by AJ Larrieu
* * *
The B&B was quiet when we got back. A few of the rooms were still empty—the two college guys sharing the Blue Room were probably still out on Bourbon—but most of the guests were sleeping. Lionel and Bruce were both snoring on the third floor. We tiptoed into the kitchen, and I turned on the lights. Shane carried Diana in his arms.
“I think the Robicheau Room is vacant.” I turned to go up the back stairs, but the motion made me dizzy, and I had to catch myself against the kitchen table.
“Cass, I think you should sit down.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and the spinning subsided. “I’m fine. Let’s get her to a room.”
“I’ll get her settled. Sit down and have some orange juice.” His eyes flicked over my face, and I felt a trickle of warmth over my lips. I swiped them with the back of my hand and came away with fresh blood.
I sat.
The stairs creaked as Shane climbed them. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and drained it in one long pull, suddenly ravenous. The kitchen was close and hot. It still hadn’t shed the heat of the day, and Lionel didn’t run the window unit down here at night. I grabbed the rest of the leftover muffins and took the basket onto the back porch.
The night was warm, but there was a slight breeze, and I sat down on the steps to munch on the muffins. I hadn’t bothered to turn the exterior lights on, so there weren’t too many bugs swarming.
I could feel Shane settling Diana on one of the guest beds and taking off her shoes. Her mind hummed with the typical disjointed images of sleep, and I slipped away before my presence could disturb her. She’d have enough to worry about when she woke up. I wanted her to get all the rest she could.
Shane moved on to the bathroom, checking for towels and toiletries. He was more like his uncle than he knew. The impulse to care and protect was as strong in Shane as it was in Lionel.
I pressed a wad of paper towels to my nose. Still bleeding. I could barely make out the old kitchen through the darkness, and I walked to it, running my hands over the rough brick.
The only warning I had was the slight change in air pressure around me. Then something slammed into me and dragged me to the dark side of the old kitchen.
I struggled on instinct, lashing out with my fist. Something caught it painfully and trapped my hands above my head. I gathered my breath to scream, but my attacker pressed a hand over my mouth and stopped me. My eyes went wide. It was Annette.
“Don’t make a sound.” She pressed her forearm to my throat. “Don’t call for help.” Her honey-soft voice had gone rough with threat and fury. Her eyes darted right and left, assessing. “If anyone walks around that corner, you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”
I believed her. I nodded as much as her grip would allow.
“Good.” She leaned closer. I could feel her breath, cool and metallic. She met my eyes dead-on. I was struck all over again by their unnatural paleness, and after a moment, they were all I could see. Ice and frozen stillness. My muscles went lax.
“Good,” she said again. “Good.”
I stared into her limitless eyes. They were beautiful, like clear, pale sapphires, reflecting all the available light and shining like lamps in the dark. I couldn’t feel the heat anymore, or hear the sounds of the Quarter. I couldn’t see the wooden fence that separated our yard from the neighbor’s. I could only see her eyes and their perfect, crystalline light.
When she spoke, her voice was tangled so completely with my own thoughts, I wasn’t sure she’d spoken after all.
“Go into the house and bring out Diana.”
It was the wrong thing to do. I nodded anyway.
“Cass?” Shane’s voice in my head, barely making it through. “What’s going on?” There was a hint of anxiety in it. He knew something wasn’t right. I should tell him what was wrong, I should let him see.
“Say nothing to anyone.”
Shane. I had to tell Shane. But I nodded, and stayed silent.
“Send her out to me, and tell no one that you saw me.” Annette removed her forearm from my throat. I hadn’t noticed the pressure. I rubbed my neck as she took a step back from me, letting me pass.
“Cass?”
“Go,” Annette said, and there was something new in her voice, something unhappy.
No—this wasn’t right. This wasn’t—
My brain cleared. My vision snapped back into focus.
“You.” I gathered my powers and slammed her, a direct shot to the chest. She barely staggered. I stepped forward, and she held her ground.
“Shadowmind.” Her eyes narrowed.
“Yeah.” I pulled from the air and the earth, the now-familiar crackle of ice giving me confidence. “And then some.”
I hurled an enhanced wall of force directly at her—enough power to shatter a human’s ribs. Annette slammed into the fence with a grunt of pain, but she kept her feet, squaring off against me.
“Very well,” she said, and ran at me.
I wasn’t prepared for how strong she was. Freakishly, inhumanly strong. She hauled me up and threw me over her shoulder, then scrambled over the fence like a squirrel up a tree. I struggled in her grip, but it was no use.
The building next door was an old mansion that had been converted to apartments sometime in the fifties. It still had a slate tile roof and a bunch of elaborate carved woodwork around the windows. I’d always thought it was pretty. At the moment, the decorative work was only good for giving Annette handholds as she climbed to the top.
“Shane!”
“Cass! Where are you?”
“Look up!”
Below, I saw him run into the yard. I beat against Annette’s back, but she held on. When we reached the top, she put me in a choke-hold, lifting me off my feet. I could barely draw enough air to stay conscious. Annette stood at the very edge of the roof, dangling me over the side. A slate tile cracked and slid to the ground, smashing on brick of the back patio.
