Back inside, I got switched from door duty to stocking the checkout aisles with candy and impulse buys. This way I could hover, just below eye-line, and do more scouting for shoplifters.
“Kooky Pow cereal. Wheat bread. Carrots. Chocodiles. One gallon skim milk. $17.89.”
I followed along under my own breath. Stocking aisle five put me in the perfect place to hear Serena at her normal station of aisle six. Childlike, with a round face and pig tails that emphasized it, Serena had a tendency to relay whatever she was scanning in a half-whisper under her breath. Repeating the items to myself helped keep me from going insane having to listen to her mechanical recitation. Some regulars actually liked this and would seek her line out on purpose. Others were not so entertained by her equal opportunity announcements of purchases, uncomfortable with the idea that she would tell everyone that along with your three hundred thread-count sheets, you were also buying a box of sized medium Durex condoms and a pack of peanuts.
“Mars Bar. Seventeen Magazine. Socks. $12.78.”
It was interesting what people would buy, though. I grabbed an empty box of Almond Joy and pulled it off of the shelf, reaching back to my little cart of candies to look for a full one. I stopped when my stomach seized with that same kind of gut-wrenching nausea as yesterday. Ugh, not again.
“Duct tape. Rope, twenty feet. Shovel. Garbage bags. Tic-Tacs.”
Creepy, right? Ever-so-slowly, I eased over to the place my shelf joined the cashier stand, peaking over the top so I could get a better glimpse of the person. The redhead from yesterday, one of the four, only now, seeing him up close, he seemed stranger than ever. His face was so pale as to have a slight greenish cast. His hand clutched the pay stand and the blue veins lining it shone through his nearly-translucent skin. He watched his items go by with large, colorless eyes, deeply set and shadowed in his face. Hard, but feminine features, a sharp jaw, and a mop of red hair made him as visually arresting as his three peers—for my queasy stomach left no doubt in my mind that he was somehow associated with the other three I’d seen yesterday.
“Do you think you could help me, ma’am? Mizz…Serena?”
Serena looked up sharply from her recounting. She’d just mentioned industrial-strength bleach and a mop.
“How can I help you, sir?” she said. Her hand went up to cover her nose and I got the feeling that his breath must reek.
“I’m not from around here, actually. And I’m supposed to meet a family friend—some sort of cousin, I don’t know, my mother wanted me to catch up with her—and I’m afraid I lost the address, and she’s unlisted.”
Serena nodded along, smiling, buying the story. I couldn’t tell for sure if he was lying, seeing as my stomach was already all tied in knots. But at this point, I felt I could comfortably make the assumption that everything coming out of his mouth was a lie.
“Well, how can I help?” Serena asked.
“I’ve been asking around and word is that you might know her. She goes by Langley. First name Meriah.”
“Meriah Langley?”
“Yes, I’m Joseph Langley, Joe. She’s my first cousin, once removed. Or something like that.”
Right. And I was the president’s daughter. Staring at the items in his cart, the everyday things began to take on a sinister cast. Duct tape. A shovel? Bleach?
“I don’t know where she lives,” Serena said. I breathed a sigh of relief. “But Kyrie does,” she added, pointing straight at me.
I felt caught as he smiled, revealing rotting teeth. “Do you think you could help me, ma’am? Mizz…Kerrie? Do you know where to find her?”
“Find who?” I asked dumbly. I heard him the first time, but repetition was a good way to stall long enough to decide how I should respond. If there was one thing I knew for certain, at that moment, it was that this man should under no circumstances find out where Meriah lived. The conviction coursed through me, strong. But I didn’t know what to do, how to act.
“Sir, I don’t know your—cousin.” My Meriah sure as hell wasn’t related to him. “So I can’t tell you where she lives. But I’ll tell you who might. Andrew Hayley, the sheriff. He knows everyone around here.”
It wasn’t a lie. I’d never been able to lie. But the half-truth flowed quickly and believably. Usually I couldn’t do that, either, but I didn’t feel guilty and that made it easier. “Sorry I couldn’t help you, sir,” I finished up.
