Katana (18 page)

“Bah!” I cried when I was sure he could no longer see me in his rearview mirror. “I’m such an idiot.” Leaning my forehead against the door, I continued to mutter as I fumbled with my keys. At the very least I could have said “bye” or some other attempt at verbal communication. Anything but standing paralyzed like the dummy I was.

Sighing, I turned the key in my deadbolt when a heavy feeling wrapped around me like a lead jacket. I leaned back and locked my knees to keep from falling down.

I was being watched.

I spun on the steps, leaning my back against the door so I could scan the neighborhood. The only noises came from buzzing cicadas and a distant barking dog. Most of the neighborhood had retired for the night, leaving the dim streetlights as the sole source of light.

That’s when I saw the silver Trans Am parked in front of Mr. and Mrs. McKinnley’s house across the street. The McKinnleys, a retired couple, owned an older Lincoln Town Car. How long had the Trans Am been parked there? I couldn’t remember seeing it before I left on my date, but then again, I hadn’t been looking.

I pushed off the door and marched across the small yard toward the mysterious car. Maybe I should have called Kim, or at least the police, but I was too angry and tired to care anymore. If the tattooed stranger followed me here to start another fight, I’d save him the trouble of having to come after me.

I was halfway into the street when the car engine roared to life. The sound, like the growl of a giant beast, startled me but didn’t stop me. I wanted this to end. The tires crunched into the gravel as they turned out toward the road.

“Oh no you don’t!” I shouted at the black-tinted window. “Don’t you go anywhere!” I jumped forward, but only managed to beat my fist against the window once before the sports car peeled out, narrowly missing my toes in its retreat. “Coward!” I shouted as it screeched around a corner and out of sight. I screamed in frustration, picked up a fistful of gravel, and threw it into the empty street.

Dogs barked and several of the neighboring houses flicked on their bedroom lights. Cursing softly, I turned and ran as fast as my heels would allow me, praying that they wouldn’t see me before I was either inside or crumbled on the ground with a twisted ankle.

So much for a nice normal night out.

Once inside, I sucked on my bottom lip to keep it from trembling. No amount of wishful thinking was going to change anything. Ignoring it would not help. As much as I hated to admit it, Kim was right.

My life was never going to be the same again.

23

M
y ringing phone ripped me from the depths of dreamless sleep. The clock read seven in the morning. Groaning, I pulled my pillow over my face to muffle the noise. It was the first day since the start of summer vacation that I wasn’t scheduled to work. I’d planned on staying in bed until noon. It wasn’t enough that Kim wanted his dead girlfriend back, a reincarnated samurai spirit wanted my body, and a tattooed freak wanted God-knows-what. Now someone wanted to take away the only thing I had left: sleep. “What?!” I shouted into the receiver.

“Ri-Ri!” Quentin exhaled loudly. “Oh, thank God. You had me so worried. What was going on with you yesterday?” He was speaking so fast his sentences fell on top of each other. “You got the whole salon in a tizzy over your little exchange. I thought this Kim guy had a thing for you. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Carly said you and some tattooed freak threatened her last night. It’s not that I blame you, I just thought you were on a date with Whitley. What are you keeping from me? How could you—”

“Q!” I interrupted. “Breathe!” I reluctantly pulled myself up against my headboard, propping two pillows behind my back. He was really worked up, so I knew I might as well get comfortable.

I heard him suck in air. “You’re right.” He took another deep breath. “Okay. That’s much better.”

“Good. Now start over.”

There was a pause. “What the hell is going on?”

I flinched back from the anger coming through the phone. I’d never heard Quentin so mad before. “Q, I’m so sorry. I—”

He cut me off. “I’ve been worried sick, you know.”

My apology didn’t work, so I was going to give reason a try. “I tried to tell you the other day in the sink room, but Jeannine interrupted us, and the same thing happened yesterday with Kim. Not to mention,” I sighed, “a part of me is worried that if I do tell you … you might not understand.”

The anger left his voice. “It’s me, Ri-Ri. What on earth could you possibly tell me that I wouldn’t understand?”

I opened my mouth to answer but couldn’t form the words. This was all wrong. I couldn’t divulge my deepest secrets while a cluster of stuffed animals stared at me from across the room. I wanted to look him in the eyes and read the thoughts that played behind them. I needed him with me, holding my hand—where he should have been all along. “I can’t do this over the phone.”

There was a sudden intake of breath. “How big is this, Ri-Ri?”

“Big,” I answered. “And even though I wanted to, I just don’t know how to handle it alone.”

“I’ll be over first thing after work.”

It was tempting. I needed a friend so badly right now, but I remembered my promise to Kim to train at the dojo. “Q, I can’t tonight. And I’m thinking about calling in sick to work tomorrow.” Getting my life back on track wasn’t going as well as I wanted, and I could use an extra day off to regroup. “Ask Jeannine if you can take an early lunch tomorrow and meet me at the sub shop. I’ll tell you everything then.”

His silence was heavy.

“Please,
Q?”

He sighed. “Eleven okay?”

I smiled. “That’s perfect. And I promise, I’ll tell you everything.” When I hung up, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. No more secrets. I needed Quentin. I had learned the hard way that trying to get through this on my own was too much to handle.

But then I had another thought. What if I told him all about awakening and transcending and he didn’t understand? Would he think I was crazy? Was our friendship worth risking by telling him my secret? And if I didn’t tell him, would my lies become a wedge between us?

I chewed on my thumbnail as I padded out of my bedroom and into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal. A massive bouquet of yellow roses sat in a vase on the counter next to my much smaller bouquet from Whitley. Curious, I lifted the card open.

