Page 14 of The Art of Us

She made it to the bathroom, set the food on the sink, and went to retrieve her duffel. Once she had the duffel in the bathroom, she locked the door. When she turned to set up her bed, she jolted at what she saw out of the corner of her eye. It was splotches of red writing on the far wall. Blood?

Alarmed, Ireland froze. Had someone come and scrawled some warning in blood on her wall?

“You should leave,” she told herself. It would have been the smart thing to do. But she didn’t. Instead, she stepped closer to the wall to inspect the writing.

“This is how every episode ofSupernaturalstarts,” she muttered to herself. But she stepped even closer. No. Not blood. It was hot pink.

That gave her the courage to step closer and read the message.

My every heartbeat is now a wracking sob, wrapped in a cloak of betrayal. I’m a hideous beast now—scarred, repulsive, and howling at the uncaring moon.

“Definitely the start to aSupernaturalepisode.” She’d watched the entire series one summer when her dad had gotten them into an apartment with paid streaming for several different services.

“What the stupid kind of message is this?” Ireland asked. Now that she was close enough to really see what she was looking at, and now that she wasn’t panicking and jumping to paranoid conclusions, she could tell the message was written in a playful pink lipstick. So likely a woman wrote it, which meant some woman had been there in her bathroom while she was gone. Itwasn’t as abandoned as she’d allowed herself to believe. This meant she had to stay extra careful.

Not that she wasn’t careful, but just that morning, she’d considered not putting her stuff into the duffel and hoisting it into the trees. It was just so much work. Now she was glad she hadn’t given in to that impulse.

She glanced around at the rest of her clean bathroom and then back to the wall with the writing. She scowled. “Seriously?” she asked. “What kind of meth-head harpy writes on a wall in lipstick?”

With a grunt of frustration, she pulled out the cleaning supplies and went to work to scrub away the mess. “Lipstick is the worst!” she whisper-yelled. It was all grease and smear and smudge and mess. “And who does this?” she asked. “Who runs around vandalizing other people’s bathrooms like this? Don’t they know? Don’t they know how hard it is to clean? Does it not occur to them thatsomeonehas to clean it up? Entitled pieces of shrewish dumpster trash.” The grumbling didn’t make the cleaning any easier, but it made her feel better about it.

When she was done, she felt tired and furious, and she cursed the anonymous vandal all over again. Then she prepared her bed, wishing she’d taken the time to get a pillow, and turned out the light.

But once the light was out, it felt like the words were seared in her mind.Scarred, hideous, beast, betrayal. Her fear rose on the tide of those words washing into her head. She wished they didn’t leave her feeling vulnerable and paralyzed.

They were like some ominous omen, and, just as she had finally admitted to herself that she missed her father, she also finally admitted that she was terrified to be so completely alone as the uncaring moon shone in through her window.

Chapter Four

Kal

Kal scrubbed his hands over his head and stared up at the ceiling of Geppetto’s. Ireland had left without saying goodbye. Dude. Not cool. Also intriguing. Why didn’t she want him to take her home? Was she living in a crap neighborhood and so felt ashamed of her situation? She couldn’t think he was that shallow, could she?

Maybe she thought he was some sort of skeeze and she didn’t want him to know where she lived.

He dismissed the thought with a laugh as soon as it came to him. Not likely. Nothing about him could have been called skeezy. Average, maybe ... sometimes he felt like he wallowed in average.

He turned his head to look at the door. How long could she have been gone? Taking the heavy cans off the shelves in the storeroom took fewer than two minutes. She had the pizza boxes, which would slow her down. Kal lifted his chin in the manager’s direction to get his attention. “Hey, Chaz. I gotta get.” When Chaz acknowledged him back with a raise of his own chin, Kal hurried out.

At the sidewalk, he inspected both directions. Nothing. She was nowhere to be seen. He chose right and started jogging. When he reached the next block, he spied her lithe frame and long, dark braids. She balanced the pizza boxes and turned left when she reached the next street, away from the direction hewould have assumed. She was heading to the outskirts of town. There weren’t any houses in that direction.

Kal stayed low and used cars, trees, and shrubbery to block him from her view so she wouldn’t know she was being followed.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Maybe I am a skeezer.”

He was surprised when she entered the almost invisible animal trail by the dumpsters behind a Lutheran church and disappeared into the tree line. “What are you doing, Ireland?” he whispered to himself. Maybe her family lived in a trailer in the woods?

Maybe.

He found it was harder to track her once they were in the trees because the trail had small twigs and branches that could snap with any step. But she stayed on the trail, keeping her footsteps one in front of the other as if she was purposely keeping her path as small as possible. He did the same, figuring he could respect whatever it was she was doing. It was getting dark, and with the sun’s exit from the sky, the temperature was dropping. Kal considered that he should have noticed the cold more, but the adrenaline pumped hot through him.

Adrenaline was weird—how it could boil blood and sharpen and dull senses at the same time.

Kal worked to be as silent as possible, but it felt like his breathing rasped loudly in the air around them. There was no way she couldn’t hear him. And maybe that was the appropriate thing. Maybe he should just call attention to the fact that he was following her rather than stalk her from behind like some axe murderer. Maybe he should call out, “Hey, Ireland, where are you going? Do you need a hand with those pizza boxes?”

But how did he explain the fact that he’d already been following her for as long as he had? She’d yank out her cell phone and call the police faster than he could say, “I’m sorry for being your local stalker.” Or worse, she could pull out a can ofmace and spray him in the eyes. She could tell him he was the idiot that he knew himself to be and never talk to him again.

That would definitely be the worst. Because he liked her. And now that she was talking to him, he really wanted her to keep talking.

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