by Bonds (epub)
She scooped them all up.
The doctor rounded the corner just as Daisy swung back out the door. He grabbed for her again, looking to push her toward the back of the clinic, but she ducked under his big arm and stepped into the hallway.
The Burner blinked, obviously surprised. “You smell sooo gooood. Just like fried chicken.” He smirked at his joke.
Behind her, the doctor exhaled. But he didn’t breathe out anything new. Nothing that smelled like the ‘trust me’ she’d breathed either. Or the ‘clearheaded.’
Daisy raised her hand and pulled back her arm. She’d always been athletic. Always able to outrun everyone on all the other teams. Always able to ride the horses no one else could ride, and hit the targets no one else could hit. But since they’d moved to America her mom had been telling her not to be obvious, so she’d cooled it with practice.
But Dr. Torres had breathed ‘clearheadedness’ at her and the Burner was about to get a taste of just exactly how well Daisy’s throwing arm worked.
“Stop!” The doctor grabbed her elbow. “Nothing sharp. Never cut a Burner, understand? Don’t make them bleed.”
“Why?” A cut would get him to back off.
The Burner laughed, filling the hallway with a popping, snapping crackle. “Boom!” he roared, waving his arms around in big circles, cackling again.
“They explode?” Daisy breathed.
The doctor nodded. “There are people in the building.”
Daisy switched the scissors for some random instrument with a blunt end that would hurt like hell but not break the skin.
It flicked against the Burner’s cheek and his head snapped back.
“Hey! That hurt!” He rubbed at his face and his skin wadded up like he was rubbing wax off a mannequin.
The next blunt thing bounced off his skull. He staggered back, roaring, and patted around his belt like he was looking for a gun.
Dr. Torres hauled Daisy around the corner and all but tossed her toward a wide, gray painted door at the back of the clinic. A big “Alarm will sound” sign hung on it, but he swiped a card and opened it without a sound. “Go!”
She ran through into the heat and glare, the doctor right behind her. He gripped the door, pulling hard against the hydraulics, and closed it behind them.
“The dark blue sedan. Over there.” He fished his keys out of his pocket. “Where did you learn to throw like that?”
She shrugged as she ran toward the car. “There’s lots of nasty crittehs in Australia you don’t want close enough to ya ta bite. Learning how to whip rocks is good, yeah?”
The dark blue sedan beeped as he pressed the remote on his keychain and unlocked it. “Get in.”
Daisy pointed at the clinic door as she climbed into the car. “Will he follow us?” Inside the car, she pulled her seatbelt across her shoulder and lap. It smelled like every car that had ever baked in the San Diego heat—deep-fried plastic with a side order of sizzle. She rolled down the window to let out at least some of the deathly high-temperature air.
The doctor started the car. “Hopefully the staff got—”
Three pops echoed from the front of the building, outside, probably on the street: Pop. Then pop, pop.
Gunfire.
Daisy gasped. Someone with guns just showed up.
The building audibly groaned. The exterior wall on the back side of the building, the one with the exit they’d just come through, visibly bowed inward.
“Pendejo!” The doctor’s hand gripped the shift and he looked like he didn’t know what to do. Like his doctor half was fighting with his protector half.
But he slammed the car into reverse and backed them straight for the drive. He didn’t turn the car around. He didn’t put it in drive. He backed it up, and he backed up fast.
The building stopped bowing inward. For a very short moment, nothing seemed to happen other than the two of them moving quickly away from the clinic.
Then the explosion took everything.
6
Daisy’s phone buzzed again, but this time it sat in Dr. Torres’s shirt pocket, not her jeans, and it startled them both. He jerked like he was about to jump out the sedan’s sun roof.
He’d turned the car around in the street behind the strip mall and drove away from the now burning clinic like it was the only thing he could do.
Which it probably was.
He pulled the phone out of his pocket and accepted the call. “No, you can’t talk to her. You talk to me, you understand? I at least understand what you are.”
A muffled voice grumbled from the phone.
“That Burner took out my clinic!”
More muffled grumbling.
“At least tell me if anyone is hurt.”
A pause, then what sounded like a number. The doctor frowned.
“Well?” Daisy asked. If someone got hurt because of her, she didn’t know what she’d do.
The doctor glanced over at her. “The staff got the patients out and managed to evac the coffee shop next door. But there are cases of smoke inhalation and several broken bones.”
“But no one died?”
The doctor frowned again. “No. But if I’d stayed, I could have helped.”
Loud yelling popped through the phone. Daisy heard “You need to run.”
“What is she talking about?”
The doctor looked like he would have pinched the bridge of his nose if he hadn’t needed to keep his hand on the steering wheel. “She says the Burner caused a distraction and I need to take advantage of it. I’m supposed to leave town.”
He turned off onto another sleepy street. “I’m going home!” he yelled into the phone.
More muffled words from the Fate.
“Who the hell thought shooting at a Burner was a good idea?” The doctor pulled the phone away from his ear when he took a left too fast and needed both hands to steer.
Daisy leaned into the turn and braced herself against the door.
