Please me, tease me, go ahead and leave me
Thirty-three year old, Kate Lockley’s head pounded, this was nothing new in her life. Her mouth tasted as if a gerbil expired in it, kicking and squealing, her mouth was as dry as Death Valley, again, nothing new in her life.
She was lying in the king sized bed, in a hotel room of a guy she had met the night before in a bar. That was not the least out of character for her, sadly.
What was the man's name again? Oh yeah.
“Thanks Harris.” Kate accepted the coffee the man gave her gratefully. She sat up, exposing her breasts as she drank her morning beverage, because they’d pretty much done everything you could do that involved swapping body fluids last night, so why the hell pretend to be Miss Dairy Queen, this morning?
She wasn’t expecting a connection with a man, hadn’t expected one, since she left L.A. in disgrace from the L.A.P.D. in February 2001. Never really had, since she hit twenty-five. There had been a souled vampire once… How screwed up could you get?
Xander hoped the woman would get dressed quickly and leave. He didn’t believe you had a connection with someone just because you made each other’s heart beat faster the night before. He hadn’t believed that in a long while.
Kate was a nice woman if bitter, but he wanted her out of here. He had things to do today.
Kate knew he wanted her to go as soon as possible, but too bad for him. She needed a shower.
She didn’t take very long to wash away all traces of his admittedly skillful touch on her body. Dressed and ready to leave, she came out into the main room, to hear him talking on his cell phone.
“Tonight, huh? Not a moment too soon.” Xander put his cell phone down and kissed her good bye dismissively on the cheek. “Nice meeting you, Kate.”
“Yeah, you too.” Thank Christ, he hypocritically wasn’t going pretend to take her phone number for future contact.
Apparently the guy was going to move to Cheever Lake today. Coincidence. Her newest client, an amnesiac woman named Faith Smith, lived there.
Kate hadn’t mentioned it. She had gone to the bar to forget her work as a Private Detective. Her work involved mostly trying to seduce clients’ husbands, to find out if they would cheat on their wives. The bastards always were prepared to.
This missing person case (in its own reverse way) was a pithy interesting contrast, to her usual slime filled days. The kind of thing Kate wanted to do when she first joined the force in sweet imitation of her old man. The drinking she did in bars sure imitated him.
Kate had a great lead come through for her regarding Faith Smith’s case. She’d traced the truck’s path that Faith had been found on. It had been enroute from L.A. to Seattle. And it passed through a small town named Sunnydale, in California.
The police in Seattle had always thought Faith must have been placed on the truck in Washington, never California, or even Oregon. Her injuries were so severe, how could Faith have survived a journey further than Washington?
But Kate needed to think outside the square, to find the key to unlocking Faith’s previous identity. The Sunnydale avenue had never been explored. There was a website set up for the previous inhabitants of the hole in the ground, that was now Sunnydale. And on that website was a message for someone named Faith. Saying to contact Maury, he had something from a friend for her.
Kate had made contact over the Internet and explained who she was. This guy, Maury, had told her he’d come up to Washington from California tomorrow. Maury warned Kate not to be alarmed over his skin condition.
Kate told him to relax. She was pretty opened minded.
She’d just got jiggy with someone with one eye after all. Kate chuckled ruefully to herself as she descended down to the ground floor in the hotel elevator.
How bad could Maury be?
***
Jake whistled cheerfully to himself as he loaded the dishwasher on Sunday morning.
He heard footsteps and straightened up, to see the sensible, yellow flannel, pajama clothed, hot body of the woman he loved, come into view.
Her hair hung down in a tangled mess around her face. Sexy.
Faith put the kettle on, avoiding his eyes.
“So how are you this morning?” Jake kissed Faith on the mouth passionately after she put her ‘world’s best mommy’ mug, down on the counter. There she was in the pink fluffy slippered flesh, his unexpected wildcat of the night before. “Not like you to sleep in. Wear yourself out last night?”
Faith felt her cheeks flush. Jesus! What had got into her last night? She was positive Jake must have scabbed welts on his back from her fingernails. And that weird dream she had this morning before waking. This tribal chick, telling her Faith didn’t know what she was, what she could be, but she would.
Faith often had weird dreams. In winter and spring 2003, she had a whole spate of nightmares, jerking her awake screaming. But they never made sense to her at the time, and she could never recall what they were about afterwards. A desert and something from beneath that devoured, was the best she could remember.
