Friday, August 29th – 9:58 pm
Avery’s feet hit the floor, the act jarring her entire body. She stumbled backward. Arms flying out, she caught her balance before falling on her ass. Blinking, she tried to focus on what was around her. She sucked in a breath so hard she almost choked. Her stomach lurched, and for a second, she thought she was going to vomit.
She took another breath, then another until her pulse slowed.
Her living room had disappeared. Mayor had disappeared.
For several seconds, she didn’t understand. “Oh, God.”
A rush of heat rolled through her body as shock slammed into her. She’d space jumped from her condo to—to—she wasn’t sure… Her pulse jumped and started racing again.
Avery couldn’t make out much. Blinking into the darkness, she adjusted her eyes against the sudden lack of light. The moonlight from a sliding glass door also helped, giving her the impression she was on the main floor of a house. The place didn’t have any furnishings. Maybe it was up for sale. From where she stood, she could make out a kitchen to her left.
She changed her mind. The place looked abandoned. Wires hung from a light fixture in what was probably the dining area, while a couple of cabinet doors in the kitchen were missing, and one hung half off its hinges. She turned around; the scrape of her heel against the dusty and littered floor ricocheted through the house. She peered at each exit, expecting the worse. When Mayor didn’t appear, she still didn’t relax.
For all she knew, she could have transported from one bad situation to one even worse.
She hadn’t a clue where she was. Frowning, she moved across the room with a tentative step. Then the yellow and orange polka dot drapes caught her eye. They looked familiar and unique. She walked over to a sliding glass door that contained a layer of grime, accidentally kicking a beer can lying on the floor. The can rattled across the floor, sending dust into the air while the smell of musk clung to the room. She wiped at her nose to stop the sneeze rising to her throat. She peered outside. The backyard also appeared so familiar…
Memories suddenly flooded her of another place and time, a time when she was a child, a time when she’d been happy. Janice and Gerald Pauley. They’d taken her in as foster parents, loved her unconditionally, and intended to adopt her. They’d even started the paperwork.
The family she’d always wanted but never got. Janice and Gerald had planned a trip to the city, to a highly reputable lawyer, and left her behind, telling her she would be bored. The trip had been their last. They’d ended up a statistic of a fifty-car pileup on the interstate. Black ice.
Sudden and unexpected tears welled in her eyes. She hadn’t thought about them for a long while. She’d tried to bury those memories with her childhood. They’d been too painful.
She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand and walked from the sliding glass door to the front window, where she could make out the street and the rest of the neighborhood. Another house across the way looked equally abandoned. It seemed the area had gone downhill since she’d lived in the house.
She was stuck in another state. It seemed her wishes had come true. Mayor couldn’t find her here. Hell, she didn’t think she could get out of the neighborhood and get home without some serious help.
Avery said a couple of choice words under her breath. She grabbed her phone from her back pocket, already knowing it was useless. But she still double-checked. She almost expected the device to be mangled, smoking, or hot to the touch from her little excursion across part of the country in a fraction of a second.
Yep. Blank screen.
She was almost eight hours away from her home. Her thoughts turned to Clover. The cat could last a couple of days with both bowls fool of food and water. At least that was something, but how the hell was she going to get back to Scottsdale? No phone, no one to contact. Ugh. There had to be a way.
Teleport. She’d gotten here and to the hospital. Then she thought of Luys’ warning about how dangerous it was. She might be pushing her luck. The idea of her body turning into some morbid creature with mixed DNA from another species made her decide against it. She wasn’t in danger right now.
She palmed her phone, nibbling on her lower lip. Maybe the time she’d shown up at the hospital by teleporting had only drained the battery. It could just need to be charged. From there, she could log into her app and get a ride. But she needed a recharge. She glanced over at the electrical outlets. That wasn’t an option. The place probably hadn’t had electricity for a couple of years. Maybe she could get it recharged somewhere. From what she could tell, the phone didn’t look broken.
