Valcour- Enchanted by a Demon (Hunted by Hellfie- Book 1)

Brianna Maitland is driving home to her mother's funeral in New York.
  In the past, Brianna's life has been placid and unremarkable.  But when she stops for the night, a chilling, cryptic, and mysterious phone call made from a disconnected phone, ratchets her with fear beyond the limits of sanity.
Heeding the caller's warning would have granted her safe passage home, but Brianna finds the alluring mystery of dark, anti-hero stranger named Jake Valcour too much to resist.  Before too long, in a surprising twist of fate, events change.  She and the handsome man are traveling alone together to New York.
But a drastic turn for the worst plunges Brianna and her new companion into danger.  Are their pursuers the greatest threat, or is Jake?  Suddenly, Brianna is forced to run for her life, and when she is forced to confront her pursuer(s), she wishes she had never learned the truth about them.

Brianna Maitland listened to the tires droning on the pavement as she drove east on Interstate 90. She hadn’t been out this way in more than a year, but she remembered the loneliness of it now, the whoosh of passing cars and transport trucks. I-90 was one long stretch of nothingness along this part of the Minnesota-Iowa border. Just one long, divided four-lane highway. Not much to see other than cars, grass, and stretches of sickly-looking trees. It gave her time to think.

She reached out and snapped on the radio. Brianna really didn’t want to think right now.

A song by the latest American Idol product was on. She made a face and changed the song. That guy was cute enough, if you were into that kind of thing. But he sounded like a chicken caught in an auto-tuner. She found a station playing older soft rock songs and settled in to an Evan and Jaron tune.

This was not a trip she had been looking forward to. Sooner or later, everyone ends up going home. Brianna just hadn’t expected it to be this soon for her. She had planned on staying in the Art Institute in Seattle for the rest of this semester at least. Maybe even finding an apartment out there permanently. She was doing well there and enjoying life on the West Coast. Her friends were there, her life was there.

Except for her parents, who were still back in
New York. And her mom had just died.

Brianna let out a long sigh, trying to keep the tears from starting up again. Mom had been young, just into her forties, and full of life on top of that. Her death hadn’t just been a surprise. It had been a shock. When her father had called to tell her about it, he had been practically incoherent. That had been just last week, and the pain was still fresh for Brianna.

She resettled her sunglasses against her face. The sun was too bright. The music on the radio sucked. Her back hurt from being in the car for hours. Everything bothered her. It was just all too much at once.

Wet tears fell down her cheeks in spite of her best efforts. She finally threw the sunglasses onto the passenger seat next to her and scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. She needed a break. She’d left
Seattle yesterday morning after a couple of last-minute goodbyes, caught a hotel in Billings, and then driven all day today and she was just done with it. It was late in the afternoon now anyway and she was hungry and tired and she really should pull over and find somewhere to spend the night. New York was a long way away still.

Ahead she caught sight of a big green highway sign for an exit. Exit one-nineteen.
Mankato and Blue Earth. Brianna had never heard of either one. But right now she just wanted off this highway and wanted a reason to not have to think about life for awhile.

She pulled off the gentle curving exit and onto a state road that led her south. Not even a mile off the Interstate, the yellow gas pump light on her Altima’s dashboard lit up with a soft ding. She checked her gauge and saw the little needle pointing squarely at the E to tell her the tank was empty.

“Gee, thanks for the heads up,” she mumbled. Now, on top of everything else, she had to find a gas station.

There hadn’t been any signs to indicate there would be gas at this exit. Or maybe there had been. She really hadn’t been paying attention, but now she scanned both sides of the road frantically. The last thing she needed was to be stranded in the middle of
Minnesota with no gas and no one to call on for help.

“God damn it,” she swore.

The state road narrowed down to two lanes as it connected with surface streets. A big sign read “Welcome to the City of Blue Earth. Dream Big.” Brianna snorted at that. Little places like this in the Midwest always had these grand slogans. Like anything was ever going to happen in a dust mote of a place like this.

Unassuming houses crowded right next to businesses up and down the streets as far as Brianna could see. Traffic was light this time of day in Blue Earth. Most of the intersections didn’t even have traffic lights. In fact, she wasn’t even sure this place deserved to be called a city. It wasn’t anything like
Seattle had been. No skyscrapers. No rush of people and vehicles. Just small-town America.

Up past a Family Dollar store, she finally saw a gas station. Six pumps, and a little convenience store on one side of the parking lot, painted a garish purple with brown stripes. Perfect. She could get the Altima gassed up and grab a soda. Maybe even get directions to a hotel.

After pumping forty dollars worth of gas to put the tank at three-quarters full, Brianna parked in a space next to the building. She saw a sign for restrooms around the side and suddenly really felt the need to pee. She’d used the bathrooms in places like this before. Not by choice. But when you had to go, you had to go.