My brain went oddly clear as I considered my options. I could jump and take her with me, but I knew I couldn’t pull from her to stop our fall. I’d have to draw from the environment. I knew it wouldn’t be enough, but it was my only option.
“Too risky.” Shane’s voice was calm, but his head was full of terror and his pulse was racing. I could tell he was marshaling his considerable strength, preparing to help me if I jumped.
“I’ll be fine.” We both knew it wasn’t true. My pulse raced. There were a dozen warm bodies in the apartment complex, and the panicked, desperate part of my brain yearned to pull from them. A more rational part worried I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I began the process of drawing energy from my surroundings.
“You don’t have enough time.”
“It’ll be enough.”
Annette took out a cell phone without loosening her grip on me even a fraction. I heard the faint ring of the landline in the B&B kitchen. Shane darted inside and picked it up.
“Let her go.” I could hear his voice through Annette’s speaker.
“Give me Diana, and I won’t drop her.”
“No, Shane.” I prayed he would listen. “I can do this.”
He wavered. For a moment, I thought he’d trust me to save myself, but then he put up shields against me and said, “Deal.”
I struggled against Annette’s grip. She didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the back door of the B&B.
“Shane, no!”
“I’m sorry.” He was running up the stairs. “We’ll get her back. I’m not risking you.”
“You have to.”
“I’m waiting,” Annette said into the phone, and then the two of us flew back onto the roof and went down under a rolling mass of wings and limbs.
Bone crunched. Whose, I wasn’t sure. More slate tiles cracked beneat
h us and fell, and Annette lost her grip on my neck. I tumbled to the edge of the roof and only barely caught myself in time, grabbing a broken tile and slicing my hand open. My legs slid over the side and I kicked wildly, dragging myself back up.
By the time I got back onto the roof, Ian and Annette were both on their feet, circling each other. One of Ian’s wings was bent awkwardly, and bloody feathers were scattered across the slate. Annette’s hands were streaked crimson.
“You okay, Cass?” Ian kept his eyes on Annette.
“How did you—”
“Later.” Ian circled Annette, watching her. They were both surefooted on the sliding tiles.
“Shane...”
“I see him.”
Ian flared his good wing. Annette lunged too fast for me to make out the movement, and another burst of feathers rained down. She wasn’t carrying a weapon that I could see, but Ian’s good wing was newly streaked with blood.
“What is he doing?” Shane raced back down the stairs alone.
“Fighting?”
“I can see that. Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Guardian.” Annette’s voice had dropped to a hiss.
Ian smiled, and then he struck. This time it was Annette who bled. I saw the blade flash in his hand, and when he spun away, there was a rip in her black shirt and red slash across her belly. Blood—not enough of it—soaked the tattered edge of her shirt. She didn’t even wince.
“Pathetic,” she said.
Ian flipped the knife and threw it at Annette’s chest.
I screamed when the blade found its home. I couldn’t help it. She staggered, looking shocked. The knife had gone in to its hilt on the left side of her chest, and she looked down at it, fingers trailing over the black plastic handle as though she was inspecting it for cracks. She hit her knees, still staring at it. Ian ran to where I clung to the roof.
“Are you okay?”
I didn’t answer him. I was shaking too hard to speak. He pulled me to my feet and dragged me forward.
“I’ll get you down. Hold on to my neck.” He wrapped my arms around him and stood, bringing me to my feet. I doubted my legs would’ve supported me otherwise. Up close, I could see how badly he was injured. I hoped he wasn’t planning on flying down, because there was enough blood on his wings to soak a bath towel.
“Fire escape,” I said. “Middle of the roof.”
He pulled me over. There was a courtyard in the middle of the structure, similar to the B&B’s, and the sound of a tinkling fountain drifted up through the night air and mingled with the clatter of our footsteps.
“Hold on. We’ll make it.” He backed toward the metal ladder leading to the backyard.
“Ian...”
Annette was on her knees. She wrapped one bloody hand around the knife and yanked it out of her chest. The blade made an awful squelching sound as it pulled free of her flesh.
Dark blood poured from the wound. She smiled, and her mouth was red with it. She had to be dying, but she got to her feet.
She faced us across the open expanse of the courtyard six stories down and threw the knife.
I had time to scream, and then Ian was spinning, shielding me, taking the hit himself. If it had been a regular human throwing that knife, we might’ve been all right. But whatever Annette was, she wasn’t human. The knife came at Ian with the force of a bullet and shredded the primary flight muscle of his right wing. We soared off the roof and plummeted.
Ian rolled through the air in a tangle of limbs and feathers, and I acted on instinct. This wasn’t like before, when I’d collected all the energy I could before making a move. I needed the power to stop us both, and that was all my body understood. I pulled, and the pull landed on the closest source I had. Ian.
I knew from tragic experience that the energy you’d need to stop a human body falling was equal to a human life. There was a price for everything. So even as one part of my mind, my shadowmind, acted instinctively to save us both, I knew that there was a good chance Ian would be dead before we hit the ground.
