“Oh, I forgot. Being born into a wealthy family means I know jack shit about the ‘real’ world, right?”
Emily turns to face me, confused. “No —”
“— I’m a police officer in New York City, Kitten. I’ve seen shit you can’t even imagine.” I gesture around us. “This place—your area—it’s a fucking haven compared to some of the places I’ve been.” I pause then scoff. “A silver spoon. That’s some real bullshit. That cat would be a walk in the park. Try being chased by a jacked up Rottweiler as foam spills from its mouth.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, I did mean it like that, but I didn’t mean it like that.”
I roll my eyes. Yeah, like that makes any sense.
She continues down the sidewalk. “All I’m trying to say is; it’s common knowledge that you shouldn’t approach feral animals. It’s dangerous, not to mention hazardous for your health.”
I smile at the irony of it. Emily coaching me on things that are hazardous to my health? What are the odds? That girl is a magnet for disaster.
“An interesting piece of advice you’ve chosen to give me.” I say as I follow closely behind her. “If you listened to it yourself you’d have never been trapped underground.”
Her lips quirk and all evidence of our argument disintegrates. “Yeah, well, I’m no good at following advice — even my own.”
She peers sideways at me and I almost falter in my steps. I’ll be damned. The murky street lights barely light her features, but even so, the girl is pretty. She’s pushed herself to the brink of complete exhaustion and still her big, pretty eyes and hollow cheeks squeeze my stomach in the strangest of ways.
“Besides, I’m glad I followed you…” She drops her stare back to the concrete. “I’d hate for you to do this on your own.”
I’m beginning to wonder if I could’ve done it on my own. The thought of not having Emily down there with me seems…I don’t know…impossible.
“Here we are.” She sighs, pushing on a wire gate that hangs by a quarter of a hinge. It screeches and squeals as it opens and it’s enough to make me reach for my ears to block its sharp sound from piercing my brain.
“This is your place, huh?” Lowering my hands, I glance around. There’s not much to say about it. It’s not the worse place I’ve seen, but once this is over, she’s definitely moving out. There’s no safety, no security — not even a proper fence. Nope. It’s not good enough.
Emily leads me through the building with ease. She’s comfortable with the cracked paint on the walls and the occasional missing tile on the floor. As we walk, I peer down the stark empty halls and blink every time a light bulb flickers. There’s no one to stop us, no one to ask for identification or to find out where we’re going. It sets me on edge. What if we were murderers — of the bad kind? I shudder at the thought. Are there children in this building? If there are, what about them? There are no yards to play in — no grass or wood chipped play spaces.
“You look really disturbed.” Emily comments, pulling me from my own head.
She glances over her shoulder just as I manage to pull my stare from a forensic notice on the door we passed a second ago. I keep my hand tucked firmly against my body as we climb the stairs. I’d rather lick the handrail of the moving sidewalk at the airport than touch this one.
“I am a little.” I admit, peering over the railing of the stairs we climb. I’m not even kidding. There’s pile of rubbish at the bottom “What kind of place is this?”
I don’t want to make her feel bad about where she lives, but come on. This isn’t a home. It’s a fucking dump—no, it’s worse than a dump. It’s a fucking atrocity that needs to be bulldozed.
“It’s home.” She states, her feet slapping the concrete stairs — yes, concrete stairs. Inside a building—with slight aggression. “It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s the only place I have so…be nice.”
I purse my lips. As the saying goes; ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.’
At the top of the sixth floor, Emily stalks toward a thin, mahogany plywood door. Taped to the middle of it is an eviction notice. It doesn’t take me much to realize the door is the entrance to her place.
With a heavy exhale and a slump of her shoulders, she exhales. “I guess I should’ve seen this coming. Sorry, Sue.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Sue?”
“She’s the original occupant — my roommate, I guess. She died after I moved in.”
“That sucks.” I scrunch my nose. “She’s not still in there, is she?”