“Give me the phone!” She almost snatched it from his hand. “You drive. I’ll talk to her.”
“No!” Dr. Torres snapped at her the way her mom did when she asked too many times if she could go to a party. “Fates are dangerous! Just as dangerous as that Burner back there. Maybe more!”
How dangerous could someone on the phone be? “She’s not here.”
He breathed and took another turn too fast. The car skidded.
Muffled yells came from the phone.
“Give it to me.” Daisy wagged her fingers again.
The doctor handed over the device.
“You tell him he is not to go home!” The woman on the other end of the call hissed like a snake. “The gunfire you heard? My kind. Fates live as a bonded triad of three persons: one sees the future, one the present, and one the past. The triad who popped the Burner aren’t from this area. Their present-seer is stitching and I am having difficulty reading them. But they feel… familiar.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Daisy yelled. “Does … familiar… make them more dangerous?”
The doctor’s eyes grew big. “Ask her who they are. Names. It’s important.”
The Fate answered before Daisy opened her mouth. “Tell him I don’t know who they are.”
“She doesn’t know. Said something about… stitching?” She covered the phone. “What’s… stitching? Does it explode like that Burner?”
The Fate and the doctor answered at the same time: “No!”
Daisy pulled the phone away from her ear so fast her head bounced against the headrest. “Neither of you is helping here.”
“It’s a Fate thing,” the doctor said.
“Some of us can hide events in the what-was-is-will-be,” the Fate finished.
Daisy didn’t ask about the what-was-is-will-be, mostly because it seemed l
ike a useless endeavor.
She was beginning to understand the doctor’s obvious annoyance concerning all things Fates. Talking to one was like talking to a baseball coach. Why the hell didn’t they just say what something was instead of making up jargon? But then again, sometimes the made-up shit did a better job of describing than plain speak.
Daisy felt the need to pinch the bridge of her nose. “You told the doctor to run.”
“Yes,” said the Fate. “He needs to leave the city now. As of this moment, the Fates in town don’t know about the doctor or his family. They’re focusing on a shiny object dangling in front of them and they’re distracted. But if he goes home, they will know.”
“She says—”
“I know!” The doctor took yet another corner too fast. He drove randomly, like he was lost, not like someone trying to get home.
Daisy inhaled and slowly blew out her breath. The Fates who blew up the clinic were distracted. But by what?
A tap sounded through the phone like the Fate smacked it against something hard. “They’re in town because they sniffed out an artifact. In San Diego. One that is important to my people. The doctor and his family are going to get caught in the crossfire unless he does exactly what I tell him to do.”
Daisy covered the phone again. “She says they’re here because they’re looking for an artifact.”
The doctor groaned. “I want to know who they are. Because it’s important I know which triad is here.”
“He wants to—”
“I see arrogance. Brazenness.” The woman paused. “Arrogant even for my kind. There’s a chance they’re going to figure out who he is.”
None of this made any sense to Daisy, but she relayed what the woman said. Dr. Torres nodded. “Why is the young lady caught up in this, Fate?” he yelled, so the woman would hear.
The woman addressed Daisy. “My people see. That artifact? Someone from Australia snuck it onto American shores a couple years ago, Daisy. We can’t see it directly, but the best of my kind can get whiffs of it, if we know where to look.”
Oh no, flitted through Daisy’s mind. Oh no in a big “What the hell did my mom do?” kind of way. But a lot of people from Australia come in and out of the States. Hell, the entire plane they flew in on was full of Australians.
So it could be anyone.
But if her mom did steal something—which the Fate seemed to be insinuating—then the woman sure seemed to be pushing them into stupid behaviors. “Then why the hell did you send me toward the doctor and not running in the exact opposite direction?”
“The closer to a lie the truth stands, the harder it is to identify.”
The bitch was reading Daisy’s mind. Pulling Daisy’s thoughts right out of her skull.
“Right now, all the Fates in San Diego are focused on getting the artifact. It’s like a fireball in the what-was-is-will-be. It’s all they see.”
“So?” Daisy didn’t know anything about distractions. Or the what-was-what-the-fuck. She just wanted to not be shot at.
“So, young lady? All those other triads? The ones who are in town because of the blindingly bright light your mother’s sticky fingers brought to America? What they see coming, when not distracted, is not what I see coming. They do not see correctly. I do. My fate is to protect the correct path and my fate has already caused me—and my triad—a level of agony you cannot understand. And if the doctor doesn’t get his ass out of San Diego right now, that path will be corrupted.” She paused. “I’m helping because I’m as bound to my fate as the doctor is to his.”
Daisy exhaled. She’d been holding her breath while the woman lectured. She hadn’t realized. “My mom was a vet.”
“Yes, she was.”
Daisy used to go on house calls with her mom occasionally, when she was little, when her mom didn’t have a sitter. They’d visit dusty offices and big warehouses in a rundown part of Perth, checking people’s guard dogs and pet cats. And the occasional iguana.
Shipping companies. Places where “artifacts” would come in and out of the country.
Daisy closed her eyes. They’d been hiding like rats because her mom had sticky fingers.
