was out there somewhere, he would look for me. Wouldn’t he?
I remembered the way he had growled in my ear, the way his hot breath had just about scalded my skin. You’re mine. You’re all mine now.
I shuddered, wrapping my arms around myself.
He was right, wasn’t he? I was his.
Four
Slate
“Three and a half hours driving through the armpit of America,” Carter grumbled as we loaded ourselves up in the SUV.
“I thought that was New Jersey,” I laughed. “Isn’t it?”
“Then what’s this? The crotch?”
Even Roan laughed as we left the hotel parking lot.
The night spent on a lumpy mattress hadn’t done my mood much good, and I could tell the rest of them felt the same. I wasn’t looking forward to spending almost four hours driving to Orlando.
“We all got an email from Mary,” I said as I checked my inbox from the front seat. “She found this girl’s address. What do we do? Just show up there?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Roan decided. “I mean, the girl just got attacked. How will she feel when the four of us show up at her front door? Hell, I know us, and I would still shit myself.”
“But you’re a pussy,” Drew laughed.
“Shut it,” he growled, then chuckled. “Anyway, no. Maybe we could sit outside for a little while, see what’s up, see if she comes out. Follow her at a distance. I don’t want to spook her for no reason—she’ll stop working with us if we scare her too bad.”
“Right. Good thinking.” Great. Sitting in a parking lot with the three of them. So much fun. “What do you think about maybe renting a second car? Splitting up? I mean, Christ, what happens when she sees four guys like us sitting together in a black SUV, following her? Or sitting in her parking lot?”
“Not a bad idea,” he admitted.
I was already halfway there. If I got lucky, I might be able to score a ride on my own. I needed a little time without the three of them up my ass. That was likely another one of my issues, the fact that we spent so much time together.
No matter what we did or how small or easy a case was, Mary assigned the four of us to it. Like she didn’t want one of us to be left out. Like we were kids who couldn’t understand why we had to be left behind. Or I wasn’t giving her enough credit; I didn’t know. Maybe it was just better for us to be together. To protect each other.
At least Roan liked good music, and the rest of us knew better than to try to change the station. It was a good way to lose a hand, reaching out to spin the dial.
I leaned my head back against the seat and tapped my fingers in time with some old school Metallica. It matched my mood.
The ride wasn’t bad, mainly because we had left the hotel way before dawn to beat rush hour traffic. By the time we got to Orlando, it was just starting to pick up.
“Who would live here?” Drew asked as he looked out the window.
“I could stand never having to deal with blizzards again,” I said. “I mean, who can hunt during a blizzard? I bet the swamps are amazing down here.”
“Swamps. Everglades. Vincent… I just got that,” Carter said.
I could almost hear the light bulb go off over his head.
“Wow. It took you that long?” Roan laughed.
“He would’ve been okay if the doctor didn’t drop him on his head when he was born,” Drew laughed before ducking one of Carter’s jabs to his shoulder.
It was a brother thing. God knew Roan and I had enough things between us.
“But like I said, I can’t wait to go on a hunt down here. We should try to make time for that,” I said.
It wasn’t like we needed to hunt to live—we could eat normal food, human food—but when I went too long without a hunt, I just didn’t feel as alive as I normally did. Something sort of drained out of me.
We decided to go straight to Maggie’s apartment building, rather than stop off at yet another hotel.
I wanted to get a look at the place and figure out which apartment was hers.
Maybe we’d get lucky and she would come out while we were waiting.
Not every picture of her featured that princess costume she wore in work. In real life, she had long, chocolate brown hair and eyes that matched.
She was a tiny thing, too, which didn’t give me much hope for how she would’ve come out of a shifter attack.
Not much over five feet tall. And pretty. Very pretty. Even out of the makeup the girls who played princesses had to wear. I wondered if she was still pretty.
Her apartment building was actually a complex with several buildings, all separated by stretches of concrete with little bits of grass I guessed could pass for lawn if a person was feeling generous.
What a bleak place. Cinderblock walls. It was almost funny, somebody who worked in a place like she did but living in a place like that. The full spectrum.
“Apartment 911B,” Roan muttered, rolling through the parking lot, looking up at the windows. “This is Building Nine. I guess, what, the B means it’s on the second floor, and the apartment number is eleven?”
