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Hunter and John were gone and Diana crept into her house, assuming the worst. She had suspected from the first time she had seen the big-eyed French girl that it would come to this. It was that look in her eyes; that look of loss that told Diana she knew the score. Word traveled fast and the quick assassinations of Leonard Pitts and Lonnie Maness by gunshot couldn’t be coincidence. She should have let them take Hunter as well on that day eight years ago, but she had been weak, giving in to her husband’s pleas. Now he had paid for that weakness.
But she wasn’t going to. She wasn’t stupid. If they couldn’t quickly track Hunter down, she had no doubt they would offer her up to call him off. It was the league she played in, but she wasn’t going to be a helpless sacrifice. Her go bag was packed and she was ready to make tracks.
She thought she heard something at the front door and she looked uneasily around. Surely they wouldn’t be coming for her so soon?
She slowly padded to her front door, pressing an eye to the peephole. The distorted view showed her nothing but the carefully kept front lawn and her car in the driveway, warped into a Psilocybin hallucination by the fish eye lens. She cautiously clicked the door open and looked out.
Stuck onto the door with a thumbtack was a fluttering, handwritten note. With trembling fingers she smoothed it down and held it steady so she could read the message. It took her only a second, and she understood in that second that the message wasn’t meant just for her, but for all of them. Her breath hitched and she closed her eyes, knowing it was already too late.
She never heard the shot when it rang out, the bullet outracing the sound, nor felt the lead as it crunched through the thin bone of her temple. Her hand clutched the note in a death spasm as she fell like a sack of potatoes in her doorway, a fireworks peppering of blood spray on her clean, white door.
The echoing crack of the distant rifle shot faded to a ghost, as if it had never been there. The easy wind rippled the single sheet of paper. It was slightly crumpled where she clutched it, but the message was easily readable to whomever found her:
“Who’s hunting you, now?”
Share the Fire
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
“Heed these words, you who wish to probe the depths of nature: If you do not find within yourself that which you seek, neither will you find it outside. In you is hidden the treasure of treasures. Know Thyself and you will know the Universe and the Gods.”
Oracle of Delphi