Yarra gazed into Avice’s eyes, knowing that this was all real. The pain in her forehead throbbed, though not with the same ferocious intensity of the flare in her heart.
The bus ride was less than comfortable, wobbling through the interstate highway, pushed by an engine with one spark plug in an automotive grave judging by the sounds that it made.
“We’ve just left the state,” he said, looking out the window at a battered sign showing their current location.
The sun was just beginning to peek out of the skyline. Already, the horizon was painted with a golden orange hue. Dawn was fast approaching. It was a new day. All of the troubles that they had faced merely a few hours ago seemed like years long gone, only a distant memory to be reminisced on.
But they both knew that the troubles were far from over. If they weren’t careful, the Keepers of the Blade would be upon them.
“Where are we heading? ”
“A friend’s,” Avice replied, not bothering to explain further. He would if he had to but, for now, the need was not there.
She nodded, too tired to continue with her line of questioning. Sleep was what she needed. When they had escaped her apartment, her body had been galvanized in a constant ‘fight or flight’ panic state. Only now, did her muscles relax and the acute focuses of her mind begin to wane as fatigue both mental and physical began to sink in. She closed her eyes, but fumbled around in her thoughts, still too tense to relax. What if they were suddenly attacked by Avice’s former clan members?
He seemed to read her mind. Putting a hand across her shoulders, he drew her closer to him. The heat of his body sank into her, lulling her into a state of relaxation. Or as close to it as was possible, given the state of the transport they were using.
Yarra sighed. Just before sleep came, she wondered how long they would have to run till the Keepers of the Blade finally caught up with them.
Chapter-2
Ambushed
Avice’s friend lived two states away. After what seemed to be an almost full day spent on the bus, mingling with quick showers in filthy rest stops and meals in dingy roadside diners, they finally arrived at their destination. The bus creaked into the station close to midnight, bringing with it a thunderstorm of such intensity Yarra had not seen in many months.
She looked out through the fogged, grimy windows. Aside from a few people huddled underneath a small, shaded area where the lights flickered erratically, it looked like a place where people came to be deliberately forgotten.
‘How apt’, she thought to herself.
The pine trees in the distance were bent at an angle, too weak to stand up to the torrential winds.
Avice got up and reached for the overhead compartment for their backpack. He smiled at her as he did so.
“What a welcome, eh? At least it won’t be a hot night!”
Yarra could not help but manage a small smile. She had grown to love his ability to see something desirable even out of a debilitating situation. It was one of his charming qualities. She watched him hoist up the backpack, his hands blindly swiping through the compartment for anything they had missed out or that might have been displaced.
The image of his body etched in her eyes began to fade away. So too did the seats of the bus to either side of them. Yarra began to lose all sense of being, her body floating through a room of light grey and yellow. She did not panic, knowing that the precognition was kicking in. Instead of struggling to get out of it like she had once done, Yarra breathed out and relaxed. Which was easier said than done, when the natural human response to such uncertainty was to panic.
Image after image came like cascading screens of a television. In one such vision, she saw herself and Avice standing under the heavy rain, surrounded by hooded figures in black. Another image was of her crying over Avice’s dead body in a dense forest, his bleeding body slashed grotesquely. Other visions were of them sitting comfortable in a home, cuddling; another vision was of her being visibly pregnant, Avice patting her belly with a laugh on his face; and the last vision was of her holding a baby and crying over a photo of him.
Mixed images, mixed visions, all overlapping alternatives.
“Yarra?” Avice gripped at her shoulder, urgently trying to both force her attention and to reassure her that he was there.
She was startled by the sound of his voice, jolting her back into reality. Her first instinct was to tell Avice all that she had seen in her visions, but in that split second, she decided otherwise. The visions had strayed too uncharacteristically into multiple outcomes. It would have been the equivalent of regaling to him a bad dream.
“Did you just have a vision?” he asked nervously.
She nodded.
“What did you see?”
Though a few of the visions involved Avice dying, or dead, they were too wooly to be considered roads into reality. Besides, in all of the vision, she had been looking at him from a considerable distance. As Avice’s mother had once said, precognitive Oracles often gauged the accuracy of the vision by how far they were from the vision’s point of view. The closer she was, the more information she could gather; sights, color, smells, tastes, even texture.
All the visions she had seen were almost equivocal to watching videos on one’s phone.
Shrugging, she just answered, “random stuff.”
“Anything about us?” he smiled, pulling her from the seat. He pulled her to him, his hands just clasping above the curve of her buttocks. Enough to get her heat starting to race in an entirely pleasant way.
Yarra was saved from answering the question as the bus driver yelled from the front of the bus. “Get off, you two! You wanna kiss, do it outside!”
