CHAPTER ONE - WINTER WARM NO MORE
Disclaimer: I do not own Roswell or its characters; I leave things like that to the WB and whoever else would like to claim them. This story is purely for enjoyment, and is a non-profit venture all the way. Please don't sue me; I have no money anyway, nor anything of significant value, except my computer, which you'd have to pry from my cold, dead fingers.
Summary: While travelling in northern Oregon, one of Liz's visions leads the Roswell Six into what looks, on first glance, like a murder - but what leads into them becoming enmeshed into something much bigger, and much more dangerous.
===============================================
She woke him at nearly midnight, gripping his arm convulsively in her sleep, jarring him out of a peaceful sleep. He jerked awake, looked over at her. She was lying flat on her back, pressed hard into the pillow, eyes wide and face shining with perspiration. He pushed himself up on one elbow, and she turned her head slightly.
Her voice was hoarse and strained. "It's a murder," she said.
* * *
The night was bitter cold - the kind that crept up the sleeves of their coats and the hems of their pants and froze them to the bone before they were outside ten minutes. An unseasonably cold night for the West coast, for Northern Oregon, even in late March. Earlier, it had been sunny and warm, but now the temperature had dropped so low that their breath clouded the air as they passed.
"Are you sure?" he asked, trying to keep up with her. "Are you sure it was here?"
Liz Parker Evans nodded firmly, not looking back at her husband, and kept moving. "I'm sure. Have I ever been wrong before?"
Max sighed, and shot her a rueful smile. "No. Stupid question. Never mind."
A chainlink fence loomed up ahead of them, massive and stretching off to the left and right without interruption. Beyond, the crowded urban jungle dropped away, and on the other side of the fence a forest stretched away beyond perception. Somewhere out there, somewhere beyond the nearest line of trees, someone was going to die.
Liz stopped at the fence, fingers twined into the wire, staring helplessly through it. "There's no way..." she began, softly, but then she grinned, rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. "God - stupid me. Go to it, your Highness."
Max returned the grin, then raised his right hand - the fence melted away before his touch, a hole appearing in the inpenetrable barrier, large enough for them to pass through, into the woods.
Liz laughed silently at herself again as they passed under the line of the trees. All these years with Max around, and she still thought in terms of human limitations - still forgot, on occasion, just how little they affected her anymore, affected any of them.
After all, her husband was an alien. So was her sister-in-law, and so was their friend Michael Guerrin. All of them had been unceremoniously delivered to this planet about fifty-five years ago, the real cause of the famous Roswell UFO. That notwithstanding, none of their group was older than twenty - they had been born some time after the crash, birthed from a pod chamber installation set there by their mother.
Not to mention that Liz herself had powers too - of varying degree and form - and she had somewhat more recently developed the ability to see into the future... albeit not always coherently.
::Which brings us to the here and now,:: Liz thought, reaching for Max's hand in the dark as they half-ran across the rocky ground, going deeper and deeper into the woods. They'd been forced to leave Roswell, their home town, shortly after graduation, in the wake of a government investigation into their identities. Now they ate, slept, breathed their life on the road, "doing good deeds and avoiding the law", as Liz had once put it, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Six comprised their group - herself, Max, Max's sister Isabel, Michael, as well as Michael's girlfriend Maria and their friend Kyle.
Tonight was one of those deeds - a vision had awoken Liz earlier, a vision of someone being murdered in these very woods. It was a stranger vision than she'd ever seen, full of confused and chaotic images, and a terror whose form and nature she could not define.
And a sense of sheltered power, seething just beyond her reach or touch.
She hadn't told Max that part - just the bare-bones necessities. That someone would die tonight, without their intervention. She hadn't told him the rest because she wasn't sure what it meant.
But she knew, with a certainty that bordered on madness, that it was waiting for them, somewhere ahead.
Then something happened that made her breath catch in her throat - a stab of something like pain, but not quite, that tore across her forehead. She stumbled, stopped, one hand clapped to her head.
Max turned back, bent down. "Liz? What's wrong?"
She concentrated on breathing, on opening her eyes. "I... I don't know," she said, struggling upright. "It was... do you feel it?"
Max turned his face to look ahead. "I don't know either," he said. "But you're right. There's -- something there. Something powerful, other than what we know about."
They shot each other a worried look, joined hands, and set off at a run again, a sense of urgency tugging at both of them.
