Forsaken (The Netherworlde Series) (19 page)

“Of course, miss,” he murmured, nodding slightly as he dislodged himself from Mei’s grasp. “Right away.”

Mei watched him go, waiting until he was out of earshot, then leaned across the table toward Jason. “There’s something else I want to ask you about. I sort of need your help again.”

Jason raised his brow, immediately suspicious. “You know that guy I mentioned, J-Dog?” she asked and he nodded. “Well, a bunch of my shit is still over at his place. I was kind of in a hurry when I left and couldn’t take it all with me. Will you come with me to get it?”

He must have looked dubious, or at least hesitant—which was good, since he
felt
that way—because she leaned forward all the more, reaching for his hand, her eyes pleading. “It’s not going to be like the club, I promise. He’s not home right now. He goes out first thing in the morning every morning, so the place will be empty. I’ll just run in, grab my shit and run back out again. Please?”

“If it’s that easy, why do you need me?” he asked. And then he thought of the bruises on her neck and it occurred to him. “Because I have a gun,” he said, answering himself. “Is that why you dragged me along to that strip bar too?”

“No.” Mei shook her head.

“You figured if Pops wouldn’t give you money outright, he’d try something like he did, and there I’d be, armed and dumb enough to step in. Which I was.” He stood, wincing slightly at a dull but insistent pain in his shoulder, and reached for his pocket. “Forget it, Mei.” Flicking a couple of twenties down on the tabletop, he turned to go. “You’re on your own.”

“You still owe me.” Mei said.

“No,” he replied, “I don’t.”

But even before he turned around to look at her, he knew she was frightened. The idea of him leaving, of having to face this guy, J-Dog, without him, terrified her even more so than being alone with Pops behind the closed office door had. Jason could sense it. Or rather, the Eidolon could. And when he turned to face her again, he could see it plainly in her face.

“Please,” she said in a voice he’d come to realize was uncharacteristically meek and quiet. When he walked back to the table and sat back down again, moving slowly, her dark eyes were glossed with a sheen of sudden, grateful tears.

“I’m not saying yes,” he told her and she pressed her lips together in a momentary line, nodding.

“He used to slap me around when he got high,” she said. “Then yesterday afternoon, he brought over three of his friends and they all sat around, smoking, getting fucked up.”

Her gaze wandered down to her plate and now her hand trailed lightly, almost unconsciously toward her throat. “That’s when this happened,” she said softly, nearly a whisper. “Then they pushed me onto the bed, held me down. J-Dog took out his camera and started shooting video while the rest of them…”

Her voice faded, but she didn’t need to say more for Jason to understand.

“Mei,” he said gently, moved with pity for the girl.

“He just laughed the whole time,” she whispered. A tear slipped over the edge of her dark lashes, rolling down her porcelain-smooth cheek. “Like it was all a big joke.”

He reached across the table, hooking her hand, drawing her gaze. “We need to go back to the health clinic. You need to let Dr. Delgado—”

“No,” she exclaimed in a wide-eyed, breathless hush, the color in her face abruptly draining to ashen. “No, she’ll want me to take an AIDS test, go to some stupid shelter and talk to a counselor, the cops, or worse, call my folks. I don’t want her to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”

“Mei,” he said again, softly. “They raped you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mei said, shaking her head. She looked at Jason, tearful and imploring. “J-Dog said he’d get rid of the video if I gave him money, three hundred dollars. That’s why I went to the club this morning. I just…I don’t know anyone else who has that kind of money, and J-Dog told me if I didn’t get it to him today, he’d put it out on the internet, plaster it everywhere. I know where he keeps his camera, the closet in his bedroom. It won’t take me five minutes to grab it, ten minutes tops.”

Jason thought about pointing out to her that there was nothing in the world to have prevented J-Dog from posting the video images online in the twelve hours or so since she’d left the apartment, but he could tell from the frightened, pitiful look on her face that she knew this too. She was hoping for the best, hoping against hope, and was desperate enough to try just about anything, no matter how reckless or futile.

