Elevation

'What's one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?' - Ted Bundy
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"Watcher!" The familiar voice unexpectedly rang through her ears, causing her to drop the heavy stack of books she'd been re-stocking the bookshelves with onto her boot-clad foot.

She squealed in pain, jumping away from the fallen books. Her head snapped, as if by its own accord, towards the front window.

He was there, standing on the sidewalk across the street. His jacket and button up from the night before had been traded for a maroon muscle shirt and his smirking lips were moist with a dark substance.

Harlyn's blood turned to ice in her veins.

Her nightmare from the night before made her immediately come to the conclusion that the dark substance could be nothing but blood, possibly even Amber's. Until that moment, she'd given her friend up for dead, but if it was Amber's blood, there was a slight possibility that she might still be alive.

She glanced at the clock above the cash register. It read 10:06, she'd been off for six minutes already.

Her eyes returned to the spot where 'Watcher' was surprisingly still standing. If he was what she thought he was, how would he have found out what time she would be getting off? And why the hell was he waiting for her out there?

He wanted her too, she realized.

That icy terror that had washed over her when she had noticed him the first place turned into adrenaline and she dove behind the cash register to get her bag and clock out.

Her heart hammering away in her chest, she had no idea how she was going to get out of the shop without drawing his attention. The only door in the whole shop led right out to meet him and she highly doubted that she could outrun him.

She peaked up over the register just in time to see an expensive-looking silver car pull up in front of the bookstore. A look of uncontainable rage and disgust appeared on 'Watcher's face. Something told her that she'd been saved.

The driver in the silver car signaled for her to hurry up and she did just that, snaking her arm under her bag's handles so it would hang at the crook of her elbow and scurrying out the front door, barely taking enough time to properly lock up.

She had no qualms about getting into a car with a stranger at that point, especially if said stranger somehow kept 'Watcher' at bay long enough for her to hop into the passenger seat and buckle up.

By the time she looked up from buckling, 'Watcher' had disappeared again.

"Who was that guy, anyway? Did you see where he went?" she asked the driver, squinting into the darkness in hopes of getting a glimpse of him to disprove the whole 'super speed' theory she'd formed about him. When the driver failed to answer her questions, she glanced over at him curiously, while asking cautiously, "I mean, you did see the man standing on the opposite side of the street from where you parked, right?"

The driver's brows furrowed in concentration and he didn't take his eyes off the road. Somehow, they were already doing sixty.

"Where are we-" her question was cut off by her scream, as something very large and heavy landed on the roof of the car.

"Get down!" the driver all-but barked, his face looking far too calm for the way he was swerving all over the road trying to dislodge whatever had landed on the roof.

Harlyn's heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest, as she shrunk further into her seat with every huge bang on the roof that would shake the whole car in its ferocity. "Oh my God!" she repeated the blasphemous sentence over and over again like her own personal mantra.

Out of nowhere, the driver stomped on the breaks and did a one hundred and eighty degree turn, throwing whatever had clamped down on the roof into the forest. He quickly released the breaks and slammed on the gas, taking the parked vehicle from zero to ninety in less than two minutes.

"What the fuck was that?" Harlyn shouted at the top of her lungs, turning around in her seat to stare out the back window of the car, watching the forest where he'd shaken the thing from the top of the car.

"Chill," he replied, still not taking his eyes from the road.

"Chill? Chill?" she screeched, "You just threw a person off the top of your car and you're telling me to chill?!"

The driver cringed at the pitch of her voice, "That was not a person."

She frowned at the finality in his voice. Of course it wasn't a person, she realized. That thing had been punching the roof of the car with an inhuman strength. Her eyes widened, it had been trying to get in to attack them.

"It would have killed us, wouldn't it?" she whispered in horror.

The driver chanced a look at her out of the corner of his eye, "How long have they been following you?"

Harlyn shook her head, "I don't know. I've only seen the one that was at the bookshop, he calls himself 'Watcher'... I think he has my friend."

The events of the last two days came spilling from her lips, the same way she had described them to Mike and Nancy with the minor difference of including seeing 'Watcher' the night before and her strange dream. She even told him about the blood she'd found on her neck when she woke up.

It didn't occur to her that he might be one of Detective Thomas's minions or a detective, himself. Something made her want to trust him.

He would nod every time she would finish a sentence with 'you know what I mean?' and appeared to genuinely believe what she was telling him.

By the time she was finished relaying the story, she looked up and realized they were definitely not in Northwood anymore.

"Where are you taking me?"