Feral (The Irisbourn Chronicles Book 1) (23 page)

“I haven’t said goodbye to Matt
yet,” I remembered suddenly.

Arisella scowled.
 
“We
definitely
don’t have time for that.
 
Be thankful
your human’s here so you can say goodbye to him.”

“No one’s saying goodbye to me,”
Dylan spat.

A loud crash emerged from inside
the house, like the sound of the front door being ripped to splinters.

“Gods,” Adrian whispered.
 
“We can’t leave him here now.”
 
He faced Dylan and spoke rapidly in a hushed
voice.
 
“If you choose to go with us, you
must understand that where we are going is not safe for you, and you may die.”

“I understand.” Dylan had turned as
pale as the sheet that was on the car.

The next resounding reverberation
that echoed through the house was enough to send everyone scrambling into the
car.
 
Before I could even comprehend what
was going on, Adrian had already claimed the seat beside me and pressed a
button on the rearview mirror that opened the garage door.

“Drive!” Adrian commanded.

I didn’t have to be told twice.
 
I saw the two caecus demons burst through the
door to the garage, just as I smashed the key into the ignition and yanked the
car into reverse.
 
I backed out of the
driveway and raced down the street at the speed of light, violating countless
traffic regulations along the way.

The caeci released shrill screams
and tore down the street on all fours after us.

My colorless knuckles trembled on
the wheel as I blew through stop signs and red lights.
 
Luckily, it was still early in the day and
barely anyone was on the road.

“Turn right here,” Adrian
directed.
 
“We’ll get rid of them once we
reach the freeway.
 
For a little while,
at least.
 
They’ll still be able to track
us.”

I did as he said, taking a direct
route to the freeway while earning infuriated honks from everyone I
passed.
 
Once we hit the freeway and
traffic became thicker, I lost sight of the caeci.
 
Hopefully they had been hit by cars.

I couldn’t believe that they had
been able to match the speed of the car.
 
Perhaps that was one of the reasons they were such deadly trackers.
 
No one would ever be able to outrun them.

“We lost them,” Adrian confirmed,
and I heard everyone exhale hugely in relief.

“What were they?” Dylan asked with
knitted eyebrows.

“Oh, right.
 
You can’t see them,” I remembered.

“I could still hear them – and
smell them.”
 
Dylan shuddered.

“They were caeci.
 
They look like mutilated corpses, so you’re
not really missing out on much,” Arisella said.

“How long will I be driving?” I
asked.

“Nine hours, maybe more depending
on traffic.
 
You may want to drive a
little more slowly though.
 
We need to
make sure they’ll still be able to follow us.”
 
Adrian produced an ancient-looking map from the glove box, and I
frowned.

“Dylan, could you load the
directions on Google Maps?”
 
I called to
the backseat.
 
The last thing I wanted
was to get hopelessly lost while caeci were on my tail.

“Sure thing.” Dylan sounded
pleased, as he watched Adrian fold up his outdated map.

“As vintage as that map looks,” I
said to Adrian apologetically, “technology is probably going to be more
efficient.”

“You’re probably right,” Adrian
admitted.

“Anyway, you and Arisella look like
you could really use some sleep,” I said.
 
“I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

It didn’t take long for Adrian and
Arisella to slip into quiet slumbers while Dylan fed me the occasional
direction from the backseat.
 
This was
the most at peace we had all been, maybe ever.

The sunlight danced on my fingers
as I drummed them lightly against the wheel.
 
Beside us, the trees morphed into one green, indistinguishable
blur.
 
The thought of caeci running in
the woods alongside us chilled me.

I watched the miles register on the
odometer, knowing that with every one, I left my home further behind.

Hadn’t I just done this?
 
Hadn’t I just moved to a whole new place to
escape my problems?

I shook my head.
 
No, my problems had just gotten worse.
 
This time, I didn’t feel confident in what I
was doing.
 