She knocked at the shabby red door marked “women” and when there was no answer she turned the knob. Inside there was a small room with two stalls and two sinks and a garbage can that looked like it hadn’t been emptied in a week or more. Brianna wrinkled her nose. It stank like all public restrooms stink, of disinfectant and stale urine. Still, the toilets were clean, she saw as she sat down to do her business.

The liquid hand soap smelled like oranges. She used a little bit of it to scrub her face after she’d washed her hands. In the mirror, she studied herself.

“Yup. There I am.”

She was just twenty, last month, but the woman she saw in the mirror looked much older. There were dark circles under her crystal blue eyes. Lips that usually always held a trace of a smile were firmly set in a frown now. It was all the stress she was carrying, she knew. At least that’s what she wanted to blame it on. Leaving school, having to drive across the country by herself, having to face her father again. Her mom’s death.

She ran her hands through her short blonde hair, sweeping it back from her temples. Strands of it fell mischievously across her eyes again anyway. Brianna blew at them a couple of times and rolled her eyes at herself. Her black t-shirt and jeans were mussed from sitting in the car so long. She smoothed them down against her body, trim and defined by a regimen of running and cardio, but the wrinkles persisted. Finally she gave up. She could care less, really. It wasn’t like she had anyone to impress here.

She went into the store and smiled at the clerk standing behind the counter, an older man in a rumpled brown shirt with stringy brown hair hanging off a balding head. The man watched her with gray, washed-out eyes. He did not return her smile. She bit her lip and looked away from him.

At the back of the store, she took a soda from the coolers. The clerk was still staring at her, she realized with a little twitch of surprise. Didn’t he have anything better to do?

“Hello,” she tried. The man didn’t answer her, just took her soda and scanned it in. Brianna passed him a five-dollar bill; he gathered the change and handed it to her, all without taking his eyes off her once.

“Um. Thanks.”

She opened the bottle as she turned away; stopping at the door to look back.

He was still staring.

“Okay... Creepy much?” she whispered, letting the little bell ring as the door closed behind her.

Brianna stood on the short sidewalk in front of the store for a while, just looking around at the city of
Blue Earth. Seeing it now, she adjusted her opinion a little. This place was small, and crowded, but somehow it had an open feeling to it, too. Instead of the tall skyscrapers and rundown buildings she had become used to in Seattle, here there were strip malls and homes and lazy intersections. Something about it felt almost relaxing to her. She took in a deep breath and let it slowly out. Thinking about it, she realized this was the first breather she’d taken for herself since rushing out of college to head home.

The sun that had seemed too bright for her when she was driving, but now it seemed dull and grey behind a bare overcast of thin clouds. She figured it was going to rain. When she had been in
Seattle it had been cloudy most of the time, just like in those Twilight movies; only without the gorgeous vampires who sparkled and broke your furniture when they made out with you.

She smirked at her little joke and sipped at the soda. Okay, so life wasn’t all that bad. Only mostly bad.

Maybe she should stop here for the night, she thought. Get a hotel room and just relax. Then again, her dad was expecting her. He needed her home. And she could get a few more hours of driving in before she actually had to stop. Maybe even make the next state. She took another sip of the soda as she thought about what she should do.

“Hello.”

Brianna hadn’t noticed the guy walk up to stand next to her. But there he was, in a dark blue t-shirt that stretched over a muscular torso and a grey sweater with Abercrombie and Finch’s logo on it zippered open down the front. His jeans were ripped across his left knee. His short black hair was curly and wavy and had lighter, almost blond highlights in it. High cheekbones. Prominent Adam’s apple.

Cute. Very cute.

But it was his eyes that caught her attention. They were a pale green, with thin lines of copper or maybe gold radiating through them, like rays of light around the black sun of his pupils. They sparked and faded as they caught the light around them. He smiled at her now and tilted his head to the side a little.

“Um. Hello?” he said again.

“Uh…hello.” Really? That was the best she could come up with? She thought she felt warmth touching her cheeks and hoped she wasn’t blushing in front of this guy. Not that it should matter. She had just met him. Well, not really met him. But…

She closed her eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them again, returning his smile with one of her own. “Hi.”

There. That was better.

“Hi.” He laughed. She liked his laugh. “Sorry if I startled you. And I know this is going to sound crazy, but I saw your
New York license plates. That cherry red Altima? That’s you, right?”

She blinked. “You’re the first one to get the color right.”  She had ordered her Altima special from the dealership. It had been a going-away present from her parents when she left for college. But even her dad couldn’t get the color right. He was always calling it strawberry. The car was still registered in
New York, and her gold-colored license plates stood out among all the blue Iowa and Minnesota plates around her.