The Final Showdown - The Moon Trilogy - Book 3

Chapter five:

Rachel grabbed at the air, trying not to fall into the yawning space that suddenly opened up beneath her.

As soon as they'd teleported, she'd landed on something that wasn't quite solid enough to hold her weight, but her efforts to stay upright only hastened the fall, and she landed noisily in a pile of what felt like metal pans.

When the light was flicked on, she saw that her guess was right. She was sitting in a big pile of cooking utensils that appeared to have fallen from a shelf upon their arrival.

Benny stifled a laugh upon seeing her predicament, but her glare silenced it all together.

Scarlett helped her up, and they began their search.

It was quickly discovered that someone had recently been in the kitchen- other than themselves- because there were faint footprints pressed into the fine dust that had gathered on the floor.

Rachel was just walking over to the doorway into the shadowy hallway beyond the kitchen when she heard the distinct but distant sound of a door opening, somewhere in the building.

She shared the briefest of glances with the others before sprinting through the doorway. She didn't know if the others had heard what she'd heard, but she needed to catch whoever it was that was running away.

As she ran, she cursed herself for tripping on those pots. That was surely the thing that had alerted the fleeing culprit to their presence in the building.

She rushed through halls, not bothering to take in any of her surroundings except for what was directly ahead. She needed to get to the nearest exit as soon as she physically could, or she would risk losing someone who had a very high possibility of being Eric Lance.

She ran faster, up a flight of stairs, and into the sunlight that was trickling through the boarded-up windows of an out-of-business street-side store. She pushed through the doors just in time to see the fast-disappearing back of a man on a motorcycle. The buzzing of the engine faded away abruptly when he turned a corner.

She hadn't been able to get a good look at the man, but she was relatively certain that she'd caught a glimpse of silver hair.

If she had just run a bit faster, or a fraction of a second sooner, she would have caught him. She let out a strangled growl; a mixture of her churning emotions.

She kicked the wall of the abandoned coffee house in a useless attempt to vent her frustration. Her shoe made a small chip in the brick wall but the action did nothing to appease her anger. She kicked it again, in the same spot, causing another tiny chip to fly off into the street, and then she punched the boards over the windows, which snapped under the blow.

She was such an idiot! She should have been faster, more careful... something!

She let him slip away again, after coming within literal feet of capturing him, once and for all.

When Benny and Scarlett finally showed up, she whirled on them in another brief flare of anger before she reined herself in with a deep breath.

"He got away, some guy of a motorcycle with suspiciously silver-looking hair." She felt the heat of her frustration burning a ragged hole in her throat, but she mostly managed to keep it away from her voice by clenching her teeth.

"That must have been him," Scarlett said. "Which means we're on the right track."

At least there was a bright side.

"Well, we should still search the building. Maybe he left something behind that will lead us to him." Benny suggested, opening the creaky door to reenter the old building.