“No,” I said. I couldn’t lie about that, because why would a paramedic be sitting in a dark alley? But I needed to say something more, something that would appease him. I racked my brain for something he would believe. “We were behind that store by the police station—”
“The bakery?”
“Right, the bakery. We were behind it for the night, because it’s warm back there.” I hoped that detail would make him believe we were homeless, like I suspected he was. “And then that earthquake hit, and suddenly there was a fire and people everywhere.”
“Earthquake?”
“Yes,” I said. Perhaps he was slow. “The building shook and cracked apart. So we left. We just wanted somewhere safe to sleep.”
“Stupid,” he said.
My brows furrowed. “Excuse me?”
“You stole a jacket and blanket and ran, instead of letting them check you out and take you to the hospital?” He came closer and crouched on his heels so we were eye level. “They would have given you a bed and a warm meal, and your friend looks like he could have used that.”
I glanced at Hernandez. The stranger was right, and clearly not slow. And now that I thought about it, Hernandez probably had a concussion from the rubble and needed a hospital. I should have left him for the paramedics to care for, instead of worrying about what the council would do or think. They already wanted to kill me. Leaving him behind wouldn’t have changed that. I had been stupid and selfish, and now the closest thing I had to a friend might pay the price.
“Did you do it?”
I looked back at the stranger. “Do what?”
His head was cocked to the side, like he was examining me and hadn’t made up his mind. “Whatever you were in jail for. Did you do it?”
My heart skipped a beat. “I told you, we were behind the bakery—”
“It wasn’t an earthquake.”
My head started to hurt from the way the conversation kept turning. “Of course it was.”
The stranger shook his head. “It was a bomb. The only reason you’d think it was an earthquake is if you were inside the bombed building. And the only reason you’d be in the building but not stick around for the paramedics to check you out is if you were in a holding cell. So, did you commit the crime they were holding you for?”
I could barely breathe. This man had completely dissected me in only a few moments. I would never evade the council’s clutches if all men were as astute as the one before me. But that didn’t mean I would stop trying. And I was tired of him looking at me like I was a bug he wanted to add to his collection.
“Why do you care if I did it or not?”
His beard twitched as he smiled, as if I’d finally said something intelligent. “I want a measure of your character. And as you’ve already seen, I can tell when you’re lying.”
I glared and leaned forward, biting off each word of my answer. “I am innocent of the crime they have laid at my feet. I did the opposite, what I thought was right, and I ran to save my life. Am I lying now?”
His smile widened. “I believe you.”
I sat back, unsure what my honesty had purchased. The stranger stuck out his hand and waited until I took it with my own. His skin was warm and callused, his grip firm.
“My name’s Callum,” he said.
“Adira,” I replied.
Callum released my hand and stood. “Once the police realize you’re missing, they’ll scour the streets for you. You don’t want to be in this alley when they do.”
He moved to Hernandez’s other side, pulled his arm around his neck, and lifted him with apparent ease. I stood, my mouth open.
“You’re not going to turn us in?” I finally asked.
“What good would that do?” Callum said.
I couldn’t answer. Callum didn’t know either of us, had no reason to help us. Yet here he was, carrying my unconscious friend and trusting that I wasn’t a criminal.
He smiled again, like he knew exactly what I was thinking. “You gonna make me carry him all by myself?”
I draped Hernandez’s other arm around my shoulders and took some of his limp weight. “Thank you.”
“Sure,” Callum said. “Now let’s get you two somewhere safe.”
7
Your “You call this safe?”
I stopped and stared at the shantytown hidden in the heart of Los Angeles. City lights from downtown behind us cast a pale, sickly light over the industrial street, draining the scene of color and life. And clearly, humans lived here. Small tents and cardboard encampments lined the sidewalks as far as I could see in the dark, interspersed with overflowing shopping carts and piles of trash. Where there weren’t makeshift shelters, there were people. Humans of all varieties lay sleeping on blankets or cardboard or nothing at all. Others hunched in doorways pushing needles in their arms, or lounged on steps with cigarettes burning between their lips. A few metal trash cans held fires to compensate for the broken streetlights.
