Opening my eyes, I slowly blinked and looked around. Me and Leo were still out on the balcony, lying on the floor. No sign of the meteor from before, if that's what it was.
Leo woke up too, and it was as he grit his teeth and raised himself into a seated position that I saw the eye markings still on his left arm. And again, he moved it weakly. "Samira," he said, reaching to touch my shoulder with a trembling hand. "Are you okay?"
"I am," I said, yet a strange sensation engulfed my head as if a fishnet had wrapped around it and was trying to pull it up off my shoulders. I must have passed out again, because the next time I opened my eyes, Leo was holding me in his arms.
Warmth cradled my heart. We didn't move from that position for a while, still processing our encounter with the ... not the devil, probably, but that evil being.
"Why us?" I asked quietly, letting my head rest on Leo's broad chest.
He helped me stand, but he had to continue supporting me after he first got me up; I felt too dizzy not to fall onto my side.
"I don't know why," he said, frown severe. "But I know we have to stick together. Let's go inside ... You're cold."
He helped me walk into the bedroom, and I sat at the foot of my bed. "Thank you, Leo."
The confusion on his face baffled me.
"Samira," he said earnestly, compassion in his black eyes, "I came here to meet a woman I might someday call my wife. You don't have to thank me."
"I suppose so ..." I attempted to smile, but my cheeks ached. Still, I wanted him to know I felt grateful. Maybe it was because we had just experienced something traumatic together, and I found his masculine body and manly mindset to be ideal for the man I wanted to marry, but I thought I felt the first blossoms of love bloom within me. "I think we're safer together. That being was too sinister for us to ever come across it alone."
He nodded, then stood at his full height, glancing around the dimly lit room. "I wonder if Noelle is still here. Didn't she say she would check on us in five minutes?"
Dread pierced my happy thoughts. "You're right. There's no way five minutes haven't passed."
That's when Leo gestured at the bathroom door on the wall across from the bed. I shuddered. It was wide open, yet it was usually closed, regardless if someone was using it or not. And the lights were off, so if Noelle had entered it, she had done so secretly and had also forgotten all about privacy.
A nervous crease formed on Leo's brow. Hesitantly, he walked toward that opened door and peered inside.
He gasped.
When he turned toward me, his eyes glimmered with tears. "I ... I'm sorry, Samira. You shouldn't look ... Noelle is dead."
"What?"
How was Noelle dead? When had she died? My hands clenched the bottom of my sweater.
"Leo, I don't understand. Is she on the floor?"
"In the tub." He ran his big hands over his face, breath coming out unsteadily. "My God ..."
"Did she slip?"
He shook his head. "No, no, there's no water. She doesn't look like she slipped."
"What do you mean?"
Did she have a heart attack?
His eyes squeezed shut, and he began to cry. Feeling the need to comfort him, I carefully stood up and walked toward him. I reached up and touched his shoulders. That's when I noticed the smell of iron coming from the bathroom.
I could have thrown up then and there. Against my better judgment, I glanced inside, and I will never forget the state of Noelle. I could see her from the torso up. She looked like she had her head smashed into the blue tile wall ... Her hair was a mess; her eyes stared blankly in the direction of the bathroom mirror, just above the sink. Her shirt had been ripped off her chest, and some sort of blade had carved strange symbols into her exposed chest. I couldn't tell what writing those symbols resembled ... Not English, French, or Arabic. And they didn't strike me as belonging to any Asian country, or even Russian Cyrillic. I supposed they may be runic, but what new age Celtic murderer could be running free in the French countryside?
Glancing back at Leo, my hands still grasping his muscular shoulders, I said, "We should go to the police. This is beyond us."
At first, he nodded in agreement. But just as I went to throw on a coat, as I suspected I may need one as the hours drifted later into the night, he stopped me.
"Samira, we can't."
"Why not?"
"Think about it." He looked back and forth from me to the bathroom. Noelle had been his friend too, so I knew his hesitation didn't come from a lack of love for her. "What policeman will believe us when we tell him we were unconscious when she was murdered? We're the only ones here." He clenched and unclenched his hands, likely a nervous tick. "They'll think we killed her, won't they? Even if we seem innocent, we would be primary suspects."
"You're right ... I don't know what to do, though. We can't just ... leave Noelle."
"She's gone, Samira." Tears raced down his brown cheeks. "Whoever did this must be gone, too."
I couldn't argue with that. Honestly, my fear of going to the police wasn't driven solely by him.
I didn't want to get wrapped up in a murder case, not just because putting me on trial for murder would give the actual killer an out, but because I didn't trust the police to treat me as they may treat a French citizen. Though we were almost in the 2030s, and it was too dark half the time to tell one person's race from another, I had already faced an anti-immigrant sentiment from the agitated French citizenry that was forced to accept immigrants who would otherwise have stayed in this country temporarily.
I also doubted we would ever look innocent now that we had these eyeball markings on our bodies. Occult symbols on suspected killers, in a case where the victim had apparent occult symbols drawn into her flesh ... If I were an outsider looking in, even I would assume we had killed her.
"We have to go, then. If we're going to run, we need to do it now." My words came out resolutely. I thought: I'm sorry, Noelle, but you don't want us going to prison for a crime we did not commit.
Leo looked at me with admiration. I could tell that my decision to run, and my willingness to take immediate action, wasn't something he had expected from me. Perhaps from women, period. But he didn't seem disappointed. I think he thought I was being brave.
Me, a young woman who was too scared of the Cloud to fly home to Morocco, brave.
"I'll pack a bag," I said and began to do just that. My vision occasionally blurred, so much so that I bumped into the dresser, or the foot of the bed or chairs placed a bit too far from the wall. Leo helped me gather my necessary belongings, and I made sure to collect all my valuables. It looked like we had not been robbed while unconscious, but I couldn't say the same about Noelle. She usually kept her wallet at the head of her bed, on her fluffiest white pillow.
I saw the pillow but no wallet.
After I made sure I had everything I needed, we ran. We took the first taxi that we came across to the nearest major city. Leo had friends there, and we could stay with some of them for a while ... Soon, our faces would be plastered near streetlamps, so people could see that we were wanted, and dangerous.
We decided we would have to flee France eventually. For now, we would try to gather as much cash as we could, doing small jobs for neighbors, and we planned to withdraw most of our money from ATMs, him from one town, me from another town.
And we made a plan to go to Spain, hitchhiking only, since we may be recognized on public transport. From there, we would go to Portugal and, hopefully, we would have lost the police by then. But we could tell that since the eyes on his arm and the eyes on my face were showing no sign of going away, the evil from that night would follow us no matter where we went. It tainted our dreams, so whenever we wanted to rest, we would rest-assured be tortured by nightmares.