“Caitlyn’s expecting you to take her swimming.” Jake reminded her. “I’ll take her if you want, if you don’t feel up to it.” He hoped he hadn’t overstepped the mark with Faith in bed last night, but she seemed keen on everything he suggested at the time. Shit, his back hurt.
“No, you sort out your hunting rifles and crap. You don’t often get the day off.” Faith stirred sugar into her morning tea. “I’ll take her.”
***
The public swimming pool of Cheever Lake was pleasantly almost deserted, due to townfolk finishing their Christmas shopping.
Faith waited in the warm water for Caitlyn to dive off the beginner’s board. Caitlyn performed a perfect execution and swan dived into the water.
“Good one, honey.” Faith praised her daughter, twirling her around in the chlorine smelling water. “Now how about the higher one?”
“Okay. Come up with me?” Caitlyn was wearing a pink Hawaiian print bikini that matched her mother’s swimming costume. It had been Caitlyn’s idea to match their swimming costumes when they went shopping last summer. Faith had smiled indulgently and said, sure. Faith always wore a one piece suit, what with the knife scar and all.
“Of course.” Faith swam over, climbed out and waited at the poolside for her.
Caitlyn tripped running alongside the pool and landed hard on her arm.
“Ow!” Caitlyn began to cry, lying where she fell. “My arm hurts real bad, Mommy.”
“Does it, baby?” Faith gracefully knelt down to kiss it better.
“Ouch! No, it hurts! I want to go home now.” Caitlyn sobbed, smacking her mother's face accidentally, as she pushed Faith away from her arm.
“Don’t be deficient, we’ve only been here fifteen minutes. The signs tell you not to run. Serves you right. Now get up on the damn board.” Faith snarled at Caitlyn, pulling her roughly to her feet.
“No! I want to go home, now!” Caitlyn screamed at Faith distressed, flailing at her mother with her unhurt arm. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
The few people using the public pool stared at them.
“Don’t you fucking embarrass me in public, firecracker.” Faith hissed cruelly. “You get up on that damn board and you fucking dive. Or else I’m gonna whip you so hard when we get home, you won’t be sitting down for a week. I’ll use Jake’s belt to do it.”
Caitlyn gulped. Faith had never hit her before. Caitlyn got sent to her room, when she occasionally got on Faith’s nerves. Her mother had never sworn at her until today. Firecracker? Mommy had never called Caitlyn that term before either.
Caitlyn was terrified. She stumbled sobbing to the diving board, wincing every step of the way as she climbed the ladder.
“Hey, Faith?” A mom, Faith knew from Caitlyn’s afternoon care center, came over to her. “I think Caitlyn’s really hurt her arm.”
***
“And she dived, Jake. She was that scared of me.” Faith wept with guilt in the basement. “She has a fractured arm, the doctor said. I was a complete bitch to her.”
“Yeah, hate to say it, Faith, but you were.” Jake paused in his stock take of cartridges. Faith didn’t have a mean bone in her body. He knew last night had been too good to be true. “Do you think… possession?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s see what happens when I go to Church this afternoon.” Faith wiped her eyes fiercely. “She told me her teddy bear’s disappointed in me.” Faith intended to dunk that teddy bear in the font filled with holy water and see what happened.
***
The family arrived home from the late afternoon service at Cheever Lake’s, only Catholic Church, racing through the front door to beat the cold.
Caitlyn scampered upstairs. Mr. Wilkins wanted to play hide and seek.
Nothing strange had happened to either mom or bear in Church that early evening. It had been tricky to explain to Father Moore, the exact reason why Faith was dipping her daughter’s, teddy bear’s paw in holy water.
Faith walked into the kitchen, preparing to bake a cake for the church fund-raiser stall on Main Street tomorrow.
Jake descended into the basement, to finish his sorting out of his hunting equipment.
Peace reigned on the house, another quiet uneventful Sunday evening in small town suburbia.
There was a funny red light moving in the kitchen. Must be one of the kids next door, playing with a laser beam.
Faith bent down to put her cake in the oven.
A rain of tranquilizer darts shattered the glass pane of the kitchen window and whistled over her head.
What the fuck?
Faith threw herself down on the floor and snaked her way over to the dishwasher. There was the biggest carving knife in the house there. Faith didn’t know why her brain was screaming at her to retrieve it.
Three men crashed simultaneously in the house. One through the kitchen window and two through the living room.
The man in the kitchen was dressed in black combat gear and wore a balaclava over his face.
