the ground before them instead of dematerializing it to show that he spoke the truth. He waited for Tyler to let go of the girl.
Lost in the the desperate feeling of wanting to survive without him having to offer himself in exchange, Kennedy somehow called Damien's athame to her from the ground.
The thing wooshed through the air to land in her open hand.
It glowed.
She turned back inside the shadow's grasp in a flash and stabbed the perplexed Tyler.
The burly shadow's eyes flashed a fiery orange color before a black trail of smoke erupted from within the vacant ears, nose and mouth. The empty body fell lifeless to the ground while Damien and Kennedy stared dumbly at the glowing athame clasped in her trembling hands.
What had she done?
How had she done it?
She threw the glowing knife at him, wanting to get rid of the dirty feeling in her hands as the stinky powdery substance that Tyler had expelled along with the smoke covered them.
The athame fell to the floor with a loud clanging noise. It stopped glowing and Damien picked it up silently as two more shadows came out of the bar's exit door.
“Get in the car!” He killed them quickly too, they had no time to waste. For once, she did exactly as she was told. Kennedy wiped her hands roughly on her green pajama pants and got in through the driver's side of the Charger.
“Damien!” She called out to him in a panic as she fired up the engine. Vermögen's exit door had opened again and out poured more black eyed men.
Damien was instantly covered by them. Kennedy reved up the engine. She had determined to run over the black eyed bastards or die trying when a bright flash of light burst from under the pile of wrestling men.
She stared open-mouthed as they were abruptly thrown back in all directions and a scowling Damien came out through the mob. He ran to the car and got in through the passenger's side.
“What are you waiting for? Go!” He yelled as he closed the door.
She snapped into action and backed the hell up out of that alley, screeching tires and everything like in a bad action movie. Kennedy directed the car into the night at a dead run and left the unconsious shadows behind.
"Are you okay?" She asked worriedly when she remembered that he had been stabbed before the whole thing got really ugly.
"I'll live." He answered blithely as his eyes went back to their original blue color. She looked on as he lifted the front end of his bloddied shirt to gauge the gash that marred the lower part of his abdomen.
“Head to the Cloud Forest down route ninety three.” He told her while exherting himself by trying to conceal his power so that they wouldn't be followed. The car went over a pot hole and Damien hissed out in pain.
She didn't care what he said, he was clearly injured.
The pain was unmatched by his anger. He was furious with himself for being so careless. He'd been so worried about Kennedy that he had been completely blinsided by the shadow as it attacked from behind him. And for what? The seer had been right about her. She hadn't even needed him to save her life.
Why would she keep something like that from him? Stupid mistakes like those, were the cause for the downfall of even the most powerful of beings. He would heal in a few hours, but that was just because he'd merely been lucky, that time.
13. Road to Nowhere
“Well they certainly weren't kidding when they called it the Cloud Forest.” Kennedy muttered to herself as she drove.
Damien was leaning back on the reclined passenger seat listening to the low sounds of music coming from the cell phone on his lap. The color was finally coming back to his face.
She understood that he was injured, but what did he think she was, a human GPS? How was she supposed to find the stupid way out of that back road when she could barely see a foot in front of the headlights?
She knew that she was on the right path to the Cloud Forest, if the dense fog was any indication. It grew thicker every mile that she went deeper into the thinning stretch of rising road. She prayed for the absence of any oncoming traffic because that would be the end of it and all their running and fighting would have been for nothing.
She'd been driving for hours but the combination of dense trees and mist left her wondering if it was still night or if it was morning already.
“There, look at that!” Damien sat up so quickly that his hand flew to hold his stomach in reaction. She was so busy trying to stay awake that she had almost missed the small detour onto a dirt path that was marked by a medium sized wooden sign with he black shape of a man down on one knee holding an outstretched bow and arrow at it's center.
An archer.
Kennedy hit the breaks, the tires slid a little on the moist asphalt. She made the left turn.
