Collide (36 page)

“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY MIND!” I roared as I
hauled for all I was worth. It let out a shriek of pain as her head
was forced back. Her hand released me and flew to the death grip I
had on her hair.

“I will have you,” the
Gaki
choked out
as I pulled again. “That strong soul of yours will be mine!”

“GET OUT OF MY FRIEND’S BODY, TOO!” I yelled
as I pulled yet again, ignoring his words. He laughed and then
Maria’s eyes closed as her body went limp. I was nearly dragged
into the back of the car with her as she slumped backwards. I
straightened quickly, released her hair and grabbed her shoulders.
I pulled her upright as she moaned slightly and brought a hand up
to rub her forehead. I stared at her, my hands clenching and
unclenching against her shoulders as I prepared to grab her hair
again if need be. I sighed in relief when she opened her eyes and
stared at me with familiar warm chocolate.

I turned at a shout behind me and saw Akira,
wings and katana out, vaulting out of a second story window to
glide towards us. Dellar came running out of the front door moments
after Akira touched down on the ground. They must have heard me
yelling and come running, or flying, as fast as they could.

“Are you all right?” Akira asked when he
reached us, his eye darting around and scanning the area.

“It was here,” Maria whispered, and I wrapped
my arms around her in a comforting hug. “I went away and it was
here. Oh Jane, it didn’t hurt you, did it?”

“No, just read some of my thoughts and
memories,” I replied and tried not to choke on the lead bar that
was stuck in my throat and stomach as I thought about its words. No
way was I going to share them. “Nothing a little face pounding
won’t help me feel better about.”

I pulled back and Dellar took my place next
to Maria, who practically huddled in his arms as her own twined
around his waist. I rubbed my hands over my arms, not because I was
cold, but because I could still feel the sensation of those fingers
pressed against my forehead as it delved into my mind and rooted
out things that I did not want to acknowledge or think about. Akira
stretched out a hand as if to touch me, and I instinctively
flinched and moved slightly away from him as that spot on my
forehead seemed to burn for a moment. He stopped and let his hand
drop, his face slightly hurt. Hating myself for putting that look
back on his face again, I blurted out the first thing that came to
my mind.

“Can you do that?” I asked.

“Do what?” he asked.

“Read minds, root out memories. He . . . she
. . . it touched my forehead in the same way you did Maria’s when
you were trying to chase down the
Gaki
through her,” I said
as I touched the spot to show him what I was talking about.

“No, I already told you I can’t do that,”
Akira said. “
Gaki
are one of the few beings that have the
power to invade minds like that. Others possess a form of
telepathy, but usually only communicate with others who possess the
same gift.”

“Good, because it’s extremely violating and
I’d have to seriously hurt you if you tried it on me,” I said.

“If I were able to do that, I would never do
it without permission,” Akira said, “simply because it IS a
horrible violation, one of the worst there is. G.O.O.P.S. has
strict rules that govern telepaths and anyone else who might have a
hint of that talent because of that. Just another reason for this
Gaki
to go.”

“You’re going to have to kill it, aren’t
you?” I asked and my heart clenched. I began to idly scratch at my
fingers.

Akira sighed and looked troubled as he
answered, “Yes, because there’s no sending a
Gaki
back after
they’ve developed a taste for something like human souls. They
become irredeemable.”

“Can you do it?” I asked. “I mean, it is
inside your brother’s body. It will most likely use that against
you, you know.”

“I know,” he said, his eyebrows scrunched
over his eyes as his lips turned down, “but I don’t have much of a
choice. It needs to be stopped, and if I wait around for my boss to
get here and do the job, not only will I lose respect in the
bureau, but the risk of it finding a new body and vanishing
escalates. I can’t run that risk.”

I nodded, agreeing with him but still worried
about whether or not he’d actually be able to follow through with
what his assignment was. If it had been me in his place, I would
have been horrified to think that I had to hunt down and destroy my
brother even though he was possessed by a soul-eating ghost. But
that didn’t change the fact that he’d be facing off against the
visage of family that he obviously cared deeply about.
Psychologically speaking, that was some insanely heavy shit.

