Since running away from Max last night, Lana had felt like complete crap. She normally wasn’t a moody person, but as Sunday morning stretched into afternoon and then evening, the ache in her middle had gotten worse. She couldn’t help wondering if this was what people meant when they talked about being lovesick. If so, it sucked.
Lana had only stayed at her parent’s house for a couple hours the night before. Just long enough to get through the initial rush of emotions that had inundated her after what happened with Max in the alley. The instinct to run home to her parents had been understandable, but it had also been stupid. It was bad enough that her mother had badgered her, wanting to know what Max had done, but her father had been a complete pain in the butt, swearing a blue streak about firing Max first thing in the morning. Unable to take it, she’d left and headed back to the refuge of Brandy and Miriam’s couch. Both women had been out, leaving her with the silence necessary to figure out what the hell had happened.
The truth was that Lana still no idea what she’d seen in the alley, but as the hours wore on, she was becoming increasingly sure it hadn’t been what she’d thought. Max might have acted odd, but there was no way she could have seen claws and fangs. That was just stupid. And all the crap he’d said about her being in danger had to be some kind of hero complex gone to the extreme. Max had simply been playing off her grief for Denise, wanting to be her knight in shining armor. She’d read about that kind of stuff happening. The thing was, he didn’t have to do anything to make her like him even more than she did. She’d already fallen for him like a ton of bricks. She’d been thinking about having kids with the guy, for heaven’s sake. Now, it looked like her father had been right all along. Max wasn’t the right man for her.
While that sounded logical, it did little to help her get over the ache in her chest. Clearly, her heart had already made up its mind about who it wanted her to be with.
Lana blinked back a rush of tears and forced herself to move away from the bar. As she wandered around the club, she kept an occasional eye on her friends, nursing a drink she really didn’t want and trying to make it look like she was having a good time. She wished she could find a spot in the club that wasn’t so loud. Between the music and everyone talking, it felt like her eardrums were about to burst.
She’d finally settled on a location between two giant speakers a few feet away from the dance floor when a shiver ran through her body. At first she thought she’d been hit with a blast from the air conditioner, but then her skin began to tingle so badly she felt like she needed to scratch all over. It was like she’d just walked into a spiderweb.
Following an instinct she didn’t fully understand, Lana began to move around the club again, trying to figure out what was making her feel so freaky. Her steps took her into one of the larger side rooms decorated in a Goth style with plenty of black lights and heavy drapery covering the walls and ceiling. There were fewer people in here than in the main room, and it wasn’t as noisy. Catching a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, she turned to see a man on the far side of the room, partially hidden by a thick velvet curtain. She moved a little to the left, trying to get a glimpse of his face and was surprised to realize it was the police officer from Central who’d spritzed her with perfume at the mall. The moment she set eyes on him, her gums and fingertips tingled. Crap, that was getting old.
She tried to duck out of the room before he saw her, but just then he looked her way. She cursed as he made eye contact. Maybe she could pretend she didn’t recognize him.
Suddenly, her whole body tingled all over like she was holding on to an electric fence. What the hell was making her feel this way?
She was still trying to figure that out when the cop from Central gave her a smile so creepy she thought her skin might slide off and run screaming out of the club. Kids who pulled the wings off of flies would look at this guy and head the other way.
And that’s exactly what she did, too.
Lana had almost reached the arched doorway that led into the main part of the club when two stocky men wearing leather jackets and jeans came into the room, blocking her path. She froze midstep as she realized one of them was the guy who’d been with the cop from Central at the mall the other day. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
She didn’t hesitate to follow her body’s instincts this time either, turning away from the two men and heading in yet a third direction. She had no idea where she was going, but she hurried past a group of women and ducked into the nearest curtain-covered doorway she saw, praying it would lead somewhere good.
She found herself in a dimly lit hallway with a red, illuminated sign at the end, declaring Emergency Exit. Alarm Will Sound. The easing of the tension in her stomach told her this was the way to go, and she immediately took off running down the corridor. She had to zig and zag around some chairs and tables stacked up against the walls, but then she was slamming through the emergency exit, tripping the fire alarm.
