Authors: Lynnie Purcell
recognized him. He was the bum from the park, though he was cleaned up, his beard gone. He poured three drinks at once and slid them down the counter in a steady rhythm of capable habit.
He smiled slightly when I leaned in to speak.
Around the rhythm of his non-stop pouring I said, “I’m here to see Serenity.”
“Clare,” he said. It was weird how he said. It wasn’t the way a person would normally say a name. It was like he was calling me out on something. He poured another drink and leaned
toward me. “You have gorgeous eyes.”
“I was born with them,” I said, my face flooding with heat.
The disarming sensuality I had noticed when he had been less kempt was intensified with his clean appearance and the close way we were talking. Too, I hadn’t been told I had gorgeous anything for weeks. He smiled and raised the bar for us, kicking behind him twice on a solid seeming wall. A door swung open for us, and he gestured us to go up. He turned away and
poured another drink, dancing back into his rhythm without missing a beat.
The stairs were narrow and crooked. The door Mick had opened for us swung shut as we stepped through to them. We all paused and shared a look as the door shut again, then focused on the purpose of our visit. Alex walked on my heels and Spider walked on hers as we walked up.
The hall at the top of the stairs was long and dimly lit with lamps, which matched the Persian feel of the place. A long row of doors stretched out of sight. Serenity stood in the middle of the hall checking messages on her phone, apparently waiting for us. “My, it did take you a while,”
she said.
“I didn’t know I was being timed,” I replied.
“What are these?” she asked, gesturing lazily with her phone at Alex and Spider.
“Those are humans,” I said.
“Charming,” she said, holding out a manicured hand for the folder.
“What is this really?” I asked, ignoring her hand.
“It is what I said: a weapon. Getting this will save countless lives.”
“You said that before. How do I know you won’t use it?”
“You don’t. Just know that you stopped a sniveling rat from selling these to the highest bidder…
namely Marcus.”
My fingers tightened on the papers. I didn’t want to give her a weapon, but I wanted her
information on Daniel. She had put me between a rock, a hard place, and my desire to see
Daniel. “How do I know I’m not handing it to a different kind of sadistic?” I asked.
She smiled oddly, liking that question. She didn’t reply, but I understood she didn’t intend to. I was either going to give the papers to her or I wasn’t. She wasn’t interested in talking about it.
“Where you gonna put it?” I asked, stalling for time.
“Somewhere secure,” she replied.
“Like a wall safe?”
She finally put her phone away and crossed her arms, giving me her full attention. It was
attention that felt deadly. “I don’t know how Daniel puts up with you…or why. Talking to you is like talking to a rock.”
“Rocks have more sense,” Alex muttered.
“You are a practical person, correct?” Serenity asked me, ignoring Alex.
“I guess…”
“If you don’t give me that folder, I won’t tell you what I know. Then, there is the fact that if I have to take that folder from you, you will regret it.”
A part of me really wanted to find a lighter and set the papers on fire then do a happy jig on top of them just to spite her. The overwhelming satisfaction of seeing her face loose that smirk wouldn’t improve my situation, though. After a long second of uncertainty, I handed her the folder. She opened it and her gold eyes lit with a dark fire as she surveyed its contents. “Club Paradise,” she said. “That’s where the nest is.”
“That’s only two blocks from here,” Spider provided.
“It’s convenient, at least,” I said.
“We could walk,” Alex agreed.
Serenity turned and swished her hips to her office door, the office we had burglarized yesterday.
She put her hand on the elegant handle. “If you don’t have any more questions, I think we’re even.”
“I have lots more questions,” I said,” but you’re not going to answer them the way I want you to.”
I understood what Daniel had meant about her. Talking to her was a study in talking in circles.
Besides, she had gotten what she wanted. Anything else she told me would be suspect at best.
“I have a question,” Spider said before we left.
Serenity looked at him in a question, her eyes perplexed at the oddness of the boy in front of her.
Perhaps, she sensed something familiar in him, too, because her eyes light up with recognition.
“Will you marry me?” Spider asked.
