Leaping (4 page)

Get out. Just get out. Think
through the rest later.

I grunt and sling Tucker’s bundled
body over my shoulder. His bare feet dangle as I walk across the room and cautiously
open the door. Just as I step out, a door across the hall flings open. The
female pirate, her costume shoved down to her hips, stumbles out. She sobs
loudly, way too loudly, and mascara-tinted tears lance down her cheeks.

I quickly set down my cargo and
hold up my blood-stained hands.

“Hey, hey, hey.” I open my arms and
she tumbles into them. Her body shudders violently, all that delicious energy
heaving against me. Her energy is music to me.
Sweet music.
I can hear
it inside the inner cavities of my mind, plucking beautiful harp strings.
Another time, another place, I wouldn’t have been strong enough to resist all
that energy, all that fear.

“Help. I….need…he’s dead….he killed
him….Batman….we have to call the…the….”

“Shhhhhh,” I say to her gently as
my fingers find the carotid artery in her neck. I press firmly.

“Stop. Wait…..wait…” the girl
mumbles. She tries to break out of my embrace, but her efforts are nothing compared
to my strength. I keep my hold, and watch the red spikes of fear fade as her
aura flattens. When her legs give out, I catch her.

 “You missed one,” I say to Gabe
who stands in the doorway panting hard.

“He had three girls in there with
‘em,” Gabe says. “I got Red Riding Hood and the witch. Man, Red Riding Hood
gave me quite a chase. You good on your end?”

“Tucker Cartwright.” I nod toward the
bundle at my feet. I carry the limp pirate back into the room. “Got a little
bloody.”

 Gabe’s angel – the vampire – is
sprawled on a huge, luxurious bed, now sporting a perfect round hole in his
forehead. The two unconscious girls are laid out nicely on the pillows beside
him. The half-dressed witch has a tranq dart in her arm. I don’t see a dart in
Red Riding Hood.

“Pull the sheet and wrap him up,” I
tell Gabe.

“Yep.” He shoves the vampire off
the bed, and the body thuds against the floor. “Any of that blood yours?”

So that’s why his voice is so hard.

I lay pirate girl down next to her
sleeping companions. “No, it’s Tucker’s. Had to use my dagger. It got dicey.” I
realize the bad pun only after I say it.

“I don’t like dicey.” It’s not the
way Gabe says it, but the flare of his aura, those spikes of pained reds, that feels
like a punch.

He rolls up the vampire in the
crisp white sheet, turning him into a life-sized bowling pin. A ruby stain
immediately begins to form and metastasize near the top.

“Time to go. Tarren’s probably
waiting for us.”

Gabe grunts, and wobbling only a
little, heaves the swathed vampire over his shoulder. When we make it back to
the hallway, I reload Tucker onto my shoulder. Thank god the two trolls didn’t
come upstairs and find his bundled corpse laying in the middle of the hallway.

“There.” Gabe points to a door that
opens up into a Jack and Jill bathroom. I twist the crystal knob, and damn, the
bathroom is so big you could probably fit an entire cheerleading squad inside
and still have room for the basketball team in the stone shower.

“God, why are so many bad guys so
rich?” Gabe says behind me.

“Batman is rich too,” I point out.
Already, the shaking is beginning to quiet in my limbs. The image of the endless
crimson puddle of Tucker’s blood is retreating from my mind as my training
kicks in. A long, thin horizontal window sits about six feet up from the tub. I
reach up, slide it open, and punch out the screen.

“You go first, bring the car
around,” I say.

“Batman doesn’t…” Gabe starts.

“…unless you want to shove these
guys through that window.”

Gabe looks at the distance from
floor to window. He’s strong for his size, but I know he doesn’t want to try
shoulder pressing two hundred pounds of dead weight over his head. “Lady’s
choice,” he says and gives me a gracious little bow before stepping into the
tub.

“You need any help?” I ask Gabe
teasingly. “I can give you a boost.” The window is small, high up. Most people
wouldn’t be able to manage it without a step ladder and a serious diet.

“In case you’ve forgotten, I was
skvyying my skinny ass through tiny windows in giant, rich-guy bathrooms long
before you ever joined this club,” Gabe says. Then he sticks his tongue out.
“Plus, Batman can always handle himself.”

He grabs the window ledge and
swings his body up and out in one fluid motion.

“Batman has a fucking butler,” I
remind him.

I hear him laugh, and then his gloved
fingertips disappear from the ledge. I listen and hear the faint impact as he
hits the ground below and cusses. I wait, watching the weird blobby shape the
blood makes on the white sheet covering the vampire.

