“I bet they keep this locked ’cause there'd be an assload of vandalism tonight.”
Jasper frowned, no doubt at Jacky’s colorful vocabulary.
Jeb answered, “I suppose that'd be the ʽtrickʼ part of this ghoulish little fest.”
“Ya suppose right,” Jacky said noncommittally.
“Then how can your parents be in here...” Beth rattled the iron gates. They were secure.
“My dad's kinda sneaky.”
His eyes met theirs in the gloom. “It's an important reason anyways.”
He swung his face from theirs.
“Allow me,” Jeb said and lifted the flap of his denims, revealing a slim tool. It was contained on a fob, which held several slim utensils.
He touched the ends to his initialized pulse, and each one glowed.
“Estimates?” Jeb asked Jasper, knowing she had a better handle on history than he did.
Jasper stooped to examine the lock and sighed. “Mid-twentieth century?”
Jeb extracted a tool about the size of a pair of tweezers and muttered, “Pre-1960…”
He inserted the tool into the keyhole, and reluctant tumblers ground out their acceptance of his burglarized pulse-hybrid lockpicks.
Jeb smiled when the lock moved inside and popped open the gate.
“That is effing slick as hell,” Jacky said, impressed.
“It's definitely a benny of being a Reflective,” Jasper said.
Jeb's lips tilted. She really was quite good at the Three lingo.
They entered.
He turned and adjusted the lock to make sure it appeared secure upon casual observation.
Jacky was already far ahead of them, and Jeb lifted his chin at Jasper. She nodded and tucked in closer to him, though she left the minimum hand-to-hand combat distance.
Reflectives moved in loose groups. No one could engage properly if their close proximity constrained movement.
Jeb doubted seeing Jacky’s parents would warrant a defense. However, a Reflective was cautious first and presumptuous as a last resort.
They tracked Jacky as he moved between grave markers, climbing a small knoll. At the zenith stood three figures, one larger than the other two.
He frowned at what seemed a strange number but held their position.
Jasper distracted him by pointing to a sculpture just ahead of them. It towered at least four kilometers above them, a silvered glacial blue in the moonlight, which was waxing to full.
Jeb heard low voices and paused, moving to the marble angel, its trumpet between its pursed lips in mid-bellow.
“What is this?” Jasper asked.
Jeb gave a very small shake of his head.
“I don't know.”
He caught her eyes in the gloom, dark pools of onyx in her pale face. Jeb hesitated. “But I know I do not like it.”
He turned back, watching.
Jasper saw it first. “I know that male.” She straightened.
Jeb's vision narrowed, automatically going to the largest of the Threes. He held a fistful of Jacky’s shirt in his hand.
They had hung back to keep their presence concealed. They'd gone over the story Jacky would shout far and wide upon his return.
It had been quite good.
“Chuck,” Jasper identified, and he and Jasper stepped out from beneath the shadow of the statue.
The angel seemed to give her assent as they raced to the Three they had come to kill.
He had the young Three they intended to return to his parents unharmed.
What madness of coincidence was this?
Like Jasper, Jeb was not a believer in chance.
*
Jeb took the hill like everything else in his life—completely.
One moment, he was an observer of a sad family reunion. The next, he was cresting the knoll overlooking twinkling city lights like slow moving fireflies.
Jeb’s assessment was instantaneous. Chuck stood over Jacky’s parents, whose slit throats soaked blood into dirt that already held the dead.
Unfortunately, Chuck was smarter than he'd first appeared and had used his every scrap of intellectual prowess for evil.
He proved it instantly by laying a blade against Jacky's throat. His frenzied eyes landed like a painful boxing glove on Jasper's face, and Jeb felt his heart stutter between emotion, duty, and compromise.
“Let the boy go,” Jeb said as though he didn't care one way or the other, as though the boy's parents’ blood had not begun to leech into the canvas lace-up shoes he secretly loved.
Now they were just shoes seeped in the death of innocents.
“Where is my Maddie? You give me answers, and maybe this shitbag smartass lives.”
He seemed to think through the murk of his dirtied motivations. “Unlike that brother of yours. Now that—that was a work of art.”
Jacky's green eyes widened. The car accident hadn’t caused Chase’s death—Chuck’s deft manipulation had made it to look as though it was.
Jeb's fists clenched.
“Don't get squirrely on me, big guy. Stand down.” His gaze swung to Beth.
“Let the little bitch, if she feels froggy enough, jump on my lily pad.”
Jasper had been silent as a tomb. She spoke with conviction, and Jeb's heart squeezed at her words. “Let Jacky go, and I'll go with you.”
“No,” Jacky squeezed out from behind a hand buried in his throat.
Nodding, Chuck smiled. “Yeah. I think that's a good trade. I fuck up your little defiant princess here—I got the assholes that knew where Maddie's holed up, and I get to have fun.”
He pointed a large finger at Jasper. “No funny games, or the kid gets it.”
That was clear to Jeb. What wasn't clear was how he would get his partner out of this criminal's hands without her suffering.
Jeb thought about how he'd taken her as partner again. His mind touched on the abuse he'd meted out to Jasper in his nightmare.
