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Chapter Three

  The minivan came to a sluggish stop. Aidan turned to look out the window with bleary eyes, hoping to see the looming pines that he knew surrounded Uncle Quinn’s home. He would much rather be in the forests than stuck in the boring death-riddled desert.

  Nothing but dehydration and dust, he thought as he looked at the sparse landscape.

  “Ulllllgh,” he moaned from the back, turning over only to get a fresh waft of rat urine. “Gross!” And he turned back toward the window to stare in disappointment at the dingy gas station’s half-lit yellow and red sign: Jim’s Stop-n-Gas.

  “Where the heck are we?” he complained while rubbing his eyes with his palms.

  “Calm down, Aid,” his mom cautioned, fumbling around in her purse.

  “Just outside of Boise, and this is going to be our last stop until we get to your uncle’s, so you better make sure to use the facilities now.” His dad carefully checked the GPS—a birthday present from the family—or what mom liked to call his fourth child. “Yep, just a straight shot for the rest of the night. Only about six more hours ‘til we’re at Winchester Lake.”

  “Six more hours and it will be time for breakfast,” Aidan muttered. He slipped on his Chucks and squirmed between his brother and sister’s bucket seats.

  He slid open the minivan’s door and slouched into the chilly darkness, grateful he kept his faded grey sweatshirt on during the ride. Now he put the hood up over his frigid ears, tucking his frizzy red hair—or what he called his insulation—into its cave.

  He stretched until his back popped, but he also heard the faint whirr of the passenger window of the van descending. Internally he sighed and thought, Now what?

  “Aid?”

  Yep, Mom was going to give him “the rules.” Again.

  “Mom!” he spun around and snapped before she could start. “I’m fifteen years old! I know not to talk to strangers or wander off into the desert alone! Jeez, can you give me a break?”

  He turned his back in a huff, not quite sure of where to storm off. He shuffled momentarily, long enough for his mom to have the last word.

  “I was just going to give you some money to go buy yourself a treat, hon. But if you want to be that way—” and all he heard was the sliding of the window as it closed.

  “Whatever,” he muttered, kicking at random stones in the dirt parking lot of the crummy gas station.

  This looks exactly like the kind of place where some serial killer abducts his next victim, he thought as he scanned the rusty two-pump station. There was only one working outdoor light that randomly flickered.

  He was surprised that there wasn’t any creepy hillbilly music playing on the outdoor speakers—just silence. But then he wasn’t sure which scenario was more unnerving.

  He wandered over to the side of the gas station’s main building and stopped to fidget with the slowly dripping, cracked water hose which suffered from years of neglect. He sniffed the end of the hose and caught a distinct iron smell.

  “That’s nasty,” he scowled as he flung the hose back down with the rest of the coil.

  After considering how rundown the outside of the place looked, Aidan decided he would rather take a chance and relieve himself outside rather than risk using the urinal and suffering death by cockroaches. Of course, the back of the building did not look promising either. As he searched the desert for a nearby tree to utilize, he heard faint shuffling behind him followed by the distinct snap of a twig.

  Someone was sneaking up on him.

  Dear Lord, I’m gonna die, he thought, panic rising in his chest. He assessed the possibility of an escape route but knew it would be too risky to cut behind the back of the gas station.

  Slightly more scuffling of feet behind him, picking up its pace.

  Yes, it is definitely an it. All things that go bump in the night are its.

  He didn’t know what else to do, so he spun around and feigned his best kung-fu pose at the intruder.

  “Heeee-ya!” he bellowed, toe pointed and arms outstretched, eyes closed and his face contorted, awaiting attack.

  “Waaaaaaaaaaa-AAAAAAA!” he wailed a rising crescendo, flipping his hands like they were fan blades. He dared to take a peek at his attacker.

  Rather than fending off a killer chainsaw cowboy, he came face-to-face with pudgy-faced Fallon who squealed with laughter.

  “Great.” Aidan lowered his arms and partially raised leg, attempting to act as though nothing was out of the ordinary. “Why are you sneaking up on me like that?”

  “Nice moves, Twinkle Toes!” Fallon erupted in laughs again, his face turning red, belly shaking with glee.

  “Shut up, FAT-ton,” Aidan shot back.

  “Gee, Aid, I haven’t heard that one before.”

  Aidan stared at his annoying brother who stood with gut sticking out. Dwayne was precariously perched between Fallon’s neck and shoulder, nesting in the extra fabric of his jacket. Dwayne stared at Aidan with bulging pink eyes.

