Surrender by J.S. Bailey

Editor: Catherine Jones Payne and Kelsey Keating Proofreader: Taylor Clifton

SURRENDER Copyright Š 2019 J.S. Bailey All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2017945446 ISBN: 978-1-64397-000-4 (Hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-946848-59-8 (Softcover) Also available in Ebook For information, write: BHC Press 885 Penniman #5505 Plymouth, MI 48170

Visit the publisher: www.bhcpress.com

works by j.s. bailey novels Rage’s Echo Servant

The Chronicles of Servitude, Book One

Sacrifice

The Chronicles of Servitude, Book Two

Solemnity

The Chronicles of Servitude, Book Four

novellas Solitude

A Chronicles of Servitude Story

short story collections Ordinary Souls

multi-author anthologies In Creeps the Night A Winter’s Romance The Whispered Tales of Graves Grove Tales by the Tree

1

1995 NATE BAGDASARIAN stood at the foot of his four-poster bed practicing Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre” on his violin for the school ensemble when the telephone on his bedside table let out a shrill ring. Annoyed, he set the violin and bow down atop the quilt his Armenian great-grandmother had stitched by hand. He’d been practicing that same bar for an hour now and still couldn’t get it quite right.

This phone call might be a welcome reprieve.

Nate plucked the phone out of its cradle with a flourish, grateful his parents had let him get his own phone line when he turned sixteen: a small blessing in a household he shared with two younger teen siblings who found themselves incapable of not talking to their friends for five minutes.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” crackled the voice of his friend Mick Honeycutt. Mick epitomized everything Nate wasn’t: lazi-

10 | J.S. BAILEY

ness, irresponsibility, and recklessness. Nate had a blast hanging out with him.

Nate plopped himself down atop the ancient quilt and ran a hand over the violin. “Is it a plane ticket to get me out of this hayseed little town?”

“Close,” Mick said. “You busy?”

“Sort of.”

“That violin don’t count, man. You know you’ll never be the next Mozart or whoever.”

Nate rolled his eyes. Mick was about as musically literate as a potato. “So what’s going on?”

“Meet me in your driveway in twenty minutes, and you’ll see.”

The line went dead before Nate could inquire further. No doubt Mick had gotten his hands on some new piece-of-junk car that would last a month before turning into scrap. In the past year Mick had gone through a junked Nova, a Ford Pinto, and a Datsun held together with bungee cords. Nate wondered what monstrosity Mick would bring to show off this time.

Nate picked up the violin and ran the bow across the strings, hitting a sour note. Grimacing, he set them aside again. He could practice some more after he’d seen Mick’s new toy.

As Nate went to his bedroom door, he felt an odd fluttering sensation inside his head. Shaking it, he kept walking.

“YOU’VE GOT to be kidding me.”

Mick beamed as he leaned against the side of a gleaming red Mustang Cobra so un-Mick-like it was almost absurd. “What do you think?” Mick asked, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

“I…it’s…wow.” For once in his life, Nate struggled to find the right words. “What did you do, rob a bank?”

“Naw, I’ve been saving up. Got tired of junking a car every few months. This baby here’s two years old. V8 engine, 235 horsepower, goes from zero to sixty in 5.9 seconds. Want to go for a spin in her?”

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Nate hesitated before answering. The voice of reason advised him to go back up to his room and get his notes and phrasing right before the ensemble met up for practice tomorrow night.

Just live a little, whispered a different, sweeter voice. You can practice more when you get back.

“Okay,” Nate said. “But I can’t be gone long.”

“Right, right, you’ve got to practice.” Mick rolled his eyes.

“Gosh, why couldn’t you have taken up guitar, instead? At least that’d get you some chicks.”

Biting back a retort, Nate buckled himself into the passenger seat. Mick got behind the wheel and threw the car into reverse.

“Did I tell you it goes from zero to sixty in 5.9 seconds?” Mick asked as they cruised along the manicured streets of Autumn Ridge, Oregon.

“Oh, does it?” Nate bit down on his tongue to hide a smile.

“Hell yeah, it does! You just watch.”

Nate assumed Mick would take the Mustang out onto the freeway to demonstrate the car’s abilities, but instead he bypassed the exit ramp and turned onto a two-lane state route that headed west into the mountains.