Lana hoped that would dissuade the men from following her, but just in case, she raced down the alley behind the club, heading for the main road out front. Once there, she’d be able to get lost in the shuffle of people hurrying out the front entrance by now.
But when she reached the street, two motorcycles slid to a stop in front of her, cutting her off. She initially thought they’d hit their brakes because of the people running out of the club, but then one of the men reached inside his jacket and came out with a pistol.
Crap.
“Boyd, this is Seth,” the man with the gun said, obviously talking to someone on a mic. “The girl just came out of the alley to the north of the club.”
Lana stared, shocked she could hear him through the full-face helmet he wore. But right then, she could hear every tiny sound around her. The noise was deafening.
“Good,” a familiar voice answered in Seth’s earpiece—the cop from the mall who probably wasn’t a cop at all. “Herd her back into the alley. We’ll take her out in here.”
Lana’s heart hammered. Safety was only a few hundred feet away on the other side of those two bikers, but she’d never get through them. Turning, she ran down the sidewalk away from the club as fast as she could, sure she was going to feel a bullet slamming into her back at any moment. She couldn’t think about that, though. All she could do was pray.
She heard the roar of the bikes behind her, but as fast as they were, she stayed ahead of them. She was moving so fast that everything around her was little more than a blur.
As if following some instinct she didn’t know she had, Lana turned into another alley, almost running right out of her strappy shoes. She dashed down the narrow space cluttered with dumpsters and trash cans, dodging some, leaping over others. She heard the bikes stop and knew they’d been forced to turn back because of all the rubble in their way.
She darted out of the alley and turned right, sprinting down the sidewalk for a few blocks before sprinting down another side street. Even though she should have easily outdistanced the men chasing her, she soon heard the sounds of pursuit. First the motorcycles, then three sets of heavy, pounding footsteps behind her. She knew it shouldn’t have been possible for her to discern three particular sets of footsteps out of all the noise around her, but she could.
She sniffed the air as she ran, not sure why, but her instincts were telling her she should be able smell the men behind her. More insanity, she knew. Those instincts had gotten her out of that club alive though, so she wasn’t ready to ignore them, even when the scents that should have been there never showed up. It was like a void where a scent should be. Even more insanity, but something inside her was terrified by this strange lack of odor.
While she was blazing, speed alone wasn’t enough to get her away from the three people chasing her and the other two on motorcycles. Every time she put some distance between her and her pursuers, the bikes seemed to get ahead of her and cut her off, constantly turning her back toward the three runners fanning out behind her. No matter what she did, the guys on the bikes kept finding her, herding her where they wanted her to go. It was like they knew how these new instincts of hers worked better than she did.
She considered digging her cell phone out of her cross-body bag and calling someone. But who would she call, and how would it help? She wasn’t even sure she could convince the police she was being chased, and even if she could, the men would almost certainly be able to catch her while she stood around playing with her phone. Even the idea of calling Max, as tempting as that might have been, didn’t come with any assurances. She might be dead long before he could get to this part of town.
She had no choice but to follow her instincts, the ones screaming at her to run in a certain direction even if that direction made no sense. The GPS in her head led her farther and farther from the more populated parts of downtown, along dingy backstreets she never would have ventured in, over industrial dividing walls she shouldn’t have been able to climb, and through deserted construction lots so dark she shouldn’t have been able to see her hands in front of her face. But for reasons that probably would have freaked her out if she’d had time to think about them, she could see just fine.
Lana didn’t know how far she’d run, but it was a long way. Oddly enough, she wasn’t out of breath. Finally, she ran into an old building that looked slated for demolition. All the windows were broken out or boarded up, with graffiti everywhere. As she flew past the homeless people squatting in the lower rooms, she wondered if she should ask them for help, but her instincts told her she’d do better on her own. Plus, she didn’t want to get anyone else hurt. If she were lucky, Boyd and his crew would keep going down the street.
She was almost to the far side of the building when she realized that she’d made a big mistake. Her pursuers hadn’t kept going. All five of them had followed her in, and they had her cornered.
