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Dallas

Present

“You didn’t think I’d walk out of those woods, either, did you?”

His eyes are a deep and desolate abyss. Abandon all hope, they would say.

“I got used to you following me. You really caught me off-guard this time.”

“Yeah?” Bowen flashes a smile that would take me out at the knees if I didn’t already know what kind of malevolence lies behind it.

He’s good at hiding, covering up discomfort with the right look or the right words. But it never lasts. Eventually, it always bubbles over like water onto a hot burner.

“I told you I’d never leave you,” he lets his eyes wander so as to not let on that he’s speaking to me, “since your brother decided to abandon you.”

I glance at the empty plate by my elbow with a steak knife next to the remnants of someone’s blackened salmon. I could grab it, sink it into his eye socket right now, spray the woman next to me with the poison bursting from his diseased brain. But I don’t.

Chess, not checkers.

I don’t even know how to play real chess, but the Queen is sitting across the patio and the stakes are too high to lose focus now. I have to finish the game started long ago, when we were just kids dragged into a nightmare.

“I’m still not alone,” I remind him of my formidable shadow just behind me, “and neither is she,” I say, glancing past him, at the woman with strawberry blonde ringlets cascading over her shoulder.

Bowen studies my face, intent on brushing me off, chalking it up to childish antics. But he can’t shake the feeling that something’s not right, that something’s escaped his control. And it has, because the universe has a way of balancing things out. At least, that’s what my brother says.

I plaster a smile on my face, the one he’s tried so hard to take from me, but never will. I didn’t even know this boy—this man—in the beginning. I wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a crowd, and yet, somehow, he found me. He came looking for me amongst millions of people, for one purpose.

And, soon enough, he’ll find out what a mistake that was.

“Shit, Dallas,” he sneers, “you’ll have to bring me something better than that.”

I glance down at my phone, at the picture I snapped right before he walked over to the bar, unaware that I was waiting for him.

“Hell, Bowen” I reply, a smile dancing behind my eyes, “I’m going to bring you hell.”

And then my thumb falls onto the glass, catapulting the image into the ether, straight to the man in black. The reaper…

Coming to collect.