Chapter Eight

“What happened in there?” Xander was leaning against the Jeep with his legs crossed.

Sage took a minute to study him. He looked a lot like Caden but not as hot. She laughed, they could almost be identical, but they had certain facial differences.

“The two of you could almost be identical.”

“We know. We’ve pulled it off a few times before we came here when it was needed.”

She nodded; Caden was talking about before they landed on Earth. She still wasn’t ready to deal with that reality yet. He opened the door for her to get in when someone called her name.

She looked around to see a woman running across the street with a big smile on her face.

“Sage, I can’t believe it’s you.”

Did she know her? Her face didn’t look familiar, but it could have been someone she went to school with. She took a step back as the woman got closer. Her head turned to look at Caden. The woman wrapped her arms around her before she could get into the jeep.

“I got you bitch.” She whispered into her ear before Caden pulled her off.

She grinned and started running away.

“Let her go.”

Sage heard Fire’s voice from a distance. Her body was burning. She felt like there were nicks in her skin. She was being invaded by an evil drug that was working its way toward her brain, insistent that it must feed on her, kill her.

“Stay away from me.” She was sweating; it was pouring down her brow and collecting under her arms.

She stumbled backward knowing that she was looking at the enemy. They wanted to kill her. Her head swung around looking for a way of escape even as she tried to keep the others in sight.

“Please let me go. You don’t have to hurt me.” Her words were whispered as if she had no hope of them releasing her.

“Sage, we only want to help you.” Cait approached her slowly trying not to alarm her.

“No!” She screamed drawing attention to them.

“Leave me alone.” She tried to run backward and fell on her rear. She began to crab walk away from them. The officers were making their way toward them.

Caden could see Jim in the background waiting for Sage to break free.

“No, no.” Caden’s body began to shake before he fell to the ground close to where Sage was.

“Are you alright?”

“They’re coming after me. They want to kill me.” His voice was deep and strained, his eyes wild as he looked at the people surrounding him.

“I have to get away. Please, can you help me?”

“I don’t know. Do I know you?”

He nodded his head sharply. “You promised to take care of me. Now you’re letting them get me. They will torture me, kill me.”

She crawled over to him. “Hurry we have to get away. Can you run? My head is fuzzy; I'm having a hard time standing up.”

“I can run, but why don’t we take my Jeep?”

“You have a Jeep?”

“It’s purple and black, I told you about it.”

“I remember a little.”

He turned over until he was on his knees. “Let me help you like you helped me.”

“I really helped you?”

“You did.”

She looked at the people who had taken several steps back and were now standing still like statues.

“What about them?” she whispered.

“They won’t touch us. They wouldn’t dare.”

He stood and reached out to help her up. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“I’m so cold.” He reached into the back of the Jeep taking out a cover.

They walked around the Jeep, and he opened the front door and helped her up. Then he tucked the cover around her before closing the door. He passed by Xander, who placed the keys in his hand.

“There are other bad people over there.” She said to him in a low voice after he got into the jeep.

Jim and several people were standing where she was pointing.

“They are very bad people,” He whispered back before starting the Jeep and taking off.

“They will follow us.”

“No, they won’t.” She sighed and snuggled deeper into the cover.

“Sage tell me what’s happening.”

“I feel like little insects with sharp claws have entered my body, and they are clawing me up from the inside.”

“You sound more lucid.” He was changing lanes darting in, and out of traffic as he headed toward the edge of the city.

“You helped with that. I had to fight them off to figure out how to help you. I won’t be able to do it for long.”

“Hold on, we’ll figure this out. Do you know who I am?”

“Caden. How could I forget you? Did that woman poison me?”

“I think so. Whatever Jim’s hands were covered in was all over her hands and arms. Don’t you think it’s time to tell me about Jim?”

“I didn’t know this at first, but eventually he told me he found this website. It was called the purification war. That’s what made him so happy he was meeting with someone from the site. He started to become a happier version of himself. It was nice at first. Then he began to abuse me. It was minor nothing that seemed real.

