Death and the Girl Next Door

Mom lost her footing and we crashed to the ground. But she didn’t give up. Crawling on her knees, she fought the windstorm with all her strength. We were almost to the car, her hand straining for the door handle when she stopped. I heard soft gasps as she disentangled my limbs and tried to literally shove me under the car. I remembered the tears staining her cheeks, her hair falling over her face, her eyes wide with uncertainty. The last word she uttered was a mere whisper.

“Hide,” she said a microsecond before she was ripped away.

I’d been clutching on to her shirt and was jerked forward with the force. I stumbled and fell, the space where she once stood so completely empty.

The winds howled around me when I crawled to my knees and looked up to search for her. But a beast stood before me instead. A monster as tall as a tree. He studied me, waiting, and my hands curled into fists. My teeth welded together as I fought the sting of my hair whipping into my eyes.

Then the strangest thing happened: He dematerialized. He became fog and I breathed him in, his essence hot and acidic. It burned my throat as I swallowed him, scorched my lungs as I inhaled until he was no longer and we were one.

“No!”

We turned and saw a man running toward us. A most curious sight, we thought.

“No!” he yelled over the wind, skidding to a stop beside us, falling to his knees. “No, I summoned you, dammit! Not her.”

He was screaming in our face and we didn’t like it. We looked over, found a stick, and decided to stab him. Part of us was surprised at how easily the stick penetrated the material of his shirt and sank into his abdomen. The other part was pleased. The dark spirits no longer rushed past us. If they got close, they would turn suddenly and head in a different direction, like fish in an aquarium. We watched as the gate in the sky closed. We watched as the wind died down and the countryside settled into complacency. We watched as the man staggered away from us, his eyes wide with fear.

And then we lay down and slept.

* * *

I covered my face with both hands as the memory faded. I wasn’t crying. I’d dug in my heels, set my jaw, and held that girlish reaction at bay—and yet my lashes were still saturated, salty tears still ran in rivulets down my cheeks and dripped off my chin as I peeked through my fingers and stared wide-eyed at the gravel beneath my knees.

I sat in stunned stillness. Trying to accept what had happened as reality. Failing. Grasping the edges of reason. Losing my grip. Clawing. Ripping. Sinking.

“The boss wants a word.”

A word. I frowned.

“Now.”

My line of sight slid down to land on an expensive pair of men’s shoes planted a foot apart in front of me. It traveled slowly up dark pants; a light blue shirt, half-tucked; sleeves rolled up to the elbows; and a red tie. The same red tie he wore that night in the forest.

John Dell scowled at me. “I’m sick of this place and I’m sick of you. Get in the van.” He pointed to the official Tourist Channel van parked a few feet away, sliding door open, like a mouth waiting to swallow me.

I blinked back to him. “Go to heck,” I whispered, my voice breathy and tired. It seemed all I could manage. I felt more drained now than I had when Brooke and I decided to stay up for two days straight. If there were ever a time for an energy drink, now would be it.

Before I could even think about standing up, my head whipped around and a blinding pain exploded in it. I spun and fell to the ground as the world tumbled beneath me. After taking a moment to orient myself, I struggled onto my hands and knees, then watched in awe as blood dripped from my head onto the powdery earth below.

And quite frankly, I’d had just about enough of it.

I crawled onto one knee and turned on him. Slipping into my best glower, I lowered my voice, controlled the tone and inflection of every word, every syllable, striving to make myself sound menacing, as I had only days earlier with Glitch. “Do you have any idea what I’m capable of?”

His eyes widened a fraction of an inch before he caught himself and narrowed them on me in suspicion. “Besides painting your nails?”

He’d hit me with the butt of a knife he had wrapped within his meaty grasp. The knife looked old. Ceremonial. Which couldn’t be good.

“Please,” I scoffed. “Why do you think the boss wants me? Wait, he didn’t tell you, did he?” When the man hesitated, I continued. “How do you think I survived a two-ton truck slamming into me, you idiot?” I started to stand, but the world tilted to the left, so I stayed put and continued the menacing bit. This could actually work if one of two things proved true: I had some really cool superpower I’d never known about or John Dell had an unnatural fear of short pixie chicks with unruly hair.

“Oh, my god,” I heard a feminine voice say. It was accompanied by the rhythmic click of heels coming from the sidewalk in front of the store. “Did you fall again?”

No way. Surely the creature whose name shall not be spoken aloud had better things to do on a Friday night than watch me bleed into the dirt.

“Do you even know how to walk?”

I looked past Mr. McCreepy, slammed my eyes shut to stop the spin of the earth, then focused on one of the dumbest people I’d ever known. The guy had a knife, for heaven’s sake.

“I’m looking for my parents. Oh, wait, aren’t you that reporter?” She flipped a strand of long blond hair over her shoulder and flashed him her twenty-dollar smile. “You know, I’ve done some acting.”