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.
Chapter 6
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
—Voltaire
LOGAN
“It couldn’t have been a woman,” Donny argues as I wince, sitting up from the ER bed.
He’s sitting down, holding an icepack to his own jaw. He was hit across the side of the face with the bat Hollis used to attack us.
“I agree with him,” Elise says on a sigh. “A woman would have gone for the gun. Not used the knife. And by the way, the sheriff is playing this like Hollis was acting on his own accord, and Johnson is backing him, saying they’d already discussed his possible discord with you being here. The director, of course, is saying it sounds like this is one man’s actions, and that we’re safe. He’s still trying to cover this up, even at the cost of our lives.”
She’s furious, and should be.