Had Matthew already left for whatever destination he refused to divulge to her? The thought brought a measured sense of relief that she wouldn’t have to face him today. Perhaps he didn’t want to see her ever again. The anguish nearly crushed her. She bit her lower lip, forcing the tears to stay away.
Outside, clouds gathered, and the temperature dropped, but she was oblivious to it as she sat slumped in her office chair, her chin resting in her left hand. She picked the sprinkles off a donut left over from that morning and laid them in neat rows on her desk.
A milkshake would be nice, she thought, but the idea of getting up and driving to the diner seemed like too much work. She didn’t feel like seeing anyone or talking to anyone right now.
The wind picked up and the trailer rocked slightly. It wasn’t until the first burst of thunder and crack of lightning that she became aware of the turmoil outside. Like the devil’s own minions were set loose, the storm came boiling in from the south, bruising the sky with angry flashes of lightning. The day quickly transformed into darkness and rain, and then hail the size of golf balls pelted the trailer, creating a cacophony of sound that forced JD to cover her ears.
Since she had walked to work that morning, her car was still at the apartment, parked under the landing of the staircase. She hoped that the General Store and trees surrounding it would shield the rest of her car from the hail. JD considered making a run for it back to her apartment, to escape the noise, but decided to remain where she was. She didn’t want to get dented herself from those monstrous hailstones.
Trapped inside the trailer, she shivered as she sat at her desk watching the ferocity of the storm rampage through Torrey. Then the power went out. The storm raged on all afternoon, before there was a momentary lull. JD thought she could make a run for it back to her apartment, but just as she stepped foot outside her office, the wind picked up, and another downpour began.
JD stood in the doorway, awestruck by the amount of water gushing and flowing over the streets, flooding the field to the south. The trees whipped about like tassels on the handlebars of a kid’s bike - she expected branches to start snapping under the stress.
At that moment, something came crashing down on the corner of her trailer above her desk. There was a horrendous outburst of shattering glass. JD flinched away, arms covering her head. A moment later, she looked up, and to her amazement saw that the corner of her office ceiling had crumbled and the window on the wall beneath it had shattered. Rain slanted inward, soaking everything almost at once. She ran to the desk to retrieve her laptop and scurried to the other end of the trailer, hunkering down in the corner between the fake tree and the bookshelf. She couldn’t think of anything that could have caused the damage. There were no trees above the trailer, unless the wind had been strong enough to hurl a tree branch from where a stand of trees stood down the road. Or, perhaps part of the schoolhouse roof had been blown off and landed on the trailer.
After half an hour, she became tired, hungry, and weary of the storm. The storm raged on in a fury of howling wind, flinging hailstones and rain against the trailer as if it was trying to rip it open and grab her. JD glanced at her watch. It was almost 3:00 pm and she hadn’t eaten lunch. She closed her eyes and concentrated on drawing in calming breaths to stave off the anxiety that was threatening to overwhelm her.
Perhaps it was the sound of the endless rain and swirling wind, or the stress of her breaking heart which exhausted her, but whatever the reasons were, she did not resist the tug of sleep when it came. Curling up around her laptop protectively, she closed her eyes. Soon, sleep released her from the chaos around her and the emotional pain inside, if only for a short while.
Sometime during her nap, the storm exhausted itself and simply evaporated into thin, wispy clouds in the distance. JD startled awake when she heard a crash. Her heart raced as she quickly surveyed her surroundings. Everything seemed to possess a strange, reddish tint. She took in the damaged office. Shattered glass was spread all over the floor and her desk. The crushed corner of the office trailer where the ceiling met the two walls looked more serious than she’d first realized. It was early evening by her best judgement, but the sky was still dark and overcast.
The sound of the crash came again, as the vandal from two weeks ago had returned and was throwing bricks against the schoolhouse walls, again. She stood up and set her laptop on the floor where she had been laying and hurried to the door to go outside. She nearly fell out the door instead. The steps were missing. They had simply been ripped from their anchors and were gone. She stared in disbelief. She squatted down at the edge, grasped the doorframe and hopped down, landing lightly on her heels.
