“I can see why,” Jorge said, snatching a tortilla chip out of the bowl at the center of the table and scooping it into the seven-layer dip Angel had made just for them. The restaurant was empty; it had closed hours ago, giving her a little time to prepare something just for Jorge and Miranda. “This is absolutely fabulous.”
“So, Jorge,” Angel said, trying to remember to do the things a careful host would before she nipped back into the kitchen to work on the dessert course. Which would be easy, actually, because she bought the tres leches cake she served from a local shop and could deep fry ice cream quickly if that was more the direction Miranda and Jorge decided to go. “What business are you in again?”
“Ewww, boring business talk,” Jorge said, eyes still animated. “Sorry, I’m in a very unexciting field—sewage engineering. My company buys and helps install modern sewage and drainage systems all through Latin America.” He shrugged expansively. “It’s terribly uninteresting, I assure you, but—it pays the bills.” And here he smiled again. “And it lets me travel, so I can’t complain too much about that.”
“So business is good, then?” Angel asked.
“As good as these chimichangas you’ve made here,” Jorge said, cutting off another little bite of his meal and chewing it slowly. “Which is to say—business is excellent.” And he grinned.
Miranda had that glow about her, and not just from the couple margaritas, either. “He had me draw up his LLC paperwork for a couple of expansion businesses.”
“Hey, attorney-client privilege,” Jorge said, faux-offended, then broke back into a grin. They kissed again, and Angel felt a little uncomfortable. They really were in the honeymoon phase, weren’t they?
“That’s good,” Angel said. “I bet the margins there are better than in the restaurant business—”
“Whoa,” Jorge said, getting to his feet, smile wiped off his face in an instant, “Angel!” And he pointed toward the pass to the kitchen.
Angel stood and turned to look back to the kitchen.
And froze.
A fire was rising up, the stove still running where—damn!—she must have left it going without realizing it. Angel wanted to move forward, her brain shouted ten solutions to the problem she was watching—Go! Run! Get the extinguisher under the sink! Put it out!
None of them translated into action, though. She was transfixed, her body frozen as she stood there, watching the flames pulsate through the window of the pass.
“Where’s the extinguisher?” Miranda’s hand found her shoulder, shaking her. “Where?”
“Under the—sink!” Angel shouted, as Miranda ran past her, Jorge in her wake. They made it into the kitchen while Angel stood, stuck in place as though she’d been glued.
“Got it!” Miranda pulled the extinguisher. The sound of it hissing as she sprayed it and doused the rising flames made its way through the pass and back to Angel, still stuck in place.
“Let me get the gas.” Jorge pushed in front of her, and the click of the cooktop knob clicking off was loud, like a hammer driving a nail of guilt into her skull.
How could I have been so stupid as to forget to shut off the cooktop? Angel wondered.
“It’s okay,” Miranda said, coming out of the swinging doors to the kitchen, Jorge trailing behind her. “I left the extinguisher on the counter. Might want to get it recharged.”
“Thanks,” Angel said, and her legs wobbled. She sat down on her chair heavily.
“You didn’t even … walk toward the kitchen,” Jorge said as he made his way back with Miranda, threading their way through the carved chairs that surrounded the tables. His tone was quiet awe. “You just … stood there.” She couldn’t tell whether he was evincing pity or just surprise.
“I … I get … “ Angel started.
“She gets nervous,” Miranda said, running a hand down Jorge’s arm, smoothing the ruffles in his suit jacket. That was probably the politest way Miranda could have put it, but it still caused Angel’s face to burn. “It’s normal.” That didn’t help.
“Oh. Sorry,” Jorge said, as though he had to apologize for noticing that she’d just failed to do a damned thing.
Angel’s face burned even harder. “I’m … sorry. I … “
“You don’t have to explain, Angel,” Miranda said, softly, waving her off. “I’m just glad we were here to help.”
Angel just lowered her head and caught sight of the plates in front of them. “I’ll clear this and get ready for dessert.” She reached out and swiped her plate and Miranda’s, putting each into the crook of her arms. “Jorge, you ready for some tres leches cake?”
