26. MEMORIZE THIS PICTURE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

MEMORIZE THIS PICTURE IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

O nce again, I found myself back in the foyer of Andras's home. Stepping back, I yanked my hand free from his, panting and clutching my chest. Nadia studied me quietly, trying to figure out, I supposed, how I felt about everything I'd seen, everything I'd learned. It was too much. It was way too much. Callum…Calum was a monster. I could feel myself cracking, shaking under the weight of it all.

"Danny," Andras whispered, "I'm so sorry." His sapphire eyes were heavy. "We'll keep you and your family safe, I promise."

"Family?" I asked, my voice hollow. My heart drummed harder and harder and harder. My mouth went ash dry. I wrapped my arms around my body as if trying to physically hold myself together.

Nadia sauntered over to me, as silent as the grave, barefoot and spackled blood and dust. She gently set a slender, crimson-crusted hand on my shoulder.

"Sorry, love," Nadia said, "but we don't have much time. I know you just saw quite a bit, but just in case, here we go: Andras's former lover is a psychotic prick who was a very powerful Roman lord. He threw a spoiled man tantrum a few centuries ago and murdered loads of people, then came after me and Andras. We subdued him, then buried his rotten, demon ass in cement, but he got out, and he's here, in Denver, trying to kill us and anyone Andras has ever cared about. Since you showed up minutes after he left, he most likely saw you if he didn't already have spies watching you. Unfortunately, that means you're in a heap of trouble. But we are here and quite capable, and I assure you, we will keep your family safe."

The room spun. I turned and puked my guts up all over Andras's tiled entryway. His large, strong hand rubbed my back and held my hair as I heaved and heaved. Finally, I stopped, bracing my hands on my knees, my breath ragged and catching.

"I have kids, Andras," I whispered, voice breaking.

Andras helped me stand, and Nadia handed me a small washrag that I used to wipe my face. Andras tucked a loose lock behind my ear and smiled at me warmly, then gestured for us to move away from the vomit pooling on the tile. I mindlessly followed, too afraid to feel embarrassed, to feel anything but terror.

"I know, Danny. I know. You have every right to hate me or be sick with worry, but we have to act fast. Listen carefully, I think I have a plan that will turn Callum's usual tools against him. Like me, Callum gets glimpses here and there into the minds of others. They're just random images most of the time, chaotic and jumbled. But if he doesn't know that you know that about him, you can possibly use it to manipulate him into a trap."

"Me? Why would I need to manipulate him? How?" I asked.

A scratching sound coming from the living room had me nearly jumping out of my skin. Andras and Nadia jerked toward the noise, and in a blur, they were gone, leaving me alone for what seemed like an eternity. I waited helplessly for everything to be okay, which took me back to high school–to the year Jess and I found our father on the floor of his office. We'd called 911 and then our mother, who'd already left for her afternoon tennis lesson. We stood outside of his office door, trembling, for what felt like forever while EMTs called out to each other in a language that we didn't understand. Jess and I held hands until the office door opened, and our father was wheeled out on a gurney, a sheet covering his mutilated corpse. Our mother arrived just as they were putting his body in the ambulance, and we watched through tearful eyes as she embraced our father for the last time and wept. It was the only time we'd ever seen her cry, before that day or since.

Andras and Nadia suddenly appeared in front of me, startling me out of the memory.

"It was just a tree branch against a window," Andras said, "but it's not safe here. We don't know when he's going to come back. Probably sooner than later. You need to get your kids out of your house. Is there somewhere they can go for the weekend, with your ex-husband, maybe? Can you fake an illness to stay behind?"

An icy chill ran through me. I nodded robotically, my mind racing with where they could go and what I could say that that might be convincing. I took a deep breath and let it out in a shaking gust. I would not panic. I would not panic.

"Can I have a drink?" I asked.

"Yes," Andras said. "Water?"

"Fuck no," I scoffed, "Something much stronger."

