Touching Fire (Touch Saga) (3 page)

“Take her through the back.” Ashton
passed Isaiah the gun, who took it and seamlessly slipped it into the waistband of his jeans. “I’ll deal with them.”

“Wait!” I lunged after him when he made for the door, ignoring Isaiah’s grip on me when I grabbed Ashton’s arm. “You can’t go out there without your gun! You have no idea—”

Ashton smiled calmly at me. It was so off-putting considering the situation that I dropped my hand.

“Don’t worry about me,
dearest. I don’t need a weapon.”

Then, with a wink that only sealed my theory that my dad was suicidal, he strolled out of the café to meet the
Shadow Brothers.

Chapter
2

The number of lackeys Garrison had at his disposal was incredible. It amazed me even more just how brainlessly loyal they were to him. In the past month, we’d met a good majority of his group; men and women with different abilities, some really cool, if not way cooler than mine.

We had encountered a woman a while back with the ability to freeze time. She literally froze everything within five feet of her. It had been a task and a half to keep six feet ahead of her
at all times. Running I could do. I was getting really good at running. Thanks to Garrison, I was in the best shape of my life. Bring on the zombies!

The trio
Ashton was about to get up close and personal with were named Marcel, Hogan and Noboru, or the Shadow Brothers as I’d nicknamed them. They were a creepy lot with the sinister ability to meld into one another the way I always imagined The Blob would, and become a giant living, breathing and killing shadow. It only seemed to work if they were together.

I
had yet to see them go into shadow mode on their own. But the moment they were together and they touched, their entire matter seemed to dissolve into a shapeless pool of black. The worst part was when you couldn’t tell if the darkness you were about to walk into was an actual shadow or them, until it was too late.

In shadow form they were toxic and touching them burned
away skin like battery acid. I had seen them envelop a man once as he’d staggered out of a bar. His screams had haunted me for days, but that was nothing compared to what happened next.

Once the shadow had shifted away, gliding off his mutilated
remains, the sight of his mangled limbs was far worse. Isaiah had tried to stop them once with a series of floodlights, but not even light stopped them. They didn’t seem to have a weakness and they attacked as a unit, which sucked when the odds were three to one, with Isaiah being the one. I was pretty useless in a fight.

It was unclear
if the three were related like Gaston and Mistral, the fire-throwers that had burned my last school to the ground and killed my mom. The Shadow Brothers were tall, with skin the color of espresso beans and eyes like pools of black tar. They always wore black cargo pants and black sweaters and had a wild passion for trench coats and army boots.

I took a step
towards the window, curious to see what Ashton was going to do. The sun glinted off his wavy locks as he moved with unnatural ease to greet our guests. Pedestrians shifted around them, unaware of the danger walking in their midst.

He
didn’t stop until there was a foot of distance between them. Out of the four, he seemed to be the shortest by a foot, but he had an aura that exuded power and demanded respect. It rippled around him in waves so thick it was palpable. His mouth moved and he made a few random hand gestures. For a moment, it appeared as though he was trying to reason with them, which was crazy.

“What is he—?”

The trio shimmered. It was subtle. No one would have noticed if they hadn’t been watching for it. I was. It started where the back of their hands touched. I could see the ripple shimmy up their arms and across their chests as they became translucent.

“Hey!” I broke free of Isaiah and ran to the window. Both palms slammed into the glass. “Look out!”

It was an utter waste of time.

In a motion that was a
streak of black, Ashton swung out with his right arm, and for that split second, nothing happened. No one moved. Time itself seemed to pour to a stop. Then, the Shadow Brother in the middle began to cry, slow tears that ran down his face in a thick, red drizzle. But the tears weren’t just coming from his eyes.

They poured
from his brow, his nose, and his mouth where it had been torn open in a ghastly smile. Blood spattered from the long, horizontal gashes and rained down his front. His entire body twitched and his hands flew up to cover his face. The other two moved in as though to protect their friend while simultaneously trying to grab Ashton before he struck again, but it was too late. Ashton had swung again, sinking his bare fingers into the middle guy’s gut and tearing upward in a fluid stroke. Body parts I was not ready to identify splashed to the floor like blood soaked rags, a second before the middle Shadow Brother crumpled, literally falling apart in pieces at my father’s feet. Then the screams started as the crowd realized what was happening.

“Holy shit!”

“Come on.” Isaiah grabbed me and dragged me towards the counter and the door behind it before I had the chance to see what happened next.

I staggered numbly after him.
“Did you see that? Did you … what…”

He shoved me through the door.

“What the hell was that?”

I
knew I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d seen worse, but there was something uniquely horrifying about witnessing your father disemboweling a man in broad daylight with his bare hands.

The
staff, a boy and two girls, glanced up from their game of cards at a round table in the corner when we stumbled into the room.

“Can we go back out?” the boy asked.

“No,” Isaiah said abruptly. “You need to get out.”

It must have been in their
training, somewhere between being taught how to make a mocha latte and pouring coffee, because no one asked why. They dropped their cards, rose out of their chairs and made a single file line out the backdoor into an alley.

“Wait.” I
saiah stopped me from following with a restraining hand on my elbow. His gaze remained fixated on the door, narrowed with concentration.

“What are we waiting for?”
I asked when seconds passed and nothing happened.

He
listened a moment longer before answering, “There’s something out there.”

My gaze swung to the open doorway, my heart
lodged somewhere in my throat. But I swallowed it down, a whole bigger problem coming to mind. “The staff … they have no idea what’s out there. They’ll walk right into it and get killed.”

I ran to the door
, ignoring Isaiah’s hiss to stop. Words of warning perched on my tongue as I leapt blindly into the alleyway, and staggered to a halt.

