Airs & Graces (2 page)

My head swam, and I asked him, again in that far away little-girl voice. “What? My boss is dead; someone killed him. I have to call the police.”

I must not have done what he wanted, because he got angry, shaking me violently and pulling me close to stare eye-to-eye with me. His eye color… shifted – it’s the best I can describe – between gray and ice blue for just a second. They seemed to flash, then return to their normal color, or what I assumed was normal for him. “Listen, I don’t have time for you to catch up on the learning curve. Understand this: your boss dead – you’re dead next! Unless we can find a way out of here…” He looked up suddenly and grimaced. “I am not the only one in here.”

I felt a surge of something: anger? …fear? Either way, I looked up at him and snapped, “No shit, you aren’t the only one here. I’m standing right here with you,” adding a muttered “Epic fucking genius you are,” under my breath. I tried to shake my arm loose from his grasp but felt like I was about to rip my shoulder out of my socket instead. He was standing very still, and his hand had gone to sheer granite where it gripped my arm with crushing force.

“You’re
hurting
me,” I said, and this seemed to bring him back to the present. He turned those strange liquid gray eyes on me and said, “Let’s move.” He dragged me back towards the office and scooped up my keys and phone off the desk with the hand he wasn’t busy assaulting me with. I was trying to put up a struggle, but he just dragged me along like an errant puppy, the soles of my Doc Martens squeaking against the well-worn hardwood floors of the shop. No matter how hard I tried to jerk him off-balance to make him let me go, he was solid. It was like pulling against one of the concrete supports for the viaduct, totally unmoving.

He stopped, as if listening, and glanced at my key ring in his hand. He rounded on me and demanded, “Where’s your car?” I couldn’t get out of his grip no matter how I pried at his fingers with my free hand, and by now what had to be shock was giving way to adrenaline. So I did the next best thing: I kicked him as hard as I could in the shin, my own eyes going wide when it didn’t even faze him.

He sighed, his shoulders dropping with the motion, and he said, “I’m trying to save you, now… where is your car?”

He sounded tired, and it took me aback, and before I knew it my free hand had come up and slapped him a good one right across the face.

“Let go of my arm,” I said, and I was proud of myself that my voice only quavered a little bit, but I don’t think he noticed.

“I can’t do that. You’re wasting time. I said I wasn’t here to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Now,
where is your car
?”

I sucked in a breath and searched his face for a heartbeat, but there was nothing sinister on it. He actually looked kind of bored – or tired or… hell, I don’t know what! Truth was, he was hard as hell to read. I swallowed, sent up a little prayer inside my head, and took a leap of faith that he was really here to do as he said,
I’m trying to save you
.

“It’s in the garage around the block, to the back of the building.” I blinked in surprise as he let out an explosive breath I hadn’t seen him holding. He towed me by my arm toward the back door and stopped cold in the archway. Carried by my own momentum I crashed into his back, which was solid, muscular, and hiding something hard and stick-like down his spine, beneath the thick leather of his coat.

“Tab, so kind of you to be here. What is that you have with you?” The voice was male and overly formal, the enunciation of his words crisp. I couldn’t see who spoke, but the guy who had a hold of my arm seemed to know who it was and, if he’d been a cat, would have been bristling. I stiffened and retreated a half-step when the guy with a hold on me brought his other hand back, placed the flat of it against my stomach, and shoved me further behind him. It was at this point that I realized he was taller than me by almost a half a foot, which made him really tall, because I stood five foot ten.

I couldn’t see around him, so I couldn’t see who was talking, but I tuned into the conversation again just in time to hear Tab, who I assumed was the guy that had the titan grip on my arm, say, “She’s nobody, just Piorre’s little shop girl.”

“Mmmm, but she’s more than that now, isn’t she?” the voice said, “I may not have gotten what I came for from the old man… I was so rudely interrupted by his ‘little shop girl’ before I could finish. I was hoping he would tell her where it was, so I could simply go and get it, but no… the old man did one better. He always was so very good at hiding things, wasn’t he?”

