Sky Ghosts: All for One (Young Adult Urban Fantasy Adventure) (Sky Ghosts Series Book 1) (13 page)

“I came around on the third day with a bandage on my back and a cast on my leg. That night I’d been delivered to our infirmary and anesthetized. Then they had to break my leg again, straighten the bones, and put them all together as they must be. Later Doc said Marco had helped him with that. I’d been unconscious for a few days, and over that time, the wounds on my back already began to heal in the ordinary way, stitches and all. That’s why the scar remained,” she fell silent, gazing out the window sightlessly. Even stunned with the story, Chad couldn’t help but wonder how long she could sit like this, looking at the nightly New York.

“Wait, if you mean that it’s all about not healing the wound quickly…” He speculated for a moment. “Then why does Marco have that scar on his arm, the one you made? He didn’t get it in a battle, he had a chance to take care of himself…”

“Marco isn’t very good at it,” she replied with a grimace. “You have to practice and develop this skill. He doesn’t have the patience,” she ceased talking, falling in thought. “Actually, Jane is the best at it. It’s like it happens by itself with her.”

“So, if she was fifteen then, now she’s only seventeen?” Chad’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Pain nodded.

“She’ll turn eighteen this September.”

“Wow…” He fell silent and thought about it for a minute. He tried to capture what defined Pain as the big sister and couldn’t. Jane was much more mature and thorough and keen, but still… There was something missing, something that would always make Pain the leader. And at the same time, only Jane’s wisdom and readiness to follow her sister wherever she went made their partnership possible. “She’s very mature for her age,” was all he said at last, and she nodded.

“Yeah,” she replied very quietly, sighing and hanging her head. “Sometimes I’m really proud of her. When I see how she manages everything with you two, how she thinks everything through. I’d never be patient enough.” She smiled, raising her head and looking out the window again. Chad was obscurely glad about that, because it was so much easier to talk to her without those pitch-black eyes staring right into his soul. “You know, poor Marco gets annoyed with this sisters’ stuff pretty often. It’s just, he’s the only one with whom I can talk about Jane. Peter’s too busy with his work,” she said and shook her head. “And Marco, he listens to it over and over again, and then he’d be like, ‘Oh, enough, you’re like a grandma!’ and leave or fall asleep…” She smiled again, making him absently smile in return.

The city outside was much darker now. Pain was silent, and Chad didn’t dare to say anything. Her sudden frankness had driven him into a stupor. He knew how to deal with the indifferent Pain, with Pain being moody, even with the annoying side of her that took pleasure in bullying the others. But this Pain, open, sincere, and caring, this was something he needed time to get used to, something he had yet to figure out. And not that he hadn’t realized that there was a reason for that thick mask of arrogance and mortal boredom, that she just used that attitude to hide her real emotions, to disguise the thin-skinned, vulnerable, and passionate individual that was underneath. But he certainly didn’t expect her to open up so suddenly, even a little bit.

The silence lingered, and he felt uncomfortable just staring at her like a curious kid at a zoo. So he decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

“Is it hard? Not having a normal youth, you know, school and parties, and to raise a little sister without anyone to take care of you?” He leaned closer over the high back of the chair, waiting for her answer, but she just frowned, her talkative mood vanishing in a blink of an eye.

“Okay, you wanted to know about the scar – I told you about the scar.” She pushed the chair back and stepped away from the window. “Get back to the telly, and I’m going to sleep,” she added with finality and turned to the bed, but he caught her arm, almost without thinking.

“Hey,” his voice, equally surprised and disappointed, sounded a little too loud even to his own ears, and she spun around, fixing her piercing gaze on him with none of her former friendliness.

“What?” she snapped, and he realized that he really was dangerously close to a dislocation at that moment. But she just stared at him, angrily, demandingly… and
alarmed.

He peered into her eyes – two black coals smoking with indignation – and suddenly he could see how she tensed, braced herself, as if waiting for a blow. What seemed like aggression really was a defense. What sounded like rudeness, in reality was just another piece of her protective armor activating in response of his behavior. And the look in her eyes, strained to the point of terror, almost pleading for him to let her go, not to push her down the road she wasn’t used to sharing with anyone, it made his breath catch in his lungs. Her arm felt like iron under his touch, and he knew she wanted to hit him, he could almost feel it in her, but something made her stop. And all of it – her reaction, her look, and that vulnerability he saw behind her eyes – it was so sad that it made something inside him tighten and ache for fixing it, only he didn’t know how. All he could do was ease the tension by letting her go, so he did, but his eyes still held her gaze as he said,

“Nothing,” he cleared his dry throat, “Thanks for telling me.” Slowly, she raised one eyebrow in silent incomprehension, and he added, “About the scar, I mean. Good night.”