This time, I had to live with
the guilt that came with abandoning my family.

Chapter
Twenty-Five

I dragged the back of my hand over
my eyes in an attempt to shield myself from the sunlight that streamed in
through my red eyelids.
 
My neck throbbed
from the awkward position it had been placed in.
 
I groaned as I forced myself into a sitting
position.

We were still in the car.

I could feel the miniscule
vibrations of the road in my bones.
 
I
turned over in my seat to stare out the window.
 
We were still driving through a woodsy area, although, from what I could
glimpse of individual trees before they flew past the window, a different
woodsy area than before.

My violet eyes stared back at me
from their reflection in the window.
 
Disconcerted, I looked away and turned my attention to the inside of the
car.

Thirty minutes after we had left,
Dylan insisted that we switch places.
 
He
knew I was too tired to drive for seven hours with nothing to distract me from
the monotony of the interstate.
 
So we
had pulled over onto the side of the road and switched places with the frenzy
of a Nascar pit stop crew, without so much as waking up Adrian and
Arisella.
 
In the back seat, I wasted no
time de-plastering my irritating, mud-colored contacts from my eyeballs.
 
They felt like burning films on my eyes, and
removing them immediately after school had always brought me a welcome wave of
relief.

“Good, we’re all up now,” Arisella
yawned in the seat beside me.
 
Based on
the empty water bottles and the heap of saturated black napkins and clothes at
her feet, she had rubbed most of the caecus blood off herself and changed into
new clothes while I slept.

“Where are we?” I asked.
 
The sun was hanging low on the horizon, as if
it were hesitant to touch the tips of the farthest trees.

“Halfway through Louisiana,” Dylan
answered.
 
“We’ve been driving for a
little over six hours.
 
And I’m proud to
announce that I have successfully burned through an entire tank of gas, so now
no one can keep me from satisfying my need to pee.”
 
Dylan shot Arisella an exultant look.

“Disgusting,” she muttered.

“There’s a gas station coming up in
two minutes.
 
I better not see anyone
racing into the bathroom ahead of me.” Dylan directed this toward Adrian.

“I highly doubt that’s going to be
a problem,” Adrian assured.

Dylan recklessly pulled into a
dilapidated gas station below a sign with grimy fluorescent lights that spelled
“Roy’s Gas.”
 
He barely even waited for
the car to come to a complete stop before dancing off in the direction of the
bathrooms.
 
I couldn’t help smiling after
him.

“He’s quite a character, isn’t he?”
Adrian was leaning up against the car in faded blue jeans and a gray American
Eagle shirt in a way that made him look like he was born to be on the cover of
a magazine.
 
It just wasn’t fair.

“I guess you could say that.”

Arisella had gone inside the gas
station to browse, leaving Adrian and I to ourselves.
 
I could feel Adrian studying my simple human
movements as I shoved the nozzle into the car and waited for the tank to fill.

“Could you stop that?” I blurted,
surprising myself.

“What?”

“Watching me.
 
It makes it hard to concentrate.”
 
I kept my eyes fixed on the pump.

“Well, what would you want me to do
instead?” Adrian looked amused.

“I don’t know.” The pump clicked
and I pulled it out of the car.
 
“Watch
the forest for caeci.”

“Where are you going?” Adrian
called as I briskly walked away from him into the gas station.

“Inside to pay.”
 
I waved the receipt behind me as proof.
 
“Don’t worry.
 
I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself.”

Ignoring everything I had just
said, Adrian remained two steps behind me.
 
He looked like he was about to join me at the register until Arisella
hissed at him from across the store, beckoning him to come.

Adrian groaned, looked at Arisella
then me, and went to his sister.

I handed the receipt to the short,
pudgy man at the register.
 
He looked
like he had more hair in his beard than I had on my head, and he smelled as if
his diet consisted solely of beef jerky.
 
I imagined his name must have been Roy.

“Evenin,” Roy rasped.
 
