02 Seekers (13 page)

I stood up, the tingling in my scalp worse with the added adrenaline, and pulled the boy after me.

My necklace pulsed into life with a bright light at the urge to protect the wayward thief. Even if he was a thief he didn’t deserve the sort of punishment my kind tended to inflict on humans caught up in the fight. Ignoring the light, I focused on the best plan of escape.

As soon as the boy gained his feet again he tried to run, but I grabbed him. “Wait,” I warned.

On cue, the dumpster dropped where he would have been had he moved. He gulped, and his eyes darted around the narrow alley for another way of escape as more items fell around us. I kept my eyes on the Watchers, figuring, despite the chaos around us, they were the most dangerous aspect of this equation, and that they would be my clue for when to run.

From my many sword fights with Margaret and Jackson, I sensed the tide of the fight subtly shift directions. The man’s swings got increasingly messier and uncertain, the woman’s own

swordsmanship turning even more impressive and dangerous. The woman started to break

through his guard, blood running down his arms and legs from her blade. In a desperate last act to save his life, the man tried to trick the woman into falling off their ledge, but it was too late.

He had already lost. The woman twirled the sword out of his hands in a move Jackson had used on me a million times, disarming him in an instant. It landed right in front of me, wedging into the cracks of the cement and vibrating from the force of the impact. I took a deep breath at the near miss. The boy whimpered slightly, but was maintaining his cool.

The woman stabbed the now unarmed man straight through the heart with her sword. Silver

blood bubbled from his lips, and he fell to his knees on the rooftop. All the swirling objects dropped to the ground as she bent down and did something I couldn’t see. When she stood back up she had his silver heart clenched in her limber fingers. A thin trail of smoke circled to the sky from where she had set his body on fire.

Not knowing if she would attack us next, I took advantage of the sword lodged at my feet. In my adrenaline fueled state it came out of the ground easily, eagerly. I gripped it with both hands feeling unbalanced after using the light fencing foils for so long. It flashed evilly in the thin sunlight of our shadowed alley.

The heart now safely tucked away, she stared down at us with black and dangerous eyes. The black eyes were uncertain and curious as she took in my shining necklace and the wicked sword I was holding. She leaned forward on the ledge in preparation for a leap down. I felt my breath catch, even as I worked to keep my hands steady. There was no way I could win a sword fight with her. She had just proven her skill...and there would be no ‘again’ like there was with Jackson. This would be a true test of my ability; a test which would have deadly consequences.

Her weight shifted on the ledge as she bent her knees to jump, but she stopped herself. She cocked her head to one side and listened. I heard the same thing she was hearing. People had heard the fight and were coming to investigate. There were quite a few, their thoughts panicked and worried at the violence. Something in her eyes told me she didn’t want the attention. She cursed, her black eyes returning to mine one last time before she stepped backwards and

disappeared from sight.

“Run,” I told the boy.

He didn’t need to be told twice. He was a passing wind over a distant prairie as his feet flew down the uneven street of the back alley. He was gone in seconds. Figuring attention wouldn’t be good for me either, hearing the thoughts grow in fervor as the people approached the mouth of the alley, I grabbed a smelly piece of cloth off the ground and wrapped the shiny blade of the sword as best I could. Then, I followed the boy out of the alley, trying hard not to look guilty.

I ran into Alex half a block away. Her round face was flushed with red, and her blonde hair was plastered to her forehead from running. She looked annoyed and relieved at the same time.

“There you are! I’ve been running around this whole fraking neighborhood trying to find you!”

She caught sight of the growing crowd and the destruction of the alley. Her eyes grew large.

“What happened?”

I took her arm and started searching for a more familiar street, one which was infinitely more crowded. Hopefully the woman, if she was watching us like I suspected she was, would lose us in the crowds. If she wasn’t, then, at least, I was learning caution…Everything felt like a hidden danger, every person we passed, a Watcher, as we circled back to the park we had just run away from.

Alex’s surprise and fear at the conclusion of my story weren’t enough to keep her from being practical. “Did you call Jackson and tell him? I mean…I think this qualifies as an emergency.”

