Teaser Tuesday: Here, Pretty Kitty.

Well, It's still not November yet and truth be told I'm starting to get jittery with all the waiting! At this rate, the book is going to be halfway done before NaNo even starts!

So, in the spirit of impatience, here's a little teaser of something I wrote on the plane last week. I'll probably keep it going on the plane home today. Or read some Agatha Christie and eat a pie. Whatever.

Sam xox

In which Eleanor has depression, get's a rude awakening and meets Rory. 

Word Count: 8,148

Leaving Starbuck’s after her office date with Jazz was harder than it should have been. Considering her new penchant for roaming the streets of London alone at night, Eleanor was reluctant to go home straight away; the further she was both in time and place from the meeting, the lower her mood seemed to drop.

                Eleanor’s depression was not the worst out there, and having it didn’t mean she couldn’t smile. She could, and did most often, but she didn’t always want to. Instead what it truly meant for her was, despite all the good she had, tried to be and was, Eleanor got down and stayed there.

                During a mood drop, like this one, nothing short of an explosion of sensation or Disney could bring her out of her mood. When she was down, 98% of the time Eleanor didn’t even want to be picked up. Like a demon she controlled and controlled her, or a parasite that caged her happiness, it really wasn’t just something that could be pushed to the back of her mind. The well-meant ‘cheer up’ speech she’d heard one too many times had started to become an insult by those who couldn’t understand.

                Rounding a corner into Piccadilly Circus, Eleanor felt a little better being in the heart of the city’s hub. At least until she noticed out of the corner of her eye a store mannequin turn to watch her as she passed a shop window.

                Between the sunflower back at Starbuck’s and now this, what started as an amused thought that she was going crazy was starting to become a serious concern.

                She halted and looked back; the mannequin was frozen, its creepy pale arms held aloft. It didn’t look like it had moved. So, she continued on.

                Passing another store, Eleanor noticed the same thing happening again and again. She continued to look back every time, but like the game ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ she used to play as a little girl when she looked back directly at them the mannequins had frozen.

                “Something’s really not right here,” she murmured under her breath. “It’s really not.”

                She picked up the pace a bit and began to hop-skip almost towards the tube station, half-stumbling down the stairwell and into a crowd of commuters gathered there. Still she felt watched.

                Scanning the miserable January crow, Eleanor tried to pick up on anything suspicious or bizarre. A young woman in a trench coat with a floppy hat pulled low over her eyes caught her attention. It was an underground train station at night, what was with the hat?

                Almost like she heard Eleanor’s internal panic, the woman looked over at her, a pleased sneer on her face. The visual contact caused the woman’s features to shimmer revealing dark sunken eyes and sharply pointed incisors. A golden lock of hair like spun straw fell across her right eye.

                Sucking in a terrified breath, Eleanor threw herself behind a group of Japanese business men and all but bolted for the Bakerloo line.

                The platform didn’t feel any safer, but the distance from the woman in the trench coat did. Regardless, the wait for the train turned what was barely a minute or two into what seemed like an eternity.

                It was the longest Tube ride of all time. It seemed everywhere she looked there were people casting her shifty glances like Trench Coat had, and the continuous counting in her head to stop herself from running screaming through the train, had made for a vastly extended trip to Paddington.

                Fear, believe it or not, was definitely one of the explosive sensations that was sure to bring her up from a down every time. It was a little hard to feel sad when you were afraid to your core. But Eleanor had never been this scared for her either her life or her sanity before.

                When the train finally pulled in, she bolted off, profusely apologising to the elderly couple she all but knocked down. She even took the stairs as the escalators weren’t quick enough for her, and thanked her lucky stars for all the yoga and cardio she’d pushed the past year. Her thighs burned on the way up but at least the shadows on the walls didn’t catch her.

                The weird occurrences over the past few days since she’d returned to the alley and found the pocket watch had just started out as shadows and that awful dynamic feeling of being watched. It had been increasing for days, but it wasn’t until today that Eleanor had started to really worry.

                Eleanor had depression and flashes of anxiety, so she was used to feeling out of sorts. But this feeling, right now as she sped-walked the two and a half blocks to her flat in the darkness, was not the same feeling. This was fast becoming a blurred line between fantasy and reality.

                Bursting into her flat, Eleanor slumped against the doorway in relief. For now, she felt like she’d reached safety.

                Chess, her puffy ginger and vanilla tabby, purred and sauntered over towards her from where he’d been perched on her tiny Ikea couch.