“It’s clear,” Gabe says into my earpiece.
“No eyes out here.”

And then it’s time for my hat
trick. I start with Tucker, who is smaller and thinner than his vampire friend.
I boost him back onto my shoulder and step into the empty tub. I know that
Tucker is dead, but I still tense up, half expecting a hand to come shooting
out from the cover to wrap around my neck.

Get a grip,
I tell myself.
With a quick bend of the knees, I press Tucker over my head and shove him
through the window. He gets a little stuck, but I push, and then he’s gone,
tumbling into the night.

The vampire is much more stubborn.
His body is unwieldy in the thin sheet, and I almost lose him as I struggle to
get him overhead. He’s all muscle, tall and heavy, with broad shoulders and a
barrel chest that does not want to go through the window. I get his legs out,
but his chest gets stuck. I keep seeing that growing red stain over his head,
the locks of dark hair peeking out from the top of the sheet.

Dammit, go!

I shove his shoulders, scooting him
out little by little.
Dear God, what if we have to cut him up?
I left my
bone saw in my other nurse’s costume. That joke isn’t even funny. I’ve seen a
lot of gruesomeness in the past year, but I’m not sure I could handle hacking
off limbs and spilling out intestines. With one final, brutal shove, the
vampire clears the window and drops like a stone. I almost feel bad for the
police who are going to have to investigate this crazy mess of a crime scene.

In one smooth motion, I grasp the window’s
edge and slide my body through the narrow opening. I let go of the ledge and
drop two stories into the bushes below. My landing is soft, but the impact jars
my elbow and the other sore places where I took a beating curtesy of Tucker’s
telekinesis. I’ll see what pretty bruise art I have as soon as we get clear of
this place.

Just as I pull my soggy vampire
from a flattened bush, the jeep pulls up, headlights off. Gabe jumps out and
opens the back. He grabs Tucker.

 “Screen was still in the window,” Gabe
says to me as if I hadn’t noticed that one part of our trio is conspicuously
absent. The bodies land heavily in the back,
wump, wump,
one after the
other.

“Maybe Tarren took another way
out,” I say without conviction.

“He never deviates unless there’s a
problem,” Gabe says. He unmutes his phone. “Batman, check, nurse check. Wings
are clipped. Cargo loaded. What’s your status, Sheriff?”

We wait for Tarren’s check-in.

Nothing.

“If he doesn’t check in, he’d want
us to wait ten minutes and then go,” I say with no conviction. Gabe and I look
at each other. We are of one mind.

“You climb back up through the
window,” Gabe says. “I’ll get back in through the front and meet you upstairs.”

Just as I nod, something hurdles
out of the window and lands with a
SMACK
on the ground.
Tarren!
My
heart nearly explodes. I stumble forward, staring at the unmoving object.

“Watch out, another one coming,”
Gabe says, touching my arm. His aura stings, snapping me through the cloud of
my fear just as another dark shape plummets to the ground. I look up at the
window just as two boots slide out, followed by legs and Tarren’s big body. It’s
amazing he can even squeeze his wide shoulders through that tiny opening. He
drops hard and rolls, his hat speeding away from him. When he stands up, Tarren
favors an ankle. A single trickle of sweat rolls down his temple.

“Everything okay?”
I pick up his hat and hand it to him.
“Are you injured?” Tarren’s eyes are planted on the bloody smears on my costume
as he takes his hat.

“It wasn’t pretty, but I got it
done.” I lean down and pick up one of the sheet-wrapped bodies.

Tarren bends to collect the other
body, but Gabe steps up, blocking him. “Next time, check in,” he says. His gaze
holds Tarren, and all of Gabe’s smiles and jokes are buried beneath the red
fear that streaks through his aura. 

Tarren nods, and I wonder as I so
often do how the one could possibly survive if the other were lost. I got a
glimpse of that chaotic ruin last year when Gabe almost died…because of what I
did…what I became. I push those thoughts away. The mission isn’t over yet. 

“We need to go,” Tarren says, and
Gabe moves out of his way. Tarren and I drop the final two bodies into the back
of the jeep. His aura hugs low to his body, almost as gray as his eyes.
Craptastic.
His eyes only shift from blue to gray when he’s angry. Is he still mad
about the fact that I didn’t have a tranq gun, or is this entire mission just
giving him the heebie jeebies, like me? He’s holding his aura down with all the
control he possesses, and I can’t read anything off it.