I could smell stale cigarette smoke on his
breath.
 
“You look like you’ve been on the
road a while.
 
Where you headed?”

“Natchez, Mississippi.” I pulled a
hundred dollar bill out of my wallet and waited for the change.
 
Matt had always supplied me with more money
than I ever had a need for.
 
“Is it much
farther?”

“A couple hours out.”

“Well, if buffalo can’t fly,
explain these,” Arisella whispered loudly from the other side of the store,
poking her finger into a bag of frozen buffalo wings.

“Aris, I don’t think that’s
actually buffalo…” Adrian argued, but even he sounded unsure when he said it.

Roy judged them with narrowed eyes.

“They’re foreign,” I said
quickly.
 
Technically it wasn’t really a
lie.
 
“I’m sorry, but I just remembered
that I should get food.
 
Would you mind
waiting while I find some things to add to the bill?”
 
None of us had eaten all day, and I couldn’t
have been the only one who was starving.

Roy grunted okay, and I went to the
back of the store to load my arms with granola bars, water bottles, and potato
chip bags.

In my peripheral vision, I saw a
shiny black sedan slide into the pump across the lot.
 
Two slender men dressed in matching dark
clothing emerged from it.
 
They looked
like they were going to a funeral.

In the frozen-foods corner secluded
by stacked boxes of beer, Adrian and Arisella were too busy bickering to notice
that one of the men had entered the gas station.
 
The stranger glanced at Adrian and Arisella
before quickly losing interest.

I lowered my eyes in an attempt to
avoid attracting attention to myself, but I didn’t have to be looking at the
stranger to know that he had locked his eyes onto me.
 
He moved stealthily across the store toward
me, before stopping to pick up a bag of nuts on the next aisle.
 
He was still watching me.

Time
to go
.

I hurried down the center aisle and
out the exit, knowing the stranger was on my heels.
 
In the back of my mind, I registered that Roy
was calling that I had forgotten my change.

I had managed to make it to the car
and chuck the food into the backseat, before I felt a hand grab me by the arm
and spin me around.
 
Something cool and
sharp was pressed to my neck, forcing my head up against the side of the car so
that I could look into the eyes of the murderous stranger.
 
Or rather, so he could look into mine.

“An
Irisbourn
,” he breathed, his lips peeling back to reveal his teeth.

“Stop,” I choked.
 
I felt hot, sticky wetness running down my
neck.

The stranger’s dark eyes
glittered.
 
“How very, very unfortunate
for y-” His words broke off suddenly as he lurched forward and a disgusting,
wet gurgle rose from his mouth.
 
The pressure
on my neck disappeared, and he crumpled to his knees in front of me, revealing
Adrian directly behind him, redness spattered across his gray American Eagle
shirt.

It was only then that I saw the
black, needle-like blade lodged in the stranger’s back, and the identical one
in his hand.

Further behind Adrian, Dylan and
Arisella stood frozen.

“Let’s move!” Arisella shouted,
bringing us all to our senses.

We all got into the car, Adrian and
I in the back and Dylan and Arisella in the front, as the enraged second
funeral man sprinted toward us from his car across the parking lot.

Dylan sped away, leaving the
reality of what we had just done behind us.

I pressed my palm into my neck in
an attempt to keep the blood from spilling out of me.
 
I had no idea how deep the wound was.
 
All I knew was that it burned like hell.

“Let me see.” Adrian pulled himself
closer to me and removed my cupped hand from around my neck.
 
I felt a new stream of blood trickle out, and
he pulled his shirt off over his head and pressed it against the base of my
throat.
 
Even though I might have been
dying, I couldn’t help staring at his chest. Damn, he was cut.

“It’s superficial,” Adrian breathed
with relief.
 
“But it should still be
bandaged.”

“Seriously? Was it really necessary
to take off your shirt?” Dylan groaned from the driver’s seat.
 
“We have sterile first aid equipment in the
back.”