For a moment she just stood there, looking at him with a mix of perplexity and distrust on her face. Then she shrugged and turned away, reaching the bed in a couple of steps and flopping on it.

Chad didn’t move from his spot. He watched her pull off her T-shirt and gear pants, then pad across the room in her white top and shorts and take her katana so she could leave it beside her bed, as always; then crawl under the covers and turn away from him, curling up cozily under the light blanket, as if she was cold. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered if men and women had different senses of temperature, because the room seemed perfectly warm to him.

His sleepiness seemed to have evaporated. Just a minute ago, his eyes were drooping, and now he felt the most awake he had been in days. But the weariness was still taking the best of him, so he decided that going back to the living room wasn’t even an option. Taking off his T-shirt, he walked to his bed, and then he sat there looking at Pain. He tried to make out at least the outline of her head against the faint light, but it seemed impossible, so he lay down with a quiet sigh and stared at the ceiling instead.

Almost an hour passed before he finally drifted off. Images flickered in his mind. Jane, fifteen years old, no chances against four Beasts, ready to die there. Pain, telling her to run, knowing it would mean instant death for her. Marco, having to break her leg, and no matter if she was unconscious or not, it was the most sickening of all images. No wonder that he dreamed of Pain, bleeding and dying and crying for help in his arms. And he could do nothing but stare in horror.

“What do you think, will Marco ever get a girlfriend?” Jane asked, smiling slyly.

Two days later the four of them sat around the coffee table in the living room, having a late supper. Nothing out of ordinary happened in the past two days, and they had got bored in the luxurious apartment. The TV became annoying, the magazines were read front to back, and there was nothing else to do. So they had settled on demolishing the food stocks and gossiping.

“Like, for more than a couple of days? I really doubt that.” Pain smirked. Chad and Dave nodded, agreeing, and it didn’t matter that they knew nothing about Marco’s love life.

“We could create a super-girl for him specially,” Jane said, picking a cookie out of a bowl with about a hundred kinds of them. “You know, pick a dozen strongest women, choose the most beautiful parts of their bodies…”

“Oh, the second part already seems impossible to me,” Pain put in, and the others grinned.

“Then we’d put those parts together and get a super-girl!” Jane continued, not paying attention to her words.

“Yeah, and we could name her Marconstein!” Pain suggested with an encouraging nod.

Chad raised his eyebrows.

“That’s one name not sounding very feminine to me…” he muttered, and despite his expectations, Pain was the first to laugh at his words.

“It’s okay! Marco could call her ‘Steiny’…” Jane winked at them.

“And then they would be the most terrifying couple in New York!” Pain raised her glass, and the guys followed her example with almost identical sneering expressions.

“Forget New York! They would be the most terrifying couple in the whole world!” Jane said, swooping up her glass, and they clinked them together with a devilish laughter.

Pain brought the glass to her mouth, still smiling, but suddenly a faint sound caught her attention. At first she took it for a microwave ping, but then she realized that no one had turned it on since they came to the living room. She cocked her head to the side, listening, but it was quiet once again.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered, putting away the glass.

The others’ eyebrows went up. As if on command, they lowered their glasses and froze.

“What?” Jane whispered back.

“Ringing,” Pain answered with a frown, pointing with her thumb in the direction of the kitchen door. The others shook their heads.

“Stay here… Keep talking!” She waved her hands, irritated, and got up.

The others just followed her with dumb looks as she snatched her jacket from the couch, put it on, and headed for the kitchen door without a sound. Like a slim black shadow, she slipped through the doorway and paused near the bedroom with her back flat against the wall. She could see Jane hovering in the living room doorway, shrugging her jacket on with a slight frown on her face. In less than a minute their mood switched from fooling around to full focus, and the fact that it was just one small sound didn’t change anything. She nodded to her sister through the doorway and peeked around the corner, getting a glimpse of the inside of the bedroom…

And then she had to suppress a gasp when she saw the cause of that sound.

