by H. D. Gordon
“Aria, don’t argue,” Thomas said, his voice strained. “There isn’t time.” He fired two more rounds. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”
The way he said this left no room for contemplation, so I tucked away my staff and climbed up the metal ladder as if my butt was afire, not daring to look down. I plowed into the heavy metal circle covering the hole over my head and pushed it to the side.
There was a loud honk and the squealing of tires, the blinding glare of headlights. I dropped my head back into the hole just a heartbeat before a Mack truck went barreling over the spot where my head had just been. Its large tires blotted out the night sky above as it went roaring past, but I was barely aware because the shock of it had caused me to lose my grip on the ladder. I slipped, my fingers reaching for purchase and not finding any.
I braced myself for the fall, preparing to strike the ground hard but instead landing atop Thomas in a terrible heap that knocked him off balance as well. If anyone had been watching, it probably would have looked downright hilarious—me tumbling off the ladder like a genius and crashing down on him, knocking the gun from his hand along with the flashlight in mine. They clattered to the ground like the falling of duel axes.
“Ahh!” I said.
“Oomph!” said Thomas.
As quick as a flash, the dogs were on us. One latched onto Thomas’s forearm and shook its head back and forth. The smell of iron hit the air as its teeth tore through skin. I wanted to help him, but I was too busy fending off my own hound. I brought my staff up just in time to keep it from reaching my vulnerable throat, and it locked onto my weapon, its dripping white teeth only inches from my face.
Its hot breath blew my hood off, its bulky body trapping me between it and the wet ground. I heard a string of curses escape me, and my voice sounded terribly small in contrast to the growls and snarls coming from the hounds.
I’m going to die! My frantic brain screamed, but my body continued to struggle.
Looking past the hound that was still fighting to get past the staff jammed in its jaws, I saw that three more hellhounds were almost upon us.
There was a snapping sound, and then the weight of the animal was off of me. I sprang up like a jack-in-the-box and watched as Thomas wrapped his hands around the neck of the hound that had been atop me. The muscles beneath his black shirt bulged as he twisted his grip and snapped its neck, mimicking the sound I’d heard just a moment ago.
As he did this, I felt the toe of my shoe hit something and looked down to see that his gun had landed beside me. I scooped it up and tossed it over to him. He fired two more shots while I swung the crossbow and arrows off my shoulders and fired a third.
The three remaining hounds absorbed the shots, two hitting the ground almost instantaneously while the third took one in the hindquarters and hightailed it out of sight.
Silence descended like something heavy, falling down around us as we caught our breath and tried to slow the racing of our hearts. Slowly my mind caught up to the turn of events, and I sucked in some of the smelly air, grateful that I was still alive to do so.
Thomas opened his mouth to say something, his eyes on the bodies of the hounds we’d taken down, but before he could get a word out, the hounds burst into flames that flickered white and blue. There was nothing to do other than stand in awe as the flames burned the hellhounds’ bodies into nothing. Afterward, the only sign that they’d been there at all was the black char on the ground and the little sparks that floated up into the air before dying out and floating away as flakes of ash.
“Forgot about that part,” I said, remembering that I’d read about this combustion once the hellhound was destroyed. Hellhounds, in fact, could not be killed. Their souls had simply returned to the Underworld, where they resided until called upon again by their master.
Thomas jerked his head toward the ladder again. “You ready to call it a night?” he asked.
I nodded, feeling worse about this whole thing than I had earlier, which was saying something.
I waved a hand at the manhole over our heads. “After you,” I said.
CHAPTER 25
While Thomas and I had been distracted by the hellhounds, the Blue Beast had made another appearance on the upside of Grant City, and had managed to kill three more people along with causing thousands of dollars in property damage.
“It was a setup,” I said, slamming my fist into the wall of the warehouse and leaving a sizeable dent there. I was so worked up I hardly felt the sting. “Someone knew I’d go down there and sent those damn hounds to distract me so that the beast could do…” I waved my hand at the television screen. “This.”
My companions were silent. The volume on the screen was off, but the picture there spoke plenty. It was an aerial view of Grant City, probably filmed from a helicopter, and the footage was being played on a loop. It showed the Blue Beast, a mass of a figure leaping between buildings, smashing windows, crushing cars, sending swarms of people running in every direction like ants that had just had their precious hill stomped on by some tantrum-throwing toddler.
The police force had tried to engage it, and another officer had died in the trying. Their weapons seemed to do little to penetrate the beast’s skin, and obviously only served to anger the thing all the more. All of this had taken place while Thomas and I had been fighting for our lives against the hounds. The timing had been pretty much exact, in fact.
Once again, the Blue Beast had wrecked havoc and gotten away.
I punched the wall again, this time splitting my knuckles and drawing blood. Sam, Matt and Caleb sat around looking forlorn and beaten. So, basically, they looked how I felt.
“It’s like we’re two steps behind every time,” I said, talking to myself more than to the others. It was past midnight now, and the four of us had school the next morning, but I was too keyed up to sleep.
“Let’s head home,” Thomas said, rewrapping his forearm, which had taken some real damage when the hound had latched onto it. “We need to rest, then regroup.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but Matt backed him up. “He’s right,” he said. “I think we’ve done all we can tonight.”
