After staying up late on her laptop working on the latest Good Samaritan story, Avery popped into the office early the next morning to finish up the article, line edit it, and put a final proofread and polish on the text. By mid-morning she had completed the next-to-last draft, the one that needed only Lexa Nash's few tweaks and approval. With that version saved to her documents file, she composed an email, attached the story titled Encounter of the Wolf Kind, and sent it to her boss.
When Lexa strolled into the office, Avery swiveled her chair and caught her before she entered her office. "I know you said my story was due by the end of the day, but it's done and waiting for you in your inbox."
"Impressive," Lexa replied. "I'll check it out and have it back to you by nine. Once you make the revisions, we'll forward it to the presses."
She inserted the key into her office door, but before she turned it, Avery said, "There's something else I need to talk to you about. It could be huge."
Her boss frowned.
"Just hear me out." Avery bolted up from her chair. "Sixty seconds."
"Thirty."
"Deal."
She followed Lexa into her office and shut the door behind her back, hearing the mechanism click in the frame. As soon as the woman put her purse on the floor next to her desk and sat in her plush leather chair, Avery started her pitch.
"You said if I got video evidence of the hero, maybe including the wolf too that's been terrorizing the town of Pineridge, you would approve the big story I'd shelved. This is personal, I admit it, because whether anyone believes me, I know the town hero rescued me from that burning car three months ago. The driver's side door was ripped off, and it wasn't because of the crash. The fire chief said it was highly unlikely that the door would have come off during the accident. He said it looked like it had been sheared from the car after it came to rest, like someone had torn it off."
Lexa looked at her watch. "You have ten seconds left."
"I believe I know how to lure the hero and maybe the wolf out of hiding."
"How?"
"I believe both of them are drawn to me in some strange, unbelievable way. Maybe it's because I'm a reporter and they want me to get their stories straight or they want to shut my stories down. I don't know. It could be some other reason. Maybe they're madly in love with me."
Lexa's brows furrowed.
"But one thing's for sure, they're hanging on every word I write."
Lexa pursed her lips in serious thought. "I can't sanction something that puts your life at risk... so don't share the details with me. If you can get solid proof the hero exists, especially if you can catch him facing off against the wolf, we'll run with your story. If you nail this, it won't be a first section, back page article, I'll put you on the front page."
Avery's eyes bulged. "I'm on it."
"Now get out of my office so I can read the story you submitted this morning."
With that, Avery spun on her heel and left the room, shutting the door behind her, her mind whirling around her. She could do this, bring actual proof there was a hero in Pineridge, not just a figment of everyone's imagination. If she could catch him battling the wolf, she could show his supernatural power to the world. But as for his identity, she would keep that to herself... she smiled warmly as she considered who the hero was. She believed she knew.
When nine o'clock rolled around, Avery made Lexa's changes to this week's story and emailed it back to her to publish. Just in case her plan fell through, she brainstormed on ideas for the next article, but couldn't take her mind off of Dorian Steele and the story she really wanted to write.
My Hero and the Wolf.
A tiny doubt nagged at her, saying, what if you're wrong? What if the hero isn't who you think it is? What if it's someone else? Which was entirely possible. That's why she needed hard evidence, at least for herself.
At ten o'clock, she texted Dorian and asked if he wanted lunch at the diner, and he agreed to meet her. They had kind of hit a dead end until the next wolf sighting, at least as far as he believed. She knew she was on the verge of blowing this case and this story wide open. When she pulled up to the diner and parked, Dorian's red Jeep Gladiator was already sitting next to the curb. As soon as she pushed through the glass door, Mel nodded toward her usual booth, and she was amused to see Dorian sitting, having left her seat open so she could sit with her back to the sun.
"How sweet of you not to take my seat this time." Avery smiled, tilted her head, eyes feeling bright and clear.
Dorian nodded, licking his lips but remaining quiet.
"Everything okay?" she asked.
"First off, I think you need to reconsider what you're planning on doing tonight." His brows pinched and his gray-blues homed in on Avery. "And what about that kiss on the cheek? What was that all about?"
"I just thought we could stop beating around the bush and be straight with each other... what we wanted."
"And what do we want?"
"We've spent a lot of time together the last few days."
"We're working on an investigation together."
Avery leaned closer from across the table. "Dinner at an Italian restaurant and then at your place last night, with the glow of the fireplace in the background. It's springtime Dorian. It's not so cold we needed a fire."
"If you insist on putting yourself in danger, then I think we need to revisit whether we keep working together. Or not."
"I saw the way you were looking at me last night," she said.
He glanced toward Mel, who was walking toward them with their food... Avery, a salad, and Dorian a club sandwich.
His eyes grew dark and distant. "I think we need to focus on what's most important."
"And what is that?"
"Staying out of harm's way."
"Dorian, everything we do in life puts us at risk." She reached across the table and placed her palm on top of his hand. He didn't withdraw, but the warmth she felt last night wasn't there. "I'm just doing my job. You must understand what I'm doing, because you've been watching me for more than just a few days."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Avery squeezed his hand. "But you do."
"No, I don't." His voice betrayed him, laced with tension.
"Yes." She grabbed his other hand, too. "Look me in the eye and tell me the other day was the first time you'd met me." She grimaced, feeling her stomach tighten. "Better yet, tell me the other day when our hands touched, when you stopped my coffee from spilling, right here at this table, tell me that was the first time you had ever laid hands on me. That you had never touched me before, ever. Not even three months ago."
