Catch Me When I Fall (2 page)

A hand touched my shoulder.

Jumping, I dropped my arms from my chest. “Bloody hell!” I hated when she did that.

“Always so stoic, Daniel. You make it easy.” Samantha smiled from ear to ear. Since she’d become a Dreamcatcher almost one hundred years ago, she’d been what they called my “understudy.”

Every Protector of the Night spent about one hundred years as an understudy before taking their trials and becoming a lead. If anything were to happen to me on a mission, Samantha would take over in my place. Our charge always held priority in our eternal lives and should never be left alone during the night for more than a minute—that’s all a Nightmare needed to attack a person’s mind. And the more a Nightmare invaded someone’s head, the more that human suffered from insanity—insanity that often led to violence or suicide.

But the likelihood of Samantha having to step in for me was slim-to-none, and we both knew it. Besides, until she took her trials, I wasn’t going to let her fight on her own. Call it a dated notion, but I was responsible for her. Our souls were dead, but our bodies still worked like the living. We could still bleed—and die. The last thing I wanted was for her to get hurt. So, Samantha had resorted to playing pranks on me in her everlasting downtime.

“Doesn’t that get old?” I crossed my arms again and stared straight ahead. Standing like this had become my usual pose when I was either bored or didn’t want to be bothered. Right now, it was the latter.

“Nope.” She mimicked my stance and watched one of Eva’s granddaughters bend over the casket to touch Eva’s hand. The granddaughter burst into tears and fell into her husband’s arms.

“Why do you watch this?” Samantha asked.

“What do you want, Sam?”

“Giovanni’s asking for you.”

I sighed. Giovanni was our Leader and the second oldest in the entire company. He had mastered the arts of both Catching and Weaving, a prerequisite for leading the Protectors of the Night. He was a royal pain in the ass, but no one avoided him. They’d be benched for a century. And as I’d yet to take more than a few months off, I didn’t want Giovanni to break my streak.

“All right. Let’s go.” Uncrossing my arms, I closed my eyes to evaporate to Rome. When I reopened them, I stood in the grand foyer of Il Palazzo di Santo Stefano, our twelve-story mansion where Catchers and Weavers trained and lived when we weren’t on assignment. The building sat right in the middle of the city, but when living humans walked past our front door, they thought they were passing a laundromat that reeked of dead cat and horse shit. It’s how we kept them out. If any of them could look through the veil, though, they would see a brick fortress that rivaled the most beautiful castles in Europe.

I stomped my black boots on the cream-colored marble floor as I crossed the room, wondering what Giovanni could want with me right now. We usually got at least a week of down time after our charge passed on. The Tuscan-gold walls blurred as I took two stairs at a time up to the twelfth floor, just wanting to get this over with. The staircase split each floor in half, and I turned right toward Giovanni’s study.

Samantha stayed on my heels and paused next to me as I knocked on large, double doors of finished, cherry wood. From inside, Giovanni’s burly guards opened them. Immediately, I was hit with the smell of Giovanni’s cigar and coughed. I had never enjoyed the smell of cigar when I was alive. It was no different now that I was dead.

I passed Seth, Giovanni’s understudy and my best friend, and nodded a “hey” in his direction. My feet trudged across the white carpet to the ornate, cherry desk in the middle of the office. A laptop sat open on it, a sign of Giovanni’s recent technological undertaking, and files were tossed about. I rolled my eyes at his inability to keep anything organized.

“You called for me, sir?”

Behind the desk was a wall-sized window Giovanni continued to stare through, watching the city as if he hadn’t heard me. But I knew he had.

“Shall I come at a later time?” I asked.

At this, Giovanni turned around, staring at me with eyes so black I could see my reflection in them. His dark brown hair had been slicked back today into a small ponytail. I wondered if he knew how much he resembled Dracula with his hair like that. Still, he would’ve blended in with any Italian on the street, so I supposed that’s what he was going for.

“No,
per favore
. Sit.” He motioned to the dark brown, leather loveseat opposite his desk. I took my seat, moving a gold pillow from underneath me as he continued. “I heard Eva passed earlier this week. How did it happen?”

“In her sleep, sir. She was comfortable.”

“That’s good to hear. It’d be a shame if she died in fear after all these years. Now tell me, how many times did you have to fight off the Nightmares for her?”

“Twenty-five thousand and twenty four, sir.”

“
Mamma mia
,” he said, his eyes wide. But then he leaned back in his seat, and his face drew back into apathy. “Is that all?”

My jaw clenched.
Nobody
had gone as long as I had without a break. Any human who died at an old age usually had two Catchers protecting them over their years. Even a week of relaxation kept us from getting overworked and burnt out.

I balled my hands before speaking. “Yes, sir.”

At this, Giovanni stood up. “Well, then I think we must do something about that. You’re my star player. I can’t have you getting rusty.”

I hated when he used sports references like I wasn’t risking my eternity every night.

