Stuck With a Rock Star

by Amelie Bloom

  I was sorely tempted to growl a little from behind my boulder and scare the daylights out of them, but I didn’t want them to get into the SUV and out of earshot.

  After the woman hung up with the tow truck, she said, “I wonder if the girlfriend is really up here?”

  Girlfriend?

  It dawned on me that the paps were referring to me. As far as the world of celebrity gossip tabloids was concerned, I was Jax Fitzroy’s woman.

  I took the long way around through the trees before I dared rejoin the road and return to the cabin.

  As I mounted the porch, what I saw hanging from the knob on the front door made my blood run cold.

  Miss Stabby had found us.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’d thought the decapitated rats were disturbing, but this was even worse. Miss Stabby had left another rat, but this time it had been barbequed almost beyond recognition.

  I picked up the envelope placed neatly on the mat next to the roasted rat and tore it open.

  “I can’t live with the thought of you being with another woman,” the note read.

  Usually, Miss Stabby’s notes were long and rambling and accompanied by bad poetry.

  I turned the paper over, which was artistically singed around the edges to see if there was more.

  As it turned out, Miss Stabby’s sudden fixation with burning things should have been an obvious clue, but at the time, I missed it.

  I removed the poor dead rat from the porch by taking the mat and tipping the body under the steps. I’d give the hideous thing a proper burial later.

  Then I used my key to open the front door. Jax was sitting on the stairs playing his guitar.

  “We’re leaving right now!” I said.

  “What happened?”

  I held up the singed note. “Miss Stabby has tracked us down.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Lilith to get here?”

  “Somewhere out there in those woods,” I said, gesturing out the shuttered window, “Miss Stabby is lurking, just waiting to make her move.”

  “What move?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d rather not be miles from help and without cell coverage when she makes it.”

  Jax didn’t argue with me.

  “I’ll go up the hill and retrieve the Jeep while you pack up your stuff,” I said. “If we run into the paps and can’t get down the hill, we’ll join them. At least there is safety in numbers.”

  “What about your stuff?”

  “My stuff doesn’t matter, but if you want to shove it all back in my bag while I’m retrieving the Jeep, that would be great.”

  I locked the door behind me and sprinted up the road to the spur where I’d hidden the Jeep from the paps, only to discover that Miss Stabby had beat me to it.

  She’d slashed the tires. All four were flat.

  We’d have to wait for Lilith.

  I had coverage by the car, so I texted Lilith an update.

  I got a terse one-word text back.

  I couldn’t have agreed with her sentiments more.

  I dashed back down the hill, let myself back into the cabin, pulled the deadbolt behind me, and took the stairs to the loft two at a time. Jax had finished packing his own voluminous backpack and was almost done with my suitcase.

  “This is it. I’m ready,” said Jax, as he emptied the contents of the top drawer of my nightstand onto the jumbled contents of my roller bag.”

  “We can’t leave,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Miss Stabby slashed our tires.”

  “Can’t you change them?”

  “She slashed all four, and there is only one spare.”

  Clearly, this was a man who’d never changed a tire in his life. Either that, or he thought I had magical powers. Alas, my powers were limited to producing band-aids, headache remedies, and sandwiches on demand.

  If I’d had the good fortune to catch Miss Stabby in the act of slashing the tires, I could have stopped her and made her severely regret her decision to mess with Jax Fitzroy’s health and wellbeing, but now the damage was already done.

  “What should we do?” Jax asked.

  “There’s not much we can do, except stay put and wait for Lilith to arrive.”

  Or Miss Stabby to strike, but I thought it unnecessary to point that out.

  “How long will it take Lilith to get here?” Jax asked.

  “It’ll be another two hours, at least.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” I told Jax, although I was rattled at the thought that somewhere out there, Miss Stabby was probably watching the cabin. “I don’t see how Miss Stabby could get in here. This place is practically a fortress of logs.”

  Miss Stabby could not possibly know that Lilith was on her way to get us. I hoped that would blunt any sense of urgency to act on Miss Stabby’s part.

  We’d be safe for the next few hours inside the cabin. Miss Stabby lacked the musculature to break down the door, and the windows were covered with heavy wooden shutters that latched from the inside. We’d be fine; I kept telling myself.

  Unless she had a gun.

  On further reflection, I decided that even if Miss Stabby had a gun and felt inclined to shoot at us through the windows, it would be impossible for her to do more than fire blindly at the shutters.

  Besides, taking potshots at people from a distance didn’t seem like Miss Stabby’s style.

  I had a feeling she was craving something much more up-close and personal. There was a reason Jax’s security team had christened her Miss Stabby and not Miss Sniper.

  “We might as well have something to eat,” I told Jax as we hauled our bags down the stairs and set them by the door, so we’d be ready to depart the second Lilith arrived with Hugo and Sven.

  “I don’t feel hungry.”

  “I don’t either, but we ought to keep our strength up.”

  It was more a matter of having something to do to keep my mind off Miss Stabby lurking, somewhere out there.

  “I suppose supper is a superior alternative to a marathon viewing of volumes three to seven of the History of the Great American Railroad.”

