Ashley gave in to Tanner and tried a half-hearted kick at my shin. She, too, didn’t make any headway.
“Julie, have you seen enough to believe me?”
Julie didn’t say anything, but her face still looked skeptical. I ventured into her mind to gauge what she was feeling. Julie wanted hope. That’s why she’d accepted Greta’s invitation. But she’d been deceived many times in her life, so she wasn’t the most trusting person. She thought, “So she can put a force field around herself. How’s that going to help me protect my kids? This ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
“You came here for hope. That’s what we offer. We can’t promise that we can stop this thing. We can’t promise that you’ll be able to create force fields around yourself, heal wounds with your mind, or move objects with your thought, but I’ll do my best to teach you how. But we’re not going down without a fight. We offer a place to band together with other people that are still Lucent – people like yourself. We’ll have strength in numbers. We’ll be a tribe. A Lucent Tribe.
“Come here, Julie. Why don’t you feel it? Put your hands on the Lucent Energy and feel the power of it.”
At first she didn’t move. She still stood in the middle of the group, her purse clutched to her, and she looked like she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole thing. I put my hand out to her. “Come,” I said. “Put your hand on the field of Lucent Energy that surrounds me.”
She slowly walked toward me.
“Put your hand out. That’s it. When you get to the field you’ll know it. You’ll feel it.”
Julie did as I said, and soon she stopped, her hand in front of her. Her face changed from skepticism, to fear, to wonder, then finally a smile.
She dropped her purse to the ground and put out her other hand. Julie used both hands to feel the bubble of Lucent Energy that I’d gathered around myself.
“You feel it, don’t you?” I whispered. “This energy – this Lucent Energy – is all around you. It’s within you, too. This is where our true power comes from. This is what we’ll fight to protect. And this is what they’ve lost.”
Julie stopped moving her hands and looked at me. Her eyes met mine and held them.
“You’ll teach me? Teach me how to hold onto mine?”
I nodded. She nodded back.
I let the energy go, and it dispersed back into the flow. I could tell when some of it flowed through Julie. She gasped and smiled wide with joy.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
I nodded again. “That was the flow of Lucent Energy through you. It felt good, huh?”
“This is the best I’ve felt in so … so long,” she said. Tears began to flow down her cheeks.
With my shield of Lucent Energy dispersed, I could reach out to her, and I did. I pulled Julie into my arms, and her head fell to my shoulder. I held her while she sobbed. She released a deep sorrow into me.
After a few minutes, I asked her in a soft voice, “So, are you in?”
She lifted her head, stepped back from me, and wiped her face with her sleeve. “I’m so in.”
Greta stepped forward and took Julie’s hand, a genuine smile on her face. Greta gave Julie a slight nod, and Julie embraced Greta. I was surprised to see Greta allow a perfect stranger to hug her. Maybe it’s just me that she can’t stand touching her?
“How about the rest of you? Who’s in?” I asked.
Megan looked around at the others and tentatively raised a hand. After a few seconds, Tanner raised his hand, then Ashley, and soon all of them had a hand in the air.
I couldn’t help but smile. I’d never been a leader, but the situation forced me to try. I hoped that I wouldn’t let them down. I hoped that what I had to offer would be enough. And I hoped that I could turn that small ragtag group into the semblance of a band of Lucent warriors, prepared to defend themselves and others against the mob of shadow people that prowled the streets.
“Okay then. Let’s begin.”
7. Doing the Right Thing
Jake
I felt like a wuss having Tristan walk with me to the bus stop, but he’d insisted. “There’s strength in numbers,” he’d said. T tried to make it sound like it was a way to help each other out. Yeah, right. He didn’t need my puny ass to protect him.
Tristan walked tall, whistled a zippy tune, and looked straight ahead. The way he carried himself practically begged shadow dudes to try and stop him.
I, on the other hand, did my best imitation of a scurrying rat. I kept my head slightly dipped, my eyes darting from side to side, my face plastered with the same dour look most people wore.
