When he crossed the Boundary, all sense of them left. He could no longer feel them trying to get in. He knew they could no longer feel him. He collapsed, gasping for air.
Hours passed before he could haul himself up and roll over onto his back. Another eternity before he could get to his knees and then to his feet.
The sky was dark, the landscape before him barren. He was Alone. He had heard of others who lived Alone. How could they stand it?
He was going to have to figure it out. The encampment was behind him—a part of his past he could never repossess.
He shivered. Then something strange happened. His vision blurred, and moisture bubbled up from inside his eyes. It spilled over onto his cheeks. He wiped at the moisture with his fingers and stared at it in puzzlement. What was this? This had never happened to him before. It didn’t hurt, so he decided it was a mystery for later.
Strange, to come to a conclusion on one’s own without anyone else’s input.
Unsure what to do next, he looked toward the horizon again and blinked. Was that color in the far sky above the mountains? The firmament was turning the barest shade of pink. His ordeal had taken the entire night. Now the sun was coming up. And it was… He had no words for what it was.
He had seen many sunrises in his lifetime but had never noticed them before. Now he was mesmerized by the color, the progressive change, the rays of light stretching over the landscape, the sheer majesty of it all. Why had the sunrise never affected him so before? He had no answer, but the moisture flowed freely from his eyes.
He had the sense that the beauty of the sunrise and the moisture in his eyes were connected, but he couldn’t explain it.
Still mystified, he knew he had to go. He had no idea how far he’d have to walk to find sustenance, and he was still close enough to the encampment to be wary of danger.
He cast a final glance over his shoulder. It wasn’t regret—not really. It was the bittersweet realization that accompanies all necessary change. He’d made a decision—all on his own—and he had to live with it.
Chapter 4: Hypnotic Eyes
Maggie wanted to sigh with exhaustion but didn’t have time. It must have been four hours since she and Marcus left her house. He’d set the pace and kept a firm hold on her hand, not allowing her to fall behind.
They’d headed east. Maggie lived close to the foot of the mountain. As they headed for the passes and civilization became scarcer, Maggie became nervous. They were still in an area she knew well—she often hiked here—but how long would that last? The sun was not setting yet but would be soon, and Marcus showed no signs of stopping.
The incline steepened as they headed into the hills, and the air got thinner. Maggie kept reassuring herself with thoughts of the gun, but she had no opportunity to get to it. Even when the gradient was practically vertical, Marcus climbed with one hand and kept hold of her with the other.
When they reached more level ground—high enough that she could see the entire valley, including the rooftops of her neighborhood—Maggie jerked her arm away from him. He turned in surprise.
“Something wrong?”
“Where are you taking me?”
He sighed. She was learning that he did that when he didn’t want to answer a question.
“I told you—”
“You told me nothing. You said we were in danger at my house. Given the dead guy in the kitchen, I believed you, but we aren’t there anymore. I’m not going any farther until you explain.” She crossed her arms and stuck her jaw out.
Marcus glanced away, looking annoyed. “We aren’t safe here, Maggie. We’re probably being followed.” He stepped toward her. “I need to take you somewhere. I know we’ve been going a long time, but it’s not much farther.”
“Where?”
His hand dropped. “My team is waiting for us. Where they are is safe.” He glanced around, as if looking for a way to convince her. “I’m not very good at explaining things, Maggie. I don’t have a way with words as you do.”
Maggie shrugged uncomfortably. She did have a way with words, but it bugged her that he knew that.
“Anything I say is going to sound insane or just scare you. Please trust me a little further. When we get there, we’ll explain everything to you. I promise.”
Maggie fought with herself. If she explained this situation to anyone else—her mother, any of her girlfriends, Jonah—they’d tell her to run screaming away from Marcus. And rightly so. Yet in this moment, she found herself wanting to take his hand.
Behind Marcus two men emerged from a stand of trees. Maggie assumed they were hikers or campers and contemplated calling to them for help. Then she looked more carefully. Both of them sported the same awful haircut as the man who’d attacked her that morning, as well as the spider web tattoo over their eyes.
The two men spotted Maggie and Marcus, and their faces did not make Maggie want to have tea with them.
“Marcus!”
Marcus’s head whipped around. When he turned back, there was no fear in his face, only urgency.
He reached out and snatched her hand. “Maggie, run.”
She tried to nod, but he was already dragging her along behind him. He forsook the level path all together and clawed his way up the face of the mountain. After a few minutes, Maggie pulled her hand away.
“Let go. We’ll go faster.”
He didn’t complain, and she managed to stay with him for a while.
Forty feet above the path they’d left was another level dirt road. Maggie thought it might be the same one, and it simply wound higher and higher. It seemed to be what Marcus was aiming for.
Climbing straight up became wearing, and Marcus got ahead of Maggie before they reached the higher road. He pulled himself up onto the level earth then turned and grabbed her arm, pulling her up. Her shoulders and torso made it up, and she was about to throw one leg onto the road and hoist herself the rest of the way when something closed around her ankle.