  He should have named that thing Sméagol. Creepy.

  “Well, have fun looking out for werewolves! I’m goin’ inside!” Fallon turned around, gave one last face, and pranced off around the corner, Dwayne spinning around on his shoulder and tittering what sounded like insults in Aidan’s direction.

  “Werewolves,” he mocked. “What a dork.”

  Shrugging off his brother’s interruption, Aidan casually looked over his shoulder and scanned his perimeter—partially to make sure that no one else saw his freak-out session and also to make sure no one else was around so that he could finish his “business.”

  There were not many trees for Aidan to choose from—only one scraggly Russian olive surviving on the outer border of the gas station—but he managed to find privacy behind its tangled boughs.

  Aidan remembered his key rule for urinating in an unknown location (he learned enough from his hours of playing combat games and reading books on surviving the zombie apocalypse). Number one rule is don’t start whistling to yourself because: one, it tells any would-be attackers your exact location; two, it drowns out the barely perceptible warning noises of any ninjas sneaking up on you; three, it lessens your level of alertness.

  As he glanced about him to keep an eye out, Aidan noticed movement atop a nearby thirty-foot pole. He stared above the glow of the streetlight; his eyes strained in the glare. He heard some kind of swishing noise.

  “Is that a bat?” he muttered to himself, eyes squinted.

  True, his first thought about the bat led to visions of vampires surrounding him in the middle of nowhere. But then he remembered that some bats carried rabies, and he mentally rushed himself to finish peeing so he could just get back inside the van and be done with the stupid drive.

  Click-clack-clack-click.

  He sharply turned his head back to the hovering light, and as his eyes adjusted, he thought he saw wing-movement above the dingy beam.

  His thoughts returned to earlier that evening, riding in the van, and the shadows he swore he saw in the corner of his eyes, rushing alongside the van and then disappearing whenever he sneaked a look. In his mind he hoped it wasn’t, but his heart furiously thumping in his chest would not be convinced otherwise.

  Could it be that there was some kind of desert monster chasing him, following him, just like some creature out of the pages of that Odyssey book his English teacher made him read last year?

  He also remembered his childhood fear of the dark and how getting up to go to the bathroom at night always freaked him out. Nightmares always brought on his restless nights.

  I’m fifteen. It’s nothing. I’m not afraid of anything. He brushed his fear away, dismissing the thought as childhood paranoia.

  Suddenly, a flurry of movement and the obscured form took flight, gliding from the light post, and landed eight feet away from Aidan up in the tree boughs.

  “Jeez!” he breathed relief. “Just a stupid bird.” Aidan laughed to himself, feeling a little silly for his c
aution and fright.

  He zipped up and stared at the bird, which oddly, stared right back at him. It tilted its head in almost robotic fashion. The black beady eyes shone back at him, even in the darkness of night. He knew the bird was a raven or a crow, but he didn’t really know how to tell the difference. His eighth grade science teacher said something about the size difference, but Aidan couldn’t have cared less about Mr. Shankel’s obsession with all things avian. Mr. Shankel’s classroom was packed with various cages housing his precious pets, while on the tops of every cabinet were stuffed versions of his living displays. Aidan thought this combination of living and dead was the creepiest part of his science teacher’s collection.

  Aidan thought that the raven fascination was a prerequisite to becoming a teacher. His English teacher would never stop talking about the symbolism of blackbirds, but Aidan still struggled to remember if it was a crow or a raven that was the subject of some famous poem. Something his teacher said about the bird’s speech capabilities, size, common symbolism, and blah-blah-blah. He couldn’t keep it all straight. Birds were birds.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be able to learn how to talk or something?” He said it more to prove Mr. Shankel wrong than to converse with the bird.

  The bird tilted its head the other way and clicked its beak together. Click-clack-clack-click.

  “Yeah, just as I thought. Genius.”

  The black bird kept staring at him, kept tilting its head from side to side like some kind of bored, caged parakeet. Aidan was sure that in a second it would start pacing up and down the branch, bobbing its head. But the bird remained stationary, except its head tilting in the night, its marble eyes staring down at Aidan. The bird, the dark, being in the middle of nowhere—it all started to weird him out. But as Aidan reached to grab a pebble to hurl at the bird, he heard his dad calling his name from across the parking lot.

  He took off toward the minivan, grateful to be leaving Jim’s Stop-n-Gas, but the bird stared on.

  Click-clack-clack-click.