by JL Terra
Evidently, being accused of murdering the mayor warranted a considerable effort to bring him down. Probably they weren’t wrong about the firepower necessary, which made him wonder if his enemy had given them particular intelligence about Malachi’s capabilities along with his home address. And how had they figured that out?
He would have given the police everything he could if it were him on the other side of this, trying to take down his enemy. Otherwise, he might have escaped too easily.
A smile curled Malachi’s lips.
Inside the backpack, his cell phone rang. He ignored the vibration and moved to the opposite end of the roof where he had a preinstalled escape route. Malachi had tied a rope to the top of the wall, with knots secured every few feet so he could climb down easily. The rope was curled up and hooked under the edge of the roof. His covert route into the apartment was different from this. But right now, he was glad he had made the arrangement because it seemed like there weren’t any cops watching this corner.
He reached down and flipped the rope out so that it would fall down to the ground. He didn’t relish the climb, but as far as workouts went, it was pretty good. Especially if it got him away from the cops.
He adjusted his backpack, tightening the straps so they were snug. He didn’t want anything to happen to the laptop, even if he did have copies of all the information hidden in other places that no one would ever find.
A whisper of air shifting made him freeze. Or maybe it was the part that had immediately preceded it, the two sounds barely indistinguishable from one another.
Before he could react, though, a bullet slammed into his chest and he tumbled forward.
Over the edge of the roof.
Chapter 10
Mei dropped the old journal. It fluttered to the floor and thunked on the wooden planks, spine up. She stared at the leather cover. Malachi had been shot. Mei knew that before she could even comprehend the implicated horror of the situation.
She clutched her chest, dropping to her knees. The pain in him felt like a volcano erupting behind her sternum. She couldn’t fathom the level of pain he must be experiencing. And at this very moment, too. The awareness of his pain was almost too much to bear, even though she knew she was receiving a lesser, muffled version.
Then, a teetering, and Mei’s stomach dropped to the floor as she grabbed the table in front of her, answering an immediate urge to hold onto something. She could feel a sudden acceleration of wind rush past her face—his face. It ruffled his hair and collar. She knew he was falling.
Malachi slammed to a halt into the ground. Stillness.
Mei stumbled back into the tiny library. He’d hit…she gasped for breath, each inhale coming fast and hard as a distraught whimper left her lips. As if in a trance, she backed up and fell into a chair. She had to get her act together. Had to collect her thoughts. Mei fumbled for her phone, pulling it from her jacket pocket and opening her contacts app to search for Remy’s number.
Shaking, she let the phone fall to her lap.
She left it there and swiped the screen with her finger, able to make the call and put it on speaker. He’s dead. Why else would she be getting these weird sensations? She’d felt it with everything in her. It was like she had fallen too.
She had felt him hit the ground.
“I want to be hard on you for not calling me, but you are—”
“Malachi.” Mei choked the word out.
Remy responded immediately. “What happened?” She used her focused voice that meant she was at her computer and at her disposal. Remy could fix anything. She could do anything. She would also hack anything.
Mei was finally able to take a decent breath. “He was shot, and I think he fell off a building.”
It sounded terrible just saying that. As though speaking aloud what had happened somehow made it more true. She suddenly noticed, though, that she could still feel his pain after all. Didn’t that mean he was still alive? At least she hoped that was how it worked. But she had no idea where he was or what was happening or if death still beckoned for him.
He isn’t dead. He isn’t dead.
She kept repeating that to herself, making it her truth. But how could that even be possible? He was shot, and he fell off a building. She didn’t have a clue how anyone could survive that unfortunate combination, but wasn’t about to deny the fact of his pain when it gave her hope.
She would continue to believe he was alive.
She would even be glad to feel his pain.
“Where are you?”
“Chinese medicine shop.”
“I’ll send an ambulance.”
That wasn’t right. She didn’t need help. It was Malachi, and any second now he would be dead. Gone from this world and unable to do any more good—the kind that had inspired her to work at the community center in the first place. To be a better person.
Before she could explain, Remy said, “Why is his phone on the street by his apartment while you’re miles away in Chinatown?”
“Go to him.” She swallowed, trying to clear the lump in her throat. “You need to help him.” She couldn’t get up. But she had to. Mei couldn’t even lift the phone anymore to talk with Remy. She was too weak. In too much pain. She lay back on the floor, entirely too fast. The back of her head bounced off the wooden planks, and she winced. Her head swam, and though she didn’t know how, she knew the strange muffled darkness she was feeling was actually Malachi losing consciousness.
Was she going to have to live through every second of his long, drawn-out death with him…breath by breath?
Tears rolled from her eyes, trailing down to her ears as she stared up at the ceiling and tried to breathe. So, this was what dying felt like? She didn’t want to go through it with him any more than she was okay with this happening to him in the first place.
“Mei? Mei, can you hear me?” Remy’s voice echoed in the room.