By this time Maria had calmed down enough
that we were able to go over the general layout of the house and
immediate vicinity after I said that the
Gaki
had only
focused on me the entire time it had control of Maria’s body and
that it had no idea Akira and Dellar had been with us. It had
seemed more interested in finding things that I hadn’t wanted to
dredge up from my memory as opposed to trying to learn what we were
up to out in the middle of nowhere at an abandoned farm.

“Most of the downstairs is fairly safe,”
Dellar was saying. “It’s the upstairs that needs to be avoided if
possible, most of the floors have rotted and there were several
places that felt like they could give at any moment when we walked
through, and in one room a bathtub had fallen through into the
rooms below. There’s a lot of trash and junk on the floor, too, but
no signs of any recent habitation, so I’d say we’re safe using this
as the ambush location.”

“I figure I can station myself in raven form
in the trees while Dellar waits behind the house out of sight. The
hard part is going to be luring the
Gaki
here,” Akira
said.

“Maybe not,” I replied. “If it’s hunting,
it’s going to go somewhere with easy access to people but that is
slightly secluded, right? Well, if it sees Maria and me, it might
follow us. It has to have transportation of some sort so that it
can move around quickly without being seen, so getting it here
won’t be a problem.”

“Why do you think it’ll follow us?” Maria
asked wearily. She had dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been
there earlier. It was obvious that every time that thing took over
her body a little more of her energy was depleted. As much as I
wanted to, I couldn’t keep what the
Gaki
had said to me a
secret.

“I think it wants to take over my body next
once it gets the rest of Maria’s soul,” I whispered, and everyone’s
heads whipped in my direction.

“What?” Akira asked, so softly I almost
missed it.

“It said as much when I was struggling with
it earlier. I don’t know, but it was very adamant that it was going
to try and take me next.”

I heard a rustle and I turned towards Akira,
surprised to see his wings vibrating slightly which created the
slight rustling noise that I had heard as his feathers brushed
against each other. I had never seen him that agitated before, and
all I could do was stare as his face darkened.

“That won’t happen,” he snarled. “I won’t let
it.”

“Um, maybe you should put the katana away in
storage?” I suggested when I noticed that his knuckles had turned
white. The leather that had been wrapped around the hilt creaked
and groaned under the strain of his grip. Akira stared at it as if
he had never seen his sword before, and then sheathed it at his
side. As I watched both it and his wings began to lose their
solidity until they were completely gone.

“That’s so cool to watch,” Maria said, and I
silently agreed. There was no way I would ever get tired of
watching him materialize or dematerialize his wings.

“I won’t let it take you, Jane,” Akira said
again. He stared at me so intently that I had to nod in an effort
to break the rising tension and get my heart back under control as
his eyes bored into mine.

“None of us will,” Dellar said. “Because it’s
not going to get near Maria.”

I wish I could say that I shared their
confidence, but I couldn’t help the niggling unease that sat at the
back of my head with sharp claws and even sharper teeth. I shared a
glance with Maria and saw that same unease mirrored in her eyes.
While we trusted the guys, we also knew that the best-laid plans
could go to hell in a heartbeat, and as we climbed back into the
car I made some small extra plans of my own.

Chapter Sixteen

“You are rather tense this evening, Miss
Alexander, is there anything amiss?”

Mr. Baker’s concerned question snapped me out
of my thoughts and I reassured him with an apologetic smile that I
was fine, just a little distracted. He gave me another concerned
look and I gave him my brightest grin in return. He didn’t look
convinced, but he let the matter drop and left the store.

I was really touched with how concerned Mr.
Baker had been about my well being when I came into work that
evening, but his “I’m not really hovering” hovering that he had
been doing was starting to get a little tiresome as I needed some
quiet time to myself to go over the plan once again.

We had agreed that it was too risky to wait
much longer, and Dellar commented that we ran a very high chance of
running into, or being observed by, other people if we put our plan
into motion during the weekend, which meant that we had to try
sometime during the week.