His mouth parted and his breaths became shallow. Suddenly, his eyes wandered, and he looked beyond Avery, out through the front windows of the diner. He turned his ear toward the door and his face grew pale, as if he were listening to someone giving him terrible news. It was that serious.
"What's wrong?" Avery asked.
"I have to go, now." He gripped my hand. "We'll talk later. I'll call or text you. But right now, I have to go."
"Why? I don't understand."
"I'll explain later."
With that feeble reply, he slid from the booth, tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and darted out the door, the chime ringing as he rushed to his Jeep Gladiator. Avery glanced at Mel, and he nodded for her to go. She pulled a twenty of her own from her purse and placed it under the saltshaker.
Avery pushed through the door, out into the bright sunlight as Dorian's tires barked, the Jeep racing away from the curb and speeding down the street. By the time she slipped behind the wheel, she craned her head back in the other direction to see him making a hard right turn. He didn't even stop at the red light to make sure it was safe to go. Deputy Colton Diggs would have blue lighted him if he'd been nearby.
Avery put the Bronco into gear and waited for a car to pass. Her heart pounded as she U-turned in the middle of the street. She floored the gas pedal and was fortunate the light flashed green by the time she made it to the intersection. She made the hard right, following Dorian's Jeep, which had a big head start on her, burning away at breakneck speed. Where was he going? What was he doing? And what had he heard? She suspected she knew how he had detected something going wrong. He hadn't checked his phone. It wasn't nothing like that. No. He had heard something that alarmed him and sent off into action.
She couldn't stop her heart from bouncing off her ribcage, trying to rip free from her body to race after Dorian.
She floored the gas pedal, but he had sped too far ahead. His Jeep took a sharp curve, heading up the steep incline that led to the mountains that surrounded Pineridge, the same snaking road that would take them to the spot where her car crash had taken place three months ago. By the time she made it to the curve, Dorian had zoomed around it, his SUV having vanished. Her pulse thumped up her neck and shoved its way into her ears. As she slowed for a twisting turn, her eyes skimmed the road and her breath had run somewhere up ahead of her because she could barely breathe.
Where had he gone?
A hundred yards up ahead, she spotted the end of his Jeep where he'd pulled off the road and parked it in a grove of trees to hide it.
Avery braked hard and stopped on the shoulder. She was out of her vehicle, sprinting toward Dorian's Jeep. But when she reached his driver's side door, she saw nothing but an empty seat.
"Dorian?" she called out. "Where are you? What's wrong?" She couldn't prevent a tear from sliding down her face, but the only emotion she felt was sheer panic.
She yelled out for him again but got nothing but squirrels jumping from limb to limb, some cracks in the treetops. Nothing else but eerie silence.
"He's not here," a man's voice said from behind her. She knew who it was.
She whirled around, breathless and speechless to see Julian Lock.
"I told you not to trust him, Avery. He's off chasing after ghosts when he should be watching over you."
Her blood ran cold, chills rushing over her arms. She glanced around and didn't see a car that had brought Julian Lock up to this spot on the mountain.
"He's out there somewhere. I can hear him." A grim smile swept across his face. "Look behind you."
When she did, she heard a rustle of gravel mixed with pine straw, and when she turned back around, Lock had vanished like yesterday on the mountainside. Avery could do nothing but get back into her vehicle and continue up the elevated road in search of Dorian. A few miles up ahead, she saw the tail end of a yellow school bus perched precariously over the edge of the roadside about to tip over the guardrail, the same location where her accident took place.
As she punched the gas, racing toward the scene, her eyes grew large and round at what she saw. She couldn't believe as the bus defied gravity and lurched backwards, away from a certain plunge down the mountainside, grinding over the metal guardrail, inching back toward the safety of the twisting road. But the trees and bend in road blocked her view of the front of the bus.
When she screeched to a halt, and exited her car, the bus, the rear end facing her had returned miraculously back to the roadway, sitting there, kids screaming, chaos unfolding inside, but no one harmed.
Dorian was nowhere to be seen. And when she reached the bus door, no one, not even the driver could explain what happened. One minute they were on the road, the next they were careening toward the edge, going over, headed toward death, and the next, they were back on the road, safe and sound.
But kids hollered at her from inside the bus.
"It was the Pineridge Hero!" a girl said.
"We know it was him!" a boy shouted.
Another cried out, "No one else could have saved us."
"It had to be him," the first girl added.
The bus driver shrugged his shoulders.
And Avery backed away, having come that close to witnessing the hero in action. There was no doubt in her mind. She sided with the kids. It was the Pineridge Hero, only she believed now more than ever, that she knew who he was, but she still had to prove it.
Tonight.
Until then, she had her next story sitting there on the road in the form of a yellow school bus, filled with frightened kids. After interviewing everyone and after Deputy Diggs arrived to take official statements, when she made it back to where Dorian had pulled off the road, she discovered his Jeep gone, no trace of him anywhere. When she tried to call him, she got no answer, and a text went without a reply too. She could only wait for tonight. She would have everything ready and waiting for the hero and the wolf to reveal themselves under the pale glow of a moon that was waxing closer to full. It would be bright and clear, and she could finally put to rest all doubt and get the proof she needed to identify the man who, quite possibly could be the love of her life.
——
Couldn't help another Clark Kent clip...