Mick checked the rearview mirror once the town had disappeared behind them and then drew to a complete stop in the middle of the road. Nate’s pulse quickened. “What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like?” Mick jammed his foot down on the accelerator, and the car shot forward so fast Nate felt himself pressed back into the seat. The speedometer needle crept up to sixty in what felt like no time at all.

“It took seven seconds,” Mick said with a frown as trees whizzed past them.

“Probably because we’re going uphill, Einstein. Whoa, take it easy, man.”

Mick took a curve at breakneck speed, making Nate’s stomach lurch like he was on an amusement park ride. He gritted his teeth.

“Could you maybe slow down?”

Mick eyed him, puzzled. “What for?”

12 | J.S. BAILEY

No sooner had he uttered those words when the biggest buck Nate had ever seen strode out of the woods into their lane. Mick swerved to the left, directly into the path of an oncoming car barreling toward them.

The sound of screeching brakes filled the air, and before Nate could fully register what was happening to him, his head bashed against the window, and pain seared through his neck with an agony he hadn’t thought possible.

The airbags should have deployed, but they did not.

The fluttering in Nate’s head came again like the wings of a trapped bird, and the next thing he knew, he was floating midair above a lonely mountain road as a yellow coupe shoved a red Mustang Cobra into and over a guardrail, sending it tumbling into a wooded valley like a crushed can. The Mustang rolled and bounced about fifty feet before lurching to a stop against a fir tree whose branches shuddered upon impact.

The coupe stayed partly on the road, its nose pointing toward the Mustang that lay broken below it.

Nate took a closer look at the Mustang as the wind whistled through the trees. No sign of life appeared within.

Fear surged through him. He had died in the car. That’s why he was floating up in the sky like a ghost. But he couldn’t die. Not now.

He was only nineteen years old.

“You can’t take me!” he bellowed at the sky, though he knew in his heart that nobody heard him.

Something fluttered again inside his mind. There is another way, but you must surrender yourself to me.

He had no clue what that meant, but it seemed the only lifeline he had.

“I—I surrender! I surrender!”

Very well.

Nate’s perspective performed another abrupt shift. He found himself inside the car again, suspended by the seatbelt he’d been prudent enough to fasten before Mick began their joyride.

The pain in his head burned nearly beyond description, and he struggled to breathe.

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“Mick?” he croaked, looking to his left and seeing his friend’s eyes frozen open in surprise. Mick’s head sat at an unnatural angle on his shoulders, and his sandy hair and face were awash with blood that dripped off the end of his nose onto the dash.

Nate opened his mouth and screamed.

NATE’S SENSES grew fuzzy. The next thing of which he was consciously aware was a bright light glowing from somewhere up above. He blinked and saw his family standing around him—Mom, Dad, Leon, and Pamela. His grandmother sat in a chair nearby blowing her nose into a pink tissue.

Nate licked cracked lips. “Where am I?” “The hospital,” his father said in a brusque tone. “You’ve been here all night.”

Nate tried to smile, but it hurt too much so he stopped. “That’s good, right? That I’m in the hospital, I mean. It means I’m going to be okay.”

An awkward silence settled over the Bagdasarians, and ravenhaired Pamela, age fifteen, began to cry.

“What’s the matter?” Nate asked, looking from his father to his mother. Something felt decidedly odd about the way he lay there, though he couldn’t put a finger on it. “I am going to be okay, right?”

“You most certainly are not!” his mother shrieked. “Your spinal cord was severed in the crash!”

Before the shock of her words could register fully in Nate’s mind, his father took his mother by the hand. “Shirley, get a hold of yourself. At least he’s alive.”

Nate watched helplessly as his mother’s face turned cold. “He’s never going to walk again. He won’t be able to feed himself, change his clothes, go to the bathroom…”

Nate realized then what felt “off ”: all sensation stopped below his neck as if he were only a head lying on a pillow. “Mom? Mom, I…”

14 | J.S. BAILEY

Her blazing green eyes seemed to belong to a stranger. “That stupid Honeycutt boy ruined you, and you were stupid enough to go with him! If he wasn’t dead, I’d go and kill him myself!” She turned away sobbing, and Nate’s father gave him such a look of pity that he started to cry, too.

