Hannah Ellis had never considered herself to be much of a runner. In primary school, running circles around the little rubbery track had often been a source of tears for her, as she wasn’t built for the sport in comparison to many of the other slight little girls who often were, and did so with ease. Once in secondary school, she hadn’t had the money for the luxury of organized sports, so she would bike or walk or hike the nearby rural cliffs on her own whenever she felt the need for a bit of alone time where she would escape from home or in the hours between when she worked. There had certainly been a few summers during her life where she had tried her hand at lacing up her trainers and trotting out into the sea-tossed mornings, willing herself to glean a healthy routine from habitually encouraging a bit of cardio.
Of course, these stints had never lasted too long. Hannah often grew bored of the task, or one of her feet would contract some form of angry blister, or she would get hungry for breakfast and turn back before she had even reached two kilometers, hopeful for a soft-boiled egg and some toast--perhaps even with some tomato to top it as well. She had completed a few very casual races in her hometown when she grew to adulthood, but nothing past the five kilometer mark and certainly at a leisurely jogging pace, never pushing herself to actually “race” as most of the other true runners would set their hearts on as they bolted off from the start line and soon dwindled over the horizon in their haste.
For that reason, she found much more joy in going at her own pace when it came to anything physical. She wasn’t competitive enough to take herself too seriously, anyways, and she tended to gravitate towards walking the city stretches or lush parks when she got herself out on the days of the year that the sun made its dramatic appearances. Warmth on her face, her lungs drawing in clean, fresh air--those were the moments that gave Hannah a peace that she had never found in the chaos and ferocity of high-impact exercise and high-stakes sports that running often entailed.
When Hannah bolted from the back door of the cafe that afternoon, however, she found herself transforming into the absolute picture of an olympic gold medalist. Forgoing her knapsack and her rainboots where they sat neatly at the backdoor, and slamming a thigh haphazardly into the hamper of dirty linens that she had abandoned by the door jam to await the laundry--sending a tidal wave of rags overflowing out onto the linoleum in her haste--Hannah broke into a sprint that even she herself hadn’t known herself capable of.
Rain was cascading down from the sky--soaking her t-shirt, waterlogging her jeans, saturating her canvas trainers, fogging up her glasses--it pelted her skin and the top of her head as she flew down the alleyway that stretched out beyond the back door of the cafe, heading straight for the cross street of Chadwick, her knees pumping in a frantic blur. Behind her, she heard a shout, and she knew vaguely that the man in the peacoat had reached the back door and was screaming after her, and that fact sent her heart into even more of a fever pitch than it already was against the strain of her speed. She saw the approaching sidewalk of Chadwick, and a few oblivious pedestrians crossing the street in front of the alley’s mouth, and she felt the threat of tears burn at her eyes through the onslaught of the rain invading behind the frames of her glasses. There were marked slapping sounds of heavy footfalls behind her in the alley--he was chasing after her--and she careened towards the end of the alley, her arms flying wildly at her sides as she gasped for air, trying to decide which way to turn when she skidded onto the slickened cobbles.
She reached the alley’s mouth, and she slammed so hard into the air that it knocked the wind out of her for the second time that day, causing her to ricochet backwards and hit the gravel of the road, her shoulders cracking violently and her whole body becoming splattered with mud and dirty runoff. She brought her hands to her forehead--the place where the impact had been so hard that her teeth had literally clacked together, nearly chipping--and she gazed up at nothing. The open space of the alley’s end was unoccluded by any structure--it was merely a slice of afternoon gray light between the two towering apartment buildings forming it--and yet she had just felt as if she had sprinted headfirst into a brick wall.
The smell of ash through the rain pierced her senses, and she saw something in the air ripple, even as the rain distorted her vision and she fought through spots of starlight encroaching on her periphery. She scrambled to her feet and lurched forwards to the alley mouth, and as she reached out for the seam between alley and Chadwick, her hands met cold, solid air, completely impenetrable as she pressed a palm too it, then slammed a fist, and then began to kick at it in a frenzy. Her lungs spasmed, aching in their hunger for all her lost breath.
“Help me!” Hannah choked out through a heaving shriek as a pedestrian walked by the alley’s end, his umbrella bending under the weight of the rain. “Sir! I’m trapped!”’
The man kept on walking at his slouched over pace, completely ignoring her assault against the invisible wall that she threw herself at. “Help!” Hannah screamed, her throat shredding. Another walker sauntered by with her small child at her hip, hurrying through the rain and tugging her son’s hood up over his head more snuggly. They gave no indication that they were aware of her presence in the slightest as they moved by, and Hannah, beginning to feel her sanity fray, clawed at the air that separated her from Chadwick street, howling like a caged animal and beating her hands as hard as she could into whatever horrible nightmare she found herself trapped inside of, the ice of the rain and the blinding pain in her arms tethering her to reality. “I’m dreaming!” She cried, palms stinging with pain, “I’m dreaming! Wake up!”
