Shock

by Francine Pascal

  But there would be plenty of time for laughter after she crossed the water. She’d use whatever she had to use to get back to Manhattan and contact the people who would help her.

  Then she’d laugh. And she’d wait. Wait to get her revenge on Gaia. For trapping her mother. For taking her place. And just—just for being Gaia.

  Then Tatiana would laugh like hell.

  Rivulets of Dread

  “DMITRI,” GAIA CALLED OUT AS SHE stormed away from Natasha. “Where’s Dmitri?” she asked one of the big CIA guys. He ignored her. She caught another one by the arm.

  “I’m looking for Dmitri,” she said.

  He barked into a walkie-talkie. “We need to find the daughter,” he told someone. “Excuse me,” he said to Gaia, shaking her off as he ran to round up Tatiana.

  Gaia felt sick and desperate. And cold inside. She had to know. She’d been told her father was dead before, but this—coming from someone so close—Natasha really seemed to know. Rivulets of dread snaked through her heart as she made her way back to the caravan of cars and vans hidden behind a warehouse. A huge square light created daylight on the deserted street. It was like a movie set. Only this was real life, and Gaia had to find out the ending. Now.

  Then she saw him. Dmitri. Standing off to the side, eerily still among all the activity. Dressed in black, his close-cropped gray-haired head pale in the light, he stared at her from across the street. She met his eyes and felt drawn toward him. She stopped running and walked, her stride even and purposeful, willing the space between them to shrink more quickly with each step.

  “It’s not true, right?” she asked, stopping a foot away from him.

  He just gazed back at her, his eyes impossibly sad, the blue of them as open and endless as a noontime sky over a freshly dug grave.

  “Dmitri. Is it true?”

  He shook his head. “We don’t know,” he said. “There is no way we can be sure. Given what we know about Natasha, it’s definitely possible.”

  Gaia knew Natasha could be lying. She’d seen her father rise from the dead more than once. But the possibility of it made her tired. Exhausted, in fact. Like her heart was made of granite. If it were true, then she had totally failed him. And if it weren’t true? She wasn’t any closer to finding him than she had been the night he disappeared. It was all too much.

  She didn’t know if she took the last step toward the old man or if he moved toward her, but Gaia felt his arms fold around her as she closed her eyes and stood trembling with confusion, allowing herself for one brief moment to feel the comfort of another human being. She’d searched so long for her father—wasted so many years hating him when she should have just been glad he was alive. Glad to share a planet with him. And when she was supposed to be watching out for him, she’d lived nose to nose with his wanna-be murderers, never lifting a finger to help him. Guilt turned her insides to custard. She thought she’d die of this feeling. The only thing that would ease the pain was her father. Her father. And she was farther away from him than ever.

  And after all he’d done for her, she’d been so inept and useless—it was as bad as if she’d tried to murder him herself.

  It was a touching sight, the young mournful girl in the old man’s arms. Gaia barely noticed when Natasha’s paddy wagon started up and drove past her and Dmitri down the artificially lit street. But Natasha’s face gazed dispassionately from the window. Watched Gaia as she pulled away. Receded as the truck gained speed. Soon she was nothing but a speck in a tiny rectangle of light, disappearing down the dark, desolate streets of Brooklyn.

  Here is a Sneak Peek of Fearless™ #28: CHASE

  No Place Else to Go

  Around every corner she passed could be the gun that held the bullet that would end her life.

  Gooey Gaze

  IT WASN’T A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE for Gaia Moore, wandering the streets of New York City with nowhere to go. It wasn’t even a unique experience for her to believe that her father was dead, that she was next, that around every corner she passed could be the gun that held the bullet that would end her life. It was just that it had been so long since she had been so entirely alone. Weeks, even. Months.

  There was no one left.