She couldn’t respond before she, too, was sucked down into the oblivion of unconsciousness.
The hallway stretched forever. Despite the blackness, a complete and total absence of light, she could tell it never ended. Along the walls, every few feet, were small entrances. She would have to crouch to go into one of the rooms—the cells. That’s what they were.
Because this was a prison.
Her hand skated across the wall as she moved down the hall. Headed where, she didn’t know. Her feet moved without touching the floor, as though she was floating. As though her body wasn’t quite physical. Some kind of apparition, in a mystical place, where spirits were kept imprisoned. Bound to this place. A judgment on their souls.
But why was she here?
A loud cry echoed down the hall. Not too far away. There had to be an infinite number of cells. Were they all full?
Mei moved toward the cry, unerringly drawn to the source of that sound of both hope and terror that echoed their contrary existence of light and darkness in equal measure. There were no earthly words to describe the noise it made.
Light erupted in one of the cells. Mei stopped and raised a hand, the beam so scintillating, it was more blinding than staring into the sun. The light had a presence. It stalled her progress, even from within the room, as though an unseen hand pushed her back. Walk no further. She waited for her hands to burn. The threat that brought the sword those times her life had been in danger.
It didn’t happen.
She heard a voice speak a language she’d never learned. The words and sounds didn’t even seem like anything she’d heard on earth. Mei struggled to remember them. It seemed as though each syllable disappeared from her mind as soon as she heard it.
Then the light was gone as well.
Its work here was done.
Mei froze for a moment before realizing she could move.
She continued on to the room and the source of that cry. A man was held captive in the darkness. How she was able to see him in the blackness, even though it was absolute, Mei didn’t know. But she knew he was there, non
etheless. A familiar man. She knew immediately who it was and felt a rush of all the emotion she’d been keeping bottled up for months now. Maybe since the day they’d met.
Malachi.
They couldn’t be more different, but her heart didn’t understand that. She only knew he drew her to him in a way she wanted to come closer. Know more. Spend time with him. Explore the possibilities.
Until life intruded back in, and Mei remembered all the reasons it was a terrible idea.
They weren’t compatible.
She blinked and stared at the room again. The cell was empty. Anguish filled her soul. “Mei.”
A heavy hand shook her shoulder.
“Mei, wake up.”
Shadrach’s face came into view. He kept shaking her.
“Dude.” She managed to get that one word out.
He let go.
“Thanks.”
“What happened? Are you hurt?”
She frowned. “I don’t think so.” Mei sat up—with a little help—and then gasped. She grabbed Shadrach’s arm as the remnants of her dream faded, and she remembered again what’d happened. “Malachi was shot. He fell off a building.”
If they didn’t know she had a thing for him before now, they probably would pretty soon.
“Ben and Taya are headed to him. Remy and I are—”
She twisted around before he’d even finished. “You’re here.”
Remy crouched, all arms and legs and that bright red hair. Mei had dispensed with her wig since Malachi had saved her. She had zero idea what color it was right now…until Remy’s eyes strayed to it.
“It’s red, right?” Mei stood up, touching her scalp. They all stood up with her, forming a huddle in the living room of the upstairs apartment above the medicine shop. She spotted the book she’d dropped before…before she’d felt Malachi’s immense suffering. Whatever that had been. Another dream, or vision, or something like that. She sensed it was a memory of Malachi’s. Did that mean the previous one had also been from his past? What meaning either of the visions held, she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t even want to know.
She could be seeing his past and living his experiences because she drank some of his blood and it had healed her. He was immortal, that was clear, but she wasn’t any closer to figuring out who he was and why that played a part into what was happening to her.
Remy lowered her gaze to Mei’s face. “Why is your hair red?” But before Mei could explain, she gasped. “Those women. You’re in danger, too. Aren’t you?”
Mei shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re here when you shouldn’t be. Because that puts you in danger.”
“And my life is more important than yours, so bla bla and I should be careful. Shadrach should have kept me far from here, tucked away in a protective bubble made of germ-free material so I’ll never suffer anything bad ever again.”
Mei had no idea what to say to that. Of course Remy’s life was more important than hers. That was the point, considering they were friends.
“Kind of, I guess.”
Shadrach snorted. Remy shot him a look out the corner of her eye.
Mei didn’t want to get into it any further, though. She got to the question that still sat heavy in her heart, “When will we know if Malachi is all right?”
Assuming, of course, that he was even still alive. Which he probably was not. And why did that make her want to collapse on the floor all over again and start crying? She never cried. Her life wasn’t one where outbursts of emotion would ever be accommodated, and absolutely not actual tears. For any reason.Shadrach glanced at his watch. “Any minute now.”
Mei wasn’t going to hang around and wait. She pulled out her phone and sent her mom a text, just in case she was in a sticky situation where she wouldn’t be able to answer the phone. That could get her a response faster than waiting for a call.
She didn’t like waiting.