It wasn’t until a hand closed around her wrist and yanked her backwards that she realized if she did not fight, she would be in quite a predicament, invisible wall or not. Letting herself be peeled from the wall, she whirled around in the man’s grip and she promptly brought her knee upwards at an angle that she knew would incapacitate him for at least enough time for her to wriggle free. The man had been anticipating her action, however, and he used his other hand to knock her leg aside, neatly protecting himself from her near-perfect aim. In his haste to deflect her, Hannah caught him by surprise when she used her free hand to send her palm up under his face to drive the heel of it into his awaiting nose.
“Shit!” He cried out, a gush of blood leaving his nostrils and staining her sleeves as he clamped the hand he had used to push her thigh aside over his face. Hannah, seizing her window of opportunity, stamped her foot down on one of his boots, causing him to stumble backwards and crumble to a kneel with a snarl.
She darted to the left, but his grasp around her wrist was ironclad. He refused to release her, sending her falling to her knees in the puddles beneath their feet, the gravel cutting into the skin of her knees through her jeans.
“Let me go!” She yelped, his fingernails digging into her wrist. “Leave me be!” Tethered together on the ground, Hannah turned onto her back in desperation and tried to kick at him as he lurched forward, wrenching her towards him and clamoring in her direction, climbing over top of her and using his body weight to pin her down.
Hannah, acutely aware of just how badly her luck had turned, tapped into the adrenaline that was pulsating through her and equipped every last bit of her strength to scream and to flail underneath him, her pounding heart a living beast in the back of her throat. He was, of course, a great deal stronger than she was, and as he overtook her and held her firmly on her back the cobbles, she knew that physically fighting him was not going to end with her being the triumphant victor. His legs on hers, his hands holding her arms, she let out a last wild, horrified scream.
She understood only a few truths as he forced her down into the dirty puddles of alleyway mud and stone: no one could hear her, no one could help her, and she was considerably close to passing out as his vengeful eyes burned above her, blood still streaming from his nose and dripping down onto her face.
It was then that the man did something that startled her out of her terrified, feral state and caused her to blanch with surprise. He released one of her arms and he held a hand inches from her forehead, his fingers splayed out as if he were straining to reach her skin, yet holding back. He muttered something under his breath--something fast and gruff--his teeth clenched together in furious concentration, his brow knit. Hannah, completely confused, went cross-eyed as she fixated on his trembling fingers hovering over her face. He hissed something again under the strain of breath it was taking for him to hold her down, and Hannah found that she couldn’t understand a single thing he was whispering--almost as if he were rapidly skipping through sentences in another language--it sounded like marbles in his mouth; entirely ineloquent, and for all intensive purposes, even slightly funny.
But then, just as Hannah was certain he was going to wrap up his mysterious pre-murder prayers and strangle her into the pavement, the man reeled backwards, bracing himself over her on his hands and knees, his face slackening from rage to puzzlement. She stopped straining when he did so, and she blinked through the incessant rain splattering off the shoulders of his peacoat and onto her glasses to find that he was studying her face with those harrowing blue eyes, examining her with an intensity that she couldn’t quite comprehend through the vicious throbbing of her pulse and the ever-growing urge to be sick all over the alleyway.
“What are you?” His words were pointed, even through his labored breathing. Hannah couldn’t save her brows from shooting to the top of her hairline.
“What?” She squawked through a cough that spasmed from her exhausted lungs, the shock of his change in demeanor striking her into speech. The man continued to stare at her, his blood-flecked face vacillating between confusion and discomfiture. “What the hell is the meaning of all this?”
“Answer the question!”
“I have no idea what you’re even asking me!” Hannah tried to roll him off of her, but he easily kept his weight atop her. “Who are you? Why are you trying to hurt me?”
“Drop the act immediately, or things are going to be very unpleasant for you,” he spoke through gritted teeth. “You are testing my patience.”
“If you’ll be so kind as to tell me what act I’m supposedly upholding, I’d be happy to shake it off!” She kicked out a leg, and he snarled. “Until then, you are literally a psychopath holding a young woman against her will down in the mud in the middle of an alley!”
The man blinked, feigning some sort of recognition, and he shook his head, sending rainwater flying. “You have four seconds to tell me who you are, and what you just saw at that shop.” His eyes narrowed once more, “lie, and I swear I’ll regain the focus to end this.”