Jorge just stared at her. Behind his quiet façade, she could see the judgment, but he said nothing save for a neutral, “Absolutely,” and she grabbed his plate up and retreated for the kitchen without a further word.
Once she made it inside the swinging doors she dropped the plates by the sink and stopped at the cook top. Thick, black carbon scoring was all over the metal blades that covered the eye, and a hint of soot dusted the vent fan hood above it.
If Miranda and Jorge hadn’t seen the fire … Angel’s dream might have burned right here, tonight, while she stood there, frozen, unable to do a damned thing about it.
Angel just stood there, again, frozen; it was a persistent thing, being stuck in place, unable to react at all, let alone quickly. She hit herself with a quiet cavalcade of mental curses.
At least it was all over now, Angel thought as she felt her legs unfreeze once more. Which was good because … she had dessert to get ready. Pasting a smile on her face that she did not remotely feel, she moved toward the commercial refrigerator in the back of the restaurant, not even trying to restrain the angrier part of her mind from flaying the rest of her for yet another failure.
CHAPTER TEN
Sienna
Now
Exploding Corvettes, ruby red eyebeams slicing across the sky, a peaceful summer night rent asunder by all hell ringing out in the once-calm eve.
Welcome home, Sienna Nealon. Nobody loves me like you do, MSP.
I was at an intersection in Minneapolis, one of the older sections of the city. There was a squat gas station with a bright yellow awning over the gas pumps just behind me. A small, old strip mall with an insurance agency and some other frontage stood across the street from that. Beside me, the Corvette had sprung into flames, smoke already obscuring my vision. No cover nearby save for burning car fragments.
“Well, shit,” I said, expressing what I’m sure was becoming a common sentiment in my life. I swear I’m always getting attacked by people for no apparent reason.
Angel rolled, lightning fast, over the wreck of the Corvette, so quickly that the flames dancing up out of the middle of the vehicle, where the engine had caught, barely touched her. “Let’s move,” she said, and damn, she was moving like the frigging wind, my upper arm clutched in a clawlike hand. It was all I could do to keep up with her as she sprinted for the gas station and, presumably, actual cover.
That ruby red eyebeam came screaming after us, and Angel hurled me bodily forward. I hit the ground in an aikido roll, leaping up in a metahuman hop that sent me up to the immense awning that covered the gas pumps. Angel gawked at me as I landed on top of it and spun, looking down at her.
“What are you doing up there?” she asked, like I’d made a jumbo mistake.
I didn’t want to spell it out for her, but looking for cover from an energy beam among gas pumps was like seeking death by fiery explosion. “Get off the ground!” I shouted, trying to convey my meaning without giving our enemy a great idea about how to swiftly turn us into extra crispy corpses.
With a glance back over her shoulder, she leapt up to join me. Her form was crisp and perfect, her reflex-type power of great aid in making her leap a lot prettier than my rolling springboard maneuver. But hey, we both got up here, and since there were no Olympic judges to mark me a five and her a ten, I just called it good.
“Let’s move,” she sa
id, and we both sprinted toward the other end of the awning. She’d had the same idea I had, apparently—go for the roof of the gas station and then put as many buildings as possible between us and our two pursuers.
Unfortunately, it appeared that the lady with the laser eyes had different plans.
The blaze of red energy cut through the awning supports below us with a sound like a chainsaw ripping through metal. I didn’t even have to see anything more than the red flashes against the gas station’s glowing orange lights to know what she’d done.
“Ohhh, f—” I started to say as the awning tipped backward. I had a feeling Laser Eyes had taken a knee in order to slice those supports just the way she wanted us to fall. Namely, back toward her and her silent amigo.
Angel grabbed me again by the upper arm and sprinted up the tilting awning. She reached the edge just as it went fully vertical, hauling me along for the ride. I hung, suspended as she leapt, using the foot or so of what had been horizontal surface where the gas station logo and sign had been hanging a few sweet moments earlier. She propelled us into a mighty leap just as the awning crashed to the ground with an almighty thunder, and then, blessedly, we were under its cover.
