The man is crying and begging. “I don’t know…don’t know…please.”
A crunch of gravel. The voices get more distinct: “That’s right, you beg me. You beg me for your fucking life.”
Oh God. I have to do something. I have to.
I clutch my bag, creeping to the van window, and I catch sight of them—it’s one guy hitting the other one. Beating him. The one being hit is older—gray hair. He looks faintly familiar. Was he at the party? Or in the kitchen? Is he being robbed?
Maybe I should help. I could go out there. I could…
Then I see the attacker’s face, wild with fury.
I freeze.
He’s a savage god with green eyes and a shaggy black crown. He’s so far gone in anger, he seems more animal than human. He kneels on top of the older man, smashing his face over and over.
With shaking hands, I punch in my phone unlock code. I need to call somebody. I need to save this man. Except I keep getting the code wrong, and the hitting goes on, and I know deep down that he’s dying, that he doesn’t have the twenty or ten or even five minutes it would take for help to arrive.
It’s him or me. It’s stand here and let a man die, or do something—for once in my life, do something that’s not wearing a dress and smiling and getting it all wrong.
So I run out there. I watch myself do it, like a movie almost. “Stop it,” I yell.
The attacker just keeps on, a dark storm, all fists and fury. My presence means nothing to him. My words don’t touch him. It’s as if I’m yelling at thunder.
My heart beats out of my chest. I’ve risked everything, come out in the open, but it’s not enough. I stamp my foot to get his attention, crushing gravel beneath my mother’s Louboutins.
“The cops are coming,” I say.
The man stills and looks up. It’s a shock when it happens, even though I’ve been trying to get him to see me. His eyes seem to blaze into my chest, hot and bright.
Breathless, I back away.
He stands, leaving the man in a groaning, whimpering heap.
I retreat slowly, showing him my phone, as though that might protect me. “Cops are coming,” I say again. A lie. I couldn’t punch in the code.
He’s coming at me, expression unreadable. He’s a few years older than I am—late twenties, maybe.
My back hits something hard. The van.
He keeps coming. I try to spin and run, but he grabs my arm and slams me back into the van. “Where do you think you’re going, little girl?”
I stare up at him, panting.
His warm breath is a feather on my nose; the heat in his eyes invades me. He grabs my hair and tilts my head back, forcing me to stare into his face, as if he’s trying to read my eyes.
A moment later, he looks up at the night sky. He seems almost wolfish, and I’m conscious, suddenly, of my bare neck so close to his snarling mouth. I wonder if he’s staring at the moon. It’s like he’s going to howl or something.
Then I get it. He’s listening for sirens.
“You’re a little fucking liar.”
“No,” I whisper.
He studies my eyes. Can he tell? I don't think so. At least he’s not so sure. “Fuck,” he says. He loops an arm around my neck, and he’s fumbling in his pocket. I gasp when he pulls out something shiny—a knife or piece of metal or something. He jams it against the passenger-side window of the van, down into the door part, jamming and thrusting; then he pulls it up and jerks open the door. The alarm blares into the night.
“Get in there.”
He doesn’t wait for me to move; he shoves me in and shuts the door. Then he goes around and pulls open the hood.
Should I try to run? Could I, in these heels?
The alarm stills. He slams the hood, grabs the half-dead guy, and drags him over behind the van. I hear the door open, feel the thump as he throws the man in.
My throat is tight. Why did I try to help? Why did I leave my party? I put my hand on the door handle.
“Don’t do it if you want to live,” he growls, getting into the driver’s seat. There’s no way he can see my hand. It’s like he knows. “You want to live, you do not move.” He rips something out of the steering column. He works calmly, like a machine. Alarms and witnesses and murders, he doesn’t care. And I can’t help but be amazed, because I was out here crying because I called somebody the wrong name. This guy, he’s cold as ice.
The van starts up. He peels out backward. He rams it into drive, and we’re off.
“Show me your phone.”
I hold it up. My hand is trembling. This feels surreal. Maybe it’s a dream.
He grabs my wrist—hard. No dream. “Fire it up.”
“Ow,” I say.
He lets me go. I hit the button, and the thing lights up. There’s red around my wrist. It’s the other man’s blood.
“You can’t just kill him,” I say, voice shaking.
My iPhone lights his face from below, illuminating the curves of his thick lips. I can see the quiver of the nostrils that form the base of his chunky nose, the thick lashes that line his huge green eyes. He looks like the devil—the devil as a primitive young thug, seething with hate.
And then he smiles. His smile is like nothing I’ve ever seen. As if he has so much hate and anger in him that it flipped over to a kind of evil beauty.
Again he speaks. “Fire. It. Up.”
Again I try to punch in my code. We’re stopped at a light, and he’s watching. I get it this time.
“Recents,” he growls. “And if you even touch that door, I’ll snap your little neck.”
I stare down at my phone. He’ll know I’m lying if I show him. He’ll kill me if I don’t. I hit recents and turn the screen to him. He grabs it and looks at the call history, showing no 911 calls, then up at me, his devil face red in the light. “Thought so.” He shoves it in his pocket. The light turns green, and he speeds off.
I glance back at the unmoving shadow in the back of the van. “You can’t just kill that guy.”
“He’s already dead,” he says.
“I can hear him breathing. Drop him at a hospital. You’ve proved your point.”
He turns to me. His wild fury has mass. Weight. It forces the breath from my lungs. “You think I’ve proved my point?”
There’s this buzzing in my ears. Everything feels unreal, or maybe it’s all too real. I try to say something, but my mouth is dry.
He doesn’t even have tattoos like regular bad guys. He has some sort of design etched into his right forearm—crude scars that seem to form an X. When I dare to look a little more closely, I see that it’s crossed weapons of some kind.
His voice is a rumble, as if it’s surging up from an underworld of pure hate. “I could shove a meat hook in his belly and hoist him up and rip his teeth out one by one with pliers, and then cut off his balls and make him chew them with his toothless bloody mouth, and that wouldn’t even begin to prove my point. Got it?”
I just gape at him.
“He wants to save himself, he’ll give me a name.”
“Whose name?”
“How about you stop worrying about him and start worrying about yourself?” He turns back to the road and keeps driving, staying exactly at the speed limit.