Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(27)

What kind of response time would anybody have to tracing a Visa swipe? An hour? Half an hour? That had to depend, in part, on their resources and how close they were to the site of the transaction, and also on how secretive they had to be, because God only knew, the attack on her had been illegal six ways to Sunday.

Screw it. She didn’t have a choice. She would have to go in with an agenda and get out fast.

She pulled into the first Marathon station she came to and leaped out, her abused muscles yelping in protest. She kept her head down as she shoved through one of the double doors and arrowed toward a restroom.

Once inside, she checked her appearance. She’d missed a couple of smears of blood. She threw handfuls of cold water over her face and neck, snatched paper towels from a dispenser and scrubbed herself dry.

The quick wash couldn’t improve the looks of the hollow-eyed woman in the mirror with the lopsided, bruised face, but at least it removed the last visible traces of blood. When she was finished she strode through the convenience store, grabbing bottles of water, a large coffee, a tuna sandwich, a turkey sandwich, a chocolate bar, and a couple of bags of trail mix.

The cashier was a beanpole of a male around twenty years old. He held a cell phone between his jaw and one skinny shoulder and talked into it as he checked her items. She kept the bruised side of her face angled away from him, staring out the plate glass at the passing traffic as he swiped her card.

The countdown began.

While the kid bagged her items in transparent plastic, she pivoted and used the ATM machine opposite the cash register. She punched numbers to withdraw the limit as her heart rate picked up. The machine spat out green bills. She snatched at them, grabbed her bags and launched out the door.

Now that she was taking action, she found the focus she used in the ER. Her movements became smooth and efficient. She tossed the bags in the car, jammed the coffee cup into the driver’s seat drink holder, slammed the gas nozzle into her gas tank and swiped her card again. As it processed she did a three-sixty.

All the traffic looked normal. A couple of cars pulled in and out of the gas station. The island where she stood was exposed by white halogen light. She imagined the barrel of a gun pointing at her from the shadows. There was no breeze.

Her card was approved. She cocked the nozzle, and the machine poured gas into her tank. Time bled out. She tracked it by the rhythmic pulse of the pump, which ran with excruciating slowness.

She wished she could try calling Justin again to see if he was all right, but all of her nerves were screaming at her to get on the move.

The pump clicked off, the sound overloud in the quiet evening. She nearly leaped out of her skin.

She had the gas tank capped and was in the driver’s seat within the space of her next breath, and she forced herself to pull away from the gas station slow and smooth, like a normal customer. As soon as she was on the road she sped up.

Nothing could have induced her to go near the U.S. 31 Bypass or 31 Business North. They were too closely linked to the routes that led back to St. Joe. If someone was hunting her, those roads would be watched.

No doubt there were dozens of back roads that could also take her north, but she didn’t know them, so she drove northeast, back toward Cleveland Road. She would take the 80 Toll Road East past Elkhart and turn north on Highway 131. She’d driven that route before. The roads were fast, and she would be traveling in the opposite direction of St. Joe.

All her surviving material possessions were with her in the car. She had no other change of clothes. She had two hundred and ninety-five dollars in cash. After this, she wouldn’t dare access her bank or credit accounts until she understood what was happening and, hopefully, was in some measure of safety again.

She had no idea where she was going, who was chasing her, why someone would try to kidnap her or why the attempt had been so violent. She was weaponless, she didn’t know who she was supposed to find, or how, and she didn’t understand the various psychic and/or strange phenomena she had experienced or witnessed that day. If she hadn’t seen the cloud of attacking hawks for herself, she never would have believed it.

She rubbed at the back of her neck and sighed. That seemed to sum up her situation pretty well.

She reached the entrance to the Toll Road, rolled through a booth for a ticket, and pulled onto the highway. Then she stepped on the gas until she was traveling the speed limit. The last thing she wanted was to draw attention and get a speeding ticket.

Full darkness had descended. The sky was a latticework of thin clouds and clear starlight, hung over a dark, quiet countryside dotted with farmland and clustered lights from the occasional neighborhood. There was a half-moon. She glanced at the moon a few times to see if it was surrounded by the Van Gogh effect, but it was partly obscured by clouds so she couldn’t tell. She gave up and concentrated on her driving instead.

She kept a back window cracked open. She was traveling at a speed that made the frigid wind knife through the interior but rather than close her window and perhaps trap her daemon outside, she turned up the heat. Welcome warmth blew over her damp hair. She sipped coffee and tried, as much as she was able, to let the tranquil scene soothe her jangled nerves.

She needed to regroup and gather her energy. It was difficult to do when she felt like someone had scraped her insides raw with the jagged edge of a grapefruit spoon. Whatever else happened next—and she truly could not imagine what that would be—she knew she was in for a long, hard night, and another long, hard day tomorrow.