“My
zu mu
will die if she sees,” Mei whispered, and when the waiter brought her a Styrofoam box, she murmured thanks, rubbed fervently at her cheek to wipe away the tear, then began to scoop the rest of her breakfast hurriedly inside. “And my parents…they’ll never forgive me. They’ll be so ashamed of me, even more than they already are.”

She looked up at him, more tears spilled, her bottom lip trembling. “Please just help me get the camera. That’s all. Then I promise, I swear, Jason, I’ll leave you alone. I just…I need you to go with me, to stand outside while I get it. I don’t want you to shoot anyone. Just use your gun and scare them if they come around, like you did with Pops.”

She sniffled, mopping at her face again. “Please,” she said, and when he nodded, relief washed over her face in a visible wave.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After they arrived at an intersection facing a three-story apartment building painted a hideous shade of avocado green, Jason waited beside Mei as she stood uncertainly on the corner. Obviously, she was frightened. Her dark eyes darted about and she nibbled absently, anxiously on the side of her thumbnail. They were back in the skid row section of town again. Having taken the streetcars as far west as they could, they’d continued on foot until coming to a stop at the corner. Gone were the trappings of the more tourist-friendly boulevards and districts. There were no coffee shops or cafes, no novelty stores or fashion boutiques. Illegible graffiti scrawled in enormous, ballooning letters adorned nearby walls. The streets and sidewalks were crowded and dirty with litter. Apartment buildings listed together with dark, narrow alleys between them and rusted fire escapes framing them.

“That’s the place?” Jason asked with a nod toward the green building.

Mei nodded. “Yeah. Come on.”

Seeming to steel herself, she shoved her hands deeply into her parka pockets and scurried across the street. Carrying the gun tucked in his own coat pocket, Jason followed. Mei skirted around the side of the building, avoiding the front entrance and heading for the alley behind it.

“Now what?” he asked. She didn’t answer right away, simply ducked into the alley, leaving Jason to follow. He could feel fear radiating off her in cold waves, as if he stood directly in front of an oscillating air conditioner. He looked down and saw the irregular pool of his shadow stealing toward hers in slow, stealthy fingertips—the Eidolon, drawn to her fear.

Not now,
he thought in dismay, even as his shadow slipped against Mei’s, melding into it, sending a ripple of pleasure through him that left him staggering into the wall, gasping for breath.
Goddamn it, not now.

“Come on.” Mei brushed past him, heading for the back of the alley. As soon as she moved, her shadow abruptly parting from his, the rapport between them broke, leaving Jason to stumble dizzily in its wake.

“It’s ten o’clock now,” Mei murmured, looking up at the fire escape as she reached the alley’s end. “He’s usually out until ten-thirty, maybe eleven. He leaves the bedroom window open. We can get inside that way.”

For the first time, apparently, she noticed he hadn’t followed and she turned. “Jason,” she hissed, flapping her hand in frantic beckon. He limped toward her, trembling all over, seized with the terrible overwhelming coldness he always felt when the Eidolon stirred inside him.

“I said we’ll have to climb.” Mei balanced precariously on the Dumpster rim, reaching up, straining to grab hold of the bottommost rung of the fire escape ladder. Hooking her fingers against it, she hopped down from the Dumpster and her slight weight was enough to lower the ladder with a scraping sound of rusty cogs and gears moving, metal grinding against metal.

“What about the door?” Jason asked, bewildered.

She spared him a glance. “What about it? I don’t have a key, so fat lot of good it’d do us.”

“No key?” he repeated, adding mentally,
Terrific.
“I thought you said you’d been living with this guy.”

Nimble as a monkey, Mei began climbing the ladder up to the next level. “Yeah, well, I also told you I dumped his ass. Now shut up and come on.”

The ibuprofen had dulled the pain in his shoulder to a tolerable degree, but as soon as he caught the fire escape ladder and tried to pull himself up, it stoked again, making him cry out quietly, hoarsely, and nearly lose his grip. He managed to haul himself clumsily up to the landing and knelt there, hanging his head, clutching his shoulder, shuddering for breath.

