Muscle by muscle, she forced herself to unclench her death grip on the steering wheel. Then her body jerked as a new wave of dread hit. She twisted in her seat to search for any sign that she’d been followed or was being watched.
All she found were the peaceful sights and sounds of a quiet neighborhood settling into dusk. The adrenaline faded, to be replaced by bone-rattling tremors and the faint roil of nausea.
She was going to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder over this day. She had earned it, she was planning for it and nobody was going to take it away from her.
What happened made no sense. Who would want to attack her? What was she running from?
How did those men know her name?
She didn’t know anyone or anything. She certainly didn’t own anything anymore. Nobody had whispered a mafia deathbed confession to her in the ER. The whole thing might be laughable except that four people were dead.
[struck, overpowered, carried to a black, unmarked van]
A wail built at the back of her throat. She clenched her teeth and swallowed the sound. If she started making noise, she might not stop. Worse, she would draw unwanted attention to herself.
[so many hawks, swirling like a storm in the jewel-toned sky]
She couldn’t just sit here outside her old apartment. This street was too trafficked. Sooner or later someone would notice.
She inspected the abrasions on the heels of her hands and dismissed them as minor. Then she tilted the rearview mirror and checked the damage to her face, pressing light fingers along her swelling cheek and jaw. The damage wasn’t too bad. If she were at the hospital she would order x-rays to check for bone fractures, but that would be just a precaution.
What hit her in the solar plexus, causing her mouth to wobble and eyes to blur, was the bright spray of drying blood that dotted her face and hair. She looked down. She was covered in other people’s blood.
[flat, popping noises, the blossom of ruby stars on a child’s T-shirt, and four people falling]
She pressed both hands to her sore mouth, panting, until the fresh wave of nausea had passed.
Oooh-kay. Okay. Usually she only dealt with that much blood in a medical facility where she was insulated with scrubs and the duties of her profession, and she wasn’t clammy from shock.
She had to wash, but she couldn’t walk into a public restroom looking the way she did. She looked around. The unopened bottle of water she had bought earlier lay in the passenger seat, where she had thrown it after the drive-thru. She also kept a first aid kit and a change of clothes in a gym bag in her trunk.
A block ahead of her, a car turned onto the street. Twin beams of light flashed across her face. The car approached at a slow pace. She twisted at the waist and bent down, drumming her fingers in a rapid tempo against the water bottle until the car had passed.
She had to move. Definitely.
She started the car and drove around to the back of the apartment house, and pulled into the parking lot. There was only one car parked in the slot closest to the house. A Dumpster squatted in the corner of the lot like a giant, bloated orange insect. She pulled the Toyota around and backed toward the Dumpster then popped the trunk.
Switching off the engine, she jumped out and limped to the back of the car as she glanced around. Dusk was deepening fast. The spring warmth from earlier that afternoon had fled, leaving behind a deepening chill. The windows from neighboring houses threw golden rectangles of light across the darkening backyards.
She didn’t see or hear anybody outside.
Did that matter? Would she be able to hear anybody in time to avoid them? How paranoid should she be?
That woman in the Grotto said she had a powerful enemy.
She guessed that meant she should be pretty paranoid.
[We’ll kill everybody in the restaurant if we have to. Not that we’d mind. We like to kill.]
Who talks like that? Nobody does.
She yanked her cotton sweater off and pulled it inside out, shivering as she inspected it under the dim light in the trunk. The only spot she could find that was not soiled was inside the back. She opened the bottle, splashed water on the material and scrubbed hard at her face, hands and arms, wetting the sweater as needed. While she worked to clean herself, she took a mouthful of water, rinsed her sore gums and tongue and spat out rusty liquid. Then she swiped at her braid with the ruined sweater, threw it in the Dumpster and yanked open the gym bag. A worn white T-shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear and old, blue canvas shoes were tucked inside.
Shaking from cold, she plunged her head and arms into the T-shirt. Did she need to ditch her jeans? She checked. The knees were wet with large, dark red patches.
[people toppling like mown flowers]
She must have crawled through blood to get to her purse. She didn’t remember. She had been focused on the men, their guns, the hawks and her own terror.
The jeans joined her sweater in the Dumpster, and she hopped into the clean pair.
A small wind gusted into her face, and a thread of a voice said in her head, Hurry.
She froze. How could she have forgotten her daemon? She slammed the trunk, slid into the driver’s seat and started the car again, letting the engine idle as she turned the heat on. Only then did she roll her window down partway.
The breeze blew in and bounced around the interior of the Toyota. Whatever it was, it seemed as upset as she.
Is there more danger? she asked. She locked her doors.
Not here. Not now. It swirled around her. It seemed as uneasy as she did about being motionless, but she could be projecting. If she followed her first impulse, she wouldn’t stop running until she hit California. Then she would think very hard about getting on a boat.
But there’s still danger, she said. Close? Searching?
Yes. We must leave.
Okay.
With her shock lessening so that she could more or less strategize, she said, I need to go to the police.
No!
Disappointment and fresh fear slammed her. Why not?