From Hernandez’s other side, Callum said, “Welcome to Skid Row.”
He started walking again, pulling my limp companion and me with him deeper into what looked and felt like an entirely different world. Everywhere I looked was another appalling scene. One human whose features gave me no clues to their gender or age rocked on the curb and muttered feverishly, fingers digging into their temples. A child’s cry rent the air and tore at my heart. Under a storefront awning, a group of young people traded cash for small bottles, the dealers’ guns tucked in their belts.
“Seriously, Callum?” I hissed after we passed them. “This doesn’t feel safe.”
“Almost there.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know where “there” was. These people looked like desperate survivors of a terrible war, not residents of a rich, bustling city. The more of them I saw, the more my heart hardened. How could humans allow such squalor? How could Morgan and the council keep slaves for money and magic and energy when so many of their own lay on the streets surrounded by other people’s garbage?
Djinn would never treat each other so poorly. In all my parents’ stories, our homeland, Kaf, had been a place of generosity, equality, and peace. I was certain that in all the Emerald Mountains there would not be such a place.
“Here,” Callum murmured, guiding us to a cardboard shelter, one of several leaning precariously against one another. We stopped and Callum took Hernandez’s weight, dragging him into the shelter. I crossed my arms tightly as he made Hernandez comfortable on a sleeping bag.
A head poked out of the next entrance in the row of cardboard rooms, a woman with frizzy hair and a sharp nose. She eyed me, her gaze intense like she was trying to look through me.
Then Callum stepped out again, looking grave. A nearby streetlight sputtered to life, showing me more details of his face. His eyes were bright blue, at odds with the weathered lines of his cheeks.
“Callum?” the woman said.
He turned to her in surprise. “Sorry to wake you, Gemma.”
“Couldn’t sleep anyway,” she muttered. “If you wanted company, you could have asked me.”
Callum shook his head. It was hard to tell in the harsh light of the flickering street lamp, but I thought he might be blushing. “She’s just a friend, Gemma.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “If you say so.”
“I’m taking her shopping. Would you keep an eye on her companion while we’re gone?” he asked, gesturing inside his shelter.
“Shopping?” I asked. What kind of shopping could be done in Skid Row, before dawn, with no money?
“You need it, honey.” Gemma leaned further out of her own space to get a look at Hernandez. Her eyebrows wiggled again and she sighed. “You’re too nice, Callum.”
“No such thing,” he said with a smile, as though it was a common exchange between them. He started walking further down the street, and I fell in step beside him.
“First rule of living on the streets,” he said quietly. “Never be alone, especially at night. Skid Row might be t
he worst part of the city, but thousands of people live here. You would not be the first with a questionable past to seek refuge among us.” He grinned. “And you won’t be the last, either.”
“You were alone when you found us,” I said. “You don’t seem to follow your own rules.”
He chuckled. “When you’ve walked the streets as long as I have, Adira, you can not follow the rules, too.”
He led me to a stuffed shopping cart on a corner, bricks on either side of its wheels to prevent it from moving. Callum dug through it for a moment, then whipped out a fabric bundle that he shook out and presented to me. It was a plain, dark, zipper hoodie.
“I already have a jacket,” I said.
“And the police will be able to pick you out from miles away. If you’re going to live on the run, you have to blend in.”
I glanced at my paramedic jacket. He was right. The yellow was impossible to ignore, and the reflective strip glinted brightly even in the ambient light of the city. A wardrobe change was in order, but I couldn’t do it here in the open. Callum thought he was helping a wrongly accused human, not an escaped djinn. I couldn’t let him, or anyone else, see my slave cuffs.
“Switch jackets,” Callum said. “Leave the paramedic one here as payment.”
Before I could come up with a reason not to remove my jacket, something rustled to my left, then a dark shape launched at me.