Faith had never seen the like. Especially not in her kitchen.
Reflexes and instincts Faith never knew she had, kicked into gear. Abandoning her quest for a knife, she jumped off the floor in order to be able to sprint into the dining room. Slamming the door behind her.
She grabbed a heavy silver candle stick off the table. Nimbly she ducked behind the door, waiting for it to open.
She used the candlestick to brain the kitchen guy, when he cautiously opened the door. He went down instantly, with a satisfying cracking sound as she smashed his skull.
Once he was felled, Faith became free to fight the other two men who burst into the dining room. It was effortless for her to kick the automatic out of one of their hands. It came naturally to her to dive somersaulting over the colonial dining table, to dodge the bullets from the other man’s automatic.
The Christmas music playing surrealy on the kitchen radio filtering through the house, became replaced in her brain with a heavy driving hard rock track. Which was odd if she’d thought about it rationally, because normally Faith liked 'The Dixie Chicks'.
It was like being a ballerina. Was that was what she had been before her memory loss? Pirouetting around the dining room in a deathly dance.
Jake came up from the basement with one of his hunting rifles and shot the man still armed in the back.
Which left Faith in the satisfying position to beat the living crap out of the disarmed guy. Beat him into a bloody screaming pulp.
“Stop it!” Jake shook her shoulder, he had his rifle to keep the intruder covered. He wanted her to ring the police.
“Fuck off, lover. This one’s mine.” Faith snapped the man’s neck with her bare hands.
Jake would never have suspected of Faith being capable of performing such an act. He never dreamed she’d even know how.
Neither did Faith.
The law enforcement officers were amazed by it.
“Maternal instincts, Faith.” The sheriff guessed, as he took Faith’s witness statement that night. “You knew your daughter was in the house and you had to protect her.”
“Yeah.” Faith hadn’t given Caitlyn a thought until the man lay dead under her hands.
“Who were they?” Jake couldn’t work it out. “Why us?” His first thought was naturally that their attackers were Satanists. But two of the corpses were wearing crosses around their necks.
And his birth mother did not desire Jake’s death, she wanted him to love her and help rule the world in evil with her.
The hit squad from wherever hadn’t focused on him in any case. The ‘soldiers’ or whoever they were, were clearly after Jake’s sweet, innocent fiancé.
“I haven’t a clue, son.” The sheriff had been friends with Jake’s dead adoptive uncle, the former town sheriff.
One of the deceased intruders had been Indian. Clearly the would be assassins were out of towners’. There were only two Indian families in the whole of Cheever Lake. The man who Faith whaled into called her ‘a bloody bitch’, before he became able to only to grunt in agony.
The sherrif scratched his head. “But we’ll find out. You just get your family into a hotel tonight.”
“Yeah.” Jake nodded in agreement, they couldn’t stay in the house tonight, not with the mess it was in, and it was now a crime scene. He cuddled a crying Caitlyn to him harder. What the hell was the world coming to?
***
Faith decided she must carry on with making her planned trip into Seattle, the next day, and meet up with Kate, and the mystery Maury. Those men had been after her. She needed to find out about her past for a clue, as to why anyone would want her dead like that.
She kissed Jake and Caitlyn good-bye in their motel room. She didn’t want them to come out in the cold. Telling them to look after each other. A neighbor had volunteered to baby sit Caitlyn today fortunately.
Faith walked across the motel car park. A one eyed man, got out of his four wheel drive, as she prepared to open the door of her small Japanese hatchback.
He looked her up and down in amazement.
Faith wondered if she had dirt on her clothes. No. Her faded blue denim jeans, turtle-neck gray sweater and warm sheepskin jacket were completely respectable. Her denim scrunchy, tying up her pony tail, matched her jeans in fact.
“You had a narrow escape, Faith.” The guy put his hand to his inside jacket pocket.
“A higher power was watching out for us, I guess.” Faith knew the bizarre attack on her house would have made the local news if not State news. Who was this one eyed guy in a sophisticated woolen suit? Oh god, he wasn’t a journalist was he?
The motel cleaners rumbled past with their linen, laden trolleys on the sidewalks outside the motel units.
Xander couldn’t believe this soccer mom crap, Faith was pulling. She’d murdered three Watchers Council members less than eleven hours ago. He’d come back from viewing their bodies in the town morgue. The identification he carried these days, got him in anywhere, no questions asked.
He couldn’t kill her here, too many witnesses. Why wasn’t she attacking him? Obviously the same reason.
