“Someone’s coming,” I said, glancing away from Alex and down at the diamond at the end of my necklace. Sure enough, it was no longer the comforting purple it always was in Kayla’s presence but a deep black.
“What’s that?” Kayla asked, pointing.
Through the streams of rain battering the windshield, I could see a single white arc of light swinging along the sidewalk.
“A lantern,” Frank said.
“No,” I said, my skin growing cold, and not because of my damp clothes or because Kayla had the AC set so high. “It’s a flashlight.”
“A flashlight?” Kayla echoed in disbelief. “Who’d be out in weather like this?”
“No one we want to run into,” I said. “Start driving.”
“Where?” Kayla asked, beginning to back out from her parking space.
“Anywhere,” I said, reaching into my bag, at the same time that Alex said, “Except my house.”
Whoever was holding the flashlight noticed the lights on Kayla’s car and began to approach at a more rapid clip. I heard a male voice shouting. It was impossible to distinguish exactly what he said with all the wind and rain. But his voice sounded disturbingly familiar.
“Faster, Kayla,” I said tensely.
“I’m trying,” Kayla said. “But I was never good at parallel parking.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Frank said. “You should have let me drive —”
“You weren’t even born in this century,” Kayla snapped.
“He’s crossing the street,” Alex said as the shadowy figure loomed closer.
Suddenly the man was in front of the car, seemingly half blown there by the wind. The headlights from Kayla’s car threw his features into strong definition. I couldn’t help giving a gasp.
“Do you know him?” Frank asked, glancing back at me.
“From a long time ago,” I said, my voice barely audible above the pounding of the rain on the roof of the car and the rhythmic tempo of the windshield wipers. “But … it can’t be him. There’s no way he’d be here. There’s no way he’d —”
Though he couldn’t possibly have been able to see me through the windshield — especially with me in the backseat and the glare of the high beams in his face — it seemed to me as if our gazes locked. I could have sworn a little smile of triumph played upon his face.
“Pierce.” Now there was no way to mistake what he was saying. He raised his flashlight and pointed the beam directly at me, through the windshield. “Come out of the car, and I won’t have to hurt the others.”
I didn’t feel afraid, exactly. It was more a sense of inevitability, like I’d always known this moment was going to come. I wasn’t at all surprised that it came outside the cemetery gates John had kicked open in frustration when we’d last discussed this particular individual.
“Shit,” Kayla said. “He’s in front of us, and I can’t back up. We’re trapped.”
“Who is he?” Alex demanded. “What does he want with you?”
“Mr. Mueller, my teacher from my old school,” I said calmly. “See how he keeps one hand in his pocket?”
Everyone looked. Mr. Mueller did, indeed, have one hand clutched tightly around his long, heavy metallic flashlight, while the other he kept hidden away in the pocket of his long black rain slicker.
“John crushed that hand to pieces,” I explained, “when Mr. Mueller touched me inappropriately with it.”
I didn’t figure they needed to know the part about how, at the time, I’d been trying to entrap Mr. Mueller to prove he’d caused the suicide of my best friend, with whom he’d been having an affair.
“Great,” Alex said. “That’s just great, Pierce. So what’s he want now, the rest of his hand back?”
“Can’t you tell him we don’t have it?” Kayla asked with mounting hysteria.
“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “The captain took care of one hand. I’ll take care of the other.” He started to get out of the car.
“Frank,” I cried. Now I wasn’t feeling so calm. “Don’t —”
Mr. Mueller didn’t like Frank getting out of the car instead of me. He raised the flashlight high in the air, then brought the end of it down so hard on the windshield, it left a perfect imprint in the shape of the instrument. Crystalline lines spread out from the indentation, all the way towards Kayla, who screamed.
“No one gets out but the girl,” Mr. Mueller rasped, right before his mouth turned into a yawning chasm of blood and razor-sharp teeth, hundreds of them in multiple rows, like a shark.
Now it wasn’t only Kayla screaming in terror. Frank swiftly shut the door and locked it, even as the entity into which Mr. Mueller had turned scrambled for the handle.
“Drive,” I said, my heart slamming against the back of my ribs.
“There’s nowhere I can go,” Kayla said.
“Go forward,” I said as Mr. Mueller darted around the front of the car, clearly intending to reach her door.
“But we’ll hit him,” she cried.
“Exactly,” I said.
“I can’t kill someone!”
“You hit your brother in the head with a fire extinguisher.”
“But that was family! And I didn’t kill him.”
When she still didn’t move, frozen in terror behind the wheel, I dove between her seat and Frank’s to hit the gas pedal at her feet with my hands.
I couldn’t see where the car went. My gaze was on the gas pedal and Kayla’s purple silken slippers. But I felt the lurch as the small compact rocketed forward. The top of my head slammed into the dashboard as the car impacted something large and heavy, something that let out an unearthly scream before landing hard against the hood. Kayla, shrieking, steered wildly, seemingly to shake off the assailant, stepping on my fingers as she tried to brake, crying, “Pierce, Pierce, what are you doing? We hit him, oh, my God, Pierce, we hit him, it’s over, let go!”
Finally Frank wrapped strong hands around my arms and thrust me back into my seat, saying, “It’s all right. He’s gone.”
When I pushed my hair from my eyes and looked behind us, my heart still thumping like a drum, I saw that Frank was only partially correct. In the red glow of Kayla’s taillights lay a large misshapen lump of Mueller, rain pouring all around him.
Not too far from where he stretched across the middle of the road lay the heavy flashlight, its beam pointing haphazardly at his feet. That’s how I happened to notice his shoes.
“Tassels,” I said in disgust.
Alex, too, was turned in his seat.
“You guys,” he said. “He’s still moving.”
Disappointed, I said, “Kayla, back up over him.”
Kayla cried, “No! We should call an ambulance.”
“He’s a Fury,” Frank said. “Let’s go. He’ll be all right.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, striking a massive sapodilla tree in the yard of a nearby home. The ensuing fireball caused us all to duck and shield our eyes.
When we turned to look back, most of the sapodilla was gone. What was left of its trunk lay twisted and in flames in the middle of the road on top of Mr. Mueller’s remains, which steamed gently in the rain.
“Well,” Frank said, after a moment’s stunned silence. “He probably won’t be all right now.”
“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Kayla cried, gripping the steering wheel. “I just murdered someone! Someone not even related to me. A teacher!”
“You didn’t murder a teacher,” I said calmly. “I did. And I should have done it a long time ago. He was a perv who caused my best friend to kill herself. For all we know, he could be Thanatos.”
“The lightning is what actually killed him,” Frank pointed out. “Not us.”
“Still,” Kayla said as she gazed tearfully at her windshield. “Look what he did to my car. No way will my insurance cover this.”