Debbie,
You light up my life.
—Love,
Jason

I closed the card and pushed her monster bouquet aside, not caring that it put them in direct sunlight so they were sure to wilt, and opened the cabinet they had blocked. It wasn’t that I minded Debbie having a relationship with a guy. She deserved someone to care about her after all these years. But why Dr. Wendell? Why was she suddenly so interested in the one guy that gave my gut the same reaction as dissection day in biology?

I pushed all thoughts of Dr. Wendell aside. I had bigger things to worry about at the moment. After snagging a bowl and filling it with cereal and milk, I walked into the living room to enjoy my toasted flakes and watch TV. I was in mid-squat over the sofa when I caught a silver gleam outside the front window.

The Trans Am was back, parked precisely in the same place it had been last night.

Unbelievable! I ignored my pulse thundering in my ears as I set my breakfast down and made my way outside, just like I ignored the morning dew as it soaked through my socks. I couldn’t believe the nerve of the guy—coming back so soon after I called him out the night before. I stood right in front of the driver’s black window, fist poised, before the first inkling of doubt seeped into my mind. I brushed it aside. Would this guy really try something in broad daylight with so many of my neighbors shuffling through their morning rituals? Then again, how long did it take to shoot someone? He could be halfway down the road before someone noticed me bleeding to death on the asphalt.

“Genius plan, Rileigh,” I mumbled as I wiped my now-slick palms on my sweats. There was no point in running back inside my house. If he was in the car he’d have already seen me. I rapped my knuckles against the tinted glass. Nothing happened. I knocked again. I didn’t hear or see anything from inside the car. Maybe no one was in it. I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned against the glass, only to jump back, heart pounding, as the electric window rolled down.

“You!” I pressed my hands against my chest in an effort to keep my heart from jumping through. “You’re not the tattooed man!”

“Who?” Kim frowned as he squinted in the morning sun that spilled into his car. He looked terrible. Heavy bags pulled at the bottom of his eyes, and his hair was flat in spots where he had laid it against the car’s headrest.

“Are you spying on me?” I demanded.

He sighed before opening the car door and stepping out onto the road.

Goodie. He was back to not answering my questions. I squeezed my hands into tight fists at my side, afraid to open my mouth and release the angry scream that hung in my throat.

Without making eye contact, he laced his fingers together and rested them against the back of his head. His shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I don’t know why you are so mad. I told you I was going to watch over you.”

“But I agreed to train with you,” I growled. “I thought that was the deal.”

He dropped his hands and looked at me. “You didn’t train last night.”

I cried out in frustration. “Are you kidding me? This is how it’s going to be?”

He nodded to my driveway, where my busted-up Fiesta waited for its appointment at the auto body shop. “What happened to your car?”

“I hit a deer.”

Kim snorted and turned back to me. “You’re oblivious to the danger you’re in, aren’t you?”

Maybe I had been, but after spending a night dodging nunchaku and having a gun pointed at me I was starting to get the picture. “I understand that there are people after me, Kim, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up my privacy. Besides, this road gets a lot of traffic and my neighbors are nosey. Somebody would have to be pretty stupid to start something with me at my house.”

“Is that so?” he asked. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper that looked like the one I’d found on my doorstep. “I didn’t want to show you this. You are under so much stress already, but you need to understand. I found this on your porch.” He handed it to me. Only one word was written on it, but I could tell the handwriting was the same:
Soon.

“Soon? What’s soon?”

Kim held his arms wide. “I don’t know. But I suspect nothing good.”

This was crazy. I dropped the note and refused to watch it fall to the ground. I didn’t want to see it ever again. “When did you find it?”

“Early this morning. After you chased me away, I came back an hour later and found it.”

I hugged myself, suddenly cold despite the warm summer morning. What did it mean? Was this a note from the tattooed guy warning me that he was coming back? Or was it something else entirely? “So tell me, then, why did you leave in the first place? Why didn’t you just let me know what was going on?”

He shrugged and stared up into the sky. “You looked mad.”

“Let me get this straight. You peeled out of here like a bat out of hell because I looked
mad?”
I laughed. “Aren’t you supposed to be some samurai badass or something?”

His eyes lowered in shame. “Not just mad.
Really
mad,” he emphasized.

I shrugged my shoulders. “So?”

“Look, I know you don’t trust me. And that’s partly because of the way I’ve handled our last couple of encounters.”

“You can scratch the
partly,”
I grumbled.

He ignored me. “So here you come, storming at me, and I just … panicked. I didn’t want you to think I was spying on your date. That wasn’t my intent at all. I just wanted to keep an eye on your house. To make sure no one was waiting for you when you got back.”

“Really?” High-pitched laughter bubbled from my throat. “That’s so funny.” I laughed some more, causing Kim’s eyes to flash with unease. “You were
here
protecting my house. Meanwhile, I’m at the coffee shop getting attacked by a guy with nunchaku. Honest-to-God nunchaku!” I kept laughing until I was out of breath and tears sprung from my eyes. “I mean,
who does that?”

“Nunchaku?” Kim looked horrified and I couldn’t tell if it was from my behavior or the fact that I was attacked. Finally he said, “It looks like someone else was conducting a test of their own.”

For no reason that I could think of, I found this funny and laughed all over again. “Rileigh.” Kim ducked his head low in an attempt to meet my eyes. “You are coming undone.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I answered, dabbing at my eyes with the back of my hands.

“Are you still planning to train tonight?”

“Would you stake out my place if I didn’t?”

He nodded.

“Well, gosh.” I clasped my hands together in mock enthusiasm. “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”