War-N-Wit, Inc. – MeanStreet, LLC (2 page)

Gabriel’s cell phone rang and vibrated simultaneously.
“Here.” He handed over the sheet of note paper. “And don’t forget about the Vegas magic act, either. Harold, you’ve R&R’d enough, how ‘bout you get your little tail feathers back where they’re supposed to be?”

The desk phone buzzed loudly. Gabriel grabbed it with one hand and picked up the cell with the other
, bracketing his ears.

“Yo, whut up?”
Two for the price of one. “Hold a minute, please.” He lowered both phones and glared at Micah. “You still here?” He flipped the glare to Harold. “And you didn’t fly the coop yet either?”

“We’re on it, G. Don’t have a heart attack.” Micah headed toward the door.

“I can’t have heart attacks. What I can and do have are exasperation attacks. Frequently. Priority to the Philly thing.”

“You think?” Micah shot back over his shoulder.

“Smartass angels,” he muttered. “Gonna be the death of me yet. If I could die, that is.”

Chapter Three

Two figures, dressed in black and gray to match the darkness, crouched in the shadows of the gated mansion gardens.

“That’s it, little girl.
Right there. That’s our pay-off.”

“I’ve heard that before, Daddy.”

“But this time it’s the truth, sweetheart! I swear! No more shadows. Money for training. You could be a world-class gymnast. You
should
be a world-class gymnast. Not swinging from ledges and tree branches and climbing in windows! I know it’s my fault. Know I’m no kind of a father at all, using his little girl to help him rob folks. And I’m so sorry, Mia, so—”

“
Sssssh
.” She pressed her finger against his lips. “It is what it is, Daddy. We are what we are. You have your specialty, I have mine. Time to move.” She adjusted the ear piece in her ear, checked the position of the microphone pinned to the neckline of the sleek body suit she wore on the job to afford maximum flexibility and movement. She reached over and did the same for her father. “Go take out the alarm system. I’ll be in position when you give the word.”

“I love you, baby. Last time. Swear to God.
After this, you can be a normal teenager again.”

She didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d
never
had the chance to be a normal teenager.

“I know, Daddy.
Love you. Now go.”

“Remember, Mia. Just because the owners are in Europe—”

“Doesn’t mean the house is empty and we don’t know where the staff is or when they might walk in. ‘Cause the butler might want to bang the maid on the boss’s bed.”

“Mia!
Good lord, girl, where do you come up with such things?”

Mia Fiori laughed. Her father genuinely believed
he’d kept her sheltered. Other than making her his partner in burglary, of course. Not that that was his fault. She’d insisted. And to him she’d always be his little girl. Well, she’d always be his girl, just not so little any more.

The figures
separated and took opposite directions into the darkness.

She
moved in and waited close to the wall under the second floor window targeted for easiest and closest proximity to the safe in the Master Suite. Poor Daddy. That one lapse in judgment, that one time he’d given in to temptation—well, sometimes one time was all it took. Nobody’d known the alarm systems marketed by the security company he worked for better than Tony Fiori. And it hadn’t taken much effort for that big league bank robber to find that out. Or to leave Tony holding the bag for the entire heist, though that hadn’t worked out as well as the robber’d planned. Tony’d plea-bargained himself down to a few years in the pen and a few more on probation by giving up a shit-load of information the master-mind didn’t even know he had. Which just went to prove the value of insurance. Still, the damage was done. He’d never worked a decent paying job again, certainly not one that carried health insurance. Mia’d been 13 when her Mom got sick. And no way in hell was Tony Fiori consigning her to what he called “the charity wards”.

Neither was Mia.
Nor was she about to let Tony try this with any partner who couldn’t be trusted. Which meant any partner other than her. She didn’t need her Mom dying and her father in jail. It’d been hard to convince him what a valuable tool she could be, but she’d finally managed to talk him into giving her a chance.

The rest, as they say, was history.
Anna Fiori hadn’t died in a charity ward. She hadn’t been buried in a pauper’s grave, either. But it took damn near every penny of every job Mia and Tony pulled to make sure of that. With nothing left, Tony planned this. The big one. The last one. The one to end it all. Goodbye Mean Street, hello Easy Street. Or so Tony said. Mia’d heard a lot of broken promises in her life. Though never because Tony hadn’t tried to keep them. She smiled. Not the smile of a teenager. The smile of a woman who’d walked through fire on more than one occasion and still lived to tell about it. Even if she sported a lot of scars.

“Okay, baby!
Mark and move.”

She jerked in surprise
and her elbow slammed into the stone wall. Damn. What she got for giving in to old memories. Served her right. She straightened up and backed away from the wall a bit, looking up at the target window. Nice ledge. Just perfect for a grappling hook. If she’d needed to use one, which she didn’t.

She crouched, jumped, and caught the first branch of the big oak situated right outside the bedroom. Made for great shade, she was sure.
Made a great ladder, too. Her gloves gave her the grip needed to start the swinging arc to loop her legs around the next branch and pull herself up. She reached for the next branch, and the next, and there she was. She maneuvered over and shoved at the window. It’d be locked of course, but you never knew. Sometimes alarm systems gave a false sense of security. And this time—unbelieveable! This was one of those times. The window slid upwards.

Quick as a cat—and she was a cat burglar, after all—she slid through and into the room. A guest bedroom, just down the hall from the
master suite. She moved to the door, cracked it open, and listened. Then she closed her eyes and concentrated to listen beyond her ears. To
feel
the listening. And something didn’t
feel
right.

