Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) (20 page)

“So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Maggie prompted when I was no longer breathing so hard I couldn’t answer.

“Wrong?” I asked, giving her innocent wide eyes. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“You don’t love running enough to push yourself that hard. Not unless you’re trying to run away from something that’s on your mind.”

I grimaced, realizing she was right. There were times when I enjoyed running, but mostly I did it because it was good for me, not because I loved it. And usually I’d quit long before I’d worked myself into such a lather.

I was sick to death of lying and trying to hide my
feelings. Or maybe I was just too exhausted, both mentally and physically, to hold it all inside. Instead of pretending nothing was wrong, I told Maggie about my disturbing conversation with Cyrus. My lips were chapped with the cold, but that didn’t stop me from chewing on them, making them worse.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “Should I tell Anderson?”

I realized I knew her answer before she even spoke. Unlike me, Maggie’s first instinct is always to follow the rules. Hiding the truth from Anderson might not be technically breaking any rules, but I suspected it would feel that way to her.

“Of course you should tell him,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a right to know. And he would
want
to know.”

“But—”

“Besides,” she interrupted, “he’s likely to find out eventually, and he’ll be pissed off that you didn’t tell him.”

She had a point. I kicked out at a pinecone in frustration, sending it straight into a tree so that it almost ricocheted back at us.

“I just don’t get it,” I said, restraining the urge to give the pinecone another kick. “Where is Emma getting all this crazy shit from? What have I ever done to give her the slightest hint that I might be after Anderson?”

I’d meant them as rhetorical questions, and wasn’t expecting Maggie to answer. And yet there was a kind of waiting quality to her silence. Something that
told me she had something to say but was thinking her words over carefully. I came to a stop, shivering in the cold now that I was finally cooling down.

“What is it? What are you thinking?”

Maggie gave me an almost apologetic smile. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you or what you’ve done. I think it’s more about Anderson.”

I frowned in confusion. “Anderson’s never done anything that would give her reason to be jealous, either. Not if she were sane, that is.”

Maggie shrugged and turned as if to start heading back toward the house, but I grabbed her arm to stop her. Obviously, she had more to say, even if she was reluctant to say it.

“Come on, Maggie. Help me out here. Is there something going on I don’t know about?”

She looked distinctly uncomfortable, but like a true friend, she answered me anyway. “I’ve known Anderson a long time. I even knew him back when he and Erin were together.” She gave me the apologetic smile again. “I can see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, Nikki. It’s just like how he used to look at Emma when his relationship with Erin was going south. Emma’s a crazy bitch, but she’s not making it all up.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but I couldn’t come up with anything to say. Never once had I picked up that kind of a vibe from Anderson, but now I had to wonder . . . was it because there’d been nothing to pick up, or had I been completely blind to the signals?

I shook my head. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You
have
to be. I can be clueless sometimes, but not
that
clueless.” My voice went up at the end, making my words sound more like a question than a statement of fact.

“Maybe,” Maggie said with an unconvincing shrug. “But I bet you anything that Emma’s seen the same thing I have, and that’s what set her off.”

“Guess that means you’re
both
nuts,” I grumbled. So much for the peaceful oblivion I’d been looking for when I decided to go running.

I was in even less of a mood to deliver bad news to
Anderson now than I had been before. How could I look him in the eye after what Maggie had just said? I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from overanalyzing every nuance of his behavior, looking for any hint that Maggie was right. If Anderson had the hots for me, I didn’t want to know it. I had more than enough complications in my life as it was.

I took a long, hot shower, and by the time I got out, I’d convinced myself I
had
to tell Anderson that Emma was behind the fires, no matter how much I didn’t want to. It could turn out to be dangerous for him to underestimate her level of malice, and the sooner he accepted what she had turned into, the safer we would all be.

Dread making my stomach feel twisted and cold, I descended the stairs to the second floor and forced myself toward Anderson’s study. The door was open, but when I stepped inside, I found the room empty.

