Page 102 of Veiled in Brick

I could see his faint reflection in the window, and though his appearance was unfamiliar to me, the description that I had obtained of him, vague as it was, was apt. He was tall—so tall that my head just barely reached his chest. Slim. Pale. His hair was black and short, and he was looking down at my horrified expression with a Cheshire-like grin. Obscure as the picture of him was in the glass, I could still make out the large darkened circles under his gaze. One could assume he was tired considering his pallor, but his eyes—his eyes were so wide that I could have been convinced that there was glue on his lids holding them open. It was the stare of a man who had lost his sanity, and though I had wondered time and again why he had chosen me in this grand endeavor of his, I had never thought to question his grip on reality until now.

The realization was a heavy one that turned my stomach to stone, sinking it to my toes for the man behind me was, without a doubt, deranged. The consideration of why he was so hellbent on finding me and stealing what he could from my body—of where he came from and how he was here—was moot. The glimmer in his eyes was the definition of psychosis. And that, in itself, terrified me to the point that my breath was taken from me because if that were truly the case—if this man, whoever he was, had just…lost it—there may be only one way to stop him. The thought chilled me through, and I shook in his grip.

It’s then that the memory becomes fuzzy. I know what I did, of course, but I’m still unsure as to how I acted so quickly. The knives were to the left. I remember the metallic sliding of the blade against the magnet on the wall. I thrust it behind me, felt little to no resistance, and moved in a rapid sawing motion until the man hissed a breath through his teeth. That was all playing in my mind on repeat. The rest turned to little second-long clips—a highlight reel, if you will—until he had me pinned to the ground.

I had escaped his initial grasp, that much was clear. I sprinted into the living room and through the door that led to the dock. My bare feet were cold on the grass. I made it ten rapid paces out into the night and I was tumbling down—whether I had tripped or he had forced me down, I don’t know. My right cheek broke my fall, and he was behind me once again, a hand pressing on the back of my neck with enough force to make me wheeze.

I drew in a large, ragged breath, ready to let it loose into the still air in a gut-wrenching scream, and he tsked me, “No, no-no, baby. You won’t want to alert your friends—your parents—Liam. You belong to me, now, love…and I can kill anyone who gets in my way.”

I think I cut him with the knife again. I think I felt him clutch at his ribcage and loosen his hold on me as he fell to the side. I think I heard him call me a bitch. All I knew for sure was twofold. The first was that as the man steadied himself on the ground, I witnessed the grasp of his thin fingers around a small, black gun, and the second was that I was running again, and he wasn’t on my tail.

And now, I was here in the wooden shed behind the tree next to the dock. I was shaking, though I wasn’t cold. My pajama shorts were ripped. The scrape on the right side of my face burned with a vengeance. I was dirty, patches of moist soil and grass stains clinging to my skin and clothing. I was obscured, at the very least. Hidden, for now. My legs ached because I couldn’t find it in me to sit—instead, I was crouched low to the ground, huddling in the shadows because I was waiting. Expecting him to return. Knowing he could find me again, yet unable to run because I would be exposed.

My fingers gripped the handle of the knife so hard that my knuckles ached, and I held the blade out in front of me in an act of self-defense. The shed was small. So small that even I had little room as I squatted in the corner next to fishing poles and tackle boxes. As much as my mind was buzzing with the odd, toxic mix of adrenaline and fear, I still attempted to map out my next actions. The first idea was to launch at him blade facing out when he would inevitably find me. Another was to wait here until it appeared that the threat was no longer, race back to the house and lock all the doors, alert Liam, Claire, and Luke about what happened, and call the police. It was a good option—a sensible option—but the man’s voice in my ear saying that he would kill anyone who gets in his way was grating. And then, because his voice continued to ring over and over in my mind, there was the consideration that I should give in.

Give up.

I mean, we tried. All of us—Liam, James, me…Claire and Luke, even. We really did try to make sure that my life wouldn’t come to this. To me waiting for the inevitable, whatever that may be.

