Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 130619 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 653(@200wpm)___ 522(@250wpm)___ 435(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130619 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 653(@200wpm)___ 522(@250wpm)___ 435(@300wpm)
Shoving aside the distorted idea of my happy childhood I didn’t have I log onto my email, intending to deal with whatever I need to deal with to ensure I have at least two weeks free. I scan a cluster of media requests, several emails from my assistant, and one from Oliver. I’m about to shut down when a ping hits my inbox.
I go utterly still as I read the sender’s name: Jeremy.
Blood rushes in my ears, and my heart putters in my chest. With a shaky hand, I click his name, and I read:
Thank you for all you have done for me. I’ll pay you back soon. Count on it.
—Jeremy
Cotton seems to burrow in my throat, thick and impossible to expel. I can’t swallow, let alone breathe. There is no questioning the threat beneath his words. The kind of threat I’d expect from the monster I met in that courtroom. If I didn’t already know that side of him to be real, if that “different” part of me didn’t feel it with every instinct I own, I’d consider this confirmation. I still don’t understand why I didn’t recognize the evil in him before now. I’m good at reading people. My father called me the lie detector when I clerked for him, his little moneymaker.
He lives for money.
I live to help others.
And I failed horribly where Jeremy is concerned. If I sense the truth now, why couldn’t I sense it in the past? It’s as if some part of me woke up in that courtroom, which is craziness. Maybe I am crazy, and yet, if I had any doubt lurking in the back of my mind about what happened with Jeremy, this is my validation of the truth. I was right. Jeremy really is a monster, and he’s coming for me.
The Sacred Book of Nephilim
In daylight, they walk. In moonlight, they crawl. In every light, they kill. They are the disciples of the Darkest Knight. And some of them don’t even know it until it’s too late. Shield yourself. Use your senses. Feel what they are. Know them, as they will always know you.
Chapter seven
Snow falls in enormous, luxurious, pure white flakes, fluttering about the hazy morning and laying down silken blankets of white around the cabin. But even as I stand at the railing of the cabin’s wooden porch, a piping hot cup of coffee in my hands, watching the beautiful promise of new beginnings in their creation, evil pierces the eerie quiet enveloping me. I can almost feel it clawing a bloody, violent path toward me through the layers of new powder.
Christmas and New Year’s have come and gone.
Ten days, to be exact.
That’s how long it’s been since my awakening on that nightmare day in court, when I learned I’d helped a brutal killer walk free, but nothing has changed. Neither I nor Jeremy have been located by anyone who might be looking for us, but I can’t escape the feeling that no matter who hunts for us both, it’s him who will find me. Him who will never let me go.
The quiet stretches long and wide in the way it does, with Mother Nature busy creating silken, light fluff almost too perfect to not be painted with her magical brush. But inside the depths of that quiet is an almost eerie echo of absolutely nothing, allowing my thoughts and fears to scream without obstruction or distraction. He’s coming, my instincts scream at me. He’s coming.
The sky dims, the orb of the sun hidden deep in the haze as the light fades to darkness, with no streak of gold, blue, or orange to announce its departure. I scan my surroundings, battling the deep, nagging certainty that has been haunting me for several hours at this point that Jeremy is already here. The fact that Hulk, who is resourceful beyond the measures I suspect I’d approve, cannot find him is unnerving.
I reassure myself that my parents are the only ones who know I’m here, and not because I wanted to tell them. Because my father’s voicemails grew more and more aggressive and almost threatening in tone, filled with promises that he’d return to the States to find me. I suspect there’s so much talk about me and the case right now, he feels he needs to be in the know in some way. Or it’s just his usual bluster. One of his opposing councils once called him “an expert bluster fucker,” and he had a hat made with that printed across it. I thought then, as I do now, that his bluster is the definition of his parenting style. Case in point, after my courtroom attack, when he’d told Oliver they were looking for flights to come home, they didn’t come home. Nevertheless, I’d called my parents and told them all is well while weaving a story about accepting one of the many offers I’d received to write a book about Jeremy’s case. As for Oliver, we’ve emailed back and forth, and I’ve fed him the same fairy tale of me being an attorney turned novelist. Only it’s not fully a fairy tale. I am writing the book about Jeremy, my way of rehashing my files and trying to figure out what went wrong.