Escape

by Francine Pascal

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  Contents

  Juicy Gossip

  Goddamn Tornados

  Ed

  Twist and Spasm

  Gaia

  Five-Foot Nose Ring

  Melodramatic Feline Scowl

  The Ultimate Truck Stop Diner

  Cool Gray Lines

  Killer of a Day

  Strange Psychedelic Hell

  Ed

  Gaia

  Sneak Peek of Fearless #27: ‘Shock’

  Gaia

  To Jon Marans

  juicy gossip

  a most explosive attack of misperception

  Basket Case

  FAKE MOTHERS ARE THE ENEMY.

  This had been Gaia Moore’s credo for the better part of the last year. It was like a physical law of sorts. A mantra that had been engraved in her brain ever since she’d suffered through her prison sentence in that brown-stone on Perry Street with the fakest of all fake mothers, Ella Niven.

  Ella had been as fake as they come. Fake nails, fake red hair, fake eyelashes, and an inflatable chest faker than Britney’s and Mariah’s combined. But the fakest thing about Ella Niven had actually been hidden under that fake chest. Her fake heart. Make that her murderous heart. Yes, in Gaia’s limited experience, fake mothers, for the most part, tried to kill you.

  All right, maybe that wasn’t fair. Ella, as it turned out, hadn’t been all bad. In fact, she hadn’t really been anything other than a victim. Just another one of Loki’s helpless victims. But still, take away those last forty-eight hours of redemption in Ella’s life, and all you had left was a jealous, vindictive, all too fake mom who had spent her last days on this earth trying to order a hit on her own adopted daughter.

  Obviously the odds of Gaia ever trusting another fake mother after that were pretty goddamn slim. But nonetheless, here she was, stomping her way down the hall of her apartment, headed for Natasha’s bedroom, with one very simple goal in mind: She had to forget absolutely everything she believed about fake moms.

  Natasha Petrova was fake mom number two, and now, more than ever, Gaia needed to trust her. Not only did she need to trust Natasha, but she actually needed her help. And Tatiana’s help, too. Because Gaia’s father was obviously in serious danger, more serious than any of them had even imagined. And Gaia had learned an essential lesson in the last few weeks—perhaps the most essential lesson of all. She had learned that she wasn’t alone.

  She did not have to face all this impending doom in a vacuum. Now there was this thing in this apartment on East Seventy-second Street that was starting to look and feel more and more like a family. And not even a fake family. Gaia had to admit that each day, the nagging sensation that Natasha and Tatiana were nothing more than cheap and nefarious imitations of a mother and sister had receded a little farther into the distance. And now, after everything they had been through together, Gaia was beginning to remember one of the best things about a family—something she hadn’t even thought about since her mother had died.

  If Gaia’s father really was in serious trouble, now at least one other person would care as much as Gaia did. That person always used to be her mother. Her real mother. But now that person was undoubtedly Natasha. And whatever doubts Gaia might have had about Natasha in the past, one thing was for damn sure: Natasha loved Gaia’s father. She truly loved him. And they were probably headed for marriage. She was the closest thing Gaia had to a real mother. Closer than Gaia was even willing to admit. And when Natasha heard about Gaia’s encounter with the real Dr. Sullivan at the hospital, she was going to be just as shocked and infuriated as Gaia was. And just as ready to kick someone’s head in.

  Gaia knocked loudly on Natasha’s bedroom door, barely waiting for her faint and groggy invitation. She slipped through the doorway and crouched down next to Natasha’s bed, glimpsing the flashing clock on the bedside table: 7:03 A.M. Natasha had somehow managed to fall back asleep since Gaia had rushed off to the hospital, though Gaia couldn’t imagine how. But Gaia’s news would surely send her flying up from the bed and straight to the phone to check in with all her Agency contacts.

  That was what they needed now. They needed the kinds of answers Gaia couldn’t possibly obtain alone.

  “What. . . what’s going on?” Natasha croaked sleepily. Her eyes slammed shut when Gaia flipped on the bedside lamp.

