I was winging along L and Stone Street, trying to decide where to ditch my ride, when I spotted the first undercover cop. He was slouched in a nondescript Taurus, and I drove past him, circled the block, and came to a stop two streets south of where he was parked. Being an intelligent girl, I’d left the Porsche back at the condo and pulled out the old Vic instead. We were on the cusp of one of Vegas’s seedier projects, and while the Porsche would’ve screamed,
Rape me!
, the Vic was more of a I-double-dog-dare-ya sort of vehicle.
Or hopefully something a little more gangsta than that.
Through the violet tint of my new worldview, I checked out my reflection again, and satisfied with my dark hair, dark clothing, and dark eyes, pushed the car door shut with a slam that ricocheted through the weed-choked lot and into the concrete buildings beyond. I doubted anyone in this neighborhood even flinched.
It was one very nervous cop in that lone unmarked car. His anxiety was as sharp as week-old sweat as he sat, hardly moving, one hand clenched around a walkie-talkie, head turned toward the building across the street on his left.
There was a portable receiver in the passenger seat, which meant whatever room in that building he was trying to maintain visual on was already tapped and live. I crouched in the gutter next to the passenger side door, praying he didn’t have a partner who would be returning soon. The pocked and ill-lit street was silent and unmoving.
“Where you think you goin’?”
I jumped before I realized the voice had come over the receiver. Fortunately the young cop inside had jolted too.
“None of yo damn,” a male voice returned, followed by a door slamming. The walkie-talkie immediately came to life.
“Suspect on the move. Stairwell. I’m on him.”
The young cop’s anxiety spiked, and the car jostled as he lowered himself further, giving me ample opportunity to raise my head and survey my surroundings. I was only using visual as a secondary sense, having already located the other four undercovers—including Ben—by scent. Visual confirmed they were all in the same locations; the first man two blocks down in a beat-up Eldorado; a second, female, standing in full view beneath the lone working streetlight a hundred yards away; another seated and seemingly dozing in a sagging lawn chair kitty-corner to the first complex, and Ben, lying beside a stack of overflowing trash cans, dressed in the same guise Warren liked to use, a street bum playing with less than a full stack.
“Suspect leaving through front entrance,” I heard, and then a pop as the front door flew open. It bounced off its hinges, ricocheting back, but by that time a man the size of a small vehicle—the suspect, I presumed—had already cleared out, and the door slammed shut behind him. He began to walk, slouched, hands tucked in his oversized pockets, heading in the direction of the Eldorado.
His head was down, a black bandana wrapped around his bald skull, but every once in a while he’d lift his chin like he was looking for someone, in almost a syncopated beat, before lowering it again.
“Headed your way, Collins,” my cop said.
“I see him.”
The man stopped next to Collins’s car, no more than a second, then bobbed his head again in that off-beat, and continued on.
Probably looking to score, I thought, watching as he crossed the intersection, past the lone streetlight and the female cop without so much as a glance at her long, exposed legs. When he’d disappeared around the chain-link fence, she began to follow. “I’m shadowing him.”
“Be careful.” This was from Ben.
A gnawing feeling began to grow at the base of my neck, and I couldn’t have agreed more. I scented fresh blood. I pushed myself forward again, careful not to jostle the car, and peered past the front tire to the Eldorado, which lay silent and dark, Collins unmoving inside. I glanced over at the man in the lawn chair, and realized he was already dead. I wanted to jump up, tell the rookie next to me to radio Ben, but I couldn’t risk spooking him so that he shot me, injuring Jasmine’s aura, and I didn’t want to blow his cover if he hadn’t already been made. Unfortunately, the suspect returned just then, strolling down this side of the street as coolly as if it were midday, whistling under drug-soaked breath. He brought the scent of more blood with him.
If I’d had only myself to worry about, I’d have rushed him…stakeout be damned. But mindful of Jasmine’s frail shell, pale and inanimate, waiting back home, I rolled under the chassis of the car instead, and remained silent. What happened next would haunt my dreams.