  Gaia pulled her collar up against the cold breeze that blew harder and more bitingly with each passing moment. It was late spring, but then, Manhattan never seemed to adhere to the Farmer’s Almanac. The island had taken on the general attitude of its inhabitants and had mastered the ability to give an “Up yours!” to even the likes of Mother Nature. At least it kept the throngs of people off the streets and inside, watching their rented movies and eating their delivery food. Fewer innocents for Gaia to trample. She turned a corner and bent into the wind.

  Just above the soft, worn cotton of her jacket, Gaia made sure her eyes were free and peeled. Natasha had been captured and was now in the custody of the CIA. At this very moment she was being questioned, interrogated, maybe even beaten (one could dream). But Tatiana was still out there somewhere. She could be anywhere. And she still had orders to kill Gaia.

  Not if I kill you first, Gaia thought, her rage bubbling over from her heart into her thoughts. It was still hard to swallow, the fact that Tatiana was in on it. The fact that everything they’d been through together had been a lie. That she’d actually been snowed by a little blond DKNY-sporting fake.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gaia spoke into the collar of her jacket, her warm breath heating her cheeks and mouth. So she’d lost Tatiana. Big deal. She’d lost more important people in her lifetime. Much more important. And if she bumped into the girl right now, she’d kick the crap out of her first and ask questions later. One question, actually. The only one that mattered.

  Where is my father?

  Yes, Natasha had claimed that he was dead. And Gaia had no reason to not believe her. Except, of course, that everything else the woman had ever said or done had been a lie. At this point, she gave her father a 50-50 chance of still being down with the breathing folk. But she was 100 percent sure that Tatiana knew the truth. And those were good odds to be working with.

  If she only knew where the hell the girl was.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go.”

  Gaia paused for a moment, taken off guard by the rambling words of the homeless man who was suddenly blocking her path. He looked at her with wild, blank eyes, shaking a battered blue-and-white coffee cup in front of her, the piddling change inside rattling pathetically. He was bundled inside about four flannel coats but somehow still looked impossibly cold. He shuffled toward her, his gooey gaze settling somewhere around the bridge of her nose.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go…”

  She knew he was just one of the thousands of unlucky people who had been driven insane by life on the street, but for a moment it felt as if he werè looking right through her skin into her heart. Somehow he was extracting the exact words she was trying to keep from eating away at her.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go…”

  “All right, all right!” Gaia said. She stuffed her hand into the depths of her jeans pocket and came out with a quarter. “Here,” she said, tossing the coin into the cup. The man didn’t acknowledge it—he simply took up the refrain once more.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go…”

  Gaia started to run.

  She ran to feel the wind on her face, to get her blood pumping, to hear the roar of the cars and people passing by in her ears, to drown out the man’s ceaseless words.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go…”

  She didn’t even realize that she was headed for Ed’s building until she was standing right in front of it. The tears that had been torn from her eyes by the stinging wind as she ran made little streaks across her temples, tightening the skin. Gaia sucked in a breath and pulled her jacket closer. She stared at the door.

  This was it. This was the place she
always used to be able to come to when there was no place else to go. Ed was the one person who had always been there for her, without fail. But she’d screwed that up too, hadn’t she? She’d screwed everything up.

  Trying not to think about the comfort that lay just beyond those sleek glass doors, Gaia turned her steps toward Washington Square Park. It was time to admit the inevitable. If she was going to get any rest tonight, which she’d need if she was going to track down Tatiana, then she was going to have to scare herself up a park bench. Washington Square Park was downtown’s Motel 6 for runaways and druggies. The only difference was that a person didn’t need to lay out any cash to get a bed.

  Gaia slipped into the park by the West entrance and started along the circle. A large woman dozed sitting up on the first bench, surrounded by dozens of shopping bags full of clothing and rags and heaven only knew what else. There was a shopping cart tied to the bench with a red bandana, and a kitten was curled up in the child’s seat among a bunch of tangled scarves. On the next bench was a scrawny kid with barely enough clothing on to keep him comfortable on a hot summer’s day, shivering away even as he slept. Gaia averted her eyes and choked back her pity. He was probably an addict who had left a perfectly good home behind him somewhere, and at that moment, Gaia couldn’t feel sorry for him. All she could think about was the warm bed out there with his name on it.