Emily snorts as she tears the paper from the door and scrunches it into a ball. “No.”
“Did you throw her over the railing?”
She sneers at me as her eyes suddenly glow playfully. “I’ll throw you over the railing if you keep making fun of where I live.”
Fair enough. I flash her my palms in defeat. “I won’t say another word about it. Promise.”
Leaning back against the railing, I watch as she shakes the door handle and pushes on the door. It didn’t occur to me until now that we can’t get into her apartment without a key. Shit. I drop my face into my palm and rub at my eyes. I walked all those damn stairs for nothing.
“Have a little faith, Stone.” Emily states with a laugh. “I can get us in.”
I lift my stare in time to see her twist and pull on the handle right before giving the bottom left corner of the door a hard kick. Just like that, the door shoots open and crashes into the wall. Over her shoulder she smirks at me. It’d be extremely sexy if I wasn’t so damn appalled.
“Well?”
“Well, I don’t know if should be impressed that you managed to get the door open or disturbed you lived here in the first place. Christ.” I push off the railing and saunter toward her. “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
“I’m tougher than I look.” Emily states as she enters her apartment.
Despite myself, I follow closely behind her and I freeze once I’m inside. Instant regret. I’m standing in the kitchen and the bathroom at the same time. Less than four feet away from me is the toilet and no more than ten feet away is a brown raggedy couch, covered in a hideous pink throw rug. The usual ‘girly’ things litter the tiny space. Pink lip gloss tubes and hair pins are scattered over the tiny kitchen bench, an unopened packet of cigarettes sit freely in a busted fruit bowl, and clothes sit in folded piles on the floor in front of the couch.
“Strangely, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.” Emily mutters, her eyes flicking over her belongings.
“Did it in the first place?”
I put my hands on my hips as my gaze settles on an opened box of condoms sitting by the smallest fridge I’ve ever seen. I ignore the dark cloud forming under my ribs. What she does — or did — is none of my business. I look back to Emily as her dark gaze flicks from the packet, then to me, and then to the door behind me.
“You wanna wait —”
“— outside?” I exhale a rush of air I didn’t know I was holding. “Yeah. I’ll give you ten minutes. Then we have to go.”
She nods and I turn and leave the room. Outside her little shoe box I slide down the wall and sit. Though my back complains and my chest aches, my legs burn with relief. I want to stop. I can’t push myself any further. I close my eyes for the briefest second and that’s all my body needs for it to pull me under without a fight.
*Emily*
My index finger slides over the zero button and, by some miracle, the call connects. A few minutes ago, I decided to put a call through to my hospital. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let them know what’s going on in my life at the moment. When all this is over I don’t want to have nothing. Nursing is all I got.
I turn my back to the door, hoping it’d block my voice from waking Jai up. I grip the strap of my heavy bag and pull it further onto my shoulder. I packed just about everything I own. One thing more and I’m certain my bag will snap and rip open.
My heart h
ammers in my chest and the feeling of doing something wrong lingers. I don’t like it...the way it wraps around my ribs and puts pressure on my lungs.
“Hel —”
The line goes dead.
“Hello?” I pull nervously on the long curly cord that sticks out from the hand piece and the severed end of it brushes along the top of my foot, tickling the skin.
Oh shit.
Slowly, knowing very well what’s behind me, I lower the ear piece, and peer over my shoulder. Angry blue eyes meet mine and I swallow hard as heat rushes over the surface of my skin.
“Really? You’re going to make a damn phone call in the middle of the mess we’re in?”
He drops the knife he used to cut the cord and I blink as the metal hits the semi-polished wood.
“It’s to the hospital.”
Jai reaches out and tugs on the cord, pulling the piece from my hand. It crashes to the floor, just missing my toes. “I don’t care who it’s to. No phone calls. We can’t risk it. Not until this is over.”
My eyebrows draw together as I clamp my hands on my hips. “This phone is twenty years old. Can it even be tapped?”
