Her heart leapt into her throat, and she tried to swallow it back down. It couldn’t be. They’d always been safe around normals. Besides, there were only two and—
One of the men removed his shades, revealing cold, dark eyes, a faint purple glow behind them.
Wraith’s stomach knotted and her blood turned to ice water.
The snatcher gave her a cold smile, then winked before replacing the glasses.
There was a flash of pain behind her eyes, like someone was reaching into her brain. For a long moment, her only thought was—Everything is fine, just as it should be. But the thought tasted of plastic, seemed false somehow. She pushed it aside, but in doing so her focus slipped and the equation shifted, no longer zeroing out. The veil around her expanded, enveloping half the rack of cigarettes.
“Holy crap!” a man in line said. His eyes looked like they were trying to leap out of his head.
“Time to fight or flee,” Nightstick said, his tone bored as he leaned against the wall.
Unconcerned with the out-of-control cloaking equation, Wraith turned to flee, but her face drove hard into the jeans that strained over the clerk’s prodigious backside. The impact drove Wraith into the wall of cigarettes. Her hood fell back and an avalanche of little boxes pummeled her. She felt a pop in her ears as her concentration, the equation, and the cloak collapsed.
“Oh, crap,” she whispered as gasps of surprise erupted from the people in line.
The clerk blinked at her. “Where did you—” Her eyes darted from Wraith to her bag packed with stolen food. “Hey! What are—?”
Before the clerk could finish, Wraith was on her feet, sprinting for the door.
One of the snatchers moved to cut her off.
“Ferrousan!” SK shouted.
The snatcher’s foot hit the ground and stuck, causing him to stumble.
Fritz said something Wraith didn’t hear, and screeching feedback erupted from the PA system. At the same time, Shadow rushed forward, lifted her hands, and shouted something in Siouan. The fluorescent bulbs in the store didn’t snuff out; rather, their light collected into Shadow’s hands. The darkness left behind was complete.
Shadow shouted again, and Wraith was barely able to cover her eyes in time. Even with eyes closed and a hand over them, she still saw nothing but white for a moment after Shadow released the collected light in a sudden, intense burst.
“Wraith, go!” Shadow yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”
“I’m not leaving you guys!”
Shadow cursed. “We’re right behind you. Run!”
Wraith bolted.
A third snatcher, one she hadn’t seen, must have avoided the flash because he shoved past a family and reached for Wraith as she ran for the door. His hand caught the hood of her jacket.
Wraith twisted, symbols gathering around her foot, and kicked at his knee as hard as she could. She didn’t weigh a lot and wasn’t a Kung Fu master, but her legs were three miles long and made an excellent fulcrum. Physics could be fun, especially when supplemented by a little kinetic entropy.
There was a wet popping sound from the snatcher’s knee as tendons snapped. He cried out in pain and released her as he collapsed to the ground.
Wraith turned to run but chanced a glance over her shoulder. She didn’t see SK or Fritz, but Shadow was drawing in for another flash.
“Watch the birdie, bitches!” Shadow yelled.
Wraith pulled her hood over her face and turned away.
“Christ!” the snatcher at her feet bellowed.
“Move your ass!” SK yelled and a hand shoved Wraith forward.
She emerged from the sliding doors into the dreary, rainy afternoon and ran for the parking lot. There was a screech as she barely avoided a black windowless utility van. Before the vehicle had come to a full stop, a snatcher leapt from a door on the far side.
Wraith dodged him, but another flash of pain almost made her fall.
She looked back over her shoulder. The snatchers were hauling a blue-haired girl from the store. Wraith blinked, and when she opened her eyes, Shadow was kicking at the snatcher who held her fast. Wraith knew something wasn’t right, but all she could think of was the color blue.
“Get out of here, you idiot!” Shadow shouted. She twisted and managed to get a leg free and kicked again at the snatcher who’d grabbed her. Another emerged from the store and put a black hood over her head.
Wraith’s mind whirled, like a gear spinning free. She knew the inside of the hood. She knew that it was musty, that it smelled of bad breath, vomit, and tears.
Her knees went weak and the world seemed to shift around her as she tumbled down next to a parked car. “No . . .” She shook her head, trying to get everything to line back up. This wasn’t right. None of the normals around her seemed to be reacting to what was happening, though some were staring at her with a mix of confusion and wariness.
“SK? Fritz?” Wraith yelled.
“Get her!” someone shouted.
Wraith snapped out of it just in time to see a snatcher flick his hand toward her. A thin silver cord leapt from his palm and snaked towards her. She dodged around the car, and in the blink of an eye, she was running. She wasn’t overly graceful, but her long legs ate lots of ground. Unfortunately, after a dozen blocks, her lungs were burning and she gasped for breath as the pounding in her head began to settle in for a lengthy stay.
Before rounding another corner, she chanced a look behind her. The snatchers were a ways back, but she knew they were still on her tail and the snatcher-mobile couldn’t be far behind them. She spotted a door just down a narrow side street and gathered a chaotic formulation into her hand. She hated taking chances like this, but she didn’t have time for anything else. She did keep the spell small as she flung the equation at the door. A moment later she pulled the door open and stepped through.
