Silence

CHAPTER 8

I SWUNG AROUND.

He had a good six inches and fifty pounds on me. The lights from the parking lot did a poor job of reaching back here, but I ran down a quick list of identifying features: reddish-blond hair gelled and spiked, watery blue eyes, studs in both ears, a shark-tooth necklace. Light acne on the lower half of his face. A black tank top that showed off a muscle-y bicep inked with a fire-breathing dragon.

“Need help?” he asked with a twist of his lips. He offered me his cell phone, then braced an arm on the pay phone, leaning into my private space. His smile was a little too sweet, a little too superior. “Hate to see a pretty girl waste money on a call.”

When I didn’t answer, he frowned slightly. “Unless you were placing a free call.” He scratched his cheek, a show of deep contemplation. “But the only free call you can make from a pay phone is … to the police.” Any hint of the angelic vanished from his tone.

I swallowed. “There was no one inside at the front counter. I thought something was wrong.” And now I knew something was wrong. The only reason he’d care if I was calling the police was if it was in his best interest to keep them far, far away. A robbery, then?

“Let me make this simple for you,” he said, slouching down and putting his face close to mine, as if I were five years old and needed slow, clear instruction. “Get back in your car and keep driving.”

It dawned on me that he didn’t realize I’d walked here. But the thought became a moot point when I heard scuffling coming from the alley just around the corner. There was a slew of curse words, and a grunt of pain.

I considered my options. I could take Shark Tooth Necklace’s advice and leave quickly, pretending I’d never been here. Or I could run to the next gas station down the road and call the police. But by then, it might be too late. If they were robbing the store, Shark Tooth and his friends weren’t going to take their sweet time. My only other option was to stay put and make an either very brave, or very stupid, attempt to stop the robbery.

“What’s going on back there?” I asked innocently, signaling the rear of the building.

“Look around,” he replied, his voice soft and silky. “This place is empty. Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody’s ever going to remember you were here. Now be a good girl and get back in your car and drive away.”

“I—”

He pressed his finger to my lips. “I’m not going to ask again.” His voice was gentle, flirtatious even. But his eyes were icy pits.

“I left my keys on the counter inside,” I said, using the first excuse that came to mind. “When I first walked in.”

He took me by the arm and hauled me around to the front of the building. His stride was twice as long as mine, and I found myself half jogging to keep up. All the while I was mentally shaking myself, ordering my ingenuity to think up an excuse for when he figured out I was lying. I didn’t know how he’d react, but I had a general idea, and it made my stomach flip upside down.

The door chimed on our way in. He forced me over to the cash register and flicked aside a cardboard display of ChapStick and a plastic bin of key chains for sale, clearly hunting for my lost keys. He moved to the next register and repeated his rushed hunt. Suddenly he stopped. His eyes drifted idly over me. “Want to tell me where your keys really are?”

I wondered if I could outrun him to the street. I wondered what the chances were that a car would drive by when I needed it most. And why, oh why, had I left Coopersmith’s without grabbing my jacket and cell phone?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Marcie,” I lied.

“Let me tell you something, Marcie,” he said, tucking a curl behind my ear. I tried to take a step back, but he pinched my ear in warning. So I stood there, enduring his touch as his finger trailed over the curve of my ear and along my jaw. He tipped my chin up, forcing me to meet his pale, almost translucent eyes. “Nobody lies to Gabe. When Gabe tells a girl to run along, she better run along. Otherwise it makes Gabe angry. And that’s a bad thing, because Gabe has a short temper. In fact, short is a generous way of putting it. You feel me?”

I found it eerie that he referred to himself in the third person, but I wasn’t about to make an issue of it. Instinct told me Gabe didn’t like to be corrected, either. Or questioned. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t dare turn away from him, afraid he might mistake such a movement for a sign of disrespect.

“I want you to go now,” he said in that deceptively velvet voice.

I nodded, backing up. My elbow bumped the door, letting in a rush of cool air.

As soon as I was outside, Gabe called through the glass door, “Ten.” He was slouched against the front counter, a warped smile on his face.

I didn’t know why he’d said the word, but I held my expression in check as I continued to back away, faster now.

“Nine,” he called next.

That’s when I figured out he was counting backward.

“Eight,” he said, pushing up from the counter and taking a few lazy steps toward the door. He placed his palms on the glass, then drew an invisible heart with his finger. Seeing the stricken look on my face, he chuckled. “Seven.”

I turned and ran.

I heard a car approaching on the main road, and I began shouting and flagging my arms. But I was still too far away, and the car zipped past, the drone of its engine vanishing around the bend.