“I forgot about him…” I admitted. “Why wasn’t he there? He said he would be watching.”

“I don’t know, Clare, maybe he lost track of you when you decided to chase after a thief for stealing a phone you didn’t even pay for.”

“Oh, sarcasm, that’s original,” I retorted, knowing she was right.

She shook her head in irritation and focused on keeping up with my long strides. I sensed her unspoken worry and her uncertainty, but she was keeping it to herself; she was good at that. We stopped three blocks away and ducked under an out-of-the-way awning. I pushed speed dial on the phone Jackson had given me and waited. Alex was look out, her eyes searching the street and roofs for possible Watchers as I waited with electrical tension for him to pick up. I got the voicemail.

“Jackson, are you there? It’s important. Something happened.” My stomach was already in

knots. There was no good reason he wouldn’t pick up. Cars hummed by, people shouted about

the chaos of the alley, and, somewhere down the road, rap blared out of a stereo. The sounds were louder in my panic. “We’ll meet you back at the hotel,” I added.

I shut the phone and shared a helpless look with Alex. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” she said.

“Me too, Luke,” I joked, loving her unintentional Star Wars reference.

“Huh?” she asked, not getting it.

“Never mind…Let’s get back to the hotel,” I said.

Alex looked around the street again. “You think it’s safe?” she asked.

“I think it’s the only place we know to meet up with Margaret and Jackson…and they’re the

safest place to be. If we have to switch hotels, then so be it.”

Alex frowned and ran her hand through her hair as we started walking again. “What does what you saw mean?”

“That someone died, I guess.”

At my words the sword I was carrying grew heavier. A dark power radiated from the blade as if it enjoyed my use of the word ‘death’. I didn’t tell Alex, but I gripped it with increasingly uncertain hands. In that instant, I wanted to throw it away and never look back. What kind of sword was it? How had it killed that man? Nothing beyond another Watcher was supposed to be able to hurt another Watcher. What had I stumbled on?

“No, I mean…it feels a bit convenient, don’t you think?”

“Not really. We know they’re all over town, so why not run into one of them?”

“You go strolling down the street and just happen to witness what you witnessed?” Her

eyebrows furrowed. “Maybe that kid was a trap. Maybe he was supposed to lead you into that alley.”

“Nah,” I replied.

“How do you know?” she asked.

I tapped my head. “He told me so. He was too scared to be in on it. My bet is coincidence. At least, we know one Watcher with some serious fighting skills in town. Margaret and Jackson might be able to track down the redhead and get some answers from her.”

“Hm,” Alex said noncommittally, her face narrowed in thought.

We made our way through the park and past the church in silent contemplation, each too

preoccupied with our own thoughts and worries to speak. I was less concerned with the run-in being a trap as I was with Jackson’s strange absenteeism. He was supposed to be following us.

What if something happened?

Near the street to our hotel a strange premonition of what we were about see rippled through my body. I forced Alex to slow down, my brain trying to protect me from the feeling of impending doom. But there was no stopping the feeling. We were walking into something bad – something as bad as what we had just left. We turned the corner and I saw the reason behind my gut feeling.

Ash and a blaring heat filled the narrow streets in relentless danger. A flashing red fire truck passed us, sirens wailing, and came to a screeching stop behind another fire engine parked right in front of our hotel. The hotel was thick with boiling black fire, the source of all the chaos.

“Holy…”

“Shh!” I shushed Alex. The voices were so overwhelming I was having trouble standing. I

leaned against the edge of a building to keep my balance. The slim shield I had started to develop had fled with the adrenaline and fear I was operating on. I couldn’t take it. “Go see what happened. I can’t…”

Alex disappeared into the crowd without a word, understanding my pain. I put my hands over my ears and started humming loudly, counting on the fire to distract people from my strangeness.

After a minute, I reopened my eyes to look for Alex and caught eyes with one person who wasn’t watching the fire. His hair was filthy, his face tan, but what I noticed most was his eyes. One was brown and the other was blue – a sharp contrast, which was freaky against his tan skin. When we connected eyes, he pulled a hood over his sandy hair and disappeared into the growing crowd.

