Page 98 of Call Off the Dark

One of the wolves bared its teeth and she took a step back. She didn’t have to look, but she knew the two behind her in the center of the clearing were coming closer too, she could feel it.

She lifted the lantern above her head and shook it back and forth. “Go away! Go home!” she shouted, nonsense words but desperate. “Go! Get!” She waved her other arm and stomped her foot.

This did nothing to deter their approach.

They were going to tear her to bits.

She dropped the lantern and took off Wade’s coat. As one of the wolves closed in, she shouted and swung the heavy canvas coat and hit its face. The wolf yelped and recoiled.

She continued to swing the coat around her body, to show the wolves that she was the aggressor and they should retreat, but instead it riled them up. They began to growl, and one of the wolves got hold of the coat with his teeth and ripped it from her hands.

She cried out as the coat was snatched away, and for a moment, everything went still as the wolves measured their new status. She picked up the lantern and shined it in their eyes. A couple of the wolves stepped back.

But then the largest wolf stepped closer.

She closed her eyes and felt regret in her heart. She didn’t want to die this way. They would eat her alive, rip the flesh from her torso while her heart was still beating. She’d feel the whole thing.

In her head, Helen said goodbye to the world.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Twenty-three months and five days ago

On Tyler’s last morning alive, he gave Helen a goodbye kiss in the elevator. Another man in the lobby had stepped in with them, and when other people were there, they usually skipped the kiss. But that day, Tyler stole it behind the back of the man in the elevator, then he slipped out to floor four as Helen continued to floor seven.

Several hours later, Tyler saw Helen for ten minutes while he ate his turkey sandwich. She had a lunch meeting with a client, so they could capture only a little pocket of time together in the enclosed glass area by the rooftop deck. By the time she got there, he’d already claimed a bench for them, and she strolled up to him with a laugh because she was bursting with a story about a coworker. She was a few months away from finishing her history degree at the University of Washington, and she was seeing everything in technicolor again.

Happy Helen was undoubtedly Tyler’s favorite Helen, but all versions of her were beloved. Even when she had gone through her darker days a couple of years earlier, when she’d felt like an endless winter storm, he’d never wanted to batten down the hatches against her. If she didn’t have it in her to be his sunshine, he still felt drawn to the pull of her dark night moon.

Those ten minutes sitting on the bench, chatting with Helen while the rain pattered on the panes above them, was the best part of Tyler’s last day at work. When he’d started to fall for her in the early days, when she’d looked into his eyes and saw the ocean in them, he’d known then that he’d tell her anything, take her everywhere, follow her anywhere. But in many ways, it didn’t matter to him if that was the rooftop deck in their office building or some faraway locale. As long as she was there, that’s where he wanted to be.

Sometimes, though, they were both so busy it felt like the hours got swept out to sea with their jobs and errands and to-dos. The constant comfort was that, by the end of the day, he knew they would always float back to each other like messages in a bottle.

That evening, while Helen was at night class, Tyler went to the gym and used the elliptical machine. Then he stopped at the grocery store on his way back to the apartment to get milk, lettuce, and paper towels.

The moment Tyler heard Helen’s key in the front door, his heart lifted. Every time she walked through that door, an empty apartment became a home again. Her hair was damp from the rain, and any minute she would probably proclaim that she looked like a “drowned rat,” but he thought she looked adorable. There was a bakery box in her hand, and he knew it would either be rainbow chip cake (his favorite) or lemon cake (hers).

It was rainbow chip. Of course.

They ordered Chinese takeout, ate the cake, and cuddled on the couch while they watched a TV show. He briefly contemplated initiating sex, but he was tired that night and could tell she was too, so he didn’t.

Except for the fact that Tyler would be murdered that night, it was an inconsequential November Tuesday.

There were so many days Tyler had shared with Helen that would have made for an exciting or poignant last day. They’d hiked to the top of Mount Adams, they’d volunteered to plant trees in Seattle’s urban spaces, and they’d pulled a drowning man into their kayak on Lake Washington. For one of his birthdays, they’d sat front row at a Sex Pistols tribute concert, and Helen had made a point to sing along with some of Tyler’s favorite lyrics. For one of their anniversaries, she’d written him a poem that gave him a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes. And one summer, they’d taken a road trip to the California coast and she’d gone down on him at a Big Sur lookout point inside a parked convertible they’d rented for the day. It didn’t get much better than a pink sunset and the waves crashing against the rocks while the waves crashed even bigger inside him.

There were so many memorable days together.

But mostly, there were ordinary days where they were simply grateful to have each other.

If Tyler had known it was to be his last day, he would have done only a few things differently. He would have initiated sex, and he would have had pizza and purple grapes for lunch, and most importantly, he would have spent every second of that day with Helen, looking into her eyes and listening to her talk. She was his favorite person, and he was hers. Some things are that simple.

Chapter Forty

Present day

Helen was sure she was going to die, and she was sure it was going to be bloody and painful. But if Tyler could endure a violent death, so could she. That’s when she heard the strange flap, the wings of something flying, but it was so much louder than a normal bird. She opened her eyes to a flash of black in the air, and she heard the word, Run, as plainly as if someone had said it in her ear.

So she did.