  “Something’s wrong,” Gaia said sharply. “With Dad. Something is really wrong.”

  Natasha squinted her eyes open and tried to get a better look at Gaia. “What are you talking about? What time is it?” Natasha leaned toward the clock and then fell back to her pillow. “Did something happen at the hospital? Did you talk to Dr. Sullivan?”

  “I did,” Gaia said. “You need to be awake for this. Are you awake?”

  Natasha jimmied herself up against the headboard and brushed her hair clumsily from her face. She pulled the covers up over her silk nightgown and tried to focus her eyes on Gaia’s. “I am sorry,” she uttered, clearing her throat before speaking again. “It has been such a horrible morning, I think I was just trying to recover. To. . . recharge for when you got—”

  “Well, the morning just got worse,” Gaia interrupted, sitting firmly down on the bed. “That call we got this morning, from Dr. Sullivan—that wasn’t Dr. Sullivan.”

  “What?” Natasha tilted her head quizzically. “What do you mean?”

  Gaia looked deeper into Natasha’s eyes. “He was a fake. He was a goddamn fake. Dad is gone.”

  A long silence took over the room. Sounds of morning traffic and the muted chatter of New Yorkers snuck in through the barely open window. Gaia couldn’t tell if Natasha was just dumbfounded or if she had already begun to think countermeasures. She prayed it was the latter. Wherever her father was, there was no time to spare on drawn-out explanations. Not that Gaia really had any explanations.

  “What do you mean. . . a ‘fake’?” Natasha asked.

  Gaia’s hand clenched with frustration, bunching up the covers, but she quickly relaxed it. She was being ludicrously unfair. Obviously Natasha was going to need a little more than that to go on. Even a clairvoyant genius would have needed a little more information.

  “I’m sorry,” Gaia said, dropping her head momentarily. “I’m sorry, I’m moving too fast. Listen. The phone call—the call we thought was from Dr. Sullivan—it was a complete fake. All that stuff he was spewing about some clinic and sending him off to Switzerland? I thought it all sounded so ridiculous, so stupid, but. . . but he’s the doctor, right? He knows everything. But he wasn’t the doctor. That’s why we need to put out an APB. That’s why we need to call in the Bureau or, you know, Interpol, or—”

  “Gaia, Gaia, shhh. . . .” Natasha placed her hand gently on Gaia’s shoulder. Gaia suddenly realized that she was talking a mile a minute, like some hyperactive five-year-old who’d neglected to take her Ritalin.

  “I’m not making any sense,” Gaia muttered, driving the palms of her hands deep into her eye sockets. She hadn’t even realized how wound up she was until she’d started to speak. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to do something. We’ve got to do something now.”

  “Gaia, I am not understanding you,” Natasha said calmly. “Did you speak to the real Dr. Sullivan or not?”

  “Yes. At the hospital. I saw the real Dr. Sullivan. I talked to him. He told me that all of Dad’s tests had come back negative.
There was no hormonal. . . whatever, and he didn’t know a damn thing about Switzerland or anywhere else. He didn’t even know Dad was gone from the hospital. Dad is not in the hospital, Natasha, he’s gone. Now I don’t know if anything is true. I don’t know if they took him to Switzerland or if he’s still in New York somewhere or what. I don’t even know who ‘they’ are. Who was I talking to on the phone? ‘They’ could be a million different people. I’d say it was Loki for sure, but he’s practically dead—”

  “Gaia.” Natasha clamped both her hands around Gaia’s shoulders and pressed down firmly. “You have got to calm down.”

  Gaia locked her eyes with Natasha’s and tried to collect herself. She was a little out of control, she knew that. But what exactly did Natasha expect? After everything they’d gone through just to have a few calm and happy minutes as a family, how could Gaia be anything other than a basket case? How could Natasha stay so calm after hearing all of it?

  “How can I calm down?” Gaia complained. “How the hell can I calm down right now? How can you be so calm? Why are we even still sitting here?”

