Catch Me When I Fall (3 page)

Replacement position for Jessica Atwol who was mortally wounded in combat, along with her understudy.

Kayla Bartlett, 16, was referred to St. Mark’s Home for the Mentally Challenged by her mother, Meredith, a neurosurgeon at St. Andrews Medical Center. Her father died in a drunk-driving accident when she was ten-years-old. She claims that on her
sixteenth birthday she burned a man alive with her own hands. Her psychiatrist has diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression, and possible schizophrenia.

Great. There wasn’t going to be a single night when the Nightmares didn’t try to invade. The beasts loved to pick on those with a tortured past, especially those that would be easy to break—like the insane.

Following Giovanni’s rules, I lit the file on fire and tossed the papers in my metal rubbish bin. But those eyes—her eyes—never left my mind.

After twenty minutes of waiting outside of
Bellandi’s
, Seth finally appeared. “You are the slowest Catcher I know,” I said.

“Sorry, man. Giovanni caught me before I left and had me shred some papers. Took me five minutes to get the damn thing to work.”

I opened the door to the bar. “Yeah, right. I know you were performing your beauty routine.”

With a playful glare, Seth shoved me inside and then followed.

Bellandi’s
was our usual place when we were both in Rome. The bar was the only one I knew that served my favorite British ale,
Worthington White Shield
, and Seth enjoyed the half-naked women parading around the room, serving the customers. It felt like ages since I’d been in here, and I relished in the familiarity of the place—the hardwood floors and paneling of the brightly-lit room; the drinks cabinet that covered the entire wall behind the black, marble-top bar; the lingering smell of cigarettes and whisky; and the heavy beats of music screaming out of the stereo in the far corner.

Corporeal—if we touched anything while invisible, we’d go right through—we grabbed stools at the bar and watched the current
calcio
game.

“Samantha’s been waitin’ for you to get back,” Seth said.

I sipped my beer. “Has she?” I’d made the mistake of sleeping with her about twenty years ago after my mentor’s funeral. Even after being a lead for about sixty years by that point, I’d still been extraordinarily close to him, and his death had wrecked me. She’d handled the rejection surprisingly well when I told her the sex had been a mistake—hell, she had to considering I was
her
mentor—but our relationship was never quite the same after that.

“You should give the girl a chance, Daniel. She’s a great Catcher, your understudy, not to mention beautiful—”

“The fact that she’s my understudy is precisely why I shouldn’t. And I don’t feel for her that way. I’m enough of a gentleman to know she deserves more than that.”

“Whatever, man. You’ve just been different. I don’t like seein’ you all, I don’t know, depressed.”

The bartender replaced my empty beer with another, and I swallowed deep. It was true I’d been different lately, distant. But I wouldn’t say I was depressed. Tired of this afterlife, yes. Did I care if a Nightmare killed me? No. But I wasn’t suicidal.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.

Seth shook his head and called for a second drink. As the bartender filled the glass, another group of Catchers walked through the door. Ivan, their leader, spotted me and smirked.

In my training, Ivan and I had been at the top of our class. I’d grown up in one of England’s noble families, trained from birth how to fight, and Ivan had been raised in a Russian war family. We were perfectly matched, and at the end of our training period, we’d been the last two standing in the Catchers’ Competition. For hours we’d fought, neither one of us yielding to the other, until finally he’d tired. My stronger stamina had been my saving grace, and I landed the finishing blow after two hours and five minutes. Since then, he and his posse had been relentless in their hatred of me.

“So, I see they’re letting the swine in, too?” Ivan led his group to where Seth and me sat at the bar.

I ignored him and stared straight ahead at the TV. Seth, on the other hand, loved confrontation. He turned around in his stool to face Ivan. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“This is my business,” Ivan replied in his thick, Russian accent. “You two are in my bar.”

“Last I checked, this bar belonged to Nico Bellandi.”

I closed my eyes.
Seth, shut up.

Ivan grabbed Seth’s shirt collar and tugged him off his stool. “If you don’t get out of my bar, negro, the counter is going to belong to your face.”

Standing up, I smacked his hand off Seth’s collar. “Shove off, Ivan.”

“Don’t touch me, Tinker.”

Ignoring the insult, I dropped cash on the bar and shifted Seth toward the door. “Come on. There’s no point in fighting with him.”

“Yeah,” Seth said, “I guess he can’t help being a prick.”

We hadn’t gone five feet when Ivan spoke. “Ouch, I’m hurt. Did you kiss your mother’s
pizda
with that mouth?”

Seth stopped in his tracks and turned to face him, his hands balled into fists. “What did you say?”