“Dude, you’re bummin’ me out,” Tristan said. “Lighten up, J.”
“Why don’t you just put a sign on me that says ‘Kick his ass’.”
“I got your back, J. You keep holding your face in that sad, nasty look it’s gonna freeze that way.”
That’s the kind of stupid thing my mom said when I was little and I crossed my eyes. “If you keep that up your eyes will get stuck that way,” she’d say. Yeah, and you go blind if you jerk off. I hadn’t gone blind.
I threw my shoulders back anyway and stopped hunching over quite so much. I didn’t dare smile or join T in whistling a tune, but I at least looked out in front of me.
“See, doesn’t that feel better?”
“A little, maybe.”
Actually, it felt more than a little better. It was amazing how much lighter I felt by standing up straight and changing the expression on my face.
“It’s kind of a nice day. You wanna take the bus or just keep walking?” asked Tristan.
We were about twenty yards from the bus stop. There were two young guys and a chick hanging out there. Both of the guys were almost as big as Tristan. That answered it.
“Um, how ’bout we hoof it the rest of the way,” I said.
“Whatever you say …” I picked up my speed but realized Tristan had stopped. “J, hold up. Look.” He motioned with his head toward the bus stop. “Trouble up ahead.”
He was talking about the two guys and the girl at the bus stop. They were gathered around someone else.
Shit! It’s a mom with a kid. Goddammit!
We watched as they crowded toward the woman. She pulled her little boy closer, sat him on her lap, and encircled her arms around him.
Stupid woman! What are you doing out here, alone, with your kid? Don’t you know anything?
They hadn’t noticed us. We could turn and walk fast away from them and try to forget what we’d seen. I wanted to tell Tristan to forget about it, cross the street to the other side and keep right on walking. But I didn’t want him to see how chicken shit I was. And no amount of running would make me stop wondering about the fate of that woman and her kid.
Dammit, I don’t need to wonder. I knew what was going to happen. At the very least, they’d take her child to a place where the shadows lurked. For what purpose, I didn’t know. But I was sure that if the shadow people were involved, it wasn’t a place where kids rode ponies and ate ice cream.
“Do you think we can take them?” I asked.
“No prob. You take skinny chick, and I’ll take the other two.”
It peeved me that Tristan stuck me with a runt girl while he manned up to take on two guys almost his size, like he thought the chick was all I could handle. But I decided not to bitch about it ’cause I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of one of those huge guys pounding the fudge out of me.
“Okay,” I said. “Got any advice on how best to approach this?”
“Kick her ass before she kicks yours.” Tristan began walking toward the bus stop.
As we approached, Tristan dropped his voice down an octave lower than even his usual bass and said, “Leave off that mama and her kid.”
The three shadows turned in the direction of the deep voice. One guy had black, greasy hair that hung to his shoulders and fell across his black eyes. Up close I could see that he was probably 6’1” but couldn’t have we
ighed more than one eighty. The other dude had short sandy brown hair, and his face looked like it had been smashed with a door. His nose was sort of flat across his face, and it sat below those hollow, black eyes that all the shadow people had. He was almost as tall as the first guy, but outweighed him by a good thirty pounds.
Then there was the skinny chick. She had long, black hair sporting a peacock blue streak. She wore skin-tight plaid pants that clung to her chicken legs. She had a ring pierced through her hose and an eyebrow ring over her right eye. Even though she was the smallest of the three, up close she was the scariest. She looked at me with her bottomless eyes, her stare full of venom.
“This ain’t none of your business,” she said. “If you’d like to live, you better run away.”
“See, now that’s just what I was thinkin’,” said Tristan. “If you want to live, you better run away, little girl.”
“You’ll be sorry you talked to me that way, asshole,” she said. “I’m going to be chosen by the master, and when I am, I’ll be immortal. And I’ll hunt you down and torture you until you cry for your mommy. Get him!”