Her daemon didn’t answer. Perhaps it didn’t have the capacity to communicate the answer, or she didn’t have the capacity to hear what it said. It continued to rotate in agitation around her so she turned her own thoughts to answering.
She didn’t believe her house burned in a freak accident. Someone set fire to it. She didn’t yet know why, so she set that aside for now.
If she had been followed from her house, those men would have taken her earlier in a much less public place—for instance when she sat outside Gretchen’s house, or when she was alone in the Grotto. Nobody knew where she was, or where she would be next. They couldn’t, because even she hadn’t known. She had gone through her entire day on impulse and instinct.
How had they found her at Friday’s?
The restaurant manager had done as she had asked, that’s how, and had called the police. Whoever was looking for her either had contacts on the police force, or they could monitor police communications.
She blew out a shaky breath, more grateful for her small presence than she could say. Without it, she would be headed right now for the nearest police station.
Okay. No police. And visiting Gretchen again was out. She couldn’t put the other woman in danger, no matter how much she wanted to see what the psychic would make of the hazardous Rubik’s cube her life had become. For the same reason, she wouldn’t be looking up old classmates in South Bend or coworkers in St. Joe, or go knocking uninvited on Justin and Tony’s door.
A train wreck of a feeling clenched in her gut. Shit, she was more worried than ever about Justin.
Air caressed her cheek.
I know, she said to it. I can’t have a nervous breakdown in the parking lot. I’m a sitting duck here.
The world had transformed into a weird mystery, and she was all alone in it except for a small puff of air that talked to her. It was such a quiet little voice, just something she heard in her head. For all she
knew it was a splinter of her own overstressed personality.
If it was, it was smarter than the rest of her and had saved her life, probably more than once. It also seemed to be pretty clued in to what was going on, so she needed to pay sharp attention whenever it gave her any advice.
The thing was, she didn’t think it was a piece of herself. Maybe if it had been just a small voice in her head, yeah sure, but it wasn’t. Even now it plucked at strands of her hair and gusted against her swelling cheek as if patting the injury.
She whispered, “You’ve been with me all day, haven’t you? I just wasn’t aware that it was you I was hearing.” The presence circled around her, like nothing so much as a small cat purring. She put a hand to her cheek. “Okay. As the Skipper might say to Gilligan, where to now, little buddy?”
North, her daemon said, flowing along her fingers in an insubstantial caress. Go north. We must find the Grandmother.
The vision at the Grotto had said Mary needed to travel north, but the woman hadn’t looked anything like a grandmother. Mary chewed her lip as she thought back over the conversation. The woman had also warned her about danger and told her to take care.
Later in the restaurant she had tried to rewrite what had happened because she hadn’t understood. While reasonable, that was a mistake that could have gotten her killed and had probably contributed to the murders of four innocent people.
She rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t think about it right now. She had to channel Scarlett O’Hara, and think about that tomorrow.
Okay, she said to her only friend. North it is. But I’m going to have a truckload of questions to ask when we find this Grandmother of yours.
She put the car in gear and, her thoughts rambling through bits and pieces of TV and movie trivia, she pulled away from her old home.
Overhead, a couple of resting hawks took flight and followed.
* * *
HER GAS GAUGE hovered a millimeter over the red E. She had to stop and fill her tank. At least if she was being hunted, they already knew she was in town. A credit card trace wouldn’t tell them anything new, and she could keep the cash she had for later. Thanks to the kindness of Gretchen and T.G.I. Friday’s, she still had ninety-five dollars in cash.
What kind of response time would anybody have to tracing a Visa swipe? An hour? Half an hour? That had to depend, in part, on their resources and how close they were to the site of the transaction, and also on how secretive they had to be, because God only knew, the attack on her had been illegal six ways to Sunday.
Screw it. She didn’t have a choice. She would have to go in with an agenda and get out fast.
She pulled into the first Marathon station she came to and leaped out, her abused muscles yelping in protest. She kept her head down as she shoved through one of the double doors and arrowed toward a restroom.
Once inside, she checked her appearance. She’d missed a couple of smears of blood. She threw handfuls of cold water over her face and neck, snatched paper towels from a dispenser and scrubbed herself dry.
The quick wash couldn’t improve the looks of the hollow-eyed woman in the mirror with the lopsided, bruised face, but at least it removed the last visible traces of blood. When she was finished she strode through the convenience store, grabbing bottles of water, a large coffee, a tuna sandwich, a turkey sandwich, a chocolate bar, and a couple of bags of trail mix.
The cashier was a beanpole of a male around twenty years old. He held a cell phone between his jaw and one skinny shoulder and talked into it as he checked her items. She kept the bruised side of her face angled away from him, staring out the plate glass at the passing traffic as he swiped her card.
The countdown began.
While the kid bagged her items in transparent plastic, she pivoted and used the ATM machine opposite the cash register. She punched numbers to withdraw the limit as her heart rate picked up. The machine spat out green bills. She snatched at them, grabbed her bags and launched out the door.
Now that she was taking action, she found the focus she used in the ER. Her movements became smooth and efficient. She tossed the bags in the car, jammed the coffee cup into the driver’s seat drink holder, slammed the gas nozzle into her gas tank and swiped her card again. As it processed she did a three-sixty.