  “Gaia.” Natasha’s tone was soothing but patronizing. She loosened her grip on Gaia’s shoulders, but she didn’t let go. “Listen to me now. If all this information were true. . . then, of course, I would be out of my mind, like you. But Gaia. . . we don’t know anything for sure. All you have right now is a prank phone call from a man you cannot even identify. Perhaps Dr. Sullivan is misinformed, uh? Or perhaps he is not aware of a decision to send Tom to this clinic in Switzerland? Believe me, Gaia, I have been doing this for a very long time. If I went running around with my head spinning every time I got a false lead or prank phone call, they would have locked me away long, long ago, you see?”

  Gaia stared defiantly into Natasha’s oddly vacant eyes. “No, I don’t see,” she said. “I don’t see why we’re not—”

  “A few calls, of course, I will make a few calls, Gaia. But what we need to do now is stay calm. What we need to do now is wait. Wait for more information. Do you understand?”

  Gaia turned her head toward the window with increasing frustration, watching as a tiny beam of light cut through the room like a laser beam—like the sun was trying to break in and light the carpet on fire.

  She turned back to Natasha and examined her face, trying desperately to sift through the condescending kindness, and the sage wisdom of an experienced agent, and the generic innocence of her big brown eyes. Gaia wanted to see some of the desperation that she was feeling. The desperation that came with loving someone so much that the thought of losing him actually damaged your sanity. That was half of what she’d come into this room for. Not just the help, but the empathy. The empathy that only a family member could feel. . .

  But she couldn’t find it. These simply were not a mother’s eyes. And they weren’t a wife’s eyes, either. Gaia didn’t even know what these eyes were.

  Maybe Natasha was just an incredibly disciplined agent. Or maybe she was just nothing like Gaia. Maybe she handled the traumas of her life with total passivity. Gaia tended to handle her traumas with a well - placed kick to the groin area. They were just . . . different. That was all. That was what was going on here. Two different people coping in two very different ways. This “new family” thing was going to be a long road.

  “No,” Gaia said finally. “No, I don’t understand. If you need to wait it out, then you wait it out. But I’m not waiting for anything. I want to know what’s going on. And I want to know it now.”

  “We need patience now, Gaia. Patience is the best way to—”

  “Where’s Tatiana?” Gaia interrupted. “I didn’t see her in our room.”

  Tatiana wouldn’t be talking any of this “patience” crap. The more Gaia thought about it, the more she realized how much better she knew Tatiana than Natasha, anyway. She’d hardly spent any real time with Natasha, at least not without being in a completely delirious fever state. But Tatiana. . . Gaia and Tatiana had been through hell and back together. Tatiana didn’t waste time. She didn’t tiptoe around a problem waiting for “more information.” When Tatiana heard about Gaia’s trip to the hospital, she’d sprout claws and fangs and go to work with Gaia on finding her father. Tatiana had guts. She must have gotten them from her father.

  “She left early,” Natasha explained. “She said something about having coffee downtown before school. Gaia, please, don’t worry, okay? I will make a few calls, all right? I will try to find out what we really know. We have to believe that Tom is okay. We have to—”

  “I have to go.” Gaia shot up from the bed and headed for the door.

  “Gaia, come on, now, don’t do that.”

  “Let me know how the waiting goes for you.”

  Gaia was out the bedroom door before she could even hear a response. Two different kinds of people, that’s all. Just two different kinds of people.

  She shot over to her room, shoved a few random books into her bag out of habit, and slipped right back out and down the hall toward the front door. She needed to get downtown and find Tatiana.

  But first, there was one more door she needed to open in the house. One more emotionally baffling, still barely believable, highly complicated door.

  Sickly Newborn

  THIS HAD ALREADY BECOME SAM’S favorite part of the morning. The part when he heard her footsteps coming toward the door at that brisk, almost military pace. It was like being a child on a Saturday morning and waking to that first whiff of his dad’s French toast. He remembered the smell of butter and cinnamon frying in a huge tarnished copper pan, along with the promise of Japanimation cartoons to follow and then a game of chess in the park. Very few things were as thrilling to Sam as a childhood Saturday morning. But the sound of Gaia’s footsteps came awfully close. And right now, lying in his lumpy twin bed, staring up at the dusty ceiling, Sam felt just about as much like a child as he had back then.