In the study, I sat in the leather chair, pulling my legs up into my chest, breathing in, out, and in, and out, trying my best to calm the voice in my head that told me to run, run, run. To my girls, to safety, to anywhere but here. Nadia eased herself onto the couch, glancing down with furrowed brows at the soft, pinkish lines all over her bare legs where deep cuts had been not so long ago. Her white slip, dirty, ripped, and blanketed in smears and splatters of blood, bunched at her hips. Andras perched on the armrest beside her, long legs crossed at the knee, hands woven together and resting on his thigh. She'd been plotting something with Andras when I'd come back from the bathroom, where I'd gone to splash ice-cold water on my face, but it had taken me a handful of minutes to calm down enough to think straight.

"What are we going to do?" I breathed, my voice shaky.

"Well," Andras exhaled, rubbing his neck, "he'll come for you tonight or tomorrow. Patience has never been one of his strong qualities; he won't put it off for long. He'll try to get into your house because it's better than plucking you off of the street in public. Don't ask him in, no matter what."

"He can't come in if I don't invite him? Like…that's a real thing?"

"No, he can't," Nadia answered flatly, sounding far away, "and yes, it's a real thing, although honestly, we aren't certain why. We believe it has something to do with the balance of nature. If creatures as strong as us could just wander into anyone's home, frankly, there wouldn't be any humans left." She wasn't boasting or threatening, I realized, just stating a fact.

"How does it work?" I asked, confused, " I didn't invite you in, Andras, so how did you come in to help me when that man broke into my house?"

"You did. Remember the night we met in your front yard at the gate?" He smiled as if he were remembering it fondly, "you said that you needed to grab your lighter and invited me to follow you inside. The intent is enough. The invitation still holds." He pressed his lips together for a beat, thinking about something, "Just make sure that you act like you don't know who Callum is, and try not to think about anything at all," he looked to Nadia, then back to me, "except for this. Memorize it, and then just hold the image in your mind."

He held up his cell phone to show me the screen, a picture of a small cabin in the woods. A sign next to the front door, nailed above the mailbox, read, "Lakewood 7."

"Imagine me and Nadia here," Andras said.

"Why?" I asked, committing the photo to memory like he'd said.

"You'll be pretending that you don't know me or Nadia, but he'll know otherwise." Andras continued, "he'll think you're trying to protect us. So when he sees this cabin in your thoughts, he'll immediately go there, and we will be waiting."

I gripped my knees. "So the plan is…for me to wait around for him to try to kill me in my own house so that I can imagine some creepy cabin I've never been to, hoping that he will take the bait and zoom up after you?" I asked in disbelief.

Nadia smiled up at Andras. "She's a total ballbuster," she said, "and you're right, I do like her."

Andras shook his head as if this were hardly the time or place.

"I know him, Danny. And we trust that he'll see it in your mind and come for us. The cabin is isolated, so we can get rid of him without being noticed by anyone who might call the police. We'll have the advantage of having cased the area and the element of surprise. The hard part for you will be not thinking of anything else."

I lowered my feet to the floor and tapped on my thighs with my fingers, 1-2-3-4-5, then 5-4-3-2-1. Everything sounded totally insane. How could this possibly work? I was a notoriously bad liar and always had been. My mind tended to race, which is why I spent so much time running, and breathing, and meditating, and…

My spine straightened as it hit me, and I smiled wickedly.

"You know what," I chuckled. It might not be that impossible, after all. "I have ten meditation apps on my phone. I can concentrate on the pressure of my feet for a very long time if I have to."

Andras stared at me for a moment as if I'd lost my mind, then threw back his head and laughed.

"Perfect!" he said.

Then the smile melted away, he gazed downward, and when his eyes flipped up to meet mine again, they were full of pain. His jaw tensed.

"I'm so sorry," he whispered.

"You couldn't have known," I reassured him.

And that was the truth. It's not like he could predict the future. Or at least, I didn't think so.

"Whether or not I could have known, I am still sorry that this a burden you don't deserve. I'm sorry for your fear, your worry, for all of it. I will do whatever I can to keep you safe, keep them safe, and to make sure nothing like this happens again."