“Do you really think this is it?” She asked after a while.
“Either that or that was a sign indicating open season for hunting back there.” Damien's attempt at being the comic relief was too forced but Kennedy knew how truly worried he must have been. It showed in his ever present frown.
The fog began to fade gradually as they went further in. The dusty shortcut lead them to a dead end formed by a semi circle of tall leafy trees with a small abandoned cabin in the middle of the seemingly forgotten place. There appeared to be nothing else around, no other way out save for the way through which they had come.
“Maybe we should stop here for a little while before we go back.” Kennedy was extremely hungry and Damien's wound needed to be tended. Maybe the people that had previously been there had left something that would be of use for her to treat the gash in his stomach behind.
Kennedy slowed the Charger to a stop before the frail looking shack and killed the engine. She was about to place her right foot on the very first step of the thing's beat up porch when the front door snapped open.
She jumped back, half expecting Leatherface. A feeble looking old man came out. His long wispy hair bounced around as he shook a wooden stick at them with one of his spindly hands.
“¿Qué rayos quieren?” The man that she thought looked like an old hermit asked gruffly.
Right, because fragile old men who could barely walk often chose to live in crumbling houses at the middle of nowhere.
“Disculpe, Señor, pero estamos perdidos. ¿Podría decirnos si hay un lugar llamado el Golden Archer por aquí cerca?” She asked the man for help.
Who knew? Maybe he could direct them to where they needed to go. He seemed to be considering something before he glanced at Damien sitting in the car and burst out screaming like a lunatic.
“¡Largo, fuera de aquí chiquillos impertinentes!” He shouted at them to leave in his funny squeaky voice before he was cut off by a nasty coughing fit.
That's what he got for yelling at them at the top of his frail, elderly – and by the sounds of it, also ephisemic – little lungs. He was probably a psychotic schizophrenic whose family had dumped there to die because they were tired of dealing with his psychiatric outbursts.
The scrawny old dude recovered from his near death experience and started to wave his walking stick around again like the mad man that he most likely was. It looked like he could hurt himself by doing that more than anyone else that got in his shaky way.
Damien ran out of the Charger and tried his best to disarm him without using brute force. He got smacked over the head with the homemade cane a few times before he managed to take it away from crazy grandpa's grip.
He held it over his head while the guy jumped trying to reach it. It wasn't a fair draw either, forget for a second that the ancient man looked like he had a thousand years on Damien. The latter was still over a foot taller than the poor old guy.
“A little help here, Riser?” Damien called out to her with one hand on the old man's forehead to keep him distanced while the other held the cane over both of them.
“Nah, you're on your own, Lion.” She said, emphasizing on the nickname Andy had given him in between laughs. The
elderly man stopped struggling.
“Riser? Why didn't ye say so in the first place?” He asked, speaking in english that time.
“Well don't just stand there gaping like idjots, come on in!” He flashed her a toothy grin as he turned and limped back into the crappy little house.
Kennedy looked at Damien and nodded to the side signaling that they should go in after the man. He just gave her a look. Perhaps she was a little crazy after all that had happened, but the guy appeared to be genuinly happy to hear her last name. Besides, Damien could destroy him with a flick of a finger if he tried anything. She raised her shoulders in dismisal.
“Well, I'm going in.” Damien was forced to scramble behind her to make sure that nothing happened to the pigheaded girl.
Inside, she was surprised at how cozy the place looked when compared to the uninviting neglect that decorated the outside. She could see the attempt at creating a home out of the tiny living space.
It only had a single average sized room, much like the berth of her mother's living room and everything was meshed together in that one space. It gave way just for a small door on the left hand corner which she figured would be the bathroom.
There was but one lone rocking chair in the house. It looked like it would give at any minute as it stood over a circular woven rug in ascending shades of green that looked more like woven blades of grass than fabric to her.
She stepped closer and realized that what was covering the splintery wooden floorboards, really was grass.