It was just a shadow.
As her blood ran cold, she steadied herself on the suspect’s strong arm. “What… the hell… is that.”
And yet she knew: It was what had been in her dream. A shadow that was so much more, and so very evil.
The suspect squared off at… whatever the hell it was. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He opened fire at the thing, emptying a clip’s worth of bullets into what she had been attacked by in her nightmare. With every impact, there was more of that high-pitched, scream-like sound she’d assumed was a person in pain. With every wounding, parts of the entity billowed out in response, the shape shifting like water.
Even as Erika witnessed this with her own eyes, her mind refused to process what she was looking at—except then everything clicked. This had to be another nightmare. She was asleep again, probably at her desk in the Bull Pen, her subconscious coughing out more of this crap—no doubt because she had been to see Keri Cambourg, and they had stood in her husband’s book collection room, and they had talked about the ancient, ugly tome that had disappeared. And then right after Erika had almost had another seizure, just as she’d headed for the triplex’s door, Keri had remembered the name of the bookstore. After which, she had gotten in her car and driven over…
Oh, God, maybe this was actually happening.
Stopping her thoughts, she pointed her own muzzle at the shadow, and as the suspect in front of her took out another gun from somewhere, she started to shoot.
’Cuz if this was just a dream, it wouldn’t matter. And holy hell, if this was actually for real? She needed to defend herself, defend him.
Pop, pop, poppoppop—
Just as she was coming to her sixth discharge, as the suspect began pulling his trigger once again, she heard a female voice in her ear. “That’s my pet you’re fucking with.”
The words were so unexpected, so calm and measured, so out of place in all the high-pitched shrieking from that entity, that Erika yanked her head around to see who was—
It was the brunette. From down by the river.
But instead of her clothes being red and skintight… she was wearing the old man’s cardigan.
“You are really underwhelming in person,” the woman drawled through the noise, in a way that couldn’t be explained. Unless she was implanting her words directly into Erika’s mind. “And you’re coming with me.”
Before Erika could respond—or fight back—a crushing weight bore down on both her chest and her back. It was as if she were pinned between two walls, and her body went limp under the pressure. As her gun dropped to the floor, she strained against suffocation and pain, tried to fight the compression, groaned to get the suspect’s attention.
“Yeah, you’re not going to get anywhere with that.”
As the suspect switched to a set of long knives and attacked with the twin blades flashing, Erika went into a tilt, her stiffened body drawn backward by some invisible force as if she were on a dolly. While her vision phased in and out, she caught sight of the cash register and the back of the checkout counter, and then she was sucked into the darkened storage room—
Down on the concrete floor, by a pile of books that had been knocked over, the body of an old man was lying faceup on the floor, the eyes open and seeing nothing. Blood had pooled under his head, and going by the pasty white skin tone, he had been dead for at least an hour or two. He was wearing… the exact same cardigan as…
“Oh, shit,” the female voice said, “do I still have that mothball sweater on—ah, much better.”
A clipping sound, of high heels on the bare floor, circled behind Erika, and then the door started to close, seemingly on its own. She got a last look at the suspect out on the far side of the counter. He was fighting with a ferocity that only came with serious training and experience, those silver-bladed daggers flashing as he battled the shadow. And in response, the thing, whatever it was… was slapping back at him with these arm-like extensions, and when there was contact, the man hissed and reared back as if hurt—
The storeroom’s door slammed shut, cutting off Erika’s view.
“I hate when you look at him like that,” the woman’s voice said. “It makes me want to kill you right now.”
* * *
Even though Balz was fully engaged with the shadow, he was aware of when Erika stopped shooting from behind him. As he transitioned from his gun to his daggers, he prayed that she’d gone the self-protection route and run out the back of the shop—
“You fucker,” he growled as the shadow nailed him another good one in the shoulder.