I spotted the boy
right away. He stood with his back to me, his head bent as he observed a soccer ball at his feet, a soccer ball with sleek, blonde hair. It took some squinting, some questioning of my sanity, but I realized quickly that it was one of the girls’ heads, just before she vanished from sight into solid concrete. The boy waited until it was completely gone before doing a little hop and sinking in after her feet first and vanishing from sight completely.

“What the f
aa—”

Isaiah grabbed me and yanked me back into the stock room.
“They’re gone.”

My
voice rose to an octave short of hysterical. “They freaking melted into the ground!”

“They work for Ashton.
You don’t expect them to be exactly normal, do you?” He was way too calm for my piece of mind.

“
Well what then?” I really needed to stop asking that. After all, wasn’t that the million dollar question at this point? What were they? What was I? Life really was one big box of freaking mystery chocolates and I was quickly becoming diabetic.

He
shrugged, all cool, calm and collected. “I don’t think we should worry about that right now. We have bigger problems.”

I took a gulping breath and smoothed my
anxious nerves. “What’s the plan, Boss?”

If he picked up on my sarcasm, Isaiah didn’t show it. Instead, he moved to the doorway and poked his head out. He looked left, then right,
and then ducked back inside.

“There’s something out there,” he said
again, aggravation tight in his voice. “I can’t get a signal on what though.”

“Meaning?” I prompted.

“Meaning I don’t know what we’re up against.” He peeked out into the alleyway again. “Whatever it is, it’s huge and powerful.”

Fantastic.
It couldn’t, for once, be something small. Where were all the evil kittens of death? Why did it always have to be something menacing and huge?

“What do we do?”

He slipped back into the room and rubbed both hands back through his hair. “I don’t…” He dropped his hands off his face and reached for the gun tucked into his waistband. “Stay here. Don’t move until I get back.”

“Whoa, wait—”

He didn’t wait. He was out the door at a jog.

For a moment, I fully intended to do as I was told. I was going to stay put until Isaiah scouted the area and
came back for me. I even moved to have a seat. But who was I kidding? I really hated sitting around waiting for someone to rescue me. Besides, whether or not Isaiah liked it, we were a team and if I wasn’t out there watching his back, who would?

I hurried to the table and snatched up one of the wooden chairs. With as much force as I could put into it, I slammed it into the metal shelv
ing bolted into the stone walls. It took a few tries, and nearly dislocating my shoulder before the thing fell to pieces at my feet. I picked up the biggest piece and weighed the jagged weapon in my hand before fisting it tight and closing the distance between me and the utter madness outside the door.

I realized two
things when I surged over the threshold and jogged to the lip of the alleyway. The first was that wearing a dress had been a very bad idea. The second thing, I was pretty sure the café’s backroom was soundproof, because beyond the door, the world was in absolute chaos.

The quiet afternoon had
escalated to a cacophony of screams and explosions. Cars were upended, alarms blared. Shop windows were shattered. People were running in terror as everything from cars to trashcans went zipping through the air. The commotion was so severe that I had no idea where to look first and nearly got clobbered by a mailbox. It was pure reflexes that saved me from getting skewered the way the front window of the Toyota behind me did. Instead, I was taken down by the brick wall I slammed into when I leapt aside.

I hit the pavement and cursed.
I was not cut out for this hero business. Someone needed to write a How-To for Dummies, the one-oh-one of heroism. I was pretty sure rule one would have been something like,
don’t wear a dress to a fight
, followed by,
don’t fall
. But, in my own defense, I still had a grip on my weapon and that totally deserved a cookie.

Wincing and rubbing my
bruised arm, I got to my feet, dusted my dress and stumbled my way down the side street in the direction of the commotion. I made it all the way to the end of the building before a figure leapt into my path. I did what any normal person would have done under such circumstances … I screamed.

“Get down!”

I was given no chance to react before I was tackled to the ground. Something hard fell with me, on me, crushing me into the pavement as something whistled overhead and the world went up in an inferno of heat that rushed over us in a wave. My ears rang, the high pitched squeal of a whistle. Shards of fragmented fire rushed down my throat, cutting soft tissue the entire way to my lungs. I gagged on ashes and I fumbled to unravel myself from the crushing weight breathing heavily into the side of my neck. Voices raged in my skull and I couldn’t tell if they were mine, the people around me, or Isaiah’s, but it all jumbled together in a war so loud I wanted to stab myself in the ear with a rusty dagger to make it stop.

Woozy, I closed my eyes
and pressed the heels of my hand into the throbbing veins at my temples. The stench of sulfur, smoke and chemicals toyed with my already queasy stomach and I was certain I would be sick.

I gasped and tried to roll onto my side.
I had finally calmed the riot in my head to a dull roar only to be paralyzed by a shot of something strong and familiar spearing through my chest. It took no time at all to put name to the feeling. Panic. Panic so intense, it was like a silver studded fist slamming repeatedly into my chest. I felt every hammer pulse through me, distorting my thoughts, making it impossible to piece together why terror was suffocating me.

“Fallon!”
Isaiah’s voice ripped through our telepathic link.
“Answer me!”

“Isaiah?” I wasn’t sure if I said it out loud, or in my head.

My vision wavered as I raised my head to peer into my savior’s face. It wasn’t Isaiah. It wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before, and I was pretty certain I’d seen most, if not all of Garrison’s crones.

“Who are you?”

“Get up!” The boy said instead.

“What—”

He rolled off me and in a single fluid motion that would have been impressive if I didn’t want to vomit on his boots, he leapt agilely to his feet and dragged me up with him. The ground swayed and I struck the side of a crushed car with my already throbbing shoulder. The collision sent fiery sickles lancing through my brain.

“Come on.” The boy grabbed my arm
again and began dragging me up from my near slumped position against the hot, warped metal.