Page 60 of The Second Sight
Brooklyn hand stayed rested in the gearshift. She went to put the car in reverse, but before she could something heavy smashed against her driver’s side window. The glass spiderwebbed, then shattered in a spray of crystalline fragments that rained across Brooklyn’s lap and the center console.
A hand thrust through the broken window, unlocking the door from the inside. Brooklyn screamed as a man in all black yanked the door open and seized her arm, dragging her from the driver’s seat. Another figure appeared at my door, breaking glass into my hair and lap as I quickly turned away. This man reached in and unlocked my door wrenching it open.
Cold hands grabbed my shoulders, pulling me roughly from the car. My back hit the side of the Honda as the man spun me around, his grip bruising my upper arms.
“I think it’s this one,” he hissed, his face inches from mine.
I stared at him, trying to ingrain his face in my memory for later use. Black man, dark skin, a few shades lighter than me, tall, short dreadlocks, beard, pierced nose.
“Let me go!” I kicked out. My foot connected with his shin. He barely flinched. I tried to claw at his eyes, but my hands were too short to connect with his face.
Across the hood of the car, Brooklyn was fighting too. While I was struggling, I caught a glimpse of her nails raking down the face of the burly man who held her. He backhanded her with a casual brutality. Her head snapped to the side from the impact. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth.
“Brooklyn!” I screamed, renewing my struggle against the man’s grip that held me.
“Get them both in the car,” commanded a third man from behind the wheel of the SUV. “Desmond wants the half-breed. We can traffic the other one.”
I recognized his voice. I twisted my body just enough to see his face. This was the man from my vision. Not the scarred one, but the other. Gideon. The light-skinned man who’d been hunting my mother. He was here, in the flesh.
These men were Bambara hunters. My captor began dragging me toward the SUV, his strength seemed inhuman. My feet scrambled for placement on the pavement, but it was like fighting against a robot. My mind raced with everything Seven had told me about the hunters. It wasn’t much.
“Gideon!” I screamed desperately, looking for a way out of this “Desmond will kill you if something happens to us!”
Gideon laughed, the sound like stones grinding together. “So, you know my name. I know yours too, Kasi. You’re Theia’s daughter. I one that got away. I can’t kill you, but I can do all kinds of nasty things to you Black American girls. Your own country doesn’t even look for you when you go missing.”
His taunt about missing Black girls and women was true. But he knew my name The realization sent fresh terror coursing through me. These weren’t random attackers. They had specifically come for me, but I knew that already. The SUV’s back door stood open. I would die before I entered that truck.I couldn’t go out like that.
“Please,” I begged. “Don’t do this.”
“Shut up.” My captors hand clamped over my mouth and his fingers dug into my cheeks.
“Tarus,” Gideon called out. “Enough, toss the colored one in.
Brooklyn was still fighting with the one he called Tarus. Her movements were growing weaker as exhaustion and fear tooktheir toll on her. Blood from her split lip dripped onto her T-shirt. Tarus was touching her in her private places. He had one hand in between her legs and the other cupping her breast. He was ignoring Gideon and molesting her right out her on this deserted public road.
The man holding me lifted my body off the ground. He carried me toward the SUV despite my kicks and struggles.
“Help!” I screamed out into the wind.
He covered my mouth with his thick fingers. I bit down hard on my captor’s hand, tasting his blood as my teeth broke skin. He cursed, pulling his hand away, and I screamed into the night, praying someone would hear.
“Help! Somebody help us!”
His fist connected with my stomach, driving the air from my lungs. I doubled over, gasping for air. He used my momentary weakness to drag me the remaining distance around Brooklyn’s car and to the SUV.
“Get the fairy bitch in the car,” the Gideon snapped. “We’ve been out here too long.”
As the brute shoved me toward the open door, I caught sight of my reflection in the SUV’s tinted window. My eyes grew wide with terror. Behind my reflection, deeper in the glass, I thought I saw movement above in the night sky. A trick of the light, maybe. Or perhaps something more.
In that moment, staring at my own terrified face, I realized I might never see my father again. The peach cobbler he’d requested seat in the backseat of Brooklyn’s car. My dad would wait for us, growing more worried with each passing minute, perhaps eventually calling my phone only to hear it ringing in the abandoned car.
“Brooklyn,” I called out. “Fight them!” But my voice was lost in the chaotic night.
A rush of wind above my head made me look up. Three dark shapes cut through the night sky, moving too fast to be birds, too large to be anything natural.
The trio swooped down from above. The moonlight shined on something that looked impossibly like wings, actual wings, not lemon pepper or buffalo wings. But bird wings extending from their backs. My breath caught in my throat as my mind struggled to process what my eyes were seeing. These weren’t people in Halloween costumes. These weren’t hallucinations. These were fae. Maybe even, yumboe, my mother’s people.
My captors grip on my arm loosened as he followed my gaze upward. A flash of uncertainty crossed his face, quickly replaced by alarm.
