Fearless (3 page)

“Thank you, Marco, you’re a sweetheart.”

Marco nodded at the woman, making sure to tilt his chin so she had a good look at his left side, the side where his broken nose hardly showed at all. “No problem.” He kept his voice deep

and smooth. She probably thought he was like twenty-five or something.

She took a long sip from the bottle of Coke he’d brought her, exposing her pale neck. She lifted one leg to rest on the low wall of the fountain, revealing several more Inches of thigh under her stretchy aqua miniskirt He tried not to stare. Or did she want him to stare?

He stopped breathing completely as she slowly, slowly brushed her fingers over his upper arm. “What happened here?” she asked.

He glanced at the purplish bruise. He paused before answering and cleared his throat, trying to make certain his voice didn’t come out squeaky. “Nothing much. I got jumped last night. These three big guys thought they were real tough. Probably black belts in karate or something.”

Her eyes widened in just the way he’d hoped. “You’re okay? Did you call the police?”

“Uh-uh. That’s not how we—how I—do things.” Marco ran a hand through his dark hair. It had come out perfectly today. “I’ve got some friends who will back me up if those guys ever come back here.” Marco loved the way she watched him when he talked. So he kept talking. He wasn’t even listening to what he was saying.

Man, she was gorgeous. She was older than he, twenty-something at least, but sexy as hell. Like

some kind of goddess with her straight red hair and green eyes. And the legs on her. He couldn’t look away.

He’d first noticed her at the beginning of the summer. All the guys noticed her—it was hard not to. She lived around here, he guessed, because she walked by this fountain almost every afternoon. He wasn’t the only one who magically turned up each day around four o’clock to watch the show.

Lately he’d noticed she’d started returning his looks. Just a glance at first, but then her eyes stayed longer. Last week she’d said hello to him, and he’d practically peed in his pants. Today she’d been late, so most of the guys had wandered away, but some kind of crazy instinct made him stay.

He took his eyes off her breasts for a moment to see if he spotted anybody he knew. He would love for any one of his buddies to see him right now.

Just then she reached toward his collarbone and rested her index finger on the pendant that lay there. The electricity from her touch surged through his chest and seemed to throw his heart off rhythm. “What is this?” Her voice was almost a whisper. “I’ve seen this before.”

He studied her face before he answered. He wasn’t sure how much to tell—how much she really wanted to know. “It’s, uh, it’s called a hieroglyph—you know,

like ancient Egyptian writing? It’s the symbol for … uh, power.”

“Where have I seen it before?” Her green eyes fixed on his.

His glance darted around the fountain. “I don’t know. Maybe you saw one of the other guys wearing it. Maybe a tattoo on somebody’s arm. It’s kind of a … I don’t know … kind of a …”

His voice trailed off awkwardly. He didn’t want her thinking he was some kind of thug. He sure didn’t want anybody to overhear him telling her secret stuff.

“A mark?” she supplied. “Some sort of identification?” She didn’t appear wary the way most girls he knew would. Her eyes were wide and intense, fascinated.

“Yeah, like that.”

“Ah. I see. Are you part of—”

Marco sucked in his breath. Suddenly this didn’t seem so cool. What if she was an undercover cop or some kind of informer? He’d heard of stuff like this. He backed up, putting a few feet between them. “I gotta be going. It’s, like, after six, and I—”

With two steps she closed the distance. “Marco. Don’t be afraid of me.” Her fingers fluttered over his cheek. “Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to. I’m just … interested, that’s all. I’m interested in everything about you.”

All the blood in his body seemed to pool in his

head. He felt dizzy. “You’re not, like, a cop or anything?” He was pretty sure she’d have to say so if she were.

She laughed. “No. Most definitely not.” She gave him a look. It was a mischievous, sexy kind of look. “Definitely not.”

GAIA SMACKED THE SHORTWAVE RADIO that sat on the table next to the bed. Her bed. She had trouble thinking of anything in this house as hers.