I shoved him to the stairs with a roll of my eyes. Serenity’s golden eyes, which were full of suppressed laughter, followed us as we let ourselves back out into the hypnotic movement of the club and the night beyond.
Chapter 15
“No,” Alex said as soon as we were outside again.
“No, what?” I asked.
“We’re not going there tonight. We’re tired. It’s late. And we know it’s dangerous. They’re Watchers, so we need to approach this differently,” she said.
“I wasn’t even thinking about it,” I said.
I honestly hadn’t been. I was thinking about Mick and how his features were somehow familiar in another way than seeing him dressed as a bum. It was as if I’d had his face described to me. I had also been wondering if I had done the right thing by giving Serenity that folder. It didn’t feel like I had.
Alex’s face was skeptical, but she didn’t say anything else. Eli came out of the darkness as we walked toward the theater. “Well?” he asked.
“Club Paradise,” I said.
His eyes narrowed, and he nodded. “I’ll go look.”
“Alex says we can’t go until tomorrow,” I said.
Eli looked at Alex, who blushed. “He can do what he wants,” she corrected. “I just don’t want you running off and doing something stupid.”
Eli’s face twitched with a funny jerk. “If you make her go back, she’ll get restless and leave when you’re asleep.”
“That’s probably true,” Alex said. Her blush hadn’t faded, and she avoided his eyes. It was so out of character that I found myself staring. She avoided my eyes, however, and I was left to guess at the possible meanings. “What do you suggest?” she asked him.
“I’ll watch her,” he said.
Alex yawned. “I’ll come, too.”
“Spider?” Eli said to Spider for help.
“You’re tired,” Spider said to Alex. “And if too many of us are hanging around, it’ll get noticed.
I really don’t think we want that.”
“Fine.” She pointed a finger at Eli. “If she does something stupid I am holding you responsible.”
“If I do something irresponsible it’ll be my choice, thank you very much,” I said.
“That’s part of the problem,” Alex replied.
Spider held out his arm for Alex to take in an old-fashioned gesture. She took his arm and waved a goodbye to me. As they walked, she put her head on his shoulder, more exhausted than she had let on.
“Looks like it’s me and you, partner,” I said to Eli. He didn’t reply. “Man, I wish you could meet Margaret. You guys would have so much to talk about,” I added.
“Was she in the fire?” he asked slowly.
“I…” I stuck my hands in my pocket and felt the gris-gris bag, Daniel’s rock, and the picture…
my good luck charms. “I hope not,” I replied.
“Do you miss them?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s hard to be away from my mom…my family. I would even take Margaret’s
glares right now if it meant I knew she was alive.”
“Yes, it is hard,” he agreed.
“You know?” I asked remembering the picture I had found in the book.
He clamped his mouth shut but nodded.
“Who was she?” I asked, referring to the girl he had been holding.
He kept his eyes trained on the buildings above us and didn’t reply. He was either intensely focused on searching for Watchers or wasn’t interested in answering. I gathered it was both. We walked until there was another line out of a different door and hard hitting music that screamed at people to move to its pulsing sound.
Eli pointed to a building across the street from the club. “We’ll see more up high,” he said.
“More climbing.”
“Nobody looks up,” he replied.
“I do,” I said.
There wasn’t a reachable fire escape on the building he picked out – the building with the best view of the entrance – so we were forced to improvise. Eli slid a large industrial trash can under a balcony for us as a stepping stone. I went up first, scaling over the two small balconies until I reached the roof. The top of the building was narrow and treacherous and definitely not meant for sitting. I sat down to keep from falling as he followed me up. He perched on an eave parallel to me with much more ease than I had managed, and we both stared down.
Club Paradise was typical – nothing on the surface screaming out of unusual circumstances.
People came and went in more or less intoxicated states. The line increased in volume as the night shifted past midnight, then dwindled down again. It was hard to keep track of so many people, so I didn’t try. Instead, I watched the man and woman who were guarding the door,
looking at their faces for clues. They had red outfits on, which matched the club’s colors. They didn’t talk to the people in line, but occasionally someone would pass the pair in silent
confidence they wouldn’t be denied. I started to notice a trend to the people they let in without looking. They were all tall, confident, and had a certain magic grace. Some were more confident than others.
