It is the flash that appears; the thunderbolt will follow.
—Voltaire
“I’ll run in and see if Craig has anything while you’re checking on—”
Donny’s words end on a grunt, and I turn around, confused as to why he just stopped talking. When I see him on the hard court, a little blood running from his mouth as he lies there unconscious, I grab for my gun too late.
Something hard slams into my head, and I fall forward, disoriented and dizzy, as I crash into the unforgiving pavement below me. My stomach pitches, and my head gains thirty pounds as I try to black out, fighting hard to stay conscious.
A blur of a man’s silhouette steps into my vision, the moonlight not favoring me enough to show me his face. At least not until he kneels down and smiles at me.
Deputy Justin Hollis.
“You boys just can’t learn to leave well enough alone, now can you?” he taunts, grabbing my gun from my hip.
Weakly, I try to fight for it, but my hands aren’t cooperating, and the world is still spinning around me. It feels like gravity has waged a war against my body, pinning me down.
As I struggle up to my hands and knees, Hollis laughs, kicking me in the stomach, sending me spiraling down on my back as my stomach heaves.
I shake my head as his laughter echoes back and forth in my mind, sounding like it’s coming from everywhere at once.
“Big bad Supervisory Special Agent Bennett. You don’t look so threatening to me. Even the sheriff was worried about you.”
The distinct sound of my gun being cocked registers, echoing from all over like his laughter. But before the gunshot can come, I hear a sharp intake of air and a pained yelp escape from him.
The gun falls, rattling somewhere in the distance, and my blurry eyes look up to see Hollis’s head snapping back as a figure clad in all black becomes a blurring fury of motion.
My head is too groggy, making the scene nothing but a distorted movie in front of me. The black-clad figure spins, shooting a foot out to the deputy’s chest. Hollis cries out, crashing to the ground. And the figure comes down on top of him, raining punches on his face.
Even the hands are clad in all black, so I can barely see what he’s doing.
Until he pulls out a knife, holding it at his side.
He leans forward, and I watch as his head comes down next to Hollis’s. Hollis cries out as the knife plunges into his side. And I see as the figure leans back up, staring down at him as he thrusts the knife inside Hollis’s chest while straddling him.
He twists the knife as Hollis screams, and I hear almost a delicate, feminine laughter floating through the air.
The knife stays in Hollis’s chest as the figure stands, and Hollis gurgles on blood, trying to speak. I sway on my side, trying to push back up before he can come for me.
But I see him bent over. He’s small. Very small. And as my vision clears just barely, I notice the small set of shoulders and very small frame.
Small. Small. Small.
That word just keeps replaying as the figure leans down and dips its finger into Hollis’s blood that is rushing from his chest. I can’t see what the figure is doing in its crouched position, but when it stands, it grabs the knife from Hollis’s chest, and then it throws it right into his groin.
One last pained sound escapes Hollis, and the unsub grabs the knife before walking away, disappearing from my sight.
I limply grab for my phone, struggling to form a grip around it when I finally find it. It falls to the ground, tumbling from my uncooperative fingers. My eyes close and open for who knows how long, before suddenly there’s a familiar face in front of me.
“Logan! He’s over here!” I hear her calling out, cupping my face.
“Run,” I whisper. “Run.”
Her face is barely visible through the blur, but I can smell her, feel her, and know it’s her by the way she touches me.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Lana says, checking something on my head.
“Here!” she shouts again to some echo in the distance.
“Logan!” Craig’s voice is barely recognizable through the veil of white noise surrounding me. “Get an ambulance out here now.”
“Donny!” someone shouts, but Lana never leaves my side.
My head is in her lap, and she’s barking out orders, asking me questions too fast for me to answer them.
My eyes finally close as she shouts my name one last time.
Too many thoughts are going through my mind as I play the scene on repeat, trying to piece it all together.
It’s not a man who just saved my life.
It wasn’t a beast at all.
It was a woman.
