created?
Before she could formulate an answer, a beefy arm swung at her and missed. Then its other arm came at her, and this time she felt the contact against her ribs. Or at least that was how her mind interpreted it. The power of the impact was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was if she had been hit with a baseball bat. She could barely think beyond the pain.
Only, she needed to think. The monster hadn’t just come of its own accord; it had to have been brought. That’s the way it had always worked. And at the moment that she’d felt the sensation on the back of her neck, she’d seen someone. Across the street.
Cass tried to turn her attention to what her eyes saw. A crowd on either side of her. A smattering of people in front of her. And there, beyond the sidewalk, on the other side of the road, was the figure in the hooded sweatshirt standing rooted in place. Staring at her.
It was an ominous stare, but before she could think about why, another swing from the monster hit her in the face. Her concentration divided between what she saw in her mind and what she needed to see in front of her, Cass couldn’t mount any resistance against the powerful beast. Another blow rocked her to her foundation, and, inside the room, she fell to her knees. Her palms were flat against the smooth, white surface of the room, but inexplicably she felt the scrape of stone under her fingers and small pebbles digging into her palms.
This wasn’t right. She was in trouble.
Inside the room, she lifted her head, trying to find the monster’s position to determine where the next attack would come from. It was moving toward her again, and she wondered if another blow might kill her. If that was even possible. She’d never come close to experiencing anything like this before.
Her focus shifting again, her eyes widened as two beams of light flashed at her, forcing her back to the world of the living. In less than an instant, Cass determined she was not on the sidewalk but was in the middle of the street instead. She had to move. A car wouldn’t see her on her hands and knees. The twin beams of light grew larger.
Mentally, she closed her eyes against the monster, deciding that facing the physical danger was more imperative than facing the spiritual one. She tried crawling forward, but she felt the presence of the monster block her path. Cass couldn’t fight off the need to stop. The only way out was to turn around. To run from it.
The sound of the car’s engine paired with the bright lights compelled her to move faster. She scrambled backward, trying to get to her feet, using her hands to push herself up and out of the way.
The car was louder, a near roar in her ear. Or was that the monster shouting again, moving closer for the final blow?
Her legs felt sluggish. Her whole body, which she’d honed to be lean and strong, able to withstand the punishment of connecting with the dead, worked against her now as she tried to stand. So she pushed harder. Finally making it to her feet, she managed to stumble back, but it was too late. The car was there, practically on top of her, only a few feet away. A blaring horn announced that it had seen her, but it wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. The squeal of brakes indicated as much.
It was going to hit her.
Suddenly, Cass felt something clamp around her arm. She was being pulled. Hard. So hard that she flew backward a couple of feet onto her ass and watched from the cobblestone sidewalk as the car screeched to a halt well past the spot where she would have been standing if she hadn’t been yanked out of the way.
“What’s the matter, you crazy bitch!” the driver called through his open window. “Are you drunk? I could have killed you.”
A cranky older man, who evidently felt that almost dying wasn’t enough of a punishment, decided to take the time to roll down the car window and yell at her for almost getting killed. Evidently satisfied that he’d scared her, he put up the window and continued on his way.
“What in the hell were you doing?”
Malcolm McDonough crouched down next to her. It took Cass a few seconds to process that he was the person who had dragged her out of the way. It took a few seconds after that to realize that whatever had sent her to her knees in the middle of the street was gone.
Without answering him, she looked up and searched the other side of the road, looking for the figure in the hooded sweatshirt. He was gone, too. Only a gaggle of gapers stood around staring at her as she lay sprawled on the sidewalk. No doubt wondering, like the driver, if she was drunk. Why else would a person throw herself into the middle of a busy street?
Malcolm reached out to cup her face, his thumb brushing against her cheek. He squinted as if trying to see by the dim light of the streetlamp. “Did you hurt yourself when you fell?”
Her tongue felt thick inside her mouth, almost as if she had had too much to drink. She waited a moment for the adrenaline to leak out of her system so she could catch her breath. The monster was gone. The person under the hood was gone, but at least now she suspected how the monster was getting through. There had been someone on the other side of the street. Watching her. The monster wasn’t penetrating the barrier between life and death on its own.
“I said, are you hurt?”
Cass blinked a few times and then turned to him. “No. Help me up, please.”
He stood, and she noted he wore the same jeans and dark sweater from this morning. He stretched out a hand and she took it, then felt herself being lifted to her feet with the same strength he’d used to pull her out of the car’s path. Her hand made contact with his chest and she felt the soft material of the sweater and a hard wall underneath it.
Immediately, she drew her hand back. She couldn’t touch him. She couldn’t touch anyone anymore.
Finally, the strangeness of his sudden appearance registered.
“What are you doing here?”
“I think I get to ask the questions,” he said. “What happened? You were standing there and then you just doubled over. People called out to you, but it’s like you couldn’t hear them and then you fell into the middle of the street like someone had pushed you.”
Cass didn’t need the instant replay. She still hurt from the monster, and alongside the pain was the frustration of feeling like she was onto something. Why had that person in the sweatshirt stopped so abruptly? Could it have simply been someone from the coffeehouse who had recognized her? Or more than that? How was he connected to the monster? Too many questions without answers.
There was no point in mentioning any of this to McDonough. He wouldn’t understand and the last thing she wanted to do was create a false connection between what had just happened and his sister’s death.
“I need to get home,” she finally said, choosing not to deal with why Malcolm had been there in the first place. She had too much to think about. Not the least of which was how the monster had gotten past the door. It seemed, to her horror, that whatever distance she’d been able to keep between the real world and the other world was fast coming to an end.
“Okay.” He took her elbow in his hand and guided her down the sidewalk and around the corner to where he’d parked his SAAB. She was only a step away from the car when she heard the sound of his remote disengaging the locks and starting the engine. This wasn’t what she meant.
“No. My bike. I have to…”
“It’s chained up. It will be safe for a while. I’ll drop you off then come back for it.”
She didn’t question the logistics of how that was all going to work. She didn’t even put up a mild protest. Defeated, wounded from battle, all she could handle was the idea of putting one foot in front of the other.
He circled the car, opened the passenger door and poured her into the bucket leather seat. When she didn’t move, he was forced to bend over her to secure the seat belt for her. She pressed herself back, but even the threat of touching him wasn’t enough to motivate her to fasten the seat belt herself.
Never before had she been so drained from contact. Then again, never before had she seen someone who had been murdered. Never before had she lost her only friend. Tears threatened to surface as she considered the ramifications of losing Dougie. With him in her life she was simply a solitary person. Without him she was alone.
But what he’d done she couldn’t forgive. If he’d been honest about it the next day, she could have believed that he had been just as surprised and disgusted by what had happened as she’d been. That the whole thing had simply