She put her hand over the phone and addressed the doctor. “You’ve been hiding, too, haven’t you?” Just like her. Hiding out trying to not be noticed and all of a sudden his life was flooded by cops and Burners and not-gods all because they’d sniffed out Daisy. The poor guy was like some fugitive who’d cleaned up his act, settled down, and started a good life. Only to accidently wake up some morning with the FBI storming his neighbor’s house.
The doctor nodded. “Yes.”
“What’d you steal?”
The doctor frowned. “If I tell you what happened, it will connect you in the present to the threads of my past. And it will make you more visible to Fates.”
“And that’s bad?” But then again, everything seemed to be bad.
Both the doctor and the woman on the phone spoke it at the same time. “Yes.”
Dr. Torres pulled into the parking lot of a crappy-looking apartment building. One that looked crappier than hers, which took some effort on the part of the residents. Daisy’s neighbors seemed to pride themselves on the fine-tuned negligence they all seemed so good at.
This building had the same peeling paint and junk on its sagging balconies. The same old, rusted cars in the parking lot. And the same potholes in the pavement.
The doctor didn’t turn off the car. “Give me the phone.”
She handed it over, figuring arguing wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference, as clueless as she was about this whole situation.
Shifters? Okay, sort of got that. And they keep saying I’m one, too. Daisy stared at her hand. Maybe if she concentrated, she could turn her skin green and scaly. Her muscles tensed. She squinted, willing “iguana” at her hand.
Nothing happened.
She flopped against the seat, a headache starting.
And Fates? He said they weren’t gods. But the woman knew information like she could read minds. Which, when Daisy thought about it, probably did make them more dangerous than that Burner who chased her into the road.
“Wait.” Daisy pointed at the phone. “Why the hell did she let me get hit by a car?” What kind of person did that?
The doctor pulled the phone away from his ear. “Because she’s a Fate and they’re all assholes, correct?”
The “correct” was meant for the caller, not Daisy. An indistinct yell popped from the phone and the doctor pulled it away from his ear again.
Daisy snickered.
Dr. Torres grinned.
He probably was a really good daddy. His little girl was lucky.
But his face grew serious again and he turned away to look out the driver’s side window, like it would make all the difference between Daisy hearing and not. “You talk to me now.” He paused. “Why?” Another pause. “No more Burners.”
Dr. Torres glanced over at her, but he looked resigned. The way she suspected he’d look if his boss just told him to clean the bathroom or something just as gross. “I won’t do it. She’s not active.”
Daisy threw her arms into the air. “What does ‘active’ mean, anyway?”
“You’re just like any other normal until a parent activates your abilities.” The doctor’s eyebrow went up like he’d gotten an idea. “Mostly like any other normal. Though you seem to already have an enthraller’s nose.”
“So once my mom… activates… me, I’ll be like you? I’ll be able to heal people?” Sweet. And she’d be able to protect herself from assholes like that homeless guy.
The doctor turned away again. “Maybe. If your mother is a Shifter.” Another pause and his attention turned back to the phone. “Yes, I want to know what her abilities will be.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t know for sure because you can�
��t see. Nice excuse, Fate.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear again when the woman yelled.
“It’s not going to happen!” He handed it over to Daisy without saying anything else.
Daisy put it to her ear. “The future hinges on what I am about to tell you,” the woman said. “The doctor needs to run. He must hide until he’s needed again. Your job is to make sure all eyes stay on you.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” Yessiree, her mom stole something bright and shiny and now a big old spotlight glared down on Daisy. “Should I run out into the road again while juggling chainsaws? What about my mom?”
The doctor pointed at the phone. “Tell her I will not run until I know my family is safe. And you and your mother. Fate be damned.” He had that look of determination about him that guys get when they were dared to do something stupid. That fuck you air they put on when called a pussy.
The doctor was about to eat the super-hot pepper. Or drive his dad’s car a hundred miles an hour over the speed limit. And he dared a Fate to tell him otherwise.
“He damned well better do as—”
Daisy cut the call. Just like that. She hung up on the Fate because right now, the woman wasn’t helping. “We need to make a plan.”
7
The Fate called back. Daisy hung up again. The next call, Daisy made the woman explain a few more things.
The doctor stopped at a diner, so they could discuss it all.
“The Fate said you can’t go back to your house.” Daisy tapped the corner of the diner booth’s grimy salt shaker on the chipped surface of the table between her and the doctor. He’d ordered a burger. She hadn’t wanted anything but he told her to eat anyway.
Dr. Torres bit into his burger but didn’t respond. Her burrito tasted good, actually, not too soft and not too crisp on the outside. And the cheese tasted fresh, not greasy. This place had good salsa, as well. She took a bite.
The doctor swallowed and sat back against the booth’s squeaky red fake leather. They’d picked a lonely, shadow-filled corner. When the waitress came over, he’d immediately filled the air with that ‘trust’ scent again. Then he launched into some story about visiting colleges with his daughter and how this place looked so good they had to stop, and the middle-aged woman waddled her middle-aged ass away, obviously thinking he was the best dad ever.