After going back and forth a little bit, we
decided the sooner the better to try and keep it off guard if it
had listened in on our conversations after it had taken over Maria
at the old farmhouse. Time wasn’t a commodity that we had much of,
and it had been my idea to start immediately after I got off work.
If we were unsuccessful in tracking down the
Gaki
tonight,
then we’d try again tomorrow, but something deep in my gut churned
in such a way that I knew we were going to run into it. I just
didn’t know what was going to happen after that.

I reached up and checked my hair for the
fifteenth time in as many minutes before I turned my attention back
to shelving the new arrivals. I had forgone my usual habit of
leaving my hair long and loose and instead had twisted it up into a
tight bun with a hair stick that had pretty little beads dangling
off the end. I didn’t wear my hair this way often, but I did enjoy
the sound the beads made as they clinked against each other, and
there was the added bonus that the other end was an extremely sharp
point. I had joked with Mom when I bought it that it would make a
wonderful concealed weapon if I ever decided to become a spy. Mom
had just rolled her eyes.

Once I finished shelving the books I turned
my attention to homework, but the words and numbers swam before my
eyes. I finally gave up after I realized I had reread the same math
problem five times without a single idea of what the numbers I was
looking at really meant. I jittered, I jumped, I paced, but nothing
I did would settle the stampeding butterflies in my stomach, so it
was no little relief when Maria entered the bookstore five minutes
before my dinner break.

“You ok?” she asked as she stared pointedly
at my bouncing foot.

“Yeah, I’m ok,” I said, my voice a little
higher pitched than usual. “You?”

“Worried,” she said, and with that single
word all of my muscles turned to softened butter. If Maria was
worried, then I wasn’t alone in my fears, and for some strange
reason that did a lot to make me feel better. “Were you able to get
the rest of the evening off?”

“Yep. I didn’t even have to ask,” I said.
“Mr. Baker flat out told me when I came in that I was only to work
until my usual break time, and then he’d take over for the rest of
the evening so that I wouldn’t ‘stress myself needlessly in the
pursuit of a paycheck.’”

“He never changes, does he?” she asked with a
fond smile.

“No, thank goodness. I don’t know what I’d do
if he stopped being so formal,” I replied.

“I’m going to wait in your car,” she said. “I
want to make sure that I’m not running low on energy if we run into
it tonight.”

“Can you tell what it’s doing?”

“No, which I guess is good because I’m not
getting any of those hungry feelings that I get whenever it’s
paying attention. I wish this weird connection thing went both
ways.”

“Yeah, would make life easier,” I agreed.

I handed her my car keys, and she exited at
the same time that Mr. Baker returned and gently shooed me on my
way. I thanked him for letting me leave early, which he waved away
with a grand hand gesture that involved a wide sweep to the side
before he placed his hand over his heart. I grabbed my book bag,
wished him a goodnight, and headed out the door.

We had agreed that I would drive to the strip
mall instead of taking my usual route through the park to help keep
from tiring Maria out so that if we did see the
Gaki
, we
could hopefully lead it away from people and to the old farmhouse.
How we were going to get it interested in following us was still a
little bit of a mystery, but an inkling of a plan lurked in the
back of my mind. Of course, it all hinged on whether or not we
actually saw the
Gaki
, recognized it, and if it was close
enough to hear our conversation, but I figured that we were finally
due some sort of good luck after all the crap we’d been through the
last few weeks.

We reached our destination, and I eyed the
small crowd of people that wandered around the food court. There
were more than I had anticipated, and that worried me a little as
Maria and I made our way to the town’s only restaurant with outdoor
seating. It was located a little further away from the hubbub of
the main food court, which was in our favor. Akira had told us that
the
Gaki
would need to eat something solid because the
physical body it possessed still needed the same everyday
requirements that all people needed in order to survive. I was a
little hesitant about it hunting in the same area twice, but Akira
had reassured me that most predators who had had a partially
successful hunt in one location tended to return to try again after
some time had passed.