“No!” a voice screamed. “Can’t have it, can’t have it!”
I stumbled back as the shape became a wildly dirty man, his hair matted and tangled, every bit of him obscured by filth. He didn’t touch me, but he didn’t have to. He reeked like the bottom of a dumpster on a hot day, and the stench was a force all its own. He tried to snatch the jacket, but Callum held it away.
“Oscar,” he said gently, “we’re just trading jackets. We will leave payment for you.”
“No, no, bad trade!” Oscar shouted. “Give it back!”
I glanced around. Callum had to calm him before he woke up the whole street. The last thing I needed was for anyone to see me and start asking questions.
“Why is it a bad trade, Oscar?” Callum kept his voice soft and even, but it didn’t seem to be helping.
“That one’s too bright,” Oscar said loudly, pointing at me. “It doesn’t belong. I don’t want it!”
While Callum tried to reason with the man, I looked at Oscar’s cart. Everything in it was dark and nondescript, the opposite of what I currently wore. But I wasn’t sure if he meant the color didn’t belong, or the jacket itself with PARAMEDIC emblazoned on it.
Or maybe he meant me.
Callum’s soothing assurances of appropriate trades and payment were only making Oscar more agitated. Someone up the street yelled at us to shut up. This had to stop.
“What if I traded something else?” I said. My voice was barely more than a whisper, but Oscar stopped shouting and faced me.
“It has to be a good trade,” he said firmly.
Callum raised one eyebrow as I took over the negotiation. I slid a hand into my pocket, Oscar watching me like a hawk. I pulled out one of the small bottles I’d grabbed at the ambulance and shook it, the pills rattling. Oscar’s eyes widened.
“Oxycodone,” I read from the label. “A really strong painkiller. I bet you could trade this for all kinds of stuff, right, Oscar?”
He stepped closer, the cloud of his stench nearly pushing me back. “Good trade,” he whispered, reaching for the pill bottle.
Callum stuck his arm between us, stopping Oscar’s advance. “That bottle is worth a lot more than one jacket.”
“Fine, fine, take more,” Oscar grumbled. He stuck out his hand to me, dirt crusted in his fingernails and ingrained in the lines of his palm. “Give it to me.”
I placed the bottle in his hand. He immediately hugged it to himself and withdrew to the shadows against the corner store. A pop and a rattle as he removed the lid, presumably to take one of the pills, made me wonder if it had not been a good trade after all.
Callum handed me the nondescript jacket, still watching Oscar. “Thank you for calming him down,” he whispered. “He’s been beaten for being too loud before. I only hope he doesn’t accidentally overdose himself.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered back.
“You do what you have to to survive.” Callum gave me a tight smile and gestured to the cart. “Take something else to balance the trade.”
As I approached the cart, I couldn’t imagine finding anything I might want or use, but a trade was a trade. I leaned over and pawed through the items, taking small breaths to avoid as much of Oscar’s residual smell as possible. His collection was mostly fabric—clothes, purses, torn curtains, dirty rags—with random odds and ends mixed in. Scratched eyeglasses seemed to be the most useful item in the cart, not that I needed them. Finally, I settled on a long swath of black fabric that seemed relatively clean and was large enough to have multiple uses, although I had no clue what I might use it for.
“Got something?” Callum asked.
“I guess.” I draped it over my shoulder, and we started walking back the way we had come. The distant rumble of traffic surrounded us, punctuated by startlingly close snores and the occasional rustle of movement as the sleepers rolled over. The normal nighttime sounds made it difficult to keep my eyes open and my feet moving.
“Do you think there’s room on the sidewalk somewhere for me?” I said as we approached Callum’s shelter, trying to keep my tone light despite the unpleasant prospect of sleeping on hard cement. “It’s been an exhausting night.”
Instead of answering, Callum stopped at the entrance to the cardboard room, where we could see Hernandez’s legs in the same position we’d left him in. The falling debris from the cell must have hit him hard. Another pang of guilt shot through me. Hopefully he didn’t have too bad of a concussion.
