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Samantha thought she was running from evil...turned out she was running home.
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Samantha was going to have to stop running at some point, but for now, survival was the number one thing on her mind. The last time she got comfortable and actually allowed herself to relax, it had ended up with three people dead. True, two of them were evil, but the third had simply been a nice old man whose kindness was the catalyst for his demise. Up until that point, she had fooled herself into believing she was the only one still in danger. That had been her mistake, one that cost her the life of the first person she had called a friend in years.
She had cried herself to sleep every night since, but no amount of tears could change what was. She needed to pull on some big girl panties and find a solution to her current predicament. Frank, her former boss, made her promise that if anything were to happen to him that she should go to Sendoa. He told her that there were people there who could help her and would be honored to do so. It was a weird promise, but his eyes pleaded with her to do so and so she did.
From the moment she met Frank, she knew he could see past the human she presented to the world. Initially, it surprised her that he knew she was more than a person and wasn’t only all right with that, he seemed to treasure it. In the past, if she even got a hint that someone suspected anything unusual about her, she would flee. Frank was somehow different. At no point in time had she ever felt ill at ease around him, so she stayed when he offered her his spare room in exchange for work.
Now here she was, searching for a town, one she wasn’t quite sure existed, because Frank had told her to. In hindsight, she realized he’d known his time was coming to an end. Little things he said seemed to make sense more now than they had before. And then there were the grand gestures she discovered after his death: when she’d grabbed her bag on her way out, she found a key with a paid invoice to the local garage. He had left her a clunker he’d apparently bought under the table for cash. He’d even left a hand-drawn map in the glove box. Yes, he knew what was coming, but that didn’t ease her guilt. Not by a long shot.
Sendoa, according to the hand-drawn map, was a good five days’ trip from where she started. The first two days she drove on adrenaline, stopping only to gas up, grab a sandwich, and take a quick sleep on the side of the road. Halfway through day three, a rest stop became a necessity. Samantha was starting to get spacey and worried her driving would end up with her car in a ditch. Stopping in a small town, she grabbed lunch at the old-fashioned diner. It tasted amazing, and she was already feeling ready to head back on the road when she noticed the town library. Libraries had computers.
Samantha had long divested herself of all things electronic. She’d found out the hard way that even throwaway phones could be tracked back to their point of activation. That was the closest she had ever been to being caught, up until the day at Frank’s anyways.
Samantha walked into the town library, glad to see that the computer area was full of people. Crowds meant blending in and blending in was exactly what she needed. Samantha was positive that if anyone heard her thoughts, they would think she was paranoid, but quite honestly, she had every reason to be. She pulled up her hoody, headed to the empty computer station, and entered Sendoa into the search engine.
After twenty minutes, she had come up with practically nothing. A town in Arizona, which was in the opposite direction from where she was heading, a few personalities from international sports, and some links to the Basque language. She would just have to trust Frank and continue on using his map. She owed him that.
As Samantha worked her way back to her car, a wave of nausea hit her. That was not good. Either she had eaten something toxic at the diner, which she doubted, or they were getting close. Too darn close. She needed to make a decision. Stay and fight; flee and hope she stayed enough ahead of them that they didn’t sense her in return; or change into her true form and hide in the woods, knowing that she would be making much of the rest of the trip by foot, well, feet, actually. Four to be exact.