He steps closer in an attempt to intimidate me with his huge frame. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“We have to play it safe. Until I’ve found my brother and Skull’s heart ceases to beat we have to lay low.” He holds his hand out for my bag. “We can talk about it later. Give me the bag, I’ll carry it for you. We’ve been here too long.”
With a huff, I slide the bag off my shoulder and put the strap in his hand. He weighs the plain, black bag before slinging it over his shoulder.
“I’m perfectly capable of —”
I stop. Judging by the way Jai’s eyebrows smooth out tells me he can hear it too. Sirens. They’re getting closer. My stomach plummets like a rock.
“Shit.” He swears, raking five stressed fingers through his hair.
I’m frozen, waiting for him to tell me what to do next. Our eyes meet, blue to brown, and I see it immediately. He’s as stuck as I am.
“Jai? What do we do?”
He curses again this time scraping his teeth over his bottom lip in frantic thought. My heart beats faster and faster every extra second he wastes thinking about what to do next.
“Jai?”
“All right. All right. Uh…” He runs his hand from his hair down over his face before expelling a rush of warm air from his lungs. “We gotta stick to the shadows until we find our next car — preferably an old one — one that won’t alert anyone of our presence.”
I nod, breathing way too hard. “That should be easy in this neighborhood.”
“Right.”
His large, warm hand snatches my wrist and he whirls around on his heels, pulling me along behind him. He moves fast, so fast we’re down the stairs and back on the street in no time. The sirens are loud. They ring in my ears, making my brain pulse and press against my skull. The sirens sound like they’re on top of us, but they fail to pierce my ears, telling me they’re on the next street. It’s only a matter of time before they find us hiding in the shadows. With a swift tug on my arm, Jai pulls me behind a large bin. My thighs scream and burn as I crouch low, resting the majority of my body weight against him. I’m not going to last much longer.
“Over there.” He whispers, thrusting out a long, thick arm and a finger to match.
I follow his line of sight to a beat up, pale gray sedan circa nineteen eighty something. Looking at its ratty paint makes me miss the first super-fast, super nice car we stole. This one is the easiest choice, I suppose. The driver’s side window is open a crack, making it all too easy for someone like Jai to break into.
“Come on.”
With quick steps, I follow him across the road. I barely have time to peer around his shoulder before he’s unlocked the car and pulled the passenger door open. He slips my bag off his shoulder and tosses it into the back seat. His blue eyes, black in this light, meet mine when he pulls back and straightens his spine.
“Last leg of the trip. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.” I say without hesitation.
A strange, dense coil of excitement twirls in my chest. Adventure. The unknown — an unknown without Skull. How can I not be ready? We need to rest, recover and re-evaluate our plan. If I’m lucky Jai will come to his senses. If we couldn’t hurt him underground with next to no men, we sure as hell can’t hurt him out here. Not when he has everyone on his side. And, even if his brother is alive...the chances of him making it to the break of dawn after the stunt we pulled is next to none. Skull will kill Joel and when that happens Jai will be unstoppable. He will be a force as destructive and as terrifying as a tornado raging on the precipice of a hurricane. He will be filled with the unrelenting wrath of an erupting volcano.
And who is going to be able to stop it?
The Lake House
Jai
Honnnnk!!
I jolt awake as my stomach and my heart collide into each other in an attempt to squeeze up my throat. Instinctively, my hands clench the wheel and I jerk it to the side, forcing the car back into its designated lane. Panting, I glance in my side mirror and at the truck travelling in the left lane. The blonde woman behind the wheel flips me off with a shake of her head. I take it like a bitch. Driving when tired is a dangerous game and the amount of micro naps I’ve taken is frightening. Like a game of Russian roulette, it’s only a matter of time before I kill Kitten, myself and a bunch of other innocent people travelling on the same road.