I smiled softly.

Nadia abruptly sat up, "Let's get you to your house so you can get your family out and somewhere safe. We don't have time for apologies and pish posh."

I nodded emphatically and we all stood. Taking two steps toward the doorway, I paused, and turned to face them. I didn't know why, but something, something… urged me to stay with them. A voice in the back of my head, intuition, whatever it was, screamed that I needed to go, too, that I needed to follow them into the mountains to fight this evil alongside them. I needed to see Callum dead with my own eyes. Kill him.

"I'll go home and ask Steven to take the girls to the guesthouse at my mother's. Can one of you make the apartment above our garage uninhabitable? Maybe break a pipe or something? Then, they can all stay in Cherry Hill until I'm no longer pretending to be sick. But once they leave, I'm coming with you guys."

"No," Andras ordered.

"It's not negotiable, Andras," I argued, tilting my chin up, our eyes held with equal determination, finding that unyielding part of myself and hauling it out of wherever it had gone to hide for the past few years. "I am coming."

Andras' face was unreadable, a mask of stone and ice and will. But after a few too many heartbeats, that icy mask melted. He nodded only once.

"Let's go," Nadia commanded, spurring us into action.

Nadia and Andras walked me as far as a neighboring house and then peeled away to sneak into the guest house and avoid the cameras. I could feel their eyes on my back as I flung open the cast iron front gate and sprinted up the porch stairs. I threw open my front door and bolted past a startled Steven, who had come over to watch the girls. They were having lunch at the table as I flew past, heading straight into the bathroom and slamming the door dramatically behind me. Once in the bathroom, my hands shook, and my temples pulsed to the rhythm of my heartbeat. Scanning the shelves, I searched for something to pour into the toilet bowl. Then spotted lavender soaking salts and grabbed the bottle. Steven knocked on the bathroom door, "everything okay in there?" he called from the hallway. Pretending to heave loudly, I let the entire container of salts cascade into the white toilet bowl, plop, plop, plop, toilet water splashed onto the floor and all over my black yoga pants. Gross . The toilet flushed, swirling the salts around and pulling them down into the pipes and sewer. Sure that all of the evidence of my lie was gone, I went to the sink to splash some cold water on my face.

"No, I'm not okay," I groaned.

I gaped at the reflection in the mirror: pale, pale skin and wild, fearful green eyes. Everything seemed to twitch from head to toe, like my entire body was being devoured by my nervous system, one electrical bite at a time. "Fuck," I whispered. Guilt rose in crushing waves between the bouts of terror. Like most people, I'd leap into the jaws of the hounds of hell for my family without a second thought. But I could not live knowing that I'd put them in danger, least of all because of some ridiculous crush. I would never forgive myself if anything happened to them because of me.

Steven knocked on the bathroom door again, "Need anything?"

"No," I said, weakly, without even having to fake it, "I think I have the stomach flu. I'm so sick. You should take the girls to my mom's and stay in the guest house there for a day or two. You should leave right now, before it spreads."

Steven cleared his throat, "I mean…if you have it, I'm sure we already do too." I yanked the door open, glaring through the one-inch opening. "Don't be a pain in the ass for once in your goddamn life." I rage-whispered, "Just get the girls out of here before we spend the weekend cleaning puke and shit out off of every surface of this home."

"What about our guest house?" Steven grumbled.

"Mommy? Are you okay in there?" Olivia called out from the dining room.

"Yes, honey! Just a tummy ache. I'll be good as new soon," I called back, doing my best to banish the uncertainty clinging to every word.

Steven turned and walked down the hallway, his footsteps growing faint the further he got. I shut the door and a beat later heard him yell, "My bathroom is flooding in the guest house! Damnit! I'll call a plumber. Girls! Let's pack your stuff! We're going to have a sleepover at your grandma's house until mommy feels better." I plopped down on the edge of the bathtub, my hands shaking and my bottom lip quivering for what felt like forever. Finally, when the front door opened and shut and the house fell silent at last, I put my head in my hands and bawled.