  “I think there is a nice fillet of salmon left, and we can make a salad.”

  Jax shredded an entire head of lettuce into a bowl before I realized what he’d done.

  “Never mind,” I said. “We’re going to have to abandon all this food here, anyway. Lilith will have to send somebody up here, later on, to put the place back together for your Uncle Rodney.”

  “Maybe we’d better put all the taxidermy back in place before Lilith gets here.”

  “Let’s eat first,” I said. “We have at least another hour.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  One hour turned into two, then three.

  We silently ate our salmon and pilaf, then polished off half the lettuce salad and the rest of the Rocky Road.

  We returned the baby alligator to its place over the bed upstairs and lugged the mattress back down to Uncle Rodney’s bedroom.

  We returned the family of pheasants to the mantle and made sure that Uncle Rodney’s bound editions of Popular Mechanics were still in chronological order.

  I cleaned the kitchen while Jax did the bathroom. We piled the dirty linens and towels in a heap in the loft for Lilith to have dealt with later.

  “Do you smell smoke?” Jax said, dumping the last of the kitchen linens onto the pile of sheets.

  I took in a deep breath through my nose.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t start a fire in the fireplace while I was cleaning the bathroom, did you?” Jax asked.

  I had not.

  “I have a terrible feeling that Miss Stabby is trying to smoke us out,” I said.

  “You think she’s trying to burn the place down?”

  “I do.”

  I did a quick survey of the lower story of the cabin and found the source of the smell. Little wisps of grey smoke rolled in under the door lead
ing out of the kitchen to the back porch.

  “We should get out of here,” said Jax, grabbing his guitar case and reaching for the handle of the front door.

  “Wait!” I grabbed him by the arm and kept a firm grip on it while my mind raced through the likely scenarios of what might happen once we flung the front door open.

  I motioned for Jax to lean in close, just in case Miss Stabby was listening at the keyhole.

  “That’s exactly what Miss Stabby hopes we will do,” I told Jax. “We’ll have to go out the upper story window.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll knot together sheets to make a rope. I’ll tie it off to the bedframe. Then we’ll creep out onto the porch roof and quietly let ourselves down to ground level.”

  “Then we hit the ground running?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “You hit the ground running. I stick around and put the fire out.”

  “I thought I sacked you,” Jax protested. “I’m not leaving you here alone to deal with a cabin on the verge of bursting into flames and Miss Stabby!”

  “Alright then, I won’t send you sprinting into the forest, but you still have to follow my instructions to the letter,” I said firmly, trying to keep the quaver out of my voice.

  I approached the back door and felt the surface. It was hot to the touch. Once the door burned through, there was a real danger the fire would be too big to put out with the limited resources we had available.

  Poor Uncle Rodney. As much as his beloved taxidermy collection creeped me out, I hated to see the whole place go up in flames.

  “Let’s wet the door down,” I said, “before we execute plan A.”

  “What’s plan B?” Jax asked.

  “We both make a run for it and let the cabin burn.”

  I filled the bucket Uncle Rodney kept under the kitchen sink with water and doused down the door several times before I filled the bucket and headed for the stairs.

  “Fill every pot and pitcher you can find,” I told Jax. “Come up as soon as you are done.”

  Halfway up the stairs, I put the bucket down and went back to the kitchen.

  “Bring your guitar up, too,” I said. “There’s no guarantee this place isn’t going to go up in flames.”

  Upstairs, I knotted the sheets together. I shoved the bed over as close as I could get it to the window, hoping that the scrapping sound wouldn’t tip the lurking Miss Stabby off to our plans.

  I couldn’t help wondering what exactly it was she planned to do when we came out.

  Did she have a gun? I doubted it. A knife? Quite possibly. She hadn’t been profiled as Miss Stabby for no reason.

  I tied off the knotted sheets to the leg of the bed. Jax had been bringing up containers of water, and he informed me that he’d finally run out.

  I soaked the sheet rope until it was dripping with water, then took the comforter off the bed and saturated it.

  I’d stuffed all my valuables into the knapsack that doubled as my handbag. I confirmed that my knife was in my pocket.

  I put on my jacket and the knapsack and picked up Jax’s guitar case.

  “I’m going out first,” I said. “Before you climb down off the roof, throw down that soaked comforter.”

  “Are you really going down with my guitar?” Jax asked.

  “Unless you’d rather it burned.”

  “I don’t care about the guitar.”

  “I know you love this old thing,” I insisted. “It’s not a big deal to take it down with me.”

  It was a big deal, actually. I wasn’t at all looking forward to shimmying down a rope of wet, knotted together sheets with only one hand, but I was 89% sure I could do it without losing my grip. I was 89% sure that Jax could not. That’s why he’d gotten the assignment of tossing the comforter off the roof instead of lugging the guitar case down with him.

  “I really don’t care all that much about that old guitar,” Jax repeated.

  “You do care. It’s your most precious possession,” I said.

  “But I care about you more.”

  If we hadn’t been standing in the upper story of a remote mountain cabin on the verge of going up in flames with a probably homicidal crazy person lurking outside waiting to do who knew what, I’d have laughed what Jax said off as a cheesy line, but under the circumstances it made my chest feel tight.