JD paused momentarily as she noticed that the reddish haze hadn’t been limited to her office. She wondered if perhaps she had knocked her head, and the blow had somehow altered her vision. She rubbed her eyes and looked about, but the redness remained. JD shook her head and went into the schoolhouse. She’d deal with her eyesight later.
Crashing, banging, and thumping noises continued inside as she approached the building. She headed for the front door of the schoolhouse and saw that it was hanging lopsided from its top hinge, splintered in half. The storm couldn’t possibly have caused this kind of damage, she reasoned, considering the surrounding homes didn’t appear to have taken a similar beating.
She shoved the door aside and ducked through. Craning her neck, she could see gaping holes in the roof that dripped water. Puddles covered the bare dirt floor. Bits of plaster, slivers of wood, paper, and garbage were scattered everywhere.
Running feet and muffled giggles came from somewhere in the dark recess of the building. Kids, she thought with a grimace.
“Get out of here or I’ll call the police!” she shouted as she headed in the direction of the noises. More giggles came from the darkness, close to where the box stood, the blue tarp seemingly destroyed in the storm, although it looked like part of it was burned. Indeed, she could detect a faint hint of smoke on the air.
“This is private property. Get out now!” She hollered as she got closer to the where the box had once stood, but all that remained was the blue tarp, or what remained of it. Errant breezes disturbed the remains of the tarp causing it to flap up and down like a wounded bird. She spotted the form of a kid dash under the tarp. JD charged after him without a second thought. She snatched the corner of the tarp and yanked it away, expecting to see a couple of kids beneath it. Instead, she saw nothing. The tarp fell away and all that was beneath it was bare, packed earth. The box was gone. There was no sign of children. JD was dumbfounded. She heard something like wind rushing through the shattered door. She spun around, but didn’t have time to draw a breath before something shadowy slammed into her, knocked her down, and covered her senses in blackness.
Chapter 22
As she felt herself returning to consciousness, she knew instinctively that she didn’t want to wake up. She forced herself to remain in the nothingness because, she could sense that somewhere on the edge of her awareness, there was a deep, throbbing pain. The pain wasn’t beckoning her out of oblivion; it had sunk its claws into her and was dragging her into reality.
Her hearing was the first of her senses to betray her. Strange beeping noises were rudely interfering with her efforts of remaining oblivious. Then her eyes registered light beyond her closed lids and they wanted to open and seek out the source. JD turned her head away from the light which only served to awaken her sense of touch. Warm, soft fabric seemed to envelope her.
She allowed one eye to peek and assess her situation. She saw tiny white and mint green tiles on a vertical surface. JD opened the other eye. Her sense of smell kicked in. Pine-scented cleanser, freshly-laundered linen, and the sharp, unpleasant odor of latex assailed her. She looked down the length of her body, which was covered with a thin, white blanket. One arm had a plastic band around the wrist; the other had a tube stuck into the soft skin at the crook of her elbow. There was no mistaking that she was in a hospit
al room. She sat up at once. The sudden movement unplugged something. A machine at the side of her bed began beeping loudly. Her head felt as heavy as a bowling ball. She slumped back against her pillows as the room tilted at an odd angle.
“Whoa, easy,” a man’s voice said from somewhere nearby. “You’re wired to stuff, don’t go setting off the alarms.” She didn’t recognize the voice, but right then, it wasn’t important as she tried to get her reeling senses under control and fought the urge to vomit.
“Settle down,” a woman called from the distance. Shoes squeaked across the tiled floor toward her.
JD felt the woman’s warm, soft hands move over her body as she got the wires straightened out and plugged back into the machine so it would stop bleating like a lost lamb.
“Get that thing out of my arm,” she said groggily.