She stepped out of the bus before Avice, running between the wet gap of the bus and the shaded area of the bus station. Though the gap was only a few feet long, Yarra’s head was soaking wet from the weight of the thunderstorm by the time she got to the shelter. She looked back to see Avice grinning at her, the raindrops running through his short hair and down his face.
He took a look around. From the squinting of his eyes, Yarra knew that he was in fact scanning the vicinity, even beyond the darkness impenetrable by human eyes, to see if they were being followed.
“No one,” he said with a slight chatter of his teeth as the cold began to sink in. He was tough, but not immune to being affected by the natural elements when he was in his human form.
Yarra huddled up in her jacket and pressed her head against his chest as they stood below the flickering lights of the bus station. The other passengers, about five of them, stood with their weak umbrellas, staring at the thunderstorm with a unanimous defeated look on their faces.
The bus peeled itself away from the station, heading off into the night. It was only a few feet away from them when the sound of the engine was easily overridden by the howling wind and rustling trees.
“Where is your friend?” Yarra asked. She looked around nervously, although her sight was nowhere near as good as his. Suddenly, the thought of her vision coming true worried her. What if the Keepers of the Blade had caught up with them? In her vision, she had seen hooded figures in black, which was strange, for Avice’s former clan members wore nothing of the sort. Their look was distinct, certainly, but not archaic.
“She does not know that we are coming,” Avice explained. His face was suddenly tense, looking at the other passengers. His eyes were stuck to one person, though Yarra could not see why.
He hoisted the backpack so it sat more comfortably and gestured for her to follow him to the rear of the bus station, where a small 24-hour convenience store was open.
“Avice?” she called out again, but he was suddenly tense. He led her into the shop where the cashier barely glanced up from his portable television. It sounded as if he was watching a soap opera. But given how quiet the place seemed, it might be the only source of entertainment that he got on a regular basis.
“The last I saw her here was about almost one hundred years ago,” Avice explained, look
ing out the glass window of the convenience store. “There were rumors that she was in this part of town, hiding from the Keepers of the Blade. That is why we are here.”
As he explained, his gaze did not leave the group of people nearby. Yarra’s eyes followed the trail of his stare, and it fell on a man. There was nothing significantly dangerous about him. Possibly in his middle age, he had donned a brown leather jacket, and in his left ear were multiple silver earrings.
She noticed then, that the man was discreetly looking at her and Avice, choosing to stare another way when he saw them looking right back at him.
“I don’t like the way one of the guys over there is staring at us,” he added.
Yarra took a better look at the man. His hair was in a ponytail extending all the way down to the small of his back. He had been a passenger on the bus they were on, sitting a few seats nearer to the front. She was not sure when he had gotten on the bus, having slept the most of her journey.
The man continued to give the occasional glance in their direction before looking away. Once, he even held his gaze longer than necessary. It seemed that he was quite interested in Yarra and Avice’s presence, rather to just a pointed, curious acknowledgment of their presence.
Yarra pretended to occupy herself with some candies on the display while discreetly keeping her attention glued onto the guy out of the corner of her eye.
“Do you think he is part of the Keepers of the Blade?” she whispered.
Avice flicked at a magazine, as cool as a cucumber, but she knew that beneath the thick layer of clothes, he too was as tensed up as she was.
“He doesn’t look too familiar.”
The man looked around at the sparsely populated bus station and made his way into the convenience store. Yarra heard Avice curse under his breath.
“Just stay away from him,” he said. “Grab what you need and let’s head out the moment that he comes in the store.”
She nodded.
The bell chimed at the entrance of the convenience store as the man entered. He caught Yarra staring, and forced a smile on his face. “Some rain!”
“Yeah…,” Yarra managed with a weak smile.
Behind him, she could feel Avice tugging at her coat to hurry her purchase. She kept shooting glances at the man whose back was turned towards them as he considered his purchase of the many array of sandwiches on display. He was a head shorter than Avice, and under the light, he looked older than he did when she had first seen him outside. He emitted an innocent, nonchalant hum as he seemed to ponder making a decision.
The cashier, too absorbed with his show, barely looked up when they came up to the counter. He rang up their purchases with his eyes still sucked into the small light emitting box. Which was depressing in a way, as his muscle memory of the repetitive, mind-numbing actions was drilled into him so much as to be automatic. They paid for a meat bun and two hot drinks, and were about to head out when the lights above them started to flicker ominously. Not just one, but all of them.
In that moment, Yarra had another vision. Not many cascading, overlapping screens as she had seen earlier, but just one. And in this image, she saw it from her own point of view. She saw the ponytailed man in the vision turn around and aim a gun at them. There was a leer on his face, and he had deliberately parted his jacket to reveal a shirtless body. There, inked clearly, was a tattoo of a blade similar to Avice’s running from his left collarbone to his navel.
As soon as the vision ended, she turned to face the man and felt the blood drain from her face in doing so. His body was still turned against them. But, all of that changed within a few seconds. She saw him turn, and something in his hand gave off a metallic glint.
