Chapter 8
Eight
HAVEN
I scream and drop to the ground, covering myself as glass goes flying everywhere.
There’s a loud thud, like bodies colliding, and then a gunshot rings out.
I pop to my feet, my heart hammering in my chest to see someone sprawled on top of my dad—another unfamiliar guy dressed in trousers and a button-down.
A deep red splotch starts to grow on his back, and then like what happened with the attacker in the woods, black smoke rises from him, twisting and snaking about until it dissipates into the air.
The demon came for me again. Just like Becks warned.
Shock roots me in place until Becks rolls the stranger off of my dad. When he doesn’t get up, the knife at his side tells me why.
Terror rips through me and I cry out, falling to the ground beside him just as my mom rushes into the room.
“What’s happened?” she asks, a sharp sound tearing from her when she sees my dad on the floor.
She disappears as I hover, not knowing what to do. When she reappears, she has a dishtowel in her hand. Dropping to her knees next to me, she wraps the towel around the knife, keeping it in place as she tries to stop the bleeding.
“Call 911.”
I go to reach for my phone, realizing I must have lost it in the woods.
“My back pocket,” she says, and I grab her phone, punching in the numbers with shaking hands.
Becks appears just as the operator picks up. I don’t see the guy who crashed through the window anymore, so I think he must have dragged him out of the way.
When I stand to tell the operator what’s happened and give her our address for an ambulance, Becks takes my place next to my mom.
The operator tells me to stay on the line, but I catch Becks saying, “More are going to keep coming. I need to take her.”
With the dispatcher jabbering in my ear, it takes my muddled brain a minute to understand what he’s saying. He wants me to leave my parents.
That’s not happening.
“Just get here, fast,” I tell the operator, and then disconnect the call as I go to my dad’s other side.
He looks up at me. “I’m okay,” he says, but his brow is already dotted with sweat, and his face is paler than I’ve ever seen it before.
There’s a sticky notepad on the end table, and Becks grabs it.
My mom’s obsessed with them. There’s a pad in every room. She leaves notes for herself as well as for me and my dad all over the house.
Becks scribbles something and then places the note next to my mom.
“Call this number and let them know where you are. They’ll protect you with their lives.”
She stares at it for a second before glancing up at Becks. “Whose number is that?”
“Your daughter and her husband.”
My sister is married?
My mom’s eyes get impossibly larger.
“Talon’s a powerful ice dragon,” Becks says quickly. “They won’t tell the Order where you are, but if anyone can protect you right now, it’s them. Together, they’re practically unstoppable.”
A million questions about my sister run through my head, but I shove them down. With my dad bleeding out in the living room and a freaking demon after me, now’s not the time.
Becks gets to his feet, but I don’t take my eyes off my dad.
“I love you,” he says, and I shake my head because it sounds too much like Goodbye.
Ambulance sirens sound in the distance and it fills me with relief.
“Hang on, Dad,” I say, tears clouding my vision. “You’re going to be all right.”
Suddenly, Becks grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet, ripping me away from my dad. With my duffel slung over his shoulder, he drags me toward the back door.
“Wait, no!” I yell, and tear from his grasp to fall back down at my dad’s side.
I don’t care what they want, I’m not leaving my parents. But across from me, my mom shakes her head, her mouth pressed into a firm line and her eyes sharp with resolve.
“Go with him, Haven,” she tells me.
“Mom, no—”
“Yes. I’ve got your father, but if you stay with us it will only be more dangerous for you. You need to get far away from here. And fast.”
I shake my head. “I-I can’t just leave you.”
“You can and you will. We didn’t spend the last twenty years trying to protect you only to fail now. You need to leave.”
The ambulance sirens are louder, maybe a block or two away.
I glance down at my dad. His eyes are slits but he’s still conscious. “We don’t want to leave you, but you need to go.”
There’s a knot in my throat I can’t speak past. I’m torn in two, wanting to honor their wishes but also not being able to make my feet move.
My dad’s gaze travels past me. “Protect her,” he says weakly, speaking to Becks somewhere behind me.
“With my life,” he vows, and then rather than wait for me this time, he grabs me around the waist and picks me right up off the floor.
Even though it’s what my parents want, I still don’t want to be separated from them. They need me. I scream and claw at Becks to break free, but it’s like fighting against a stack of stones.
Unmovable and painful.
I’m pretty sure I do more damage to myself than him.
When he shoves through the back door, hauling me with him, I’m hit in the face with a cold gush of wind. The ambulance sirens are earsplitting, and then suddenly cut off, making me think they’ve reached my house.
Becks gets a few yards away from the house and puts me down. He immediately grabs the sides of my face, forcing me to look at him.
“You will see your parents again. I promise,” he vows. “But right now I need you to stop fighting me. We have to get as far away from here as possible. That’s the best thing you can do for them right now. It’s safer for them to be separated from you. Do you understand?”
My heart races a million beats a minute and my body screams at me to get back to my parents, but as I lock eyes with him, the panic begins to subside.
I nod slowly, and relief fills his green gaze.
“I need you to trust me right now. Is that something you think you can do?”