“He complained about dinner or what I chose to wear. Soon he didn’t want me to go out with my friends. We got into fights about my going to school, after I graduated, he refused to allow me to work. I did anyway, and he got me fired from every job. Then he began to hit me. He would apologize then do it again.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“He threatened to kill my mother. She’s all I have left in the world. One day before he became evil, he asked me about her. I told him where she lived, and that I wanted her to meet him one day. So, I knew he could track her down if he wanted to.”

“You left him in the end.”

“I went to where she was living to save her life, but she was gone, vanished into thin air. I gave my number to her neighbor and asked she pass it on if she ever heard from my mom again. A week later, she called me, to tell me that she was with someone and was safe and would contact me when I was also safe. That was the last I heard from my mom, but I knew he wouldn’t find her.”

We should tell him the rest. Honesty was talking, she believed in laying all her cards on the table.

What if he’s playing with us? Suckering us in so he can kill us. Fear was shaking in her cute red heels. She was scared of everyone, and right now she was so frightened of Caden, she wanted to kill him.

I think everything will be okay. All we need to do is hold on. Optimism gave a speech and did a cheer afterward like she was a cheerleader.

“You’ve been really quiet.”

“I'm listening to the voices in my head.” They left the city behind now he was on the highway.

“What are they telling you?”

“Why aren't you freaked out by what I said?”

“I’ve heard it before. It's standard O.P.”

“Right about now I want to argue that. Instead, I’ll tell you more, for as long as I remain lucid. I found books written in a language I’ve never seen before. I used google to try and translate them or even translate one word but it was stumped.” The books felt old. They were more like scrolls than books.

“I flipped through them until a drawing caught my attention. It was a circle with a Z inside of it and two lines drawn from the top of the circle to the bottom. All I needed to do was look at it to shiver. One day Jim sat down beside me. He was drunk; I was scared he would want sex.”

They were sitting in the living room on the couch, and she was wondering for the millionth time why she was still there. The apartment was uncomfortably hot, and it smelled from whatever he did in the spare bedroom.

“I remember him taking his hand and caressing the side of my face. He said he was almost ready for the ultimate sacrifice. Sacrifice? He nodded his head. As soon as the sacrifice was complete, he would be able to take his rightful place as one of the destroyers.”

She scanned the living room looking for the fantasy role play games he used to like to indulge in, but he got rid of all of them. Had he been doing L.A.R.P without her realizing?

“What game is this from, I asked him. His reply was that it wasn’t a game. This was the real deal. There was good and evil in the universe, and he had been asked to join the group that would win. I remember saying to him, so you decided to side with evil.”

She could still remember his laughter; it felt like it was shredding her back.

“I asked him what the sacrifice was. He turned to look at me and said you. That’s when he kissed me biting my lip until there was blood. I ran away that night.”

Caden was driving on a narrow road that needed serious upkeep before he stopped in front of a rundown shack.

“Where are we?”

“This is one of the safe houses we’ve set up around the area and through the city.”

“There is nothing safe about that shack. If I blow on it wrong, it will fall.”

“Let’s go inside and test your theory.” He left the Jeep and came to open the door for her.

“Thank you. Maybe you should go and leave me here alone.”

“Why?” He pulled her close to his body before directing her to the door.

“I can feel the drug getting closer to my brain. Soon I won’t be able to fight it off.”

“Then we’ll deal with it.” He opened the door, and they walked in. She felt a warmth press down on her body like she had just walked through a bowl of Jell-O.

She stopped inside the doorway. “Where are we?”

Where they were, wasn’t a shack. The door opened to a nice living room. It was small but more than enough room for two people. There was a couch and two chairs along with blue walls and a television mounted on the wall.

“Caden?”

“The point of a safe house is for it to fly under the radar. The shack acts as a doorway into the house. Anyone coming in without authorization will walk into the building you saw. If the building were demolished, it would not affect this house or us. We own the land we will simply rebuild.”

“You can do all of this because you’re not human.”

“I’m not evil.”

“No, that’s Jim’s gig, not yours.” She placed her back against the wall and slid to the floor. “I don’t think I can take anymore.”

She started beating her head against the wall as small whimpering sounds came out. Her fingers clawed ripping at her clothes and her skin. There was a battle being raged, and she was losing.