Landing (25 page)
Authors: J Bennett
Epilogue
Gabe’s aura is faltering fast, but
he insists on showing Tarren and me this “angel problem” he found. While he
gets himself situated at his desk, I go down to the basement and fetch Tarren
from his lab.
When he learns that Gabe is in the
house, Tarren graces me with one of his sterner scowls, which I deflect with a
shrug.
We approach the dining room together.
The glow of the three computer monitors washes over Gabe’s haggard face. Seeing
his wasted body in profile, the tremble of his hands, almost buckles my knees.
Beside me, Tarren’s aura flares with bruised, wounded reds. He keeps his face
passive and locks down his emotions.
Gabe glances up at the amiable
scene I created from his warring figurines. “Nice touch Maya,” he says dryly.
“You shouldn’t have come back so
soon,” Tarren says. His voice is harsh, but I see him so differently now. Not
angry. Not cold and disassociated. I know beneath his seeming calm, there’s a
flood of concern that he’s barely holding in check.
Gabe, who cannot see his brother’s
aura, turns toward Tarren. His lips turn up into a small, bitter smile. “Sorry
to be an inconvenience,” he says softly.
“You’re not,” I say. “We’re just…”
I stop as hostile oranges flicker in the pale smoke of Gabe’s aura.
“Worried?” he finishes for me, and
that bitter smile tightens.
“What’s this about?” Tarren asks
and folds his arms over his chest.
“Oh nothing,” Gabe shrugs, “except
the big secret’s out.”
He pulls up an Internet window.
“YouTube revealed our big secret?”
I say dumbly.
“Just watch,” Gabe instructs and
clicks the large play button on the screen.
Four figures stand in the shot, all
wearing identical black hoodies with the hoods pulled up. The shortest one
might be a girl or a kid. The rest are obviously men. One wears a rusted chain
around his waist.
“What is this?” Tarren asks.
“Angels?”
“Just watch,” Gabe repeats.
All four figures wear cheap plastic
animal masks that cover the top half of their faces. There’s a puma, a penguin,
a tiger, and the shortest one wears some sort of bird mask.
The guy in the puma mask clears his
throat. “There are creatures that stalk the night,” he says with such forced
grit that it’s clear he’s memorized his lines. “We don’t know exactly what they
are yet, but they’re not human. These creatures are incredibly strong and fast.
We also think they may be able to start fires with their minds.”
The video quality sucks. It was
probably recorded with a cellphone, and by the looks of the background, they’re
in someone’s unfinished basement.
“They suck the life force out of
humans,” Puma Mask continues. “It happens through their hands.”
“Damn,” Tarren says.
There’s something about the man in
the penguin mask. That chin. My mind is fluttering, combing through all my
perfectly preserved memories trying to find the connection.
“We don’t know how many of them
there are, but they’ve killed innocent people. Lots of innocent people. We’ve
all seen them do it, and we’re not going to let it keep happening.” Puma Mask
smacks his fist into his open palm awkwardly. “We’re going to tell the world.”
“Here’s where it gets good,” Gabe
says.
Puma Mask opens his mouth to
continue, but then Tiger Mask suddenly yells, “We’re going to kill you
motherfuckers!” He’s the one wearing a rusted chain as a belt.
“Look,” Gabe points toward the
screen. “Puma Dude is super pissed.” He laughs. “Now he tries to recover.”
“The Totem is here to…uh…protect the
innocent and…fight against…these foul creatures.” Puma Mask throws a disgusted
look at Tiger Mask.
Gabe snickers. “Protect the
innocent from these foul creatures,” he says, impersonating Puma Mask.
On screen, the figures stand in
silence. The smallest one in the bird mask looks at Puma Mask like he’s
supposed to have another line.
Then Penguin Mask speaks. His voice
is soft but intense. “We’re not afraid,” he says, looking directly into the
camera. “Wherever you are, I’m coming for you.”
The clip ends.
“I like Tiger Dude,” Gabe says,
clearly amused.
Tarren is not even close to being
amused. “This is a problem,” he says.
Oh yes it is, because I recognize
the voice of Penguin Mask. The lack of goatee threw me for a moment, but I know
that strong chin of his too. I’m the one Rain Bailey is coming for.
>>>Keep Reading>>>
What will Maya do now that Grand is dead and her revenge is
complete? Can she heal the rifts within her family? Find out in
RISING
, Book Three, in the
Girl With
Broken Wings
series.