“He’s heading back your way, Brown.” Ben again.
My officer answered, the sweat now pouring off him in sheets. “I see him.”
Brown stayed where he was. The man drew closer. I shut my eyes and fixed my mind on Jasmine’s trusting face.
He was quick. That was how he’d gotten by Collins, killing him without missing one step of his psychotic beat. I smelled the steel of his gun, and that pop sounded again…the same I’d heard over the radio minutes earlier in the stairwell. I
flinched as the bullet plowed through the floor, but held my breath. I hadn’t felt this vulnerable in a long time…not only in the months I’d been a superhero, but years.
I swallowed as the hard toe combat boots turned from me, and a walkie-talkie clattered to the pavement. It had to belong to the guy in the lawn chair. That’s how the suspect knew where everyone was located. Then the whistling began again, and trapped beneath a car with a dead cop in it, wrapped in a little girl’s fragile skin, I could only watch as the killer headed straight for the trash-strewn lot and Ben.
Ben wasn’t stupid. He knew their cover had been blown, so he didn’t try to radio, and he was no longer slumped next to the pile of trash. Instead he’d fled to the back of the gated lot, a narrow, weed-choked strip of iron fencing separating two project houses from each other, but by the lazy gait of his pursuer, and that meandering song he was whistling—which I now recognized as some sort of sadistic death march—I knew there was no way out. So I waited until the killer’s shadow had lengthened into giantlike proportions on the street, and let it snap and disappear before grabbing the radio he’d abandoned, and followed.
My choices were limited. I might be a superhero, but I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I couldn’t be behind the killer and still stop a bullet from entering my lover. I couldn’t protect both Jasmine and Ben at the same time. “Hang on, Jasmine,” I whispered.
I ran along the outside of the fence, crouched low as I leaped over bottles and cans and anything else that would give up my presence and location. I slowed fifteen feet behind my target, who stood an equal distance to the end of the fencing, and saw I was right. The fence there was high, barbed, and there was no way out.
“Know what we call this, Po-Po?” the man called out, his baritone ringing beautifully through the silent night. “This be Dog Run. ’Cause of its length and ’cause you only get out if I feel like lettin’ you out.”
Silence from the end of the run, but I knew Ben was there. The killer knew it too.
“You want out, you gonna have to go for a little run.”
“You’re under arrest.”
The man laughed with his rich, deep voice. “Now I know you think ’cause you got that big ol’ forty-five pointed my way that I be steppin’ aside and let you on your way, but we both know I can’t do that. You’re what ya’ll call an eyewitness. I call you a loose end, and Magnum don’t abide no loose ends. But maybe we can come to some sort of agreement. Step on out here before I start punching some more holes through that back fence…and anything standing in front of it.”
And he reached into the front of his baggy pants to pull out a sawed-off shotgun. I lifted my walkie-talkie to my mouth, and pushed the button before he could point. From somewhere in the darkness, Ben’s radio squawked to life.
“You put that big bitch down or I’ll show you exactly how to tie up a loose end.”
Magnum jerked like a fish on a line, and swiveled to face the entrance of Dog Run. His grip tightened as he turned back to Ben.
“To your left,” I told him, through the radio. He strained to peer over his wide shoulder. “Your other left, asshole.”
As his head jerked away, I dropped the walkie-talkie and leaped, clearing the fence to land beside him in the space of two seconds. Despite my speed, and Ben’s surprised gasp, it was about one second too long. The jittery gangster was already turning back, and I was stuck in a precarious crouch beneath him, but not so precarious I couldn’t jam my fist upward in a superstrength undercut that rocked the breath from his body. I know. Such a girl thing to do. But as he crumpled, curling into himself with a strangled groan, I rose and hammered my locked fists down onto the back of his neck. Lucky for him, I didn’t want him to identify me later. I’d just taken the edge off his misery.
I planted a boot on his back to make sure he remained
motionless, then looked up into the shadows at the back fence. “You can come out now.”
Ben didn’t move. His nerves were spiked, his anxiety and indecision sour on the still air.