“But my song,” Nate said, remembering the violin he’d left lying on his bed. “I’m supposed to be practicing my song.” He tried to sit up, to lift his arm to scratch the itch on his nose, but nothing happened.

And then, with sickening certainty, he understood.

2

TWENTY YEARS LATER BRADLEY SCHOLL burst into the house out of breath, his chest hitching as he labored to breathe. He slammed the door closed, double-bolted the latches, and leaned against it a moment while his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

He’d always hated this cold, miserable time of year that mostly seemed to be night. Bad things happened at night. Bad things were happening now.

Or were they? His thoughts had been so muddled this past year that he could scarcely keep things together. It became a struggle enough to crawl out of bed in the morning and eat and put on clothes like a normal person. The thing he’d heard at the bar tonight? Could have meant anything. He’d been drinking; he could have misinterpreted a conversation on which he’d had no business eavesdropping.

16 | J.S. BAILEY

He patted the wall for the switch, knowing a scaly, clawed hand would reach out of the shadows and ensnare him, but the light came on without incident.

Bradley shrugged off his coat and threw it over the back of the recliner. Not for the first time, he wished he didn’t live alone. It would have been nice to come home to someone who could lie and tell him everything would be all right.

He went to the fridge and selected yet another beer, then went down to the basement to play around in his lab in an effort to distract himself from his troubles.

The lab was just a hobby. Rows of potted plants—all of them legal, of course—lined up under banks of grow lights he’d ordered from the internet. Some of them were blooming—a December miracle.

Bradley swigged his beer and picked up a scalpel. It shook in his hands as he used it to slice away the outer skin of an aloe leaf. He placed the pale green strip on a glass slide, squirted on a single drop of methylene blue to enhance the color, and dropped a slide cover into place before slipping it under his microscope.

He twirled the knobs to bring the plant’s rectangular cells into focus, hoping to forget the thing that had sent his nerves on a nosedive. His microscope had been his most loyal friend in recent years. Using it to peer into a less chaotic version of reality generally calmed him.

“Bradley?”

He stiffened at the sound of the voice, and though he kept his eye in front of the microscope’s eyepiece, his vision went out of focus.

“Bradley, you’ve got to move on.”

Gritting his teeth, he turned. A young woman in a white tank top and cutoff denim shorts perched atop his lab stool, eyeing him with pity.

My sister.

“Go away, Jess,” he said, hating the rasp in his voice.

Jess flinched at his words, and the sight of it hurt him. “Bradley, you shouldn’t be here anymore. You’re dead. You’ve been dead awhile.”

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Bradley choked out a sob and brushed away a tear with the back of his hand. “No. You’re the one who’s dead. You got high at a party and fell off a hotel balcony.” Bradley had been so devastated by the news that he took a month-long leave of absence from the product testing lab where he worked.

Where he used to work. They’d sent him packing months ago, and not because of his continued grief.

Jess’s brown eyes were wells of sorrow—she’d inherited them from their mother, while Bradley had been given blue eyes so pale they could have been made of ice. “Please don’t do this. You know you’re dead, too. You just don’t remember it.”

Memories rushed through his head: drinking at a different bar, getting into a fight with another patron, and being thrown out into the cold.

“I don’t remember it because it never happened,” Bradley growled. “Now I don’t know what you want from me, but you’d better go before I—” He broke off, embarrassed. What could he do, call the cops on a ghost?

Jess slid off the stool and strode up to him, the top of her head coming to his chin. He tried not to recoil. She looked like Jess down to every last detail, but he knew it couldn’t be her, not in the flesh.

He’d watched as the lid closed on her coffin, and as the coffin was lowered into the earth.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “I can show you.”

Before he could object, she latched her other hand onto his, and the next thing he knew, he was stumbling drunkenly along the shoulder of the road.

Something clanged close by: the railroad crossing. Bradley squinted, his cheeks stinging in the frigid air, and realized he stood precisely where the tracks crossed Umpqua Street.

An oncoming train barreled into him, sending him into oblivion.

Then he was back in his basement like he’d never left it.

Jess released his hand. “See?” Bradley shook his head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t. I mean…”

He gestured at the rows of potted aloe, romaine lettuce, and peas.

