Diaries of an Urban Panther (3 page)

He strode into the room but stopped mid way as he saw my watery eyes.

“You’re fine,” he repeated.

“I got attacked,” I said through gritted teeth as I curled my arms underneath the pillow. “Now I’m trapped in a stranger’s house. Nothing about this is
fine
.”

He sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed again. “At this rate, you’ll be healed in about a day, maybe with no scars. And then I’ll let you go home.”

Putting the large plastic first aid kit on his lap, he picked out bottles and packages of gauze. I watched him open bandages and spread a white cream on a cotton ball. I gasped as he began to wipe the skin down with the cold cream.

“Sorry,” he said.

“A kidnapper saying ‘
I’m sorry
.’ That’s gotta be a first,” I grumbled.

“I’m not kidnapping you. I’m making sure that you are . . . safe.”

“Safe from what?” I asked as I looked over at his knee.

He kept cleaning, kept dabbing on the cold cream with the soft cotton ball. It soothed the burning sensation but it did nothing for the aching muscles underneath and the scared girl underneath all that. “What exactly was in that alley?”

With pursed lips, he placed a large bandage across the clean wounds and ripped four strips of tape.

Giving up on getting any answers out of him, I buried my head in my pillow and let him finish taping the large bandage across my left shoulder.

He stood and collected the supplies, putting them meticulously back in their places in the large plastic first aid kit as if he had done it a million times before.

“You’d better eat and I’m sorry if the clothes don’t fit.”

Turning my head, I watched him go. He closed the door and put back the chair. My stomach growled with hunger and the burger next to me looked wonderful. Screw the diet. I needed to survive here.

A
fter the caffeine and the clothes, I had enough energy to sit up in the bed and look around at my prison. As my mind raced through the clues in his room, I could only come up with three things that even remotely made sense.

1. He was a vampire hunter and I had been caught in the crossfire of his war against the dark arts. He was holding me here to make sure I hadn’t been infected by whatever beastie he had been tracking. I had written it in a script that had been rejected but it had always been a favorite of mine.

2. He was plain psycho and since he couldn’t have Jessa, he decided to take her friend to be his sex slave or his collateral when he bargained for Jessa’s affection. Which wasn’t going to work. He should have taken her Fendi purse instead.

3. In his TV-rotted mind, he had rescued me from an actual dog attack and was trying to do the right thing in very misguided sort of way. Which might explain why I was not as afraid of him as I should be.

When the fear crept away and I was sure I could stand, I tried the window, just for good measure. If something did happen and I ended up on the evening news, I didn’t want some neighbor going, “Why didn’t she just crawl out the window?”

It was unlocked. What kind of evil kidnapper doesn’t secure a window? His loss, I thought as I quietly opened the window and peered out.

Huh. One story house with the neighbors only a few feet away. No alarms went off; there weren’t bars on the windows. Just a short drop to the ground below. Something wasn’t right about this.

I slid a leg out the window and stretched my leg down until my toes touched the cool grass. God bless a 34-inch inseam.

Careful of my left shoulder, I slid out the window with a little
umph
.

Take that, Stalker boy.

Running for the streetlights, my heart began to pound. Freedom. Where to go from here? I couldn’t see downtown. Hell, I couldn’t see three feet in front of my face. It was pitch black with no moon in the sky. Not that I could navigate home by it.

A hand clamped down on my injured shoulder and pain shot down through my torso. A boot nudged my knees out from under me and I fell hard. The jolt made me bite the end of my tongue and tears welled up in my eyes as I tasted blood.

“Really think it was going to be that easy?”

“Kinda.”

He walked in front of me and looked down with a queer smile on his face. In one swift movement, he swept up my right hand, pulled me to my feet, and threw me over his shoulder.

Defeat didn’t prevent me from struggling as much as I could. I kicked and pounded and screamed, but it didn’t faze him, or the neighbors, as he walked us through the front door and locked it behind us.

He dropped me on the couch and my shoulder reared to life again. I clutched it tightly and glared up at him.

Garrett’s head cocked and his hands rested on his hips. “How about you try a shower? Should make your shoulder feel better.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re getting a little ripe.”

My cheeks flared with anger. “How about you let me go home and I’ll take a shower there?”

He laughed. “Not yet, Miss Jordan.”

I stood, holding my shoulder. It felt dislocated and my fingers now tingled.

As he guided me through the house, I looked around at the obvious bachelor pad with various stacks of things everywhere with accompanying smells. The french fry smell permeated the front of the house. The kitchen was spotless but the back hallway smelled of standing water. It didn’t give me faith in the bathroom he was now pointing to.

I nodded and watched him close the door. It wasn’t the cleanest place in the world but I didn’t know if I had the option to be picky right now. As I turned to the shower, I saw a stack of clean towels on the toilet. I was pretty sure that serial killers didn’t leave fresh towels.

“The window is nailed shut,” he said through the door.

“Thanks for the heads up,” I called back.

I really wasn’t looking for an escape. Plus, I really didn’t want him to catch me hanging half way out of the tiny window I was too chubby to fit through. I turned on the water full blast, as hot as I could stand it, and watched the bathroom steam up. I wiped the mirror and looked at my shadowed eyes, pale skin. I pulled off the maroon shirt and turned around.

I pulled off the large piece of gauze and there it was in all its glory. A full four slashes down my shoulder could have been fingernails, or a knife, or any number of weapons I could dream up.