When I made it to the road, I glanced right, then left. On a hasty decision, I turned toward Coopersmith’s.

“Ready or not, here I come,” I heard Gabe call out behind me.

I pumped my arms harder, hearing the obnoxious slap of my ballet flats on the pavement. I wanted to throw a look over my shoulder and see how far back he was, but forced myself to concentrate on the bend in the road ahead. I tried to keep as much distance as possible between me and Gabe. A car would come soon. It had to.

“Is that as fast as you can go?” He couldn’t have been more than twenty feet behind. Worse, his voice didn’t sound fatigued. I was struck by the horrible thought that he wasn’t even trying. He was enjoying the cat-and-mouse, and while I grew more and more tired with every step, he grew more and more excited.

“Keep going!” he singsonged. “But don’t wear yourself out. It won’t be any fun if you can’t put up a fight when I catch you. I want to play.”

Ahead, I heard the deep rumble of an approaching engine. Headlights swung into view, and I moved into the middle of the road, frantically waving my arms. Gabe wouldn’t hurt me with a witness looking on. Would he?

“Stop!” I yelled, continuing to hail what I could now see was a pickup truck rolling closer.

The driver slowed beside me, cracking his window. He was middle-aged with a flannel shirt and smelled strongly of the fish docks.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. His gaze shifted over my shoulder, where I felt Gabe’s presence like a cold crackle in the air.

“Just playing hide-and-seek,” Gabe said, slinging his arm around my shoulders.

I shrugged him off. “I’ve never seen this guy before,” I told the man. “He threatened me at the 7-Eleven. I think he and his friends are trying to rob the store. When I walked in, the store was empty and I heard a struggle in the back. We need to call the police.”

I paused, about to ask the man if he had a cell phone, when I watched with confusion as he turned to face forward, ignoring me. He cranked his window all the way up, locking himself inside the cab of the truck.

“You have to help!” I said, rapping his window. But his forward fixed stare didn’t waver. A little chill danced over my skin. The man wasn’t going to help. He was going to leave me out here with Gabe.

Gabe mimicked me, knocking obnoxiously on the man’s window. “Help me!” he cried in a shrill voice. “Gabe and his friends are robbing the 7-Eleven. Oh, mister, you have to help me stop them!” When he finished, he flung his head back, choking on his own laughter.

Almost robotically, the man in the truck looked over at us. His eyes were slightly crossed and unblinking.

“What’s the matter with you!” I said, rattling the truck’s door handle. I smacked the window again. “Call the police!”

The man stepped on the gas. The truck accelerated slowly, and I jogged beside it, still clinging to the hope that I could open the door. He fed the truck more gas, and I tripped over my feet to keep up. Suddenly he took off like a shot, and I was flung off into the road.

I whirled to Gabe. “What did you do to him?”

This.

I flinched, hearing the word echo inside my head like a phantom presence. Gabe’s eyes blackened into hollows. His hair started visibly growing, first on top of his head, and then everywhere. It tufted out from his arms, down to the tips of his fingers, until he was covered in fur. Matted, reeking brown fur. He lumbered toward me on his hind legs, gaining height until he towered over me. He swiped his arm, and I saw a flash of claws. Then he crashed down on all fours, put his wet black nose in my face, and roared — an angry, reverberating sound. He had transformed into a grizzly bear.

In my terror, I tripped backward and went down. I scuttled backward, blindly sweeping the roadside for a rock. Catching one in my hand, I hurled it at the bear. It hit him in the shoulder and bounced aside. I grabbed another rock, aiming for his head. The rock flew into his snout, and he snapped his head to the side, saliva trailing from his mouth. He roared again, then came at me faster than I could scramble backward.

Using his paw, he flattened me against the pavement. He was pushing too hard; my ribs creaked in pain.

“Stop!” I tried to shove his paw off, but he was much too strong. I didn’t know if he could hear me. Or understand. I didn’t know if any part of Gabe was left inside the bear. Never before in my life had I witnessed anything so inexplicably horrifying.

The wind picked up, tangling my hair across my face. Through it, I watched the wind carry off the bear’s fur. Little tufts of it drifted up into the night. When I looked again, it was Gabe leaning over me. His sadistic grin implied, You’re my puppet. And don’t you forget it.

I wasn’t sure which terrified me more: Gabe or the bear.

“Up you go,” he said, hoisting me to my feet.

He propelled me back along the road until the lights of 7-Eleven came into view. My mind staggered. Had he — hypnotized me? Made me believe he’d turned himself into a bear? Was there any other explanation? I knew I had to get out of here and call for help, but I hadn’t come up with the how yet.

We rounded the building to the alley, where the others were congregated.

