Page 13 of Stalked

“Heal yourself, dammit,” the man said in a low, tender voice as if he wanted no one else to hear but me.

I looked up, confused, but in an instant, he was gone—vanishing before I could blink. That awareness that he was no longer holding me felt bare, lonely, and scary.

My head pounded so hard that I forced my eyes closed and lay all the way down on the ground, feeling the dried leaves and twigs scratch against my tender skin and the mud soaking into my clothes.

I felt my eyes roll back against my eyelids, and my mind drifted into the darkness of another haunting and ominous dream.

A sensation of relief hit me as my body felt pain free again, except everything around me felt suffocating. I tried to take a few breaths, but my lungs were restricted.

I looked around and saw that I was in a dark forest. The sky was cloudy, and flashes of lightning flickered over the tops of the trees. I walked a few feet until I entered a clearing where a woman with a rope wrapped around her neck was standing on a wooden platform below a large tree. The rope was secured to a thick branch above her. There was no escape for the woman, only certain death. When I looked more closely at her, I noticed her face was the same as mine.

The only difference between us was the color of her hair, which was light auburn, and the clothes she wore were not from this era. An angry crowd surrounded the woman, hoisting up flaming torches.

I jumped back at the sudden chaos, watching the surrounding scene.

“Witch!” they chanted in unison.

“Hang her now!” a man bellowed.

The woman closed her eyes as the platform opened from under her. Her feet dropped, and her body went limp. The shock of her death made me scream, closing my eyes tightly, unable to tolerate the sight of watching someone die. When I opened my eyes again, all I saw was a white-painted ceiling above me.

CHAPTER 5

“OH, THANK GOD,”Lily whispered. “Shannon, please go find a nurse and tell them Mercy’s awake.”

I lay in a hospital bed, wearing nothing but a flimsy white gown and a plastic band around my wrist with my name on it. Riley and Shannon stood by the back wall while Lily stayed by my side. Shannon quickly walked out of the room to grab a nearby nurse.

Lily grabbed my hand. “Minor injuries, Mercy. You’re okay.”

I didn’t feel okay. I felt achy, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as it had been in the car.

They must have me on some pretty powerful painkillers.

I looked down at my leg and noticed my ankle wasn’t in a cast, either. I placed my fingertips on my forehead, gliding them gently across the skin, but felt nothing.

What the fuck?

I looked up at Lily. “Jesus, what happened to me?”

“You were in an accident not too far from our house. Someone saw your car from their home across the street and called 911,” she said. “Before the ambulance reached you, they saw you stumbling into the woods, collapsing about twenty feet from your car. The doctor thinks you may have passed out.”

“What do you mean, I was walking?” I shook my head. “No, that isn’t what happened. My ankle broke when I crashed. I remember now. There’s no way I would have been walking after that.” I tried to recall what had happened, but my mind wasn’t making sense of it.

Lily and Riley looked at each other and then back at me. I glanced down at my foot again, moving my ankle from side to side. “Or I thought I did.”

“You scared the hell out of all of us,” Riley said, coming to my side. “From what the nurses have said, nothing’s broken, though.” He inched closer until we almost touched. “Kind of surprised, though, you destroyed your car.”

“Shit,” I said, closing my eyes to calm the room from spinning.

“The door had been completely ripped off in the crash,” he added.

“What?” My jaw dropped. The stranger who saved me was real. Everything I remember happening was real.

I glanced around the room. “Is Cami here, too?” I asked Lily.

“She’s here, somewhere,” Lily replied. “The last I saw her was in the waiting room, speaking with her mom on the phone.”

Before Lily opened her mouth again, Shannon followed in with the nurse, who checked my monitors.

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