“If I try to make a call, my phone will survive about as long as a show about adults living in the suburbs would on the CW.”
“Could you send a text?”
“I can try,” I said.
I tensed. The closest people would obviously be my parents. And the grief I was going to get when they picked us up would be almost unbearable.
Almost.
I opened up the texts between me and my mom, and saw she’d texted me to tell me she was going to pick me up at the school.
I’ll be at the school at seven to get you. You better be there when I get there. Leave it to the lawyer to actually spell the words in her text instead of going for the easier “U”s and whatnot.
Admittedly, I deserved that level of distrust. One afternoon last week I completely skipped Math League, deciding that going to the coffee shop around the corner was a way better use of my time. It really had been; the cold brew coffee I had with coconut milk had been the best thing to happen to me all day. Especially since when I got home, I got grounded until next month. The sacrifices we make for caffeine.
Hey Mom, I typed, I got lost. I forgot u were going 2 pick me up, so I decided 2 walk home with a new friend. Could u come find me?
I looked around trying to get my location and saw the street sign.
We r on
And it died.
“Did you send it?” Xandra asked, looking into my face anxiously.
My face burned with frustration. “No. It died before I could.”
She groaned.
“Well, we can’t stand here all night,” I said.
“No duh.” Xandra looked back and forth down the sidewalk. “Do you think he’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “What do you think we should do?”
Xandra did a visual sweep of the sidewalks again. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just come on,” she hissed, and she started at a slow run down the street.
I followed, not caring that I hadn’t run since gym class on Monday, and knowing I was terrible at it. I didn’t care because the fear was pumping my veins full of adrenaline, and even though my knees were super shaky, I felt like I could run for miles.
Mostly because I felt like my life was in danger, and the deepening darkness didn’t help.
A street light overhead flickered and went out as soon as we ran beneath it.
“Way to add to the moment, municipal lighting failure,” Xandra muttered. Then she gasped, and I nearly collided with her when I looked up and saw Byron standing there, not even twenty paces away, on the sidewalk, grinning at us.
Xandra turned and disappeared between two buildings, and I didn’t hesitate to follow her.
Just before I rounded the corner, I locked eyes with him, and a horrifying realization hit me. It made me almost stumble over my own feet as I ran.
He’s toying with us.
I sped up, trying to catch up with Xandra. I could hear her gasping, broken up by what sounded like an occasional sob. She quickly darted around another corner, and I followed.
The absolute last thing I wanted was to be left behind right now.
I found her leaning against a brick wall, a streetlight at the end of the alley flooding the ground with light. She was clutching at her sweater like it might strangle her, and she looked at me as I came to a halt beside her, my hands on my knees, also sucking breath in like I never had in my life.
“Don’t slow down yet, ladies, or I might catch up.” Byron’s voice bounced along the sun-faded brick wall, and though we couldn’t see him, it made both of us choke off our gasps and dart down the alley back into the street.
His laughter followed us.
Xandra dashed across the street, the tall, gleaming towers of Tampa like faraway, unreachable hope glowing in the distance. She’d darted between another pair of buildings, these appearing to be government buildings made of old stone block that looked like they might have been here since before the state was founded.
I caught up and saw her trying to steady her hand enough to punch in a code on a large metal door along the back of one of the tall, cinder block walls.
“Where are we?” I managed to get out between wheezes.
She didn’t answer. She swore under her breath and tried the code again.
I looked back down the alley into the street, but there was no sign of Byron. That didn’t make me relax. He was turning out to be really good at pouncing on us when we weren’t expecting him to.
“There!” Xandra exclaimed, and she pushed the door open and waved me inside hurriedly, and then threw her whole weight against it, closing it behind her. It seemed to be working against her, and so I threw my weight against it too.
Finally, the blessed click came, and we both collapsed against the cold metal, breathing heavily.
Chapter 3
The room was dark, but I could see it was full of tall shelves lined with dark boxes with white labels on the front, everything very orderly. The room smelled of dust and old paper. Normally I would have appreciated that smell. But it was hard to appreciate anything at the moment except not being dead thanks to a stalker in the alley.
There were windows at the top of the tall ceilings, barely large enough for a squirrel to fit through. Wrought iron grates were bolted to the inside. Small pools of light spattered the floor, but not nearly enough to make the entire room visible.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
“The city government’s archive,” Xandra answered. “They keep a lot of stuff stored down here.” She looked at me over her shoulder, though her expression was hard to determine in the darkness. “My dad works here. I’ve been coming here since I was a little girl. Luckily, the code hasn’t changed. “
“Can he get in here?” I asked. “There’s something really weird about this guy. Like, James Franco weird.”
“I know. I was thinking the same thing. Not about James Franco, but … yeah, this guy is strange.” She crossed her arms and shook her head. “And no, he can’t get in here. At least he shouldn’t be able to, unless he can somehow turn into a ghost and float through the fifteen-inch-thick steel walls.”