There were two Beasts by one of the windows with unsheathed swords in their hands. One of them seemed to be instructing the other, speaking in a whisper and gesticulating with both hands. The drapes were pulled aside, and she could see that the space behind the window was filled with black figures, not a glimpse of the darkening sky visible.

Pain shot her katana an angry look – it was leaned up against the bed, across the whole room. Not wasting the time they had left before the Beasts would attack, she darted to a kitchen cabinet and picked up two knives, weighing each of them on her palm. It was better to save their arsenal for later. Then she peeked inside the living room, locking her gaze with her sister’s, and gestured for them to get in the corner and stay there. She could see how Jane strained, her face getting darker, her hand reaching for a knife at her weapons belt. As Pain returned to the bedroom door and once again froze there, she could already feel her pulse decelerate. One deep inhale and she raised the first knife, tensing before a jump. Exhale – time seemed to slow down, her vision to sharpen, and that was when she leaped.

In a blink of an eye, she appeared in the middle of the room, throwing the first knife at the back of one fighter, and the second one at the other’s chest just as he looked at her, startled. She grabbed her katana and Jane’s waist sheath, and when the third Beast got inside, she was already at the window with the sword in her hand.

The grinding of steel on steel deafened her as the Beast brought down his broadsword, hitting the katana hard. She gritted her teeth as she pushed his sword to the side. He drew back for another blow, and while he did so, she did a risky move: she drew a knife from his belt and drove it deep into his chest. Mouth opened in shock, he collapsed to the floor after his heavy sword. It struck the light carpet point-down just as Pain jumped back and got ready for the next opponent.

She was waiting for the others, her sword drawn back in a gleaming arc, her face determined, mind sharp with focus, but the attackers seemed to have decided otherwise.

The window was narrow, so they could only get inside one by one. In this case they all were going to die because the power play was lost for them, and Pain was waiting on the other side with her katana at the ready. So they vanished in the darkness for a second while one of them flew back, gaining speed-

“HOLY MOTHER OF- !!”

Pain barely had the time to leap across the room when shards of glass shot through it, and the Beast sailed through the biggest window, like some oversized crazy pigeon. He tumbled into the wall with a grunt, and when he staggered upright and turned to look at her, a slender dagger was already flying to his throat. Pain didn’t see the result, because she was already racing toward the kitchen, leaving only a long tail of profanities after her. She stopped at the living room doorway, tossing Jane’s sheath inside the room and shaking the splinters out of her hair, her face set into an enraged scowl.

The Beasts gushed after her in a deadly tide. She lashed out at them, not even paying attention to who got caught by her blade, and soon her gloveless hands began to slip on the sword’s hilt from the spilled blood. But no matter how savagely she raked through the mob, they were driving her farther and farther back because the narrow space of the kitchen didn’t give her the freedom to take a good swing. She passed through the doorway and found Jane by her side. Her sister didn’t waste time and slashed away at the first head that risked peeking into the room.

“So, no luck with the plan A, huh?” she noted.

“Nope,” a satisfied grunt, and another Beast dropped dead, “but we still have a lot of glass to break in here. Back off to the window, we’re sticking to the plan B now,” Pain instructed and kicked her next opponent square in the chest, making him slam into another Beast, creating a small melee there.

Jane didn’t say anything; plan B always meant running. Spotting the right moment, Pain took a good jump backwards and landed behind the couch.

“Guys, come here, keep behind us!” she shouted, worried that the Beasts would break through and seize Chad and Dave. Their enemies rushed inside the room after her, and Jane slashed at them from the side, pinning them between herself and her sister.

Pain didn’t have a chance to see if Jane was alright behind the bristled crowd of Beasts. She hit her opponent in the shoulder. He had a ski mask on his head, like a robber, and two short swords in both hands. His howl became a furious snarl when he lunged at her, brandishing his swords chaotically. She watched him with something close to incredulous contempt in her look as she ducked away from his swords, not even using the katana. She swished it only once, and his masked head flew into the corner just as Dave jumped out of it. He got behind her back as the attacker’s place was taken by another one, with red hair. Chad was next to Dave, relatively safe behind the katana’s flashing blade at least for a while. Jane was still not far from the doorway, too occupied with dispatching Beast after Beast to back off to them.