* * *
In the heart of the forest, the moonlight cut a swath through the canopy of tall cedars to shine down into a clearing about twenty feet across. The moonlight also fell on the face of the girl crouched on the ground at the clearing's edge, on the steel of an unsheathed blade, on pooling blood on the ground.
Clenching her teeth, drawing a breath, the girl sprang to her feet, and threw herself at the assailant. She just barely cleared the fallen form on the ground between them before her shoulder connected with his chest. She was rewarded with a grunt from him, proving she'd at least surprised him. But then his hand closed around her upper arm, and wrenched, hard. With a stifled curse, she felt the shoulder pop out of joint, even as she lost her footing and slid, on her back, two or three feet across the grassy ground before she found her rhythm again and rolled back to her feet. He was stronger than she, larger, and she was running out of time. Now that he'd seen her, he'd try to keep her from leaving, try to...
She felt him moving before she saw him - his right foot shifted as he put his weight on it, and he took a sweeping step forward, driving the blade downward --
-- into suddenly vacant turf, as she had rolled to the left an instant before. Now she stood three feet behind him, one hand raised wardingly before her while the other hung useless at her side.
"Enough," she said, breathing hard. "That's --"
She didn't get a chance to finish the sentence - because he roared and ran at her, the blade brandished before him a blur.
Heaving an angry sigh, she stepped back on her left foot and turned halfway, readying to spin out of the way --
"Gyaahh!"
The man's yell surprised her enough to make her lose her balance, and she stumbled back a few steps before she found it again, and looked up, the right hand coming up again, fingers spread, palm outward, power coursing toward the outstretched fingers in readiness to defend, as she looked wildly about the clearing --
-- and saw her attacker lying motionless on the ground a little distance away.
She blinked down at the man, who was now clearly unconscious, then looked up, across the clearing. A young man and woman stood there, hand in hand. The young man, dark in hair and eyes, had his right hand raised in what was obviously a gesture of warding. Both were staring at her as if she were something rather strange and dangerous.
She certainly noticed that neither she nor the young man had dropped their defenses. Which was strange, because most people - at least those who led an existence vaguely similar to normality - wouldn't have so immediately associated the gesture of spread, warding hand with any kind of real danger.
The fact that he had meant one of two things - either he thought she might be a threat to him, or he was a threat to her.
The latter possibility made her narrow her eyes at the pair standing by the trees.
"Who are you?"
She paused as she realized that both of them had said that at the same time, and raised a sardonic eyebrow at him. "Look," she said. "You don't zap me, and I won't flatten you."
He seemed to consider this - and she took the opportunity to take account of him. She blinked in faint surprise when she found that she couldn't read him - his mind was sealed in a shield more inpenetrable than she'd ever seen in a human, even a telepath.
::Which means that maybe he's not human,:: pointed out some disconnected part of her mind.
The girl, on the other hand, was rawly open, and touching her mind brought a flood of images and sounds rushing out. Hastily, she slammed the connection shut, and the girl jerked visibly, as if she'd felt it.
::Well, no doubt about her species, anyway.::
Slowly, the young man lowered his hand. She did the same, and then dropped into a crouch next to the second of the fallen forms, feeling for a pulse, checking for breath.
There was none. She clenched her jaw, closed the corpse's eyes.
::Damnit. If only I'd gotten here sooner...::
"Who was she?"
She looked up. That was the girl, dark eyes anxious, dusky skin a little pale against the dark brown of her hair.
"A friend," she answered, biting back the sigh of frustration. "An unfortunate friend."
She stood up, dusting her hands off on the legs of her jeans. The man still looked suspicious - no, she amended, really more of a boy. He had a boy's face, though his eyes told of something more, something darker and more painful, just like his companion. Both of them, though young, held themselves with the appearance of experience - and maybe, she thought, a little pain, too.
"You never answered *my* question," he said, sullenly. She frowned. He seemed to expect an answer - like he usually got one, she guessed.
"You're right," she said, raising her eyebrow again."I didn't."
He took a step forward - the girl followed, matching him step for step. They moved as one.
At that, she jumped to her feet. The pair stopped again. "Look --" he said, "I don't mean you any harm."
* * *
Max's words seemed to bring little comfort to the diminuitive woman facing them. Her eyes narrowed again, and her back stiffened. She pushed her long dark braid over her shoulder. "You'll forgive me if I don't take your words immediately at face value," she said, glancing down at the two prone forms. Max looked as well.
"And him?" Max jerked his chin in the direction of the man from whom they'd rescued her - though now he was beginning to wonder if she'd really needed rescuing.
