Valcour Enchanted by a Demon

Chapter 4

“So can I walk you back to your hotel?”

Dinner had been better than she had hoped, and not just because the food was delicious. After his steak and her salad she had let Jake talk her into desert; a piece of rich chocolate cake. It was to die for.

Now they stood outside the restaurant, talking. It was finally starting to get dark, the sun having touched and dipped behind the horizon of trees and rooftops while they ate, and now he was offering to walk her back to her hotel.

“Um, thank you, but I’m pretty sure I can find my way back there by myself. Kind of just down the street. As cities go, this isn’t a very big place.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But you can’t blame them for trying. Seen the Green Giant statue yet?”

“The what now?”

Jake laughed at the expression on her face. “I’m serious. Over there a ways off Route 169. Sixty-foot-tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant. Looks just like him.”

“And you would know because you and the Green Giant are such good friends?”

“Well I don’t like to brag.”

Brianna laughed with him and put her hand lightly on his arm. She didn’t feel awkward doing it at all, which was very strange. She had to keep reminding herself that she had just met Jake. Touching should be out of the question, but it felt so right. People walked around them and past them as they stood there. She could care less about any of them. Her whole world consisted of her, and Jake.

The sudden attraction she had to him was interesting and even kind of fun. But she had no illusions about it going anywhere. She had to get home to help her dad. After this one brief moment in time, after their drive across the country, she was sure she’d never see him again.

So, why not indulge it a little?

“Come on then,” she said, rolling her eyes and starting off toward her hotel. “Maybe I’ll walk you to my hotel. But I’m giving you a ride, not sharing a room, got it?”

Jake caught up to her quickly, matching her step, hands thrust into the pockets of his sweater again. She noticed how much taller he was, and stood up a little straighter. He pretended not to notice and she pretended not to see his little smirk.

“So you aren’t from here?” she asked him after they had gone a whole block. “I mean, because you do seem to know the Jolly Green Giant and all?”

He shook his head, keeping his eyes on the people around them. “I’m not from here.”

“Then where?”

He stared at a man in a dark business suit. “Sorry. No spoilers. I’ll tell you all about it on our drive, all right?” He kept his attention on the guy in the suit, watching him pass by, watching him over his shoulder to make sure he kept going.

He turned to find Brianna staring at him. “What?”

“Are you looking for someone?” she asked.

“No one in particular.”

She wondered what that meant.

He did the same thing to a very shapely blonde wearing a tight skirt that left her legs bare up past her knees. “Okay,” Brianna stopped and turned to him with a fist on her hip, causing him to stop short with her. “Now I’m just jealous.”

“Don’t be,” he joked. “Your legs are much prettier.”

“Yeah, right. Like you can tell when I’m wearing jeans.” She laughed, “Seriously, what gives? You’re either paranoid or you like checking everybody out.”

He managed to look embarrassed. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s…”

“Complicated?” she guessed.

“Yeah, that.” Even as he said it, his eyes followed someone walking past behind Brianna. He stopped when he saw her staring intently at him. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Brianna. I’m not trying to ignore you.”

“You’re doing a good job of it if you’re not trying.”

He winced. “Yeah. You still want me to come with you?”

Oh, she should so tell him No. The word was on the tip of her tongue. Suddenly she was keenly aware that she was about to take a perfect stranger across the country with her. But instead she just shrugged. “I’m leaving at nine tomorrow. If you’re here when I leave, then I guess I’ll still take you. How’s that?”

“Better than I could have hoped for, really. So your hotel is this one?”

Brianna had almost forgotten what they were doing. She was still enjoying his company that much. She looked up where his thumb was pointing now and saw that they had come all the way back to her hotel.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said, trying not to feel awkward. “Um. So, this is me. Where are you staying?”

He didn’t answer. He was staring in through the front windows of the hotel, his eyes focused on something on the other side of the glass. Brianna followed his gaze and saw the inside of the lobby, saw Mary the desk clerk at the front counter, talking to two men. The men were both the same freakishly tall height, considerably above six feet it looked like, and both wore dark black suits, white collars and cuffs showing from under trim suit coats. As she watched, they both turned as one, to look out through the windows.

They were staring at Jake.

Brianna shivered. The men both had the same short, midnight-black hair slicked back from high foreheads. And both of them had the same washed-out gray eyes, narrow gazes directed sharply at Jake. The intensity of it was almost like a physical weight that pushed at Brianna and made her feel queasy.

She shivered. “Jake, do you know those two…?”

