Then he looked at the man standing next to her. The man was only an inch taller than Charlee, with a fine, pointed chin that at any other time Lucas might have considered weak. His eyes were close-set. He was smiling with a chilling sort of glee, showing rows of ragged, blackened and ruined teeth. The same impish joy glowed in his eyes.
He was waving around a knife with a strange handle with holes in it and a double blade that looked like it split in the middle. Lucas had never seen one before, but he coupled up the split blade with chatter at school and wondered if this was what the street kids called a butterfly knife. It was long and looked very sharp.
“You must be Sergio,” Lucas said.
“You don’t get to talk, fucker,” Sergio told him.
“You must be one of the stupidest idiots on the globe,” Lucas told him. “You’ve been told what would happen to you if you ever bother my sister. But that’s okay. If you quit now, if you let us go, then I can maybe stop what will happen to you next. But only if you let us go now.”
Sergio had a grip on the knife that made his knuckles whiten. He waved it around so that it swung in front of Charlee’s stomach with each circle of his arm. “I took care of that faggot banker man,” Sergio said. “I got him what they call neutralized. It’s just you and me and skinny cunt-face here.”
Lucas glanced at Charlee. Her huge eyes were watching him, but as he looked, her attention was caught by something over her shoulder. She looked back at him and her eyes widened even further, which was not something he thought was possible. Warning him?
There was a soft sound that Lucas recognized. It was a police radio crackling, the sound turned down low. The sound made his guts loosen with hot relief, but he kept still, trying to hold on to the calm pocket that was letting him think and keeping the fear at bay.
“Shit, fucking cops!” one of the gang whispered. Lucas hadn’t looked at the others, for he had their locations mapped in his mind in relation to where he was standing and that was all he needed to know, but he heard them now as they shifted restlessly, looking around wildly.
A dark cloud passed over Sergio’s face. He didn’t move, even though the others clearly wanted to leave.
From just behind them, probably on the other side of the bushes screening them, came the same electronic crackle. “Yeah, just checking out that ten-ten that was called in. Gimme a few.”
Lucas felt rather than saw the gang members melting away, because they did it silently and swiftly and he didn’t watch them go. He kept his gaze on Sergio, who was still swinging the knife, but in smaller circles now. Sergio had a look on his face that Lucas recognized with a twist of fear. He looked like a little kid who had just been told he had to come into the house, play time was over. Sergio looked like he was ready for a full-on tantrum.
His knife was still too close to Charlee for Lucas to try anything, even though Sergio’s back-up had all fled. What Lucas did know was that the moment the cop spotted either Sergio with his knife or Charlee who looked exactly like the hostage she was, it would trigger…he didn’t know what.
All the silvered calmness that had let him think disappeared. Lucas was back to being scared again.
* * * * *
Asher shut the apartment door and looked around the dim room, feeling an odd weariness in his bones. It was only six in the evening, but he had already put in a long night. While they didn’t get jet lag from the portals, there was a disconnect and disorientation that developed if you used the portals too much. It came from having to deal physically and psychologically with successive changes of time zones, climates, times of year and more. He had definitely been using them a lot.
More and more, he was starting to understand why most of the Kine found accommodations as close to the hall as possible. It made life considerably more simple if you only had to step across the road or walk a block to get home from the hall. He had to think hard to recall why he had settled in the Bronx, (families, neighborhoods, homes) and remember the satisfaction he’d felt when he’d found this place, which had been so far away from the hall.
He tossed his keys and the long coat onto the sofa and scrubbed at his hair, yawning. He couldn’t go to bed yet, even though he wanted to. He needed to stay up a few more hours so he was sleeping through more or less a normal night.
There was a “1” glowing on the answering machine.
Curious, he headed over to the machine. Everyone he knew usually waited to see him to pass on news. They were all Kine and used to communicating in person. If humans needed him, they tended to call him at the restaurant or the bank, as the only humans that might want to talk to him were associated with his businesses. It was rare to get a phone call at home; most of them were survey companies or people trying to sell something, and they didn’t leave messages.
He pressed the playback button and stared out the window at the street below, which was going through the early evening routine. Supper, TV, bath and bed, for most of the houses he could see down there.
The machine beeped as the tape stopped rewinding, then clicked into play mode.
“I got the girl, you faggot motherfucker.”
Asher whirled to stare at the machine. All the mead he’d drunk in the last few hours seemed to swirl in his gut. He knew the voice. He didn’t even have to guess. He just knew.
Charlee. They’ve got Charlee.
But the voice kept going, speaking of things Asher hadn’t put together fully yet, laying it out in grisly detail. “I know where you live, faggot. I know where you work. I know about the bank and your little restaurant. I know all about you, fucker. So now you know how this goes. If you come after me or touch any of my men, if you bother us in any way at all, I’ll come looking for you and yours.”
But he has Charlee. The thought stayed front and center.
The tape was still rolling. “I get the redhead. Then, faggot, we’re done. We’re square and you can stay in your hole. But I get the skinny bitch and no interference. That evens the score.”
The tape stopped and the machine clicked and rewound itself neatly while Asher stared at it. His mind worked slowly, for it was bogged down in horror.