She stepped out of a completely different door. A quick glance around told her she’d bought a dozen blocks or so, moving away from the Space Needle toward downtown. She took off again. None of this made any sense. Snatchers had never grabbed anyone in broad daylight and never with so many mundy witnesses.
She stayed to the alleyways, putting as many turns as she could between her and her pursuers, even chancing a few more random doors. Every so often, she’d pass Nightstick where he lounged against a wall.
Before long, she realized she had no idea where she was or where to go. The tall buildings loomed over her, and she felt like a rat searching for cheese. People walked down the streets, but no one seemed to give her a second glance. And why didn’t anyone else see the snatchers? It was almost like she was the only one who could see them. But she wasn’t just imagining them. Was she?
Pain lanced through her head, and the thought shattered.
“This way!” a snatcher shouted from ahead of her.
“Are these guys marathon runners or something?” Wraith said. Nightstick didn’t answer.
She fled again, down yet another alley. When she passed a Dumpster, she stopped. With all the strength she could manage, she pushed it at an angle until it blocked the narrow path. But the alley was a dead end.
Nightstick stood to one side playing cat’s cradle with a loop of string. “Running out of ground, rabbit.”
“Apartium!” yelled a man from the alley entrance.
She backed away as a thin line of white heat ran up the middle of the Dumpster and cut it in half.
“Crosian!” another man shouted, and the two ends crumpled like pop cans against the brick walls.
“Oh, they look angry,” Nightstick said, still focused on the string looped between his fingers.
Wraith looked around as the snatchers strode toward her. She spotted a weathered metal door, then flung the probability equation and reached for the handle at the same moment. An instant after the ma
gic hit, she pulled open the door, stepped through, and slammed it shut behind her, returning it to a normal door.
She found herself on the top level of a parking garage. The door now led to the stairwell, but she thought better of using it. Stepping to the railing, she looked over. It was sixty feet down, at least. With no other option, she ran for the ramp down but froze when a van turned the corner on the level below and stopped at the far end of the ramp, less than a hundred feet away.
The nagging fear in her stomach became a meal to sharp-toothed anger and defiance.
Drawing a slow breath in through her nose, she raised her right hand, index finger pointing at the van like an imaginary gun. She planted her feet as she balled up all the fear and anger and focused on the symbol tattooed on the palm of her hand. Some of the numbers and symbols that floated around her zipped into her hands, forming an elaborate mass of equations.
The engine revved, tires squealed, and the van lurched forward.
“BANG!” Her hand came up in recoil and she slid back several feet.
An invisible ball of collected particles the size of a basketball, with the mass and speed of an armored car at a hundred miles per hour, smashed into the grill. The front of the van caved in as the rest of it came to a loud and sudden stop, the back end lifting up off the ground a couple feet.
When it came down, the crash was deafening. Then all was quiet.
Wraith’s eyes went wide and she looked from her trembling hand to the wreckage. “Shadow!”
She yanked open the driver’s side door and a bloody, unconscious man fell out. She stepped over the snatcher and looked inside. Shadow was suspended in a web of thin chains, a black bag over her head. Wraith knew those chains, somehow. And she knew they drained away the hope and magic of their captives in equal parts.
Tears ran down Wraith’s face, and she started to climb inside to free her friend
“You little—” The snatcher on the ground grabbed her ankle.
Wraith screamed and kicked over and over. The man’s nose cracked, blood sprayed, and he fell back. His head smacked the ground, and he went still.
Wraith climbed into the van, tears pouring down her face as she yanked off the hood.
A blue-haired girl flinched away. “Please, don’t hurt me!”
“You’re not Shadow,” Wraith said.
“Who’s Shadow?” the girl asked.
“Well, this is an interesting turn of events,” Nightstick said from the back of the van.
Confusion and a throbbing in her brain caused Wraith to wince. Something tried to crawl from the darkness of her memories. “No, no, no,” she said as she gripped her hair. “You have to be Shadow. You have to be!”
“What the hell are you doing?” Shadow asked.
Wraith opened her eyes and looked at her friend, who was staring back at her impatiently. The girl with the blue hair was gone. It was Shadow in the van, in chains. “Where—?” Wraith opened her mouth to ask a question, but the thought was pulled into the darkness of her mind.
“You need to get out of here,” Shadow said.
“What? No, not without you,” Wraith said.
“Time is short, kid,” Nightstick said. “Best hurry.”
Wraith’s hands shook trying to open the locks. “Damn it, Fritz could just make them pop open.”
“There’s no time, you have to run, Stretch!”
Wraith clenched her jaw and ignored the nagging confusion, but it was like a splinter in her mind. “No, I’m not leaving you! Not agai—” Pain lanced through Wraith’s head, and the world felt artificial. She could hear Nightstick making an unhappy sound.
The door to the stairwell opened. The two snatchers stepped out and looked around.
“I’ll get away, I always do,” Shadow said. “They can’t hold me. Run, now!”
Reluctantly, Wraith climbed out. She gave the creep on the ground another kick to the face.
“We’re not here for you,” one of the snatchers said, nodding at the van. “She’s the one we want.”
