“I’ll wait for you here,” Laila said as she made goo goo eyes at a cute boy and his little friend inside of him.
“I’ll show you where to go,” Cliff said with a smile on his face. Ugh.
“Fine,” I grated. I suppose that Laila wouldn’t be much help anyways. I was seriously outnumbered and she was a non-gifted human who had absolutely no idea what was really going on right under her nose.
“Come on.” Cliff tried to link his arm with mine and I sidestepped him, not wanting to come into contact with his bare skin again. The bold move made him frown at me.
“Do I need to remind you again that I have a boyfriend back home?” I punctuated my sentence with the best death glare in my arsenal.
It didn’t even faze him. “Can’t blame a guy for trying,” he said with a laugh.
“Actually, yes I can,” I retorted with ice dripping from my voice. I trailed along behind him, wishing I could use my dragon magic to fry him to a crisp, but I knew it was just the Rider I wanted dead, and not poor Cliff, at least not the real Cliff. When we got to the top of a huge set of winding stairs, Cliff sauntered down to the end of the hallway and turned the light on in the bathroom for me.
As I moved to walk past him, he stuck his arm up to rest his hand on the edge of the doorjamb to completely block my way. “Aren’t you gonna thank me for taking you to this bathroom where you don’t even have to stand in line?”
“Ummm . . . Thank you,” I said crisply, and tried to duck under his arm, but he wasn’t having any of it. Or maybe it was the Rider that wasn’t having any of it.
Cliff’s features suddenly seemed to completely take on the appearance of the alien within. It was a shock that made me stumble back and gasp. “Cliff has been difficult to hold on to from day one,” the Rider snarled at me as he grabbed a huge clump of my white hair at the back of my head. “But I have a feeling if we get one of us into you, and the two of you make nice with us”—he smiled a big toothy grin at me—“then Cliffy here will be a lot more easy to manage.”
Riders couldn’t possess dragons. I still wasn’t really sure why, but if they tried to put a Rider in me they would know something was different and my cover would be completely blown. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I twisted abruptly and managed to wrench myself out from under Cliff’s tight grasp, losing a clump of hair in the process, and slammed him into the wall. His head hit at a wrong angle, or just right for me, and he passed out cold. He probably hadn’t been expecting that. That made two of us . . . or should I say three?
I stood there for a second, my chest heaving from the sudden adrenaline rush, before my brain finally caught up with what had just happened. Now what the hell was I supposed to do? “Think, P.J., think,” I whispered hoarsely to myself. I glanced back down the dark hall just to make sure someone hadn’t come up behind me when I wasn’t paying attention. Much to my relief the coast was still clear. But I knew I had to do . . . something . . . fast.
Okay, first I should probably check to make sure that Cliff was in fact still sucking in oxygen. I tentatively stepped over his slumped body, my heart pounding in my chest, half expecting him to suddenly sit up and attack me like in some grade B horror movie villain. But he didn’t, and the rise and fall of his chest let me know that I hadn’t killed him. I heaved a sigh of relief, short lived, as I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Shit. In a moment of panic I grabbed Cliff under the arms and drug him into the bathroom, it was harder work than I would have thought, and as soon as he was far enough in, I shut the door behind us and locked it. Great—now I’d managed to trap myself in an even smaller space with the hostile Rider. Go me!
I looked around the small second story bathroom for some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . inspiration to help me out of my predicament, but none came. I was about one panicked second away from ripping off my Khol repelling bracelet so that I could call him for help. The only thing stopping me was that I didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger . . . yet. Well, that and I didn’t know if my pride could take that kind of blow. I was kind of attached to the idea of doing things on my own now, and besides if I was going to be with Bryn, I couldn’t keep relying on Khol for everything without killing Bryn a little more each time. I was beginning to understand why Bryn was so upset about me always relying on Khol instead of him, when I should have chosen him, or the best option . . . myself.
A knock on the door made me feel like my heart was going to explode out of my chest and I tried to sound calm when I answered. “Someone’s in here,” I squeaked. Yep . . . I sounded like the epitome of calm. Nothing suspicious going on here . . . nothing at all.
“Cliff in there with you?” a male voice asked while I heard a decidedly masculine chuckle at his question. Shit. Two Riders outside the door, and me stuck in here with a third. Think, P.J., Think. My eyes finally settled on the window. I bit my lip with determination. There really wasn’t any other way. I stepped over Cliff’s still unconscious body and pushed the medium sized frosted window open. I hoisted myself up onto the ledge and looked around for options to climb down to the ground on: a tree, a drainpipe, a vine . . . something . . . anything . . . but there was nothing. I heard a loud groan come from the bathroom floor as Cliff started to come to. I had to make a decision on what I was going to do . . . fast.
“Cliff man, you in there?” the Rider outside the door asked with suspicion in his voice. Cliff groaned louder in response. “Hey,” the Rider said. “What’s going on in there?” The door handle began to rattle as he tried to turn the locked knob without any luck. It looked like I was going to have to jump. Hopefully, I’d just sprain an ankle or do something pretty benign, but at least I would get away relatively unscathed, all things considered. I wondered briefly if I should try to tuck and roll or just jump feet first. Or maybe—
“Not so fast,” a very angry Rider growled from Cliff’s body as he grabbed me by my shoulder. I let out a startled scream as I teetered forward toward the ground and instinctively reached back to grasp Cliff’s hand. But instead of keeping me on the ledge, the sudden movement sent us both careening forward. With nothing else to do but fall, I clamped my eyes shut and wished I had never left the house tonight. Why, oh why, couldn’t I have spent a nice evening at home at the Murder House? Spending time with ghosts isn’t as bad as becoming one. Suddenly a weird—familiar—feeling of dizziness overtook me, and instead of feeling the impact of the hard ground shortly before my emanate demise, I landed with an oof on what felt like a bed. Of course, I felt Cliff crash into me half a second later.
“What the fu—?” Cliff exclaimed as I opened my eyes to find the purple and white pattern of my bedspread that I had been using at the Murder House under my nose. I quickly reeled around, picked up the lamp from my nightstand, and knocked Cliff out cold again. As he slumped down to the ground, I found myself wondering for the second time in one evening if I had killed him.
My bedroom door slammed open, hitting the wall behind it to reveal a battle ready Nala. She paused to take in the scene of Cliff unconscious on the floor, and a freaked out me standing over him with what was left of my lamp and relaxed a bit. “Who’s he, and what happened?” she asked a little too calmly.
“That,” I started, surprising myself with how normal I sounded, “is the Rider who was going to blow my cover by trying to force one of his buddies into me because his host has some kind of thing for me.” I inhaled and exhaled a couple of times trying to get fresh oxygen to my brain. “And I have absolutely no idea what happened. One minute I’m hurtling toward the ground to my death, and the next I’m here.”