He flipped open the address book on the table and looked up the number for Darwin Baxter and dialed. The phone rang and rang at the other end. No one home.
The ringing sound went on, muted, as he put the phone back on the base, thinking it through. He couldn’t call the SPCA to get her number. They were closed. He didn’t have a single phone book in the apartment, either. He knew all the numbers he needed.
Darwin Baxter had been his one shot. He didn’t know how to reach Charlee in any other way. She had always been there, for lunch or after school. She was just there. He’d never had to contact her the human way.
He sank down onto the sofa. His keys dug sharply into his hip, but he barely noticed it. A more painful truth was making itself known: he had to wait. He had to wait and hope that Charlee would call him.
You haven’t bothered talking to her for months, you asshole. Why would she reach out now?
He hung his head and closed his eyes, dealing with the stark reality. She might call because of their deal and she needed his help now. But she probably wouldn’t call...because he had made sure she wouldn’t want to.
Chapter Twelve
Charlee woke to pain. It seemed to be blanketing her entire body, like a mist with tendrils that worked their way inside through every pore. She came swimming up from (it’s all black, where have I been) somewhere, to an awareness of herself and how all of her seemed to throb with the pain.
For a while, she had no idea how long, she floated in that state. As she pulled more of her consciousness together, she felt glad about the pain. She didn’t know why she should feel that way, but she did.
Then sounds drew her attention. She was hearing sounds around her now. Soft sounds. She wanted to stay in the misty place where pain was the only thought, but the sounds were pulling her up toward the surface, making her focus.
<
br /> She listened, not analyzing. Stayed small and mute. Far away, there were happy sounds. Music. Even though she didn’t want to, she could identify it. That was a television.
Noticing the television helped the other sounds make sense. Beeping, steady and slow. She had never heard it in real life, but she knew what it was: a heart monitor. Then she heard the soft squeak of rubber on linoleum, the shuffle of someone rearranging themselves in a chair and she knew where she was.
The pain seemed to gather and leap in intensity and now it had a focal point. Her face, the left side of her face, was a white-hot mass of shrieking agony. She groaned as she opened her eyes.
Her groan brought attention. Her father rose from the chair by her side to lean over her and stroke her forehead. “Hi, sweetie,” he breathed. He was unshaved and his eyes were red. The whiskers that were growing in were reddish brown. Their color had explained to Charlee her own red hair, once she had learned about genes. The loose skin under her father’s chin wobbled as he leaned. The bulgy bit that used to be there had gone. When had that happened? Charlee wondered groggily. How did I miss that?
He kissed her forehead and she smelled his aftershave, but stronger than that was a minty smell. Like mouthwash. His whiskers tickled her forehead.
“Hurts,” Charlee whispered...or tried to. The agony in her face wouldn’t let her move that side of it. The word came out slurry. “Hursss.”
“I know, honey,” Dad said gently. “They said you might hurt when you woke. I can get the nurse to give you some more painkillers, if you want.”
“Wait,” she said, working to form the word properly. There were questions she wanted answered, first. She refocused beyond her father, beyond the end of the bed. There was another plastic chair there and her mother was curled up in it, her head on her arm. She was asleep. That explained why her father had whispered.
“Time?” she asked.
“It’s nearly two in the morning,” he told her.
She was remembering now. She didn’t want to, but it was coming back on its own. The park. Sergio. The knife....
“Lucas?” she asked.
Dad nodded. “He’s here, too. He’s just across the passage, there. They say he’s going to be out until morning. He was in surgery until a couple of hours ago.”
Charlee closed her eyes. She remembered it all now, the last few minutes before the blackness. The cop stepping around the bush, walking like he was bored out of his brain, his gaze scanning the trees. He’d seen them and his eyes had widened and his hand jerked down toward his gun as he realized what he had walked into.
Sergio stood in front of Charlee, between her and Lucas. He had grinned at the cop, the big knife waving unceasingly as it had since he had dragged her off the sidewalk an hour before.
The cop pulled the gun.
Sergio’s grin seemed to widen. Then he moved, so fast that Charlee didn’t really see it. He seemed to throw out his hand toward her, the one with the knife. There was a tearing sound—she remembered it, would remember it forever—and her brain was just starting to say, with some surprise, why, that sounds like it’s coming from inside me, when the pain hit. It was hot and cold at the same time, across her cheek. There was incredible heat on her chin, moving down her neck.
Her eye on that side seemed to lose focus. Her leg buckled and she realized she was falling to the ground. But her mind, her curious mind, kept recording things. The cop’s gun firing. The way Sergio spun around that made her think with fierce satisfaction that the bullet had got him. But that wasn’t it at all. He was spinning, whirling with the ferocious energy of a kid’s toy top, the kind they didn’t make anymore but that she remembered playing with when she was smaller. The knife was whirling, too. Whizzing fast, making a whistling sound and that was a sound she would remember forever, too.
The blade slid into Lucas’ thigh, on the side, almost exactly halfway between his knee and his hip. It punched in like a hot knife would slide into butter, right up to the top of the blade. There was a muffled, wet sound that reminded Charlee of cracking wet branches over her knee.