Shadrach shot her a look as she pocketed her phone again. Mei didn’t want to admit how much this most recent vision had thrown her off. She wanted to go somewhere else and talk about anything else. Anything to take her mind off the darkness of the hallway, and the all-encompassing black that had seemed to soak into her skin. Until the light. Not only that, but before the light had shown up, it almost seemed like the darkness was at home there. She’d been standing in its domain.
Feeling drawn to it. Pulled and connected. By something in her that was inherently the same.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t need a doctor.” What she needed was her best friend, the genius, not a medical professional. Not that one was separate from the other. Both were who Remy was, and those were good things.
Shadrach had picked up her book off the floor. Well, not her book exactly. The one she’d been looking at before she’d passed out.
Mei snatched it from his hand. Was there something inside this book that made her fall into that dream world?
She rifled through the pages, but it was a bunch of writings she didn’t understand because she had never learned to read or write in Chinese. She sighed and tossed the book on a sideboard, a dresser-type thing in the corner. It looked ornate, and on any other day she would have studied it further because it probably had one of those hidden compartments in it. It certainly seemed like that type of meticulous build of costly wood, handed down from generation to generation.
Instead, she said, “So we’re just going to stand here and wait for mom to call about Malachi?” Or for her to return the text.
Remy took her arm and led her to a couch that had seen better days. And not just because the cushions had all been shredded with a knife.
“I’m not sitting on that.”
Remy sighed. “The others are helping Malachi. We’re here helping you. And it’s a good thing we showed up when we did, because your eyes were completely white and you were having some kind of funky episode.”
“Is that the medical definition?”
Remy didn’t react.
The invitation was there for Mei to explain, but she wasn’t ready to voice aloud the things she’d seen. Not when she hardly knew what to even make of it. First of all, if Malachi wanted them to know what he really was, then he would have shared. Second, she wasn’t going to talk about a possibly-dead man.
“Okay then,” Remy said. “No talking about Malachi. No talking about you, and certainly no talking about the fact you have red hair. So let’s talk about this instead. We ID’d one of the women who was murdered. There were a few social media posts she’d done on her personal accounts about her palms burning, and then a sword appearing in her hands. She was pretty freaked out about it and most people who read the posts thought she was just trying to get attention.”
“She wasn’t.” Mei didn’t want to talk about this either. Not really. “It was the truth.”
“And I am not supposed to ask how you know that?”
“It’s probably better if you don’t.”
It was Shadrach who said, “At some point you’re going to have to let us in.” Not for his sake, but for the sake of his wife who was hurt by Mei’s growing secretiveness.
She sighed. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”
Both of them stared at her.
Mei said, “Let’s just get out of here.”
“But you’re not going to tell us what you’re doing here in the first place?”
“I found a guy here who’s involved with Ricardo, Bella’s brother. It also has something to do with Malachi, and something to do with me, but I have no idea what that is. I’m still putting everything together. He told me where to find the guy who’s behind all this, the one flooding the streets with a new drug.”
“Wow, that’s a lot,” Shadrach said. “You’ve been busy.”
Remy stared her down. “I’m guessing that’s about half of what she’s got.”
Mei smiled at her best friend. “Like I said, let’s get out of here.”
She took the book, just
in case her mom could read it and tell her what it said. They had spent so little time in China, and no time at all that Mei could actually remember. Still, her mom had been taught about their heritage as a child. If she had passed on any of it to Mei, then she might have had a shot at understanding what this was. But given the sword, she wasn’t so sure that was true.
It might be a long shot, or the book might contain valuable information Taya, and maybe Remy, could maybe translate.
Shadrach drove. Remy sat up front, so Mei got in the back. Their German Shepherd, who had really been Shadrach’s dog, considering it had been his military canine in the Marine Corps, had passed away a few months ago and they were looking at getting a puppy. She knew they weren’t going to jump on the first dog they found, even if everyone was ready for another animal on the team.
Still, everyone felt the loss of that great dog.
Mei’s mom texted back then. She had a location on Malachi and the ambulance that was transporting him. He was on his way to the hospital.
Mei let out some of the tension she’d been holding onto in a long exhale and relayed the information to Shadrach. Remy pulled up the GPS signal for Ben and Taya’s car on her phone and directed him. Ten minutes later, they pulled up behind a rental car with Rhode Island plates that was headed south on Columbus. The car pulled off onto a side street and Shadrach veered in after them, parking right behind.
At the end of the street, an ambulance was parked haphazardly, the front passenger door open.
This wasn’t good. “They didn’t make it to the hospital?” It looked to Mei like an ambush had happened.
They approached the ambulance as a group, the five of them spreading out in formation. The way they had done so many times before. It was fluid no matter how many team members were here or what the job was. And the sense of camaraderie was something Mei didn’t ever take for granted.
She loved this team and never wanted to lose them, which was exactly what would happen if she confronted who and what she really was. If she allowed his sword to dictate her life instead of owning her own destiny.