Faith shrugged in dismissal at the rude freak staring at her and got in her car. Emerald City, here she came.
She was lying in the king sized bed, in a hotel room of a guy she had met the night before in a bar. That was not the least out of character for her, sadly.
What was the man's name again? Oh yeah.
“Thanks Harris.” Kate accepted the coffee the man gave her gratefully. She sat up, exposing her breasts as she drank her morning beverage, because they’d pretty much done everything you could do that involved swapping body fluids last night, so why the hell pretend to be Miss Dairy Queen, this morning?
She wasn’t expecting a connection with a man, hadn’t expected one, since she left L.A. in disgrace from the L.A.P.D. in February 2001. Never really had, since she hit twenty-five. There had been a souled vampire once… How screwed up could you get?
Xander hoped the woman would get dressed quickly and leave. He didn’t believe you had a connection with someone just because you made each other’s heart beat faster the night before. He hadn’t believed that in a long while.
Kate was a nice woman if bitter, but he wanted her out of here. He had things to do today.
Kate knew he wanted her to go as soon as possible, but too bad for him. She needed a shower.
She didn’t take very long to wash away all traces of his admittedly skillful touch on her body. Dressed and ready to leave, she came out into the main room, to hear him talking on his cell phone.
“Tonight, huh? Not a moment too soon.” Xander put his cell phone down and kissed her good bye dismissively on the cheek. “Nice meeting you, Kate.”
“Yeah, you too.” Thank Christ, he hypocritically wasn’t going pretend to take her phone number for future contact.
Apparently the guy was going to move to Cheever Lake today. Coincidence. Her newest client, an amnesiac woman named Faith Smith, lived there.
Kate hadn’t mentioned it. She had gone to the bar to forget her work as a Private Detective. Her work involved mostly trying to seduce clients’ husbands, to find out if they would cheat on their wives. The bastards always were prepared to.
This missing person case (in its own reverse way) was a pithy interesting contrast, to her usual slime filled days. The kind of thing Kate wanted to do when she first joined the force in sweet imitation of her old man. The drinking she did in bars sure imitated him.
Kate had a great lead come through for her regarding Faith Smith’s case. She’d traced the truck’s path that Faith had been found on. It had been enroute from L.A. to Seattle. And it passed through a small town named Sunnydale, in California.
The police in Seattle had always thought Faith must have been placed on the truck in Washington, never California, or even Oregon. Her injuries were so severe, how could Faith have survived a journey further than Washington?
But Kate needed to think outside the square, to find the key to unlocking Faith’s previous identity. The Sunnydale avenue had never been explored. There was a website set up for the previous inhabitants of the hole in the ground, that was now Sunnydale. And on that website was a message for someone named Faith. Saying to contact Maury, he had something from a friend for her.
Kate had made contact over the Internet and explained who she was. This guy, Maury, had told her he’d come up to Washington from California tomorrow. Maury warned Kate not to be alarmed over his skin condition.
Kate told him to relax. She was pretty opened minded.
She’d just got jiggy with someone with one eye after all. Kate chuckled ruefully to herself as she descended down to the ground floor in the hotel elevator.
How bad could Maury be?
***
Jake whistled cheerfully to himself as he loaded the dishwasher on Sunday morning.
He heard footsteps and straightened up, to see the sensible, yellow flannel, pajama clothed, hot body of the woman he loved, come into view.
Her hair hung down in a tangled mess around her face. Sexy.
Faith put the kettle on, avoiding his eyes.
“So how are you this morning?” Jake kissed Faith on the mouth passionately after she put her ‘world’s best mommy’ mug, down on the counter. There she was in the pink fluffy slippered flesh, his unexpected wildcat of the night before. “Not like you to sleep in. Wear yourself out last night?”
Faith felt her cheeks flush. Jesus! What had got into her last night? She was positive Jake must have scabbed welts on his back from her fingernails. And that weird dream she had this morning before waking. This tribal chick, telling her Faith didn’t know what she was, what she could be, but she would.
Faith often had weird dreams. In winter and spring 2003, she had a whole spate of nightmares, jerking her awake screaming. But they never made sense to her at the time, and she could never recall what they were about afterwards. A desert and something from beneath that devoured, was the best she could remember.
“Caitlyn’s expecting you to take her swimming.” Jake reminded her. “I’ll take her if you want, if you don’t feel up to it.” He hoped he hadn’t overstepped the mark with Faith in bed last night, but she seemed keen on everything he suggested at the time. Shit, his back hurt.
