CHAPTER FOUR
1049 Words
Grace.
I picked up the vial slowly and put it in my pocket and said nothing.
Kent watched me do it. He didn't reach for it, didn't demand an explanation, just watched with that same patience that I was already starting to find deeply unsettling. Honestly, everything about him unsettled me. After a moment, he stood, told me there was a room upstairs I could use, and left me alone in the office without another word.
I sat there for a long time in the quiet, turning the vial over in my fingers without taking it out, feeling the faint warmth of it through the fabric. Then I went upstairs, found the room and lay on the bed fully dressed, with the gun I'd found on the side table tucked under my pillow. He'd left it there for me to find, still fully loaded. He didn't think I would hurt him, or maybe he didn't care because a gun wouldn't do anything to him.
I held the gun tightly and drifted off to sleep, my body giving in to the exhaustion.
He was at the bar when I came down after I woke up. I didn't know what time it was, but it was bright, like noon.
He looked like he'd been there for hours, which I suspected he had, sitting at the far end with a coffee and an aura about him that belonged to someone who had never needed much sleep. He waited until I'd poured myself a cup from the pot on the counter before he spoke. I'd already accepted my fate, getting out of here won't be easy. I might as well get familiar with the place and its people and find a way to escape.
"There are rules," he said.
I turned around when I felt eyes on me. Above us, from the railing that ran around the upper level, three or four of his men were watching. Nobody pretended they weren't.
"Of course there are," I said.
"You don't leave Velmore. You don't contact anyone on the outside. You don't go near the eastern woods." So that's the name of this town. I'd never heard of it before.
"I don't leave," I repeated. "You mean I'm a prisoner."
"I mean you're alive, and I'd like you to stay that way." He said, like he'd already decided and there was nothing I could do about it.
"And if I disagree?"
"Then you'd be wrong." He picked up his coffee. "You crossed a ward that has kept this town off every map for a century. The moment you step outside my boundary, you're visible."
I opened my mouth and closed it again, because the part of me that had spent six hours on a dark highway running from something with wrong joints knew he wasn't lying. Also, forgetting what he just said about some ward, he knew something was chasing me. Something that wasn't human.
"Fine," I said. "Who are they?" The men on the railing were bothering me.
He looked up at the railing. "Come down."
They came down with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The first one moved like a wall that had decided to become a person, broad and silent, with eyes that assessed me in one sweep and clearly found the assessment disappointing. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and crossed his arms.
"Rook," Kent said. "My right hand."
Rook said nothing. He looked at me like one would look at a pest.
"Hi," I tried.
Nothing.
"He's friendly once you get to know him," said the second one, appearing at Rook's shoulder with the energy of someone who had been waiting his whole life to say exactly that. He was younger than the others, bright-eyed in a way that felt slightly out of place in a room that smelled like leather and danger, and he was grinning at me like I was the best thing that had happened to him all week. "I'm Jinx. That's not my real name but nobody uses the real one so don't bother."
"Grace," I said. Kent gave me a look, which I returned. He'd seen my ID, there was no point lying about my name anymore.
"I know. Kent told us." He glanced at Kent, then back at me. I glared at him, he'd told them my name.
"I can show you around if you want. The town's actually pretty cool once you stop being terrified of it. There's a decent diner. Mara's clinic is on the south side if your arm needs looking at properly," He said the last part with a pointed look at the bandaging on my arm that needed changing.
I looked at Kent. He was looking at the window. His jaw was tight in a way I was already learning to read as him having opinions he wasn't going to voice.
"Sure," I said. "Okay." I followed him outside once the other men introduced themselves.
Jinx talked for most of the walk through town, which was fine because it meant I didn't have to. Velmore was strange, it looked like a place with too much history with buildings that had been repurposed four times over, streets that felt older than they looked. People nodded at Jinx and looked at me with curiosity that was mostly polite.
We were standing in the town square when he grabbed my arm.
I winced, because it was the wrong arm, and he immediately let go and said, "Sorry, sorry, don't look east."
I looked east.
At the tree line, maybe two hundred metres away, something stood very still in the shadow. Tall. Too tall. Dark, like it carried its own shadow around with it.
It was looking directly at me.
I knew it was looking at me the same way I'd known the thing in the lab smoke had been looking at me. Not because I could see its eyes. Because I could feel them. It was the thing on the highway.
My blood went cold.
They hadn't lost me. They had never lost me. Whatever had killed Dr Fenn had followed me all the way here, it was standing at the tree line in broad daylight, and it already knew exactly which face in the square was mine.
I'd been found.
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