“Ben,” I said, knowing his name on my lips would jar him into action. “Come out.”
It wasn’t the happy reunion I had imagined. He emerged like a refugee, his figure hunched in ragged clothes and lank hair, stinking of garbage and sweat and whatever else he’d smeared over his body, though his eyes flashed, sharp and assessing. It wasn’t a look like Joaquin’s, with marble-hard orbs burning from beneath a skeleton’s frame. It wasn’t like any of the agents of Light either; he didn’t possess the confidence of a nonmortal, or the ability to scent out danger before it was seen. No, this was an altogether human gaze, but still cold, petrified emotion. It was the look of a predator.
And I didn’t care. I sucked in a deep, grateful breath. He was perfect, and safe, and whole.
“How do you know my—”
But by then he was close enough to see me.
“What’s wrong?” I said, his expression making my throat tight. “Never seen a dead girl before?”
Joking was the wrong approach to take. Ben began to shake.
“Shh. Okay,” I said, stepping toward him. “It’s okay.”
“J-Jo?” he said, his voice thin with disbelief.
Magnum began to stir on the ground. I brought my boot down, knocking him unconscious again. “Yeah, honey. It’s me.”
“But y-you’re…”
“I know,” I said, nodding sadly. “Meaner.”
“But how—?”
“Ben, honey, there’s not really time, is there? You have five dead officers out there and, I assume, a lot of explaining to do. Cuff this asshole, and get to it. We’ll talk later.” I glanced back down at Magnum’s sprawled bulk. “He didn’t see me, so whatever story you come up with will do. He
didn’t put up a fight, so you won’t have to explain my footprints in the dirt. Cover them with your own and—”
I stopped, tilting my head, listening to sounds far in the distance.
“What?” Ben asked. “What is it?”
“Sirens,” I said, a moment before they could be heard by a mortal.
His face cleared once he made them out, and he looked at me with renewed astonishment. “I called them on my cell while I was running back here.”
“Good. Tighter time frame. Your story, whatever it is, will hold.” I took a step past him toward the back of Dog Run as the first flashing lights careened around the corner. Ben stopped me, grip tight on my arm. I should have kissed him once, because once would be enough, saving him in a single instant. It was enough to make him remember me, and us, and to keep him from going on that date with Rose. From accepting poisonous kisses from strangers. From leaving me behind entirely.
But his eyes were warm and moist and he was looking at me with such naked longing that more adrenaline pumped through my veins than the entire short-lived chase into the Dog Run. So many people in this world, I thought wonderingly, but only one man who spoke to my soul. How could a superhero beholden to uphold peace and protect all the innocents in an entire city single out one as special, as more worthy than all the rest? How were soul mates retained when years and realities and even death stood between them?
“Don’t leave,” he said, and in my heart I heard what he wasn’t saying.
Don’t leave me. Not again.
Tires squealed to a halt at the front of the Dog Run, and sirens and lights bathed the quiet, violent street in crimson and cream slashes. And still he looked at
me
. Not Olivia. And that made all the difference.
“Blue Angel,” I said, and though it was a statement, my voice rose on a questioning note. I wasn’t even sure I should be saying it.
A sigh of relief, and Ben nodded. “Wait for me. No matter how long this takes.”
I reached up and put a hand to his cheek, and after a second his body heat soaked through Jasmine’s aura and warmed me throughout. I smiled. “I have been.”
And I stepped away, leaped, and cleared the back fence just as the first flashlights came arching our way.
Back in the days when cowboys still clipped along dusty one-lane roads and the test site put on expensive and lethal light shows for politicians, stars, and foreign dignitaries alike, there was a burgeoning business in Las Vegas called atomic art. Signs meant to attract attention to new establishments popped up as ubiquitously as mushroom clouds in the baby blue Nevada skies, and the Blue Angel, situated above the motel of the same name, was one of them.