“No, you sort out your hunting rifles and crap. You don’t often get the day off.” Faith stirred sugar into her morning tea. “I’ll take her.”
***
The public swimming pool of Cheever Lake was pleasantly almost deserted, due to townfolk finishing their Christmas shopping.
Faith waited in the warm water for Caitlyn to dive off the beginner’s board. Caitlyn performed a perfect execution and swan dived into the water.
“Good one, honey.” Faith praised her daughter, twirling her around in the chlorine smelling water. “Now how about the higher one?”
“Okay. Come up with me?” Caitlyn was wearing a pink Hawaiian print bikini that matched her mother’s swimming costume. It had been Caitlyn’s idea to match their swimming costumes when they went shopping last summer. Faith had smiled indulgently and said, sure. Faith always wore a one piece suit, what with the knife scar and all.
“Of course.” Faith swam over, climbed out and waited at the poolside for her.
Caitlyn tripped running alongside the pool and landed hard on her arm.
“Ow!” Caitlyn began to cry, lying where she fell. “My arm hurts real bad, Mommy.”
“Does it, baby?” Faith gracefully knelt down to kiss it better.
“Ouch! No, it hurts! I want to go home now.” Caitlyn sobbed, smacking her mother's face accidentally, as she pushed Faith away from her arm.
“Don’t be deficient, we’ve only been here fifteen minutes. The signs tell you not to run. Serves you right. Now get up on the damn board.” Faith snarled at Caitlyn, pulling her roughly to her feet.
“No! I want to go home, now!” Caitlyn screamed at Faith distressed, flailing at her mother with her unhurt arm. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
The few people using the public pool stared at them.
“Don’t you fucking embarrass me in public, firecracker.” Faith hissed cruelly. “You get up on that damn board and you fucking dive. Or else I’m gonna whip you so hard when we get home, you won’t be sitting down for a week. I’ll use Jake’s belt to do it.”
Caitlyn gulped. Faith had never hit her before. Caitlyn got sent to her room, when she occasionally got on Faith’s nerves. Her mother had never sworn at her until today. Firecracker? Mommy had never called Caitlyn that term before either.
Caitlyn was terrified. She stumbled sobbing to the diving board, wincing every step of the way as she climbed the ladder.
“Hey, Faith?” A mom, Faith knew from Caitlyn’s afternoon care center, came over to her. “I think Caitlyn’s really hurt her arm.”
***
“And she dived, Jake. She was that scared of me.” Faith wept with guilt in the basement. “She has a fractured arm, the doctor said. I was a complete bitch to her.”
“Yeah, hate to say it, Faith, but you were.” Jake paused in his stock take of cartridges. Faith didn’t have a mean bone in her body. He knew last night had been too good to be true. “Do you think… possession?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s see what happens when I go to Church this afternoon.” Faith wiped her eyes fiercely. “She told me her teddy bear’s disappointed in me.” Faith intended to dunk that teddy bear in the font filled with holy water and see what happened.
***
The family arrived home from the late afternoon service at Cheever Lake’s, only Catholic Church, racing through the front door to beat the cold.
Caitlyn scampered upstairs. Mr. Wilkins wanted to play hide and seek.
Nothing strange had happened to either mom or bear in Church that early evening. It had been tricky to explain to Father Moore, the exact reason why Faith was dipping her daughter’s, teddy bear’s paw in holy water.
Faith walked into the kitchen, preparing to bake a cake for the church fund-raiser stall on Main Street tomorrow.
Jake descended into the basement, to finish his sorting out of his hunting equipment.
Peace reigned on the house, another quiet uneventful Sunday evening in small town suburbia.
There was a funny red light moving in the kitchen. Must be one of the kids next door, playing with a laser beam.
Faith bent down to put her cake in the oven.
A rain of tranquilizer darts shattered the glass pane of the kitchen window and whistled over her head.
What the fuck?
Faith threw herself down on the floor and snaked her way over to the dishwasher. There was the biggest carving knife in the house there. Faith didn’t know why her brain was screaming at her to retrieve it.
Three men crashed simultaneously in the house. One through the kitchen window and two through the living room.
The man in the kitchen was dressed in black combat gear and wore a balaclava over his face.
Faith had never seen the like. Especially not in her kitchen.