"Not a friend." The woman's voice hardened a little, and Liz saw her tighten one hand around something that hung about her neck. As she dropped her hand, Liz saw an egg-shaped red stone set in silver... and saw also that the stone seemed to be glowing, faintly.
"He's the one I saw," Liz finally spoke up. "He did this, didn't he?" She looked to the stranger who seemed surprised. "I saw him attacking her - I saw him kill her. Is that what happened?"
The woman studied her - then seemed to reach some conclusion. "You're a Seer? That does explain it, I guess."
Liz blinked at her. "How do you --"
Max closed a hand around her wrist. "Don't tell her anything." He looked back to the woman. "How did you know that?"
The woman shrugged, and said, quite frankly: "She's got a Gift. I can feel it on her. That's the only one that makes sense."
Max held her eyes. "And you?"
The woman cradled her left arm in her right. "I am, thus far, having a very bad night," she said, "I'm afraid I'll have to leave you to... whatever you were doing."
It happened so quickly there was no time to react - she took a step back, turned, and fled... and was out of sight more rapidly than either Max or Liz would have believed possible.
* * *
The dead woman had been pretty, at least until about an hour ago. Her hair was pale red and pooled on the ground beneath her in waves. She was pale, and there were freckles dashed across her nose and cheeks, and on her bare arms. Her nose was a little crooked, as if it had been broken once, but it did little to marr the clean lines of her face.
Liz stared down at the woman with tears in her eyes. She couldn't have been older than eighteen.
The attacker, on the other hand...
The man on the ground was very tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. His face was seamed with scars, and his eyes were deeply set under dark, bushy eyebrows. His whole face had a sinister set to it - one that made Liz very glad Max was currently occupied in tying him hand and foot.
"What could have been happening here?" she asked softly, half to herself, as Max finished. They'd encountered this young woman the previous day - she had been hitchiking along the Interstate between Ashland and Medford. The van had passed her, and after some spirited debate among its six passengers, they had turned around and picked her up, then continued on her way. She hadn't given them a name, and they'd left her in Medford. But as she'd climbed out of the van, Liz had handed her her duffle bag - and as their hands had touched, she'd experienced a premonition of the stranger's death.
Unfortunately, this had been one of the more impressionistic visions, and it hadn't been until a few hours ago that, in a dream, Liz had acquired enough clear direction from the vision to really understand it.
And now they were too late.
Max came to stand beside her, slipping an arm around her waist to quell her slight tremors. "I don't know," he said. "But it's certainly not a mugging. At least, not unless muggers in Oregon are using swords now." He gestured with his chin at the unsheathed blade that lay on the ground next to the unconscious man. It closely ressembled a Japanese Katana, but with none of a Katana's angular lines. This weapon was narrow and light, but had a peaked point and the blade was completely flat. The handle looked like black plastic, and had finger grooves molded into it. No; this was no ceremonial sword. This was a precision weapon. Max would have been willing to bet that it was perfectly balanced, too.
"And that woman!" Liz said, trying to stop her teeth chattering. It was getting colder out here the longer they waited. "She - she had powers, didn't she, Max? And she knew that I have them, and you, too. What was she?"
A troubled expression crossed her husband's features. "I don't know," he said slowly. "She certainly seemed to think that she could have beaten us both in a confrontation if she'd had to. And she knew him." He gestured again to the prone assassin. "At least, she knew who he was. And why he was here. And why he -"
"Killed this woman," Liz finished for him, and shivered. "Max, why do I feel like we've just stepped into something dangerous?"
Max shook his head. "Don't know. But I feel the same way."
Just at the edge of earshot, then, they heard sirens, probably from the road they'd left. They'd called them with Max's cell phone.
Liz turned to catch his gaze as he looked up. "We should go. Being fugitives and all."
Max nodded, stood, caught her hand - and they set out into the woods, taking a path that would bring them back onto the road some ways down from the arriving police.
* * *
The strange woman had had the same thought, though instead of running further, she stopped, still in the midst of the woods, and looked around. She touched her pendant, looked around again, and then set out in the direction of the responding glow.
Beneath a massive cedar, she stopped, pressed her fingers against the bark. A shape appeared, faintly, in the trees ancient lines - a shape like a door. Presently, she whispered something near the trunk, and the shape flashed brighter, then suddenly darkened. Shooting a final glance over her shoulder, she stepped forward, and vanished into the black. A moment later, there was no sign of the door, of the girl, of anyone having been there at all.
