Page 8 of When Darkness Calls

Thump.

Thump thump.

Thump.

“Who’s there?” I tentatively push a branch away. My fingers hit something. Something warm. A scream bursts through my lungs. I jumped back. Falling on my back. Scrambling away.

“No.” The word escapes me on an exhale.

No. No. No. No. No.

The rustling begins again. I covered my face with my arm as a squirrel jumped from the bush. It runs a few feet away from me and turns nibbling at a fallen acorn.

Relief floods me. A nervous laugh bubbles from my throat as I get back to my feet and turn around.

“For fuck’s sake, I thought you were someone trying to kill me—”

The breath is snatched from my lungs as a hand shoots out to grip my throat, throwing me back to the ground. My spine cracks against the grassy soil, my head bouncing once, twice. I stare up unblinking, my eyes blurry, seeing double, as the world flips upside down. The motion roils in my stomach. The flood of saliva following the rush of nausea.

“We aren’t going to kill you, sweetheart. For you, it will be much, much worse.” A sick feeling settles deep inside me. My head pounds, my ears ring, but the voice sounds so familiar. I just can’t place it. The figure stands above me clouded in a deep shadow.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” I choke out, swallowing the bile threatening to escape.

Three more figures surround me. Their shapes disrupt the clear darkness of the night sky.

“Because…” one said, grabbing my cheeks. I jerk my head away causing the dizziness to worsen. I blink slowly, opening my eyes to see another figure in the distance. Standing beneath a far streetlight, nothing but a shadow. It’s moving. With each blink it draws nearer.

“We have a job…” another said, trailing a hand down my throat to grasp my breast hard. I grimace. The one to grab me cocks his head.

“And you, you are just too easy.”

A heavy weight crashes into the side of my head. My body heaves through the crunching noise. I can’t move. Everything throbs and aches. Vomit pours from between my parted lips, pooling around the side of my face forced into the grass. Something warm and wet trickles down my cheek. I’m not sure if it’s tears or blood. Both.

I try to open my eyes, but the world spins too fast.

Grayson was right.

Thuds sound across the vacant area.

Is it my heartbeat? Is it the guys that attacked me? Was it the figure in the shadows? I can’t hear much more than the constant thuds of heavy weight crashing into something immovable and the deep heavy breaths I tried to gulp down. But soon the thuds quiet, and it’s only shallow gasps filling the air.

The grass rustles near my head. I painstakingly cracked one eye open, and then the other. Trying to focus on the boots in front of me. I turn my head slightly, trying to look up, but a sharp pain at the side of my temple shoots through me. Hot and cold and slicing like a razor blade through every neuron. I clenched my eyes shut.

The figure crouches down, raking a tender hand across my cheek. The firm gentleness of their touch hurts but eases the fear itching beneath my skin.

A hooded man cradles my head in his large hands. Thumb sweeping softly through the wetness on my face.

“Look at me.”

His voice echoes through my ears like we had left the park and found ourselves in a cave.

“Let me see those eyes, beautiful,” he whispers, voice stern. It rumbles through his chest like it came from a place deep within his soul.

I opened them slowly, expecting to see kindness shining within his own, but I was wrong.

Beneath the hood, a white mask glows in the darkness. Bottomless, soulless eyes, round, painted so black they appeared vacant. The edges are messy and blurring like ink that hasn’t dried, smeared across a blank page.

“Who—”