  Finally, Gaia came across an empty bench. She glanced around to make sure the immediate area was creep free. Satisfied, she laid down, her face toward the back of the seat, and curled her arm under her head.

  Don’t think about anything, she told herself. You can deal with it all tomorrow.

  As Gaia felt herself starting to drift, she silently thanked the stars for her ability to fall asleep anywhere. But just as her thoughts were fading to black, the entire bench shook from the force of a powerful blow. She sat up straight and looked right into the stubble-covered face of a square-shouldered, square-jawed, totally strung-out junkie. His eyes were rimmed with red and his breathing was ragged. He bared his teeth like a rabid dog.

  “This is my bench, girlie,” he said, gracing Gaia with a cloud of breath that smelled of rotten beer.

  “Leave me alone,” Gaia said, starting to lie down again. She was definitely not in the mood.

  The junkie walked around to the front of the bench, grabbed the back of Gaia’s jacket, and yanked her to the ground. Her shoulder hit the asphalt and her head bounced against the hard ground. Quickly, Gaia rolled over onto her stomach and pushed herself up. When she turned around, the junkie was right in her face, laughing. Gaia scrunched up her nose and tried not to breathe.

  “Look, when I got here, the bench was empty,” Gaia said. “You don’t look like the brightest guy in the world, but I’m sure you’ve heard of finders keepers.”

  “’F you won’t give the bench up, I got no problem takin’ it from ya,” the guy said.

  Gaia rolled her eyes. For once, she didn’t feel like fighting, but she’d already had more than enough of the grandstanding banter portion of the evening. She had a feeling that this was the type of guy who could stand here and trade threats until he passed out, but there was no telling how long that would take. Besides, the sweet taste of sleep was still in her mouth and she wanted to get back there. So she decided to take the short cut. She reached out and shoved him.

  The junkie staggered back, surprised, then narrowed his eyes and threw a wide, arcing punch. Gaia easily blocked it, grasped his arm and turned into him, jabbing her elbow back into his stomach. He doubled over slightly, and she brought her skull back into his with a crack. When she spun away from him and took her fighting stance, he already looked pretty beaten up. Gaia was about to let her guard down when he let out a battle cry and rushed her, tackling her right to the ground.

  Gaia tried to push him off of her, waiting for her adrenaline to kick in, waiting for that rush of energy, but it didn’t come. She was just tired. And not a little bit bored. As she contemplated this, the junkie got one good punch into her gut and another to her jaw that sent stars across her vision. Gaia had had enough. She propped her calves under his torso and lifted, flipping him up and over her head, onto his back. He let out a groan as he fell. Gaia got up and hovered over him.

  “Are we done yet?” she asked.

  He waved his hands in front of his face and winced. “We’re done! We’re done! Please don’t hurt me!”

  “Fine,” Gaia said, trying not to show how relieved she was. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  The junkie stood up, keeping his distance from Gaia, then ran off awkwardly into the night. Gaia trudged back over to her bench, feeling heavy and low and disappointed. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t gotten worked up and focused and generally jazzed during a fight. And right now she felt about as alive as she did in her highly unstimulating math class every day. What was wrong with her? It wasn’t like she hadn’t been in places as depressing as this before. She’d spent almost her entire life in them.

  But this time was somehow different. When she reached inside and tried to summon up some kind of motivating emotion—anger, vengefulness—all she felt was…broken.

  She laid down on the bench again, her brow furrowing as she put her head down on the pillow of her bent arm.

  Don’t think about anything, she told herself again. You can deal with it all tomorrow.

  Then she closed her eyes and let sleep finally come.

  Bitch on a Mission

  TATIANA’S HAND SHOOK VIOLENTLY AS she attempted for the third time to master the simple act of inserting a key into a lock. She blamed her shivering on the fact that she hadn’t expected the sudden shift in the weather and so hadn’t dressed for it. She also hadn’t expected, however, to see her mother get dragged off by a couple of huge men in black spy gear.

