“What do you want to do?” Jaelyn said while Raven lay belly-down onto her bed, kicking up her legs as an attempt to get her energy out.
Jae was lying on the bed next to her, doing the same, though Raven was resting her head on her hands like a pillow, staring off into space.
“We could have a makeover,” Jae suggested. “Or maybe paint each other’s nails.”
Raven looked to her then. “This isn’t elementary school, Jae. And you know very well I’m not good at painting nails.”
She faked a shutter. “I looked like I was bleeding from all my fingers for a month.”
Raven laughed. “Yeah, it was a mistake to use red nail polish when I suck at painting in general.”
They both giggled.
“What about brushing each other’s hair?”
“I wouldn’t even try,” Raven said. “I even go to war with my hair daily.”
“Who wins?” Jae asked.
Raven gave her a look. “Who do you think? My hair’s like Medusa’s. It has a mind of its own.”
“Will it bite me if I brush it?” Jae joked.
“Maybe,” Raven said back, “but I wouldn’t risk it.”
They both laughed again… but when the joking mood wore off… silence drew along them…
“Jae…” Raven said then, seeing her best friend glance at her from the corner of her eye, “you took psychology, right?”
“Yeah,” she responded, “last semester, why?”
Raven tried to catch the words flying by her mind, forming a sentence. “So… you leaned about serial killers, right?”
“Yep,” she said, “serial killer Fridays.”
“Do you think that… Malachi is actually a killer?”
Her mouth gaped. “No… I was joking… Why are you asking me this?”
“You know how my parents were attacked?” Raven said.
A nod.
“And how I was attacked?”
Another nod.
“Well… I don’t remember the place where I was attacked… and I don’t remember when, really… I just remembered that the boy… had blonde hair.”
“Like… dirty blonde? White?”
“I don’t know…” she responded. “I just remember it being really light… and… Malachi has….”
“Blonde hair,” Jaelyn finished. “Babe, lemme tell you this, okay? Like… ninety percent of the US population has blonde hair, whether natural or died.”
“Do you think he’s actually do something like that?” Raven questioned, shuttering when she spoke the words, “Kill me?”
“I don’t know him that well, Ray,” she responded. “So I can’t really answer.”
Silence.
“Buuuut,” Jae said, “if you can describe his personality a little from yesterday… I might get an idea? But it most probably won’t be a valid one.”
Raven thought for a moment. “He changes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So… he’s like scare me with stuff he knows about me… like my favorite things and stuff… and when we did that assignment in biology, he had a whole paragraph, but I wasn’t completely sure if it was about me or not… because he hid it… And I seriously think he has a one-way ticket to my brain because he knows how to push my buttons very well.”
“Ahhhhh…” Jaelyn said. “He’s one of those.”
“One of what?”
She waved the question off. “Continue.”
Raven shook her head. “Well… when I went home that day… I called him.”
“How did you know his number?”
“He gave it to me.”
“Okay… continue.”
“So… I called him and of course he said, ‘who is this?’ But I started to act childish and didn’t tell him it was me.”
“Sounds like you,” Jae commented, “keep going.”
Raven shot her a look before speaking, “I told him to stop stalking me, and he asked me of course, ‘shouldn’t I know who I’m stalking?’ And I started to question if he was stalking multiple girls… but he told me he had sights for another girl… singular….”
“Why was he telling a supposed stranger this?” Jae questioned.
“I’m getting there,” Raven said, “I asked him ‘which girl?’ and he said, ‘I think you know the answer to that.’ But I got concerned… He knew it was me… He said something like ‘does this person happen to be Raven Magicae?’ or something….”
“That’s creepy,” Jae commented.
“So I finally gave up the act… and he said at the end of the call, ‘I’ll see you soon.’”
“At school… right…?” Jae said.
“That’s what I asked… he hung up.”
“Odd….”
“And when I got home,” Raven said, “he showed up in my house, scaring the crap out of me and somehow knew my favorite food and went in, knowing where everything was and started cooking and—”
“Whoa—whoa—whoa—whoa,” Jae interjected. “He showed up at your house? I thought he picked you up at the street….”
“It was both.”