Two were dressed in street clothes, similar to Gabe’s. The third was wearing a lime-green polo with 7-ELEVEN and the name B.J. embroidered on the pocket.

B.J. was on his knees, clutching his ribs, moaning inconsolably. His eyes were squeezed shut, and saliva trickled from the corner of his mouth. One of Gabe’s friends — he wore an oversize gray hoodie — stood over B.J. with a tire iron, raised and ready to swing, presumably again.

My mouth went dry, and my legs seemed to be made of straw. I couldn’t unglue my eyes from the dark red stain seeping through the midsection of B.J.’s shirt.

“You’re hurting him,” I said, aghast.

Gabe held his hand out for the tire iron, and it was readily given to him.

“You mean this?” Gabe asked with mock sincerity.

He swung the tire iron down square against B.J.’s back, and I heard a grotesque crunch. B.J. screamed, collapsed onto his side, and writhed in pain.

Gabe stretched the tire iron across the back of his shoulders, hanging his arms over it like it was a baseball bat. “Home run!” he hollered.

The other two laughed. I was dizzy with the need to be sick.

“Just take the money!” I said, my voice rising toward a shout. Clearly this was a robbery, but they were taking it five steps too far. “You’re going to kill him if you keep hitting him!”

A snicker moved through the group, as if they knew something I did not.

“Kill him? Unlikely,” Gabe said.

“He’s already bleeding heavily!”

Gabe raised an uncaring shoulder. And that’s when I knew he wasn’t just cruel, but insane. “He’ll heal.”

“Not if he doesn’t get to a hospital soon.”

Gabe used his shoe to nudge B.J., who had rolled over and planted his forehead on the cement apron spreading out from the back entrance. His whole body trembled, and I thought it looked like he was going into shock.

“Did you hear her?” Gabe yelled down at B.J. “You need to get to a hospital. I’ll drive you there myself and dump you in front of the ER. But first you got to say it. Swear the oath.”

With great effort, B.J. lifted his head to fix a withering stare on Gabe. He opened his mouth, and I thought he was going to say whatever it was they all wanted him to, but instead he spat, hitting Gabe in the leg. “You can’t kill me,” he sneered, but his teeth chattered and his eyes rolled back to whites, clearly showing he was on the brink of fainting. “The — Black — Hand — told — me.”

“Wrong answer,” Gabe said, tossing the tire iron up and catching it like a baton. When the trick ended, he swooped the tire iron down in a violent arc. The metal smashed over B.J.’s spine, causing him to jerk rod-straight and cry out in a hair-raising yowl.

I drew both hands over my mouth, transfixed by horror. Horror from both the gruesome picture in front of me, and from a word screaming inside my head. It was as though the word had snapped free from deep in my subconscious and smacked me head-on.

Nephilim.

That’s what B.J. is, I thought, even though the word meant nothing to me. And they’re trying to force him to swear an oath of fealty.

It was a frightening revelation, because I didn’t know what any of it meant. Where was I getting this from? How could I know anything about what was happening, when I’d never seen anything like it before?

I was torn from any further thought on the matter when a white SUV swung into the alley ahead, the beam of its headlights causing all of us to freeze. Gabe discreetly lowered the tire iron, hiding it behind his leg. I prayed that whoever was behind the wheel would reverse out of the alley and call the police. If the driver came much closer, well, I’d already seen what Gabe could do to convince people not to help.

I began drafting ideas in my mind of how to drag B.J. from the scene while Gabe and the others were distracted, when one of the guys — the one in the gray hoodie — asked Gabe, “Do you think they’re Nephilim?”

Nephilim. That word. Again. Spoken out loud this time.

Instead of comforting me, the word only ratcheted up my terror another few notches. I knew the word, and now it seemed Gabe and his friends did too. How could we possibly have it in common? How could we have anything in common?

Gabe shook his head. “They’d bring more than one car. The Black Hand wouldn’t go up against us with less than twenty of his guys.”

“Police, then? Could be an unmarked car. I can go convince them they’ve made a wrong turn.”

The way he said it made me wonder if Gabe wasn’t the only one capable of his powerful brand of hypnotism. Maybe his two friends were as well.

The guy in the gray hoodie started forward, when Gabe put his arm out, catching him in the chest. “Wait.”

The SUV rumbled closer, gravel popping under its wheels. My legs hummed with nervous adrenaline. If a fight broke out, Gabe and the others might get so wrapped up in it, I could grab B.J. under his armpits and haul him out of the alley. A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Suddenly Gabe boomed with laughter. He slapped his friends on the back, his teeth gleaming.

“Well, well, boys. Look who came to the party after all.”