Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,63

hashok connected with the door again, the chest of drawers rocked unsteadily, but it held the door shut.

With a shuddering breath, I grabbed Elien again, spun him toward the window, and shoved.

He took two steps and hesitated.

“Not without you,” he whispered.

I came after him, herding him toward the window. The cool October air washed over me; I kicked out the screen, helped Elien up on the ledge, and pointed to the trellis.

The hashok shrieked and slammed into the door again.

“Fast as you can,” I whispered.

He nodded, lowered himself, and his eyes widened for a moment. I grabbed his wrists, and he nodded a silent thanks. Then he must have found his footing because he nodded, twisted his hands free, and began to climb down.

I followed.

Twice more I heard the hashok connect with the door. When I was halfway down the trellis, though, I realized the sounds had stopped. The smell of bruised jessamine was so thick it made me gag. Wooden slats splintered under my grip, digging into my palm. I heard a thump as Elien’s feet hit the ground.

“Run,” I whispered.

“Not without you.”

I dropped the last five feet, and we sprinted around the side of the house. Elien grabbed my hand, tugging me along. I flinched as we charged out onto the front lawn. The hashok must have known we were trying to escape. It would be waiting. It would launch itself at us, and the best thing I could hope for was to release Elien’s hand and let him keep running. I might be able to slow the damn thing down for a few minutes.

But the only thing that met us was a quiet street, and the steady glow of the streetlights, and the echoes of our steps clapping back from the silent houses around us.

ELIEN (15)

“Pull over,” I said. We’d been driving for at least five minutes; the houses of La Grange blurred around me. Every few moments, one of them would snap into focus—a red-brick Colonial looking painfully out of place, paint peeling from the top of the porch columns—and then the world would dissolve again, and I’d be back in my old bedroom, a hand over my mouth, the taste of grass, the smell of fried catfish.

Dag kept driving.

“Pull over, pull over,” I said, slapping his arm.

“Eli, that thing could be right behind us.”

“Pull over right fucking now!”

Braking hard, Dag nosed up against the curb. The Escort’s grumbly, rumbly engine made the seats vibrate. The Big Mac smell from the back seat was overwhelming, and I rolled down the window. The air was cool against my feverish face, and I heaved once, but nothing came up.

Dag’s hand came to rest at the small of my back, and then it bumped up along my spine, then back down, then up again. I focused on the touch, followed it back to the present.

“Oh my God,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut so I wouldn’t cry.

“It’s ok,” Dag said. “We’re ok.”

I tried to hold it together, but I started shaking again.

“Look,” Dag said, “we’re safe, we’re in the car, we’re driving away.”

“No, we’re not ok,” I said. “It was there. It’s her, right? It’s got to be her. We were in her house. She came back, and she found us, and she tried to kill us again. And she’s not going to stop, Dag. That’s what that the psychic told me. She’s going to keep coming, and she’s going to kill me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Hold on,” Dag said. “We’re not exactly helpless. We’ve learned a lot about this thing just in the last couple of days.”

“We know its name, Dag.” I turned to face him. “We know it likes to cause pain and suffering. That’s all we fucking know. We don’t know how to stop it. We don’t know how to kill it. We don’t even know how to prove it’s real—we just searched her house, and we couldn’t find anything. She has a perfect life, an ordinary life, and under the surface, she’s a monster, and we could never prove it in a million years.”

For a long moment, Dag studied me, shadows lying thick across his face.

“Means, motive, and opportunity,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s where you start with a murder.”

“These aren’t ordinary murders, Dag. You can’t prove an escalating cycle of violence. You can’t prove that an evil monster possessed your best friend and made him try to kill me. You can’t prove that a blue firefly took over a dead man’s body.”

“Eli—”

“Stop fucking