Hannah swallowed hard, something in her chest seeming to warn her against giving him anything but the truth in that moment. “I’m Hannah,” she croaked. “I work there.”
“I know that,” he growled. “Tell me what happened before the window broke.”
“Will you please get off me before I drown in this puddle?” Hannah looked down at where his legs were still pinning her to the pavement. “This is not exactly the best position for a conversation.”
“Tell me right now, or I will kill you,” his eyes flashed above her, horrible sparking pinpoints of fury in the afternoon gray. Hannah felt a cold sweat break out, a feeling quite different from the rainwater she was absolutely and abhorrently soaked by.
“Smoke,” Hannah shook her head. “It was so thick that it clouded the front door and then started to eat up the whole window…but it was pushing in on the glass--like it was trying to get inside.” She gave a strangled sort of disbelieving laugh, and his face twisted with displeasure. “When I tried to leave out the back door, it was coming through the keyhole. Then someone outside slammed into the door and dented it inward.”
“You saw someone?” He asked her, eyes glinting with the question.
“Well, no. But it looked as if someone was shouldering themselves inside. I fell backwards onto the floor, and then the window shattered.”
The man didn’t speak, but Hannah felt his grip on her loosen. He continued to watch her with an expression that was both appraising and convoluted. She shifted under his weight, and she winced in pain at the place where his knee was overtop of her thigh. “My legs are going numb,” she moaned.
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“This…smoke,” the man said sharply. “Have you seen it anywhere else before?”
She stared at him with what she expected was a very sarcastic countenance. “I’ve seen smoke before.”
“Smoke that was trying to kill you?” His words sent a jolt of fear through her, but she didn’t understand why, as they were semi-hysterical. “Smoke that was breaking doors to get to you?”
“You’re daft,” Hannah breathed. “Listen here; how did the window break? Did a car strike the shop?” She was silent for a beat, and then her eyes widened. “And what on earth is wrong with this damned alleyway?”
“You’re…actually Common?” The man breathed, disgust riddling his face. Hannah’s mouth opened in shock at the insult. “How is this possible?”
“And you, sir, are rude,” Hannah grunted.
“I don’t understand,” the man mused, more to himself than to Hannah. “It should have worked.”
“Are you going to clue me in, or--?”
The man suddenly shot a hand up to her forehead again with violently stiff, splayed fingers, his face pinched with concentration. Again, a muttered string of odd words fell from his lips, and Hannah somehow found herself on the verge of laughter. “What in God’s name are you doing?” She asked, the corners of her mouth fighting to stay in a frown. “Stop being so weird!”
“What are you doing?” The man exclaimed in total frustration, bringing both of his hands up in an exasperated motion, sitting back on his heels and releasing his weight from her legs. Hannah scrambled backwards, acutely aware of just how sodden her entire body was with rain and with mud. “You’re not warded.”
“...You ask a lot of confusing questions,” Hannah snapped, trying to get her numb legs underneath her through the barrage of pins and needles that were dancing beneath her skin. “I can’t imagine that you really expect logical answers when you insist upon speaking in gibberish!”
He watched her, a wrinkle of unease on his brow. “Something isn’t right.”
She swallowed a bark of laughter, “what the devil do you mean? Is this a usual encounter for you?”
“Will you please shut up?” He pushed his thumb and his forefinger into the bridge of his nose, as if fighting an oncoming sneeze. “I need to think.”
“I’ll happily leave you to it, then,” Hannah made to stand, but one of her feet slipped in the puddle she had been submerged in, and he flinched with the spray of water she sent in his direction.
The man, a note of anger flaring in him once more, stood sharply, and he towered over her from where she knelt on the ground. “Get up,” he commanded. “You’re coming with me.”
“As if!” Hannah shot to her feet and swayed for a moment, trying to get circulation back into her ankles. She moved backwards, turning over her shoulder to run, but she stumbled as the man grabbed her arm and held her there. “Help!” She screamed down the length of the alley, but the panic in her stomach reminded her that she had just previously been beating on a wall of invisible bricks shrieking like a banshee and no one had even bothered to glance in her direction. She figured that she had to adjust her expectations--if this man truly wanted to kill her, perhaps he would have up and done it by now--but she had no interest in going anywhere with him, seeing as this was all beginning to feel like one deeply involved nightmare that she was apparently incapable of freeing herself from.