Disclaimer: I do not own Roswell or its characters; I leave things like that to the WB and whoever else would like to claim them. This story is purely for enjoyment, and is a non-profit venture all the way. Please don't sue me; I have no money anyway, nor anything of significant value, except my computer, which you'd have to pry from my cold, dead fingers.
Summary: While travelling in northern Oregon, one of Liz's visions leads the Roswell Six into what looks, on first glance, like a murder - but what leads into them becoming enmeshed into something much bigger, and much more dangerous.
===============================================
She woke him at nearly midnight, gripping his arm convulsively in her sleep, jarring him out of a peaceful sleep. He jerked awake, looked over at her. She was lying flat on her back, pressed hard into the pillow, eyes wide and face shining with perspiration. He pushed himself up on one elbow, and she turned her head slightly.
Her voice was hoarse and strained. "It's a murder," she said.
* * *
The night was bitter cold - the kind that crept up the sleeves of their coats and the hems of their pants and froze them to the bone before they were outside ten minutes. An unseasonably cold night for the West coast, for Northern Oregon, even in late March. Earlier, it had been sunny and warm, but now the temperature had dropped so low that their breath clouded the air as they passed.
"Are you sure?" he asked, trying to keep up with her. "Are you sure it was here?"
Liz Parker Evans nodded firmly, not looking back at her husband, and kept moving. "I'm sure. Have I ever been wrong before?"
Max sighed, and shot her a rueful smile. "No. Stupid question. Never mind."
A chainlink fence loomed up ahead of them, massive and stretching off to the left and right without interruption. Beyond, the crowded urban jungle dropped away, and on the other side of the fence a forest stretched away beyond perception. Somewhere out there, somewhere beyond the nearest line of trees, someone was going to die.
Liz stopped at the fence, fingers twined into the wire, staring helplessly through it. "There's no way..." she began, softly, but then she grinned, rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. "God - stupid me. Go to it, your Highness."
Max returned the grin, then raised his right hand - the fence melted away before his touch, a hole appearing in the inpenetrable barrier, large enough for them to pass through, into the woods.
Liz laughed silently at herself again as they passed under the line of the trees. All these years with Max around, and she still thought in terms of human limitations - still forgot, on occasion, just how little they affected her anymore, affected any of them.
After all, her husband was an alien. So was her sister-in-law, and so was their friend Michael Guerrin. All of them had been unceremoniously delivered to this planet about fifty-five years ago, the real cause of the famous Roswell UFO. That notwithstanding, none of their group was older than twenty - they had been born some time after the crash, birthed from a pod chamber installation set there by their mother.
Not to mention that Liz herself had powers too - of varying degree and form - and she had somewhat more recently developed the ability to see into the future... albeit not always coherently.
::Which brings us to the here and now,:: Liz thought, reaching for Max's hand in the dark as they half-ran across the rocky ground, going deeper and deeper into the woods. They'd been forced to leave Roswell, their home town, shortly after graduation, in the wake of a government investigation into their identities. Now they ate, slept, breathed their life on the road, "doing good deeds and avoiding the law", as Liz had once put it, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Six comprised their group - herself, Max, Max's sister Isabel, Michael, as well as Michael's girlfriend Maria and their friend Kyle.
Tonight was one of those deeds - a vision had awoken Liz earlier, a vision of someone being murdered in these very woods. It was a stranger vision than she'd ever seen, full of confused and chaotic images, and a terror whose form and nature she could not define.
And a sense of sheltered power, seething just beyond her reach or touch.
She hadn't told Max that part - just the bare-bones necessities. That someone would die tonight, without their intervention. She hadn't told him the rest because she wasn't sure what it meant.
But she knew, with a certainty that bordered on madness, that it was waiting for them, somewhere ahead.
Then something happened that made her breath catch in her throat - a stab of something like pain, but not quite, that tore across her forehead. She stumbled, stopped, one hand clapped to her head.
Max turned back, bent down. "Liz? What's wrong?"
She concentrated on breathing, on opening her eyes. "I... I don't know," she said, struggling upright. "It was... do you feel it?"
Max turned his face to look ahead. "I don't know either," he said. "But you're right. There's -- something there. Something powerful, other than what we know about."
They shot each other a worried look, joined hands, and set off at a run again, a sense of urgency tugging at both of them.
