Dark Harvest (#Wattys2018)

Chapter 23

The trip home with Brian was uneventful. My head was pounding and all I wanted to do was get back to the office and get home. Brian must of sensed it because he kept the chit chat down to a minimum.

"Are you sure you can drive?"

I grumbled, "Yeah."

"Avery was just pissed about losing Diana and the kids she killed," he added but I didn't bother responding to that.

I had learned a long time ago it didn't serve any purpose beating yourself up over split decisions you had to make when fighting. Even if I had not run out of the bar, there wasn't any guarantee that we would have caught her, or that no one would have been hurt. And it sucked. But none of us were directly responsible for their deaths. We had tried to vacate the area instead of all three of us focusing on taking down Diana.

Which was probably why she was able to escape.

And I knew what it was like to be responsible for someone's death, and I couldn't hang my heart strings up on this. It was only a matter of time till Malak killed someone to get to me. Like he almost had done with Rebecca.

And there would be bodies.

Not just because Malak enjoyed killing people, but because he would know it would find out.

And those deaths... each of those would be my fault.

Because instead of killing him, I ran away.

I got back to the office and slipped into the bucket seat of my GTI before making a painful trip home. The good thing was that my vision seemed to be clear. The bad thing was that it felt like a jackhammer was going off in my brain.

Honestly, I didn't really remember how I got home, as I stumbled up the steps to my door. I barely got the chance to even check the wards that Rebecca had helped set up before I collapsed onto the couch and fell asleep.

It would be a miracle if I lived to see thirty.

**********

Tap.

Tap.

What the ...

Tap.

Something fuzzy pressed against my nose and lips. Fuzzy, with the faint smell of cat litter, and the slight hint of something sharp.

My eyes snapped open, and I immediately swore as I swung my hand to cover my eyes from the intense light that seemed to be searing my retinas. Stripes yowled, ducking the arm weapon and leapt off of my chest. Instead of sitting up, I rolled away from the back of the couch, hiding my face from the window that was allowing the evil light lasers to destroy what was left of my brain.

Nursing a concussion can be similar to nursing a hangover. However, greasy food was not going to help the stomach ache. I called out of work, forcing me to dip into the money Julian had given me. If I was going to pay the bills this month, it wasn't going to get done by calling out on my ten dollar an hour job.

My next step was to get some liquid energy into me. Thank God for Keurig.

Stripes had taken up residence in the kitchen and proceeded to voice his complaints in long and piercingly loud levels about the emptiness of his food bowl. Reaching into the cabinet as my Keurig stirred into life, I dumped the cat food box bag over his bowl until there was only a hint of bowl left. I let loose a few colorful words at the mess but Stripes seemed to have finally forgiven me for my earlier behavior.