Killer

by Francine Pascal

  Ever since Gaia had entered their lives, it had been nothing but Gaia this, Gaia that—Gaia, Gaia, Gaia. And Loki was going to end up with his precious little niece, just like he wanted, while Ella was left out in the cold. Well, what about her? Didn’t she count for anything anymore? Hadn’t she given him everything? But he didn’t care. Perhaps he’d pushed her away because she wasn’t pretty enough, wasn’t young enough—wasn’t Gaia enough.

  No. She shook her head, gazing into her steely green eyes in the mirror. Her red hair was dazzling, and her porcelain face still beautiful—despite the wounds. She was young and pretty. She was a woman. And Gaia was a child. That was the difference.

  Ella snorted. Loki might have cast her on the side of the road like an old hubcap, but she wasn’t even close to being through with him yet. There’s only one way of getting the attention of a man with a one-track mind, she said to herself. To hunt down the thing he loves the most and kill it.

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  FEARLESS™

  KILLER

  FRANCINE PASCAL

  To Brianna Adler

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET PULSE, published by

  Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Produced by 17th Street Productions,

  an Alloy Online, Inc. company

  33 West 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Copyright © 2000 by Francine Pascal

  Cover art copyright © 2000 by 17th Street Productions,

  an Alloy Online, Inc. company.

  Cover photography by St. Denis. Cover design by Mike Rivilis.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address 17th Street Productions,

  33 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011, or Pocket Books,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  ISBN: 0-7434-3416-1

  Fearless™ is a trademark of Francine Pascal.

  POCKET PULSE and colophon are

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  KILLER

  GAIA

  In algebra and other heinous forms of advanced math, there’s a lot of talk about logic. You know—if A equals B and B equals C, then A must equal C. Get it? That kind of thing. It’s pretty obvious. I mean, you don’t have to have a degree in rocket science to make these sorts of basic connections. Even somebody who hates math (like me) can grasp the old A-is-to-B-is-to-C bit.

  So it’s kind of strange that it took me so long to figure out that my father was the one who shot Ella on the street yesterday.

  Okay. I guess I should back up a little. Actually, what I should do is break it down into mathematical terms. You know, show you the logic of it.

  A. I saw my father

  B. He was pointing a gun at Ella.

  C. Ella got shot.

  So obviously my father was the one who shot Ella. This should have been very clear to me from the moment it happened. But still, I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Of course, that’s because the idea of my father shooting my foster mother raises a lot of very disturbing questions—the kind of questions that are about as far from logic as you can get.

  For starters, what was my father even doing there? All of a sudden he bursts out of nowhere and saves my life.

  Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention a key part of this whole equation: Ella was trying to kill me. That actually sounds a lot more shocking than it really is. Legally she’s my foster mother, but legality is about as far as the relationship goes. She’s working for somebody (who, I don’t know), she’s trained in martial arts (again, this is a total surprise), and she’s very unbalanced. Psychotic, in fact. (Why, I have no idea.) All I know for certain is that she hates my guts—and she has from the moment she met me.

  Which brings us back to the incident on the street.

  Recently the tension between Ella and me has been a little worse than usual. Maybe that’s an understatement. If the previous tension could be represented by, say, a single Krispy Kreme doughnut, the tension now can be represented by a doughnut the size of Australia. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which revolve around a certain Sam Moon, and none of which I feel like addressing at the moment.

  All I know for certain is that I can no longer live with Ella. Again, it’s just a matter of logic. It doesn’t make much sense to live with a woman who’s trying to kill me, right?

  Luckily I have a way out.

  My uncle Oliver is kidnapping me. Of course, “kidnapping” is also strictly a legal term—like “foster mother.” I’ll be a very willing victim. Because by kidnapping me, he’ll be saving my life. Which he’s already done on one occasion. It’s something he and my father have in common—besides an uncanny resemblance. That’s right. Coincidentally, my uncle is another blood relative who happened to explode out of nowhere and save my life. But I guess that would make sense. He and my father are twins. Why wouldn’t they choose to behave in the same totally inexplicable way?

  There’s only one little catch. Before I leave town with my uncle—before I say good-bye to this city for the rest of my life (or at least until I turn eighteen)—I have to find my father.

  Yes, I realize that this sounds stupid. I realize that it defies logic. My life is in danger. But I don’t have a choice. I have to know why my father tracked me down. He has to answer for the past five years. Somebody does, anyway, because I’m sick and tired of being so confused. Anyway, I keep imagining the conversation we’ll have when I do confront him. It runs over and over again in my head, like one of those adventure-fantasy books where you choose your own ending. Mostly it consists of me firing a lot of questions at him. (No, the gun imagery is not intentional.)

  Why did he and Oliver have a falling-out?

  What happened between him and Oliver and my mother?

  Why did he abandon me?

