Last Safe Place, The by Ninie Hammon Page B

she sees Bernie scowl. He doesn’t like her humor. It makes her human and real and neither characteristic appeals to him personally nor satisfies his purposes. Bernie doesn’t like for her to break character. That’s the main reason she does it.
    But the man before her never blinks. There is something chilling about his astonishing good looks. His features are too well-defined, as sharp as a hatchet, poster boy for the Hitler Youth.
    “Sweet Zara, you’re even more lively than I pictured, with even more sparkle. A bit untamed to be sure, but that spirit can be bridled.” He manages to make “bridled” sound menacing. “I’ve been looking for you for millennia. Now, our time has come.”
    Okay, this guy is definitely certifiable. Gorgeous, but crackers.
    Gabriella picks up a copy of The Bride of the Beast and opens it to the cover page in the front. She reaches for a pen and says formally, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re holding up the line. Do you want me to write something in particular or just sign it?”
    He leans down close and she smells a hint of garlic his breath mint can’t disguise, a fresh lime aftershave and some other scent that eludes her. It is an earthy smell, like fresh plowed sod or damp leaves, but unpleasant. Moldy leaves, perhaps. And dirt from an open—
    “Write: ‘To my Master and Lord. I will honor you, serve you, obey you and bear you a son. We will reign together, the Beast and his Bride.’”
    His voice is thick and clotted with urgency; his breathing labored. The cold he emanates chills Gabriella to the bone and she begins to tremble. She drops her pen, yanks her hand away from the book and looks up into his face. That’s a mistake. His eyes seize hers and lock on. She falls into their frigid depths, deeper and deeper into the blue that darkens through purple to black.
    His eyes hold her captive. She is only set free when he drops his gaze—like she’d seized an electric cable and couldn’t let go until the juice was turned off. She slumps back in her chair gasping.
    “I will see you soon, my Love,” he says. “I will come for you when it is time.” He straightens up, turns and walks away—leaving the un-autographed book lying beneath her trembling hands.
    Gabriella feels tears well in her eyes and spill soundlessly down her cheeks as she watches him go. She has never been so frightened in her life. Needlessly frightened. The man did absolutely nothing menacing, yet everything was menacing. An image blooms of the hobbits, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, crouching against the embankment as the Black Rider sniffs for them on the road above. Sick, mindless fear. How could anything human possibly be so innocently terrifying?
    To Bernie’s vast dismay, she lurches to her feet and retreats to the ladies room and refuses to come out until he clears the bookstore. Then she sneaks furtively out the back door and into a waiting limousine to go home.
    The day after the book signing, three dozen black roses were delivered to her house. That’s when she learned his name. Yesheb Al Tobbanoft. From that moment forward, his unrelenting attention became the canvas on which every day was painted. Over the course of the next eight months, he sent her flowers, presents, cards and letters—she refused delivery on all of them. Then he began to show up wherever she was. How did he know she was taking Ty to the museum, that she was going to the dentist or to the grocery store? She finally went to court and got a restraining order from a reluctant, unbelieving judge. That didn’t make Yesheb leave her alone, it only moved his attentions back a few yards. When she saw him on the sidewalk in front of her house or inside the fence, standing in the trees watching, shecalled the police. Time and time again. But he was never there when the police arrived and she quickly became the little boy who cried wolf.
    After he showed up at the intersection in Orlando, where she had sneaked away to take Ty to