Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(21)

Then she heard a voice inside her head. Danger.

Seriously. Inside her head.

“Yes?” she whispered on a bare thread of sound. Her whole body tingled. “I know. I—Is it okay if I breathe?”

But then she had to. Stunned and feeling ridiculous, she clapped a hand over her mouth as she drew in air through her nose, as if that might help her to avoid breathing in whatever it was that swirled around her.

Must stay with you, keep you safe.

Gretchen had said that she had sensed someone was with Mary. Could this be BabyMama Two? She asked, “Who are you and how long have you been there? Were you in the car with me earlier?”

DANGER!

“Yes, I saw the news,” she whispered. Could this creature or spirit understand television, or care? “I know my house is burning.”

A couple approached the restaurant. Mary caught a sidelong glance from the woman as they passed. She started to walk again toward the parking lot.

The air grew more agitated. Not there. Here and now!

How can that be?

She rounded the corner of the building to the parking lot.

Two men approached. They were fit and tanned, in their thirties or forties. One wore a light jacket and jeans. The other wore khaki pants and a sport coat. Both were smiling. Preoccupied, she gave them the barest glance.

Something odd and subtle caught her attention. She lifted her head with a frown.

RUN! the presence screamed.

She jerked to a halt, caught between trying to make sense of what her small voice said, and—what was so odd about those men?

Purposeful and bland, they strode forward.

Toward her, not the restaurant doors. She took a step back, then another.

Then she figured out what was so different about them. Her eyes widened.

The edges of the men’s bodies weren’t glowing with that strange Van Gogh effect, as was virtually everything else. Instead they were surrounded by a dull smudge of darkness. Wrongness snapped at her with invisible fangs.

One of them called out with a smile. “Dr. Byrne?”

He reached inside his jacket.

Alarm jolted through her. She whirled to lunge back around the corner. She heard footsteps running after her. They didn’t say anything further. That frightened her more. It frightened her badly.

She barreled into a family of four as they stepped outside the restaurant doors, a father and mother, a boy around eleven and an older woman. All were varying shades of blond. Mary’s knees weakened with relief even as both she and the older woman staggered. The man grabbed their arms to keep them from falling. The wife yanked her son out of the way.

“Careful,” the man said. “Are you two all right?”

The older woman shook free. She snapped at Mary, “You’re going too fast.”

“I’m sorry.” Words tumbled out of her. “Two men are chasing me.”

“Chasing you,” said the older woman.

“I beg your pardon?” said the younger woman, who looked around with incredulity. “Here?”

Mary knew how the woman felt. Whoever those men were, they wouldn’t do anything here at the front of the restaurant, not with the family as witnesses and all the cars whizzing by on Grape Road.

It was too public.

Just like Dairy Queen had been yesterday.

Fuck.

She knew when the two men rounded the corner. She felt their presence as a prickle along the back of her neck. She and the others turned to look at them.

“Let’s go back inside, Christine,” the husband said, putting an arm around his wife. “Just until this is sorted out. Right now.”

Mary reached for the nearest door handle. Even as she jolted into movement again, she knew she was moving too slow.

She heard flat, popping noises and turned her head.

Crimson exploded in the middle of the man’s forehead. The young woman Christine opened hazel eyes wide in surprise as she began a slow, graceful, downward pirouette. A spray of ruby stars appeared on the boy’s soccer league T-shirt. The boy looked down and fingered one of the stars as his knees collapsed. The older woman’s jaw shattered, bone and tissue flying.

Liquid warmth splashed over Mary’s face and torso.

She knew that warm wetness well. Red was an important color to her. Four people toppled to the pavement like mown flowers.

“No,” she said. She opened her mouth wide. Someone started to scream. She thought it might be her.

Her invisible presence screamed with her. RUN RUN RUN!

Still smiling, the man in the sports coat lunged at her and clamped a hand around her arm. The other looked around with a sharp gaze while he tucked his gun and silencer back inside his jacket.

She dragged hard against the fingers that dug into her flesh, still screaming.

“Come with us now, Mary,” Sport Coat said. “You don’t want any more people to get shot, do you? We’ll kill everybody in the restaurant if we have to.”

“Not that we’d mind,” Spring Jacket added. “We like to kill.”

But her body couldn’t be reasoned with, or ordered to obey. It had a mind of its own and convulsed into wild struggles. Spring Jacket stepped over the bodies of the family to reach for her other arm.

She was a small, underweight woman. Both men had at least sixty pounds on her. Even as she bucked and heaved against the hard hands that sought to subdue her, her mind was a different engine that ran on its own track.