Master? Immortal? What is she talking about? I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach began to churn. C’mon, Jake, keep it together. Don’t puke now.
The two big dudes moved toward Tristan. T stood his ground and smiled like he looked forward to whatever was going to happen next. And there I was, trying not to ralph on myself.
The smashed-face guy pulled a piece of metal pipe out of his jacket and reared back his hand to whack Tristan with it. Tristan kicked the guy’s hand, and the pipe sailed through the air. The greasy-haired guy landed a solid punch on Tristan’s kidneys while he fought off smashed-face guy, but Tristan seemed unfazed by it. Tristan smashed the greasy-haired guy with the flat of his arm and kicked the other guy in the gut, sending him to the ground.
I stood there like a paid spectator watching a heavyweight fight. I hadn’t moved an inch closer. I knew I should at least try to help Tristan, but I couldn’t get my body to move.
I’d forgotten about the skinny chick but was soon reminded of her presence when I felt a kick to my ribs. It was hard enough to double me over, but fortunately I kept my breakfast down.
“What, are you some kind of ’tard? Don’t you know what run means?” scrawny girl asked.
“Look, leave off. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You may not want it, but you’ve got it.” She punctuated her statement with another kick, this time to my stomach. It was getting harder not to hurl.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. It was a double lie. I did want to hurt her, but I had zero confidence that I could.
She answered with a laugh instead of another kick. “You, hurt me? You’re fuckin’ hilarious, ’tard.”
I saw her get ready to kick me again, but this time I caught her leg and upended her. She landed on the concrete sidewalk with a thud.
“You’re fuckin’ dead, ’tard,” she screeched at me. “You hear me? D-E-A-D.” She got up and flew at me in a fury.
In the year or so since we’d come back from the Umbra Perdita, I’d built up some muscle as a defense, but I hadn’t developed an offense. I’d always been the brains of any operation, not the muscle. But I’d walked into a situation where there was no time for a plan, and no amount of reasoning was going to get scrawny girl to leave off and not beat me to a pulp.
What an embarrassing way to die. Beaten up by a skinny chick.
It was time to tap into my inner lion. I tried, but I didn’t hear a roar. It was more of a mew. C’mon, Jake. Get it together, man. You can take her.
Scrawny chick was at me with her nails and teeth. It was like a rabid squirrel had attacked me. I flailed my arms in an attempt to bat her away, but she was all over me.
I had scratch marks all over my arms, and the blood dripped onto the dry pavement. I landed some kicks on her, but they didn’t seem to faze her. Her size was an advantage. It was hard to land a hit on something so small and quick.
I saw her long hair swinging and grabbed for it. I wound up with a big wad of her black hair in my hands and did the only thing I could think of to do. I yanked her head down hard while I pulled up my knee. I heard bone crunch, and she cried in pain. Her hair was still wound around my hand, and I used it to pull her up while I grabbed her arm in my other hand and twisted it up and into her back. She tried to wiggle free, but I shoved her arm further up her back and yanked on her hair. She cried out in pain and stopped trying to get free.
Tristan still fought the two big dudes. They were both covered in blood, and the guy with the smashed-in face looked like maybe he had a broken nose. Sweat poured down Tristan’s face, and he had a bloody lip, but otherwise he looked like he was okay. How long can he keep this up?
“Leave off him!” I shouted. “Or I’ll break her neck.”
Tristan and the two shadow dudes stopped fighting and looked in my direction. The shadow guys didn’t look like they intended to leave.
“Did you hear me? She’s got a broken nose. If you two don’t shove off, she’ll have a lot worse than that.”
“We don’t care ’bout her,” smashed-face guy said. His voice came out all nasally.
“Yeah, kill her if ya want to,” said the greasy-haired guy.
“You fuckin’ assholes,” scrawny girl screamed. “He kills me, what ya goin’ to tell the master, huh? He’s expecting me back, remember? I’m the one that knows where his package is. You guys want to go back to him and let him know you don’t have his package and you let me get killed?”