She stepped closer to the living room window and peered outside. The street appeared little better than the house. The neighborhood didn’t look safe anymore. The unkept yards, chain-link fences, and bars on the windows on a couple of occupied houses told her walking around out there at night wasn’t the smartest move. But she didn’t have an option. Then she thought about going to a nearby house. Nope. That was probably a worse idea. She could get shot for trespassing. There had to be a convenience store close by, though, right? Maybe? They were everywhere in the city and probably safer than knocking on any one of those front doors.
But the idea of walking down the road with so few lights was intimidating and a tad scary. Well, it had to be done. Stepping outside, she crossed to the sidewalk, looked both ways, and decided to go left. Fingers crossed, she decided it turned out to be the shorter and the safest of the two routes. At one point, unease crawled across her entire body when she noticed a couple of shadowed figures down another street. Three men stood talking in a front yard. They grew silent as all of them looked her way.
I am not a victim. I am not a victim, she chanted to herself as she strode down the sidewalk. She glanced over to where they stood from the corner of her eye. They hadn’t moved. When she crossed over to the next street, they disappeared from her sight. A few minutes later, she looked over her shoulder, and when she didn’t find anyone following her, she relaxed.
A main road came into view. Breathing a sigh of relief, she found a store two blocks away.
She slipped inside and looked around for a charger. Crap. She didn’t have the funds to purchase one. That was stupid to not have thought of it. Had she completely lost her brain somewhere? Sighing in frustration, she walked down a couple of aisles until she found one that would fit her phone. Stealing wasn’t an option. That was just wrong. She’d done some crazy things when she was a teenager, but she wasn’t one any longer. Sighing again, she pulled the charger from a hook and walked up to the counter. Right now, she was the only customer in the store. She eyed the cashier, a big woman with bleached blond hair, dark roots, and bright blue eye shadow.
The woman towered over her by a good foot. Avery suspected the raised floor on the other side of the counter gave the cashier leverage for any thug that walked in. “Um… I was hoping to get a charger, but I can’t pay until my phone has some power. I don’t have any cash, and I don’t live in the neighborhood.”
“And your point?” She snapped her gum with a loud pop. The crease between her brows looked like it had been there for decades.
Avery should have known she wouldn’t get far without money. She’d had her head in the clouds. Her phone was the only option. She didn’t know how else to get back home. She guessed keeping to herself and being completely anti-social was now biting her in the butt. She had no one to turn to for help other than strangers. “Well, I hoped that if I could borrow it and—”
“No.”
“It would be for a couple of minutes until—”
“No.”
Avery’s eyes narrowed. She couldn’t read what the woman was thinking with her map of deep creases. God, how was she going to get out of this one? Her shoulders slumped. “I understand.” She picked up the charger and put it back on the shelf. She had to walk by the counter to get to the exit.
“Bad day, eh?” The woman snapped her gum again.
Tears welled in Avery's eyes. She couldn’t help it. Having someone say it aloud just made it that much of a reality. She blinked until her vision cleared. “It’s been rough. It comes close to one of my worse days.”
The woman eyed the phone in Avery’s hand. “I have a charger.”
“You do?” Avery breathed on a soft sigh. “I’m hoping my phone just needs a boost and isn’t broken.”
“You can borrow mine and plug it in over in the corner there. I can’t have you use something you haven’t paid for.”
“Thank you!” Avery wanted to hug her but decided the woman wouldn’t appreciate it.
When she plugged her phone in, a faint red bar appeared on the screen. Thank God. She now had a lifeline. Technology. She hated and loved it at the same time. Avery tried not to pace as the phone charged but kept to the corner of the store as customers came in and paid at the counter. Some, she couldn’t help noticing, reeked of alcohol or body odor.
When she reached 20 percent, she handed the charger back. “Thanks.”
Her face still inscrutable, the cashier snapped her gum and nodded. “Just paying it forward.”
Not knowing what to say to that, Avery nodded back and moved toward the double doors but paused. The newspaper’s headlines screamed back at her.
Savage murder in upscale Scottsdale. The Butcher strikes again. She winced. She hated the name they’d dubbed for the murderer. It fanned paranoia and fear. She winced again. Ha. The truth was even stranger than any conspiracy theory out there.
