Page 6 of Destined for Shadows
No answer.
She kept the weapon close to her side, cocked but out of sight behind the truck door, not wanting to reveal the revolver until she was certain the person out there was a threat. So far, they’d done nothing more than move between trees. Could Emily and her friends be playing a prank on her? It wouldn’t have surprised Cori. Melena’s adopted teenage daughter had pulled some wild stunts in the past, one of which got a guy stuck in a bear trap out in the middle of nowhere and nearly got Mel turned into a werewolf when she tried to rescue him.
“Stop being a coward and come out,” she said, tone more forceful this time.
Cori waited, hoping her taunts would be enough to put an end to this stalemate. Seconds ticked by before the dark figure stepped around a tree. He moved slowly, once again hardly disturbing the brush. She almost couldn’t breathe as he crept closer. Then the shadows peeled away from the man as he reached the edge of the woods, and he stepped into the circle of light.
Her heart thundered in her ears, and she lost the ability to breathe. It wasn’thim. It couldn’t be him, and yet he looked exactly the same as the last time she’d seen him nearly four years ago. He was the man who had haunted a thousand nightmares and left her waking up shaking and sweating in the middle of the night. Her gaze started at the top of his head with his shaven brown hair, down to his pitch-black eyes, then on to his goatee and mustache, and she noted his skin had become paler, almost like a ghost. And just the same as before, he had a stocky physique with large muscles built for fighting, especially those weaker than him. She knew about that all too well.
“Hello, baby,” he said, his voice coming out low and rumbling.
A cold shiver ran down her spine. “Griff?”
Her ex-husband chuckled, the resonance sounding similar to something she’d expect from of a horror movie. Everything about him sent alarm bells ringing. He didn’t seem real, but no amount of blinking made the specter of him go away. Cori wanted to pinch herself to see if this was some kind of bad dream. And could she possibly escape it?
He took a step closer, flowing over her lawn so smoothly she couldn’t be certain he actually touched it. “I’ve come back for you, baby, and you’re going to pay for what you did.”
She lifted the stainless steel revolver in her hand. It shook a little, but she didn’t let that deter her. “Stay away from me.”
He barely spared her weapon a glance.
“Come here, Cori,” he beckoned, voice deep and mesmerizing. “I want to look at you.” The tone and expression on his face reminded her of those early years when they were together. Griff had been attentive back then and would do anything to make her happy. Not like later.
Her feet threatened to move of their own volition, but she kept them firmly planted. “No.”
“Yes,” he said, his gaze turning demanding.
“Leave me alone.”
He let out a growl and rushed forward in a blur across her lawn. She fired, squeezing the trigger over and over again. The shots pierced Cori’s ears, and the recoil punished her palms and wrists, but she didn’t stop until she’d unloaded all six rounds.
As she lowered the revolver, she squinted into the darkness, unable to find a body or any sign of her ex-husband. He’d vanished. She scanned left and right, studied the woods, and finally spun about in case he’d somehow gotten behind her. Nothing. She couldn’t have imagined him, though. Griff had been standing directly in front of her when she’d started firing, but sometime between the first round and the last, he’d fled.
Cori lowered her weapon with one hand and used the other to dig into her purse, searching for the box of ammunition she’d put in there. Her ex was hiding out there somewhere, and she had to be ready for him when he came out again. She grasped hold of the package with trembling fingers and started to pull it out, but a flash of light ten feet away made her freeze.
Bartol appeared, his gaze scanning the area with alarm. “What is going on?”
Cori shook herself and continued the process of reloading her weapon. A nephilim might be a lot more deadly than a revolver, but she still wanted her own weapon on hand in case her ex appeared again. Assuming, of course, that Griff wasn’t just a ghost who’d come back to haunt her. She had no idea how to fight one of those since no one had ever mentioned them being real before.
“A man tried to attack me,” she said, forcing herself to sound calmer than she felt. Cori wasn’t prepared to tell Bartol she knew the guy and that he was someone from her past. “I shot at him, but he disappeared.”
His brows drew together. “He disappeared?”
“Yes.”
He frowned at the empty field and woods. “I don’t see anyone. Did you hit him?”
“I don’t know.” She checked her revolver and dropped it back into her purse. “He moved too fast for me to be able to tell—like he was a ghost or something.”
“Where exactly?”
She pointed at the spot in the woods where she’d fired all her rounds. “There.”
They walked together to the place where her ex-husband had stood. She didn’t spot any drops of blood on the ground to prove Griff had been hit, and none of the underbrush appeared disturbed. The only evidence of the confrontation at all was several of the trees had bits of bark torn off of them from where her bullets had struck. Could she have just been seeing things? Her ex-husband’s body had seemed almost ethereal, but darkness could play tricks on the eyes. He had to have been real because she couldn’t be going crazy. Not when things were actually looking up for her.
“He was here?” Bartol pointed to the shrubbery where her ex-husband’s specter had exited the woods. “In this spot?”
Cori nodded. “Yes. He even spoke to me.”