By my calculations we’re an hour from our destination. George Lake. I stayed there during the summer a few times when I was a kid. It’s been fifteen years since we sold the lake house and we haven’t been back. As we were fleeing from the tunnels, I was driving myself insane trying to think of a place to hide until I’m ready to attack again.
Then it hit me.
The lake.
There are loads of houses out there—most unused outside of summer. Since it’s fall now I’m certain a particular lake house will be abandoned until next summer. It belongs to a man named Mr. Dooney. I knew him growing up. Mr. Dooney was a lonely man, getting on in years, and occupied the lake house down the road from ours. The lake house was a gift from a son that he hated, but his wife adored. He wanted to sell it loads of times, but couldn’t because she loved it so much. When his wife passed away he still couldn’t bring himself to get rid of the place. He even stays in it every summer as a tribute to the late Mrs. Dooney.
If life has been kind to him, and he’s still alive, his house will be empty, making it a perfect hideout for me and Emily. No one will find us there…if we’re smart.
Another honk and I jolt awake, unaware that my eyes had closed once again. To my right, a woman thrusts her hand and points to the sleeping child in the back—no older than three. I offer her the best sympathetic look I can muster. It must come off as a scowl because she flips me off straight after.
Flicking my eyes back to the road, I free a hand and run it over my face. I’m not going to make it to the lake. I’d ask Kitten to drive, but I noticed an uneasiness about her when she rides in a car—even a car going at normal speeds. I glance at her, then back to the road. I bet it feels good to sleep. She’s so out of it, she could pass as dead. Her dirty, black hair covers half of her face, and dirt taints her skin. She’s exhausted and looks it, even while resting.
I exhale. It feels never ending. Each mile we travel seemingly stretches into three. I glance at Emily again, then back to the road. Dawn is upon us, brightening the sky with its pale blues and the faintest hint of orange and red along the horizon. Not long until the sun is blazing and Skull begins his hunt—assuming he hasn’t already.
The nagging, stomach turning thought of the pain we’ve brought down on my brother because of our rebellion creeps into my mind, poisoning me with guilt and anger. I quickly push it out, choosing to revisit it once I’m refreshed. A tired man is an irr
ational one and I can’t afford to be irrational.
Not now.
I have to have a plan. I need to be smart. Only when Joel is safe can I go after Skull with reckless abandon, not caring if I go down in the process. However, in order to make it that far, I mustn’t kill myself on the way to the hideout. I have to make it to the lake alive before I can make Skull feel every slice of pain I want him to feel.
Just to the lake... my eyes grow heavy.
I have to make it to the lake.
****
I could fucking cry. I pull on the parking brake and drop my head against the headrest. I made it. For the one millionth time my eyes threaten to close and this time I let them since it no longer threatens the lives of anyone around me. A fuzziness encases my brain and the bullshit that has followed me through the past few years of my life feels like a distant memory now. All that matters is sleep.
I force my eyes open and lean to the right to catch a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. My first thought when I look past the dirt caked onto my skin is: I’m white! I mean, I’ve always been Caucasian, but my skin tone has never resembled the color of milk. For as long as I can remember, my skin has always been a warm tan due to excess time in the sun. Now I look like I’ve never stepped foot outside in my life.
“Relax. There’s not a single scratch on your pretty face.”
I look at Emily. She squints her eyes, thinning them until I can’t see the color of her irises. Her skin has the same white hue as mine—if not whiter. Her black hair, that has become a deep brown around the edges, incandescent in the light of the morning sun, is in tangles, making her look wild and dangerous.
Stretching her long arms above her head and cringing, she smiles at me through the pain.
“I’m digging the cavewoman look.” I say, dragging a hand to my mouth to stifle a yawn. “Have you clubbed any baby animals today?”
She rolls her eyes and the tired bags underneath them become more prominent. “Hilarious.”
Emily takes in the two story lake house in front of us. I watch as her eyes scan every windowsill, door frame and potted plant. “This is it, huh?”