Tarren closes the back door on our
silent cargo. I let out my breath, feeling like I was just released from an
incredibly tight corset. This mission could have turned into a shit hurricane
in a hundred different ways, but we improvised, and we took four very bad people
out of commission permanently. I wasn’t fast enough to save that poor dead girl
lying in Tucker Cartwright’s bed, but there are other starlets who will live to
audition another day because of me.

We did a good thing. Won another
small battle.

I open my mouth to say something profound
and encouraging to my weary team when my phone dings with an incoming message.

Shit.
Rain knows I’m on a
mission. He shouldn’t text…unless.

Gabe says something behind me, but
I don’t hear it as my hands tear into my holster, digging out my phone. Stupid
fingers. I press too hard, and the slider on the screen doesn’t move. I take a
little breath, and try again, slower. This time the phone opens. I jab at my
passcode and then slap the message icon. My breath turns into a garbled sob as
I read the message.

Hurt. Help. Enterprise.
 

“Drive faster,” I growl at Tarren
from the back seat of the jeep as I peel out of my costume. Every inch of my
body is coiled with energy, ready to spring into action and fight something.

Anything.

The long stretch of highway in
front of us gloats at my helplessness. We’re still at least an hour and a half
out from Enterprise, Nevada were Rain was patrolling.

“Speeding will only attract
attention,” Tarren says, because of course he can be calm and cool when my
world is tumbling apart like a Jenga tower. Doesn’t Tarren care that Rain has
this incredible, warm laugh that wraps you up like a flannel blanket on a
winter night? That Rain is always tapping his fingers, drumming his knees, or
humming like he has an entire symphony inside of him begging to come out? That
he is so self-depreciating his flaws become their own charming, necessary parts
of him?

Tarren doesn’t know any of this,
and it wouldn’t budge his speedometer one mile even if he did.

“Chain and Rattlesnake were on the
mission with him. They’re looking for him right now,” Gabe says from the
passenger seat. His mask is off, and the commendably durable Sir Hopsalot sits patiently
in his lap. Gabe taps out messages on his phone with one hand and scratches the
bunny behind a long, floppy ear with the other. He’s probably chatting with
Bear, leader of the Totem. “By the time we get there they’ll probably have
found him already.”

But he didn’t text them. He
texted me,
I think, as I lay across the back seat and pull on the black
nylon pants I often wear on missions.
I have to find him.
I ball my
fists up. Punching out the window isn’t going to help anything, but right now I
might just do it anyway. Instead, I grab a tight black workout top from my
duffle bag and throw it on.

”Rattlesnake?” Tarren asks.

“New recruit,” Gabe responds. “They’re
up to six now. Quite the team.”

Tarren’s aura flickers. “Team.” He
says the word with drippy distain. “Their training is minimal. They’re more of
a liability than—”

“We already know what you think of
the Totem,” I snap at him, and my voice wobbles. “They’re amateurs. They’re
just going to get themselves killed. Well, fuck it, you’re right Tarren, you’re
always right. But they want to be out there. They want to fight. And they’ve
got just as much right to try as us.”

Gabe turns around in the passenger
seat. His expression is sympathetic. “Maya, we all want to find him.”  

“They’re a distraction,” Tarren
says softly. His eyes find mine in the rearview mirror, and they’ve gone hard
again, all mission mode. It’s clear that he knows about me and Rain, has
probably known all along since we started texting like hormone-fueled
middle-schoolers.

Tarren is right…again. Rain is the
mother of all distractions. How often do I sneak texts to him while we drive
these endless miles? How many hours do I sacrifice to the altar of worry on his
behalf? 

Gabe’s phone buzzes, and I suck in
a breath. He glances at the screen. “Well, whaddya know, Tucker Cartwright’s
missing. Who had him in the death pool?”

I slump against the door, not
caring that the seatbelt jabs into my side.

Gabe’s phone buzzes again and
again, and then it basically turns into a vibrator with news updates pinging
every second. “Oh wow, the conspiracy theories are getting good,” Gabe notes as
he flicks through the articles. One hand unconsciously strokes the gray bunny
in his lap. “There’s some early leaks that drug paraphernalia was found on the
scene. Oooh, some fans are putting together money to pay a ransom. Think it
might be a drug cartel kidnapping. Can I call in, please, please please?” He
looks to his brother. “I do an awesome Spanish accent, jefe.” 

Tarren doesn’t even bother
answering.

“They found one body on the scene. Young
woman. Hasn’t been identified yet. Is that a problem for us?”

“No, she was a human,” I say. “She
was in Tucker’s room. He’d iced her before I got there.”