18 | J.S. BAILEY

“If I’m dead, how are these plants still alive? No one else is here to water them.”

“They are dead. Take a closer look.”

Bradley blinked. All of the plants had withered, even the aloe plants, which he’d found virtually impossible to kill. A layer of dust coated everything in the lab, and spider webs stretched their way from the grow lights to the table beneath them.

“Now do you believe me?” Jess asked.

“I don’t know.” Bradley ran a hand through his blond hair. “I want to see where it happened. To see if I can remember for real.”

The corner of Jess’s mouth turned up in a knowing smile.

“Let’s go, then.”

She took his hand, and together they ascended the stairs into the living room. Out of force of habit, Bradley slipped on his coat.

He really, truly, despised the cold.

They set out into the night, hand in hand once more. Bradley was surprised that Jess’s hand gave off warmth. Perhaps he perceived it that way because he was dead, too.

“Don’t be sad,” Jess said as they walked to the end of the street and turned left. “Everybody dies.”

Bradley just nodded. The thought of spending his entire afterlife with his baby sister at his side took away some of the sting. They’d been the best of friends in life. That could continue on into death.

It only took a few minutes to reach the tracks that crossed Umpqua Street, as they were only a few blocks from his house. The wind scattered dead leaves across the road and into the parking lot of an abandoned factory beside the tracks. Bradley veered off the road and walked down the parking lot parallel to the tracks, letting go of Jess’s hand to shove his own into his pockets.

“I still don’t remember it,” he said.

“And I don’t remember falling off that balcony,” Jess said. “Injuries like ours are traumatic. It’s normal to forget them. It makes it easier to cope.”

Bradley supposed she might be right.

“There is one way to prove you really are dead.”

Bradley turned. “What’s that?”

SURRENDER | 19

The wind tossed Jess’s long hair into tangles that she didn’t bother brushing aside. “Stand in the middle of the tracks and wait for the next train. It won’t be able to hurt you.”

The thought of doing such a thing made his skin crawl. “And if it does?”

“It can’t. I promise. Now go on and see for yourself. I’ll be right here waiting.”

Bradley let out a pent-up breath (could he really breathe if he were a ghost?) and stepped closer to the tracks. Jess had never led him astray, and he couldn’t see why she would start now. “Will you stand here with me?” he asked.

Jess’s smile lit up the night. “Of course.”

3

BOBBY ROLAND hurtled down a corridor as the corpse of a man named Farley shuffled after him like a zombie in some stupid horror flick. His heart pounded, and sweat dripped from every pore as Farley got closer and closer, and then cold hands latched around Bobby’s neck, and then Bobby was sitting upright on the couch in his tiny living room, no Farley in sight.

He rubbed his neck where the dream specter had touched it.

Farley had been a real person once. Bobby had killed him to save himself and his mother.

Bobby survived, of course. His mother had died anyway, at the hand of another man on a different day.

Not wanting to think about those terrible days he’d endured the past summer, Bobby’s eyes went to the clock on the wall: 6:00 pm.

“Crap.”

He lurched to his feet in an instant, jamming them into a pair of gym shoes. He hadn’t meant to sleep so long after his weightlifting session earlier that afternoon, and now he was running late for an errand he’d promised to complete by the end of the day.

SURRENDER | 21

“Father Preston is going to kill me,” he muttered as he pulled on a hoodie and snatched up his keys and wallet. In reality, the priest probably wouldn’t be overly bothered by Bobby’s delay. All Bobby had promised to do was pick up boxes of canned goods from his church and deliver them to a church in Hillsdale.

He still hated disappointing people. He’d done plenty of that already.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, the Spirit murmured while Bobby dashed to his Nissan. You do fine.

Bobby had no comment.

Father Preston walked out the front of St. Paul’s Church when Bobby squealed into the lot minutes later. The middle-aged priest wore a long black coat and a blue scarf that covered the bottom portion of his face.

Bobby parked in the space next to Father Preston’s car and hopped out. “Sorry I’m late. Where are the boxes?”

Father Preston tugged his scarf down and offered Bobby a warm smile. “Just inside the door. And here I thought you’d finally found someone who would benefit from your—ahem—services.”