The two guys didn’t say anything, but they stepped away from Tristan.
“Hand that scrawny bitch over,” said the greasy-haired guy.
“I will, as soon as you put about twenty feet between yourselves and this bus stop. Go on.”
They hesitated, but walked backwards until they were about ten feet away from the bus stop. I’d said twenty, but I decided not to quibble over ten feet. I wanted to get the hell away from there and get that girl’s greasy hair out of my hand.
I shoved her hard, and she fell to the ground. She laid there for a second, face down on the concrete. At first I thought that somehow I’d killed her when I threw her down. But she pushed herself up and turned to face me.
“You fight like a girl, ’tard.” Her lip was curled into an ugly sneer, her black eyes bored into me like some kind of cold laser. “This ain’t over. When I’m done with the job for my master, I’m going to hunt your ass down, and when I find you, I’ll beat you so hard your momma will have to scrape you off of the sidewalk like a piece of gum.” She turned to the woman on the bench, still clutching her son to her. Tears poured from the woman’s eyes, and her little boy silently cried too. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten ’bout you,” she said and pointed to the woman on the bench. “I’ll be back for you too.”
“But I didn’t do nothin’ to you,” the woman said.
“Cram it. The master has chosen him. Nothin’ you say can stop it. It don’t matter where you go, either, so don’t think ’bout trying to run. He’ll find you. He always finds ’em.”
She turned her back on me and walked over to her two thug companions. They didn’t move to leave until she called over her shoulder to them. “C’mon, idiots. We’ve got work to do. We’ll take care of these two later.” Both of the guys stared at us with their dark, blank eyes for a few more seconds, then turned and followed behind the scrawny girl.
As soon as they were out of earshot, I turned to the woman on the bench and said, “Don’t listen to her. You’re safe now.”
“Safe? What the hell’s wrong with you?” she screamed at me. “Ain’t none of us safe no more. And now, thanks to you two dipshits, I’m marked.”
You were already marked.
“You got someone you can stay with?” asked Tristan.
“No, I ain’t got nobody. Besides, it don’t matter. Like she said, they’ll find us. If they’s a mind to tak
e someone, no point in runnin’.”
“But you can’t give in to them,” I said. “Look, why don’t you go home, pack some things, and get out of town. That chick was just blowing smoke. She’s full of hot air. But all the same, why don’t you get yourself and your son away from this area for a few weeks until all this dies down a bit.”
“Dies down a bit? Where you been, man? There ain’t nothin’ dyin’ down except for people. Now are you two goin’ ta leave me alone or not? Go on, git out of here.”
“C’mon, J,” Tristan said. He pulled lightly on my shirtsleeve. “Let’s go.”
Go? We’d risked our lives to save the woman and her son and she was telling us to shove off? It felt like we’d put ourselves at risk for nothing if we were going to just leave her there. For all we knew, scrawny girl and friends would be back any minute and finish what they’d started. Or maybe some other shadow people would happen upon the lady and beat her up for whatever money and valuables she had on her.
I made no move to follow after Tristan. The woman on the bench just glared at me. “Can’t you hear? I don’t want no help from you,” she said.
“J, c’mon. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped,” Tristan said. He grabbed my arm and pulled.
I reluctantly followed him. With every fiber of my being it felt wrong to leave her there. But Tristan was right. I couldn’t save someone who didn’t want to be saved. Or maybe she didn’t see any hope to be saved from the shadows that spread ever more quickly around us.
We walked in silence for about a mile, then Tristan broke the stillness of the air.
“Hey, J, maybe you should meet up with that girl. You know, that one who called you a few weeks back.”
“Greta? No way, dude. I’m done with that mess.”
“Why you slammin’ that door shut?”
“’Cause the last time I was with Greta and that red-haired witch I almost got killed.”
“Dude, you about get killed every damned day now.”
The Akasha Chronicles Trilogy Boxed Set: The Complete Emily Adams Series Page 51
