Krystal found her way to the interstate, the glow of the rising moon illuminating their path. The Hummer shot past a trail of slow-moving sedans and minivans.
Above their heads, the white and blue lights on the underbellies of circling airplanes twinkled like stars in the night sky. Stifling a low moan, Kraven winced and stretched his back.
“If you are a friend of Alexandra's, then she is a lucky girl,” Krystal told him, raising her plucked eyebrows and stealing a glance at her handsome passenger.
Kraven ached to be near Alexandra again.
If only I could make her understand
, he thought. The Hummer drew closer to the bustling airport. He considered turning back, retreating, letting Alexandra believe he had only been a dream, or even a nightmare.
He felt the Hummer come to a stop. “Here we are,” Krystal offered shyly and brazenly brushed a lock of hair from his sad eyes.
“Thank you,” Kraven said, pushing open the passenger door.
“You're welcome,” she said, leaning closer and closing her eyes. When nothing happened, she opened her eyes.
“Gone?” Krystal asked the empty passenger seat.
Stalking the shadows at the edge of the parking deck, Kraven eluded the security lights bathing the aisles of parked cars in a sallow glow. Running down a flight of stairs, he found the bottom floor and followed a throng of shuffling silver-haired ladies from the First Baptist Church of Happy Valley. Slowly but surely, they moved from a white passenger bus into the main airport terminal.
When the doors of the entrance slid open before him, Kraven paused, uncertain of his plan until he spotted a potential prey. Every two hours, Wayne Jefferson strolled up from the bowels of the international concourse for an extended cigarette break outside the main entrance doors. He had been an airport security guard for five years, each of them spent on foot patrol between International Concourse Gates One and Fifteen. According to the pedometer he kept strapped to his wrist, he had walked hundreds of miles watching as humanity flooded past him daily.
Patting his shirt's front pocket, he winked at a short-skirted, red-haired flight attendant wheeling her suitcase behind her. “Ma'am,” he said as she passed, his hand retrieving a cigarette from the half-empty pack in his shirt pocket.
Because his gaze was glued to the back of the redhead bobbing through the crowd toward the security lines, he did not notice the senior ladies bearing down upon him.
Ethel Jenkins did not mean to run over his toe with her motorized scooter. “Pardon me, sonny,” she shouted over her shoulder on her way to the security gates. “Vegas, here we come,” she said, shaking a fist into the air.
On his knees, Wayne bit his tongue to stifle a curse. Inside his boot, his big toe throbbed.
Hobbling to his feet, he shoved the butt end of his unlit cigarette to his grimacing mouth. “Excuse me,” he said to Ethel, stretching the words with sarcastic accusation. But she was long gone.
In his impatience, he did not notice the tall, raven-haired man hovering at his back. “Excuse me,” Kraven mimicked him and tapped the security guard lightly on the shoulder.
Weak
, Kraven thought. He smelled fear.
Too easy.
“Get your hand off of me,” Wayne blustered. He stood six inches shorter in his boots than Kraven. Completely bald except for his unruly, thick eyebrows, he anxiously rubbed the prickly stubble sprouting behind his ears.
“You need to come with me,” Kraven said, wiping the smirk from his mouth with his fingers.
“Do I?” Wayne asked, rocking back on his heels, his fingers entwined in the loops of his leather belt, the pressure of his holster skimming his shaking thigh.
“Yes,” Kraven assured him. “A bag,” he said, throwing his thumb over his shoulder. “There's an abandoned bag.”
Training and instinct focused the security guard's eyes on the middle of the intimidating stranger's forehead. He saw no guilt there.
“Where?” asked Wayne.
“Follow me,” Kraven told him, his azure eyes locked on the hazel orbs of the skittish security guard.
Wayne fell in, lockstep, beside Kraven as they advanced toward the doors of the terminal. Forgetting to light his cigarette, Wayne kept his hands shoved inside his pants pockets.
The passersby, a multitude of travelers, seemed a blur to Wayne. They walked together into the evening. They went toward the crowded parking deck and up two flights of cement steps to the open, top floor.
Hypnotically marchingâleft, right, leftâthe security guard's boots squeaked against the cement. His path did not veer from the lead forged by Kraven.