Adrian just smirked and leaned over
the seat to retrieve the medical kit.

“You killed someone,” I stated
while Adrian calmly cut a square of gauze, “and left him in a gas station.”

“In case you didn’t notice, he was
Bloodbourn.
 
And about to kill you, I
might add.
 
Now hold still.”
 
Adrian replaced his shirt with the gauze and
fastened it into place with medical tape.

“Tell your conscience to relax,”
Arisella advised.
 
“Adrian murdered a
murderer.”

“Guys, as much as I hate to
interrupt your discussion about the murder Adrian just committed, I think
Bloodbourn #2 is following us.”

Without a doubt, the black sedan
from the gas station was riding our bumper, although the windows were too dark
to see inside.

“Keep driving and stay calm,”
Arisella instructed.
 
“We’ll lose him on
the next interchange.”

It took about fifteen minutes for
the bleeding at my neck to completely stop, and then thirty more to get rid of
the Bloodbourn sedan.

We drove into Natchez just as the
final traces of sunlight were shrinking from the sky.
 
A relatively small city on the edge of the
Mississippi River, Natchez alternated between perfectly preserved antebellum
mansions and abandoned houses that were barely standing.
 
Maybe during the day, the city might have
provided a pleasant throwback to the eighteen hundreds, but at night it just
looked unwelcoming and ghost-like.

Dylan cleared his throat, breaking
the silence.
 
“Hey, hasn’t that Lexus
been behind us for a while now?”

“Hell, I think he’s right.”
 
Arisella twisted around in her seat.
 
“I can’t tell if it’s Bloodbourn though.”

“Hmm, I wonder…” Dylan mused, as he
took a sharp right turn at the very last second.
 
The Lexus just barely managed to follow
suit.
 
“Yeah, they’re definitely
following us.”

“Great, how are we going to get rid
of them now?” Arisella grumbled.

“I’m going to start by running this
red light.”
 
Dylan slammed his foot into
the gas pedal, his eyes on a yellow light that was two hundred feet away.
 
We all held our breath as he narrowly avoided
sending us to our fiery deaths in a stream of traffic.

“Of all the impulsive decisions!” I
shouted, slamming my foot into his seat.

“We got rid of the Lexus though,
see?”

I wanted to slap the triumphant
smile off his face.

Flashes of whiteness between the
trees claimed my attention, and I squinted into the darkness.

“Caeci are here,” Adrian said with
irritation.

“And Bloodbourn #2 is back,” Dylan
gulped, as the black sedan turned into the lane beside us.

“How did this happen?!” Arisella
stormed.
 
“It’s like they knew we would
be here.
 
How could they know that?”

I groaned as a sudden realization
struck me.
 
“I may have, uh, told the
cashier at that gas station in Louisiana,” I admitted.

Arisella swiveled her head around,
openmouthed and bug-eyed.
 
“How could you
be so stupid?”

“Arisella,” Adrian admonished.
 
“She didn’t know this would happen.”

Without any warning, Dylan swerved
hard right, sending the tires squealing as we jerked to one side of the
car.
 
I clung to my side with all my
strength, so I could keep myself from toppling onto Adrian.

“Can you all please be quiet?!”
Dylan hollered.
 
“Now that I’ve
singlehandedly lost the sedan, can we focus on escaping the caecus things?
 
For Christ’s sake, I can’t even see them!”

“Take a road down by the river.”
Adrian tossed the three travel backpacks out of the back, so he, Arisella, and
I could pull ours on.
 
“It’ll be harder
for them to follow us out without the cover of the woods.”

Dylan took another sharp turn, and
then another, until we were speeding alongside the ebony waters of the
Mississippi River.

“Oh,
shit
!” Dylan exclaimed, hitting the breaks and sending us all
lurching forward.
 
“It’s a dead
end.”
 
Sure enough, the road ended in a
cul-de-sac in front of a large, abandoned warehouse.