  The list goes on, and it takes a lot of different paths, depending on how I imagine the way my father responds. Sometimes I see him falling on his knees, begging for forgiveness. Sometimes I see him turning his back on me. Sometimes he’s not there at all.

  The last one is the scenario that seems most likely. But this fantasy conversation probably won’t even be an issue.

  Especially if Ella recovers from her gunshot wound.

  vapid and tacky

  She was nothing, less than nothing—a freelance assassin . . . a pawn.

  GAIA MOORE PUNCHED THE PHONE number one last time. There were a few rings, just like before, then the high-pitched three-tone warning that made her want to grind her teeth right down to the roots.

  Life in Under Six Minutes

  “I’m sorry; the number you have dialed is no longer in service,” the automated voice droned.

  Gaia slammed the receiver down in its cradle. There had to be some sort of glitch in the phone system. Maybe everyone in Manhattan had decided to order a pizza all at the same time. Because there was no way her unc
le Oliver would change his phone number without telling her. Why would he? Didn’t he promise to take her away to Europe? Didn’t he say that he was going to save her from her miserable existence? This was just some sort of mix-up....

  She knew Uncle Oliver would eventually make good on his promises. She knew it. But she wasn’t about to just hang around George and Ella’s brown-stone, waiting for him to get in touch with her. She would be a proverbial sitting duck.

  Ella might not be that hurt. Of course, the last time Gaia had seen her, Ella was lying on the pavement in the middle of the park, bleeding. It was hard to tell how serious the wound was, but if Ella was as strong as Gaia was beginning to suspect, there was a fairly good possibility the stepmonster might soon return. To finish Gaia off for good.

  My foster mother wants me dead.

  Even now, the words in Gaia’s head made little sense. It was all still too much for her to take in. Sure, they had always hated each other . . . but to go so far asto pull out a gun? If she functioned like a normal human being, Gaia imagined that she would have sweaty palms right now. Wobbly knees. She’d be quivering—like an old newspaper over a subway grate. Or like a bowl of that nauseating Village School cafeteria Jell-O. Like a normal person. She’d exhibit the signs . . . the signs of fear. Maybe she’d even hyperventilate.

  But instead, as always, her mind was sharp and clear. Her movements were quick and decisive—like an animal’s. She darted up the stairs to the fourth floor, her lungs rising and falling in perfect rhythm. In situations like these, there were advantages to being a freak of nature. She knew she had to leave. Immediately.

  Gaia tore furiously through the dirty laundry scattered around her sparse bedroom, stuffing only the most essential pieces into her beat-up messenger bag. Cargo pants—in. T-shirts and trashed sneakers—in. Black hooded sweatshirt—definitely in.

  Unworn Gap capris purchased in a moment of consumer weakness—hopelessly out.

  What had ever possessed her to buy a pair of pants that emphasized her grotesque calves?

  One wool cap, one bottle of Cockroach nail polish. If five years of being shuffled from one foster home to another had taught Gaia anything, it washow to pack up her life in under six minutes. The secret was always keeping your personal possessions down to a bare minimum and never owning anything you couldn’t ditch at a moment’s notice. That went for people, too . Not that there were very many people she was leaving behind.

  Gaia had never been very successful at collecting friends. Unlike Heather Gannis, who was constantly swarmed with her own ego-bloating posse, Gaia could count the number of friends she had on one hand and still have enough fingers left over to go bowling. Actually, she could count the number of friendsshe had on her thumb.

  The only person she had left was Ed.

  Ed Fargo. Shred. The good guy. Ed understood what it was like to be an outsider—a freak like her, in his own way. Ed’s wheelchair was to Gaia’s fearlessness as ... what? A sickness was to a disease? A boat was to a ship? Maybe not, but he had been loyal and understanding, especially during the times when Gaia knew she wasn’t so easy to understand. It crushed her to imagine a life with him. But it beat sticking around and getting killed.

  Of course ... there was Sam.

  Sam wasn’t a real friend, though. Hardly. He was an enemy. He was an insect, fit to be squashed. The lowest form of vermin on the planet. But maybe Gaia should count him, anyway, because having just one friend on the entire planet was way too depressing for words. It was hard to know exactly what Sam was to her—the ultimate crush, a failed romantic possibility, the only person she had ever loved. Most important, Sam was the betrayer of her dreams. While she had been loving him from a distance, he had slept with Ella.

  Even the thought of it stung like a slap. It hurt. Physically. Even if Ella hadn’t tried to kill her, that was reason enough to get the hell out of town.

  At four and a half minutes Gaia snapped the bag closed and slung it over her shoulder. A new record. Flying down the staircase at the speed of light, Gaia’s tangled yellow hair brushed the expensively framed trash that Ella liked to refer to as her “work”—trite black-and-white photos of wide-eyed kittens, open-toed shoes, and the Flatiron Building. Vapid and tacky. But that pretty much summed up Ella in a nutshell.

  “Psychoslut” summed her up pretty well, too, though.