For about a second.
We came to a crash landing that we both rolled out of, Angel letting go of me just before impact. I caught most of it on my shoulder, rolling across my back and then thumping to a halt because there was a damned curb that surrounded the gas station, and it halted my momentum cold. Didn’t feel too great, either, my right butt cheek and kidney taking the brunt of the impact on a six-inch rise of concrete. I sprawled, my legs and backside thumping over the curb while my back and shoulders and head all remained on the asphalt below. It left me laid out with the curb jutting into the small of my back, grunting in pain because it was a nice, sharpish edge across the middle plane of my body.
And then the laser flashed overhead like a ruby spear of light, slicing its way into the gas station, and I was suddenly glad I hadn’t leapt back to my feet, fresh as a daisy. Cuz that sucker would have caught me in the head.
“Move move move!” Angel said, yanking me by the arm again. Apparently she’d had a softer landing, because she was hunched over, dragging me toward the side of the building.
“I’m not stopping to take a nap,” I said, a little crotchety from my painful landing. I threw off her arm and rolled backward, getting to a squat and then hurrying around the side of the squarish gas station with her. The smell of petrol was pretty heavy in the air, and all I could think after seeing the Corvette’s engine in flames was, Man, I hope Laser Eyes doesn’t target a gas pump. Cuz that’d really turn this homecoming into a bad night.
The sound of straining metal being hit by something loud and strong and kind of whining echoed behind me, prompting me to give a look. The other guy, Non-Laser Eyes, had done something that blasted that awning, which had been acting as a shield between the gas station and the road, in half. Laser Eyes had probably cut it pretty neatly, but her compadre was standing there, hands extended like he’d thrown some sort of double punch, and the awning was thrown aside, making a nice little path for the two of them to come after us.
There they were, the both of them, and they had us, flush against the wall of the gas station. I could almost feel the heat as Laser Eyes warmed up her power, sweet smile visible as she looked at us through the now-parted awning. We were easy targets, sitting ducks, without an inch of cover in sight—just waiting to be blasted into oblivion.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Trouble on our six,” I said to Angel, surprisingly calm considering we were about to be vaporized into free-floating atoms by the lady with the wicked smile and wicked-er laser eyes. We were square in the middle of a no man’s land, walls of brick and wide windows outlining us against the side of the gas station, while our foes—one of whom had fantastic distance vision and laser eyeballs with which to shoot us dead—were warming up to dust us off.
Angel, apparently, had a plan, though. And my hand. I had no plan, and so I didn’t exactly fight it when she dragged me by the arm, again, leaping both our asses through the six-foot plate glass window into the gas station.
It hurt. A lot.
“Why is it always glass?” I asked, coming to after a moment of hard landing followed by pleasant blackout, my skin shredded in a half dozen places with shards of window stuck in me like porcupine quills.
“It was that or being exposed as a target for la jefa,” Angel said, brushing shards of glass out of her own skin, eyes barely twitching as she did so. There was no way to bend your body that would have prevented us from taking some pain during that leap, but Angel was one tough lady to just brush it off like that.
I mimicked her action, because standing still was only going to get us dead in a hurry. I was back on my feet a moment later, but bleeding rather heavily—just like she was. “Okay,” I said, feeling just a touch lightheaded from blood loss. “What now?” I might have had a plan of my own, but since she was leading and I’d just suffered an itty-bitty blackout, I figured I’d hear what she had to say while I caught my breath.
“Come on,” she said, and dragged me again without any regard for the ouchie I had on my upper arm, which was clearly her favorite grabbing place.
“I can walk by myself, you know!” Actually, that was questionable. I was feeling a little lightheaded. But, still, I’m Sienna freaking Nealon, and I’ve got my pride.
She dodged around the counter, where a dumbstruck employee was huddling next to a display of candies. She grabbed him, too, a dark-skinned, thin, rakish fellow with a tiny bit of mustache on his upper lip and dragged him along for the ride as she pulled us through the aisle.