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LANDING
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Works by J Bennett
Girl With Broken Wings Series
Falling
(Book One)
Coping
(Novella, 1.5)
Landing
(Book Two)
Rising
(Book Three)
<<
Recovering
(Novella, 3.5)
Leaping
(Book Four)
The Vampire’s Housekeeper Chronicles
<<
Employment Interview With A Vampire
(Short Story, # 1)
The
Vampire Hunter Comes To Call
(Short Story, # 2)
Duel
With The Werefrog
(Short Story, #3)
When
Vampires And Ninjas Collide
(Short Story, #4)
Death
in the Family
(Short Story, #5)
Apprenticeship
With A Vampire
(Novella, #6)
About
J Bennett
J
Bennett lives and writes in San Diego. Her writing partner is a bunny named
Avalon who contributes to each manuscript by trying to eat it. His adorableness
is his primary strength as a writer.
J
Bennett is a professional copywriter and an author who loves asking that
oh-so-dangerous question – “What if?” She currently writes a paranormal
adventure series,
Girl With Broken Wings,
and a tongue-in-cheek vampire
humor short story series,
The Vampire’s Housekeeper Chronicles.
Contact
J Bennett at
[email protected]
.
>>> Keep
Reading for a Sample of RISING <<<
Next in the
Girl With Broken Wings Series
Rising
Book Three
Chapter 1
My heels
clack clack clack
across
the uneven parking lot. I touch my blonde wig to make sure a stray wisp of my
real hair hasn’t fallen down.
Clack, clack, clack.
The shoes are uncomfortable,
strappy little things, but at least it only takes a moment to kick them off in
case I need to run, jump, kill someone, or all of the above.
A girl’s got to be prepared.
As I step across a frozen puddle
reflecting colored smudges from the blinking neon lights ahead of us, I set my
teeth together hard. The hunger roils within me. It mixes with the heavy base
beats emanating from the strip club. My palms are already heating up, but I can
handle this now. I’m well fed – four rats before we started patrolling tonight
– and I’m getting better every day at holding in my darker, hungrier self.
“Ready?” Tarren asks by my side.
His long strides eat up the distance between us and the strip club, but I have
no trouble keeping up.
“That beard’s a good look for you,”
I respond, because I know he hates wearing it.
Tarren pushes open the door, and we
enter a front room area with a slimy linoleum floor. A grizzled bouncer, who
smells like showers are wishful thinking, squats on a stool in front of us.
I’m twenty years old, but that’s
not what my fake ID says. I hand it over, and the bouncer
harumps
at the
name on the card. Buffy. It’s a dumb joke that wasn’t funny the first time Gabe
thought of it and nowhere near hilarious when he proudly handed me this ID. My
chest tightens up.
Gabe.
He should be here, sauntering into this strip
club by my side. He’s so natural at this undercover thing, pulling on different
personas like they were a second skin.
Tarren, on the other hand, is a
terrible actor. He would’ve gotten cast as Non-Speaking Shrub or Person Two On
Bus in the school play if Diana hadn’t homeschooled her children between
missions. Even when he tries to play at being a natural person-like person, Tarren
is stiff and intimidating. On these assignments, I feel like I have to carry
the burden of a decent subterfuge for both of us, which is why I laugh shrilly
like the dumb blonde I’m trying to be.
“It’s a late birthday present for
him,” I gush to the bouncer, leaning momentarily into Tarren.
The bouncer grunts once, hands back
our IDs, and we enter into the fray through a second set of doors. Even if I
didn’t possess superhuman senses, the place would be way over the top. My acute
hearing, vision, and smell just make the tragedy of this run-down stripper
nightmare all the more unpleasant.
Whoever is in charge around here
seems to have come up with the theory that the louder the music and the more
frantic the onstage lasers and fog machine, the less likely the patrons are to
notice that half the strippers look like middle-aged meth addicts.
As we move past the door, I steel
myself against the onslaught of stimuli, letting my hypersensitive body adjust.
It’s a real treat – all that music banging into my ear drums, the laser lights
flashing across my retinas, and the feel of so much greasy lust spilling through
the auras of the patrons.
“Anything?” Tarren whispers. He
doesn’t bother leaning down. He knows I can hear him in spite of the
skull-shattering music.
I give the room a quick once over,
my eyes settling on each figure leaning over the stage or hunched at one of the
shadowed tables. I register the clear glow of a colorful aura around each body.
I shake my head and catch a small shiver in Tarren’s aura. This is our second
strip club of the night, the twelfth since we arrived in Detroit two days ago.
Still no angel. It’s looking more and more likely that our target moved on;
that we missed him.