I could have gone looking for him, or I could have tried again later. Instead, I decided to take the coward’s way out. Maybe the “right” thing to do would have been to wait until I had a chance to sit down with Anderson and deliver the news in person, but I’d had more than enough confrontation for one day, and I just couldn’t face more.

Hoping Anderson wouldn’t come back and catch me in the act, I rummaged through his desk for a pen. Then I took the screen shot that Cyrus had given me and scrawled a brief note on it.
I saw Cyrus today, and he gave me this. He says he got it off of Emma’s computer. Remember not to shoot the messenger.
I left the paper on the seat of his chair, and then hustled out of there, glad to have escaped without having to face him.

Thursday and Friday passed
without me once catching a glimpse of Anderson in the house. I kept expecting him to show up on my doorstep, or call me and demand I come to his study, but he didn’t. I might have thought he’d gone off somewhere for a vacation, except when I casually asked Maggie at lunch one day if she’d seen him lately, she told me he was home. I wondered if he had just chosen to ignore the message I’d left him, or whether he was pissed at me for being the bearer of bad tidings and was simply avoiding me.

Another storm was due to roll into town sometime Saturday morning, with a slight chance of snowfall. As usual, it was still dark out when I woke up in the morning, but I could almost
feel
the threat of the approaching storm. I needed to make a grocery run, and it looked like I’d better do it soon if I didn’t want to risk having to drive in the snow. The
only grocery store I knew of that was open at six in the morning was a good twenty minutes away, but it would be worth it if the snow came.

It started raining as soon as I pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot, but it was nothing more than a chill drizzle. No snow yet, but the temperature had dropped ominously. Predictably, the parking lot was almost deserted at this time in the morning, and I hoped that meant the hoarders hadn’t hit the shelves yet and bought out all the milk, bread, and eggs as sometimes happens before a snowfall.

It was raining a little harder when I exited the store, and if I hadn’t had two paper grocery bags in my arms, I would have put up my umbrella. Instead, I merely hurried a little more, ducking my head to keep the droplets out of my eyes.

The parking lot was still mostly deserted, and though it was somewhere around dawn, the clouds were heavy enough to keep the rising sun from showing through yet. I noticed that even with about a hundred open spaces available throughout the parking lot, some jackass had parked his car so close to mine I’d have to perform contortions to get into the driver’s seat.

I’d planned ahead and had put my keys in one hand before scooping a grocery bag into each arm. I popped the trunk, then used my knee to nudge it open enough so I could put the bags in. I heard the sound of a car door closing, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone walking around the car beside me. I shoved my bags into the trunk, planning to ask
the driver nicely if he would pull up so I could get into my driver’s seat.

I slammed the trunk closed, then turned to the driver beside me. He had opened his own trunk, although I was sure he hadn’t gone into the grocery store yet. He turned his head toward me and grinned. I frowned, not knowing what he was so happy about. Until his hand emerged from the trunk and I saw the tire iron in it.

It had taken me way too long to recognize the threat, and though I tried to ward off the blow with my shoulder, the tire iron still connected solidly with my skull, sending a stab of pain through my head. It felt like the parking lot pitched below me, and though I desperately tried to stay on my feet so I could take evasive action, I couldn’t do it. The ground rushed up to meet me, and my attacker took another step toward me, raising the tire iron.

My head throbbed, and my brain felt all woozy. I tried screaming for help, though I doubted there was anyone nearby who could hear me.

The lunatic swung at me again, and I rolled violently to the side to avoid the blow. I heard the metallic clank of the weapon striking the pavement, and my attacker’s curse at having missed. My stomach didn’t like the sudden movement, threatening to toss my breakfast. I wondered if that meant I had a concussion from that first blow.

I didn’t have time to bemoan my miseries, not unless I wanted to add more to the list. Swallowing my gorge, I tried to push to my feet. If the world
would stop spinning enough for me to stand up, maybe I could run into the store, where there were at least a handful of people who might help me.