No one
was in sight, though. And if something wasn’t right, she’d best be moving her little cat burglar feet. Strategically placed nightlights cast enough light for a safe walk down the hall, but not much more than that. She moved carefully, staying near the walls, keeping to the shadows. Almost there. She paused. Something was off. Beyond the door to the master suite, the hall made a ninety degree turn and continued on, leading—where? Her skin prickled. No, her nerves prickled. Not the ordinary heightened sense of awareness that came with every job they pulled. More like fingernails on a blackboard. Or a fork scratching across a plate. A subliminal sound abraded her ear drums.

Time to get her butt into that master suite and use those sensitive ear drums of hers on the
safe, the way Tony’d taught her. But she couldn’t. She kept walking towards that ninety degree angle where the hall turned. The subliminal sound got louder and louder. And then all at once it wasn’t subliminal anymore. Low, concentrated,
throbbing.
Chanting. Someone—no, a lot more than one someone—was chanting. She’d heard it all her life. At Mass. Not that she and Tony went to Mass much anymore. Confession and penance didn’t seem like such a good idea, knowing full well they’d be repeating their sins, and sooner rather than later. But Mom had so loved Mass. And even when she’d been too sick to go to Church, she’d loved her recordings of the Gregorian chants.

Mia loved them, too, the feeling of peace, the pulsing power of faith they imparted, but she didn’t listen to them anymore. She felt unworthy, undeserving. This, though. No, this was different. The ke
y? The language? Yes. But that still wasn’t it. This chant didn’t soothe. It
irritated
. More than that, it crawled through her brain, buzzing like a nest of angry hornets, burning her ears, burning her brain, burning her skin.

If she had the sense God gave a goat, she’d turn and run.
In fact, she tried to do just that. She couldn’t. Something wouldn’t let her. Something she couldn’t control.

She made the ninety degree turn with the hall, into a shorter corridor running into double doors. Light spilled faintly underneath them. The chanting increased in volume. Dark. Commanding.
Unholy
.

She tried again to turn and run. Her feet wouldn’t move in any di
rection but forward. Something unlike anything she’d ever experienced before wanted her to see what was beyond those doors.

She put her hand on one of the handles and slowly—oh,
so
slowly—turned the handle. She pushed inward millimeter by millimeter until one eye peered into the flickering candlelight. Candlelight from the rows of black candles flanking the upside down cross above the perverted altar. Robed figures in a semicircle bent and swayed with the chant, and settled into a pulsing monotone. Above the chant, a piercing wail speared Mia’s heart. A baby. Her eyes flew back to that hideous altar. They had a baby on that altar. And every robed figure held a knife. Knives with twisted blades.

How much time did she have? And time to do what, exactly? If she rushed in and grabbed the baby, they’d kill her. No question. Problem was, then they’d kill the b
aby anyway. Because nobody’d know it was happening. And she never carried a cell phone on the job. No pockets, no room, no need. Just extra baggage. She closed the door and backed away from it. Whatever power made her walk down that hallway and open the door in the first place had better make sure she had enough time to get it back open again, that’s just all there was to it. She pulled the neckline material to move the microphone as close as possible to her mouth.

“Daddy!”

“
Mia, good God, girl, I was just about to come in after you—”

“Daddy, you have to call the cops and get them here.
Now
! I don’t know how much time we’ve got!”

“You lost your mind—”

“
Listen to me!
There’s a—
cult
or something! In a big room up here! They have a baby and Daddy, they’re about to
kill
it, now call the cops!
Now
!”

“Mia
, you get your ass out—”

“This is bigger than us, Daddy, just
do
it!”

The cadence of the chant changed. Surged. Moved to climax.

“
Do it!
”

Mia ran
through the double doors just as the knives began their downward descent and flung herself over the wailing infant.

* * *

A black cat leapt branch to branch up the massive maple tree. Not just any black cat. A cat with an angelic disposition. Micah. His ears quivered, his nerves screamed. That chant. The cadence was changing, changing too fast for cat mode to keep up with. Why the hell hadn’t Gabriel sent him out sooner? Not like G to cut things this close.

No help for it. Psychic hooks shot out from his brain, searching for the pulsing energy that powered the Universe. Got it! He reeled it back in and
black cat became a glowing orb streaking the last few feet toward the window at light speed.

The orb burst through
the glass. Blazing pure, golden power overshadowed the dark blackish-red shadows of the mini-hell on earth created by the robed figures. The power attacked, shifting form into a massive shadow of a human figure sporting wings. The wings beat furiously. High winds buffeted the room, bouncing back and forth, one stream merging into another and another until they converged and shot full-force toward the target. The robed figures shrieked but the wind didn’t care. It lifted them off their feet and sucked them into the whirling vortex, and as suddenly as the raging energy appeared, it departed. The room held nothing but the giant shadow of a human figure sporting wings. And a teenage girl, thirteen twisted knives protruding obscenely from her bleeding body as it sprawled over the wailing infant.

Sonofabitch!
This wasn’t a rescue mission. It was a harvest. Gabriel could’ve
told
him, damnit!

Glowing light covered the girl’s body, rising, rising, into human shape. The figure of a teenage girl. Confusion radiated out from the light. Micah pulled his energy in tight, forming the compact figure of a human male in his prime, wings now in proportion to the human size. He swooped over to the radiant shadow above the body and gathered it
into his arms, hugging tightly, rising upwards.

“Whaa—where—what’s going on?
What’s happening to me?
”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ve got you.
I’ve got you. You’re going home.”