Kraven knew the Hummer would be unlocked, even before he placed his fingers on the door handle. She had been anxious and furious, which had made her careless. So what if the truck was stolen? She had insurance. Her husband would buy her another one.
She did remember the unlocked car while she was waiting in line to buy a ticket on the first flight out of Atlanta that night to Miami Beach. But she was in too much of a hurry to go back.
In the parking deck, Wayne obeyed Kraven, who told him to climb inside the Hummer and hand over his uniform and gun. Wayne would do anything to be left alone. He wanted to lie down, close his eyes, and sleep away the pain boring into his head between his eyes.
Removing his clothes, he felt much cooler. “Go,” he stuttered, giving his clothes to Kraven. Then he passed out across the back seat of the Hummer and did not awake until dawn.
Although Wayne was shorter than Kraven, the security guard stood wider, and his clothes fit loosely over Kraven's t-shirt and camouflage cargo pants. Cinching a belt around his trim waist, Kraven flexed and stretched the tendons in his back as they constricted, a spasm of anticipation tingling through his taut muscles.
“Sweet dreams,” he told the security guard snoring in the back seat and slammed closed the back door of the Hummer.
Kraven walked swiftly toward the airport terminal. Lost in the steady stream of travelers passing in and out of the glass doors, he rode the wave of preoccupied humanity to the security gates and flashed his gleaming brass badge and wide grin at a security officer to bypass her lengthy line.
Pushed by the throng of chattering travelers toward an escalator, he stood patiently on the moving staircase as he descended into the bustling airport. At the foot of the moving stairs, the crowd spilled from the steps onto a platform to wait for the monorail train that would whisk them to their concourses. Some travelers, however, chose to walk to their planes through the miles of windowless, underground corridors.
Eager to rid himself of the babbling crowds, Kraven chose to head underground. Through the cement-block walls, he could hear the roar of engines throttling for take-off. His heartbeat pounded in his ears.
Not yet
, he scolded himself as his shoulder blades trembled. His eyes darted across the faces of the ambling travelers, looking past them down the endless cement corridor.
He saw it no more than twenty yards farther down the hallway: his escape route. The door was inconspicuous and unmarked, the same pale white as the walls. It had no handle and no lock.
Carefully, slowly, Kraven approached. Nodding politely to a couple in matching khaki shorts and Hawaiian print shirts, he let them pass as they rolled their overstuffed carry-on suitcases behind them.
No one else was approaching, not for another hundred yards in either direction. Alone, he stuck his ear to the door, the chill metal vibrating against his skin as the rumble of a jet engine thundered on the runway on the other side.
Kraven raised his leg and kicked dead center into the door. It swung helplessly on rusted hinges, and he pushed his way outside into the night.
“Hey you!” a shrill voice accosted him. Kraven blinked in the moonlight. A whistle popped in his ears. A man in a neon-yellow vest and hard hat pointed a flashlight at his face.
Kraven jumped at the man, who was standing behind the wheel of a luggage cart. “Be quiet,” Kraven said softly, his hand over the confused man's mouth. Kraven placed him gently on the ground.
Kraven seized the steering wheel of the luggage cart and stepped on the accelerator pedal. When he lunged forward, all of the suitcases spilled to the ground. He raced down the center of the taxiway, where plane after plane was waiting for take-off. Passing the roaring jets, Kraven clasped his gut in his hand as he steered the stolen cart to the front of the line.
From his belly, a spark rose into his throat, and his lips parted wide. Slamming his boot against the brake pedal, he flew from the seat, a cloud of smoke cloaking his rising body. He spit a flame at the rear of his abandoned vehicle.
The gas tank ignited, the explosion engulfing the cart in raging orange and blue flames. Kraven brushed the sparks of fire from his flesh and waited behind the burning cart, confident no one could see him. All the people aboard the planes were focused on the fire, not the figure lurking inside the smoke. Aboard the plane closest to the burning cart, the pilots listened breathlessly to the control tower, which halted all take-offs.
All the airplanes waiting in the sky to land were told to circle. No approaches would be permitted until the fire was safely extinguished.