For a moment they froze in their positions and it looked grotesquely like Sergio was just resting the side of his fist against Lucas’ leg, the way buddies did it, but usually against each other’s arms or shoulders.
Lucas started falling sideways.
That makes two of us on the ground, Charlee thought and followed it up with an idea that shocked her even as it formed in her mind. Now the cop has a clear shot. I hope he takes it.
But the shot didn’t come. Not that Charlee heard; the mist that was blurring her vision in her left eye crossed over to the right and became dark instead of light.
Charlee blinked, coupling up those last moments with these new ones: hospital, surgery, pain. She could see through the door of the tiny ward. There were only three other beds in the ward and they all had their curtains drawn around them. Through the door and on the other side of the wide passageway, there was another open door similar to this one. A cop sat on a chair reading a magazine, next to the door. He looked bored.
How they had both arrived here, she would find out eventually. Probably the cop had called an ambulance. The more disturbing question was created by the cop outside Lucas’ ward. If there was a cop guarding him, she guessed there was one guarding her, which meant that Sergio had got away. Where was he?
“Is Lucas going to be okay?” she asked her father. The full sentence, with six whole words, made her face blaze with agony.
He stopped fussing over straightening the sheet and covers over her, but didn’t meet her eye. “They had to put a steel pin in his thigh. The bone was...it was pretty bad, honey.”
“But he’s okay?” What she wanted to ask was if he would live, if he would survive this. Is he dying? But actually saying those bald words out loud felt like she might invoke that very fate for him. So she edged around it.
“They’ll know more when he wakes up. The surgeon...he thought it went well.”
It’s not like he’d say he’d screwed up. The thought, like the hope that the cop would shoot Sergio, seemed to come from an inner place she hadn’t been aware of before. They were adult, uneasy thoughts, and even as she had them, even while she was busy being shocked, the same inner place was nodding, agreeing with their pragmatic realism.
But Lucas would wake. It sounded like his leg was badly broken, but people always recovered from broken legs. She spared a thought for his football ambitions. He had confided to her only a week ago that he thought he might be up for selection. Straight out of high school, it would be a dream shot, but there had been comments and praise and he had been introduced to some very interesting people lately.
All that was gone, at least for now, and Charlee tried to feel sad for him but she didn’t. She was just fiercely glad that he was still alive. It was the same gladness that had embraced the pain when she had been coming to, thrilled that she could feel any pain at all.
Her father tucked her sheet neatly around her middle. “There’s someone waiting to see you. Do you feel up to having a visitor?”
“At two in the morning?” she asked, wondering who on earth was out there.
“This is the ER, honey. They can wait in the waiting room all night if they want. He said he wouldn’t go home until he talked to you.”
“Sure,” she said, running through the very short list of possible males that might want to talk to her. There was her teacher, Mr. Osman, and maybe Darwin. Darryl from the clinic, but how would he have found out?
Her father headed for the door.
“Daddy, could you ask the nurse if I can have that painkiller?” Charlee asked. Talking was killing her. She had to stop with the long sentences.
“Sure thing.” He disappeared around the corner, a medium-height man with a medium build and a face he called ‘forgettable’, but she loved him all the same. It was a love that sometimes hurt, but it was there and undeniable.
A few minutes later he came back and Da
rwin was right behind him, his head nearly brushing the top of the door. His hair was wild and kinky and shot with grey. He had red eyes and he was wearing no socks. His shirt was rumpled, with the ironed-in wrinkles that came from having worn the shirt too long.
Charlee was very glad to see him. Her eyes watered, although the left one seemed drier than the right. She blinked rapidly. She hated crying in front of people.
Darwin rested both hands on the rail that ran along her bed and she saw him tighten his grip. “I just had to say hello before I went home,” he told her. “I wanted to find out what happened and make sure you’re...well....” It was the first time she had ever seen him trip over his words. Darwin knew every word in the world and how to use it. She learned most of her new words from him.
And now he couldn’t find any. His eyes looked suspiciously watery, too.
“Daddy, could I talk to Darwin alone for a minute?” she asked.
Her dad glanced at Darwin, surprised. But Darwin looked as harmless as he really was. He was a sixty-year-old sort-of librarian who looked like he had been sleeping upright in a chair and couldn’t even remember to put socks on. Her father worked on the docks (and he had taught her more new words, although most of his were for smashed-my-thumb occasions) and saw all kinds of tough and dangerous people. She saw him assess Darwin in one quick glance. He already knew Darwin had been teaching her for a few years, although he’d never really discussed it with her. Now he nodded his agreement. He stepped out into the passage, moved down to Lucas’ door and went inside.
Darwin’s eyes narrowed. “It was the gang, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“You can’t go home,” she said urgently, cutting right to the chase. Trying to lead up to it, trying to explain things, would take too much talking and she was nearly out of words. The pain was building now. It was a high singing in her mind, trying to steal her attention and make her focus on it and nothing else.
He straightened up, like she had surprised him. “I’m not safe?” he asked carefully.
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 19