The tire iron connected with my back at shoulder blade level, knocking me flat on my face and forcing the air out of my lungs. My reeling mind ordered me to pull myself together and get up, but my body was having none of it. Pain and nausea roiled through me, along with a good dose of fear. No, my attacker couldn’t kill me, at least not permanently. However, he could do a whole lot of very unpleasant things to me if I didn’t find some way to muster my strength for an escape.

I was still struggling to get up when I heard the scrape of a footstep on the pavement right by my head. I looked around just in time to see my attacker’s foot coming for my face.

I blacked out for a while, but either I wasn’t as badly hurt as it seemed, or my supernatural healing was working overtime, because I woke up what had to be no more than a few seconds later. Pain screamed through my head, and I wanted to shrivel up and hide in some dark corner until it went away.

I was draped over a hard, bony shoulder, a pair of arms clamped around my legs. I struggled feebly, but the only effect was to let my attacker know I was conscious again. He slung me off his shoulder, and I tried once again to scream for help. I don’t think a whole lot of sound made it out of my mouth.

I thumped down on the ground much sooner than I was expecting to, and in my weakened state
even that relatively mild impact was almost enough to knock me out again. Like I said, my mind was pretty fuzzy, and it took me an agonizing minute to realize I’d been dumped into the trunk of my attacker’s car.

This couldn’t be good.

My attacker leaned into the trunk, and I got a good look at his face for the first time. He was no one I knew, and I didn’t see any sign of a glyph anywhere on him. I hoped that meant he was just some random human thug who’d seen a delicate-looking woman alone in a darkened parking lot and decided to take advantage of the situation. If that was the case, I might be able to surprise him with my supernatural healing ability and make my escape.

The possibility that he might
not
be some random human, that he might have been after
me
specifically, was not something I cared to contemplate.

I was in no shape to make a flashy getaway from the car in my current condition, and I decided my best chance of escape—at least while my head was still reeling from what I was now sure was a concussion—was to attract attention and get help. I drew in breath to scream, but even that turned out to be more than my body could handle, as the ribs in my back sent a breath-stealing blast of pain through me. Maybe I had some broken ribs to go with the concussion.

My midsection hurt so much I barely even felt it when my attacker punched me and I blacked out again.

When next I woke up, my situation had not improved.
My head felt even more woozy, and the car felt like
it was pitching and bucking beneath me. I was lying on my stomach, my hands bound behind my back. I heard the distinctive ripping sound of duct tape, and felt something being wound around my ankles. I tried to voice a protest, but there was duct tape over my mouth, too. I swallowed a few times in rapid succession. This would be a really bad time to throw up, no matter how bad the nausea was.

Once again, my struggles served only to let my captor know I was awake.

“Damn, you are one tough bitch,” I heard him mutter.

He grabbed me by the hair and slammed my head down against the floor of the trunk. If I hadn’t already been hurt, I don’t know if the impact of my head against the carpet would have done much, but as it was, it stunned me into semiconsciousness.

In the last few moments of light before the trunk slammed shut, I caught sight of something that struck terror into my heart: lying next to me, on the floor of the trunk beside the roll of duct tape my attacker had thrown in when he was finished with it, was a shovel.

I closed my eyes
in the darkness of the trunk and tried not to panic. Panic would steal my ability to think rationally even better than the aftereffects of the concussion would.

It could be just a coincidence that there was a shovel in the trunk with me. Maybe my captor was a gardener, or a handyman or something. It didn’t mean he was planning to bury me alive.

Or bury me after killing me, which was just as bad.

My attempts to comfort myself didn’t do a whole lot of good, and fear stole my breath. Ever since I’d first heard about what Konstantin had done to Emma, chaining her at the bottom of a lake so that she would revive and die over and over again for all eternity, facing a similar fate had become my worst nightmare. Immortality might have its perks, but making a fate like that possible was one hell of an awful drawback.