I jumped in front of him and placed a hand on his chest. “Seth, don’t.”

But he knew as well as I did how to translate Russian. If I didn’t get Seth out of here now, he was going to beat the living shit out of Ivan.

Ivan crossed his arms over his chest and raised his eyebrows, taunting Seth. “You heard me. Tell me—did she beg for it after a while?”

Seth clocked him in the jaw.
Damn.
Ivan flew backward into his friends, knocking one of them to the ground. They jumped into action. While one went after Seth, another swung at me. Dodging the punch, I grabbed his arm. With one hand on each side of his elbow, I tugged down while bringing my knee up to strike. I heard the snap of his elbow when the joint hit my knee. His arm bent in half and with a cry of pain, he fell away.

Ivan’s elbow caught my nose as I spun around. Swearing, I stumbled into the bar stool behind me, my nose gushing blood. Ivan’s fist came for my face again. I spun out of the way and heard the crack of knuckles when he punched the countertop. Grabbing the back of his head, I smacked his skull into the hard marble.

By now the bartender was yelling at us to cease fighting or get out, but Ivan wasn’t letting up. Our fight escalated into a boxing match. Again he swung at me, but I blocked his fist and backhanded him into a table. The people sitting there had been smart enough to move when the brawl broke out, but their drinks hadn’t. The glasses shattered.

I took a second to glance at Seth who had taken down one of the other Catchers and was now in his own boxing match with the last of Ivan’s posse. His bottom lip was swollen and bloody, but other than that, he didn’t look too bad.

Ivan caught me off guard and picked up the table, throwing it at my head. I ducked just in time and swore when the table soared over the bar into the drinks cabinet, breaking almost every bottle in it. Glass flew everywhere, and I covered my head.

Before I could drop my arms, Ivan body slammed me. Glass cut through the back of my shirt into my skin as we skidded across the floor. I ignored the sharp pain and brought my arms up to block more punches. When I saw my opening, I flipped Ivan off me, and he sailed over my head into the bar.

I jumped up and spun around, ready to block another attack, but Ivan lay limp on the ground. My chest rose and fell as I tried to catch my breath, and my hands shook at my side. Adrenaline coursed through my body. I pressed my fingers to Ivan’s neck. His heartbeat pounded against my fingers.

Thank god
. Leaving Seth to fight for himself would’ve been a shitty thing to do, but I still didn’t want to kill the guy.

“
Fuori, ora! Chiamo la polizia!
” the bartender yelled, threatening to call the police if we didn’t leave now.

“
Mi dispiace per il disordine
.” I apologized for the mess, throwing a wad of cash at the owner, then grabbed Seth’s arm. We needed to get out of here before the police arrived and accused the man of insanity for talking about people who fought then disappeared. We walked down the road until we were sure no one saw us then evaporated back to the mansion.

fter sleeping for exactly seven hours—as I always did—I showered and dressed in my usual outfit: dark wash jeans, black T-shirt and black boots. Running a comb through my dark blond hair, I winced when the teeth raked tender spots on my skull. Seth and I had gone to the medical wing upon our return to the mansion for a healing serum, but the effects hadn’t quite kicked in yet. I still looked like a raccoon with dark purple bruises surrounding my blue eyes.

Samantha caught me on my trek to the dining hall, her curly, blonde hair bouncing in a ponytail as she jogged to catch up with me. “Hey!”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and turned to greet her. “Hey, Sam.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Seth tells me your new charge is some psycho. Maybe I should be thanking you for stealing her from me.” Except I could tell she wasn’t thanking me. Her eyes burned with rage.

“Back off. I had a rough night.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

My jaw twitched. “And you
should
be thanking me because you’re not ready yet to take something on like this.”

“Oh yeah? How would you know? You look like you ran face-first into a moving train.”

I walked away, unwilling to deal with her shit today, and about flipped when she followed me.

“You’re never here anymore. You have no idea what I’m capable of. You go to funerals and movies and concerts like you’re still some freaking human while I stay here and train with Seth. You have no right telling me what I can and can’t do.”

I stopped and stared at her. Did she not realize I was trying to protect her? “Actually, I do.”

Her hard, chocolate brown eyes stared into mine as she unfolded her arms. “Fine. Have fun with your psycho.” She spun around and stormed away before I had a chance to respond.

Shaking my head, I jogged down the stairs to the first floor and passed beneath the oversized, crystal chandelier in the grand foyer. The morning sun from the mansion’s gigantic front windows bounced off the crystal, casting little rainbows to dance on the gold wallpaper. I entered the carpeted hall on my right and headed for the double-doors at the end. As I reached for the handle, they opened and a blur of waist-high, red hair flew at me.