She suspected word had traveled out of state because of the bizarre savagery of the killing. A simple stabbing or shooting didn’t get headlines—pretty sad, really—but a bizarre ritualist killer that randomly found his victims stoked hysteria and fear.
The date was from today. But that didn’t reveal how long the body had been decomposing before someone found it. It could be hours or weeks. After or before the police arrested Luys? The timing could mean everything. If Luys was innocent after all… She frowned. She didn’t want to think about Luys.
She glanced over her shoulder and found the woman staring at her. Avery itched to grab the paper and run, but common sense stilled her itchy fingers. Instead, she flipped the paper over to read the rest of the article. The words heart, ripped out, bloody jumped from the page…
“We’re not a library.”
Pausing, she peered over her shoulder again at the cashier. The lines in the woman’s wrinkled face had deepened. Sighing, Avery flipped the paper back to its original position and slipped out of the store.
She managed to get a ride through the app on her phone and didn’t have to wait long. On the drive home, which was going to cost her a small fortune, she scanned through the stories in her phone’s news feed, mindful of how much battery she had left.
There. Murder. Brutal attack.
Her hand tightened on her phone. The article involved lots of speculation as to the motivation and state of the body but no details other than another murder. No names, no specific location other than mentioning Scottsdale.
She sank her head against the backrest and tried to get her pulse back to normal, as normal as she was right now. When it came down to it, she didn’t know what normal was, not when it came to her body and the changes that had swept through her system. She didn’t feel any different. She seemed to have a regular heartbeat. It didn’t feel like it had liquified or turned into some petrified substance.
Whatever was now flowing through her DNA had eradicated her cancer, and she should be thankful. But right now, she felt anything but.
The idea of going home filled her with dread. Mayor could be still inside her home waiting for her. Then there were Stephen’s threats she couldn’t exactly forget. She didn’t feel safe in her place. Not now. Not when Mayor, in all her rage, was bound to show up at her condo again.
She’d have to find a place to stay temporarily until things calmed down or Mayor tired of looking for her. Yeah, she could try space jumping like this last time, but she could only run so long. Also, she was realizing time traveling was not so easy. She couldn’t seem to do it with a thought or belief. There had to be an emotion behind it. Each place she’d found herself had been a deep and subconscious desire, a hunger for a person or place where she felt safe.
Avery’s ride pulled into the parking lot of her condo complex a good hour before the morning’s sun crested the horizon. She remained in the back until she looked through all the windows of the car for signs of Mayor. The area was quiet; it was early yet for people to be moving around on the weekend. She could still be out there, but Avery thought—hoped and prayed—after so many hours, she would have gotten tired and left.
Beyond exhausted, she fumbled from the compact car and, once on the sidewalk with the driver paid and driving off, she rolled her shoulders to get the kinks out of her neck. She walked over to the mail center, knowing Clover could wait a couple more minutes and delaying the inevitable moment when she stepped through her front door. She glanced over to her condo. The door was closed and looked like Mayor hadn’t damaged the lock or jam, unlike her brother. From the front window, lamplight illuminated the front yard. It didn’t mean Mayor was waiting inside since she’d been the one to turn on the lights. Even so, she wasn’t going to just walk through that front door unprepared.
She didn’t know if she should stay in her condo. It wasn’t safe. Mayor could show up anytime. Avery wasn’t the only one who could travel through space and time. Even though she was bone tired, her smartest move was to pack up Clover and some clothing and find a place to stay temporarily.
As she dug into the dark hole of her mailbox, a sound, almost like a low rumble, carried into the alcove from somewhere in the complex. She stiffened. Frowning, she pulled out several junk inserts and closed the mailbox door on a sigh, all the while trying to decipher the noise. She was getting creeped out, but she couldn’t help it. Who wouldn’t get all worked up after everything she’d been through? Damn it. Mayor could be playing with her right now, waiting around the corner, ready to attack at any second.
Avery curled her fingers around the mail and glanced over both shoulders. Nothing. Still…
Avery tensed.