There was a sudden burst of orange light behind her that cut through the afternoon gray, and when she looked over her shoulder, she saw the man’s hands had begun to glow where they were making contact with her t-shirt, and her skin was warming where he touched her. She gasped, lurching hard away from him, but his grip was strong and he held her there. Soft tendrils of light bloomed from his palms, enriching her arms down to the wrists.
“What…” Hannah felt faint with disbelief as the wisps from his palms swirled themselves into links of iridescent chains around her wrists, shackling her hands together in glimmering lengths of solid, warm light. When he took his hands off of her, he came away holding a strand of the light between his fingers--a goddamn leash.
“I’m taking you with me,” he said, his voice low and biting. He jabbed another accusing finger at her, “you are challenging, even for me. But I need answers, and if Emery has to be the one to drag them out of you, then so be it.”
He yanked on the chain he held, and Hannah found herself staggering towards him, the strength of his tug not nearly as extreme as the indescribable shove that the chains gave in their propulsion of moving her closer. It was as if something inside of her had reacted to the tightness around her wrists, unable to resist some force that had her stumbling after him as he turned around and began to drag her along towards the mouth of the alley that she had only moments before been pounding against in vain.
“This is lunacy!” Hannah cried as her traitorous body was unable to fight back against his casual leading that felt to her as if he were heaving her along behind a speeding automobile. “What sort of hellish dream is this?”
“Stop talking,” the man groaned, lugging her right up beside him and forcing one of her arms to link with his. It was then that Hannah noticed that he was starkly dry, and that his peacoat and trousers were no longer marred by thick amounts of runoff and mud as they had been when they were rolling about on the ground of the alley. His hair was pressed, his shirt was buttoned, and he looked entirely unphased--and even more uninterested--by everything that had just taken place between them. Hannah started to speak--completely flabbergasted by her discovery--but she was silenced by the even more shocking realization that she herself was comfortably dry, with her t-shirt and jeans looking clean and pressed and her ragged braid somehow pleated neatly down her back as if she had just finished tying it back as she had that morning.
“Our clothes,” Hannah sputtered, gawking.
“I’m not going to catch a cold while attached to you,” he gave her a sour look. His nose was no longer covered in blood--in fact, he looked sharp and clean and remarkably unrumpled. He scowled, “in any case, you’re welcome.”
“I’m going to be sick,” she said through a flash of sickly heat that ran up her collarbones. Her head was spinning, and she was curious as to how long the maniac that she was now shackled to was going to put up with walking a girl down the road who was keen on projectile vomiting. Then, she considered the possibility of vomiting onto him--the nicest idea she had come up with thus far.
“Listen to me,” he said in a hushed voice as he closed a fist around the ethereal little chain, and Hannah instantly felt her body become completely incapable of fighting back as he strode from the alley’s mouth onto Chadwick with her appearing to lean easily on his arm. “I don’t expect any of this to make sense to your Common mind, but right now you’d be smart to walk alongside me and to keep your loud mouth shut.” He turned them to the right, guiding her down the sidewalk towards Horseferry. The rain had waned once more as the dark thunderheads roiled on in the fading afternoon light, becoming nothing more than a sprinkle that dusted the tops of Hannah’s shoulders. “Whatever was trying to get to you at that cafe could still be lurking about in the shadows around us, and I am the only thing that kept it from blasting through those walls and devouring you. I’ll be quick to remind you of that if you decide to run your tongue as we stroll.”
They moved up Horseferry, and Hannah could see the twinkling lights of Strutton Ground Market beginning to flick on ahead of them. Pedestrians moved this way and that around them, faces hidden behind collars and under hats, each of them hustling by Hannah and the man in the peacoat completely oblivious to the fact that Hannah was bound by a seemingly shimmering set of manacles. Hannah swallowed hard, her throat dry. Admittedly, she felt as if this dream was beginning to get a little out of hand. As they walked, a riot of panic was beginning to take hold of all of her senses--this man who had positively been on the verge of murdering her was now taking her somewhere unknown--nightmare or not, the terror that was welling up from within her was choking her with emotion that felt all too real.
“You got rid of all the smoke?” Hannah asked in what she hoped was a casual tone, but it cracked violently with fear as it left her lips. “You shattered that massive window?”
“No one else saw,” he murmured. They were striding through the Market center now, still moving briskly on towards the four-way at Broadway. “I ensured that.”
“How could that possibly be?” Hannah was making desperate, frightened eyes at every human being that they pushed past in their path, but it was almost if no one could see them at all--not one person looked up to meet her gaze. The smell of street food from the stands made her stomach grumble; she remembered faintly that she hadn’t had time to eat lunch during her busy workday. “And…something was trying to get to me?”