Tarren must be thinking the same
thing. He commandeers the table closest to the door, and his mouth is tight
with disappointment. If the angel jumped town, we’ll have to wait until we find
his pattern again. More dead strippers. We already missed him in St. Louis last
week, and, four dead girls later, he’s slipping through our fingers in Detroit.
Angels – I hate that term. The
things we’re hunting are anything but the dew-eyed Precious Moments figurines
my grandmother loved to collect. Our “angels” are actually just plain o’ humans
who accepted a little DNA scrambling in exchange for some big physical and
mental upgrades and a wicked appetite that I understand all too well.
I drop down into the chair next to
Tarren, lean on my elbows, and keep all the shivering pieces of my brain
carefully stitched together. This is what the hunger does to me – chips away
pieces of my control like the shell of a hardboiled egg until…until something
bad emerges.
Only ten minutes,
I tell myself.
No problemo.
My
fingernails tap across the table’s surface. It would be too noticeable if we
left right away, so Tarren insists that we wait exactly ten minutes. When I get
the nod from him, I’ll loudly proclaim that I’m disgusted and demand that we
leave. Tarren, for his part, will sigh like I’m such a drag, and we’ll shuffle
out. Onto the next strip joint. More neon. More dumb lasers and fog machines. More
hunger that I must keep at bay.
At least there’s not a bachelor
party in this club
, I console myself.
We wait. I spend about five seconds
wondering at the solid, high-quality oak tables they’ve got in this place – maybe
they were left over from the previous establishment – and then realize that I
don’t care, because I’m so done with soaking in this heavy music, this sticky
floor, the outpouring of emotion around me that only I can see.
I turn my head and study Tarren
under my lashes. My half-brother has rugged-guy brooding down to an art. The
nice cheekbones, chiseled jaw, and wide blue-gray eyes are built right in. He’s
also managed to perfect that weary
the things I’ve seen
look that ages
him far past his twenty-six years.
I’ve been trying to wipe that look
off his face for the past two months, but it’s like a permanent fixture.
His gaze sweeps across the stage
where three women are developing very special connections with the respective
poles they writhe against. His gaze lingers on the third woman, young and
pretty with long black tresses that lap across large breasts. Most of the other
men in the place crowd around her section of the stage, sticking their grubby
dollars in her scarlet thong.
Tarren’s aura is a cloud of pale
blue color held tightly around his body. He’s pinning it down, hiding his true
emotions, as usual. But as he watches the woman gyrate on stage, I catch faint
hues of purple lust seeping through his control. He’s trying to hide it, trying
to repress as always, but I’m actually relieved. Lust is emotion. Lust means he
isn’t irrevocably broken.
Because I have to save Tarren. It’s
a promise I made to myself three months ago the night I almost destroyed
him…destroyed everything. I haven’t actually figured out how to save Tarren,
but I have a feeling even Hercules wouldn’t want to take on this labor. Tarren
is so addicted to his guilt that capturing Cerebus seems like a cinch compared
with dragging my brother into self-acceptance, into forgiving himself for what
he’s done.
We’ve got another five minutes to
kill, and I’m already starting to lose it a little. My forearms shake, and if I
took off my tight, fingerless gloves, it’s a good bet that a soft glow would
pulse from beneath my palms.
A stripper weaves her way around
the tables. Her face hides behind several heavy layers of makeup, but I can
still see the bags under her eyes. The black ruffled bra-thing she’s wearing
struggles to hitch up her large breasts as they sag and spill over the cups.
The lasers momentarily highlight a C-section scar across her abdomen, thick and
ropey like it didn’t heal right.
Despite the lack of attention she
receives from the patrons, the stripper keeps her chin up as she determinedly saunters
around the tables in her impossibly high go-go boots. Her heavy thighs jiggling
as she sways her wide hips and shakes a pink feathered boa that seems to be
molting. Her aura is pale and sluggish, filled with threads of burnt umber.
The more time I spend studying the
ethereal, glowing auras of my brothers and the ordinary people we encounter on
the road, the more I’m learning that each one is unique. Certain colors have
broad emotional connotations, but they can split into so many different shades,
weave and saturate in a million distinct combinations and patterns. I study the
shades in the stripper’s aura. While oranges usually equate to shame or
embarrassment, I think that for this particular stripper those colors signify
resignation. I also notice pale reds – discomfort – emanating from her aura
around her lower back and feet.
I make a decision and wave her
over. After all, it’s been Tarren’s birthday every day for two weeks now, and I
still haven’t gotten him anything.
The stripper slinks our way.