When I was a kid I used to ask my mom to drive past that motel, worn down even then, save for the lovely lady twirling on her pedestal, standing guard over Fremont Street. Her robes, a powder blue, clung to her curvaceous frame, and her hair was beacon yellow as she pointed a star-tipped wand at pedestrians like she was bestowing blessings on all who passed below.
I stood below her now, gazing up at her chipped and faded gown, and realized there was more kitsch than romance to her, and that this original thoroughfare leading weary travelers downtown into Glitter Gulch was more highway to hell for most than it was yellow brick road. I sighed, unreasonably sad at being disillusioned. I’d long been aware that
most people who came to Vegas never truly found what they were looking for.
So what the hell was I doing here? I should be back with Hunter, plotting our next move, kicking preternatural ass, and leaving street dreams and battered symbols to the mortals who needed them most. Instead, while the city sat embroiled in an apocalyptic-type plague, I was crouched beneath a fallen angel, trying to get my groove on.
I rolled my eyes, shifted, and placed my other heel against the wall, but I continued to wait for Ben and whatever questions and demands he brought with him. And the truth was, I
couldn’t
wait. God help me, I was like a high school senior on prom night, except instead of a gown and corsage I was wearing a preteen’s aura and a supernatural sidearm. How romantic.
Two and a half hours later a truck door slammed and the scent of hopeful nervousness wafted my way. I straightened, swallowed hard, and turned to face the lot behind the motel. Seconds later, Ben turned the corner of the cinder-block building and stopped, silhouetted there. We stared at each other, the Blue Angel twirling overhead, wrapping ribbons of light and shadow around our bodies so that we kept appearing to each other anew, over and over again.
I’d like to say I was giving him time to get used to seeing me again, but I was doing the same. I’d shut him off in my brain to survive this world without him, so in a sense, he was coming back to me as well. Finally, convinced that neither of us was going to disappear, we stepped forward at the same time.
A ghost of a smile flitted over his face. I felt it visit mine as well. “Hi,” I said. “Again.”
“You fly.”
It wasn’t the first thing I’d expected to come from his mouth. I’d been imagining endearments, perhaps a touch of anger or tears or silent numbness, so the words sparked a self-conscious laugh from deep in my chest, but I checked it, and it came out strangled instead. “I, uh…leap. It’s different.”
“Leap,” he repeated, coming closer. “And you save former boyfriends from death by junkie in darkened lots.”
I ignored the question underlying his words and focused on the facts. I smelled exhaustion and blood on him, and fresh pity coursed through me as I thought of his dead friends. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save them, Ben. I was protecting someone else. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.”
“So that hasn’t changed, at least. You’re still wandering dangerous streets, looking for trouble.”
I wanted to bristle at that, but I had to choose my battles. “Yeah, well. You know me.”
“I thought I did.”
“Ben, look—”
“No,” he said, holding up a hand, then extending it to brush my arm. Carefully, as if I might break. I let my eyes flutter shut, unable to remember the last time I’d been handled carefully. “I don’t care. I mean, I do. I will later. But, Jo…you’re here. I’m seeing you. I-I’m touching you. I’m not dreaming you. Am I?”
In all the time that I’d known Ben, that I’d watched and followed him—seen him joyful, grieving, strong, and destroyed—I’d never seen the toxic fusion of all those things swirling on his face at once. His eyes, however, remained steady on mine, asking,
Where have you been?
I could either tell him, or lie. Reveal all, or remain hidden. But I did neither. I could leap from rooftops, dodge blows, and face bullets with impervious courage, but I couldn’t choose between my two lives, and I couldn’t allow Ben to be stuck between them, a pendulum swinging back and forth.
I shook my head sadly. “It’s all a dream, Ben. It’s one long night where nothing and everything makes sense. Like when you’re running, but not getting anywhere. When you’re falling, but you never hit the bottom.” I caught myself then, how vague and unsatisfying that all sounded, and smiled ruefully. “What I mean is…it’s complicated.”
Ben returned my smile, gave a slow nod of understanding
that I didn’t deserve, and said, “But it’s never been complicated between us, Jo.”
“Except for that whole lose you/find you, lose you/find you thing.”