  “Damn it. Get a grip,” she said through her teeth. If her mother could see her now, she’d be ashamed. Tatiana had to pull herself together. Her mother was counting on her.

  Finally, Tatiana gripped her right hand with her left to steady it, and mercifully, the key slid into the lock. There was a moment of suspense as she turned it, but the lock clicked and the door swung open with a slow, angry creak as if it had just been woken from a deep slumber. Tatiana had the right place. She was home.

  She slipped through the door and quickly punched the code her mother had made her memorize into the key pad on the near wall, the red light flashing menacingly as she worked. After hitting all the numbers, Tatiana pressed her thumb into the enter key and squeezed her eyes shut. The alarm let out a loud beep, and when she opened her eyes again, the red light had turned to green. Tatiana closed the door behind her and fastened all five safety locks. She leaned back against the door and allowed herself to breathe. She was safe. Alone, but safe.

  Peeling off her lightweight jacket, Tatiana decided to explore her new abode. In the semidarkness she found a light switch and flicked it on, illuminating the small living room with the weak light from a single overhead fixture. She’d been hearing about the Alphabet City safe house ever since she and her mother had arrived in New York City, but she’d never been here. The moment she saw the place in the light, she felt an almost painful longing for the lofty space of the Seventy-second Street apartment.

  Your mother is most likely in a jail cell right now, she told herself. Quit your whining.

  She breathed in the musty, sooty smell of the air and took a few steps into the tiny square living room. The walls where plain and white, and an old but comfortable-looking corduroy couch stood to one side. A table next to it held a single glass lamp with a dingy shade. Tatiana walked over to the one piece of artwork on the wall—a framed print of Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” and lifted it from the nail that held it in place. Just as she’d been told, there was a square gray safe door built into the wall. Tatiana quickly dialed in the combination, which she’d also committed to memory, and the door popped open, letting out a hiss of air.


  There were stacks upon stacks of bills inside—American dollars, Canadian dollars, Mexican pesos, British pounds, and Russian rubles. Tatiana slipped a few twenties from one of the bundles of dollars, then pulled out a stack of passports. As she flipped through them—there were at least ten with her picture, each from a different country—she smirked sadly at the names her mother had given her. Annie Whitmore, Corrine Deveneaux, Marianna Alonso, Marcella Tuscano.

  I could just disappear, Tatiana thought, allowing the seduction of such a thought to momentarily wet her lips and send her pulse racing. She gazed at her picture in the Italian passport and imagined it—imagined herself on the white sands of the Mediterranean, sipping something fruity and letting her bare back bathe in the sun. But as quickly as the image came, she squelched it. She wasn’t going anywhere without her mother. Not now. Not ever.

  She took the last items out of the safe, a nice, sleek .45 pistol and a full clip, then shoved the passports back inside. She shoved the clip into the gun, savoring the menacing click as it locked into place. After making sure the safety was on, Tatiana slipped the gun between her waistband and her back. Then she closed the safe and hung the painting again. She had to check the rest of her provisions.

  The kitchen, just to the left of the living room, was lined with avocado green cabinets and held a large brown refrigerator. Tatiana walked over to the pantry and checked inside. The shelves were stocked with canned soups, pasta sauces, packets of instant oatmeal, and cans of soda and juice.

  She walked back across the living room to the bedroom, which took all of three steps, and flicked on the light. Two twin-size beds, draped with blue blankets, stood on either side of a single nightstand. Inspection of a small dresser against the far wall revealed drawers filled with plain underwear, bras, T-shirts and sweaters in Tatiana and Natasha’s sizes. The closet held a few pairs of jeans, assorted footwear and two heavy winter coats. On the top shelf was a wide array of wigs, hats and sunglasses. Tatiana pulled down a long, dark wig with natural-looking waves and smiled morosely. Her mother had certainly been prepared.