She laughed, but her heart definitely wasn’t in it.
I looked up around the room. “Is there another way he can get in, aside from the door?” I pointed to the one behind us.
She shook her head again. “That’s the only door. And as long as we have it locked …” She crossed over to the entrance again, and double checked the locks she’d already secured. “It should be fine.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath and swallowed. My throat was painfully dry. My heart had slowed, but every time I thought about Byron’s eyes, a flash of fear caused it to hammer against my ribcage again.
“Maybe he could hack the code, though. Or maybe he saw us punch it in.”
Xandra made a disgusted sound in her throat, as if we hadn’t just been running from our lives. “He wasn’t anywhere near us. He was across the street, remember?”
“Well, you’re awfully calm now,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Why wouldn’t I be? We’re safe.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked. “There’s no guarantee he can’t—”
“This is the old fallout shelter for the municipal building, okay? If it can hold out a nuclear blast, some teenage boy isn’t going to get in.”
Something like anger flashed through me, and I glared at her, hoping she’d notice in the shadows of the unlit vault. “This Byron isn’t an ordinary teenage boy. I mean, neither of us recognize him, and he was able to get in front of us without us even seeing him—”
“Are you even listening to yourself?” Xandra said, her arms held out in disbelief. “You’re getting paranoid.”
My voice rose to match hers. “Did you not see what I saw—?”
There was a loud crash against the outside wall, and I let out a cry of terror, freezing, my hand anchored on one of the near
by bookcases, knuckles pale from the grip.
“What was that?” Xandra whispered from the other side of the shelves.
The crash sounded again, and I saw movement in one of the small windows up near the ceiling. When I looked, a face peered in through the glass, the lights from the street casting him into shadow.
“Byron,” I breathed, and I clutched the shelf tighter.
He could see me, his gaze settling on me like an albatross around my neck.
“Hey!”
His voice was muffled. The glass was most likely bullet proof, if everything Xandra said was true. But I could still hear him, though his face was obscured by a cross-hatching wire that ran through the glass.
“Let me in.” His voice was a whispered command, and it made me shiver as though I’d just been hit with a blast of New York winter right off the lakes.
I had to force myself to keep breathing. Long, slow breaths.
There was a loud smack against the glass, and then the face disappeared.
“How … how did he get up there?” Xandra whispered from the other side of the boxes. “That’s got to be a twenty-foot drop … he would have broken his legs!”
“God, let it be so,” I said.
There was a loud thud against the door.
“He’s trying to break the door down!” I said, retreating from it.
“He won’t be able to,” Xandra said, but her voice seemed more uneasy when she said it this time. “Not unless he has dynamite.”
“Or is on steroids or PCP.” I looked at Xandra. “Is PCP still a thing? My parents talk about it like it’s still happening.”
“Never heard of it,” she murmured faintly.
I shuddered, remembering the feel of Byron’s gaze on me. The distance and reinforced glass between us had done nothing to dull the creepy touch that came with the glance.
“Xandra, there is seriously something wrong with this guy …”
Her silence told me she agreed with me.
“I mean, he just … appeared when we were walking. Did you even see him come up to me?”
“I wasn’t exactly paying attention to you,” Xandra said. “But, yeah, it was weird he just sort of showed up.”
When I realized the immediate threat was on the other side of a steel door, I collapsed onto the floor.
“And then, the look on his face … it was like he was …”
For some reason, I had a super hard time admitting what my brain was telling me out loud.
“It was like he was enjoying himself.”
Xandra cleared her throat and appeared around the other side of the shelf.
She sat down beside me. We could still see the window and the door, but were nestled in the shadows—as if we could somehow hide our faces from whatever was out there, waiting for us to come out.
Xandra huffed.
“You know, if you hadn’t been wandering around in a place you don’t know, then maybe we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess.”
I shook my head. Did I hear her right?
“Wait, this is all my fault?” I laughed, but it was more of a short bark.
She snorted. “Yeah, this is your fault.”
“Way to blame the victim.” I couldn’t believe this girl. Who did she think she was? “You think I wanted attention from that … creep?”
“I don’t know what you’d want because I don’t know you.”
My jaw clenched.
“Nobody knows you,” Xandra continued. “You’ve been at the school for what, like a month? How could you expect anyone to know you aren’t some sort of weirdo? You certainly don’t act normal.”
I ground my teeth. Was this really the time for her to highlight my—
Dweebitude?
Xandra made another noise of disgust. A silhouette, she rose to her feet.
“Do you have a phone charger?”
Do you have a brain?
I rolled my eyes and sighed heavily. “No, I don’t. My battery usually lasts all day – when I don't have Math League.”
“Shoot. I don't have one either,” she said.
There was another loud bang, and I braced my hands on the floor to keep from falling over sideways.
“Come on, girls, let me in. The mosquitoes are awful out here.”
“Is he serious?” Xandra said, moving into the darkness somewhere to my right.