He brought my hand to his chest, drawing me closer. “Except for that.”
And what did
that
matter? I thought, as he lowered his lips to mine, as all that was heat and hearth and home enveloped me more thoroughly than any aura ever could. What did anything matter when his lips were warming mine, when his tongue found its home in my mouth, and his arms wrapped around me to draw me deeper, both away and into myself?
Ben managed to pull away first, making me wonder just which of us was superhuman. “Unless we’re going to make love in a place that charges by the hour, day, or week, I suggest you tell me where to take you. Now.”
I laughed. “As tempting as the week-long stay sounds, I think I have a better place.”
“Do you?”
I did, though I hadn’t thought about it until now. Olivia’s apartment was out because Hunter was now living there, and wouldn’t
that
be fun? Ben’s place would offer too much distraction—phone calls, memories, files on dead girls—and I wanted him to myself. But there was one place sure to offer both privacy and retreat from the world. I took his hand, smiling up at him as I did, and we headed to his truck. “Take me home.”
If Ben was a reminder of my past, going home was a full frontal jump into a life I’d left behind. We strolled up the walkway, after making sure we were seen by no neighbors, and I fumbled for the key Xavier had given me months before. It was a gift, he had explained. I—meaning Olivia—could sell my sister’s home and all its belongings, or hang on to it as long as I wanted. He’d continue to pay the mortgage, keep up the utilities…whatever made me happy.
I hadn’t been back for many reasons, the most obvious being that I was sure it was being monitored by the Shadow organization. But the Shadows were in hiding, the streets empty, and the house was dark but for the single interior light that went on with a timer. I slid my key into the lock, closing my eyes to heighten my olfactory sense, but scented nothing more than dust, a few dead bugs, and a bunch of memories. After shutting off the alarm, I flipped on a light and glanced around. It looked like a waiting room for displaced ghosts, I thought, everything draped in sheets. There were no plants and certainly no animals. Nothing living had been here for a long while.
Ben joined me in the center of the room, looking about. “You don’t come here anymore, do you?”
I thought of my darkroom set up on the other side of the house, how it called to me, and how I’d resisted coming back here even for it. For any reason. Until now. “I haven’t, no.”
He looked sad at that, almost as sad as I felt.
“Come on,” I said, “I think there’s some wine in the kitchen.”
I moved around efficiently, opening drawers, and handling flatware and wineglasses I’d never thought to see, much less touch, again. I was aware of Ben’s eyes following me, and I’d have risked a look in the mirror hanging across from me in the dining area, except that it had been draped as well. Instead I caught my reflection in the face of the microwave, and though blurred, it reassured me that Jasmine’s aura was still holding. I turned, holding out a glass.
“Sancerre,” I said. “My favorite.”
“Is it?” He took a sip, though I don’t know if he really tasted it. He was too focused on me. There was that predatory look I’d seen back at Dog Run, though this time I didn’t mind it at all. “I never knew that. But then there’s a lot I never knew about you. Here’s to some things never changing.”
The flash of sarcasm meant he was recovering from his shell-shock, but I merely clicked my wineglass against his, and said nothing. His expression softened.
“I meant what I said before, Jo. I don’t care where you’ve been, what you’ve done. I wonder, of course, but I can see you, I can touch you. And I can see you’re about to say something to try and take that away, like this is a mistake, and you must have reasons for that as well, but…” He paused, shaking his head, and ran a hand along his mouth. “Fuck your reasons.”
I put my glass down. “Ben—”
“And fuck that reasonable tone too.”
“Ben.”
“That’s right,” he said, backing me into the counter. “My name is on your lips, something I never thought I’d hear again. So if you don’t want me to start questioning all the things you’re not saying, you’d better just say it again.”
I was ready to argue, to bolt, but one look into his implacable face, and I couldn’t help it; I licked my lips. “Ben.”
“Again,” he said, inches closer, watching me fiercely, seeing me as few people ever did. He always had.
“Ben,” I complied, whispering, being seen.