I tried to disengage, but I was tapped into every part of him, from the impulses firing in his brain to the thrum of blood in his heart. The unnatural warmth of him, the corded muscle in his calves and forearms, his breath. His tangle of buried memories flashed in my own head—his lips on the warm skin of a woman’s back, her red-gold hair brushing his face, her laugh. The feel of a blade against his skin, the surge of fury as he struck back. Power arced through me and kept on coming, filling me up with strength until we froze in midair five feet from the ground.
“What the fuck?” Ian said, and I was so surprised, I lost my mental grip and sent us tumbling, not quite gently, into the fountain at the center of the courtyard.
I struggled out of the tangle of his wings. The left one was streaked with blood and bent back at an angle that made me want to look away. Red inked the water.
“Christ.” Ian stood up and used his tattoo-covered right arm to lift his broken wing. “That hurt like a motherfucker.”
“You’re alive—you’re okay.” I stared at him in shock. He seemed completely unaffected.
“Fuck no, I’m not okay. That bitch threw a knife at me.” The knife was still embedded in the flesh of his wing. He pulled it out. The sound it made—a sucking, wet squick—made me cringe. He wiped the blade on his wet jeans and looked at it. “My own goddamn knife.” He looked up at the roof, eyes blazing. “She’s gone.”
“What—how do you know?”
“I just...know.” He stepped out of the fountain and winced.
“You should be dead.” I couldn’t get past it. A pull like that should’ve at least knocked him out.
“Flesh wound.” He peered at his wing, frowning. “The other one’s worse.” He tried to lift his broken left wing and let it fall again.
“No—I mean I pulled from you. You should be dead.”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “Don’t know what you mean. Come on. She’s gone, but she could come back.”
Shane. We both turned toward the breezeway and froze. In the open French doors leading to the building’s darkened foyer was a compact man in a brown suit, smoking a cigar. He had a ridiculous handlebar mustache. He looked at us, made a zipped-closed motion across his lips, raised his palms, and looked pointedly and wide-eyed at his feet.
Chapter Nine
Ian managed to keep his wings hidden while we walked back to the B&B, but the illusion was patchy and flickering. Every time I looked at him I caught a glimpse of warm brown feathers or tattered, red-streaked flesh. He dripped blood onto the sidewalk.
I was still charged up from the pull. I probably could’ve carried him, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. I was hyperaware of his body in ways I didn’t like, the connection of the pull still vibrating between us. His mental state flashed and ebbed in my brain, a mixture of anger, pain and post-fight adrenaline. He was still as full of energy as the day he’d first shown up at the B&B.
“It didn’t affect you?” I still couldn’t believe it.
He turned his head and winced. “What do you mean?”
“The pull. It didn’t affect you. I mean, you didn’t even notice.”
“What the fuck is a pull?”
“Never mind.” I would worry about this later, when no one was bleeding. “How did you even know we were up there?”
“Felt it.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, Shane met us out front running. “Cass!” He ran his hands over my face, and when he found me whole dragged me in close and wrapped his arms around me. His mind tangled with mine, searching.
“Are you hurt? Are you all right?”
“Fine, I’m fine. Ian took the knife—he took the knife for me.”
Shane looked at Ian over my shoulder. �
�You’re hurt,” he said.
“I’ll live.” His wing dragged the ground and left a streak of blood on the concrete. “What happened to the bitch?”
“She jumped.” Shane shook his head, still stunned. I watched his memory of it. Annette leaped from the roof and landed on the sidewalk with a crack of concrete. She should’ve been dead twice over, but she ran down Ursulines Avenue, staggering and trailing blood. “She looked pretty badly hurt.”
I knew without asking that Shane had stayed to protect the B&B.
“Diana?” I asked, suddenly worried. What if Annette had a partner?
“Fine,” Shane said. “Still sleeping. Come on—we need to get you both indoors.” He didn’t say it out loud, but I knew we presented a spectacle to anyone who happened to look out a window. There was only so much we could write off to New Orleans’ legendary nightlife.
Ian nodded, but with his next step, he staggered and had to catch himself on the brick wall bordering the B&B. Shane didn’t comment, but in my head, he said, “I’ll call Bunny.”
A healer. We didn’t bother her for little things, but this wasn’t little. Shane took out his phone.
When we got inside, Lionel and Bruce were waiting for us in the kitchen. Ian dragged himself in and collapsed into a chair, spent.
“Sweet Jesus, son, are you all right?” Bruce raked his eyes over Ian’s blood-spattered wings.
Ian didn’t answer, and Lionel and Bruce exchanged a look. Without even speaking, Bruce pulled out a first aid kit and clean towels while Lionel started boiling water. You’d never know Bruce wasn’t a telepath, the way those two could read each other’s minds.
Shane remained outside and spoke to Bunny, and I stayed where I was, leaning in the doorway. I was shaking with the leftover power of the pull. Every voice in the B&B was murmuring in my head—asleep, awake, frightened, calm. The power in my mind was so intense, I could’ve lifted the whole building off of its foundation. The realization of what just happened hit me in pieces, all out of order. Ian bleeding on the asphalt, the fall, the knife sinking into Annette’s chest. The pull. My hands trembled with the memory. When Shane finished his call and walked up behind me, I yelped.
