“Maybe so,” I resigned. She saw past it immediately but we both knew that rationally, her theory was the more solid one. After all, I had hit my head pretty hard while careening through the woods. Maybe I’d left the client behind hours ago, and all the extra parts were made up in my head during the aimless wandering after the crash?
Without anything left to say, my mom turned the key and started to drive.
Part of me hoped she was right.
The night’s ordeal had exhausted me, so as soon as we got home I went straight to bed. I heard my mom’s key ring rattle as she hung it onto the tack on the kitchen wall, and suddenly I was aware of just how much keys echoed in the house. It was funny and bitter at the same time—how long had I thought I’d been making it out undiscovered when my mom had been patiently locking doors and closing windows behind me? I felt like the world’s most bumbling spy.
This is going to make work ten times harder now, I caught myself thinking. But it was true. I needed to figure out entirely new escape plans.
And like that, I was already thinking of work again. I’d nearly been murdered—or at least thought I’d been nearly murdered—and already work was back on my mind. I was an addict.
I heard my mom’s steps as she laboriously climbed back up the same stairs she had likely dashed down a few hours earlier. Of course I’d had no scruples about sneaking out for work. But that guiltlessness only lasted until I realized how many hours of rest my mom had missed for me. She didn’t need anything else to add to her current list of reasons to lose sleep.
My head pounded wickedly, the heartbeat in my ears overtaking the silence my house soon fell into. I wanted to pore over all that’d happened between the two times I’d gone to bed, but I forced myself to leave it alone. I was starting to feel sore, probably from the swerving I’d done in my car. Sleep crept up slowly, though just as I became certain I’d never get any rest before morning, I was gone.
The moment I drifted off I found myself awakening again—this time, somewhere other than my room. Dreaming.
I was falling backward. Not the typical of dream where I was simply dropping through the air but more of a steady plunge into darkness behind me. It was like I was being carried on a feather through a black mist, until the invisible ship on which I floated entered into a place of whirling gray. This gray soon became watery colors, then formed shapes, then all of a sudden I was back in the woods.
I was running through the trees, this time without the protection of my car. Where the branches and sticks had once torn paint from the car’s doors and sides, they now ripped into my skin, forcing tears into my eyes.
And my finger…there was now a heavy, silver ring around the third finger from my thumb on my right hand, just like the white ring I’d seen on Mr. Sharpe but with three vertical cuts instead of one. It was throbbing and bleeding so terribly that I held it in my left fist to stop the flow of red liquid, like the band itself was digging into my skin. Still, even as it dripped across my shirt, I couldn’t stop.
Every few seconds, I looked back, seeing something moving between the gray towers of trees that stood like prison fence posts—a flash of muted blonde hair, a gleam of silver. It made a rustling noise, diving from side-to-side, its breath even louder than my own. I could hear it against leaves, my steps heavy but my pursuer’s nearly silent.
I was vulnerable without my car’s layer of metal between me and the relentless man. So I continued to run, not daring to stop even though I spotted countless tree trunks I could dive behind. My pursuer was always four steps behind me—just far enough so he couldn’t reach me, but always so close I could hear him and the torn spots in his coat that fluttered in the wind.
“We’re almost there,” I heard him say, voice like a whisper beside my ear. “The lights.”
I slid to a stop, but only because I’d reached the edge of the cliff. It was hazy this time, darker than it had been in real life, but I could tell where the edge dropped into nothing. Rocks I’d skidded against went flying over, clattering against the metal wreckage of an upside-down car below. Its wheel was still spinning.
I whirled around. Mr. Sharpe had stopped at the edge of the trees. His fingers were spread open, long claws in a brilliant array. There was little emotion on his face, no reaction or feeling for what he was about to do, like I was merely an item for him to cross off a list.
He stepped forward. My feet slid back an inch and I could already feel where the rock ended. Mr. Sharpe didn’t grin, didn’t acknowledge that he had cornered me.
No words. No warning or threat. He just moved forward, fingers twitching and curling with anticipation.
I stepped back again but my foot slipped against the dusty edge. Before I could catch myself, I heard my shoes scrape, the gasp of my own breath, and then I stumbled into nothing.
3
Birthmark
I expected to feel my spine colliding with the rocks, to be flipped over as I slammed into the stones…even the man’s dagger-like fingers pricking my skin, if only for a moment. But the only thing I felt was my own pillow, pulled from under my head and slammed against my nose a second later.
“Zombie attack!” came the yell of my sister Alli, battering me with the pillow as I rolled over and shouted at her. She beat me again but I managed to grab the pillow, throwing it across the room where it crashed with a line of tripods and sent them flying.
“Are you insane?” I exploded, freeing myself from under the sheets and raising my hands in defense. She held my other pillow as a shield.
“That’s what you get when you don’t turn on your alarm,” she said between laughs. Alli was eleven, a mirror of my mom with messy blonde hair and brown eyes. She was very awake, even though my mind was still hopping back and forth from my nightmare to the oh-so-thankfully-opposite world I was in now.
“Why didn’t you at least knock?” I protested.
“I did knock,” she replied. I glared at her.
“Knocked very softly,” she corrected. I threw a pillow at her but she was a good dodger. My heart was still beating rapidly beneath skin drenched in sweat—I could still hear the horrible breathing of Mr. Sharpe as he chased me. I rolled over miserably, wishing the entire night could have all been one long nightmare. The white bandage still wrapped around my arm told me I wasn’t so lucky.
“You’re up, finally,” my mom said, appearing in the doorway with a cordless phone in hand, her palm over the receiver.
“Phone call, for you,” she told me. Her voice didn’t sound too sharp—at least not as bad as was to be expected the night after I’d crashed my car, though she did regard me with a gaze of slight dissatisfaction. Why was she even letting me take clients today? It seemed odd, until I realized that she was so entirely convinced that Mr. Sharpe had been my imagination that she wasn’t worried about more murderous clients. I put a hand out to take the phone but she kept it out of reach.
“We’re not gonna talk about what happened last night,” she said, looking at the gash on my arm. “But don’t think just because you paid for that car that I’m driving you to clients or to school.”
I would have argued but she obviously wasn’t in the mood for me to defend myself.
“So we’re skipping The Rules at least?” I said, hopeful.
“You are absolutely incorrect,” she said.
“After all I’ve been through?” I protested. We both knew I’d need money to replace the car; luckily I had plenty of other, cheaper cameras. But there was really no use in trying to get around it. I knew The Rules. Alli knew The Rules too, especially the third one about my pay going to her college fund. She giggled lightly and rubbed her fingers together like she was shuffling through a stack of cash. My mom shot her a glare and the little troll darted out.