Reflexes and instincts Faith never knew she had, kicked into gear. Abandoning her quest for a knife, she jumped off the floor in order to be able to sprint into the dining room. Slamming the door behind her.
She grabbed a heavy silver candle stick off the table. Nimbly she ducked behind the door, waiting for it to open.
She used the candlestick to brain the kitchen guy, when he cautiously opened the door. He went down instantly, with a satisfying cracking sound as she smashed his skull.
Once he was felled, Faith became free to fight the other two men who burst into the dining room. It was effortless for her to kick the automatic out of one of their hands. It came naturally to her to dive somersaulting over the colonial dining table, to dodge the bullets from the other man’s automatic.
The Christmas music playing surrealy on the kitchen radio filtering through the house, became replaced in her brain with a heavy driving hard rock track. Which was odd if she’d thought about it rationally, because normally Faith liked 'The Dixie Chicks'.
It was like being a ballerina. Was that was what she had been before her memory loss? Pirouetting around the dining room in a deathly dance.
Jake came up from the basement with one of his hunting rifles and shot the man still armed in the back.
Which left Faith in the satisfying position to beat the living crap out of the disarmed guy. Beat him into a bloody screaming pulp.
“Stop it!” Jake shook her shoulder, he had his rifle to keep the intruder covered. He wanted her to ring the police.
“Fuck off, lover. This one’s mine.” Faith snapped the man’s neck with her bare hands.
Jake would never have suspected of Faith being capable of performing such an act. He never dreamed she’d even know how.
Neither did Faith.
The law enforcement officers were amazed by it.
“Maternal instincts, Faith.” The sheriff guessed, as he took Faith’s witness statement that night. “You knew your daughter was in the house and you had to protect her.”
“Yeah.” Faith hadn’t given Caitlyn a thought until the man lay dead under her hands.
“Who were they?” Jake couldn’t work it out. “Why us?” His first thought was naturally that their attackers were Satanists. But two of the corpses were wearing crosses around their necks.
And his birth mother did not desire Jake’s death, she wanted him to love her and help rule the world in evil with her.
The hit squad from wherever hadn’t focused on him in any case. The ‘soldiers’ or whoever they were, were clearly after Jake’s sweet, innocent fiancé.
“I haven’t a clue, son.” The sheriff had been friends with Jake’s dead adoptive uncle, the former town sheriff.
One of the deceased intruders had been Indian. Clearly the would be assassins were out of towners’. There were only two Indian families in the whole of Cheever Lake. The man who Faith whaled into called her ‘a bloody bitch’, before he became able to only to grunt in agony.
The sherrif scratched his head. “But we’ll find out. You just get your family into a hotel tonight.”
“Yeah.” Jake nodded in agreement, they couldn’t stay in the house tonight, not with the mess it was in, and it was now a crime scene. He cuddled a crying Caitlyn to him harder. What the hell was the world coming to?
***
Faith decided she must carry on with making her planned trip into Seattle, the next day, and meet up with Kate, and the mystery Maury. Those men had been after her. She needed to find out about her past for a clue, as to why anyone would want her dead like that.
She kissed Jake and Caitlyn good-bye in their motel room. She didn’t want them to come out in the cold. Telling them to look after each other. A neighbor had volunteered to baby sit Caitlyn today fortunately.
Faith walked across the motel car park. A one eyed man, got out of his four wheel drive, as she prepared to open the door of her small Japanese hatchback.
He looked her up and down in amazement.
Faith wondered if she had dirt on her clothes. No. Her faded blue denim jeans, turtle-neck gray sweater and warm sheepskin jacket were completely respectable. Her denim scrunchy, tying up her pony tail, matched her jeans in fact.
“You had a narrow escape, Faith.” The guy put his hand to his inside jacket pocket.
“A higher power was watching out for us, I guess.” Faith knew the bizarre attack on her house would have made the local news if not State news. Who was this one eyed guy in a sophisticated woolen suit? Oh god, he wasn’t a journalist was he?
The motel cleaners rumbled past with their linen, laden trolleys on the sidewalks outside the motel units.
Xander couldn’t believe this soccer mom crap, Faith was pulling. She’d murdered three Watchers Council members less than eleven hours ago. He’d come back from viewing their bodies in the town morgue. The identification he carried these days, got him in anywhere, no questions asked.
He couldn’t kill her here, too many witnesses. Why wasn’t she attacking him? Obviously the same reason.
Faith shrugged in dismissal at the rude freak staring at her and got in her car. Emerald City, here she came.