The Lost Saint (18 page)

I tried not to scream. I really did. I choked it back as hard as I could, but a high-pitched squawk escaped from my throat. I threw my hands over my mouth.

The guy pushed his hand against Talbot’s sternum, pressing him into the wall. He gestured in my direction. “We’ve got company.”

The second guy turned toward me. He had no face
other than the two dark eyes that glared at me through the holes in the red ski mask.

“Bring her here,” the gunman ordered.

The other guy took a step toward me.

“Do something, Grace,” Talbot said.

The guy took a second and a third step.

Do what? Run?
But I was frozen to that spot. Except, I wasn’t technically
frozen
, since every cell in my body seared like Fourth of July sparklers under my skin.

The man had only half a dozen more steps to take to close the gap between us, but I still couldn’t move. My stomach clenched into a fiery knot.

“Damn it, Grace!” Talbot shouted. “Do something. I know you can.”

“Do what?” I shouted back.

“That feeling in your stomach? That’s anger. That’s power. Grab on to it and kick that guy’s ass!”

How would he know …?

“Shut up.” The gunman smacked Talbot on the head with the gun. A trickle of red ran down his forehead. “Grab the girl, now!” he ordered his crony.

Talbot was right. That knot in my stomach had become a flaming rage. Daniel would tell me to push it away. Find balance. But as the large masked thug reached for me, I let that rage wash over me, and my fists went flying. I socked him in the gut, and he went
sailing back several feet. I’d had no idea I was capable of hitting that hard.

He hit the brick wall of the adjacent building, but it didn’t seem to faze him. He caught himself and charged in my direction. I countered out of his way, but then he swung around and snatched at my shirt. One of his fists had tattoos of the letters
S
and
K
between his knuckles. This guy reeked, and the smell—like two-month-old milk—only aggravated me more. I grabbed his hands and twisted them away from me, then pulled his body down closer as I kneed him in the groin. He grunted with pain. His tongue lolled out of his mouth. I pushed him, and he stumbled back. I kicked him in the left kneecap while he was unstable, and he buckled under his own weight and fell to the ground. I glared down at him, my hands up in fists.

“Hey!” the gunman shouted. “You’ll pay for that.”

Watch out!
I heard inside my head, and I looked up just in time to stare down the barrel of a gun.

“No!” Talbot shouted, and in a lightning-quick move, he wrenched himself out of the guy’s hold and then had the man’s gun-wielding hand in his. Talbot slammed the guy’s arm down and against his knee. I swear I heard the cracking of bones.

The guy dropped the gun and pulled his arm in against his chest, moaning. He took a wild swing at Talbot with his uninjured arm. Talbot blocked the blow
and smashed the palm of his hand into the guy’s ski mask, presumably where his nose would be. The guy sputtered and coughed.

“What the hell, man?” He gasped and pulled at his ski mask, but before he could even yank it off, Talbot took a running leap, bounced off the cement wall like it was a springboard, and sent a flying kick right into the guy’s chest.

The gunman crumpled to the ground. Talbot landed in a crouching position next to him. There was just enough light left in the dim alley to glint off his green eyes, making them look like dazzling emeralds.

I gasped. “You’re a … You’re a …”

“An Urbat.” Talbot straightened up. He crossed the alley between us, then placed his warm, callused hand against my arm. “Just like you.”

BACK AT THE VAN

The thug I’d knocked down got away during the skirmish, and Talbot wanted to make sure the other one didn’t escape when he regained full consciousness. I couldn’t help watching the large muscles in Talbot’s forearms ripple as he used his belt to hog-tie the gunman next to the Dumpster. He did it with such ease I pictured him roping a calf on whatever farm he presumably came from. Talbot then emptied the gun of its bullets and tucked them into the front pocket of
his flannel shirt. Then he wiped the gun clean with his shirttail and tossed it next to the semiconscious guy’s head. “For evidence,” he said.

