Page 57 of Safe in Shadow
Footsteps came running right toward her, a deranged yell outshouting the storm.
Nyx gave her one last, grim look over his shoulder, unwrapped his coils and arms from around her, and shot forward with a room-shaking cry of his own.
Chapter Twenty
The Stranger was blinded by a thick cloud of darkness. His mind briefly went back to his one and only time at Vacation Bible School. He thought there was something about a plague of darkness being inflicted on people who were doing something wrong. Not sure what, but he was also sure he hadn’t done anything wrong. Not much, anyway.
He clawed at the darkness, but it was mobile. It moved around him like the eyewall of a hurricane. Projectiles found their way to him, as if the whirling blackness had hands and arms, as if it could aim. A book. A lamp. A nightstand!
Buffeted and bruised, he was forced to retreat from the room, even though he had heard Pam’s telltale scream coming from inside. He knew now. She was hiding from him. Hiding under the bed.
“I’ll get you!”
“No. You won’t.”
The door whacked him in the face. A jagged pole from the bannister was brandished in his face like a sword. “Is someone there?”
“Yes.” No other information was given, but the darkness now had eyes. A form.
The Stranger heard something moving in the bedroom he had been driven from, and mania seized him. “I want her! She’s mine! She’s always been mine.”
The jagged wooden end of the makeshift weapon whacked him across the face, dragging the splintered end along his eyeand across the bridge of his nose. He almost lost his balance at the top of the stairs, but instead, turned and ran, slipping and catching himself halfway down. His arms burned, and his tailbone hurt, but adrenaline carried him through.
“Out of our home,” the shadowy figure snarled. “The human is mine!”
“Human?”
“A term you’ve forgotten.” The thing moved faster than him, hurling whatever objects it could find at him, beating him with household debris until he was out on the porch, and then sprawling backwards in the grass.
Lighting flashed, and he could see the figure more clearly—and the blonde woman upstairs, now covered and with her hand up to her cheek—probably on the phone.
To the police.
The police could not find him here! They couldn’t find his presents to Pam in the woods. They couldn’t find him if he was gone. He had no record. If he got away now, it didn’t matter what they found inside the house or in the woods. There would be no fingerprints to match, no blood samples to trace...
The Stranger scrambled towards his car, only to see the shadow rush ahead. The sharp stick slammed through the windshield with force that no human being should be capable of delivering.
Momentarily nonplussed, The Stranger stood and watched the storm-strewn branches come to the shadow’s aid, beating him, beating the car. Trying to trap him.
Well, he knew these woods better than anyone else alive. He turned tail and ran into the dark shelter of the trees. The car was his. The car would lead them to so many things.
But if he got away, that wouldn’t matter. He could get away. Start over. Leave Pam and all her ghosts behind.
NYX HAD A HORRIBLEfeeling of deja vu, only this time, he wasn’t herding Cynthia and her terrified horse; he was chasing a desperate man, a serial killer, as the storm intensified and the lightning became a nonstop illumination to their wild chase through the woods.