His fists tightened.
Chuck taking Jasper out of his line of sight was not an option.
“Come ’ere, little girl.”
Jasper's expression soured.
Six feet three, two hundred forty pounds, former athlete, first third of life cycles.
Too young for the damage he's done to his body to have caught up. Size advantage, but slower than Jasper.
Chuck smelled like the pennies of Three, which still passed for currency but were no longer made.
He smelled of other people's blood.
Jeb didn't realize he'd moved until Jacky came sailing through the air, headed straight for him.
Jeb instinctively caught him.
It was well-played.
He set Jacky down quickly and spun to locate his partner.
The hill was vacant.
Jasper was gone.
*
Fifth: protect the young.
On his hands and knees, Jacky gasped for air.
Jeb eyes sought his partner in the tapestry of darkness peppered by silvery markers of the dead.
He assessed Jacky.
Bruised trachea, compromised breathing; debilitated by ten percent.
Eighth: defend those who cannot.
“Come on,” Jeb said to Jacky.
He didn't wait to see if the boy would follow, but ran headlong after where he thought Jasper would be.
How did she not subdue Chuck?
Was there something they hadn’t known? Jeb ticked off his age—Chuck was too old to have paranormal talent. He had a weapon, and though it would do the job, it should not have been sufficient to overcome Jasper. She was trained to counter all weapons from every explored sector.
He spotted tracks—two sets.
Jeb crouched, his fingers going to the depressions. Like railroad tracks from hundreds of years ago, they ran deep, side-by-side, and the heel moved the grass apart like a plow through grass waters.
Jeb closed his eyes, and his nostrils flared wide.
His eyes sprang ope
n, and his vision speared a far corner. He stepped into one of the prints.
It wasn't a dragging heel print, but deep and long—laid by a male similar in size to Jeb.
Jeb's instep matched the pattern.
He ran, and Jacky followed, gasping.
*
A hand cracked across her face, and the stinging of flesh on flesh roused Beth like an ice-water dousing.
Beth's face swung with the momentum of the slap.
She knew how to take a hit, and fighting it meant more damage.
She was intimately aware of torture techniques, and she felt the bite of old-fashioned zip ties constricting her wrists as she was bound to a chair.
Putrid breath fell across her face, and Beth recoiled instinctively.
“Don't get shy on me now, sweetheart.”
His hands plunged into her unbraided hair.
Beth bit her lip to keep from crying out.
She opened her eyes; a sting like an insect bite was at her neck.
The bastard had juiced her with a sedative.
She shuddered to think about the sterility of the needle.
None.
Her mind churned through the possibilities.
That was how Chuck had overtaken Jacky's parents. It was fast working.
It robbed Beth's consciousness that fast.
While Jacky's parents lay on the ground they'd been sacrificial lambs to his blade.
How did Maddie survive this maniac?
She almost hadn't.
Chuck was speaking, and Beth had been slow in answering.
The second hit was harder, more accurate, and her mouth complied, spraying blood.
Some of the splatter hit Chuck in the face, and he casually swiped it away.
The impact had been close to Beth't temple, and the area would begin to swell, taking some of her vision along with it.
She spit blood.
“I said—where the fuck is Maddie?” His voice was a soft roar and Beth shook her head to clear it.
If she had not been Reflective, that last hit would have broken something. As it was—it'd hurt.
“Somewhere safe,” Beth replied.
Chuck paced, his large hands, adept at hitting, swung in agitated jerks and fits as he moved back and forth in front of her.
He turned, facing her. Beth could see that he ached to jerk her head back, using her hair as a handle. She suddenly wondered if her long hair would get her killed.
Chuck kicked the chair back, and Beth fell, her head smacking the floor, her hands crushed and immobile behind her. Her shoulders felt as if they were being torn out of their sockets.
She did cry out then.
“Good, not so tough as I thought.”
He bent down over her.
“You think I don't know what she was?” His face lowered over Beth. “That I don't know what you are?”
The wash of his rotten breath bathed Beth's face, and she leaned forward, clamping her teeth around his disgusting lower lip, and bit through.
He jerked up instinctively—the exact wrong thing to do.
Beth hung on, and his lip nearly tore off. Beth had to close her eyes against the heavy spray of blood.
His blood flooded her nostrils in a metallic slap, and she choked. Her teeth full of his flesh, her nose full of his blood, she couldn't breathe.
Still she held.
He roared and hit her in the head hard. It rang her bell, and her teeth released him as the chair she was bound in tipped to the side.
She landed hard and screamed.
Beth shook her head to free it of his vile leavings and saw his ruined mouth.
She'd always been an opportunist. And for that, she would pay.
He mewled like a wounded animal.
And anything wild retaliates when it’s injured because it feels cornered.
With a bellow, Chuck charged, and Beth waited, her heart a part of her throat.
When he'd grabbed the chair off the floor to right it, he swung her around, sending blood, spit, and hair flying with the force.
The chair legs creaked at the abuse.
Chuck jerked her close.
Beth bunched her unbound knee tight against her chest then drove it into his crotch with everything she had.
She prayed to Principle it was enough.