“I told you to be quiet,” he hissed. They passed through the end of the Market and stepped onto Broadway, with the man picking up the pace considerably, making Hannah almost skip along beside him in his careening. The gray light of the rainclouds was beginning to give way to blinding beams of sun that shot through any crevice it could find in the spread of gloom, and Hannah saw a few streetlamps ahead of them begin to sputter, waking from their nocturnal slumber and illuminating the car-crammed streets with dim yellow sparks of light. She wondered if she was going to wake in a cold sweat after all of this cardio that her mind seemed to be putting her through during this nightmare. She also wondered how long she was going to be able to convince herself that she was actually dreaming until total hysteria took over at the state of her current predicament.
“What’s your name?” She asked him after a few long moments of strained silence, and he tensed on her arm. When he said nothing, she bit her lip. “Let me guess--you won’t tell me that, either.”
They reached the cross street of Broadway, took a hard left, and Hannah understood that he was leading them towards the descending steps of the tube station at St. James’s Park. She made a motion to pull against him, her heart racing in her ears and begging her to make some sort of effort to escape, but a mere tightening of his fingers on that blasted orange anomaly around her wrists had her practically somersaulting forward alongside him, all resistance she mustered being promptly incapacitated. She yelped with surprise, and she could practically hear him rolling his eyes as he lugged her down the steps and they crossed to the entry kiosks. The man reached into his coat pocket and fished out a train card, and Hannah snorted with a strained laugh at the absurdity of the sight of it.
“All these performatives, and yet you need a train card to ride the Underground?”
He sighed, exasperated, and he yanked her through with him, the bar whirling around on its hinge as they went through and smacking ruefully into Hannah’s back. She glared at it over her shoulder as they hustled onward down the hall in the direction of the platforms. As they neared the platform leading to the green line of District, Hannah began to try to step on her own feet. If she could generate a sharp enough pain, perhaps she could pull herself from the throngs of this nightmare that was staying well past its welcome. The man held her upright even in her tripping gait, and before she knew it, they were standing at the edge of the platform, just behind the yellow line that was painted strictly before the gap, cheerily exclaiming to the masses to mind it. People were everywhere in their commutes--the platform was buzzing with conversation, and someone was even busking with a guitar nearby--but as they stood there with their toes brushing the line, Hannah knew with horrible absolution that she was still unseeable by everyone who crowded around them, all of them impatiently awaiting the train’s imminent arrival
“Are you going to kill me?” Hannah asked the man as she turned her head to face him, her voice brittle. If he was planning on it, she at least wanted him to give her the facts, and to be blunt about it. Perhaps even the shock of that would send her sitting up in bed, awakened at last.
“Not yet,” the man answered coldly, staring straight ahead in annoyance.
“What are you planning, then?”
His lip curled up. “Not of your concern.”
“I believe it might be,” Hannah heard the bleat of the train’s horn somewhere far down the dark tunnel off to their left, and the crowd around them buzzed with electricity. The smell of something burning met her nostrils.
“Will you at least tell me where we are going?”
“No.”
Hannah sighed. “This is the most exhausting nightmare I’ve had in a while.”
When she said this, he finally turned to meet her eye, and her stomach dropped out from under her upon seeing those blue eyes narrow with a breath of unexpected sympathy. What was written on his face was all it took to give her the truth that she had been fearing since she saw him amid a sea of glass in the rubble of the cafe.
“Hannah,” he said, horribly soft. “This is no dream.”
The platform rumbled under their feet, announcing the approaching train, and the wave of people around them seemed to press in closer in their anticipation of the mad rush-hour mob they were about to take part in to shove themselves into the belly of the metal beast. Hannah felt her pulse thundering all down her arms and legs, a bird hovering in midair, wings beating frantically--fruitlessly.
She blinked at him--it was all she could think to do--and he shook his head imperceptibly. “Now, do exactly as I say.”
The train roared into the station and whirled by in a fluid mass of light and vibrant colors. The man broke her gaze and stared into its sprinting length, his long peacoat being tossed to the side by the wind it kicked up and sent all throughout the crowd. Hannah’s hair whipped around her face, and in the racket of it all, she saw his mouth moving as he spoke to her, nodding his head at the tube. She faintly heard him through ears that were being choked out by mirthy delirium, sending her underwater in the immediate shocking reality of the concrete platform her two feet were planted upon.
“Step forward.”
He took one great stride in front of himself, his long leg reaching over the line and into the empty air of the gap.
When Hannah could finally understand that she was also mercilessly moving in the same direction as him and that her own foot was hanging over the edge, her body ready to meld with the speeding train, she let out a wild, uncontrollable scream.