“Piece of crap,” she murmured. She’d picked up the radio at a junk shop on Canal Street. She’d gotten it to tune in to the local police frequency, but the damn thing emitted almost nothing but static. She rearranged the antenna she’d rigged until she heard a break in the fuzz. She rolled off the bed and walked to the window. Ah, that was good. She could decipher various bleeps that sounded almost like words. She stood by the door. Oh, it liked that. Now she could actually understand the words.

Bzzzzt
—MacDougal and LaGuardia—
bzzzt
—slashing
victim, female African American in her thirties—
bzzzt
—young male perpetrator—
bzzzz
…

Dammit She tried jumping up and down.

—lost him in the park—
bzzzzzzzzz
…

Shit. Gaia grabbed the radio and threw it off the table. What a stupid hobby. Why couldn’t she just watch
Roswell
like a normal girl?

Well, for one thing, because the television was in the so-called family room. It would mean walking past, possibly even fraternizing with, George and his bimbo bride. It wasn’t that she didn’t like George. She did. He was trying really hard to make her feel comfortable. He tried so hard, in fact, that she found it awkward to be around him. He put on this peppy voice and asked her about her classes or her friends. What was she going to say, “I see my math teacher through crosshairs”? “My best friend has Alzheimer’s”? George wanted something within the universe of normal, and she simply couldn’t give him that.

Ella was another story. Stupid, vain Ella she genuinely disliked. There were Ella’s fingernails, her passion for Victoria’s Secret catalogs, her love of Mariah Carey. That was about it for Ella. How in the world had a sensible man like George fallen prey to a tarty thing like her? And God, he had fallen.

Gaia really needed some air. She strode to the door

of the room and listened for signs of life. What sucked was that her room was on the fourth floor of the four-story house. She hid up there during the little time she spent in the house because she hated walking past every other room on her way in and out. She was like a latter-day Rapunzel except her hair was only a few inches below her shoulders, slightly fried, not all that blond, and furthermore, who the hell was ever going to climb up to give her a hand? The guy in the wheelchair from school?

What she-and Rapunzel, frankly-needed was a decent ladder.

Gaia opened the door slowly. Hopefully George was still at work and Ella was—who ever knew where Ella was? By profession Ella considered herself a photographer, but Gaia had a hard time taking her seriously. It gave Ella an excuse to saunter through hip downtown neighborhoods with a camera slung over her shoulder. Apparently she got the odd commission to photograph somebody’s dog or living room or something. Her “work,” as George called it in his pious way, was displayed over most of the wall space in the house—mostly arty black-and-white pictures of dolls’ heads and high-heeled shoes.

Thank God for the automatic camera that makes it all possible, Gaia thought sarcastically as she crept through the hallway and down the stairs.

At the second landing she was faced once again

by “the photograph.” Most days she averted her eyes. Although Ella hadn’t taken it, it was by far the most upsetting in the house. It was a picture of an eleven-year-old Gaia with her parents, snapped by George the week he visited them at their country house in the Berkshires. Once Gaia looked at the photo, she found it hard to look away and, after that, hard to get her mind to cooperate with her.

The Gaia in the picture made her think of a little monkey, clinging to her dad with long skinny arms, her wrists circled by several filthy friendship bracelets, her narrow shoulders lost in the beloved brown fisherman’s sweater he’d bought for her on a trip to Ireland. Gaia’s smile was big and exuberant, so pitifully unaware of what the next year would bring.

Now Gaia moved her gaze to her mother, even as she willed herself not to. If Gaia’s face in the picture was all embarrassing openness, her mother’s was pure mystery. No matter how many times Gaia searched it, no matter how clearly she saw those features, she felt she couldn’t tell what her mother really looked like. She
needed
something from that face that it never gave. The same miserable questions started their spiraling march through Gaia’s brain:
Why am I holding Daddy and not you? Why aren’t I beautiful like you? Did you love me, anyway? Did you ever know how much I loved you?