  He had to admit, this bizarre circumstance did have an unfortunate air of infantilization—just waiting there like a child for Gaia to open the door. In fact, ever since he’d woken up that first morning—the morning after he was sure he had died—he’d felt like some kind of sickly newborn. That was what it had felt like. Like he was some premature newborn trapped inside an incubator and denied just about all human contact—certainly the kind of contact he’d needed. He’d needed a gentle hand to wake him and tell him he was alive instead of the cold, gruff voices and sharp needles of his prison guards. He’d needed someone to talk to, maybe even cry to, instead of four white walls and a mattress that seemed to be made out of bricks and mortar. Sam had had no idea that resurrection could be so lonely.

  But of course, he wasn’t being altogether honest with himself. It wasn’t really a mother’s touch he’d yearned for in that cell. It wasn’t just any gentle touch he’d imagined a thousand times over. It was Gaia’s touch. Only Gaia’s.

  Her knuckles rapped against the door, tapping out the secret signal. Sam leapt from his bed, knocking over three books and four magazines that were only a fraction of the mess that had surrounded him like a dusty fortress in the bed. He turned the knob, releasing the flimsy lock on the door, and stepped back to let Gaia in.

  God, she was a vision. It was the exact same sensation every time he saw her—ever since he’d seen her face lying next to his, half passed out by the West Side Highway. The truth was, lying all those weeks in Loki’s cold, ascetic compound, half conscious from morphine and whatever else they were giving him, Sam had honestly wondered from time to time whether it was all just some kind of dream. He’d considered it a very real possibility that he was in fact dead and that the compound was nothing other than a purgatory of sorts—some halfway nightmare place he’d been consigned to until they’d made up his room for him in heaven. But when he’d opened his eyes and seen Gaia’s face just inches from his own, sprawled out in the dirt by that highway. . . that was the first time he’d truly believed that he wasn’t dead. That was when he knew she was no longer t
he imagined Gaia of his dreams or his memories. She was the real Gaia, with that lightly freckled, delicately chiseled face that no memory could possibly do justice to. Every time he saw her again, it was like waking up from a dream.

  “Are you okay?” Gaia whispered, closing the door behind her and locking it.

  “I’m fine,” Sam replied. “Why?”

  “You just looked weird. I thought it was your back again.”

  “No, my back is fine,” Sam assured her. “No pain today. No pain at all.” Sam had paused for a moment to breathe her in completely, when he suddenly realized that Gaia was the one who looked strange. Every muscle in her face had tensed up, not to mention her fidgeting fingers and her tapping right heel. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she said absentmindedly, looking back toward the door. “No, I’m not.”

  Sam was struck by a powerful impulse to wrap his arms around her. So he slid a pair of his wrinkled khaki pants on over his boxers and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

  This was basically the system he’d been using since being hidden away in her apartment. It was an incredibly simple system, really. Every time his body ached to get closer to her, he stepped farther away. Because he didn’t know what else to do. Because there was no book called How to Come Back from the Dead and Rekindle a Romance. Hell, Sam wasn’t even sure there was a romance to rekindle. Things had been such a disastrous mess between them before he had. . . “died.” They’d had nothing but miscommunication and arguments for weeks, all thanks to the torture Josh Kendall had put him through. Gaia and Sam had broken up with almost nothing left to salvage of their relationship. But now. . .

  Now Josh was dead. Now Loki was a vegetable in some hospital bed somewhere—talk about poetic justice. Yes, they were both basically dead, and Sam was alive. Now had almost nothing to do with then. It was as if the earth’s clock had been set back to before Sam’s “death.” And as far as Sam was concerned, if they could set the clock back to before his death, well, then why not set the clock back just a little further? Set it back to before Sam had ever met Josh Kendall. To before Gaia’s uncle had begun to sink his claws into Sam. Set it back to when he and Gaia were just in love. When there was nothing dangerous about being in love.