The redhead before Pain had only a heavy knife in his hand, but there was so much confidence in his predatory grin that she paused for a moment, choosing the best way to assault him. He lunged at her once, twice, leaving long scratches along her shoulders, but she didn’t attack. He needed less time to strike at her with his knife than she to swing her sword. She decided to knock the weapon out of his hand, striking at it with the katana, one, two, three, four times – it didn’t work. He was good, reacting quickly and precisely. And then suddenly something hurled through the air and smashed into his head with enough force to knock him out. It didn’t matter, though, because her sword was at his neck in a heartbeat. But she realized with a surprise that it was a book from one of the shelves behind her.

She slewed around, shooting the guys an incredulous glance.

“You’re welcome!” Chad waved his hands with a crooked smile.

“Oh, shut up!” She snorted and fended off another blow.

Two Asian men now stood before her. They both had regular katanas in their hands, just like hers but shorter.

“Two on one, boys, not fair.”

She smirked, catching her breath, and made a tentative lunge, trying to get one of them in the stomach with her sword. Instead, she got a shallow cut on her right side, which his partner made.

“Whoa!” she exclaimed in surprise, feeling her jacket break at the seam. “It’s new gear, you, dog!” she yelled furiously, swinging her sword with so much force and speed that it sheared the one at her right almost in two halves. A startled gasp sounded from the other as he stepped back, staring with round eyes from her to his fallen comrade and back.

“And they say size doesn’t matter…”

She grinned at him, and then he threw himself forward with a fierce shriek, swishing his katana again and again. He did manage to wound Pain in the right shoulder, but with her next blow she beheaded him, sending a fountain of blood into the air and onto the white couch. Dave winced and shrank back, and as his wild gaze switched from the beheaded figure of the Beast to Pain’s shoulder, he wondered if she even felt all those wounds. She moved just as freely as before. He tried to see in the dimness of the room if they were still bleeding and couldn’t. Somehow the girls managed to do it all simultaneously, to fight and heal themselves, and while it was far beyond his comprehension, he was incredibly glad about that. Otherwise, the picture before him would be even less promising, if that was still possible.

In the other half of the room, Jane was wielding her swords like a mincing machine. There was a heap of bodies to her right already, and her forehead was glistening with sweat, but she wasn’t anywhere close to tired yet. The adrenaline burned through her veins, making her feel like if she stopped fighting now, her heart would explode. But she had to back off, to follow her sister and cover Chad back there. So she spotted the right moment and jumped, landing in front of Chad and making him step back in surprise.

“Dave, open the window!” Pain commanded right away.

He frowned, but grabbed the handle, opening the same window through which they had got here just three days ago.

Pain positioned herself closer to Jane so she could mutter into her ear, “You take them and go down slowly, I’ll catch up.”

Even when her sister was still talking, Jane could feel her eyes widen.

“I hate to break it to you, but we’re kinda in the middle of Manhattan here, I can’t go down!” she hissed back.

“Manhattan-Shmanhattan! It’s Saturday night, everyone’s stoned out there! You could drop an elephant on a parachute, and nobody would notice!”

“Not
that
stoned!”

“Whatever, you get the idea. Either this or waiting for me in the air, but we’ve got to get them out of here!”

“And speaking of elephants, I don’t think I can carry them both!” Jane was panting already, her swords flashing left and right.

“Yes, you can. Just get them outside, and I’ll distract the folks here and follow you.”

Jane cut her eyes toward her with distrust just as someone slashed at her arm, making her wince and hit back in full force.

“I hope you have a plan, because if there are any more of them outside, we’re screwed,” she responded finally.

“Of course, I have a plan! Jesus, go already!” Pain pushed her away, her face offended and irritated at the same time.

Jane only shook her head. She knew what the plan was, because it never changed for her sister – killing everybody. But there was no time to argue, so she stepped back and pushed Dave to the window.

“Get on the windowsill, quickly.”

Dave stiffened and stared at her with round eyes.

“What??”

She growled quietly, losing her self-control at once.

“We’re leaving! Get outside, I’ll catch you!” she muttered.

Dave’s feet dragged him onto the windowsill before he could realize what he was doing. He paused inside the frame, not wanting to turn and look down; he just stared at Jane instead.

And then she leaped. She dove through the window, shoving him outside with enough force to knock his breath out of him, and he screamed, grabbing for her jacket, grabbing for anything. He didn’t even notice that her hand was already gripping his sweatshirt; he just continued to clutch at her clothes, feeling as if he was still falling into the black abyss below.