And then, as always, the thoughts got so unfathomably sad, they didn’t even come in words. Her throat started to ache, and her vision swam. She couldn’t pull enough air into her lungs. Without exactly realizing what she was doing, her hands shot out and yanked the framed photograph off the wall.

“What are you doing?”

Gaia spun around. Her heart was bouncing in her chest, and it took her a moment to focus her eyes on Ella. She cleared her throat. She took a deep breath. She tried to rearrange her posture into something less rigid.

“I am removing this picture from the wall.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Sure.”

Ella waited impatiently. “Okay, why?”

Gaia placed the picture facedown on the bookcase. She glanced at her watch. “I didn’t say I’d answer.”

Ella got that eye-rolling martyred look. “Gaia, you know George loves that picture. He put it up for you.”

Gaia cleared her throat again. She tried shrugging, but it didn’t come off with the indifference she was aiming for. “If George put it up for my benefit, he won’t mind if I take it down.”

Ella’s hands found their way to her hips as they mostly did within a few minutes of starting a conversation with Gaia. “I swear, Gaia, George does so much for you. I would think you could at least—”

Gaia tuned out the shrill voice as she made her way

down the rest of the steps and out the front door. She knew every word of the speech. There wouldn’t be any vocabulary words or dever turns of phrase. Ella wasn’t going to surprise her.

Gaia took the sidewalk at a near run. She felt like she might explode. The sky was darkening as she turned left on West 4th Street, leaving bustling outdoor cafes, overpriced little restaurants, all-night delis, her favorite subterranean record shop behind her in a blur.

She headed straight for the park No one was going to scare her out of her shortcut And certainly not tonight, not in the mood she was in. And in fact, she hoped they’d try. Let them find her instead of some kid or some old guy who wouldn’t know how to handle it. Maybe if she did this enough, those creeps would learn that everyone who looked vulnerable wasn’t necessarily so. What a gorgeous lesson to teach them. After all, wasn’t that what her gifts were all about? Power to the little people!

She spun around, instantly accosted by strange blurred images. A flash of chrome. Two large wheels.

THREE MORE STEPS. OKAY, FIVE MORE steps. Okay, ten more. Just to the maple tree. Okay, not that one, the one behind it.

She was a little nuts. She knew it Skulking around Washington Square Park for three hours and twenty-three minutes, counting steps (and okay, seconds), looking for trouble. It could be called entrapment That’s exactly what she wanted to do, entrap those lowlifes.

Gaia lingered under the tree, feeling drops of sweat sliding down her spine. Wasn’t New York City supposed to be getting cool in September? The smell of late season pollen was so thick, it felt like paste in her nostrils. Please, somebody. Anybody. She’d come here with the secret hope that one of the notorious slashers would have a go at her, but now she’d grown desperate. She would take absolutely any criminal, from petty shoplifter to ax murderer; she really wasn’t choosy. Hey, who even needed a criminal? She was ready to pounce on the strength of a big mouth or a bad attitude.

But she wouldn’t. Gaia would never attack anybody unprovoked. She would never do more harm than necessary. That was the code, and as much as she hated her father, she was still bound to honor it. It was bred into her, just like her blue eyes that seemed

to change shade with her mood, the weather, the color of her shirt Just like her love of sweets. She had to use her Miraculous Gift (that’s what her father always called it) as a force for good. Her mission was to draw out violent behavior and squash it, not to produce more violence.

But sometimes carrying out her mission felt more self-indulgent than honorable. Did it count as a good deed if you enjoyed yourself? She liked to think she thrived on self-defense. But there were times, really upsetting times, when she saw the line between defense and offense as clear as day and barreled toward it. Hey, she had an extraordinary talent, and she wanted to use it.

What if one day she crossed that line that separated good guys from bad guys? It would be easy. There was only a hair’s width between them. Why hadn’t anyone warned her that inside the crucible of real anger, good and bad were so nearly the same?