Something hit the wall behind the counter where we’d been huddling a moment earlier, another screeching noise, and then came a rumbling as bricks fell and shelves and shit overturned. I tossed a glance back and saw the overhead cigarette pack holders that hung above the counter come crashing down along with half the wall.
Mr. Non-Laser Eyes had just busted into the station. Legitimately busted the place down.
“Do they not have doors where you come from?” I muttered, knowing that there was no way they could hear me over the sound of the wall coming down. Angel was dragging me and the clerk through the small aisle of automotive goods, and I reached out and grabbed a bottle of motor oil, just because.
“He probably comes from Tamaulipas, so … some doors, yes,” Angel answered, who was taking me literally for some reason. Maybe because her mind was elsewhere, focused on escape.
I looked at the guy she had in her death grip, his eyes wide as a bowl of soup. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Abdi,” he said, nearly breathless, as Angel yanked us into a back hallway in the small station, past the bathrooms and through a door that was marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. She ripped right through now, pulling us both along for the ride insanely fast.
I sniffed; Abdi had a scent about him, stale cigarette smoke. “Can I have your lighter?” I asked. I’d come to the basics of a plan a little bit ago, but it had been very gut-level and I’d only gotten to the essentials after I grabbed the motor oil. A lighter, too, was an essential.
“Okay,” Abdi said as Angel came to a halt, looking around. There was an exit to the side, and before Abdi or I could get our feet beneath us, she plunged through, practically busting out the back exit and into a concrete pull-around that ended in a fence that backed onto someone’s yard beyond. I could see a maple tree hanging over the pine boards, stretching up into the sky above. A very old car was parked here, partially blocking the lane around the gas station.
Abdi handed me his lighter with a shaking hand after fumbling in a couple pockets for it first. Angel had paused, watching our exchange with a suspicious look. “Seriously?” she asked me, sounding like … well, me. Or maybe Kat. She’d lost her glasses somewhere in the diving and jumping and broken glass, but I’d been too distracted by the drizzles of blood that ran down her face to notice
until now.
I took a shredded section of my once pristine shirt and pulled it off in my hand. “If you have any other ideas, I’m open to suggestions. This is the plan I’ve got.”
Angel just thought about it for a second and shrugged. “No, do it. Maybe this will give us cover to get out of here.”
“Okay,” I said, stuffing the makeshift rag in the top of the oil bottle as I discarded the cap. Then I lit the tip of the shredded, slightly bloodstained part of my shirt. “Fire in the hole.”
And I chucked it over the building.
“You know oil doesn’t really blow up like a bomb, right?” Angel asked as my makeshift molotov went sailing over the squat, small gas station building. “It’s not super combustible like—”
A thump issued from beyond the station, the sound of the plastic bottle hitting the ground, then …
Silence.
“I don’t need the oil to ‘blow up,’ okay?” I said. “Laser Eyes and Non-Laser Eyes—”
“Those are not their names.”
“Well, they weren’t wearing nametags and I’m not psychic, and it doesn’t matter. See, when Non-Laser-Eyes pushed that awning, he busted open the pumps—”
“His name is Miguel Cerreros, and his power is sonic blasts from his hands.”
“Good to know, but kinda irrelevant at the moment. So, the pumps are busted open, which means gas—”
A WHUMP! ten times as loud as a gunshot rang out, the building between us and the explosion the only thing saving us from taking the brunt of the blast. Angel grabbed me and Abdi by the arms and hauled us to the ground as all the leaking gas that had been puddling out front went up in an explosion that lit the night. A mushroom cloud of fiery orange blossomed into the sky above us, and a wave of heat washed over me like I was sitting next to a bonfire up at the cabin, roasting marshmallows. Which would have totally been a better thing to do on a Minnesota summer night than what I was actually doing.
“Abdi,” I said as I got to my feet, “get the hell out of here.” I didn’t have to tell him twice; he bolted for the car parked only a few feet away, scrambling for keys in his pocket and unlocking it, starting it and throwing it into gear a moment later, damned near running us both over on the way out. A piece of flaming debris was sitting on his roof; it fell off as he peeled out and laid down five feet of rubber on the concrete.
Driven Page 5