I threw up my hands. “But we haven’t actually done anything!”
Sam came over to me and placed her hands on my shoulders. “Go home, Aria,” she said. “Sleep. We’ll be back at it tomorrow. We have school in the morning, and you have practice before that.”
As reinforcement, Caleb came over and kissed my forehead. “Listen to your friends,” he said. “Because they’re right. And that’s not all you have on the schedule tomorrow.”
Suddenly I was too tired to argue, so I only raised my eyebrows in question. “Why? What else do I have to do tomorrow?”
Caleb stuffed his hands in his pockets and flicked his head so that the little piece of hair that had fallen down on his forehead flipped back into place. “Tomorrow we’re going to break into my father’s company,” he said. “It’s time to stop being two steps behind.”
***
“Oh, stop being such a baby. You’re way too buff and manly to be such a baby.”
Thomas gave a small chuckle. “I haven’t made a sound despite the fact that you poured the antiseptic on my arm as if I’d somehow scorned you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, but I can see your aura, and you want to make a sound.” I wiped the last bit of blood from the jagged tear marks on his forearm where the hound’s teeth had cut nearly to the bone. Then I began gingerly wrapping it with gauze.
“You’re a strange creature, Aria Fae,” he said.
I nodded. “Yes, so I’ve heard.” I secured the bandage with some medical tape and sat back to survey my work. “There. All done. You’re gonna have some vicious scars, though. No way around it.”
Thomas shrugged, and I could see in his aura that he really didn’t care. “Won’t be first, probably not the last.” He met my eyes and almost smiled. “Especially since I’m friends with you.”
“Is that wh
at we are?” I said. “Friends?”
As soon as the words left me, I wished I could take them back. They hung in the air between us now like bubbles of embarrassment.
“Aria,” he sighed, and that was all.
I stood from the bed on which we’d both been sitting and put some distance between us. “Never mind,” I said quickly. “Stupid question. Forget about it.” I opened the door of my apartment, telling him without words that he could leave now, preferably before I died of humiliation.
But Thomas made no move to leave.
“How many scars do you have?” he asked.
Seeing that he was going to draw this out, I sighed and shut the door again. “I don’t know,” I answered. “Too many to count. Why?”
He shrugged, and though his face and posture betrayed nothing, I saw in his aura that he was nervous. It made me tilt my head. In the near half-year that I’d known him, I’d rarely seen Thomas get nervous.
“I bet I have more,” he said, and pulled his shirt off over his head.
To my dismay, my jaw practically smacked the floorboards. For a completely indeterminable amount of time, I was unable to do anything but work my mouth like a fish and take in the sight that was Thomas Reid without his shirt on.
His body was like something carved out of marble, each muscle and ridge in his abdomen visible. My eyes lingered there, and I’m not sure I could have pulled them away if I’d had to. He shifted his position, and I watched as the muscles in his arms and chest flexed and relaxed. He turned, and as he did so I saw that the scars on his back outnumbered those on his front, which was saying something since there was so many. His skin was untouched by ink but marred with old wounds that looked like they’d been caused by knife and bullet and probably just serious combat.
In other words, his body was much like my own—strong, but scarred irrevocably.
In answer, and with a dose of courage I didn’t know I had in me, I pulled my own shirt off and stood before him. I knew how good of shape I was in, but being scarred in the way I was, from all the fighting and training I’d endured, had a way of making a girl self-conscious. There was no chance I could feel this, though, not with the way Thomas’s hazel eyes roamed over me, slowly, drinking me in.
Part of me wanted to run at him and leap frog his fine self like my life depended on it, but the other part of me remembered that the last time I’d done that—with Nick Ramhart, nonetheless—I’d spent a good amount of time chastising myself over it. I didn’t regret what had happened between Nick and I per say, but it sure did complicate things.
Is that what I wanted to do with Thomas? Complicate things?
Thomas took the pressure off of me to make such a decision. He made no move to take it to the next level, only sat beside me while we counted each other’s scars.
Turned out, we had the exact same amount of them, a fact that somehow failed to astonish either of us, as if it were the only thing that made sense in this entire crazy world.
And, really, maybe it was.
CHAPTER 26
“Buttholes and elbows!” Coach Sanders yelled at us as we circled the track for the fourth time. “That’s all I want to see, ladies! Get those knees up!”
It was not even 7:30 in the morning and already I was feeling the fatigue from the night before. The bright sun overhead didn’t help any, and by the time I finished my two miles, I was drenched in sweat and my feet ached. I felt as though I had been on them nonstop for the past week.
After our warm up run, we played a mock game, Andrea, Raven, and I on our best behavior since our last reprimanding. With all that had been going on, I’d nearly forgotten about the exchange between Andrea and me concerning the manner in which I’d seen her leaving Coach Sanders’s office the other day, but now, I remembered.
Honestly, though, whether it was because I was in a foul mood, or because she’d been so rude about the whole thing, I pushed it out of my head and decided it wasn’t my problem. Andrea was a tough girl. She could handle herself, and really, maybe my instincts about the whole thing had been off. Either way, I had plenty of other things to occupy my thoughts.