“Should I call the police now?” I pulled out my phone.

“Let me do it,” Talbot said. “My phone’s a prepaid, so they won’t be able to trace it.”

“You mean we’re not sticking around?”

“What would we tell them? Besides, I gotta get you back to that bus before they think I’ve run off with you. I can’t afford to lose this job.” He pulled out his phone and motioned for me to follow him out of the alley.

“We’re just leaving him here like that?” I looked back at the guy, lying on his side, groaning with pain. “It seems a little inhumane.”

“That guy tried to kill you, Grace.” He flipped open his phone. “Besides, he isn’t human. That there is what you call a demon.”

At first I thought he was being metaphorical, but then his meaning clicked. “A demon? A living, breathing, bona fide demon?”

“What? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen one before.”

I shrugged. “Well, not really. I met one at a party once. She did this little mind-control trick with her eyes.”

“Ah, an Akh. They’re a terrible sort.” He clucked his tongue. “This one here is a Gelal. They prey on young women. That girl would have gone through all sorts of hell if we hadn’t shown up.”

“How can you tell?” I asked. The guy still seemed like a person to me. I was itching to go over and take off his mask to see what he really looked liked underneath.

“The smell.” Talbot crinkled his nose. “You really are a rookie, aren’t you? I bet you haven’t even figured out how to track someone yet.”

I looked down at the ground. The masked demon let out a loud, angry groan.

“We better go,” Talbot said. “I’m just hoping the police get here before he comes to enough to break free.”

Talbot hit a button on his phone and put it to his ear.

“You have 911 on speed dial?”

“I told you I make a lot of
deliveries.
”

I followed him out of the alley. “Wait, you mean you do
this
a lot?”

But Talbot didn’t respond. He was too busy telling the operator on the other end of the line that a young woman had been attacked near Tidwell Library and that they’d find the perpetrator behind a Dumpster near Tidwell and Vine. He hung up before they could ask him any questions.

“You still got the keys?”

“Um, yeah, I hope.” I patted down my pockets and found the keys.

Talbot unlocked the passenger’s-side door and held it open for me. Sometime between Talbot’s shutting my door and his climbing in through the driver’s side, the
shock of everything that had happened finally hit me. My hands shook so hard I could barely fasten my seat belt.

“Are you okay?” Talbot asked. “You did awesome back there. Just like I knew you would.”

“But how … how did you know that I could even do anything? How did you know what I am?” I’d already asked how he’d known I was an Urbat earlier, but he’d insisted on taking care of the gunman before we talked about it. But now I wanted answers.

“Your necklace.” Talbot reached over and touched the cracked moonstone pendant that hung from my neck. “Kind of a dead giveaway, if you think about it.” He brushed one of my curls against my neck with his fingers as he pulled his hand away. “And I saw you fight back at The Depot. Most girls can’t pull off a roundhouse kick like that on a guy that big unless she’s packing some serious paranormal heat.” He crinkled his nose again. “Plus, you kinda smell, too.”

“What?” I sniffed both my arms. I smelled perfectly normal to me—okay, kind of sweaty from fighting, but not at all like those guys in that alley.

Talbot laughed, his cheeks dimpling with his smile.

“You jerk!” I punched him playfully in the arm.

He grabbed my hand. “Hey, watch it, kid. You’ve got a mean right hook.”

Talbot’s hand, wrapped around my fist, seemed huge by comparison. I could see the veins stretching along
his tendons. He squeezed my fingers, and a pulse of tingling energy ran up my arm and down my spine. It felt like the connection that had passed between Daniel and me when we first held hands in the Garden of Angels. The tingling sensation turned to a shudder. I tugged my hand out of Talbot’s grasp. It wasn’t right to feel that kind of energy with anyone other than Daniel.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. Talbot shifted his gaze away from my face. He coughed slightly and started the van. We pulled away from the library. After a moment, I asked the question that had been nagging at the back of my mind.