Chuck fell, and Beth did too. It was the first break of the night—she landed on a big parka that had been discarded on the floor.
She lay on her face, the chair riding her back like a monkey, ass in the air and her face planted in soft down.
She was suffocating in a jacket, tied to the chair while a dangerous Three lay just paces away, grabbing at his nether regions.
With every ounce of her diminishing strength, Beth turned her head. Glorious oxygen filled her burning lungs.
She coughed, and Chuck's muddy eyes trained on her face.
The planned cruelty she saw in the stare turned her veins to ice.
When Chuck recovered from her opportunist attack, it would be she who would be defenseless.
Beth closed her eyes, thinking of her life and how much of it was yet unlived.
She thought of Jeb.
The effort to keep the crystalized tears of her despair from falling was ugly.
*
Jeb's head cocked to the side when he thought he heard a vague scream.
Ten precious minutes they'd been looking for Jasper.
It was sufficient time for one human to do the unspeakable to another.
The trail had ended at a car's treads.
The spun mud had been flung along the sides of tree trunks in a villainous spray of indifference.
Chuck had left in one Hades of a hurry.
Jacky had managed to gasp out that there was a caretaker's shed not too far away and that Chuck held a part-time maintenance position there.
Sure he does.
“Can we run it?”
Jacky shook his head.
“You can,” he said, out of breath.
“Where?” Jeb asked. A muffled clap arrested his body, and his ears pricked, listening for Jasper.
Her scent was on the wind, like wild roses and woman. He caught it.
“Half mile that way,” Jacky pointed vaguely north.
Jeb ran, his heels kicking his own ass, his arms cracking against his side like spinning saws.
Breath tore at his throat as his hair swept back.
Scraping, then a clatter.
He shot to the left.
A roof—he could just make out the outline of black against a midnight sky. A crumbled, out-of-use chimney jogged out of the top like a rotting tooth hanging on by a thread.
The door was painted red like old blood.
Jeb never slowed down, swinging his leg out in a kick that took the handle, flinging it away and throwing the door open ahead of his momentum.
His mind was a camera shutter.
The scene filled his vision.
Click.
Jasper covered in blood, her face so soaked with it that only her eyes gazed unblinking back at him like stranded black gems.
Click.
A bloodied Three, his lip a torn flap of meat. A limping stagger told Jeb Jasper had worked him.
Click.
Jeb plowed into Chuck, upending him neatly.
They sailed into the back wall and through it.
Chuck swiped the knife out, and Jeb plowed the hilt with his fist.
It flew away harmlessly, and Jeb sank his fist into Chuck's throat, ending whatever words he'd thought to utter.
A gurgle leaked out as Jeb straddled him.
Jeb jerked Chuck up with one hand and joined his other around the Three's neck. He placed his thumbs underneath the meaty jaw, and his eyes met Chuck’s.
Jeb smiled as he spun that neck in the wrong direction.
Bone squealed for a moment's protest as he ended Chuck.
Jeb dropped the body and stood.
He turned around, staring through the
hole in the shed and saw Jasper through it.
He'd never seen her cry—not once.
Jeb's hands shook; the rage had nowhere else to go. Killing Chuck twice wouldn't have been enough.
Tears made clean tracks through the blood on Jasper’s face.
Jeb wondered when logic had left him and emotion taken its place.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jeb had never felt empathy during a session of torture. It's not what Reflectives worried, or talked, about. They completed their mission.
Things occurred.
So why was he having so much trouble breathing as his ceramic switchblade cut through the obsolete binders that held Jasper's wrists?
Her hands fell, the brutal stripes against her flesh bleeding and raw.
He pulled her away from the chair, kicking it aside.
It rolled in a clatter, and Jeb sat on his ass, widening his legs.
He leaned forward, carefully sliding his powerful arms underneath Jasper's back.
She was so light as he pulled her onto his lap.
Her eyes were at half-mast. Consciousness was not full.
He extracted a clean towel from one of the utility pockets in his denims and wiped her face. It made a clean spot, but it wasn't sufficient. She needed a thorough cleansing.
“Hey,” he said when the velvet of her gaze swept past his own.
“Hey,” she whispered back.
Jeb meant to look away, he did. He found he could not. The dried blood, grime, and her wounded face needed attention.
He moved her head to the crook of his arm. The naked bulb swinging above them threw jagged shadows and light around the room and across her expression.
A fine bruise was beginning at the corner of Jasper's eye, and her opposite cheek was starting to swell from a hard slap to her ivory skin, marred with a hot-pink handprint.
“He's dead.”
She blinked slowly.
“Mission accomplished,” Jasper whispered as her head rolled more deeply inside his arm.
Jeb felt his heartbeat thump against her face.
The moment was a keen one—ready, alive.
Instinctual.
Beth felt it, too. She moved her face away from the hammering heartbeats against his ribs.
His eyes moved to her mouth, the only thing that was whole and perfect.
He licked his lips.
In that moment, Jeb was painfully aware of his long-term denial.
His hand moved to cradle her jaw, a thumb caressing the delicate bone. He took in the fluttering pulse at the base of her throat.
reflection 01 - the reflective Page 20
