Chapter 8 #2
“Humor me.”
I swallowed. The retort I’d been building died somewhere between my chest and my throat.
“For fuck’s sake,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, closer, meant only for the small, dark space between us. “We have no idea what’s going on. You didn’t see what I saw from that window.”
His eyes moved past me, scanning the lot, the road beyond it, the treeline past that.
I watched the muscles in his jaw work as he cataloged every shadow, every corner, every place something might be waiting.
When he looked back down at me, I became suddenly, painfully aware of how close we were standing, how his fingers still circled my wrist, how I could sense his pulse against mine, or perhaps that was just my own, hammering too fast.
“And you’re slightly taller than a twelve-year-old.”
There it was.
The words hit exactly where they always did—that precise, well-practiced jab he’d been landing since the day we met. I stiffened immediately, heat flaring in my chest. Irritation, mostly. Familiar and sharp, and safe.
But something else, too. Something that had no business being there.
I hated being reminded how small I was. Hated how easy it was for people to look past me, over me, or down on me. Hated that his body had the ability to block mine completely if he stepped forward, that he probably knew it.
Five feet tall.
Five useless feet of me standing in the dark with his hand on my arm and my heart doing a jig in my chest.
I crossed my arms. “I’m perfectly capable of walking to my car.”
His jaw tightened. His gaze lowered to my mouth—for a split second, so quick I doubted if I had actually seen it.
“I didn’t say you weren’t.”
His hand was still on my arm.
Warm now. His thumb shifted against my skin, tracing a small, unconscious circle just below the inside of my elbow. I don’t think he knew he was doing it, but I sensed it everywhere—up my arm, settling somewhere in my chest, slightly out of reach.
I didn’t look at him. If I did, he’d see something in my face that I didn’t want to show.
So I looked at the parking lot instead, at the dark, at nothing.
He wasn’t just teasing me.
He was worried.
Genuinely, quietly worried—about the sirens, about the darkness, about me walking sixty feet across an empty lot by myself.
And he was bad at saying it, so he’d wrapped it in a joke about my height because that was easier, because that was what we did.
We pushed and needled and kept each other at arm’s length, and it had always worked.
Until right now, standing in the dark with his thumb still moving against my skin and the smell of something metallic in the air and no signal on my phone, and no way to know what was happening beyond this parking lot.
The realization unsettled me more than anything else tonight. More than the sirens. More than the silence that followed. The unwanted, undeniable pull to close the distance we’d always kept between us—to step forward instead of pulling away.
His fingers relaxed around my wrist. Not quite letting go, but loosening enough to give me the choice.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Lead the way.”
He didn’t gloat. Didn’t smirk. That alone told me more than I wanted to know.
The parking lot stretched out ahead of us, black and wide and empty. Our footsteps were the only sound—the flat scuff of his boots, the quicker tap of my shoes trying to keep pace without looking like I was hurrying.
I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me scared.
But I wasn’t stupid either.
My gaze swept the darkness as we moved, casual but constant.
Every shadow seemed heavier than it should have.
Every shape at the edge of my vision seemed like it might shift if I looked away too long.
A dumpster. A light pole. The low concrete wall at the edge of the lot.
All the things I’d walked past a thousand times without thinking.
All of them were weird now in ways I had no way to explain.
The silence was the worst part. Not true silence—the sirens were still out there, coming closer.
I swallowed and curled my fingers tighter around the strap of my bag.
Callan walked slightly ahead of me, his shoulders squared, his head turning in slow, methodical sweeps.
Left. Right. Center. Left again. There was nothing casual about it.
His posture was rigid, coiled, his weight balanced in a way I’d never noticed before—or possibly never had reason to notice.
Every few steps, one arm drifted back toward me, his fingers brushing my sleeve as if he were checking.
Confirming that I was still there. Still close.
He didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
His truck was just ahead—possibly twenty feet—when the night turned darker.
Three shots. Rapid. Close.
Crack-crack-crack.
The sound hit my chest like a physical blow, shooting through my chest before my ears even registered what it was. It was so close I swore I felt the air move.
A sound came out of me I didn’t recognize, somewhere between a gasp and a cry that I couldn’t have stopped if I’d tried. My body moved before my brain caught up. My fingers found his jacket and locked into the fabric, fistfuls of it, gripping so hard my knuckles ached instantly.