  If Ella’s aim with a gun was as lousy as it was with a camera, staying healthy wasn’t going to be a problem. But Gaia knew now that she couldn’t take that risk. Ella’s entire existence was an act. Ella was trained in several martial arts—just like Gaia. Oh, yes. After that combat in the front hall about a week ago, Gaia knew that Ella was one of the few people on earth who could kick her ass. So there was no reason to assume that Ella wasn’t trained to be an expert marksman, either. This whole spandex, big-hair, trophy-wife thing that Ella played to the hilt was a cover.

  The question still remained, however: What exactly was she covering up?

  At the second-floor landing Gaia’s feet came to an involuntary halt. As hard as she tried to look away, her eyes came to rest on the very last photograph. It wasn’t one of Ella’s travesties—but a snapshot that George had taken of Gaia with her mother and father five years ago. Before her world had fallen apart.

  Father.

  Those two single syllables fired like cannon shots through her mind. It had been him on the street, hadn’t it? The one who had shot Ella? So why had he vanished? Why hadn’t he come running to save her? Why had he ditched her ... again?

  But his photo couldn’t answer those questions. The sight of the clueless twelve-year-old girl with skinny arms and dirty friendship bracelets set in motion an endless chain of self-pity and burning anger. Gaia had been so trusting. She had actually been naive enough to believe her father would be there for her ... forever.

  Gaia ripped the photo off the wall with such raw force that a three-inch chunk of plaster came off with it. She shoved it in the bag.

  Whatever. She wouldn’t try to guess at her father’s motives. Her uncle was there for her now. That was all that mattered.

  Go ... go ...

  Racing down the hall and into George’s office, Gaia was seized with a raw, gnawing guilt. The desktop was bare except for a computer, the way George always left it when he was out of town. She wouldn’t be able to say good-bye. Despite his grotesque taste in wives, George was a good man. He had been a friend of her father’s ....

  Stop thinking of—

  From downstairs came the heavy whoosh of the front door opening.

  Gaia’s stomach soured at the familiar, nauseating clack of stiletto heels pounding on marble.

  Ella hadn’t been that hurt. No. She had clawed her way home.

  “IT WAS A RARE MISCALCULATION,” Pearl said, crossing her legs elegantly. “There was little I could do without seeming suspicious.”

  Failed Experiment

  Loki’s cold blue eyes scanned the impeccable appointments of Pearl’s Park Avenue co-op, the apartment she inhabited whenever she came to New York. Everything reeked of money—the priceless oil paintings, the lacquered oak table, the three-quarter view of Central Park . . . and most especially, Pearl herself. From her blond French twist to her Prada shoes, Pearl had flawlessly assumed the life of an Upper East Side socialite.

  So it was that much more surprising to him that she could also be so horrendously unprofessional.

  “I should have hired someone more competent,” Loki finally stated, his voice empty.

  Pearl’s manicured fingers absently brushed her Chanel suit. “You know these things don’t always go as planned. They can take time.”

  Loki’s jaw hardened. “I don’t have the luxury of time,” he said.

  There was a silent pause as Pearl refreshed her teacup. “Loki, I’m not trying to second-guess your motives, but are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked. The flatness of her tone matched his. “You’ve been grooming Ella from a tender age in matters both professio
nal . . . and otherwise.”

  For a moment Loki glared at her, half tempted to lunge at her and crack her neck in half. Who was she to question what he wanted? To act with such insubordination. She was nothing, less than nothing—a freelance assassin . . . a pawn. In hisgame. But he was too tired—to attack or to deny her assertions, to do anything. The exhaustion ate at him like a virus.

  “It’s been a less than successful experiment,” Loki finally grumbled. “Ella’s turned from a brilliant operative into an embarrassing joke. She’s consistently defied me. I won’t tolerate disobedience.”

  Pearl shrugged. “I understand that. But she seems, well, rather harmless.”

  Harmless. Anger rose inside him again. “Ella almost killed my niece, right after you botched your mission,” he snapped. He shook his head as he thought about how close it had been. Much too close. Close enough for him to realize how precious Gaia was to him. Because Gaia was more than just a lure he could use to draw his brother out from hiding whenever he needed to . . . far more. She was also the only lasting legacy of her mother, Katia. His one true love.

  Sweet Katia.

  A shudder passed through his bones. Katia should have been his wife. Gaia should have been hischild. Tom should never have been in the picture. And even though Katia was gone now, pieces of her still remained in Gaia. So Loki vowed to keep his niece—his daughter, really—close to him forever . . . to look into her beautiful blue eyes and see a glimmer of his beloved Katia. And far more.

  “Gaia is the most important person in my life,” he found himself saying, almost to himself. “Are you aware of the implications her death could have had for you?”

  The slender choker encircling Pearl’s slender throat bobbed as she swallowed hard. “Give me another chance. I’ve gotten very close to Ella. No one would have an easier time neutralizing her than me.”