“Regardless of what she is or isn’t now, she’s mine and not yours, Rahab. Even you aren’t stupid enough to tangle with me over a vessel, right?”

I stumbled back another couple of steps as the man who had a hold of me began a slow retreat away from the proper voice, belonging to whoever had just admitted he had killed a little old man in his little old antique shop for something that was probably here and just worthless old junk anyways.

I felt sick, but it was about to get worse. As we drew even with the front counter, and the architecture opened up inside the old building, I could see around the black clad shoulder of the man that had found me over my boss’ body, and I could now see who advanced on us.

He was tall, too, but not quite as tall as the guy directly in front of me, maybe six foot two instead of six foot four. He wore a cream-colored three-piece suit with a bronze-colored tie under an expensive looking light tan trench coat, and he was covered in a Rorschach-worthy bloodstain across his chest, hips, and the tops of his thighs. The dagger he’d done it with was clasped in one hand, the other hanging loose at his side. His expression was cold; his eyes a pale, pale green, set in a pale white face beneath long hair that was so blond it looked white too. His face was pretty, too effeminate to be called handsome, his cheekbones high, but his jaw just a tad too narrow to be considered masculine. He was slim, but in a dancer’s sort of way, not like the man in black, who was slender but solid in an athletic way and who was pushing me back behind him again, which is when Rahab, the guy in cream, grinned, and all the pretense of pretty boy went down the drain. His teeth, every single one of them, had been filed and filled his mouth with nothing but wicked points. When he saw my expression, it caused him to grin wider, and after that, I was all too willing to duck behind Tab and hide.

“What flavor of freak is this guy?” I asked, suddenly completely cool with Tab and all his weirdness. After getting a look at Rahab’s dental work, now I was willing to cooperate with Tab however much he wanted me to, as long as he would get us away from the guy with the knife that had killed Piorre. Tab ignored my question, his attention completely on the other man. His grip must have loosened slightly on my forearm because suddenly my hand was awash in pins and needles as the blood flowed back into it. Still he hadn’t let go, and I didn’t want to push my luck.

I peeked back around Tab’s left side to see what Rahab was doing, and it was a mistake. Rahab looked like he’d been waiting for it, because he suddenly lunged forward striking out just beneath Tabs arm and punched me square in the chest, low on the left side of my body. I was all at once aware of several things: one, that I was falling backwards; two, that Tab had let go of my arm and was reaching for something low on his back beneath his coat; and three, the blow to my ribs, just below my breast hurt
way more
than it ought to have. It felt like forever until I hit the floor, sliding back on my ass toward the front of the shop before I banged into one of the solid wing-backed chairs on display. I saw stars for a second and just sat there, trying to relearn how to breathe.

In a blur of motion, my protector had not only pushed Rahab back, but twisted him to the ground and was over him, left hand around the creamy psychotic’s throat. Tab pulled out a long knife from under his coat. The knife glowed unnaturally, the red light engulfing and surpassing the end of the blade by a couple of extra feet, forming a sort of ethereal extension that seemed to somehow be just as real as the steel beneath it. Rahab tried to grapple with the dark-colored man’s right arm but was shrugged aside as Tab reared the weapon back, high over Rahab’s pale helpless form.

I watched as Tab plunged the blade of red light into Rahab’s chest with a sense of relief. As he forced the blade further in, seemingly into the floor underneath Rahab’s blood-coated body, Tab tilted his head, grimaced, and in a disappointed tone said, “I guess I was wrong about you: you are that stupid.”

I didn’t blink. My eyes were too wide with amazement, and so I saw that before the physical blade even touched Rahab’s flesh, he turned to solid black smoke. I know its cliché, but a sound like a thousand snakes hissing or a ruptured steam pipe filled the room, and the smoke dissipated, wafting along the floor until it was no more.

My chest was on fire where I’d been hit, and I put my hand over the spot, raising it to where I could look when it came away feeling wet. I made a strangled sound in my throat when I choked down the budding scream. My hand was soaked in my blood, and my chest hurt so badly, but despite the man in black having just saved my ass, I still felt like I was in trouble. That I was next.