Worse yet, what if one day she’d stop being able to see the line at all? She wouldn’t know anymore if she was good or bad or crazy or sane. Maybe Gaia didn’t know the meaning of scary, but that sounded an awful lot like it.

Gaia made a slow loop around the maple tree. She had to get out of this park, but she really didn’t feel like going back to George and Ella’s. God forbid

George would put on that earnest face and try to talk about “her loss” as he often did after Ella complained about her.

She didn’t fed like walking on Broadway—the street was mobbed with NYU students, tourists, and shoppers at every hour of the day. Instead she turned south on Mercer Street. She loved the deserted, canyonlike feel of the narrow street and the sound her steps made on the cobblestones. She’d walk straight down to Houston Street and see what was playing at the Angelika.

Suddenly, as if in answer to a prayer, Gaia heard voices behind her. She stopped and fumbled through her backpack as if she were looking for something. Jeez, what a girl had to do to get mugged in this city.

The voices turned into whispers, and then she heard footsteps, slow. Oh, yes. Finally. She turned toward the noise, pasting what she hoped looked like a terrified expression on her face. Inside, her heart was leaping with anticipation.

There were three of them, and they looked young—around sixteen or seventeen. Two of them had shaved heads. The smallest brandished a razor blade. Gaia detected more than a hint of nervousness under his swagger. She backed up (fearfully, she hoped), wanting the situation to escalate. She hated herself, but there it was.

The little thug was up front, covering the ground

between them with a menacing lurch. The other two were hanging back, present to witness this feat of loyalty. It was becoming obvious to Gaia what was up here, and it pissed her off.

Come on, boys,
she silently encouraged them.
Come and get me
. Her mind hovered on the swastika she’d seen painted on the ground in the park That coupled with the shaved heads and the leather jackets gave her the strong suspicion that these assholes were some kind of neo-Nazi white supremacist outfit.

Her concentration was so keen, she had to remind herself to keep breathing. She couldn’t let her anger get the best of her. She had to play this just right. If she struck back too quickly, she might scare them away. The kid was trying hard to look tough, but his toughness went about as deep as the sheen of sweat on his upper lip.

Now
. He was right on her, razor blade lifted. She screamed helplessly as she drew back her arm for a sharp blow to his wrist. And just as she balanced her weight to deliver the strike she heard a thunderous shout and a commotion behind her.

Suddenly noise was coming from every direction. Her adrenaline was rising fast, but her focus was thrown. She spun around, instantly accosted by strange blurred images. A flash of chrome. Two large wheels. She jumped back to try to make sense of it.

“Get away from her!” a familiar voice shouted.

Gaia’s razor-blade-wielding attacker fell back in confusion.

Equally confused, Gaia swiveled her head.

“It’s okay, Gaia! Go! Run!”

She watched in perfect amazement as Ed, the guy in the wheelchair from school, rolled into the fray. Her very own knight in shining armor come to save the day.

“You’ve got to be joking,” she muttered under her breath.

But no, there he was. Mr. Valiant.

Now what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just burst into action with Ed sitting on the sidelines. He’d see everything. He’d know far more than he was allowed.

It was one thing showing an attacker her tricks. Every time she did this, she made a wager that her attacker wouldn’t confess to being pounded by a girl, and she’d never been wrong. But Ed was a different story. Ed would tell the nifty adventure to everybody in school. They’d probably recruit her for the judo club or something.

The adrenaline was surging through her veins, and the primary person she wanted to strangle was Ed.

The three attackers had been as surprised as she by Ed’s arrival, but they were now regrouping.

Okay, fine. She’d take a couple of hits. She wouldn’t

let the razor blade near her, but that would be easy enough to dispose of in a stealthy way. They’d hit her. She’d scream. Somebody would hear the noise and call the cops. The three losers would feel manly and dangerous and go away. The little one would earn his initiation on somebody else.

It was disappointing as hell, but she’d deal.