* * *
In the heart of the forest, the moonlight cut a swath through the canopy of tall cedars to shine down into a clearing about twenty feet across. The moonlight also fell on the face of the girl crouched on the ground at the clearing's edge, on the steel of an unsheathed blade, on pooling blood on the ground.
Clenching her teeth, drawing a breath, the girl sprang to her feet, and threw herself at the assailant. She just barely cleared the fallen form on the ground between them before her shoulder connected with his chest. She was rewarded with a grunt from him, proving she'd at least surprised him. But then his hand closed around her upper arm, and wrenched, hard. With a stifled curse, she felt the shoulder pop out of joint, even as she lost her footing and slid, on her back, two or three feet across the grassy ground before she found her rhythm again and rolled back to her feet. He was stronger than she, larger, and she was running out of time. Now that he'd seen her, he'd try to keep her from leaving, try to...
She felt him moving before she saw him - his right foot shifted as he put his weight on it, and he took a sweeping step forward, driving the blade downward --
-- into suddenly vacant turf, as she had rolled to the left an instant before. Now she stood three feet behind him, one hand raised wardingly before her while the other hung useless at her side.
"Enough," she said, breathing hard. "That's --"
She didn't get a chance to finish the sentence - because he roared and ran at her, the blade brandished before him a blur.
Heaving an angry sigh, she stepped back on her left foot and turned halfway, readying to spin out of the way --
"Gyaahh!"
The man's yell surprised her enough to make her lose her balance, and she stumbled back a few steps before she found it again, and looked up, the right hand coming up again, fingers spread, palm outward, power coursing toward the outstretched fingers in readiness to defend, as she looked wildly about the clearing --
-- and saw her attacker lying motionless on the ground a little distance away.
She blinked down at the man, who was now clearly unconscious, then looked up, across the clearing. A young man and woman stood there, hand in hand. The young man, dark in hair and eyes, had his right hand raised in what was obviously a gesture of warding. Both were staring at her as if she were something rather strange and dangerous.
She certainly noticed that neither she nor the young man had dropped their defenses. Which was strange, because most people - at least those who led an existence vaguely similar to normality - wouldn't have so immediately associated the gesture of spread, warding hand with any kind of real danger.
The fact that he had meant one of two things - either he thought she might be a threat to him, or he was a threat to her.
The latter possibility made her narrow her eyes at the pair standing by the trees.
"Who are you?"
She paused as she realized that both of them had said that at the same time, and raised a sardonic eyebrow at him. "Look," she said. "You don't zap me, and I won't flatten you."
He seemed to consider this - and she took the opportunity to take account of him. She blinked in faint surprise when she found that she couldn't read him - his mind was sealed in a shield more inpenetrable than she'd ever seen in a human, even a telepath.
::Which means that maybe he's not human,:: pointed out some disconnected part of her mind.
The girl, on the other hand, was rawly open, and touching her mind brought a flood of images and sounds rushing out. Hastily, she slammed the connection shut, and the girl jerked visibly, as if she'd felt it.
::Well, no doubt about her species, anyway.::
Slowly, the young man lowered his hand. She did the same, and then dropped into a crouch next to the second of the fallen forms, feeling for a pulse, checking for breath.
There was none. She clenched her jaw, closed the corpse's eyes.
::Damnit. If only I'd gotten here sooner...::
"Who was she?"
She looked up. That was the girl, dark eyes anxious, dusky skin a little pale against the dark brown of her hair.
"A friend," she answered, biting back the sigh of frustration. "An unfortunate friend."
She stood up, dusting her hands off on the legs of her jeans. The man still looked suspicious - no, she amended, really more of a boy. He had a boy's face, though his eyes told of something more, something darker and more painful, just like his companion. Both of them, though young, held themselves with the appearance of experience - and maybe, she thought, a little pain, too.
"You never answered *my* question," he said, sullenly. She frowned. He seemed to expect an answer - like he usually got one, she guessed.
"You're right," she said, raising her eyebrow again."I didn't."
He took a step forward - the girl followed, matching him step for step. They moved as one.
At that, she jumped to her feet. The pair stopped again. "Look --" he said, "I don't mean you any harm."
* * *
Max's words seemed to bring little comfort to the diminuitive woman facing them. Her eyes narrowed again, and her back stiffened. She pushed her long dark braid over her shoulder. "You'll forgive me if I don't take your words immediately at face value," she said, glancing down at the two prone forms. Max looked as well.
"And him?" Max jerked his chin in the direction of the man from whom they'd rescued her - though now he was beginning to wonder if she'd really needed rescuing.
