Page 93 of Visions of Darkness

I swung around before I could watch anything else play out, and I took Aria by the elbow as we darted back onto the sidewalk. We rushed, our feet pounding on the concrete as I led her back to the car. I jerked open her door and she jumped in, and I rounded the front and slipped into my seat. I peeled out from the lot, heading back in the direction of the freeway.

Aria blew out the strain, her fingers driving through the long locks of her black hair before I felt her gaze washing over me. Confusion and hope bound her spirit. “The woman. She knew what we were.”

My stomach clutched, and I exhaled as I passed over the piece of paper that I still had crumpled in my hand. “Think so. What does it say?”

Cloaked in anxiety, Aria unwrapped it. “It’s her name and a phone number. Maria Lewis. And there’s another name: Charles Lewis. She wrote that one in all caps, like she wanted to emphasize it.”

“She wants us to look him up,” I surmised.

“I think so.”

“The next place we stop, we’ll find somewhere to do it.”

Aria sank back in her seat, taking in a bunch of breaths before she whispered, “I feel it, Pax. It feels like maybe the answers are right there, hovering all around us, and we just can’t see them yet. But I also can feel the devastation coming, too.”

Fear clamped around my heart, and my teeth ground as I uttered, “Then that means we have to head it off.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aria

It was strange not having a real destination. We were simply driving, although it was clear Pax wanted to put as much distance between New York and ourselves as possible, so I assumed we were going to end up somewhere on the West Coast.

We’d driven all day and well into the dark, and it was past ten when we pulled into another crummy motel about fifty miles on the other side of Saint Louis, Missouri. This one was two stories, the doors also accessed directly from the outside.

Pax said it was safer that way; it was best if we weren’t trapped inside a building if we needed to make a quick escape.

We climbed the exterior steps to our room on the second level, each of us loaded down with bags, plus I carried a large brown sack from a local burger place where we’d gone through the drive-through.

Pax slid the key into the lock, and he again went inside and searched the room before he gave me the all clear and I shuffled in.

It was much the same as the last one, though here the interior was a dingy, dust-tainted blue.

Two beds on the left. A table directly to the right.

I dumped my bag onto the farthest bed before I placed the paper sack on the small table.

Grease saturated the bottom, and the heavy scent of french fries floated into the air.

My stomach grumbled.

“You’d think I hadn’t fed you all day.” That low voice slipped over me from behind. So close that it sent a rash of chills skating over my flesh. I did my best to shake it off. To pretend I wasn’t affected. To act like my body didn’t shiver and my spirit didn’t ache.

I wondered if he could feel it.

If he ever had.

If every time I entered Tearsith, he could see the wash of what radiated from me.

This love that felt trapped inside, a secret shrouded in our mystery.

“I guess I’m making up for when I was in the facility,” I told him, lifting a shoulder to my ear as I tried to play off the reaction I had to him.

That reaction had only grown in the distance we’d traveled today.

Today I’d had time to just ... study him.

Watch him as he’d driven for countless miles, the man hedged in a cloak of armor so hard he might as well have been covered in jagged, unpolished steel. His attention rapt and never failing.

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