“Hi handsome,” she purrs at Tarren.
Tarren opens his mouth, intent on
shooing her away.
“How much for a lap dance?” I
holler over the music.
“Twenty,” she yells back.
“Done.” I pull off some fives from
the slim roll in my pocket and lay them on the table.
“For you or him?” she asks.
“It’s his birthday,” I nod toward
Tarren and give him a wide grin as the stripper clomps over to him. “Happy
birthday,” I say to him.
Tarren can’t actually risk shooting
me in a public setting, but that’s not to say the thought isn’t crossing his
mind right now. Instead, he settles for giving me the mother of all scowls.
Then, he quickly plasters on a tight smile as the woman, who introduces herself
as Ambrosia, starts swaying her hips at him.
“I like your beard,” Ambrosia says
in a high, childlike voice as she grinds against him.
“Thanks,” Tarren coughs out.
I hoot and cheer her on. Yeah, this
isn’t nice of me at all — raining all over Tarren’s little brood session,
trying to force his walls down via stripper. But I’ll use any weapon at my
disposal if it will get him to relax even a little.
“Happy biiiirrrtttthday…Mr.
President,” Ambrosia moans as she presses her breasts together in front of
Tarren’s face.
Nice touch.
Tarren, for his part, tries to
stoically last through the experience. He doesn’t actually flinch at those huge
knockers drowning out his line of sight, but he grips the edge of our table so
hard that his knuckles are going white.
Ambrosia notices his reticence and
– God bless this woman – she doubles up, sucking on her finger and straddling
Tarren as she thrusts her pelvis forward. I check the club touching polices
listed in stern, all-caps letters on a big sign next to the door, and yep,
Ambrosia’s broken about half of them already.
“Oh!” She yells as she spanks
herself.
If only Gabe could see this.
I’m struck again by the familiar
ache of regret and loss. It should be Gabe in this strip club with me. He’d
have enjoyed the hell out of this assignment, using these ten minutes of
downtime to their fullest extent.
The lap dance sputters fast.
Tarren isn’t giving Ambrosia anything to work with, and I can’t keep up my
false bravado.
Finally, Ambrosia leans forward and
reaches to stroke Tarren’s beard. “Looks like there’s a scar under there, big
boy. How’d you get—”
Tarren snatches her hand and
thrusts it away from his face.
“Hey!” Ambrosia stumbles back, her
aura flashing bright reds. “You can’t touch me!”
The table tilts, and I realize that
I’m pushing down hard as I grip the edges and try to calm the hunger that
Ambrosia’s wild aura is stoking inside me.
Tarren holds up his hands. “I…uh,
we’re leaving. Here.” He digs into his pocket and adds a crisp twenty on top of
my wrinkled fives. He gives me a piercing look. I swallow and nod that I’m
okay.
Ambrosia looks at me funny. “That
table is really heavy,” she says.
“Ambrosia is a Greek word,” Tarren
says quickly to distract her from my freakish strength. “It was the food of the
gods, the essence of their immortality.”
Ambrosia’s gaze swings to
him, and her eyes sharpen. “That’s the worst come on I’ve heard all day,” she
spits back, husky tones replacing the fake girlish trill. She snatches the
money off the table. The bills go into her bra, and off she saunters in those loud
white go-go boots.
“We’re leaving,” Tarren
says, his voice a low, rolling growl.
I’m in for it.
I forcefully release my fingers
from the edge of the table, and we stand up together. I can’t get distance from
this wreckage of humanity fast enough. Just as I turn toward the door, a new
figure enters, bringing in a bluster of cold with him. The man is short, bald,
and definitely an angel.
Easy enough for me to tell. He
doesn’t have an aura – no brilliant shimmer of colors outlining his body.
And if he happens to look over
here, he’s going to catch a whole lot of the same nothing on my end.
Technically I have an aura – or at least I’ve been told I do – but it’s pale
and weak, and even if the angel doesn’t realize I’m a hybrid, he’ll definitely
figure out that I’m not totally human.
I tap the outside of my wrist, and
Tarren is instantly on alert. He follows my gaze to the figure at the door. The
guy still stands in front of the door leering toward the stage. Even in the
darkness, I can see his swarthy, pock-marked skin and the bitter cut to his
mouth.
Tarren and I are both on our feet.
I’ve got my coat in my arms – Tarren never took his off – and we’re clearly on
our way out. We’ll have to pass the angel to get to the door. He’ll notice me,
unless… Tarren comes around the table and stands just behind me. I feel the
dampened throb of his energy and close my eyes for a moment, gathering myself.