"Not a friend." The woman's voice hardened a little, and Liz saw her tighten one hand around something that hung about her neck. As she dropped her hand, Liz saw an egg-shaped red stone set in silver... and saw also that the stone seemed to be glowing, faintly.
"He's the one I saw," Liz finally spoke up. "He did this, didn't he?" She looked to the stranger who seemed surprised. "I saw him attacking her - I saw him kill her. Is that what happened?"
The woman studied her - then seemed to reach some conclusion. "You're a Seer? That does explain it, I guess."
Liz blinked at her. "How do you --"
Max closed a hand around her wrist. "Don't tell her anything." He looked back to the woman. "How did you know that?"
The woman shrugged, and said, quite frankly: "She's got a Gift. I can feel it on her. That's the only one that makes sense."
Max held her eyes. "And you?"
The woman cradled her left arm in her right. "I am, thus far, having a very bad night," she said, "I'm afraid I'll have to leave you to... whatever you were doing."
It happened so quickly there was no time to react - she took a step back, turned, and fled... and was out of sight more rapidly than either Max or Liz would have believed possible.
* * *
The dead woman had been pretty, at least until about an hour ago. Her hair was pale red and pooled on the ground beneath her in waves. She was pale, and there were freckles dashed across her nose and cheeks, and on her bare arms. Her nose was a little crooked, as if it had been broken once, but it did little to marr the clean lines of her face.
Liz stared down at the woman with tears in her eyes. She couldn't have been older than eighteen.
The attacker, on the other hand...
The man on the ground was very tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular. His face was seamed with scars, and his eyes were deeply set under dark, bushy eyebrows. His whole face had a sinister set to it - one that made Liz very glad Max was currently occupied in tying him hand and foot.
"What could have been happening here?" she asked softly, half to herself, as Max finished. They'd encountered this young woman the previous day - she had been hitchiking along the Interstate between Ashland and Medford. The van had passed her, and after some spirited debate among its six passengers, they had turned around and picked her up, then continued on her way. She hadn't given them a name, and they'd left her in Medford. But as she'd climbed out of the van, Liz had handed her her duffle bag - and as their hands had touched, she'd experienced a premonition of the stranger's death.
Unfortunately, this had been one of the more impressionistic visions, and it hadn't been until a few hours ago that, in a dream, Liz had acquired enough clear direction from the vision to really understand it.
And now they were too late.
Max came to stand beside her, slipping an arm around her waist to quell her slight tremors. "I don't know," he said. "But it's certainly not a mugging. At least, not unless muggers in Oregon are using swords now." He gestured with his chin at the unsheathed blade that lay on the ground next to the unconscious man. It closely ressembled a Japanese Katana, but with none of a Katana's angular lines. This weapon was narrow and light, but had a peaked point and the blade was completely flat. The handle looked like black plastic, and had finger grooves molded into it. No; this was no ceremonial sword. This was a precision weapon. Max would have been willing to bet that it was perfectly balanced, too.
"And that woman!" Liz said, trying to stop her teeth chattering. It was getting colder out here the longer they waited. "She - she had powers, didn't she, Max? And she knew that I have them, and you, too. What was she?"
A troubled expression crossed her husband's features. "I don't know," he said slowly. "She certainly seemed to think that she could have beaten us both in a confrontation if she'd had to. And she knew him." He gestured again to the prone assassin. "At least, she knew who he was. And why he was here. And why he -"
"Killed this woman," Liz finished for him, and shivered. "Max, why do I feel like we've just stepped into something dangerous?"
Max shook his head. "Don't know. But I feel the same way."
Just at the edge of earshot, then, they heard sirens, probably from the road they'd left. They'd called them with Max's cell phone.
Liz turned to catch his gaze as he looked up. "We should go. Being fugitives and all."
Max nodded, stood, caught her hand - and they set out into the woods, taking a path that would bring them back onto the road some ways down from the arriving police.
* * *
The strange woman had had the same thought, though instead of running further, she stopped, still in the midst of the woods, and looked around. She touched her pendant, looked around again, and then set out in the direction of the responding glow.
Beneath a massive cedar, she stopped, pressed her fingers against the bark. A shape appeared, faintly, in the trees ancient lines - a shape like a door. Presently, she whispered something near the trunk, and the shape flashed brighter, then suddenly darkened. Shooting a final glance over her shoulder, she stepped forward, and vanished into the black. A moment later, there was no sign of the door, of the girl, of anyone having been there at all.