“Again.”
“God,” I reached for him. “Benjamin. Ben Traina.” I slid my limbs around him, wrapping myself up tight; pelvis, chest, lips meeting his, forcing him to lift me, climbing into him, losing myself. Saying his name. “Mine…”
He pulled back at last, smiling as he stared into my eyes. “That’s all I need to hear.”
He carried me to the bedroom that way, as I nibbled at his neck and ear, and the corner of his mouth, the hard warmth of his body sparking into mine. He flipped on the light with his elbow, but I reached over and flipped it back off, uncurling myself from him long enough to yank the dust sheet from the bed in a single flourish and discard it in the corner. Then I raised the blinds and opened the windows, allowing the stars and distant streetlights to bathe the room in an ethereal glow. A cricket chirped from beyond the window screen, and a night-ferried breeze swept the room like the wide caress of a cool hand. It would only last for a couple of
hours, I knew. Then the scorching sun would be back, and we’d have to face each other in the stark light of day. Face those questions he wasn’t asking as well. But I turned back to Ben anyway. If a couple of hours was all we had, I didn’t want to waste a minute.
We filled ourselves on each other, and once we were sated, sweaty and loose-limbed, lying in a tangle in the middle of the bed, we opened our bruised and swollen lips, and simply talked. How many people get the chance to talk to someone lost to them forever?
“I knew it. I knew you weren’t dead,” he said, leaning on one elbow, toying with my hair with his free hand, while I passed the single glass of wine I’d brought back to the bed between us. He took the sip I pressed to his lips, and some dripped down his chin. I leaned over and licked it off, my thigh curving up and over his hip. “I felt your presence inside me, around me. Like you were watching, though not like the angels in a far-off place. Was I right?”
I nodded. “About one thing…I’m definitely no angel.”
“Tough talk, tough girl,” he said, running his hand under the covers, along my side. Chills popped up on my thigh, and he smiled. “I always liked that about you. Except…now you really are tough, aren’t you?”
Now his hand moved to my left arm, where scars from my latest battles rose like Braille on the otherwise smooth skin.
“Find it unattractive?” I asked, dodging the question.
“Obviously,” he said, slipping a hand between my thighs. I was still wet from our lovemaking, and his fingers slid along the soft skin with gentle ease. I sighed into them, my eyes fluttering closed. His voice, however, had them winging back open. “So how did you do that? That leapy thing?”
“I thought you didn’t care.” I sure didn’t at the moment.
“I said it didn’t matter, and it doesn’t.” His fingers explored me, brushed me open, slipped inside. We both sighed. “I didn’t say I wasn’t curious.”
I opened to him further, lazy and unguarded. In body and
speech. “And remember what I said? All of life is one big dream. What if you’re dreaming now? What if your real life awaits you on the other side of night? You’ll wake and I’ll be gone.”
He rolled over on top of me so fast I didn’t have time to save the wineglass. It tipped, spilling chilled, fermented juice between us, dribbling down my chest, soaking into the bedsheets as I stared up at Ben, startled. His eyes were wild now, and filled with the questions he was trying so hard not to ask, instinct telling him if he pushed too hard, I’d be just that…lost to him. And Ben wasn’t going to let that happen without a fight.
“You’re the only woman who’s ever been strong enough for me. Did you know that?” He scraped his nails against my wrists as he pinned me beneath him, and I simply lay there, open to him, not exactly proving his point. “I like that, you know. A strong woman needing me.” He lifted himself up, one hand on each side of my head, and shoved my legs open with a thigh.
I swallowed hard and traced the tattoo circling his right bicep, following the waves of pattern with my battered fingertips. I couldn’t speak. I was quivering inside, and I lifted to meet his flesh, though he pulled back, smiling at me in the dim light.
“It’s a different kind of strength,” he continued, like he’d thought about it for a while. His erection played lightly against my belly. “Being the soft spot where a strong woman can rest.” He lowered his head, hair falling over his eyes, and when he glanced back up at me through it, his smile was untamed. “I fucking love it.”