“How would you feel about taking on a tough case?” His eyes filled with wonder. If I wasn’t so exhausted, I might have been more excited to know what had made our serious boss so intrigued.

“Forgive me, sir, but I did just finish a very long assignment. Might I have at least a year to refresh?”

Giovanni stared at me then shrugged. The reaction was so out of character it unnerved me. He turned to Samantha and pointed. “You. How would you like to take on a very dangerous case? It could be the highlight of your career.”

A wave of heat ran through my body as I snapped my head to stare at her. The last thing I wanted was for Samantha’s first charge as a lead to be a difficult one. She could be killed. Giovanni needed to give her a young child with a short lifespan. There’d be fewer chances to fight Nightmares that way.

Samantha perked up. “I’m ready, sir. Absolutely.”

I jumped up. “No way. She is
not
ready, Giovanni.”

A flash of anger sparked in his eye at the use of his first name. “And who else should I go to, Daniel? If not you, then I want the Catcher you trained. One of you two will do it, whether you like it or not.”

My jaw twitched. He was using my understudy as a way to get to me. I wanted to push him and his cavalier attitude out the window he stared through so often. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

Samantha’s face reddened. I’d pulled the rug out from underneath her. But she was immature, impatient and had yet to Catch on her own. If she hated me, so be it. At least she’d still exist.

Giovanni smiled in victory. “Glad to hear you’re on board. I’ll send Seth to your room later with the file. For tonight, enjoy your dinner and get some rest. You will need it.”

I turned and stormed out the door, past Seth’s apologetic eyes and Samantha’s hateful stare. What I wouldn’t give to trade places with Eva right now. At least then I’d be on my way to the Heavens instead of putting my eternity on the line for another stupid assignment.

itting at the dark oak desk in the far corner of my bedroom, I shoveled food into my mouth while reading through my original copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
, one of my favorite novels. After two hundred years of Dreamcatching, I’d had plenty of time to collect books. I’d probably read this one fifty times.

“Come in,” I said when someone knocked on my door. I marked my page with a leather bookmark and turned in my chair to see who’d come to visit. Seth. Standing, I greeted my friend with our “secret handshake.” We’d seen people do one of those fancy handshakes once, and it just kind of stuck. I smiled a little as our hands moved back and forth like floppy fish.

“You not goin’ to your party?” Seth asked, his Alabama drawl still strong fifty years after his death.

“I never have.” Although it was a nightly event—Protectors celebrating the peaceful passing of their charges—I had yet to attend one of my own congratulation parties. Something about celebrating death bothered me.

“Come on, man. You could at least enjoy a few beers, find some pretty lady to follow you upstairs.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

I shook my head and smirked. His thoughts were always in the gutter. “Why don’t you give me the file, and then you can go downstairs and party for the both of us?”

Seth smiled and held out the file. I took the manila folder and sat back in my chair. The corner of the desk bumped one of my bookshelves and nearly sent books falling to the floor. Seth plopped down on my bed and hung his legs over the edge, his dark skin in extreme contrast to my off-white comforter. People often said my room looked like a hospital with white walls and white bed sheets. But I preferred life simple.

“So where you goin’ next?” Seth asked.

When I opened the file, the first things I noticed were her eyes. They were hazel, and the gold in them framed her pupil like the sun on a bright, summer day. She had soft, feminine features, lightly tanned skin, and long, brown hair the color of a dark chocolate Hershey bar. The strands looked like they would be soft to touch. She was pretty. I glanced at the name. Kayla Bartlett. How could she be a tough case?

“Well?” Seth probed.

“Ohio. There’s a girl there who lives…” I’d been so immobilized by her face, I hadn’t yet checked where she lived. “In a mental ward.” And there was the catch. Great. Giovanni was sending me to a loony.

“Is she hot?” Seth jumped off the bed to peek over my shoulder. “Damn, she’s fine.”

“And insane.” Snapping the folder closed, I made a mental note to check the rest of the details when Seth was gone.

“So? When she gets naked, it won’t matter if she’s all there or not.” He bounced from side to side and pretended to smack an imaginary girl’s behind while he bit his lip in a display of ecstasy.

I shook my head and used a phrase I had heard in passing by one of the newest Catchers. “You, my friend, need to remember to think with your upstairs brain.”

Seth burst out laughing. “Man, did you really just say that?”

I couldn’t help but smile. I wasn’t always without a sense of humor. “Tell you what. I don’t want to go to my ‘party,’ but I could use a good beer. Want to go to
Bellandi’s
?” I hadn’t seen my best friend in months, and if I was going to be in the United States for god-knows-how-long, I didn’t really want to sit in my room all night by myself. There’d be plenty of alone time when I was holed up in a flat in Columbus. As long as we didn’t reveal ourselves to our charges, there was no rule that said we couldn’t exist amongst the living.

“Yeah, man. I’ll change and meet you there.” Seth held his hand out to me for a fist-bump.

When he evaporated from the room, I returned to my desk and opened the file.