“You’re on a drip, honey. You’re awfully dehydrated. Relax,” the nurse said as she began to take her vitals.
Dehydrated? That was the least of her problems. Her head felt like it was going to split open like an over ripe melon. Her chest ached and when she drew in a breath, her ribs burned. She felt a pressure cuff squeeze her arm and something cool clamped to the end of her right middle finger. The nurse stuck something in her ear and checked the bandages on her head that she didn’t realize were there.
The nurse left with a warning. “Don’t move too quickly. I’ll be back to check on you in a bit.” JD lay there a moment, listening to the beeping machines and her own breathing before she remembered that someone else was in the room with her. She turned her head carefully to the right and saw a man sitting in the chair next to her. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at her intently. A butterfly bandage was across his left cheek, and his eye looked a little bruised. What was worse, she didn’t know who he was. At least, for several long moments, she didn’t know. She kept looking at him, and he looked back at her, waiting. It finally occurred to her who the man was.
“Nathan?” she croaked.
He nodded. “How is the head?”
She ignored the question. “What happened to you?”
“Took care of a vagrant problem at your site,” he replied.
“What are you doing here?”
“Just checking on you,” he said as if he did this every day.
“Why?” she asked, her voice full of distrust. He looked like he had been there awhile with the chair pulled away from the wall, a blanket slung over the back of it, and a pillow tucked under his arm. Had he been sleeping here as well? How long had she been out?
“I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
JD studied him carefully. It felt like it would be a normal thing for him to be there at her bedside, but her rational self, argued the fact that he was still pretty much a stranger, and strangers didn’t sleep by your bedside in the hospital.
She was desperately thirsty and looked around for the nurse’s call button. Nathan stood, leaned over her and snatched the call button off a hook above her head and handed it to her. She lifted her left hand to press the button and saw that it was bandaged. She paused as she turned and twisted her hand, looking perplexed. After a moment, she pressed the button and set the button down as Nathan sat back down.
A different nurse appeared almost instantly, as if she were on her way in to check on her anyway. “Can I have some water please?” JD croaked, almost asking for a slice of lemon to go with it. The nurse smiled as if pleased and hurried away with a cheerful, “You bet!”
JD over at Nathan. “What happened to me?” she asked.
“You hit your head,” Nathan said, looking like he was feeling her pain and motioned toward his own brow.
JD reached up and touched her bandaged head, locating the tender spot above her right eye. She didn’t know how serious it was, but the bump felt huge, and she wondered if she was going to have a scar. She remembered being struck with something, but her memory was fuzzy. I should have worn my hardhat, she thought remorsefully.
“I figured out that part already,” she said with a hint of sarcasm. “How did I hit my head?”
Nathan cocked his head. “You don’t remember?”
She thought back, remembering chasing after a kid and turning around to see something large and black slam into her. Nothing more.
“No,” she said slowly.
“You were assaulted. I scared him off,” Nathan explained.
JD waited for him to continue, but after a moment, it was clear he wasn’t going to divulge anything more.
“By who?” she pressed.
“A vagrant,” Nathan answered.
JD considered his bandaged face and began to piece together an explanation that he seemed reluctant to share.
“He hit you, too?” She motioned to his face.
Nathan nodded.
“What happened exactly?” she asked.
The nurse returned with a large, plastic mug that had a straw sticking out of it. She pulled a table on wheels over to her bed and set the mug on it, then pushed it closer to JD where she could easily reach it. When the nurse left, JD tossed the straw aside, using both hands to grasp the mug to drink deeply. When she was satiated, she set the mug down and looked expectantly at Nathan to answer her earlier question, but he was gone. She looked about the room, bewildered.
The nurse returned with a small paper cup containing a pain pill. JD took it gratefully as she was beginning to feel the pain in her head radiate over her face and down her neck and shoulders.
“What happened?” JD asked the nurse.
“They said you had an accident at a construction site. Don’t you remember?” the nurse asked.