It was a hand, a strong one, and it was going to pull her off the side of the mountain. She envisioned being thrown away from the face of the incline and bouncing down several hundred feet. Death would be merciful if that happened.
She grabbed a deep-seated root for anchorage. It didn’t help. The hand yanked her ankle down, and all the root did was give her something akin to a carpet burn as it pulled through her hand. If not for Marcus’s grip on her forearm, she would have gone over the precipice.
She gave up on the root and grasped his arm with both of hers, holding on for dear life. Marcus pulled something from his coat and leaned out over the drop-off. She couldn’t see what he had.
Suddenly Maggie felt…bleary. She smelled burning flesh; then her ears were ringing. A white-hot pincer was drilling into her skull. She tried to scream, but the pain was too intense. Unable to hold onto Marcus anymore, she put both hands to her head, but the sensation didn’t stop—if anything, it increased.
The world rang louder and louder. The pain grew so intense that her arms shook. Her throat was hoarse from trying to scream. She wished for oblivion.
Then the hand fell away from her ankle. The sensation, which had come on gradually, was gone so suddenly it took her breath away.
Marcus pulled her up onto the dirt road. She was panting. When her shoulders and torso were up, he grabbed the belt loops of her jeans and hauled her up the rest of the way. She lay down in the dirt, trembling and gasping.
After a moment, Marcus leaned over her. He put his hands on either side of her face and looked intently into her eyes. She was still too overcome by the experience to stop him or even wonder what he was doing.
He was looking at her but not seeing her. He gazed down, but his eyes were out of focus. Those eyes of his—amber with colorful flecks—were so strange and hypnotic… As he stared down at her, she felt better. Her nerves calmed, and her energy returned.
After a moment, his eyes focused again. He was looking at her now, and she was very aware that she was lying
on the ground on her back with him nearly on top of her. He was lying alongside her, but his body was right up against hers, and with him leaning over her and holding her face in his hands, it felt…intimate.
She shrugged uncomfortably, and he dropped his hands from her face, resting them in fists on the ground on either side of her head.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded, unable to find her voice.
He hesitated another moment before pushing himself up and taking her hands. “Take it easy,” he said, gently pulling her into a sitting position. He watched her warily, as though she might explode at any moment. “Any headaches?”
She shook her head. “What just happened?”
“He grabbed your ankle, tried to hurt you.”
She glanced at his hands, but they were empty. If he had a weapon, he’d already put it away.
“How are you, Maggie? Are you sure you feel all right?”
She didn’t want to tell him how shaken she was. Instead she crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked down. She could see both men on the road below them, lying on their backs. They were stirring.
“You didn’t kill them.”
He joined her. “No. Only stunned them. If nothing’s broken, they’ll pursue us again. We have to keep moving.”
He pulled her to her feet, chose a direction, and they jogged along the dirt path. Maggie didn’t protest. She was too shaken to do anything but allow herself to be led.
She didn’t know who those men were, but she knew they were evil. She could feel that. She didn’t know anything about Marcus either, but something told her that he was the safer of the two choices.
***
Twenty minutes later they were still jogging. When the path wound upward again, they left it, forging their own path through virgin woods. Maggie kept thinking she heard footsteps behind them, but her nerves were so frazzled that she knew she could be imagining it. Marcus made no sign that he’d heard anything, but every time she heard a noise, his pace quickened.
They came to a massive clearing. Maggie was vaguely reminded of a football field; only there wasn’t as much color. Or any hot guys in football gear.
A loud crunch came from behind them, and both Maggie and Marcus whipped around. The two men from before were standing not ten feet from them. The taller of the two glared at Marcus with a hateful, unforgiving stare; then his eyes shifted to Maggie. His mouth slid into a greasy grin, revealing crooked, yellow teeth.
“It is you.” His whisper was guttural enough to send a chill down Maggie’s spine.
This wasn’t the same man who attacked her in the parlor. How did he know what that man had said to her?
Marcus took her shoulders and turned her to face him.
“Maggie, there’s a huge boulder across the clearing. I want you to run toward it. I’ll be right behind you.”
“A rock? How is that going to save us?”
Marcus put his hand on the back of Maggie’s neck and pulled her face close to his. His fingers dug into the skin at the nape, though not painfully.
“Maggie, these are not decent men. Don’t let them touch you. Understand?”
Maggie nodded. The two men were talking to one another, but she couldn’t tell what they were saying.
Ready, Marcus mouthed.
She nodded.
“Go!”
She took off as fast as her legs could carry her. She’d never been a great runner, but she’d never had the motivation of raw fear before. As soon as she turned, she saw the boulder. It would be taller than her when she reached it and at least twelve feet in width. She wondered how a boulder would help them. Perhaps Marcus had guns hidden behind it? Or a car?
She still had her gun in her purse. When she reached the boulder, she would pull it out—to defend Marcus, if nothing else.