“I haven’t found one yet.” As the Servant, Bobby was tasked with exorcising demons from the possessed, whom he could detect via the aura that the evil spirits broadcast into his mind. “At least not since last summer,” he added with a frown.

Father Preston’s sigh formed a misty plume in front of his face.

“I’m sure you’ll find someone eventually. Randy always seemed to find enough of them.” He paused to check his wristwatch. “See you around, Bobby. Don’t forget to lock up before you leave.”

He strode past Bobby and got into his car, then backed out of the parking space and was gone.

Bobby’s shoulders slumped. He had been on the lookout for the telltale black aura for months, going to shopping malls and even a few concerts to see if he could spot one in the crowd. He’d briefly encountered a possessed man at a bar called The Pink Rooster up in Hillsdale the week after he’d taken on the mantle of Servitude, but he’d been too terrified to act when the entity possessing the man caused Bobby to mentally relive some of his own lesser moments.

22 | J.S. BAILEY

Bobby had fled the bar like a frightened kid.

Shaking his head, Bobby popped the trunk. Time to get down to business.

St. Paul’s had just concluded a food drive for the poor of Autumn Ridge and was sending some of the excess over to St. Augustine’s in Hillsdale. Bobby, St. Paul’s one and only maintenance man, had volunteered himself to make the delivery.

He arranged the boxes of food in his trunk, then set out.

Hillsdale was just a short jaunt up Interstate 5. Bobby took the second Hillsdale exit and swung onto a home-lined street called Columbia Boulevard. The somber brick façade of St. Augustine’s soon loomed on the right between two Victorian-style houses, and he pulled into the lot and popped the trunk once more.

He hefted the first box into his arms. Feeling his budding muscles bulge under the weight of canned goods, he made his way toward the church door.

It swung open before he had the chance to knock. Thirty-yearold Father Kurt, a close friend of Father Preston, held the door open while Bobby carried the box inside.

“Thanks,” Bobby panted. “Where do you want these?”

“You can set them right here by the wall,” the bespectacled young priest said, indicating an empty spot on the narthex floor.

“Thanks again for sending it all over.”

“No problem.”

The moment Bobby plopped the heavy box onto the floor, a tidal wave of urgency crashed over him, rendering him immobile for long seconds.

Images tumbled through his head like windblown snapshots.

Train tracks. A man, waiting. The gate going down across the road as a locomotive rumbles through.

A terrified scream cut short.

Sweat broke out across his body.

Someone he knew was about to be mowed down by a train.

Father Kurt was saying something. “—all right?” The man’s face had become a mask of concern.

SURRENDER | 23

“Something, uh, just came up,” Bobby said lamely. “I’ll leave the other boxes here later.”

“But it’ll only take a—” “I don’t have a minute!”

Hating that he had to appear rude, Bobby jogged outside, slammed the still-full trunk closed, and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving a very confused Father Kurt standing in front of the church with folded arms. He knew the place he’d seen in the vision.

Tracks crossed Umpqua Street near an abandoned factory on the other side of Hillsdale.

If he wasn’t fast enough, someone would die there.

Bobby’s heart hammered as he zigzagged through residential streets and ran a red light at the intersection of Grapevine and Meadowview. If he failed someone else after all he’d been through…

“I will not fail,” he said through clenched teeth. “Not this time.”

Bobby screeched to a halt in the factory parking lot ten minutes later. The tracks ran parallel to the lot and building.

No train was in sight.

Yet. Bobby grabbed a Maglite out of the glovebox and clicked it on before stepping out into the night.

He pointed the beam in the direction his premonition had indicated and sucked in a sharp breath. A man stood directly on top of the tracks a tenth of a mile away from him. His hands were jammed into the pockets of a light gray coat, and the wind tousled his platinum blond hair into wispy tangles.

An aura blacker than pitch flooded Bobby’s mind the moment he laid eyes on the man.

Well, then.

Not wanting to startle him into violence, Bobby approached on quiet feet, then remembered the guy must have seen the light, so he broke into a run.

He halted about ten yards from the man, who hadn’t budged.

“Will it come soon?” the man asked in a thin voice.

24 | J.S. BAILEY

“I’d bet money on it,” Bobby said. He could feel a black tendril trying to slither through some gap in his mind, and he willed the Spirit to bar it. “Do you want to step over here and talk?”

