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I’m thrown forward, wrenching my back and neck. I throw my arms up barely in time to break my fall. I hit the ground hard. My teeth rattle painfully but I manage to avoid hitting my head. There’s no time to be lying here moaning, so I leap to my feet.
“Are you all right?” The voice is a rich baritone that resounds through me, echoing in my core.
“I’ll be fine,” I say, turning to face the stranger and taking a step back to keep some distance between us.
He’s dark and in what is becoming commonplace, familiar. Shadows seem to cling to him, making it hard to discern the details of his appearance. He has thick, curly hair that looks like it has a mind of its own, some pieces sticking out oddly while still managing to look good. He has a youthful appearance, as if he’s somehow untouched by the world around him. Almost as if he’s not really a part of it but only an observer. As if he’s too odd, too different to be affected by reality.
“Good,” he says, not smiling but not frowning. His eyes are deep brown with emerald flecks, and they feel like they look past me, as if I’m not really here either. “I need you, Quinn.”
My heart leaps into my throat. I blink, slowly, placing my hands on my hips. I work moisture back into my mouth while we stare at each other.
“How do you know my name?”
“I know everything about you.”
“Nice. Cryptic and creepy. Is that what you’re going for? Highland creeper? Really?”
He blinks which seems to happen in slow motion, as if his eyelids move on their own bandwidth of time, slowly closing without any care in the world, meeting, then slowly parting as they return to open. He purses his lips and tilts his head slightly to the left.
“Wrong question.”
“Wrong question? What?” I frown, mind racing. “Wait. You know something about how I’m here!”
The corners of his lips flirt with becoming a smile but the effort of moving up proves too much for them, leaving his face grim.
“This is your destiny,” he says.
“My destiny? Right. I’ll get right on that. Oh, wait, I don’t have any clue what you’re talking about!”
He arches an eyebrow as anger carries me away.
“Who are you?”
“Wrong question, again,” he says, his face seeming to cloud over as his eyes narrow. “We don’t have time for this. Think.”
I stop, eyes widening, and anger burns into rage.
“Oh, you did not,” I say, my voice soft. “You did not just tell me to think.”
“Quinn,” he says, raising his hands between us, making soothing motions.
“No,” I say, pointing my finger at him. “You don’t get to Quinn me. I don’t know who you are or how you know my name.”
“You do know me,” he insists, taking a step back. He glances over his shoulder. I peek too but I don’t know what it is he is looking at as there’s nothing but blank fog. When he turns back, his frown deepens and his eyes flash as he grimaces. “We don’t have time for this.”
It feels like his words echo in my head, reverberating, repeating back on themselves. They’re trying to coalesce, form something, tugging at memory. Déjà vu drifts through but there’s nothing for it to latch on to, leaving me with a sense of this being vaguely familiar. As if he’s a grade school classmate whom I’ve mostly forgotten before meeting again twenty years later.
The fog thickens, rising to my calves. A storm is rolling in with clouds so dark they shade from bruised purple to almost black. Lightning flashes behind them and if I know any one thing for sure, it’s that I don’t want to be out here in the open when that storm breaks. The wind blows harder, pulling at the dark cloak the stranger wears.
“Right,” I say. “No time. I’m leaving.”
I turn and as I take a step, he grabs my shoulder with a grip like a vise, spinning me around to face him.
“Listen!”
“Don’t.” I jerk free of his grip. “Don’t ever grab me.”
I all but growl the words, and he raises his hands in surrender.