“It makes as much sense as anything else.”
We narrowed it down to a few different windows that could be hers.
I looked around the area close to those windows, wondering which car was hers. I could imagine her driving something small and not very expensive. I understood cast members didn’t make a ton of money—and if she lived in a cinderblock apartment building, she couldn’t be rolling in dough. I wondered if the little Bug was hers. A little pink Bug. I could see a princess driving a car like that.
We sat for one hour, then another.
And nothing happened.
She never came out.
That pink Bug never moved.
And as time passed, the more certain I was that the car belonged to her. Every other car moved at least once, but not that one. It only made sense.
“Gimme a sec,” I said, getting out of the SUV.
“What are you doing?” Roan asked.
“I just need to know something.” I went over to the driver’s side of the car, looking up at the windows as I did. Making sure she wasn’t watching.
What would she think if she saw me lurking around her car? I didn’t know how I could be so sure she was a wreck. I just had a feeling.
I crouched down low, looking hard though I didn’t need to look to know my hunch was right. There was blood on the car, somewhere. I could smell it. Somebody had made the owner of the car bleed, and some of that blood got on the pink paint.
It was smeared on the handle, I finally noticed, and when I looked inside, I saw some on the steering wheel and along the headrest. She had been bleeding out of the back of her head, at least. Maybe she had touched her fingers to it, trying to judge what was wrong with her, and gotten the blood on the wheel.
“What are you looking at?” Carter asked, rolling down the window.
“Just trying out a hunch.” I went back to the SUV and climbed in. “That’s her car. There’s blood.”
“Shit,” Drew muttered.
“Not a ton,” I said, “and it doesn’t look like it’s just left over from when she tried to clean it up, if you know what I mean. It’s just right there on the wheel and the headrest. She didn’t get torn up.”
“That’s a relief, anyway,” Roan murmured as he stared up at the windows.
But he knew as well as I did that a person didn’t have to get physically torn up to feel torn up inside. We had all seen it and been through it.
I would never forget some of the things I had seen, t
he things my superiors had ordered me to do. And I had done them, too, because it was orders and because I didn’t have a choice.
And they had given me and all the rest of us the shaft, anyway. So it didn’t matter.
“We should get to the hotel and settle in,” he decided. “We can come back later. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”
“No. She’s not.” I stared up at the window.
“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” he muttered.
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere, either. I would bury myself in my apartment and never come back out. If I were her, I mean.”
“That’s nice, but real life doesn’t stop. She has to leave sometime, and we’ll track her when she does.”
“Of course.”
And we would.
I just didn’t think it would be that easy.
Wherever it happened, she was near her car. I wondered if she sat in that car, shaking, wondering what the hell had just happened to her. How long did it take before she started driving? How long had it been since the attack?
She probably hadn’t driven since then—she would’ve seen the blood and at least tried to do something about it. So she had holed up in her apartment. Poor kid.
“Who would do something like that?” Drew asked as we left the parking lot.
“He had to be crazy,” I said. “I mean, if that treaty exists—the one Vincent talked about—he should know better. Maybe he’s from another country, where they don’t know about any treaty.”
“Or maybe he’s just vicious. He wanted her, she didn’t give him what he wanted, and he decided to take it anyway.”
I remembered looking at the seat in the car. “There wasn’t any blood where she sat,” I said. “I don’t know if he got everything he wanted.”
“Do you think she went to the hospital?” Drew asked.
“We can call around, find out,” Roan said. “Once we get to the hotel. I could use an excuse to stretch my legs and stop driving this damn car.”
“Any one of us could’ve driven,” I reminded him.
“Not while I’m in the car,” he reminded me, ever the alpha.
We were all alphas, but he was the only one who rubbed it in our faces. Just one of the many things we had butted heads on over the years.
“So quit your bitching,” Carter said, shoving the back of his seat.
We all laughed, even Roan, and generally fell into a conversation about our rooms and whether we would get a second car to ride around in.
I couldn’t get the image of that blood out of my mind, though, and it lingered there throughout the rest of the trip to the hotel.
The deep brownish red, smeared across the gray upholstery.
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed Roan’s story! Here’s Slate’s!
Slate
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Copyright © 2017 by Ava Benton
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