Terror shredded her ability to think. She couldn’t make herself move as he stood towering over her, rolling her nipple in his fingers, smiling, imagining all the things he would do with her before he killed her.
“I have at last come back for you, my little angel.”
Angela finally began to form thoughts. She realized that she had to do something or she was going to die a long and agonizing death.
Her boots with her knife were on the other side of him, at the foot of the bed, so she abruptly turned to dive for the gun she kept on her nightstand. The gun wasn’t there. He must have taken it.
He slammed into her from behind. His big arms wrapped her in a bear hug. He lifted her from her feet.
As panic brought her fully awake, she remembered Nate’s lessons.
She knew she had three seconds to live.
The bear of a man bent her forward, his feet spread as he walked her toward the bed, toward her death.
Bent forward, Angela shifted her hips to the left, reached back with her right hand, and forcefully grabbed his genitals. She gritted her teeth and abruptly twisted them with every fiber of her strength.
He might have been big and strong, but he was no less vulnerable down there.
Cassiel let out a surprised cry as he reflexively released the bear hug to break away from the source of sudden pain. As soon as he did, Angela spun around and with a backhanded swing hit him on the side of his bull neck as hard as she could, shocking his carotid artery.
It stunned him momentarily. He staggered back, drunkenly, his knees nearly buckling. It gave her just enough time and space to dart past him and out through the bedroom doorway before he fully recovered.
She had plenty more guns in the basement, but she kept the basement door locked. But even if she did manage to unlock the door in time, those guns were all new and none of them were loaded. There was no way to load one of them before he would be on her.
She briefly considered running into the kitchen to grab a knife. But if Cassiel had her gun from the nightstand he would simply shoot her. He was an expert shot. He would undoubtedly shoot to cripple so she couldn’t get away. Then he could start in on her with his sick desires.
Even if he didn’t have a gun, he was experienced at knife fights. Using a knife was his preferred way to murder people, so he was deadly with an edged weapon. So was Angela, but it would be a risky gamble to grab a knife from the kitchen and get into a knife fight with someone that big, powerful, and experienced. If he got the knife away from her she would be dead, but not quickly.
The keys to her truck were back in the bedroom. Even if she had them, she didn’t think there would be any way to unlock it, get in, and get it started before Cassiel was able to stop her.
Angela rejected all those options in a fraction of a second and instead bolted out the back door. She snatched a quick look over her shoulder as she leaped down onto the hard ground and saw him coming out of the house right behind her. In the light of the full moon she could see that he had a knife in his fist. His jaw was clenched in rage. She told herself that at least it wasn’t a gun.
Angela only had on panties. Her feet were bare. Running outside barefooted was risky.
She didn’t have a choice. She was committed.
SIXTY
Angela knew that her only chance was to somehow even the odds. As she ran, she glanced up at the twin mountains rising up in the moonlight. Before the trail split, she quickly made her choice and raced up the trail to the right, up Grandfather Mountain.
She’d climbed that trail so often she could probably do it in the dark. The moonlight certainly helped. But running was different. She had to make split-second decisions as she raced into the night. Being barefoot made each of those split-second decisions potentially fatal.
As she plunged into the woods, Cassiel was right behind her. He wasn’t quite close enough to grab her, but he was right there if she faltered for even a second. He yelled at her to stop, promising to slice to her throat for a quick end rather than a night of the worst he could do.
She knew from the visions when she had looked into his eyes what kinds of things he liked to do. That made her run faster.
She used outcroppings that she knew rose from the forest floor, jumping from one to the next, avoiding as much as possible running across ground littered with everything from pine needles to sticks to pinecones. She put her thoughts about the man chasing her out of her mind and focused on the task at hand. She had climbed this trail more times than she could remember. She knew every rock, every tree so well she would have been able to run it through her mind without forgetting an inch of the trail.
She let her conscious thoughts go and instead let her inner mind take over. The trail had long ago been indelibly imprinted there. She tried not to think of where she had to step. Instead, she raced along the trail, putting every foot in the exact right place without being aware she was doing it. As the trail began to climb, she knew ahead of time which foot she needed to use in each spot so as not to get crossed up.
Cassiel didn’t know the trail, and since he was running he couldn’t see where he was going very well. He stumbled a few times, but recovered quickly. As Angela ran past a balsam fir, she grabbed a bough that hung across the path. She pulled it with her, then let it go to spring back and smack him in the face. He growled in rage as he slashed his arms to get past it.
She had to run up a stream for a brief distance to get to the trail on the opposite side. Ordinarily she would have danced across the dry rocks sticking up out of the water, jumping from one to another, but with a killer right behind her there was no time to pick those places to step.
The water was only six to eight inches deep, but it was freezing cold, and in places smooth rock ledge under the water was slimy and slippery. She lost her footing and went to one knee on one of those smooth, slippery spots, but kept her balance and immediately got up and kept going. Cassiel slipped and fell on his ass. That gained her a few precious seconds.
When she reached the trail on the far side of the stream, she jumped up out of the water onto the mossy bank and ran into the forest on a trail that was mostly a cushion of pine needles. The trail was also littered with small bits of branches and sticks. They hurt when her feet landed on them. She had no choice but to ignore the pain.
She knew where there were tree roots across the path. She had to be careful lest she trip over one and fall. When she reached a wet, low-lying area where there were too many roots to miss, she danced over the tops of fatter roots worn smooth from the countless times she had done the same thing while wearing boots.
Her grandfather had first taken her on this trail when she had been a little girl. She’d often climbed one of the two mountains with her grandmother to have a picnic at the top while enjoying a view out on the world. The man chasing her had murdered them both.
In the moonlight Angela saw familiar landmarks of rock formations and the curving limb of an oak that let her know which way the trail was going to turn before she even got there. That helped her stay ahead of the big man in boots pursuing her. They might as well have been the only two people in the world. There was no one anywhere near enough to hear her call for help. If he caught her and started cutting on her with that knife, only Grandfather Mountain would hear her screams.
When she reached the maple with a low limb that dipped down and stuck out over the trail, she knew she had to make a sharp left up the trail as it climbed more sharply over rock formations. Her grandfather had been the one who had scouted and built the trail, long before she had even been born. Now she was using his trail up the mountain to try to escape a killer.