“If those guys were really demons, then why did they need a gun?”

Talbot shrugged. “I don’t know, Grace, but it worries me. Gelals don’t even usually come out until well after midnight. They’re completely nocturnal, you know? And the fact that they were even here in the city is a mystery. That’s the third pair of them I’ve come across in the last two months, but before that I hadn’t even encountered one since I was last on the West Coast.” He shook his head. “There’s something going down around here. Used to be I had to go looking for demons, track them for months before one came out of hiding, but now the city seems to be crawling with them. And I keep hearing rumors that someone’s gathering werewolves, Gelals, Akhs, and all kinds of other paranormal teens
into some sort of gang. They supposedly call themselves the Shadow Kings.”

“A gang of paranormals?”

“You know those ‘invisible bandits’ they keep talking about on the news?”

I nodded.

“You don’t think humans are behind all that?”

“No. Not at all,” I said. “They hit a grocery store in my town. Ransacked the entire place in less than five minutes. My … boyfriend and I were saying that a gang of superpowered teens had to be behind it all. And I think my brother may be mixed up with them. He said something to April about finding a new family.”

Talbot’s eyebrows arched up. “Your brother is like you?”

“Kind of.” I didn’t know what I should say to Talbot. I mean, we’d known each other only for a total of a few hours—yet in those few hours he’d saved my life twice. And he was the only person I knew like me. Someone who had powers and actually wanted to use them for good. At least from what I could tell.
You can trust him
, that voice whispered in my head. “Jude’s turned into a full werewolf. I haven’t. He bit me when he first turned, and then he tried to kill his best friend—my, um, boyfriend. I think that’s why Jude left home.” I breathed out a sigh. It felt good to tell the truth to someone who could really understand.

Talbot nodded. “So who’s this boyfriend you keep mentioning? Sounds like your brother dislikes him just as much as I do.”

I cocked my head and looked at Talbot. What did he mean by that?

“Sorry.” Talbot flashed me a smile. “Just thinking that this
boyfriend
must be pretty special to warrant having a girl like you. But what’d he do to tick off your bro?”

“Oh. Daniel—my boyfriend …” Ugh. It was like this conversation couldn’t go ten seconds now without one of us dropping the
B
word. Daniel and I didn’t even like to call each other boyfriend and girlfriend. It just sounded so trite compared to how we felt about each other. “Daniel, my boy—” I cleared my throat. “He used to be a werewolf. He’s the one who infected my brother a few years ago. My brother kind of hates his guts now.”

Talbot gave me a quizzical, yet amused look. He shook his head. “What do you mean Daniel
used to be
a werewolf? I was under the impression that being an Urbat is a permanent condition.”

“I cured him.”

Talbot’s eyes widened. He slammed on the breaks just before almost running a red light. “How did you do that?”

Unfortunately, I was too tired to tell that much of the story. “True love’s first kill”—I waved my hand in
the air—“yada, yada, yada … It’s really a story for another day.”

Talbot blinked. He let out a short laugh and then gazed into my eyes. “I do believe, Miss Grace Divine, that you get more and more interesting by the minute.”

The tone of his voice when he said the words
Miss Grace
sent another flutter of warm familiarity through my body.
What is it about him?

The light turned green, and we drove through the intersection. I turned my head and stared out the passenger’s-side window. “You should talk. I mean, I assume this is something you do a lot. Track down demons and investigate gangs of paranormal thieves? Is this Good Samaritan job just a front for your vigilante superhero quest?”

“Guilty as charged,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Got infected when my parents were killed by werewolves, swore I’d use my powers to protect the world from demons … yada, yada, yada … It’s really a story for another time.”

“Oh, come on, you can’t do that to me.”

“Yes, I can, because we’re here.” I followed his pointing finger toward the lit-up bus in front of the rec center. Students filled the bus, and Principal Conway paced out in front of it with his cell phone pressed to his ear.