Gemma looked out of her shelter and eyed me again. “I thought you went shopping.”
“We did,” I said, holding up the nondescript jacket and the cloth on my shoulder.
Her eyebrows jumped, creating a complex map of wrinkles on her forehead. “Must have been a really good trade.”
“Speaking of which,” Callum began slowly, turning around to face me. “I don’t mean to pry, Adira, but do you have other medical supplies in your pockets?”
My hand tightened on the fabric draped over my shoulder. The supplies I’d grabbed were the only things of value I had, my only form of money. And now he’d just revealed them to someone else. Did he expect me to pay him for his help after he had freely offered it? I had hoped Callum was the exception to the rule that all humans were selfish monsters.
Something of my thoughts must have shown on my face, because he lifted a hand as if to calm me. “I only ask because I couldn’t help but notice that both you and your companion have dried blood on your faces. I’m sure we can find a rag and some water, but if you have anything more sterile, that would be safer.”
“Oh.” I had completely forgotten the blood on my temple after the cell collapsed. I relaxed a bit and slid a hand into my other pocket. “Yes, I have some alcohol wipes and bandages.”
“Not now,” Gemma hissed. She stared down the street toward Oscar’s shopping cart.
I followed her gaze. Several blocks down, further than Oscar’s corner, a small beam of light waved frantically, bobbing and flashing as whoever carried it dashed from shelter to shelter. More pinpricks of light clicked on like a spreading fire, some making tents glow and others sliding across the street like embers on the wind.
“Oh, no,” Callum breathed.
“What is it?”
“Code,” Gemma said. “Means police are coming this way.”
My stomach clenched and my hands trembled with a sudden rush of adrenaline. “You said we’d be safe here.”
“I thought you would be until morning,” Callum said. “We have to make you blend in as much as possible. Gemma—”
The woman was out of her shelter be
fore he finished her name. She grabbed my arm and pushed me toward her home. From the corner of my eye, I saw Callum duck into his before cardboard walls cut him from my sight.
Gemma’s home was about the size of dog house, and became much smaller when she followed me in. The cement sidewalk was buried under piles of clothes and blankets that gave me a soft place to kneel. She started pawing through the piles, muttering to herself. Then she paused and glared at me.
“What are you just sitting there for? Put on your new things!”
I stuffed my arms into my new hoodie, still wearing the paramedic jacket. I had to bend oddly to keep from bumping the cardboard walls. Then I adjusted the sleeves while Gemma’s back was turned to keep slave cuffs safely hidden, grateful I didn’t have to expose them. Gemma found what she’d been looking for and tossed it at me, a ragged skirt with an elastic waist. With more contortions in the cramped space, I finally pulled it on. Then I grabbed the other spoil from my shopping trip, the oversized length of dark cloth, and tied it around my waist like a second skirt. The layers were bulky and too warm for the weather, but I had no where else to put it.
From one of her piles, Gemma pulled out an ancient hairbrush with half its bristles missing. She scooted over to me and attacked my hair with it. But instead of brushing down to the ends, she lifted hunks of my hair and scraped the hairbrush toward my head, slamming it on my scalp in her haste.
“Ow! What are you doing?”
“Ratting your hair. It’s too nice.”
I winced as she worked her way around the top of my head. Over the scraping of the bristles, I could hear tense whispers rippling down the street. A few pounding footsteps passed us, along with the brief flash of light in the doorway that indicated a messenger.
Gemma tossed the brush into a corner and grabbed my chin, turning my face to see it from every angle. “At least you’re a little dirty. That’ll help.” Her eyes lingered on my temple. “But blood draws too much attention.”
“I’ll get an alcohol wipe,” I said, digging in my jackets to reach the right pocket.
“No time,” she said. Then she licked her thumb and swiped it across my temple. “If they ask, your name is Alice. Got it?”
Heroines and Hellions: a Limited Edition Urban Fantasy Collection Page 170