Despite the obvious rush, he’s speaking slowly and softly, his tone soothing rather than demanding, coaxing me to calm down.
I nod again. “Yes. I can do that,” I say, finding my voice.
“Good.” The corners of his mouth turn up, sending a subtle warmth threading through me as he takes my hand, utterly enveloping mine. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Becks glances at me from the driver’s seat, the SUV eating up the country roads beneath us. His hair is tousled and his cheeks flushed, but the look in his eye is steady, controlled.
After leaving my house, we made a mad dash back through the woods to where his car was parked. He threw my duffel into the back as I climbed in the passenger seat, and then after getting behind the wheel, he gunned the engine and we were off.
That was fifteen minutes ago. It’s taken me this long to find my voice.
“As far away from the university as fast as we can.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
He rubs his lower lip, drawing my attention to its fullness before I force my gaze back to his face.
“How about this? As soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.”
“What?” I ask, a latent shot of adrenaline coursing through me. “You don’t have a plan?”
“I have a plan,” he responds, his green eyes flashing when he gives me a quick look. “Just some of the details aren’t fleshed out yet.”
“Unbelievable.” I huff out a breath. “He kidnaps me without so much as a concrete plan.”
“I did not kidnap you,” he says gruffly.
“Debatable.”
A muscle tics in Becks’ jaw. “Things escalated further than I was expecting. And besides that . . . ”
“What?” I ask when he doesn’t go on.
He glances at me out of the corner of his eye, and I get the impression he’s trying to decide how much to tell me. Which means he’s hiding things.
“If you want me to trust you, keeping stuff from me isn’t helping your case,” I point out.
He sighs, but nods. “The original plan was to take you back to the Order headquarters,” he says.
A spike of fear pierces my heart. I know about the Order. My parents blame the organization for what happened to us all those years ago. I may tentatively trust Becks, but I have a deep-seated apprehension, bordering on hate, for the Order.
If my parents had never been part of the secret organization, or had simply left when they found out they were pregnant, I might have had a chance at a normal life, one that didn’t include moving a dozen times before I hit middle school, or parents who jumped at every shadow.
“Why aren’t we going there?” I ask, making sure to keep my voice level.
Becks said he wasn’t an Order member, but it seems he has ties to them. Until I understand those dynamics, I need to be careful. If he plans to shuttle me over to that sketchy organization, I think I’d rather take my chances on my own. But he doesn’t need to know that.
He falls quiet again, and it starts to annoy me.
Just as I open my mouth to tell him off, he says, “Because I’m no longer confident the Order is a safe place for you.
I’m going to be real with you.” His eyes stay fixed on the dark country roads ahead.
“There are a lot of good people in the Order, some of the best I’ve ever met, but it looks like there might be a mole in the organization, someone actually working with the demon. ”
The thought of someone aiding the demon, a being of pure evil, is almost unfathomable, and it makes my stomach turn.
But I’m also relieved. Relieved that it means he’s not taking me to them.
“Why do you think someone’s helping the demon?”
A muscle tics in his jaw again, and when he talks it feels like he’s forcing the words out against his better judgment.
“Because before I found you, there was a string of dead girls the demon left in its wake.”
I swallow the gasp that rises in my throat as Becks goes on.
“For weeks, we’ve been one step behind. As soon as we found someone we thought might be you, they’d turn up dead before we could reach them.
The only way we can figure that the demon kept getting to the girls before us was if someone inside the organization leaked the information.
Until he or she is discovered, I don’t think it’s a safe place for you anymore.
The only ones I trust are Locklyn and Talon. ”
He cuts a look my way. “They will protect your parents. With their lives.”
I nod, struggling past the lump in my throat at the mention of my mom and dad.
I’ve been trying hard to keep my thoughts off them these last few minutes, because if I don’t I’ll drive myself crazy with worry.
But my mind keeps circling back to the guy who attacked me in the woods.
The preternatural strength. The endurance.
The sharp claws extending from his fingers.
Taking a deep breath, I remind myself that the ambulance arrived right as we left the house, and that according to Becks, Locklyn and Talon would be with them in a couple of hours.
I can only hope that my sister and her husband are as strong a pair as Becks keeps making them out to be, because if the demon goes after my parents and they’re not, I won’t ever see them again.
“Those girls were killed just because they weren’t me?”
“It’s not your fault,” Becks says in lieu of an answer.
I nod, but I can’t help feeling like it is.
My eyes fill up with tears as sadness—for my parents, for the girls who were needlessly killed as the demon hunted me—overwhelms my already exhausted body. I glance out the dark window to hide my face from Becks.
It falls silent in the cab again. Becks is no doubt as deep in his own thoughts as I am in my own.
There’s so much to discuss, but I just can’t.
I need a moment, or more like a solid month, to digest everything that’s happened and that I’ve learned in the last few hours.
My mind spins, pressure building into a dull headache. It’s not until I give myself permission to stop searching for an answer, for a reason, that everything finally goes blank, and the rocking of the car, and the dark trees zooming past, lull me into a blessed state of nothingness.