“Definitely some Watchers hanging around,” I said to Eli after a couple of hours.
“How can you tell?” he asked.
Jackson had told me a person would learn to recognize Watchers after a while. I smiled at the memory. “If you’re around them long enough you pick up on things. You see the two in the
door? They’re Watchers. Watch how they move…and the way they look at the humans. It’s the
way I look at an ant. And the people they’re letting in without checking their i.ds – they all have this certain set about their shoulders….Can’t you see it?” I asked.
He shrugged and kept his eyes trained at the two in the door. I stared at him for a moment thinking over what separated humans from Watchers. He had his hoodie pulled over his hair, partially hiding his angular face. He was a lot more confident on his ledge than I was, but it was obvious he wasn’t aware of his full potential as a Watcher. As difficult as his life had to have been, the knowledge I had given him, the truth of what he was, didn’t feel like enough of a reason for him to be so dedicated to helping me find Daniel. He had no vested interest in this.
“Why are you really helping me?” I asked him softly.
“We covered that,” he said.
“You’re helping out two strangers because I told you the truth?” I asked. “I’m sorry, but the world isn’t that generous.”
His dirty fingernails dug into the shingles of the roof. “You’re the only link I have to this world,”
he finally said. “To better understand. To fully grasp what I can do.”
“And were you going to get the information from me through osmosis, or were you planning on asking?”
“What’s osmosis?” he asked.
“Didn’t you learn about it in school?” I asked.
“What school?” he asked back.
“Any, I guess,” I said.
“Never went. My…” He rolled his shoulders and stared at the partygoers again without finishing.
“Geez, Eli…that was a close call. You almost gave away some personal data,” I said.
He exhaled sharply and cut his eyes over to me. “My mom wouldn’t let me go. She said it was too dangerous. Then she died. Happy?”
“Not really,” I said. “You knew your mom?” I asked.
“She died when I was young.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This place is the nest?” he asked, changing the subject. “That woman wasn’t lying?”
“It’s hard to tell from a roof,” I said.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on it for a couple of days to be sure,” he said
“Watching the Watchers,” I said. “I don’t know if I can handle a couple of days,” I added
thoughtfully.
“You will,” he said.
It was my turn to shrug. We went to staring at the building again. The club stayed open late – late enough for daylight to be brushing the horizon when it closed. The pull of sleep was nothing compared to my adrenaline and the rush of excitement at seeing Watchers so close. Serenity hadn’t just fed me a story to get what she wanted; she had kept up with her end of the bargain.
While I wasn’t thrilled about handing off a potential weapon to an even more potentially
dangerous person, I was glad to be closer to Daniel.
When the club shut its doors, and threw the last drunk patron out to the hungry streets, we left.
The streets were silent and still, the night air heavy on my lungs as we went to the theater. Eli was quiet, of course. I was silent as well, for different reasons. Inside the dark theater, at the top of the stairs, Eli started down the hall of the second story to a part of the building I hadn’t been in before. I started down the stairs, figuring our time together was over, but he stopped me. “The girl in the picture is my sister,” he said. “I killed her.”
He left with those words hanging in the darkness. My body was a frozen statue on the dark steps for a long moment. Slowly, his words pounding through my brain, I found my way to the stage. I didn’t know what had made him tell me, I wasn’t sure if I had wanted to know. All I knew is that it changed my opinion of him.
The only way I knew daylight had arrived to the world was the slow waking of the kids. They were clockwork when it came to waking up and getting breakfast. I had learned to tell the time of day by their stomachs. Ethan was first to wake up. He rolled over on his bed of costumes and sat up. His dirty hair stuck out in odd angles as he stretched and yawned. He jumped when he
noticed me sitting in the chair watching the group.
“What the…that’s totally creepy, man,” he chided me.