You’re such a fucking flake, she chided herself when she regained the ability to think reasonably, putting the cell phone back down in her lap. The back of her neck ached already and she knew that if she didn’t get home and get some ice on it soon, it’d be too swollen for her to work again by morning. She almost considered that a reason not to do it.
Summoning all her courage, she released the brake and let the car roll through the intersection, hoping to get home before too late. Maybe in time to get a decent night’s sleep for once.
No sooner was the car past the light and starting to speed up again when the clinking started again, resuming its persistent tack on her last nerve. It wasn’t just the clicking itself that nagged at her, but the annoying sense that something wasn’t right that she couldn’t quite pin down. Making sure to keep one eye on the road again, she re-surveyed the dashboard indicator lights, turning off the heater to make sure it wasn’t something blowing up against it. The sound continued unabated. Frowning, last glanced up into the rear view mirror.
Her eyes went wide.
There was someone in the backseat.
She felt an enormous pain on her chest as something ripped out of the seat from behind her, travelling through her midsection. She couldn’t see what it was but it felt cold at first, then slowly got warmer and warmer. The moist heat spread throughout her body as she slumped against her steering wheel, rapidly losing consciousness. Her body jolted violently as the killer tried hard to remove the appendage, jerking it from side to side, ripping it across Roxanne’s chest sending spurts of blood from the wound as well as from her mouth.
The car slammed head on into a fire hydrant, thrusting both bodies forward again. Her air bag puffed open, leaking deadly fumes out where from it had been punctured. The gas burned at her nose and throat, making her last few breaths sheer agony. Water splashed down onto her face. Her eyes began to roll into the back of her head as blood poured from her open wound and down into the street, the red liquid so thick that it dropped to the bottom of the puddles it fell into.
The monster calmly opened the door, letting her battered body slump out onto the pavement.
Her vision was fuzzy and she couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing, but she heard the click and recognized it. She opened her eyes wide, tears clearing the blood out of them for her, and saw the metal buckle from the back seatbelt clang against the side of the car. There was a scrape there from where it had happened so many times and when the wind picked up it got more rapid again.
-clink-
-clink- -clink-.
The back door opened and the winch that held the belt finally kicked in, sucking the buckle back into the car in a flash so fast that her tired mind did not even register it. All she knew was that the sound had finally stopped.
The shadowed monster once more brought itself down across Roxanne’s once beautiful face.
Blood mixed with water and gushed down into the sewer grate, falling through pipes and earth as it went.
Natasha Mercer popped two Tylenol into her mouth with an open palm, their stale taste filling her mouth for a moment before she knocked her head back and forced them down her throat without the benefit of water. She closed her eyes for a long moment, feeling nothing except the steady thud in the back of her head and cursing. She knew the pills weren’t supposed to work for at least fifteen minutes, but sometimes just the act of taking them was enough to will the aches and pains away.
She considered herself a strong woman. Anyone would after what she’d gone through in her time on this world.
She had never known her father. As a child she’d always dreamed that her conception had been some royal scandal. That she’d been the love child of a prince or a king, and that someday the real daughter would die and some handsome prince would sweep her off her feet and bring her to England or France to be his second duchess.
Those dreams had faded in her twenties, reserved for romantic thoughts in the minutes just before sleep. Thirty had brought an end to them completely, save for the odd reminiscing on them while she watched her own daughter play.
Her once vibrant and beautiful appearance had shifted into a haggard form of a woman at the very end of a very slender rope. She realized now that her origins didn’t involve kings or queens, but it did involve riches, ironically. Simply put, her father’s family didn’t deem her mother ‘good enough’ to enter into the family. They had cast her pregnant mother out onto the streets with no child support or means of finance. When she’d learned that, Natasha had sworn she’d prove her father’s family wrong. That she would make herself good enough, in her own eyes if not in theirs.
For a short time, she had actually dared to hope that she would succeed.
She looked up from the large desk covered in scattered papers she sat behind. Her gaze moved over the open suitcase on the floor and then on to the suede love-seat beneath the large bay window where her daughter slept, her knees curled
