Winnie was walking directly toward the little group of three guys and Iliana as Keller reached the door.
The guys were looking up, instantly alert. Keller saw their faces and gathered herself for a leap.
But it never happened. Before she could get all her muscles ready, the silhouette guy turned-and everything changed.
Time went into slow motion. Keller saw his face clearly, as if she'd had a year to study it. He wasn't bad-looking-quite handsome, actually. He didn't look much older than she was, and he had clean, nicely molded features. He had a small, compact body with what looked like hard muscles under his clothes.
His hair was black, shaggy but shiny, almost like fur. It fell over his forehead in an odd way, a way that looked deliberately disarrayed and was at odds with the neatness of the rest of him.
And he had eyes of obsidian.
Totally opaque.
Shiny silver-black, with nothing clear or transparent about them. They revealed nothing; they simply threw light back at anyone who looked into them. They were the eyes of a monster, and every one of Keller's five hundred voluntary muscles froze in fear.
She didn't need to hear the roar that was far below the pitch that human ears could pick up. She didn't need to see the swirl of dark energy that flared like a red-tinged black aura around him. She knew already, instinctively, and she tried to get the breath to yell a warning to Winnie.
There was no time.
She could only watch as the boy's face turned toward Winnie and power exploded out of him.
He did it so casually. Keller could tell that it was only a flick of his mind, like a horse slapping its tail at a fly. But the dark power slammed into Winnie and sent her flying through the air, arms and legs outstretched, until she hit a wall covered with display plates and clocks. The crash was tremendous.
Winnie! Keller almost yelled it out loud.
Winnie fell behind the cash register counter, out of Keller's line of sight. Keller couldn't tell if she were alive or not. The cashier who had been standing behind the counter went running and screaming toward the back of the shop. The customers scattered, some following the cashier, some dashing for the exit.
Keller hung in the doorway a second longer as they streamed out around her. Then she reeled away to stand with her back against the window of the next shop, breathing hard. There were coils of ice in her guts.