“That’s all right, I’ll just keep asking.”
He walked away, taking the stench of illness with him as he wheezed out the door. I watched carefully as he disappeared. And I worried. I wasn’t the only person around here who knew Meriah—it was a small town, after all—and it wouldn’t be too long before someone told him where she lived.
I told Serena I was taking my break and rushed to the back room. I quickly pulled my cell phone out of my purse and dialed Meriah’s number. I got her answering machine, of course. She was terrible about remembering to take her cell phone with her.
I left a message describing what happened (though, “This man who says he’s your cousin showed up and wondered where you live and then bought a shovel” sounds pretty lame as a warning) and telling her to call me back. I spent the rest of my ten minutes tapping my fingers and checking the clock. By the time my break ended, Meriah still hadn’t called. I had about an hour and forty-five minutes left on my shift. Restless energy filled me. I couldn’t wait that long. An hour was long enough to find someone who knew Meriah and it would only take twenty minutes for him to get to her place. I made up my mind. Mr. Smiley wouldn’t be happy, but I was begging off early due to family emergency.
Grabbing my coat, I spent the next seven (agonizing) minutes trying to track down a manager capable of letting me sign out. Since I was normally a model employee, it wasn’t hard to convince him I really needed to go.
I hit the parking lot at a swift half-jog and leapt in to my truck. I glanced at the truck’s digital clock. I still had plenty of time to make it out to Meriah’s and back in time to pick up my mom. That is, if this was all just a fleeting fancy of paranoia, which part of me assumed it was. The guy wasn’t even as tall as me. I’d be damned if I’d see a man whose eyes are even with my nose as a threat. Even so, my foot fell heavy on the accelerator as I pulled out of town. And my eyes kept glancing in the rearview mirror, looking out for a cherry red mustang, or anything suspicious, for the fact of the matter. He did have three creepy friends, after all.
I made it out to Meriah’s in a record sixteen minutes. No sign of her car when I pulled up in front of her house, though she usually parked it in the garage. But no sign of other cars, either, so that was good. The fact she didn’t greet me on the porch reinforced the suspicion she probably wasn’t home but, still…I’d driven all the way out here, I decided, I might as well check.
She’d given me a spare key a while back, and I slipped it into the lock and softly opened the door. I stepped in to the hall and closed the door behind me. I looked around. It didn’t feel empty to me. But all was quiet and still. I stepped down the hall, peeking in to the living room and den where she held all of her music lessons. Nothing.
I returned to the front hall, creeping up the front steps. It was strange to be in someone’s house without permission—I felt guilty, like a burglar. I didn’t belong here, but, again, I needed to find her. The second story was small, a front room and a back. I knew she used the back mainly for storage—she had more musical instruments then you could shake a stick at—and so I went straight to the front, her bedroom. I opened the door, expecting to find her sitting at her desk, on her computer, listening to headphones.
But the desk was empty. The room was empty, and her phone plugged into the charger on the night stand. Damn it, she’d just forgotten her phone again. So all that worry was a big fat load of cr—
—A hand clamped down over my mouth. I nearly peed my pants, but even as my bowels threatened to rebel, my body was acting. My elbow shot out and back, nailing my attacker neatly under the ribs. The other hand reached up and dug fingernails—quite long, thanks, I do take my vitamins—into the hand covering my mouth.
“Damn, Kyrie, stop it! It’s me! Stop it!”
I stilled instantly at the sound of Nathan’s soft tenor, whispering in my ear. The hand dropped and I spun to confront him. “Nate! What are you doing here?”
His hand came up again, the universal gesture of, “shh.”
And then I heard it, the slamming of car doors. I’d been so distracted in my efforts to find Meriah, I must have missed the sound of the car in the gravel drive. I ran to the window, peeping out through the sheer eyelet curtains: sure enough, there they were. All four together. The big man was opening up the trunk of the Mustang, pulling something out; was that a shotgun? Bettie Page, wearing a black-checked halter top and her hair in gorgeous finger waves I couldn’t help but envy—quietly commanded the others, directing them to ‘start looking, now.’