“Duck!” Yarra shouted, lunging at Avice and bringing them both onto the floor with a painful thud. The sound of a single gunshot and breaking glass was heard above them.
The cashier screamed out, exclaiming a string of profanities, and then all was silent again. The lights in the store flickered, dimmed and then burned out, plunging the store into total darkness. All that she could hear was the sound of the actors in the soap mechanically talking on, and the sickening creak of their assailant’s leather shoes moving in the dark.
Avice removed his backpack and placed a finger on Yarra’s lips, beckoning her to stop panting so noisily. He took a small packet of chewing gum that was on display, and threw it into the darkness. It landed with a skidding sound and a thud on the floor at the end of the aisle, temporarily distracting their attacker.
“I should have killed you on the bus when I had the chance…,” the man called out. “Imagine that! Little Avice, a traitor to the clan with the slut he ran off with! Today must be my lucky day. Your parents have put a bounty on your head!”
Yarra gulped. The Keepers of the Blades did not play around with traitors. Just a few hours after their escape, and a prize had already been put on Avice’s capture, or even worse, death.
Avice, however, seemed visibly unaffected by the threat. He knew that the man would follow the sound of the fallen object that he had thrown seconds earlier. Using this to his advantage, he beckoned for her to follow him in a silent crawl to the opposite side.
She followed, resting her clothed knees against the floor to prevent any squelching sounds that would have been produced by the boots that she wore. Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. Just then, a flash of lightning flooded in and she almost screamed at the sight of the man not even ten feet away from her. Luckily, he was facing the other way.
They used the long crash of thunder to crawl behind the man who was still oblivious to their position. She saw Avice’s figure crouch a mere five feet away from their attacker, resting fleetingly on his heels. He looked at her, then gestured for her to hide behind the counter with the cashier. That at least would offer her more solid barrier of protection against further gunshots.
She shook her head, too petrified to be apart from him. But he knew that time was of the essence. The longer they hid with no action, the higher the chance was that they would be found unprepared. With a huge spurt of adrenaline-driven energy, he pushed the bookrack in front of him, toppling the object over onto the gunman’s body. The magazines and books fell, followed by the heavy wooden object.
Their attacker, too surprised by the sudden move, did not have time to move out of the way. The bookrack crashed into his arms and the gun slipped out of his hand, skidding along the tiled floor.
“Yarra, get the gun!” Avice said, standing on the now horizontal bookrack, pinning the man down with his body weight in addition to the weight of the display itself.
She ran and held the revolver; it felt warm in her hands, still hot from when he fired the shot that felt like it had been only seconds earlier.
The man groaned in pain before Avice delivered a punch to his face. As the man grimaced, her lover began to transform in the dark. His metamorphosis was not as significant as that of a werewolf, but Yarra could see his usually tanned skin turning pale, almost pearl white – more so in the darkness. The color spread over his skin in blotches, that rapidly joined together seamlessly. The nails on his fingers grew longer and sharper. Avice then slashed at the man’s body, making her flinch with how viperously fast it was.
For a moment, she thought that Avice had slashed the man’s chest to kill. But the man did not howl in pain, as only his leather jacket had been torn apart like pieces of paper cut in the middle. There on his chest was the tattoo of a silver blade on his hairy chest. The man was also a member of the Keepers of the Blade, just as she had seen in her vision.
“How did you find us?” Avice shouted. Yarra had not seen him so angry before. The man, however, did not immediately answer, and merely continued groaning. Another punch landed on his right eye, and that time he howled. Only, the howl was not human, but more of a crude animalistic cry of pain. It made the fine hairs on Yarra’s neck stand straight.
Suddenly, the lights she thought had burnt out earlier came flickering back on. Sh
e saw Avice squatting over the bookrack clearly and in more detail. The man below had a bloodied lip and a swollen eye from where Avice had hit him. There was no denying that from the sallowness of the man’s skin and his now sharp claws pinned under the rack, and the four protruding fangs growling at her and Avice, that he was also a vampire. Was that how he had been able to track them so well?
“It is useless,” the man said, spitting a loose tooth and bloodied saliva at Avice’s face. “They are on their way!”
They did not need to ask the man who he was talking about. Instinctively, she looked out through the now cracked window where the bullet had pierced through. All was quiet. She looked back at Avice and shook her head despairingly, but also to indicate that nobody else was there. Nobody out of the ordinary anyway.
“Are you getting any visions?”
“Nothing too accurately prescient,” she said. She was shaking from head to toe, as shock started to kick in, in addition to the fatigue lingering from the escape. That was the first time that a vision had come mere seconds before it had happened. Usually, it would have warned her an hour before. Was she beginning to lose her power?
Claimed by Love (A Rizer Pack Shifter Series Book 3) Page 56