Her words faded away as she turned to him and saw how his expression had changed. His face had darkened, eyebrows lowered, teeth bared in a snarl. She hardly recognized him.

“Jake?”

“We need to go.”

He grabbed her wrist and started quickly back down the sidewalk, not giving her a chance to argue or ask what was wrong.

Over her shoulder, she saw the two men coming through the door to the hotel. They were walking slowly, steadily, after them. A small knot of fear was starting to form in her stomach. Who were these people? Who was Jake?

“Don’t ask,” he said, as she opened her mouth to do just that, keeping pace with his steps. “Just please, trust me. We need to stay away from those two.”

“Who are they? What do they want?”

“They want me.” That was all he said. Then there was only the running.

Brianna wondered to herself why she was allowing him to drag her down the streets of Blue Earth like this, past shops and homes and people. Streetlights came on in response to the deepening dark of nighttime, and the crowds of people who had been out earlier were now slowly disappearing, leaving few others out and about besides her, Jake, and the two men following.

She looked back over her shoulder again. The two men were still there, walking slowly, not rushing, and yet managing to stay not far behind.

Jake saw them too, and ground his teeth in a scowl. He took them off the main road, down several side streets, taking as many turns as he could. “Jake, where are we going?” she asked him.

“Somewhere we can hide.”

They came to a red brick building with stone steps leading up to a red door. Without hesitation he led them there. Brianna saw “Blue Earth Community Library” spelled out in gold stick-on letters across the door.

“You’re not seriously going to hide us in a library, are you?” she asked him. “Wait, why are we hiding at all? Why don’t we just call the police? Don’t you have a cell phone with you?”

He held his hands gently on either side of her face, turning her eyes up to his. “Brianna, I need you to trust me,” he said.

And she did. His touch left her cheeks burning and for a moment she felt slightly dizzy.

Jake took hold of the door’s brass handle and tugged. It didn’t open. It was after eight o’clock now, and scanning the sign in the window next to the door Brianna saw that the library wasn’t ever open past six at the latest. “Jake, there’s no one here.”

“Good. This will go easier if there’s no one else around.”

He tugged on the door again, one hand on the handle, one hand stroking the frame slowly. And this time it opened.

She blinked in surprise, looking from the door to him. Jake shrugged and pulled her inside. “Someone must have forgotten to lock it.”

Inside there was one large open room, with two smaller rooms leading off from either side. Two overhead fluorescent lights had been left on, dimly lighting the place. She saw three parallel rows of shelving units marching down the center of the room, packed with books, and more books lining shelves along the walls. A counter with computers and papers stood along the wall to their left.

Brianna had always loved libraries. Loved to sit in them for hours and just explore the different books until she found one that caught her imagination. She stared at all the stories around her now, words and ideas and information waiting to be shared. Libraries were magical places for her.

Except of course, when she was running in a panic from strange men stalking her through the night.

She listened but couldn’t hear anyone else in the building. Not that she could have heard much over the beating of her own heart. They stopped in the middle of the room, between the stacks, and Jake turned first one way and then the other before taking her hand again and heading to the back of the room.

“Come on,” he said to her. “If I can get in, so can they.”

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Not now.”

He led them to the very back of the room, where a gray metal cart on wheels stood with dozens of books on it, all waiting to be returned to their proper place on the shelves. “This will do. Here, get down.” He got down flat on the floor and squeezed himself into the deep, empty bottom shelf along the wall. “Hurry,” he said, when she didn’t immediately do it herself.

At the other end of the building, Brianna heard the library door open.

She had no idea what he was thinking. There was apparently no way they could hide from anyone like this. She had no choice but to do the same thing Jake had done, as he asked, lying down flat on the floor and sliding into the bottom shelf with him, her face close enough to his that she could feel his breath against her cheek.

When she was in as far as she could squeeze herself Jake took hold of the book cart by one leg, just above the castor wheel, and pulled it close to them against the wall of shelves they were hiding in, partly blocking them from anyone’s view.

The door closed with a loud, echoing bang. Then she heard footsteps as the men entered the library.

She put a hand over her mouth. She didn’t dare speak or even breathe. It was only then, when she realized her hands were shaking, that Brianna was aware that breathing silently was almost an impossible task. She didn’t know why they were hiding, but those men were chasing them for a reason, and they seemed dangerous.

She heard them now, speaking in low, quiet voices that she couldn’t make out. They were at the other end of the room. But it wouldn’t take them long to search this place. Or to find them.

Jake wrapped his hand over hers, put his face close and whispered, “It will be all right. Shh.”

The footsteps came closer.