A blink.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I went upstairs to pull my hair up… but this wound I have on my side started burning… right? And of course I’m not particularly comfortable with him roaming around my house freely… but I decided to patch it up again.”
She decided to leave out the whole “I was bleeding heavily” part, and the fact that he healed her so quickly… which seemed a little inhuman but she pushed the thought away.
“And when I took the gauze off… he walked in….”
Jae’s eyes widened. “We’re you naked?”
“NO!” Raven almost screamed.
She threw her hands up innocently at her startled tone.
Raven took a deep breath before continuing, “He actually forced me to lay down and he… No,” she added at Jae’s startled expression, “he didn’t rape me, he actually… healed me… Like he had some medical knowledge….”
“Huh….”
“I keep on asking him if he wants to kill me and he always answers vaguely like: ‘Not really,’ or… ‘why would I try to kill you?’ But… one weird thing… he constantly says… ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ like I’m a terrified child….”
“Well…” Jae butted in, “you did seem kind of… startled all day yesterday… and really shaken today… I think he could tell you were scared.”
“Oh… am I that easy to read?”
A nod.
Raven sighed. “But after the whole… ‘patch up’ incident… I got really confused….”
“How so?”
“I thought originally that he was going to kill me… but then he did something nice like that… and I didn’t really understand… why.”
“Huh… so… how did he kidnap you?”
“Well…” Raven gave her an innocent smile, “I kind of pulled a knife on him.”
“What?”
“Yeah… I pulled a steak knife on him and told him to get out of my house.”
“So….”
“He did… and I got a pack together quickly,” she patted her backpack on the side of her bed, “and ran out.”
“And that’s when you called me.”
“Yeah.”
“After…?”
“I was running down the streets… and I kind of ran into him….”
“That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“I know right…? But… I was being attacked by muggers at some point….”
Jae’s eyes widened.
They weren’t really muggers, though… they were apart of that cult that wanted to murder her… though Raven hadn’t told anyone about that yet…
She wanted to keep them safe…
But she had to think… was staying here keeping her safe…? If Malachi was apart of them… would they hunt her down and maybe hurt Jaelyn’s family…?
“I know… it’s all scrambled…” Raven responded after a moment, “but Malachi seemed scary at first. He grabbed me when I tried to run and I stabbed him… and for a moment, he acted like he was one of the muggers and scared the crap out of me again… but the next thing I knew… he beat them all up….”
He actually shot them.
“And threatened them to leave me alone….”
To put it lightly, and he threatened one because the other two were dead.
“And they ran off….”
The one alive did…
“And I fainted at some point… and I woke up in his house.”
“Okaaaay…” Jae said with raised brows, “I’m guessing you’re not going to answer any of my questions about the muggers or the running away… but… I guess I can kind of profile him…?”
Raven nodded, eager to know.
“I’m not a psychologist,” Jae cautioned, “okay?”
A fast nod.
“So… one: he seems like one of those boys who like to mess with girls. Tease them, scare them, confuse them... Two: he’s been stalking you for so long that he knows that much about you… and he probably has been in your house before if he knew where everything was… but he might’ve been watching through a window or something….”
Raven’s heart started throbbing.
“Three: He’s clearly hiding something… but I’m not sure what.”
“Does he give you serial killer vibes still…?”
She tipped her head to the side. “I’m not really sure… but it seems as if—as I said before—he’s conflicted… though I don’t know why.”
“Hmmmm….”
“Are you completely sure we shouldn’t call the police?” Jaelyn said.
Raven nodded. “I need to know more.”
“Just don’t get lost, alright?”
She nodded, knowing that she meant…
Getting so curious that she’d dig herself deep in a hole… unable to escape..
A hole she could possibly die in…
Raven knew very well that not calling the police was a horrible idea… but that weird instinct was screaming at her not to… and she knew she needed answers… not to lock him away in a jail…
And the instinct was always right.
“Anyway,” Jaelyn yawned at their silence, stretching her arms up, “I’m hitten’ the sack. It’s almost midnight.”
“I will too,” Raven responded, slipping off the bed and stepping over to the twin mattress that Jae’s parents put on the floor. “See you in the morning.”
“See ya.” She flipped off the switch when Raven slid under the covers.
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