“You all right?” Above him, Mei paused, looking down at him in concern.

“Yeah,” Jason said breathlessly, nodding. “Just give me a minute.”

She began to move again, climbing up the fire escape, holding the railings on either side of her, her feet dropping quickly, quietly against the stairs. The aging frame creaked and groaned at every step and flakes of rust began tumbling down in copper-colored flurries.

As he began to climb again, moving slowly, hesitantly, she reached the top floor of the building and crouched outside a window. It had been left partially ajar to let in cool air, and she hooked her fingers beneath the weathered edge, grunting as she tried to open it.

“It’s stuck,” she called to him.

“Here.” By now, he’d finally reached the top and joined her beside the window. She moved aside as he squatted, giving the window sill a few light experimental hits with the side of his fist to loosen any stubborn paint. “I’ll get it.”

He clenched his teeth against sudden shocking pain as he shoved the window up. Sprinkles of chipped paint peppered down against his sleeves, and the old half-rotted wood groaned as it trudged begrudgingly on its tracks. It hurt enough to leave him light-headed, seeing little sparkles of light dancing across his line of sight, and he pressed the heel of his hand against his brow, sitting back hard against the fire escape landing.

“You all right?” she asked again, her dark eyes round and worried.

“Yeah,” he said, even though he wasn’t, and even though he was really wishing he’d grabbed the Percocets from Sam’s apartment the day before. “Go on. Hurry up.”

Mei ducked her head and crawled through the narrow opening into the apartment and he limped to his feet and followed. Once inside, she darted across the small room, picking her way through a mess of dirty clothes, empty pizza boxes and Chinese food containers, old beer bottles, soda cans and overflowing ashtrays.

“I thought you said you knew where the camera was,” he said after a few moments in which she tore noisily through the closet.

“I do,” she replied, still sifting and searching, throwing aside shoe boxes, clothes, a battered old baseball mitt. She’d periodically stuff things down into her coat pockets, but he couldn’t see what they were.

Jason bristled, turning back to the window, hoping the cold air would clear his mind, foggy now from anger as well as the pain in his shoulder.
It’s my own damn fault,
he thought.
It’s not like she stuck a gun to my head and made me come with her. I could be on a bus for Seattle right now, but nope. It’s just like Eddie said, I’ve always got to be the goddamn hero.

He felt a pattering of paint chips against his hand, which still rested against the window sill, and then the window came crashing down, slamming into his fingers. The bones all splintered at the brutal impact and Jason cried out in startled pain, trying reflexively, vainly, to jerk his hand away.

“Jason!” Mei exclaimed, and then her voice ripped up shrill octaves, a scream of sudden stark terror as the outermost wall of the apartment came to life, lunging forward in an abrupt surge of plaster and stone. Like the sewage creature in the darkened bathroom at Sully’s, the general shape was humanoid, but it towered above Jason at more than eight feet tall, its grotesque body formed out of steel beams and iron pipes for a rudimentary skeleton, wires, lumber and insulation fleshing it out. The window was its head. The glass in its wide panes shattered as the wooden frame wrenched loose of the wall and the jagged shards of remaining glass became teeth that it gnashed by moving the upper and lower sash, mimicking the opening and closing of a furious, gaping maw.

“Oh, Jesus!” Mei screeched. When the window had torn away from the plaster, Jason’s hand was freed. He’d fallen to the floor and scrambled back now, plowing a path through dirty clothes and garbage, cradling his injured hand against his chest. His eyes were wide in stunned shock as the thing lumbered forward, ripping entire lengths of cable—ten, twenty, even thirty feet or more of coaxial—out of the walls in crooked, crumbling seams.

Mei screamed. “What is that?
What the fuck is that thing?
”

Whatever it is, it’s big, it’s pissed off,
Jason thought,
and it’s headed right for me.