“Damn,” Gabe mutters, and a pale
streak of red moves through the eddies of his aura.

I close my eyes. I want to tip my
brain over and empty out all my jarring thoughts, but instead my mind churns up
my last encounter with Rain. It was brief. Charged. Ringed with laughter and
longing…just like all the others.

Two weeks ago my brothers and I mopped
up a mission in Dallas, and the benevolent Tarren gave us the afternoon to
sleep and shower so we could be fresh for the next hunt. Rain happened to be in
Fort Worth on his way to assist his teammate, Leopard in Monroe, Louisiana.

We met at a little diner I found in
some forgotten corner of the city where the tables were sticky, but the
waitresses gave out genuine smiles along with huge plates of chilly cheese
fries. I’d only had 15 minutes left on the clock when Rain came skidding in,
nearly slamming into a waitress when he saw me and smiled.

Fifteen minutes. Long enough to
re-memorize his sleepy brown eyes, the freckles on his neck, every strand of
his messy, spiky hair. He’d lost a little weight, and I ordered him a milkshake
without asking. Those first few minutes were slow and quiet as we took each
other in, the strange proximity of our faces after months of texting and stolen
calls in the middle of the night.

I expected to see exhaustion stamped
on his features, the same road weariness that has become a permanent,
almost-living member of my family as we face a plethora of enemies. Instead, I
saw a sadness in Rain, not new, but bigger than before, like a widening river
behind his smiles. It moved inside of his aura, amber shades of regret. The
killing is hard for me, but I suspect it’s even harder for him. Rain has
trouble keeping his hate fueled. He tells me that there are days he wakes up
and just feels sorry for everyone involved.

The shake arrived, and it was like
a magic talisman. Words came pouring out of us. I told Rain about the group of
four angels we’d just buried in the dry dirt of Dallas and the weird, sideways
crosses they’d all worn on chains around their necks. As he sucked down his
shake, Rain pantomimed his latest misadventures.

As he spoke, I watched his hand tap
out an unconscious beat on the laminate table. I laughed at his stories even
though his mistakes stoked my worries to new heights. Every laugh, every shy
glance into his brown eyes seemed to plant a little seed in my soul that would
grow delicate roots between us, binding us closer and closer.

And I’d thought,
What happens if
all those roots get torn out of me one day?

Fifteen short minutes. Just a
glimpse of him. Half a milkshake. A little bit dribbling down his chin, because
he honestly can’t be clean about anything. I’d longed to reach out, dab away that
melting sweetness from his skin, but his aura was playing music in my mind, and
it’s better, smarter, not to risk contact.

And now?
Now I wish I’d
reached out to him, done more than wiped away a bit of shake. Now I wish I’d
kissed him and felt his mouth open against mine.

“Another hour and we’ll be there,”
Tarren says from the front seat, snapping me back into the present. All I can
do is shove my feet into sneakers and feel those roots tugging at all the
tender places inside of me.

***

The air is cold and dry in the
desert at night. Only 14 miles outside the heart of Las Vegas, Enterprise might
as well be on a different planet. Even though I see fast food joints and big
box stores, this town feels empty… desolate. In Las Vegas you can forget that
the desert even exists. Here in Enterprise, the desert is a living presence, almost
waiting to take back the roads and all the other things that men have planted
in the sandy soil.

We rendezvous with Chain and Rattlesnake
in the parking lot of a particularly sad looking Days Inn. Our headlights catch
their silhouettes as we pull into a spot next to their truck. Turns out that
Rattlesnake is not a beefy buzz cut stamped with tribal tattoos. She’s a tall,
stocky woman packed tight into a pair of jeans and cowboy boots. Thick arms cross
over ample breasts that push against her nylon jacket. Blonde curls dangle down
her face, and I catch the flash of big hoop earrings as she leans down to
whisper into Chain’s ear.

Chain and I go way back. A year ago
I dragged him out of a burning building in Poughkeepsie that almost swallowed
us both. A few months later we met again, this time under very different
circumstances. He and the Totem performed a nice little swoop and kidnap,
mistaking me for the enemy. The way Chain looks at me now, his face closed and
hostile, I wonder if he ever changed his mind. Maybe he still lumps me in with
the rest of the angels he has shown a surprising aptitude for killing.

Standing next to Rattlesnake, Chain
would look almost delicate if it weren’t for his aura lashing up and down in
swirling shades of crimson. Each person’s aura is unique. The movement and
colors always have their own special meaning. It takes me a while to accurately
read each new aura, the same way it used to take weeks or months to memorize
all the hidden meanings behind the expressions of a new face. 