There. Again. Soft but insistent. Someone moaning? Was a couple having sex close by? She wrinkled her nose. They should keep it behind closed doors. Frowning, she edged along the mailbox unit and toward the walkway between two residential buildings. She saw no one. Clouds covered the sky, deepening and darkening shadows. The rumble of thunder rolled across the night, melding, then obscuring the moaning.
She eyed her front window again, dread crawling across every pore of her body. If there was any hint of Mayor, Avery would break records getting out of the place. If there wasn’t a sign of the other woman, she was going to slip inside, get her purse, Clover, and a week’s worth of clothing, then she was in her car and driving off to somewhere far safer.
The moaning stopped. Sounds, far louder than before, followed. She detected possible grunting and shuffling. Avery wrinkled her nose again. The couple was really going at it. As she reached the sidewalk between both residential buildings, she glanced down the walkway.
Two figures seemed melded together off the pathway and in the bushes. Yep, a couple in a full-blown sex act. At least that’s what she figured, but it was too dark to see much of anything.
With her gaze lingering on the couple as she moved toward her condo, she slowed to a stand and frowned. Something seemed off. A metallic scent drifted in the air. Blood? Oh, God, no… Heart pounding, she couldn’t look away even if she wanted to as a different scenario hit her. The couple was not having sex like she first thought. One of the two seemed to convulse as gurgling noises carried across the distance between her and them.
Then both figures separated and the larger of the two lifted the other into the air—just like Mayor had done to her earlier. For a wild minute, Avery thought it was the other woman, but the shadow was larger, taller. Was the attacker like Mayor and Luys, even herself? Eternal and capable of inhuman powers?
She squinted against the shadows but couldn’t make out if either were her neighbors.
Could it be Luys? Impossible. He was in jail. Unless he’d escaped…
She eased ever so slowly toward her condo, afraid any sudden move might alert the attacker.
The person holding the other in an effortless grip swiveled his head in her direction.
Avery sucked in a breath just as a cloud skated further across the sky, exposing the moon. The light briefly peeled back the shadows. Oh, shit. Just enough to reveal the attacker’s identity. But far worse, the sudden moonlight revealed her own identity.
Her breath caught in her lungs. She knew him.
Not Luys. Not Mayor.
But Ben. Her neighbor.
Was he one of them? Was he working with Mayor? Were the two of them rampaging through Scottsdale and the surrounding area in a killing spree? He had to be tied to Mayor.
Damn it. He was a cop. Someone who was supposed to protect others, not kill them! He had to have been the one who murdered Noah Harris.
Ben dropped the body beside him and advanced toward her. The person on the ground didn’t move and was probably dead or near death. She couldn’t make out Ben’s expression, but it couldn’t be good.
She took several steps backward. Oh, God. He was going to kill her. He had to after she’d recognized him. Pivoting, she dropped her mail, the letters fluttering into the air like dying doves, and raced toward her car. Her condo wasn’t an option, not with the possibility of Mayor waiting inside. But she had a key to her car inside a magnetic holder in the wheel well. She’d just needed the time to get it, lock the door, and start the engine before Ben got his hands on her.
Luys. All this time the killer hadn’t been Luys. They’d arrested an innocent man, and she’d believed the worse of him.
Oh, God. Now, more than ever, she needed his help.
The slap of her shoes on the cement rocketed into the night. Ben’s feet thudded from behind. She needed to go faster, push harder. He was gaining on her. It would be a matter of minutes before he caught up to her. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs, and a cry of terror sliced past her lips.
Her car came into view, a good 15 yards away.
Ben’s footsteps thundered behind, increasing in volume the closer he got. He was gaining on her. She could hear his breath, feel the excitement rolling off him. She’d never make the car.
She veered to the left, back into the complex. It gave her added seconds, nothing more. But Ben quickly made up the distance
His breath on her neck crawled across her skin as he grabbed her arm. Oh, God.
She was going to die. She wasn’t a damn cat. She had one life. She’d escaped Mayor only to die from some sick serial killer.
She wasn’t ready. Stupid, so stupid. I’m so sorry, Luys, for doubting you! I wish…I wish…