After peeling off the rest of the clothes, I stepped into the hot water and immediately my muscles relaxed. I fell easily into the routine of showering. Washing my hair and face and finding a cloth to wash my body, I scrubbed the parts of my back I could, relieving some of the itch. The smoke from the bar still clung to my hair and I had dirt still encrusted on my knees from the fall in the alley.

From where that thing jumped me
. Even in the hot water, I shivered at the images behind my eyes. I shook my head and tried to focus on one thing at a time.
Get out of this alive, Violet, and then we’ll talk about never putting out the trash again.

I dried off, wrapped the towel around me, and sat on the cold porcelain toilet for a moment. I figured I could play this two ways: (1) like a captive—be scared and terrified and not help myself at all or (2) be intelligent and witty, swallow my fear, and try to get some information out of this guy about why I was here and not in a hospital—and why wounds were now scabbed up on my back after only three days.

A tap on the door made me jump off the toilet seat.

“You okay?”

“Fine, just collecting my thoughts.”

“Figured out if I’m a bad guy yet?” he said from the other side.

“Nope,” I answered honestly.

“Cup of coffee?”

Coffee was my weakness, my kryptonite and the one thing that I could never turn down. Food, sex, and shelter were optional; coffee was not.

“Sure,” I pepped up. “Add cinnamon and I’d think you’re an angel.”

He chuckled as he moved away from the door. I rested my head in my hands and prayed I would be okay. And I don’t pray. Stopped praying about twelve years ago.

But something about him didn’t feel evil, didn’t make me quake in terror. Didn’t make me cry any more than I already had. And he had spent two months following us without incident. He was there when I needed help and seemed handy with the medical tape. Maybe he was just weird. Weird I could deal with. Cannibalistic, not so much.

Sufficiently dry, I put the clothes back on. I ran my fingers through my wet locks and hoped his two-in-one shampoo would be enough to tame my kinky hair. In that motion, I was surprised to find my back didn’t sting on the surface; it was more of a deeper hurt now, a muscle hurt. It still burned to the touch but the worn T-shirt felt good against the exposed scabs.

Shuffling out into the living room, careful to not step on anything in my bare feet, I immediately smelled coffee and cinnamon. It was much better than the french fry smell.

He handed me a chipped brown mug. “Have a seat,” he said. It was more of a command than an invitation.

I stepped over a pile of clothes and sat on the lumpy couch where he had been watching TV. The place wasn’t a fortress, just a living room. I didn’t see any guns or knives, just a few baseball bats and a hockey stick, but nothing of real violence. The really odd thing about the scene was that nothing hung on the walls, no pictures or posters or anything. No clues of who he was. Probably kept it that way so his victims couldn’t identify him later on. There was also a layer of dust an inch thick but I wasn’t exactly the right person to be judging dusting habits. I could grow potatoes on my mantle.

Garrett sat at the other end of the couch, between me and the door, and watched as I sipped my steamy mug of caffeine. The hot liquid soothed everything, every muscle, every neuron. It was sweet and had just the right amount of sugar and milk in it.

“You must have been watching me.”

“Like a hawk,” he said as he took a sip of his own.

I finally caught the glimpse of the clock on the top of the TV playing a muted infomercial.

“Do you normally have coffee at 3 a.m.?” I took another long sip.

“Actually yeah,” he said with a shrug.

“So when do I go home?” I asked bluntly, the warm cup in my hands restoring my witty edge.

“When I say,” he responded. He sipped his coffee. “You’re not like the others, Miss Jordan.”

“How many others have you kidnapped?”

“I didn’t kidnap you. I rescued you from a very large . . . thing,” he corrected.

“What was it? What did you shoot it with?”

Garrett’s eyes widened for a moment but snapped back to the unreadable face. “Didn’t think you were awake at that point.”

“I wasn’t. I was guessing,” I muttered into my coffee mug.

Garrett’s jaw clenched as he breathed loudly out through his nose, scolding himself.

“You said you were waiting to see if I was safe. Am I safe?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “With the way you’re healing, I can’t be sure.”

“Well, what do you think? Because I’ve had plenty of time to dream up thousands of theories with all the
Cloak and Dagger
stuff going on here.”

Garrett looked deep into his coffee, avoiding my eyes. “Do you really want to know what I think?”

“Of course I want to know. I’m smart enough to know the thing in the alley was too big to be a dog but you took it down pretty quick. I know even in my younger days, I didn’t heal this fast. I want to know why you brought me here and not a hospital.”

Garrett pursed his lips and leaned back on his couch. His T-shirt stretched over his chest as he put his arm on the back of the couch. There was a dark mark there, some kind of tattoo on the inner side of his left upper arm. It was a small design, something in a circle. I tried not to stare at it but couldn’t help myself.

He shifted position and kept his arm to his side from then on.

I curled my feet underneath me and waited, watching, as he decided what to tell me. I’d decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He had healed me, fed me, and clothed me. And the addition of cinnamon was above the call of a normal kidnapper.

“You were attacked by a werewolf.”

Laughter echoed in my head and I immediately knew number three of my scenarios was right: He was gorgeous but insane. I was about to be dinner. Only Violet Jordan could get herself into a situation like this. I smiled and was about to say something witty to that effect but the darkness in his eyes made my smile fade.

“I didn’t get a good look but I shot it with silver. Works for most things if I’m wrong.”

The penny taste of fear filled me. I gripped my coffee tighter as I worked through this in my brain.
He was insane
; it was the only thought that ran through my head. I mean sure, I wrote about this stuff on TV but it was
SCIFI
, hence, the
FI
part of it.