All the traffic looked normal. A couple of cars pulled in and out of the gas station. The island where she stood was exposed by white halogen light. She imagined the barrel of a gun pointing at her from the shadows. There was no breeze.
Her card was approved. She cocked the nozzle, and the machine poured gas into her tank. Time bled out. She tracked it by the rhythmic pulse of the pump, which ran with excruciating slowness.
She wished she could try calling Justin again to see if he was all right, but all of her nerves were screaming at her to get on the move.
The pump clicked off, the sound overloud in the quiet evening. She nearly leaped out of her skin.
She had the gas tank capped and was in the driver’s seat within the space of her next breath, and she forced herself to pull away from the gas station slow and smooth, like a normal customer. As soon as she was on the road she sped up.
Nothing could have induced her to go near the U.S. 31 Bypass or 31 Business North. They were too closely linked to the routes that led back to St. Joe. If someone was hunting her, those roads would be watched.
No doubt there were dozens of back roads that could also take her north, but she didn’t know them, so she drove northeast, back toward Cleveland Road. She would take the 80 Toll Road East past Elkhart and turn north on Highway 131. She’d driven that route before. The roads were fast, and she would be traveling in the opposite direction of St. Joe.
All her surviving material possessions were with her in the car. She had no other change of clothes. She had two hundred and ninety-five dollars in cash. After this, she wouldn’t dare access her bank or credit accounts until she understood what was happening and, hopefully, was in some measure of safety again.
She had no idea where she was going, who was chasing her, why someone would try to kidnap her or why the attempt had been so violent. She was weaponless, she didn’t know who she was supposed to find, or how, and she didn’t understand the various psychic and/or strange phenomena she had experienced or witnessed that day. If she hadn’t seen the cloud of attacking hawks for herself, she never would have believed it.
She rubbed at the back of her neck and sighed. That seemed to sum up her situation pretty well.
She reached the entrance to the Toll Road, rolled through a booth for a ticket, and pulled onto the highway. Then she stepped on the gas until she was traveling the speed limit. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention and get a speeding ticket.
Full darkness had descended. The sky was a latticework of thin clouds and clear starlight, hung over a dark, quiet countryside dotted with farmland and clustered lights from the occasional neighborhood. There was a half-moon. She glanced at the moon a few times to see if it was surrounded by the Van Gogh effect, but it was partly obscured by clouds so she couldn’t tell. She gave up and concentrated on her driving instead.
She kept a back window cracked open. She was traveling at a speed that made the frigid wind knife through the interior but rather than close her window and perhaps trap her daemon outside, she turned up the heat. Welcome warmth blew over her damp hair. She sipped coffee and tried, as much as she was able, to let the tranquil scene soothe her jangled nerves.
She needed to regroup and gather her energy. It was difficult to do when she felt like someone had scraped her insides raw with the jagged edge of a grapefruit spoon. Whatever else happened next—and she truly could not imagine what that would be—she knew she was in for a long, hard night, and another long, hard day tomorrow.
Soon she reached the exit for Highway 131. She suffered a few bad moments as she pulled up to pay at the tollbooth. Her fingers were shaking as she handed money to the attendant, but the middle-aged man seemed bored and sleepy, and
he hardly spared her a second glance.
Giddy with relief, she pulled up to the intersection and turned north. She made good time for a while as she passed through the small towns sprinkled throughout southern Michigan. Soon the highway broadened into four lanes. Then she picked up speed again, soaking up a fugitive sense of safety she felt at increasing the physical distance between her and South Bend.
Close to an hour later, she came to the outskirts of Kalamazoo and the traffic increased, and a horrified realization swept over her. I-94 was another fast highway. It hugged the southern part of Lake Michigan like a lover, curved north to St. Joe and then sliced due east across the width of Michigan.
It was a quick route, easy to drive. Someone could have traveled directly from St. Joe and already be in the Kalamazoo area, lying in wait for her arrival.
Wait. Did that even make sense? If she didn’t have any idea where she was going, how could anybody else know? Was she panicking unnecessarily? The problem was, she didn’t understand how they had found her in the first place.
Her attackers were somehow connected to the police, and she was vulnerable through the license plates on her car. But if someone had traced her that way, wouldn’t they have already pulled her over? Or could somebody be following her even now? How could she tell in the dark?
She felt as if she had slammed into a guardrail doing ninety miles an hour. The lingering energy from caffeine and adrenaline drained out the soles of her feet, and her body began to shake. Her eyesight blurred, and she had to keep blinking hard to keep the heavy traffic in focus.
She didn’t have a mind for this kind of existence. She glanced around, trying to spot any anomalies. All the traffic was traveling more or less at the same speed and going in the same direction. That’s what people did on highways.
Her body reminded her that she’d been on the losing end of a fight and dropped to the pavement more than once. Her hands, wrists, arms and shoulders throbbed with a ferocious ache. Between the open window and the blowing heat and her own whirling senses, she couldn’t sense whether or not she still had her airy presence.
Rising Darkness (A GAME OF SHADOWS NOVEL) Page 9