He turned to look at me, liquid gray eyes, flashing in a whorl of ice blue as he sheathed his blade. I sat up slowly as he moved his coat over the weapon to conceal it.

“When I put you behind me,” he said. “I expect you to stay there.”

I blinked, took my hand away from my chest and held it out wordlessly with the lack of any snappy comebacks.

He dropped to one knee next to me and grabbed the front of my shirt at my collar, snarling “Hold still!” as he ripped the front of my tee from my body in one, fluid motion.

I squealed, an undignified girly sound that I absolutely hated, and swatted at his hands while I tried to backpedal out of his reach. He simply grabbed the waist of my jeans, his fingertips down my pants, and pulled me toward him, roughly pinning me down with a hand on my stomach.

“I can give you modesty or save your life, your choice,” he stated flatly, staring into my eyes as if waiting for a response. I swallowed my pride and nodded, holding my hands up and away. He manhandled my left breast up and out of his way and jammed his thumb against the wound I still had yet to see. There was another flash of red light and a searing pain in my side that made me cry out. I balled up my fist and took a swing at his head in a reflexive awkward punch, which, had it followed through would have connected sharply with his cheekbone, but he caught my wrist and held it, leveling his gaze even with my own.

“This will buy us some time. Clearly there are those that wish you dead, and even you must be able to recognize I am not one of them. Now, do you want to live, or shall I leave you to them?” I looked at my right hand, balled tight into the fist that had been about to strike him, Piorre’s rosary still dangling in my grasp. I fought for breath, finding it hard to breathe through the crushing pain under my left breast, but things were starting to focus, and I realized this guy, Tab, still had my phone and my keys, which meant even if I did get out of here, he had a way of tracking me down and a way to get into my place.

Now that my brain was working for the time being, albeit in overdrive, I had another scary thought… the police were never in a million years going to believe any of this.
What the fuck was I going to do?

He hooked the zipper at the bottom of my jacket and pulled, zipping it all the way up to my chin, concealing the bloody ruin of my shirt. He double checked my face, searching my expression, which I tried to school into a mask that would give nothing away, before he hauled me by my right arm to my feet.

For better or worse I was with this guy until an opportunity presented itself for me to get away with his having no way to track me. I’d deal with the cops if and when it came to that, but for now I had one burning question. “Where are you going to take me?”

He looked a little less annoyed, almost relieved, and said, “Remember how you started today not being special? I’m going to try to put you back that way. We haven’t much time.”

We traipsed back through the office to the side door that led to the street, and he pushed it open. I wrapped Piorre’s rosary securely around my wrist and followed him out. It was still sunny and perfect outside, the people still hustling along the sidewalk coming and going about their business like nothing was amiss, and I came to the stunning realization that for them, nothing was.

Tab put his lips against my ear and breathed, “Your car – take us to it.” I nodded and started walking, his hand tight on my arm as we moved along the sidewalk. We went half a block east and then north down the alley, stopping and descending a short flight of steps to the side door to the garage. He held out my keys on his palm, his thumb through the ring so I couldn’t snatch them and try to run, and shook them. I pointed out the key he wanted, and he unlocked the door. We slipped out of the bright sunshine and into the dim parking structure. He gave my arm a little shake, his gaze scouring every corner of the garage, his body tense and at the ready, almost twitching at every perceived sound or movement in the shadows.

“Which one?” he asked, and I pointed mutely down the aisle. He grunted and said “Be more specific.”

I swallowed hard and told him, “It’s the Subaru, the silver Impreza at the end of the row.”

He hauled me forward, deeper into the darkness toward my car, and I could slowly feel my heart melt into a puddle of dread. If he got me into the car, would I be worse off than I was now? I decided finally, when we were two or three stalls down from it, that yes, yes I would be in much worse shape, and so I tried to fight. I threw myself away from him, but his grip on my arm was sure. He got his other arm around my waist and hauled me up off my feet as he hit the button on my keys to disengage my car alarm. I heard the chirp and the locks thump as they disengaged, and I opened my mouth to scream just as his hand clamped over it, muffling the sound to next to useless.