It all seemed irrelevant now—all of our feeble attempts at my salvation—because I could hear the deep clunking of steps against the wood of the dock. The sound rattled in my ears. Drowned out the faint noise of the lake lapping up onto the shore. I rested on the tips of my toes, grasping the knife and ready to force myself forward with a tackling stab, and what I knew as fear—fear for my life—twisted into an amalgamation of relief and horror as the voice that belonged to the man on the dock called to me quietly.

“Zoey?”

The breath left my lungs in a rattle as Liam’s anxious call of my name reached my ears, and I dropped the knife. It fell to the ground with a dull thud, and though the sound of him calmed me enough to drop my weapon, the realization that Liam was now out in the open—out in the open with a man who had threatened his life and several others—out in the open with a man who had a gun—hit me with a nauseating pang to my chest. And while the idea of my stalker leaving my lifeless, used-up body in a place where it would inevitably decay into the ground was horrifying…the notion that the man would go through Liam to do so terrified me to the point that I felt my bones shake beneath my muscle. I slapped a hand over my mouth, for I had begun to whimper with every exhale, and I heard him again—this time with a rushed, hopeful tone.

“Shit—Zoey?” He was so close now that I could hear his heavy breathing—sense the panic in his exhales as the air left him in ragged gusts—and then the door to the shed eased its way open. Liam stood before me, a knife held loosely in his right hand and the whites of his eyes gleaming in the moonlight as he took in my appearance. He moved quickly to kneel in front of me, resting the blade on the floor with a metallic clack against my own. “Jesus Christ.” He touched either of my upper arms gently with shaking hands.

“Liam,” I spoke with a gritty voice, “Shit, you can’t be here.”

Liam’s gaze bounced about, enraging further by the second as he quickly took in every dirt splotch—every ripped bit of fabric—every scratch on me.

He spat out, “Was it him?” My head bobbed up and down in response, and he snapped, “Where is he?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. Took off—you have to—”

He spoke rapidly, “I saw blood in the kitchen; where are you hurt?”

“I, um—fine, I’m fine.” Somehow, I forced my stammering to the side and rushed out, “He has a gun, we have to go.”

“Fuck, okay,” he replied, his eyes nearly bulging from his skull. He offered me a hand, and I took it. “Can you run?”

I nodded, and he pulled me to my feet. I swayed, Liam steadied me with a hand around my waist and a rapid, concerned glance up and down my body, and then he quickly reached down to grab the knives. He handed me my own, grasped me by my left wrist, and led me back out into the night.

We jogged in a crouch, low to the ground as Liam pulled me along. Step by step, I cursed the cicadas. I hadn’t noticed their obvious presence while I was by the water, but now that we were yards away, their buzzing damn near drowned everything else out. They deafened me, and as intently as I listened for the pounding of footsteps, it was no use. My pulse choked me, beating in my throat, my next full breath only taken once we were within the safety of the inside.

The door to the living room shut behind us, and I locked it with a trembling flick of my knife-laden hand. I heard Liam draw the air around him into his lungs with just as much desperation as I did, and he yanked me to him. Standing on the ornamental rug in front of the couch, the knife that I had been holding fell out of my grasp and onto the floor beneath me with a clunk. Liam crushed me with his embrace, his blade fell to the rug as well, and his hands splayed wide across my back. One arm around my shoulders and the other encompassing my waist, his large body enveloped me, his grip digging into my skin through my clothing. He held me so tightly that I could feel a subtle tremble with every one of his exhales, and he spoke to me quietly from above.

“You didn’t come back to bed, so I went to look for you…it—it looked like a knife was missing from that strip on the wall; I saw the blood on the floor—what happened?”

My breath still slowing, I faltered when I said, “Grab—grabbed me in the kitchen.”

Liam’s hold on me finally subsided, and he took a step back to look at me once more.

“The blood?” he asked.

“Not mine,” I whispered, and Liam’s face whipped from the torn spot on my pajama shorts to look into my eyes, the slightest glimmer of relief within his. I repeated myself, “Not mine, Lee. His.”

He glimpsed both of the knives on the floor and blinked a long blink. “You stabbed him, then?”

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