Callan didn’t freeze. Didn’t flinch.
In one motion—fast, fluid, no hesitation—he lunged forward, his hand finding my shoulder and driving me back against the cold metal of his truck. My back hit the door panel, and the impact knocked the air out of me.
“Get down.” His mouth was at my ear, barely a whisper, barely even a breath.
* * *
His body was already between me and the open lot, pressed against mine, blocking everything. One arm braced against the truck beside my head. The other gripped my shoulder, pinning me in place, his heartbeat faint against my collarbone. Fast. Controlled. But fast.
I didn’t move. My heart was beating so hard.
“What—”
“Shhh.”
Not a word. Just air. Just the shape of it against my skin.
I fell still. Completely still. I stopped breathing. I stopped thinking. I pressed myself flat against the truck and made myself as small as I’d ever been, and I listened.
Silence.
Then—not silence, but worse. A sound I didn’t immediately place. Wet. Shuffling.
Callan’s hand tightened on my shoulder. A warning: Don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t breathe.
I turned my head slowly, just enough to see past the edge of his arm.
About fifty feet in front of us.
A woman.
She stood in the middle of the lot, half-swallowed by darkness.
At first, my brain wouldn’t process what I was seeing. It tried to make her normal. Tried to fit her into a category that made sense—a drunk stumbling out of the bar down the road, someone hurt in a car accident, someone who needed help.
But nothing about her was right.
She moved in jerky movements. Her legs carried her forward in uneven, stuttered steps, each one landing wrong. Her knees bent at odd intervals. Too far. Not far enough. One foot dragged behind the other, scraping against the asphalt with a sound that carried across the empty lot.
Her head was tilted sharply to the right, her chin nearly resting against her shoulder. Not drooping. Not like someone tired or hurt. The angle too severe, too deliberate. Like something had wrenched it there, and she’d never bothered to correct it.
Her arms hung at her sides. Slack. Loose. Swaying with each broken step as if they weren’t attached to anything that controlled them.
Her clothes were dark. Wet.
My eyes adjusted slowly, pulling detail from the shadows, and I wished they hadn’t.
It wasn’t water.
Blood. So much of it that her shirt had gone black with it, plastered to her torso, dripping.
It ran down her neck in thick streaks, disappearing into her collar and reappearing below, trailing down her arms to her hands.
Her fingers glistened. It dripped from them in a slow, steady patter against the pavement.
I was able to hear it. In the silence, in the space between her dragging footsteps, each drop hitting the ground.
Pat. Pat. Pat.
Her left hand was holding something. It took me a moment to understand what.
Flesh, ragged and wet, dangling from her fingers, swinging slightly with each step.
I couldn’t tell what part of the body it had come from.
I didn’t want to know. My stomach lurched violently, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
She took another step. Her foot caught on a crack in the asphalt, maybe, or her own failing coordination—and she stumbled forward.
The movement should have been clumsy. Human.
Instead, she caught herself in a way that was too fast, too sharp, her body snapping upright with a jolt that didn’t match anything I understood about how people moved.
The piece of flesh slipped from her fingers and hit the ground with a soft, wet plop. She didn’t notice or didn’t care.
My fingers were buried so deep in Callan’s jacket that I could feel my nails bending against the fabric underneath. Every part of me wanted to run. Every part of me wanted to scream. But his body was a wall against mine, solid and unmoving, and his hand on my shoulder said one thing over and over.
Stay still. Stay still. Stay still.
He wasn’t breathing. I could feel his chest against mine, rigid, locked, held in place by pure will. His heart hammered against my collarbone, the only sign that he was as terrified as I was.
We watched her.
She took another step. Then another. A horrible, broken rhythm—step, drag, step, drag—each one leaving a dark smear on the asphalt behind her. A trail. I followed it backward, tracing the wet line across the parking lot to where it disappeared into the darkness near the far edge of the lot.
Where it started.
Where whatever had happened that left that much blood on a person.
The sirens screamed somewhere behind us, rising and falling, and the woman’s head twitched.
Not turned. Twitched. A sharp, involuntary snap to the left, like a predator catching a scent. Her whole body went rigid for a moment—shoulders locking, fingers splaying wide, that terrible tilted head jerking once, twice, three times in quick succession.
Listening.