Practice ended at last, and I hurried up and showered off and dressed in the locker room so that I could meet Sam and Matt outside on the front steps of the school building as usual. As soon as I took sight of them, I saw their auras were as conflicted as mine probably was.
Sam gave me a fist bump and passed me the Monday morning Grant City Gazette as we entered the building. On the front page of the paper there was another grainy picture of the Blue Beast in all its destructive glory.
And the headline. The damn headline.
BLUE BEAST ON THE RAMPAGE
And below that:
MASKED MAIDEN NOWHERE TO BE FOUND
I crumpled the paper up after reading the name Gail Golden at the bottom. “Well,” I said, “I guess she gets points for creativity.”
“It says the mayor is going to make another statement this afternoon,” Sam replied. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“Got your panties all in a twist, fairy?” said a familiar, wannabe-sultry voice.
I felt my blood boil and turned on my heel. “Watch it, Raven,” I said between clenched teeth.
“Or wh—?
Before she could finish her sentence, I’d grabbed her by the collar and slammed her into the lockers with a clanging sound that reverberated down the hallway. Dimly, I was aware that all conversation had halted, but I was too worked up to care.
“Or I’m going to break your pretty face,” I growled, my nose nearly touching hers.
Raven tilted her head, her red lips pulling up in a smirk. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You think I’m pretty?”
“Aria,” said Matt, pulling up alongside me and placing a hand on my arm. “Everyone is watching.”
Sam pulled up on my other side. “Come on. She’s not worth it.”
With what felt like enormous effort, I acknowledged that my friends were right, and that this was what Raven wanted, to get me all flustered so that I would make stupid decisions and feel like things were even more out of my control. I gave Raven a last little shove back against the lockers and released my hold, allowing my friends to pull me away.
“You okay?” Sam asked, once we’d rounded the corner and gotten away from the evil Succubus.
“I’m trying to be,” I answered. I tossed the newspaper I’d tucked in my pocket in the recycle bin as we passed it. “I can’t seem to do anything right. A couple months ago the Gazette was mocking my efforts to help Grant City, and now they’re pissed I haven’t stopped the Blue Beast. I just can’t win.”
Sam laced her arm through mine and Matt gave me a playful nudge, lightening my mood as if by magic.
“You forget,” Sam said, “you’ve got two of the smartest people in Grant City on your side. With odds like that, you can’t lose.”
“That’s right,” Matt agreed. “We’re the Dream Team, remember? We totally got this.”
I nodded and forced a smile to form on my lips, but I wasn’t the only one who had forgotten something. My friends had forgotten that I could read auras, and that because of this, I could tell when they were lying.
With a sinking in my heart, I saw that they were as afraid as I was, that they didn’t believe the words coming out of their own mouths.
***
“First, I’m going to ask that everyone remain as calm as possible during these troubling times, and to rest assured that we are doing everything within our power to put a stop to this Blue Beast,” said Mayor Briggs. “We understand that some of you are afraid, but we must remember to act rationally, and that throwing ourselves into a state of panic doesn’t do anyone any good.”
Beside me, Sam snorted. “She should tell that to Miss Gail Golden and her blaring headlines,” Sam mumbled.
“We are going to be implementing a curfew,” continued the mayor. “Just until this thing has been settled. Anyone who is not working needs to be in their
homes by eight p.m. Again, this is for your own safety. Thus far, there have been seven casualties as a result of this beast’s rampages, and I would prefer it if we didn’t allow the number to climb any further. I’m really counting on your cooperation in this matter.”
Mayor Briggs stood on the steps of City Hall, behind a podium with at least five different microphones sticking out of the top of it. Before her stood a gang of reporters, and at intervals their cameras would flash and light up the mayor’s face. A murmur had gone through the crowd with this announcement, and she held up her hand to silence them once more.
“We are prepared to use deadly force to stop this beast, and are bringing in reinforcements to get the job done, but there is another matter I want to address, and despite the backlash I expect to gain from it, with all that has happened, with the lives of seven citizens of Grant City having been lost already, I feel it is the right thing to do.”
The mayor looked up into the camera now, her face a blank slate, but her posture conveying her turmoil. “So this is in regards to the Masked Maiden. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I’m not too proud to admit that this city could use your help in stopping the Blue Beast.” Her voice quivered and her hand shook as she made a fist and brought it down hard on the podium. “One of the victims was my niece,” she said. “She’s currently in critical condition at Grant City General. I don’t mean to sound as though my niece’s life is anymore important than any of the others who have been injured or the lives of those we’ve lost. My heart and prayers go out to the families. I only mean to highlight the fact that this whole mess has become personal for so many of us, and as the leader of this city, I’m not too proud to ask for help on behalf of all of us. She paused here, her eyes staring into the camera as if she could see me on the other side of the screen. “So Masked Maiden, please, if you’re out there and you’re listening, Grant City could use your help.”
The television screens on the walls switched to commercial shortly thereafter, and the buzz of conversation in the coffee shop picked up again, the topic of the talks likely obvious.