“The mosquitoes here do suck,” I said. “Also … yeah, he’s relentless.”
There was a smack against the door again.
“How long do you think he’s going to keep this up for?” I wondered.
“I mean, eventually he’ll get bored,” Xandra replied. Then, more distantly: “I hope.”
I swallowed hard, literally and figuratively, putting my pride down. “Thanks for not leaving me out there on my own.”
I didn’t really think she really deserved my thanks right now, but given that there was a psycho outside, this was probably the time to make friends rather than enemies.
“I’m not heartless,” Xandra said. “And you apparently have trouble carrying on a normal conversation with men. Or anyone, possibly.”
“What is your damage?” I lashed out. “Why are you getting after me when we are literally pinned in here until what’s-his-face decides to leave?”
“I …” she started, and then I heard her exhale. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m just …”
“Freaking out?” I finished for her.
“Yeah.”
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, even though the air was stifling and sticky. “Whatever. Let’s just try to figure out how to get past him.”
Xandra came back over to me and sat down beside me again. “I just wish I knew more about this guy, you know? Is he, like, an escaped rapist or something? A serial killer?”
The ideas made my chest ache with fear, but I shook my head. “He looked too young to have escaped from jail. But what do I know?”
Xandra shifted uncomfortably beside me. “What I want to know is how he could almost read our minds, you know? Like, he knew exactly where we were going to go. Beat us there, too.”
I glanced at my watch, the luminescent hands showing it was almost eight.
Only eight? How long were we going to be stuck in here? It felt like hours, or even days, had passed since we left the school. Even facing Mom’s fury suddenly seemed preferable to this situation.
“He can drop from twenty feet with no apparent problems,” I said. “And what's even weirder is I didn’t see anything out in the alley that would help him get up that high—no trash cans or dumpsters or anything to stand on.”
“I’ve never seen him before, and I’m definitely not convinced he goes to our school.”
“I thought he was lying when he was talking to me. There was something … off about him.”
“You think so?” Xandra’s nose was wrinkled in skepticism. “I know a liar when I see one. “
“Nice gift to have,” I replied. She didn’t catch the sarcasm.
“I just don’t see why he was so fixated on me, and how he knew my name,” I murmured.
“Why is it the worst guys are always the most gorgeous ones?” Xandra collapsed, bemoaning an uneasy truth that I, too, was wrestling with.
“Like, unnaturally so, wouldn’t you say? That kind of guy doesn’t actually exist in real life. His skin? Flawless. Which, I mean … with guys our age …”
Xandra nodded, shifted herself toward me, and leaned in closer. “Okay, hear me out. I’m kind of an anime junkie—” no kidding, with the kitten earrings and the hair “—and this whole thing just screams ‘out of the ordinary,’ right?”
“Right …” I agreed reluctantly.
“There’s one I’ve watched at least seven times, and the guy who the main character falls in love with is just like our unwelcome guest outside.”
“Go on,” I said, unsure about where she was going with all of this.
“He’s super hot, has super speed, and super strength,”
she said, voice rising in—was that excitement? Now? “All of the girls fawn over him, but he’s not around very much. Only comes out at night, you see.”
I blinked, processing what she was saying. There was something … uncomfortably familiar about her train of thought. “What, you mean like a superhero?”
More like the villain, I was thinking.
Xandra shook her head.
“No. What if our friend outside … is a vampire?”
Chapter 4
“Ha ha, absolutely hilarious,” I said, after a silence that seemed to last forever. “Great joke when we’re trapped in a claustrophobic bunker and we’ve got a lunatic banging on the door outside.”
I was starting to question Xandra’s sanity. That was a thing, wasn’t it? For people to lose their minds when forced into scary situations?
“No, hear me out,” she said, and she leaned closer. “Have you ever seen a person act the way he has been? Appearing out of nowhere, being sort of sweet and sensual one second, and then frightening the next? I mean, it’s just weird. Beyond normal flip-flopping or manipulation.”
“He’s a weird dude,” I answered. “But he’s a dude. Guys are scary sometimes, okay? That doesn’t make him some sort of man-bat creature who wears a cape and lives in a castle.”
She made another sound of disgust. Already I was getting tired of hearing them.
“Vampires aren’t like they are in those old stories. Maybe they used to be more like Dracula, but in modern times, they do way more to try to blend in with our society.” I widened my eyes, and she added, “You know—if they were for real, that’s how they’d do it, wouldn’t they?”
There was another loud crash against the door, and I realized it frightened me a little less this time. No sign of him breaking the door down.
Yet.
I scolded myself. Of course not yet. Not ever. He wasn’t strong enough to break through two feet of steel. No human was.
“Oh really?” I challenged Xandra, trying to do anything to distract my mind from the noises from outside. “And just how do they manage to blend into society? Last I checked, eating other people tends to be the kind of thing that gets sensational amounts of news coverage.”
No One Will Believe You Page 2