Wraith backed away from the snatchers, but stopped when she bumped into the railing. She glanced over her shoulder at the drop, then at her shoes.
“You need to stop interfering,” the other snatcher said. “You know what we’re doing and how important it is.”
“Heard that before, haven’t we?” Nightstick asked.
Wraith closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and drew in a slow breath. “Suck on this.”
Though he was silent, she could sense Nightstick’s approval.
Both men sensed her drawing in power and raised their left hands, the symbols drawn on their palms glowing with a faint purple light.
“You can’t have them! Leave us alone!” The floating numbers shook in anticipation and glowed brightly as she leapt up onto the metal tubing and then into empty air, slapping her left shoe, or rather the symbols drawn on it, and forcing power into them.
Then she fell, and time seemed to slow.
The symbols around her fluttered drunkenly for a long moment, then the magic sputtered and symbols streaked to her shoes, but she continued to fall. She gritted her teeth and focused harder, her shoes growing hot with the increased flow of power. She tried to steady the torrent, desperate not to blow the charm, but she continued to fall. Then more numbers joined the others, completing the formula and zeroing the sum.
The air thickened around her until it felt like she was falling through Jell-O. She hit the ground running with little more force than if she had come from a five-foot drop. Chancing a glance over her shoulder, she saw the two snatchers watching her from the railing, one speaking into a cell phone. She was glad these trained monkeys couldn’t fly.
A couple miles, countless turns, and an indefinable amount of time later, she stopped and doubled over, gasping for breath. After a couple short minutes, the stitch in her side faded. She pulled a battered pair of leather-and-brass goggles from her bag and slipped them on. The left lens was red, the right green, and they were both covered with thin copper wire shaped into whirling symbols. After a moment’s concentration, the color faded from the world. Traces of magic drifted almost invisibly from the mundane people passing by and the scattered plant life. She scanned all around, but didn’t see the bright glow that would surround the snatchers or any sign they’d put a tracking spell on her.
“Congratulations, clean getaway,” Nightstick said, a sneer behind his words.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You could’ve taken them out and you know it.”
Wraith ignored the twisting in her stomach. Convinced the coast was clear, she pushed the goggles up from her eyes and walked to the condemned tenement. There, she moved a graffiti-covered sheet of plywood and slipped inside. The abandoned building was quiet. The only sound was the flapping soles of her now demolished shoes slapping the dust- and debris-strewn floor. She headed for the stairs. Seven stories later, she reached the uppermost level.
She stopped and stared.
The room was a large rectangle stretching forty feet wide by twenty feet deep. Most of the far wall was comprised of windows with square glass panes. Near a section of mostly intact windows was a single old mattress with several blankets on it. A collection of knickknacks were scattered nearby. Other than that, and Nightstick leaning on his ever-present shillelagh, the room was empty.
“What the hell?” She looked where the other beds should’ve been, were supposed to be, and, in fact, had been that morning.
“SK? Fritz?”
The silence was oppressive and seemed to swallow her small voice.
“Did the snatchers grab them after all?”
“Well, that isn’t very likely, is it?” Nightstick said, chuckling.
Wraith ignored him and continued talking to herself—the self that wasn’
t a snarky hallucination. “And then what? They came here and took all their stuff?”
Her head throbbed, so she closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.
Nightstick made some comment, but she wasn’t listening. Something moved in her peripheral vision, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. A dog the size of a small pony, but with the reddish coloring of a coyote, limped out of the darkness toward her, favoring his right front leg.
Wraith let out a nervous laugh. “Toto, you scared the Skittles out of me.” She knelt down, wrapped her arms around the dog, and hugged him tightly.
Toto licked her face a few times.
“I missed you too.” She ruffled the dog’s fur, and didn’t let go. “They got Shadow. And I don’t know what happened to SK or Fritz.”
Toto tilted his head to one side.
Nightstick chuckled. “What’s that? Timmy’s stuck in a well?”
Wraith shot him a glare, and he turned away. Though there was no way to see them behind his white glasses, she knew he rolled his eyes.
“We’ll give it some time,” she said to the dog. “Maybe someone just stole their stuff.” It wouldn’t be the first time someone picked them clean. She felt bad, though. Fritz had managed to collect some decent tools, and Shadow’s sketchbook and pencils were her solace.
Toto sniffed her bag and his mouth opened into a doggy grin as his tail went into manic wagging.
Wraith sat down next to the window and opened her bag. “Yeah, I got something for you.”
Toto followed her and waited patiently, sort of.
She removed the bag of treats and tossed some on the ground. As the dog munched the bacon-flavored strips, Wraith removed her destroyed sneakers and examined them. The soles were melted and flapped like a puppet’s mouth. The symbols had nearly burned through the toe.
“Not exactly what I’d intended, but at least it worked,” she said to Toto and tossed the shoes into a corner.
He never looked up.
“Thanks for reminding me of my place.” She slid her mattress to one side, lifted a floorboard, and retrieved a pair of glittery ruby red Doc Martens boots from the stash. She’d hoped her Chucks would last longer, but it couldn’t be helped. She replaced the board and the bed, then sat and pulled on the boots.
The Forgotten Page 4