As the cloud of thick, gray smoke engulfed the runway, Kraven released his grip upon humanity and tore the melting shirt from his back. Fleshy, red-scaled wings sprang from mounds beneath his shoulder blades and stretched above his head.
Crouching to the cement, his thighs parallel to the ground, he closed his eyes and then sprang upward. Higher and higher he rose. A shroud of smoke swirled across his flapping wings and concealed his flight.
A low cloud bank occupied the evening sky around the airport and hid Kraven from disbelieving mortals. The firefighters disappeared beneath him, their figures too small and fragile for him to recognize as he soared into the night.
I will find her
, he promised himself. He could hear her heart beating somewhere below him. His angel did not live in the heavens. He would descend again for her, die for her, destroy himself if that meant saving her.
Soft but persistent, like the wings of a hovering hummingbird, a determined voice attempted to wake him. “Jonathan,” the voice sang. He thought that the voice sounded soothing, like a summer rain bursting on a roof.
He woke slowly. He had been sleeping on the rotting floor of a one-room shanty. Grizzled and weary, he could not rub his eyes because his arms were bound behind his back. Through blood-crusted lids, he recognized a face staring at him.
Jonathan Peyton had seen the man before. He stared closely as he regained full and coherent consciousness. The man had pale-blond hair, streaked white at the temples. His aquiline nose was bent ever so slightly to the right from playing football with no helmet. He had a hard, clenched jaw and dimpled chin. He looked at Jonathan with sad, wide eyes. Recognition lit Jonathan's haggard face.
“Uncle Joe!” he said, panting, struggling to raise his back from the wooden planks.
They had never met, but Jonathan knew the sight of his uncle's face well enough from the pictures his mother, June, had treasured. Joseph had died when Jonathan was only an infant. There were two versions to the story, he knew. The official story was that Joseph had died of a gunshot wound in a hunting accident. But as his mother had told the story to him, she had been holding him in her arms when she heard her brother cry out in the woods. That cry was his last breath. A wolf had attacked Joseph mercilessly in the forest surrounding Peyton Manor.
Jonathan fought his bindings, the tightly wound rope rubbing his skin raw.
“Jonathan,” the figure above him called his name again.
His heart pounded ecstatically in his heaving chest. He was forced to rest, taking short gasps of staggered breath. Although his wrists burned as if he had stuck them inside a bonfire, he realized that the rope had loosened.
“Why are you here?” Jonathan Peyton asked, unafraid of the apparition standing beside him.
In the center of the small shack, a lit candle flickered, but the figure cast no shadow. In a dim corner across the tiny room, a single rocking chair stood motionless, a threadbare quilt of worn rags thrown across the back.
Dressed in the field fatigues of a soldier, Joseph stood next to the chair. He stooped to the burning candle and raked his palm across the flame. “I am here for the same reason you are,” he answered, as his nephew Jonathan continued to pry at the rope around his wrists. “For Alexandra.”
The gasp that spilled from Jonathan's lips shook the frail walls of the one-room shack. He dug his heels into a wide gap in the rotting floorboards and stretched his wrists frenziedly behind his back. The rope binding snapped.
The fading apparition of his uncle smirked and pointed a finger to the candle. With his chest heaving, Jonathan shoved his knuckles to his teeth to stifle a maddening cry in his throat. Kicking the candle with his foot, he fanned the flame that smoldered on the dry, thin floor planks.
Swiping the quilt from the chair, Jonathan flung the filthy cloth onto the candle and cupped his palms around his mouth as the blanket ignited. Sparks flew to the ceiling as smoke engulfed the room.
“Uncle!” Jonathan called out as the apparition dissolved into the haze.
The fire licked at his flesh as he choked for fresh air. While flames consumed the walls and rose to the roof, he stumbled through the doorway.
The full moon lit the forest floor, and he recognized each of the towering moss-draped oak trees standing stoic and brave around him. The furious blaze devoured the shack that had long hidden beneath their shadows.
Run, he told himself as he lunged into the trees.
The house is close.
Tossing and turning in the stifling heat of the late summer night, Brad punched his lumpy pillow and launched himself from his mattress. There was no power and no air conditioning. For once, he missed his cramped dorm room at Vanderbilt.