  “I’m going down,” I said. “If I tell you to run, run! And keep running until you get to that big boulder halfway up the hill behind the cabin.”

  I inched the window sash up slowly, hoping it would not squeak. When I got the window open, I could smell smoke and hear the crackling of the fire on the back porch. I hoped if Miss Stabby had used an accelerant to get the fire started, she had not splashed it on the cabin itself, or there was no hope of getting the fire out with nothing more than a wet blanket.

  I inched out the window and stepped gently out onto the porch roof. I motioned to Jax to hand me his guitar case. For a few seconds, he hesitated, and I was afraid he was going to refuse to give it to me, but then he gave in and handed it out to me.

  I held the guitar case in one hand and used my stronger right arm to take the weight of my body as I slithered my way over the edge of the porch roof and let the knotted sheet rope slip through my fist.

  When I got to the first knot, I discovered that my plan had a fatal flaw. If I loosened my grip sufficiently to make it over the knot, I risked losing control and dropping to the ground.

  I decided to try and wedge the guitar case between my body and the knotted sheets and hope I didn’t drop the case, both damaging the guitar and alerting Miss Stabby that her prisoners were making an escape.

  It worked, barely. The sheet ran out about six feet above the ground, and when I dropped, I lost control of the guitar, which fell to the ground with a dull thud and a faint jangle of strings.

  I hoped it was still intact, and Miss Stabby hadn’t heard it fall to the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I stood perfectly still and peered into the moonlit landscape for a few seconds in case Miss Stabby was in the immediate vicinity until my vision was obscured by getting hit on the head with the wet bedspread.

  Before I’d clawed my way out of the sodden comforter, I heard Jax hissing from above that I’d better move out of the way before I got kicked in the head.

  “Why’d you throw that thing on my head?” I growled.

  “How was I to see you. Why were you standing there at the bottom of the rope?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m going to try and put the fire out; you keep watch for Miss Stabby.”

  The comforter wasn’t nearly as wet as it had been before my hair and jacket had soaked up half the moisture, but I took it and started attempting to beat out the flames.

  The back door and the porch planks just in front of it had caught fire. Flames were creeping up the wall surrounding the door frame, but I was optimistic I could still put the fire out.

  Whatever it was Miss Stabby had used as the fuel for the initial fire had evidently burned up already. I set to work beating at the smoldering floorboards.

  I was gaining ground on the flames when I heard Jax scream and turned to see that Miss Stabby had attacked him from behind.

  I don’t know where Miss Stabby had sourced her array of costume heads, but tonight she’d opted to masquerade as Peppa Pig. She made a convincing Peppa Pig, providing Peppa Pig was the sort to leap onto people’s backs. As I recalled, however, sticking a switchblade to people’s throats was very much not a part of Peppa’s modus operandi.

  There was nothing I could do. I watched helplessly as Peppa/Miss Stabby threatened to slit Jax's throat.

  “You thought you could steal him from me, didn’t you, you—" she screeched. At least I think it was a screech. All the layers of padding on the costume Peppa went a long way to muffling Miss Stabby’s message.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, biding for time while I looked around for anything in my environment I
might use to incapacitate her from a distance.

  I could easily overpower Miss Stabby in hand-to-hand combat, but if she’d already gone for the jugular, beating her into submission after the fact would be useless.

  I feared that the moment I took a single step toward Miss Stabby, she would press the knife into Jax’s neck.

  “You know why I’m doing this,” said Miss Stabby. “You left me with no other choice.”

  “You always have a choice,” I said. “You still have the choice to do the right thing. If you let Jax walk away, I promise nothing bad will happen to you.”

  “I don’t want to let him walk away.”

  “Just drop the knife, disappear into the woods, and no one will be the wiser.”

  Peppa had her arms wrapped around Jax’s neck, and her entire body weight was pulling him backward. I didn’t know how long he could hold her before they both toppled to the ground, and when they did, there was a very good chance one, or both of them, were going to end up bleeding.

  “If you could just make up your mind quickly,” said Jax in a strangled voice, or perhaps—”

  “Shut up!” said Miss Stabby to Jax. “I’m really disappointed in you.”

  “I think I’d better do the talking,” I suggested.

  Miss Stabby didn’t argue with that, and neither did Jax.

  “I’ve watched you two together,” said Miss Stabby. “Don’t try to convince me you aren’t trying to steal my precious boy from me. I’m not stupid.”

  I had a hard time refraining from pointing out that Jax had never belonged to this deranged woman in the first place, but the memory of Miss Stabby’s notes alluding to her desire that she and Jax enter the afterlife together stopped me.

  I could not see Jax’s expression clearly in the shadow cast by the cabin. I was certain he was scared, which any sane person would have been, but I hoped he wasn’t terrified.

  He might still be capable of rational thought. I decided to call on what meager training I’d been able to give him.

  During our self-defense lessons, we’d simulated this exact scenario.

  I stepped out of the shadow into the moonlight and hoped he could read my face.