The Last of the Twenty: The Setting of the Board

Chapter 39

“Sorry, it’s just hard to think about it” she said with a weak smile.

“Do you need a break? I can get you a soda or something” Raymond offered. Kelly just shook her head no and kept going.

“No, I need to get this done. After I fell, I yelled out and asked what he wanted. Then he put his hand, his cold dirty hand, over my mouth and told me he wanted my blood.” Stopping for a moment, Kelly shivered and gripped the cross tight against her chest, covering the right cast with fingers sticking out of her left cast.

“That was when he picked me up and carried me into the woods. I swear we were moving so fast I thought I was on a roller coaster. I didn’t know anything could move that fast in real life…”

Raymond thought about what Keith had told him earlier about the thief moving too fast to be real. This case was turning out to be too much.

“Do you need a break” Kelly asked, noticing Raymond looking off. He shook his head at her and smiled.

“Sorry about that, us old guys do that from time to time, keep going, I promise I’m listening.”

“It’s ok, I know I sound crazy” she said with a small, unsure laugh.

Raymond was about to tell her she didn’t but just as he opened his mouth to say it she held up one finger and kept talking.

“When he brought me into the woods, that’s when things got really bad. I was fighting and screaming, I don’t even remember when he broke my wrists, I just know I screamed louder when he did. Then he ripped off my shirt and I thought he wanted to… well, you know. That seemed worse to me than anything else, until he brought out that knife. He said he didn’t want to turn me, whatever that meant, that he wanted to go slow… that’s when he cut me.” While she talked, her eyes started to get wide as she stared off at the wall, remembering that awful night.

“His breath was cold,” she said still looking at the wall, “but when he put his mouth on me, when he licked me, it burned. I think that was the poison the doctors told me about, something on his tongue, all I know is it felt like fire. He was sucking the blood out of my cut when the other showed up and pulled him off.”

“The other” Raymond asked, interrupting her.

She looked over to him, confused.

“You didn’t know? He’s the one who brought me here.”

“Who was he? What did he look like?” Raymond asked. Kelly just shrugged.

“Don’t know, it was too dark. He was bigger than the other, he threw the smaller one around like a doll. I think I was losing it by then because I swear he pulled a glowing sword out from nowhere and stabbed the smaller one. They said something to each other before he did, but I couldn’t hear it. The last thing I remember was the smaller one that attacked me looked like he caught fire for a split second, a bright blue fire, then fell down and burst into dust. I was screaming when the bigger one walked over to me and, and I swear his eyes were glowing yellow in the middle. Anyways, that’s all I saw before I passed out and woke up in the hospital.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about the bigger one? Any features you remember? Hair long or short? Stuff like that.”

She shook her head. Still holding her cross, Kelly settled further into her bed and shivered. Raymond could see she was getting too tired to talk much more, and he wanted to check out the security footage before he left. “No, just that he was bigger than the one that attacked me and his eyes…”

“You said they were yellow? I thought it was too dark by then to tell that.”

“No,” she said quietly, “they were glowing yellow. They looked like the reflection you see when a cat looks at you sometimes, but they weren’t reflecting anything, they had their own light.”