The man whirled to face him. Bobby recognized him immediately: of all the people it could have been, this was the demoniac he’d abandoned at The Pink Rooster months previously.

Abandoned, because Bobby had been too scared and ashamed to help.

“How can you see me?” the man asked. “Are you dead, too?”

Bobby frowned. “I don’t think so.”

The man turned his head to the side as if he were looking at someone Bobby couldn’t see. “That’s what I thought,” he said.

Another tendril stroked at Bobby’s thoughts. You cannot help him.

Knowing he must tread with extreme caution, Bobby said, “What did you think?”

“That you don’t remember dying.”

“There’s sort of a good reason for that.”

The man made a weak gesture with his right hand. “Come stand on the tracks with us.”

“Why?” “That way you’ll know.”

It may have been Bobby’s imagination, but he thought he heard a rumble in the distance. “Listen,” he said. “Can’t we figure out if we’re dead or not somewhere else?”

“Here is good enough.”

Bobby tried to keep his frustration at a minimum even though panic swelled inside of him at an alarming rate. If Blond Guy didn’t get off the tracks in the next thirty seconds, Bobby would have to try to body-slam him to the ground, and that was a hard thing to do when you only weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds.

Help me, Bobby prayed.

Then it came to him. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Bradley. Never Brad.”

“Bradley what?”

SURRENDER | 25

“Does it matter?” Bradley gazed down the tracks with an expression bordering sickeningly on hope. “It should be here any minute.”

Okay, so that didn’t work. Bobby strained to think of a new tactic. The demon possessing him must have caused Bradley to think he was a ghost and convinced him to go stand on the tracks to prove it to himself.

“Why does it have to be a train?” Bobby asked.

Bradley’s brow creased. “That’s how I died.”

“Who told you that?”

Bradley pointed at the air next to him. “She did.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

“You don’t?” Bradley’s thin, blond eyebrows knit together. “I don’t under—” He broke off, listening, and Bobby heard it, too: the unmistakable rumble of an approaching locomotive.

“Bradley, get off the tracks and come here.”

“But I have to know!”

“Which means you aren’t sure if you’re dead or not, right?”

Lights from the train cut through the darkness. Bradley’s eyes widened, and before he could do anything even more rash, Bobby launched himself at him, shoved him as hard as he could in the chest, and sent them both toppling down an embankment.

The wind from the train’s passage ruffled Bobby’s dark hair as it clattered by. When the last car receded from them with a lonesome clack-clack on the tracks, Bradley sat up and stared after it.

“That would have hit me,” he said.

“Yes, and then you really would be dead. Come on, get up.”

Somehow Bobby had managed to hang onto his flashlight, and he helped Bradley off the ground with his free hand.

Bradley’s hand felt clammy, and when Bobby let go, Bradley’s breathing thickened. “I—I’m alive. For real?”

“It looks that way to me. Um, can we talk somewhere warmer than this?”

Bradley’s brows knit together. “Talk?”

“Yeah, about anything you want.”

Bradley grew silent, then squinted and tilted his head. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

26 | J.S. BAILEY

“Yeah—The Pink Rooster, back in July. I was looking for a woman and asked if you’d seen her.” Bobby tried not to shudder at the memory. He counted himself lucky to have blocked out any demonic attacks so far tonight. Mentally reliving the crimes of his youth had not made for an enjoyable pastime. “I’m Bobby, by the way. Bobby Roland.”

“Bradley Scholl.” Bradley stuck out a hand, and Bobby shook it. “I do sort of remember meeting you…did you ever find her?”

Bobby hesitated a moment, hoping Bradley wouldn’t try to delve any deeper. “I did.”

“Well, that’s good…I don’t know, maybe I should talk to someone. I—I think I might be going crazy.”

They started walking back to where Bobby had parked the Nissan.

“He’s going to kill you,” Bradley said, almost casually.

The question caught Bobby so off guard he stopped in his tracks. “What? Who is?”

“Thane.”

about the author J.S. BAILEY enjoys writing eerie tales of the supernatural that keep readers on the edges of their seats. She has published six novels and twenty short stories, with more on the way. Bailey is fond of long walks in the woods, British television, and lots of burritos. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and cats.