Seconds later, Alex was back. She pulled me away from the building and up the street to the park. “The fire is only about ten minutes old. I heard over the radio that they’d found some bodies. You think it was arson?”

I raised an eyebrow at her in response.

“Yeah…me too,” she agreed. “Try Jackson again.”

I went to pull my phone out of my pocket, but was greeted with air instead. It was gone.

Someone had stolen my phone while I had been distracted by the noises. I turned back to search for a culprit. The street was too crowded and hectic to pick out the guilty party. What was it with today and phone thieves?

“Are you kidding me?!” I kicked at an unoffending trash can, sending it sprawling down the sidewalk.

My ears buzzed with more sound, increasing my frustration. I could hear the firefighters from inside; I could hear them talking about a strange pile of ash, and I heard every creak as they searched through the rooms before the building was totally consumed by fire, I heard the people on the street, the talking, the laughing, the worry, places I shouldn’t have heard within normal limits.

“What? What’s the matter?” Alex asked at my kick.

“My phone is missing. Do you have Jackson’s number? We could go somewhere and call him.”

“No. He had it programmed into the phones he gave us.”

“This is a mess. Where do we go? Where…Should we wait for them or hide? Is this aimed at us?

I can’t think.” I sat down on the curb and put my hands over my ears again.

Alex pulled my hand away. Her face was worried, but serious. “Clare. Snap out of it. Sitting here is dangerous, if we were supposed to be in that fire. It could be a coincidence, but…”

She was right. I valued her life more than that. I valued seeing Daniel again more than that. I stood up, urging the sounds to calm in my ears. They lowered to a dull roar as a rash plan formed from my encounter with the kid. I walked to the first vendor I saw and bought the most sedate shirt on the rack along with another bag that was bigger and had a shoulder strap. When my purchase was complete, I grabbed hold of Alex’s hand and marched her into the closest

convenience store’s bathroom. I avoided the clerk, hoping he wouldn’t see my accessory. A

sword bag wasn’t exactly Couture. When Alex and I were safely locked in, I retrieved the pocket knife from my boot Alex had given me as a reminder of our blood pact, insisting it was prudent to always have a knife. I poked a couple of holes in the shirt then handed it to her.

“Put this on. Ditch the sunglasses and your bag, and think dirty,” I said.

“Think dirty?” she asked, already changing shirts.

“We’ve got to hide. How many ratty kids and homeless people have you seen down here?” I

asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice,” she said.

“Exactly.”

I tried to tug her bag out of her hand, but she had a vice grip. “Do I really have to leave it?” she asked.

“It’s a hundred dollar bag, Alex.”

“That’s my point, Clare” she said.

“Alex...” I warned.

She sighed and reluctantly released her grip. “Aren’t you going to change?” she asked.

“Does anything about my outfit scream ‘money!’?” I asked.

Though rhetorical, she answered my question anyway, “God, no.”

“Where do you think the best place to run into Margaret and Jackson would be?” I asked.

“At the hotel,” she replied dryly.

I started pacing in the tiny space. “No. They won’t hang around there. Where would they think we would go to wait for them?”

“They’d probably think I went shopping and you went to mope.”

“Shopping area,” I snapped my fingers. “Good idea.”

Damn kids in there...I bet they’re tweaking. I am sick an’ tired of these young punks thinkin’ they
can come in here and use my bathroom for that crap. I’ll show them!

“We gotta go,” I told Alex. I dumped her bag, sans her wallet, into the trash. “The owner thinks we’re doing drugs and is marching over to throw us out.”

“After you,” she said holding open the door for me.

The man, who was half way down the aisle, glared at us as we scampered from the store. I waved as he called out for us not to come back.

Alex squinted into the sun as we stepped outside, missing her sunglasses. “Maybe we should call Dad,” she suggested.

“That’s a great idea. Here’s you: ‘Hey, Dad, so my hotel just caught on fire, probably set by Watchers out to get us. People died. Oh, and we can’t find Margaret or Jackson, because Clare’s phone was stolen and mine got smashed…can you send money, so we can stay alive long enough to find them? Thanks.’ He’ll love that.”