Chain is easy to read though. His
red isn’t physical pain or emotional turmoil. It’s anger. It fills him, fuels
him, controls him. The only time I’ve ever seen any waver in his internal
volcano is…

Tarren steps out of the jeep.

Chain’s aura flushes with heavy purple
hues and his fingers find the rusted chain belt hooked round his slender hips.

Lust.

I get out of the jeep and follow my
brothers as we face the two Totem members.

 “Bad circumstances to meet,” Gabe
says as he extends a hand to Rattlesnake. “I’m Gabe.”

“They didn’t tell me ya’ll dressed
up in costumes,” Rattlesnake answers with Texas flavoring every word. She takes
Gabe’s hand. Apparently nobody has informed her about the dopey, plastic animal
masks the Totem used to wear under the hapless leadership of the not-so-dearly-departed
Puma.       

“Of course we have costumes.” Gabe
sounds hurt. “We’re superheroes. What did you expect?” As long as Gabe is
breathing he’ll have a joke on his lips. I’m usually thankful for his armor of
humor, but not tonight, not when Rain could be unconscious and bleeding in some
dirty alley. When he could be…

 “We came from a costume party. It
was a mission,” I tell Rattlesnake.

Her eyes go round. “Wait just one
fuckin’ minute. Ya’all were comin’ from Los Angeles, right? That’s what Bear
said?” She gives the briefest glance back to Chain. “Ya did it didin’ ya?
Tucker Cartwright? Holy hot damn!” she hoots, and a huge smile erupts from her
pink painted lips. “Ya’ll got the balls of bulls on ya. I used ta have posters
of him on my walls. Your lips are miiiiiiine, girl,” she croons.

“Do you have tracking on Penguin’s
phone,” I snap, using Rain’s Totem moniker.

Chain shakes his head. I watch his
fingers toy with the chain around his waist. “We discussed that a while ago
with Bear, but we decided it could be a liability if one of us was
compromised.”

That sounds like something Bear
would say.

“He’s on his way,” Rattlesnake
adds, “but he’s coming from Knoxville.” She leans against Chain’s truck. The
sharp jut of her hip and those silver hoops swinging from her lobes make me certain
that Rattlesnake is one of those women who delights in describing herself as
sassy
.

“Tell us the details about the
mission,” Tarren says, and the calmness and authority in his voice are a balm I
didn’t know I needed. For all his faults, my brother comes with some pretty
impressive skills. Chief among them is the natural leadership that seems to
ooze out of every pore. His frosty gaze says,
If it can be done, I’ll do it
and look freaking awesome while I’m at it.
And Tarren has proven to me more
than once that he can do amazing things.

 “Six days ago Penguin came across
a police report in Paradise, a small town on the other side of Las Vegas,”
Chain begins, his voice ridiculously low and gravelly. Sounds like he’s trying
out for the role of a mob boss at the community theater. 

Gabe snickers. “Town’s just asking
for it with a name like that. Fifty bucks says Paradise is ground zero for the
zombie apocalypse.”

I turn and give him a look that
says,
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
“Continue,” I say to Chain.

His eyes dance between Gabe and me,
and then he starts again in his fake growl. “A patient was found dead in a
local nursing home. Not unusual, of course, but the doctor discovered that the
woman’s body temperature was extremely low given the estimated time of death.
The facility had a camera in the hallway, and when they reviewed the footage,
they discovered that an unknown woman went into her room just before she died. That’s
it.”

“Low body temp,” Tarren repeats. A
telltale sign of an angel feeding. “Compelling but not definitive.”

Chain clears his throat. He looks everywhere
except Tarren. “Penguin did a little digging and found two more reports of
unusually cold bodies in and around Las Vegas, both nursing home patients.”

“Snacking on geriatrics, that’s
just low,” Gabe says.

Speaking of low, my stomach is
sinking way, way down. Nursing home patients. Oh, doesn’t that just raise every
big red flag in my secret rule book – the one my brothers don’t know I have. I’d
bet my life savings, if I had any, that all the victims were catatonic, in the
last stages of cancer, or otherwise knock, knock, knocking on Heaven’s door. I
know exactly what we’re dealing with – an Angel of Mercy – but how to drop the
news to my brothers and our uneasy Totem alliance members that this is an angel
we aren’t supposed to go after?

Why the hell didn’t I ask Rain
more questions about his mission?

I immediately answer my own
question.
Because I didn’t want to know.
The more details he gives me,
the more vividly I can imagine all the ways he could get hurt or killed. And
now we’re here.