When she was halfway across the clearing, Maggie suddenly felt as if she were running in slow motion, pushing through jell-o instead of air. It was like a nightmare where she was being chased and her pursuers were running at normal speed, while she floundered at a snail’s pace.
Out of the corner of her eye, Maggie could see a dark, towering figure coming toward her, but whether to meet her or catch her, she couldn’t say. She tried to turn her head to see the figure more fully, but it was like trying to push her face through rock; it just wouldn’t turn that way.
Then an arm was wrapped tightly around her waist, and she couldn’t breathe. Or see. The meadow, the boulder, the mountain…it all fell away into opaqueness.
A flash of purple light. A rock formation. Brown boots walking across a room at eye level. A hand with an ugly black burn on it. A woman standing in front of a broken lighthouse. Blood on her hands. A whisper of a voice. Gasping, clawing for air.
With a painful inhalation of breath, Maggie opened her eyes and kicked viciously away from whoever had her. She was lying on the ground in the arms of a stranger she couldn’t see. She half rolled, half dragged, half clawed away before realizing it was Marcus.
He didn’t try to stop her. Rivulets of sweat were rolling down his face, and he was panting.
Maggie looked around. They were in the same place—the meadow on the mountain—but it was…different. Where the day had been bright and sunny, it was now dark and ominous. The sun had gone down when Maggie blinked, but it was more than that. Dark-gray clouds covered the sky all the way to the horizon.
Maggie swiveled around to see the boulder. At first she thought it was not there. Then she realized it was, but it was no longer one big boulder. It was in pieces. It looked like it had been struck by lightning and shattered.
A rock formation.
Maggie put a hand to her forehead. The flashes. One of them was a rock formation. Now, standing ten feet in front of the shattered boulder, under an overcast sky, she was seeing that formation.
So Jonah was right; they were memories. She’d been here before, and ever since Vegas she’d kept seeing this very spot, this very formation.
In her flash it was different, though. For some reason, she’d never realized before that there were people sitting on top of it. It was dark in the memory, and the people were merely darker silhouettes that blended in with the night. A light that struck Maggie as artificial illuminated them, and their eyes glowed when it hit them.
“You all right, Maggie?”
Maggie yelped and scrambled toward Marcus, for he was not the one who had asked her. Whirling around, Maggie came face to face with an enormous black man. His eyes were blue, which was striking in an African American, and he looked at her with concern.
The tall, dark figure who’d been running toward her before must have been him.
His eyes slid sideways to Marcus, who got to his feet.
“Maggie, this is Karl.”
Maggie didn’t know what to say. Karl was four times her size—simply gargantuan—and she knew nothing more about him than she did about Marcus.
When she didn’t answer, Karl addressed Marcus. “Mission accomplished?”
“Yes, but with more questions than answers,” Marcus said.
Karl let out a soft, rumbling chuckle. “Naturally.”
Maggie got to her feet. The earth felt different. The air smelled unusual. The wind felt strange. Marcus came up beside her. He peered down at her in that disconcerting way again, as though seeing into her thoughts.
“What just happened?”
“Everything’s all right now, Maggie. We have some time. I’ll explain everything.”
“Marcus, I swear if you say that to me one more time—”
He surprised her by laughing. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what this must be like for you.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We just need to get over to that rock.”
Maggie dropped her head back in exasperation. “Why?”
“Because that’s where the rest of our team is.”
“What, like, inside the rock?”
His eyebrows went up, and his smile widened. “Precisely.”
Chapter 5: The Good Doctor
Marcus held out his hand, and against her better judgment, Maggie took it. He led her to the shattered boulder with Karl trailing behind. Walking to the opposite side of it, he let go of her hand and knelt in the grass. His hand disappeared under a steering wheel-sized rock, and she heard high-pitched tones, like the dials of a cell phone.
A square of sod to the left of where they stood caved in several inches then slid out of view. Beneath it Maggie glimpsed a granite staircase leading into the depths of the mountain.
A slender figure emerged from the hole, rising by quantum degrees from the earth.
Despite the gray light of…whatever time of day this was, Maggie could tell the woman was Caucasian with dark hair. She looked steadily at Marcus with hooded eyes.
“What time is it?” The woman’s voice was steady and resonating.
“It is late,” Marcus answered.
“Too late?”
“It is never too late.”
The woman’s face softened into a smile. She held out her hand, which Marcus took, smiling.
“Lila. Everything quiet tonight?”
“Yup, how about you? Mission uneventful?”
“Not exactly.”
The woman called Lila looked alarmed. “What do you mean?”
Marcus waved her off. “Not to worry. Everyone’s fine.” He turned and pulled Maggie up to stand beside him.
“Maggie.” Lila stepped toward her, and for a moment, Maggie thought the young woman would hug her.
Marcus grabbed Lila’s arm. “Lila,” he said quietly.
Lila froze, her smile fading. She looked down at the ground. “Sorry,” she said, matching Marcus’s quiet tone. “I forgot.”
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