“Who are they?”
“Why, the two men that brought you here, a police officer and the man that was just here,” she replied. So, Matthew hadn’t returned to the site, or if he did, he hadn’t been the one to rescue her. The thought sent a piercing jab of regret through her. Or, was he the one who had attacked her? After the last time she had seen him and how rough he had been with her and the horrible things he had said, she wouldn’t have been surprised. What she didn’t understand was, why?
“Where am I?” JD asked, remembering that Torrey didn’t have a hospital.
The nurse gave her a puzzled expression. “In a hospital,” she replied slowly.
“No, I mean, what town?” JD said as patiently as she could.
The nurse laughed a little, patting JD’s arm as if she was relieved that she still had her senses about her. “Richfield,” she told her. “Is there anything else you need?”
“No,” JD lied.
The nurse left, taking the empty paper cup with her. What JD really needed was her laptop, a phone, and a double chocolate chip milkshake with a brownie. She was getting out of here tomorrow. She didn’t even know what today was, or how long she had been out, but she had a feeling she was behind schedule. She looked around for a calendar or clock, something to help her know where in the planning schedule she was. For all she knew, she had been out cold for a week.
JD reached up and fingered the bandage around her head again, forgetting for a moment that her left hand was bandaged too. She ran her other hand over it, but did not sense any pain. Curious as to what kind of wound she had received there, she peeled the covering off and removed a bloodied square of cloth. To her astonishment, a symbol had been burned into her flesh, an encircled six-pointed circle. Just like Matthew’s. Just like the one on the box. Had Matthew done this to her?
***
“She doesn’t remember?” Roy asked as they sat outside the hospital in his cruiser.
“No,” Nathan responded. He stared straight ahead, unmoving and tight as rope ready to snap. Roy studied him for a bit, and then said, “I don’t suppose you had something to do with it?”
Nathan shot him an exasperated look. “The schoolhouse was swarming with imps. She was lucky I showed up when I did, what with all the hell breaking loose that day. She could do without that memory.” Nathan exh
aled heavily, and then continued, “But I couldn’t remove the mark.”
“What mark?” Roy asked before taking a drink from his thermos.
“Quabin’s symbol, it’s burned into her hand.” Nathan glanced at Roy meaningfully and then held up his own hand, the same mark on his own.
“Why would Quabin mark her?”
Nathan looked down, searching his thoughts and feelings. “I don’t know, but Matthew has gone rogue and the box is missing. It seems to me there was a coordinated effort in keeping us distracted with the all the Fallens swarming in, while he betrayed us by freeing Quabin,” he said. A moment later, he added, “I just don’t know why Julia was pulled into this and why she was marked.”
“Could she be the one we are waiting for?” Roy asked.
Nathan shook his head, “If she is, then why did she betray us and help Matthew set Quabin free? I don’t get it. The One we are waiting for would come with a sword to battle Quabin and set all the souls that are trapped here free. Not free Quabin and trap the souls further.”
“We don’t know who JD is exactly, that’s for sure.” Roy responded. “But, now we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands.”
“I know. I know. I just can’t believe Matthew did this. I’ll head to Enosha and recruit some help to find him and the Box.”
“What about JD?” Roy asked.
Nathan paused. “I don’t know. She’s definitely mortal and probably just another hapless victim of Quabin’s like Matthew and I are. I’ll make sure she gets back on track with her work and then send her packing back to L.A. as soon as her work is finished here.”
Nathan got out of Roy’s cruiser, climbed in his own truck parked next to it, and drove away. He had to find Matthew, had to end this before Quabin could organize the Fallens again. And what to do with JD? He just hoped he could keep her out of it long enough to see her safely back to L.A., before the confrontation between the Fallens and the Host, which was bound to happen. There was no stopping it. The mark on her hand troubled him. It wouldn’t be there if she hadn’t willingly done something to accept it. But what had she done?
If I Fall... Page 13