Call Me Wicked

LAUREN PARISH DID NOT intend to die today.
Death was nowhere on her to-do list, and yet here she was, crouched on the fire escape outside her bedroom window, cold wind snaking up her nightgown and her heart pounding wildly in her ears. Four stories up, with two men in black tearing through her apartment and muttering Czech words she could not identify, death didn't seem such an unlikely scenario all of a sudden.
Five minutes ago, she'd been sitting in bed flipping through research notes for a presentation due next week, when an image had flashed in her mind. She saw two men standing at her door, using some kind of tool to pick the lock. When her hearing, more acute than that of mortals, caught the slightest sound of metal against metal at her front door, she'd turned off her bedside lamp, dropped the notes, and scrambled to the window, her only escape. She was easing the window shut again when she heard the men enter the apartment.
It hadn't been the first time one of her visions had proven useful, but it had definitely been the most opportune.
She barely had enough room to keep herself out of sight of the window on the small landing, and she had to either go up or down. Her breath was coming out in quick shallow gasps, and her legs quaked beneath her. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn't. She had to summon whatever strength she possessed to stay calm, to escape.
She knew without thinking twice who the men were, and she knew their intent without a doubt was to kill her, or take her to be interrogated and then kill her.
Neither choice was remotely appealing.
So this is what it felt like to stare death in the face. It was a fear she hadn't been struck by since childhood, a fear her ancestors had held close and nurtured, a fear she'd foolishly let slip away in her comfortable life--in her disdain for what had always seemed to her generation as the elders' cowardice.
The men only had to feel the still-warm bed where she'd been sitting to know that she'd been there, that she was hiding somewhere close by. She glanced up and saw that her crazy upstairs neighbor was home, but the woman would call the police before she'd let Lauren climb in her window.
She looked down and could see no light coming from the window directly below. The apartment was occupied by a young couple who had a cat they let go in and out the window, and if she was lucky, the window would be open now.
Ever so slowly, she peered into her bedroom again and caught sight of one of the men standing beside her bed, doing exactly what she feared he'd do. Her heart flip-flopped. When he ran his hand along the sheet where she'd been sitting, she held her breath and eased herself slowly toward the ladder.
The old metal fire escape was creaky, and even a cat scaling it had a tendency to sound like a herd of buffalo. Lauren didn't have a chance. Why couldn't she have been born with some really cool power like the ability to shape-shift? Now would have been a great time to transform into a mouse.
She moved as quickly as she could, eased herself down the ladder with a minimum of noise, and stopped at the neighbor's landing. The window, as she suspected, was ajar six inches. But when she tried to push it up farther, she saw that a piece of wood had been nailed into place to prevent the window from opening any wider.
Lauren muttered a curse and glanced up. From above, she could hear her own window opening. She sucked icy air into her lungs and shivered, then pushed up hard on the window. It wouldn't budge. She noticed the wood window frame was rotting, and she had to decide whether to keep trying to get into this window or take the risk of going another floor down.
Above, if they were looking down at her now, they'd see her. She felt a burst of adrenaline, and she stood up, kicked the window frame with all the strength she could summon, and felt the satisfying give of the wood against her heel.