Satan's Vessel

5.

'... sure she is the one?'

'She has to be. Why else would the Fallen ... ?'

The voice muffled into silence as Kaitlyn rose in and out of consciousness. Her eyelids felt so heavy. She tried to open them but they seemed to weigh a tonne. Her body was worse. She couldn't move. Was she dreaming?

'They can make mistakes too.'

'No. She is the one. I know it in my heart.'

No. It was too sharp. It was too real. The two men sounded close, only metres away or nearer. One of their voices she recognised but couldn't fathom why. It made her heart race.

There was grim laughter. 'Except you don't have a heart.'

'My heart is with God—and he knows all.'

Their voices steadily became clearer. Her eyelids were becoming lighter. She could move her fingers now. She could feel that she was lying on something soft. Her fingers brushed against the smoothness of sheets.

'It was a close call. How did they find her?'

'They must have been trailing us. We will need to be much more careful in the future.'

A terrible realisation gripped Kaitlyn's stomach. She was on a bed in the presence of two men she didn't know, utterly wiped out. Where was she? Hadn't she been at the bar? She couldn't remember falling asleep. She couldn't remember getting home. What had they done to her? She gripped onto the sheets.

'Careful. She's waking up.'

There was a pause. 'Kaitlyn?'

Now she remembered that voice. Are you having dreams, Kaitlyn? The man in the grey hoodie! He'd been chasing her down the street. She recalled the roar of a car engine. Bright headlights. The man with the broken neck! The sound of his screaming as he burned alive.

As he burned alive.

You will come to understand.

Kaitlyn's eyes snapped open. She sat up with a gasp. Grey Hoodie and a second man were gazing at her from the foot of the bed she was lying on. Though she couldn't really call him Grey Hoodie now, no longer wearing his sweater, bare from the waist up. She stared at him. His face ...

'Have no fear,' he said gently. 'We are not going to harm you.'

Just like before, his face had that queer brightness to it. He didn't beam. He didn't glow. It was hard to describe. It was almost as though he was softly lit by some kind of inner candlelight. And amid that light he was striking to look at, almost otherworldly with his high cheekbones and broad jaw and gleaming green eyes—an impossible feature against his dark skin. His hair was cut closely to the scalp and his face was darkly stubbled.

'Where am I?' she said.

Just as she'd assumed back on the street, he was very muscular. Hard abdomen. Powerful chest. Thick, bulging veins wreathed his forearms.

He could crush her.

'You are safe,' said the second man. 'You are in the house of the Lord where no one can hurt you.'

As for his companion he was just as startling. He, too, was bare from the waist up. In stark contrast to Grey Hoodie, he possessed Asian features alongside porcelain white skin which gleamed against the single light hanging from a short chain above her bed. His long silken hair draped his broad shoulders in a black curtain. Like Grey Hoodie, he had startling eyes—not green but a strange-coloured brown that almost looked deep orange. He, too, had a face that was strangely bright.