Salt and Blood
271 Words
Chapter Three
Things happen fast after that. Too fast. A chair scrapes violently. Someone shouts. A glass shatters.
Elias moves first. He grabs my wrist, firm but not cruel and pulls me down behind the bar just as something heavy crashes where my head was seconds earlier.
“What the hell is going on?” I gasp.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Sorry.That’s all he says. The pub erupts into chaos. The regulars scatter. One of the men vaults over a table. The other lunges forward. Elias reaches into his coat and pulls out a gun.
I freeze. Everything freezes. Not in films. Not in stories. Guns don’t belong here. Not in my sleepy winter town.
“Stay down,” he tells me quietly.
Then he stands. The tall man stops.
“You really thought you could disappear?” he says, voice echoing through the pub. “You know what you took.”
“I didn’t take it,” Elias replies.
“You ran.”
“Yes.”
Silence and then a shot. The sound explodes in the small room. Plaster rains from the ceiling. Someone screams. I clamp my hands over my ears. When I look up again, Elias is moving toward the back door and he’s looking at me. Not at them. At me.
“Bella,” he says.
I don’t remember telling him my name.
“Come with me.”
It’s madness. Absolute madness. But outside, sirens haven’t started. No one here can protect me and somehow, I know something worse is coming.
“Why?” I whisper.
His jaw tightens.
“Because they saw you.”
- Writer