I ducked away from the window. I hadn’t caught a glimpse of Nate’s motorcycle, so how did he get here? And why was he here?
“C’mon, Kyrie,”
he whispered.
“Let’s go.”
I narrowed my eyes at the commanding tone. But there was no time to question him now. Given a choice between Nate and the Four, I’d have to go with Nate. Obnoxious ex-boyfriend over creepy, evil college kids. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
Downstairs, I heard the soft mutter of voices—one low bas of a male, the other almost too light to hear. Nate mouthed something, I couldn’t tell what, and gestured toward the closet. I shook my head. Better not to be trapped like a rat. If they were hunting Meriah, it just might occur to them to look in the closet. I gestured toward the window. Nathan looked out and grimaced, but he slid the lock open and pressed open the window sash. A screech of wood rang out and we flinched, waiting.
The gentle murmur of voices continued below, unchanged. I could hear them opening and closing the pantry doors. Nathan gave me a “lady’s first” gesture and I slipped one leg out, bending my body low to ease through the small opening the window afforded before stepping out on to the roof.
Meriah’s house was a typical farm structure. The downstairs was significantly larger than upstairs and the roof extended over the first floor and out past the large walk-around porch. The slope of the roof was gradual enough that I could easily stand on it and walk around. Nathan, slightly larger than me, had to work a little harder to get through the window, but he managed.
We crouched and hurried toward the edge of the roof. There, we looked down. The house was built high, which meant that despite being only a one-story drop, we’d still be falling about twelve feet. Laying down on his stomach, still totally silent, Nathan slid the lower half of his body over the edge of the roof. Then he lowered the rest of his torso down. Dangling as he was, the distance of the fall was reduced considerably. He gave a little swing and let go, landing in a crouch.
I lay down on the rough roof, bracing myself. Strong I was, but heights were not my forte. Looking down, I saw Nathan take up stance below me, ready to catch. Always a gentleman.
I’ll spare you the recounting of my awkward decent. Needless to say, it was neither graceful, nor pretty, but it got the job done and Nathan wound up with only one—accidental, I swear—bruise from the process.
Their beautiful red Mustang was parked at an angle, effectively blocking my truck in. I had four-wheel drive, but the heavy underbrush, the few scattered trees, a ditch, and not to mention barbed wire fence were going to be difficult to navigate around.
Nonetheless, I headed that way until Nathan jerked my hand in a different direction. He pulled me past the truck, past the Mustang, and I saw now what I had missed before as I’d driven up. His motorcycle, lying in the underbrush against a tree. No wonder I hadn’t seen it before—it’d been practically hidden. He righted the thing and got on, indicating that I should follow.
And here I hesitated. Certainly, one might wonder at this pause. On the one hand, four instruments of pure living evil were searching the house behind us, with uncertain, but clearly malicious motives. On the other hand, it was a motorcycle. Or, as my mama called them, a Death Mobile for people who want Soup Brains. Beautiful as the bike was, my mom’s upbringing had been effective in this regard, and my body froze at the prospect of climbing on the back of it, much less without a helmet. Nate didn’t even have a helmet for himself.
“
Kyrie
,” Nathan hissed. “
Get. On.
”
I looked back longingly toward my truck. Maybe that ditch wasn’t so deep that—
“Hey!” At the sound of the woman’s voice, my heart skipped a beat. Turning, I saw Bettie Page on the porch. Maybe a 5’5” cutie doesn’t sound threatening to you, but as she stomped authoritatively toward us in her platform pumps, I felt my bowels clench again.
“What are you doing here?” She sniffed. “Nephilim?” The way she said the word seemed strangely sibilant. I’d never heard it before, but the word rang a chord in me, somewhere deep. She took a step forward, arching a brow. “You are. You are. I thought I might have noticed something before, but the scent of vomit masked you.”
Vomit? The bathroom. She’d known I was there the whole time?