                Cheshire, a gift from Jaz after they’d read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at university, was, as always less happy to see her and more displeased that it was a full hour past dinner time. His look of disdain was familiarly comforting and helped her to shrug off the trauma of the past few hours.

                “Hey Chess,” she called and rubbed her fingers at him. “C’mere pretty kitty.”

                Chess just arched a feline brow, jumped onto the kitchen counter and waited.

                “Yeah, yeah. Ok.”

                I wish Chess had been with me at Starbuck’s, she mused as she pulled a tuna can from the pantry, he’d have peed on that damn creepy sunflower. All she’d have had to do was say something like, “don’t pee on the flowers, Chess”. He was sort of a bastard like that.

                But alas his antics calmed her enough that she was soon collected enough to not need every light in the flat switched on and the television on loud. A couple more hours with a contented Chess in her lap and she was even able to pluck up the courage to close her eyes and go to sleep. Sort of.

                A bang woke Eleanor up a few hours later. She was disorientated at first, having fallen into an exhausted, dreamless sleep, and didn’t realise at first what had awakened her.

                A second bang sounded and she groped for the bedside lamp, senses tingling. It’s just Chess, her rational mind tried to say, but her fear was already rising and sending her panic into overdrive.

                As the lamp flicked on it cast daunting shadows into every corner of her room. More than one set of eyes stared out at her from the darkness, and if it really was Chess doing the banging like she hoped, then it couldn’t have been him.

                She lunged out of bed and for the ceiling light, smothering a shriek at what she saw when she flipped it up and on:

                In the corner of her room, the opposite side of the bed to her stood a tall man. He had dark, sunken eyes, very pale skin and sharp pointed teeth. But the thing that terrified her the most wasn’t his face or the ominous glint in his eyes; rather it was the masses of thorny vines creeping around his arms and torso like they had a mind of their own. Looking down, Eleanor saw that they extended across the floor, throughout the room, along the walls and towards her.

                This time, she really did scream.

                At the sound, the thorn man lunged across the bed for her missing her by a hair as Eleanor threw herself out of the door, slamming it behind her.

                Unfortunately, that wasn’t her salvation.

                On her tiny couch, with her back towards the bedroom door, the woman in the trench coat from Piccadilly sat humming a wordless nursery rhyme. At the sound of the door slamming, she turned her head praying mantis style to look around at Eleanor who screamed again and tried to back away. The woman was too fast; in a split second she was upright, across the room and had Eleanor by the throat, clawed fingers digging in to her flesh.

                “Put the girl down, Goldie, she’s mine!” The thorn man had meanwhile wrenched the bedroom door open and come into the room to join them, his vines slithering towards where they stood.

                “All’s fair, thorny; we made no alliance,” she replied, voice like syrup and eyes on Eleanor as she tightened her choke-hold enough to make the latter start to see stars.

                “I found the girl, I got here first.”

                “I don’t care; first to kill wins.”

                Another bang resounded off the walls as a third creature appeared. “Give her to me; I’ll be the one to kill her.”

                The newcomer had bluish, marbled skin and the kind of facial features that you hoped never to dream of. He looked like the most evil genie you’d ever seen.

                “Back off, Djinn!” Hissed the thorn man, a vine mimicked his toned and shot towards the blue genie like a whip. To Eleanor’s, and the thorn man’s, surprise it passed through like the genie was incorporeal.  

                He chuckled. “Some assassin you are.”The genie held up a hand, palm flat. “You lose.”

                A shock of energy blasted from his palm and went up through the room. The thorn man burst into supernatural blue flames, screaming in agony. The action caused the golden-haired woman to drop Eleanor and she wasted no time collecting her breath before making a break for the doorway to freedom. Whatever the hell those people were and why they wanted to kill her, Eleanor was disinclined to stay and find out.

                She ran out into the entrance hall and down the stairs, having a moment of further panic for Chess before remembering that despite his bulk, he was a lot quicker then she was. He probably bailed the second he sensed something was about to hit the flat.

                Finally at the front door, Eleanor threw it open and ran out into the street, barefoot, in her flannel kitten pyjamas, and smack bang into a solid wall of muscle.

                Rory Odell had been trailing the young woman with the raven hair for days, and standing outside her flat in the street he sensed something wasn’t right. He was hot to march on up to check it out, when his girl came bolting out of the front door in fluffy nightwear and straight for him. He barely managed to catch her before she bowled him over.

                He took one look at her and saw that she was barefoot, cold and in shock, with faint bruises beginning to show on the soft skin around her neck. So he did what any well-bred gentleman would have done; he threw his coat over her, grabbed her hand and said:

                “Come with me if you want to live.”