She looked into his eyes. She focused on them, their green pupils with their sparks of copper. No. Not copper, she realized. The lines that radiated out from the iris in each of his eyes were the pure color of gold. They mesmerized her, holding her attention and calming her.

Closer. Step. Step. Soft sounds of shoes on the deep brown carpet.

Jake held a finger to his lips. Not that he needed to remind her to be quiet.

The footsteps were right next to her now as one of the men followed the wall around the room. Turning her head as little as possible, she saw a pair of shiny black shoes stop just on the other side of the book cart. And then the other man’s shoes were there too, facing the first man.

“Anything?” asked a deep, resonant voice.

“No.” Brianna knew it had to be the second man who answered, but the voice sounded identical to the first man’s. “I cannot think in here. But I do not see them.”

“We are sure they came in here.”

“Yes. We are. But they are not here now.”

“Perhaps they left through a window.”

“I do not know how he evaded us, but we know where he will be.”

“The hotel.”

“Yes.”

Then the two of them walked away.

Brianna turned to Jake, unable to believe that they hadn’t been seen. She took her hand away from her mouth to say something but he put his finger up against her lips instead, frantically shaking his head, urging her not to say anything yet.

Brianna heard the footsteps going back to the front door of the library. There was a pause, a silence, as if the men were waiting to be sure there was no one to be found. Then the door opened, and it closed again.

It was another few dozen heartbeats before Jake took his hand away from her face. When he did, he sighed out a long breath he must have been holding and started pushing himself out of their hiding spot. “All right. You can come out of there now.”

He pushed the cart away for her and offered his hand to her to help her up. She ignored it, using the shelves as a handhold instead. “Do you mind explaining that to me now? Do you?”

The tone of her voice must have been even harsher than she realized. He took a single step back from her, raising his hands palms out. “I’m sorry, Brianna. Really, really sorry. But they wouldn’t have left you alone. Not after they saw you with me. I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“So you took us to a library?” She wanted to yell it at him, but she was keeping her voice down. Those men might still be close enough to hear her if she shouted.

And they were in a library, after all.

“It was the best place I could think of.”

“Seriously? Wouldn’t a police station have been a better place? You didn’t think that maybe they’d find us in here?” She thought about that. Leaning her hips against the stacks, folding her arms under her breasts, she took a moment to settle herself. “And how come they didn’t find us, anyway?”

“It was the books,” he explained. “It’s too loud in here for them.”

“Excuse me? How is it too loud in a place where there aren’t even any people who could have helped us if the two crazy men had found us hiding behind a freaking book cart!”

He smiled at her as she said it, and it made her furious that he found this amusing. “Stop laughing at me, Jake. I’m serious! You’re the one who has men chasing after him. And you’re the one that got me caught up in this…this…whatever it is! So no more stalling, no more promises of explaining yourself to me later. Confession time is now.”

She saw him chew on the inside of his cheek in thought. Then he stuffed his hands into his pockets again and nodded stiffly, like he’d made some hard decision. “Those two weren’t looking for us in here. Not in the strictest sense. They were listening for us. They could hear a pin drop in the middle of a desert. That’s how they knew we were outside your hotel before they saw us. They could hear my heartbeat.”

She didn’t understand. “Your heartbeat?”

“Yes. My heartbeat. And that’s what they were listening for in here. Well, mine and yours.”

“But they couldn’t hear it.” She couldn’t help the sarcasm that slipped into her words.

“No, they couldn’t.”

“Because of the books.”

“Right. Those men, they soak in information from any outside source. Books, television, computers. They hear it in their heads. So, take them into a place like this, and it’s like a thousand people shouting at them all at once. They can’t hear anything else. And they’ve forgotten how to use their eyes.”

“Well. Isn’t that lucky for us.”

“Sarcasm’s like a second language for you, isn’t it?” He tried for a smile as he shifted his weight from foot to foot nervously. “I’m telling you the truth, Brianna. You wanted it, and I’m giving it to you. I just don’t know how much you’re ready to hear.”

She closed her eyes and tried to think. A few breaths later, she still hadn’t figured anything out. “Okay. Pretend this isn’t making any sense to me, because it’s not. Can you please explain to me exactly who it is that was chasing us, who can hear books and heartbeats? And use little words for me. Okay? Who exactly were those two?”

He stared at her, his face suddenly very, very serious. He seemed to suddenly age in front of her for a moment as though he’d been caring a terrible secret for too long. She could tell he didn’t want to answer her, but he did it anyway.

“Demons,” he said to her. “They were demons.”