Erin smiled at him and a few seconds later they were gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jordan’s phone played the theme to ‘Mission Impossible’ just as the jet’s wheels lifted off from the Atlanta International runway. He dropped the ice pack that he was holding against the side of his face and answered the phone with a quick tap.
“What?” he said.
“‘What?’ Don’t ‘what’ me, Jordan. What the hell happened?” Ricardo said.
“Oh, I’ll tell you what happened,” Jordan said. “We had him- tased and ready to bag when out of nowhere- and I literally mean out of fucking nowhere, Ricky -that Simms skank appears and touches me on the arm. The next thing I know I’m falling into the middle of I-85 and dodging traffic. What the hell was that, Ricky? Where was The Seer on that one?”
“What about the ‘phage?”
“Oh, I’m fine, thanks for asking. The ‘phage is gone. By the time I got back to the site, he and the skank were in the wind and Carmine was a mess. I didn’t think anything could bust him up like that after we were Awakened. I barely got him out of there before the feds showed up.”
“Is he all right?”
Jordan looked over at the couch where his brother was lying. The co-pilot was also a trained medic and had started an IV that was rapidly feeding fluids into Carmine’s arm. Bone still showed through in some of the spots where his head had hit the ground, but fresh pink skin was just starting to appear over the wounds. “He’s healing but his tattoos are going to need some work. He’ll be pissed about that,” Jordan said.
“Well, let’s hear it for Fae DNA. Tell me about the ‘phage.”
“Strong. Really, strong. As strong as Carmine. He took a beating like it was nothing. He had full control of his faculties, too. No signs of insanity or predatory impulses at all. Honestly, I think he just wanted to get away from us, but we managed to piss him off enough to throw down.”
“You talked to him?”
“Oh, we had a lovely chat, Ricky. Wish you could’ve been there.”
“Stow it, smartass.”
“Seriously, you could pass this guy on the street and never know he was a deader. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, well, The Seer is… disappointed.”
“Well maybe The Seer should have given us a heads up about the girl.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Jordan. You know this. He doesn’t control it, the Dwellers Between do.”
Jordan bit his tongue. Sometimes he forgot what a true believer Ricardo was. “Regardless, they’re gone again. What now?”
Jordan could almost hear the smile that crossed Ricardo’s face. “It’s time,” he said.
“Time for what?” Jordan asked.
“We have gathered the appropriate number of sacrifices and they are currently subdued and being transported to the site The Seer has chosen. Rejoice, brother, because in two days we will throw open the doors and let the true masters of this and all worlds walk it once more.”
“Two days?” Jordan said. “That’s…Wow.”
Ricardo laughed. “They truly are mighty if they can shut you up. How soon do you think before Carmine is back in fighting form?”
“I’m not sure. This is the first time he’s been hurt this bad. Say twelve hours? That’s just a guess.”
“All right, then. We’ll get him checked out on site.”
“Where’s that?”
“Tiny little desert town called Leticia, Texas. I will email all the details. You guys should be back on the ground in a couple of hours. I’ll make sure the transport is rigged so Carmine can stretch out for the ride. You guys need to be at your best. Recruiting you two and all the people you’ve collected has been building to this. We’re going to re-write history, Jordan. Bask in shadow, brother.”
“Until darkness reigns,” Jordan said before quickly ending the call. He dropped the phone and replaced the ice pack on his face. His neck was stiff and the side of his head where Trent had kicked him throbbed. He healed faster than most people, but his tissues didn’t regenerate at the same rate as Carmine’s. Jordan had never envied any of his brother’s abilities until that moment.
He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He wanted a drink, but didn’t want to go through the aches and pains of getting one. Instead, he decided it would be better to just sit there and suffer. He had it coming, he figured. They’d gotten a little too full of themselves, a little too cocksure, and gone into the unknown assuming they would come out on top.
It was a little understandable, he supposed. When Ricardo had come to them three years earlier, they were just a couple of small time cons doing a nickel for armed robbery. At first, Jordan had though Ricardo insane, but when he offered them a deal that would get them out and wipe their records that very day, it made Jordan believe in miracles.
He shook his head at the memory. Life was some bizarre shit sometimes. When he’d learned about the bloodlines and Awakenings and Paragons, it had all seemed like something from one of the comic books he had read when he was a kid. The first time he’d felt the power of his Awakening, though, he had laughed and cried all at once.
Since then it had been get a target, snatch the target, deliver the target, and go live the high life on the Progeny dime. Nobody could fight or get away from them. No one had even the slightest chance against them. It was the perfect gig.
Until now. Until Israel Trent and Erin Simms had come back into their lives.
Carmine suddenly sat up with a short, angry scream. He looked around, bewildered, and then saw Jordan.
“What the hell?” he said, the words slurred through a still-healing jaw. “Where are we? Where’s Trent?”
Jordan repositioned the ice pack on his face. “We’re clean,” he said. “Trent’s gone and we’re in the air. Probably somewhere over Alabama by now. Lay down, dumb-ass. You’re hurt.”
“What happened?” Carmine asked, lying back down. His breath whistled through regrowing teeth.
Jordan filled him in on the reappearance of Erin Simms, their narrow getaway, and the phone call from Ricardo.
“So the bitch did this to me? That hooker from Vegas?” Anger radiated from Carmine’s words.
“Well, I think it was a team effort. Trent did bloody you up pretty good.”
“I swear to fucking god I’m going to tear them both apart. Do we know where they are?”
“Not a clue. Don’t worry, though. If they’re with Sentry we’re bound to see them again. We’ll get our shot. In the meantime, we’ve got an assignment.”
Carmine was a silent ball of frustration for a long while. Finally, he said, “Fine, whatever. Let’s go mess with Texas.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
One-ninety-one Peachtree Tower was actually two fifty-story towers connected by a more narrow series of floors between them. Each of the larger towers was crowned by a structure that reminded Erin of something you might see in pictures of ancient Greece or Rome- she could never keep them straight. That’s where she’d brought them after a short series of pulls to various rooftops. She figured it was damn near impossible to follow her when she moved like that, but she jumped around a little just to be safe.
Israel seemed to take the experience well. He never showed any signs of getting sick or stumbling like she had the first few times, but he still looked bad. He was beaten up pretty badly. Torn lips and a dozen or more cuts on his face all slowly oozed a kind of thin fluid that looked more like dark red oil than blood. There was no swelling she could see but his skin was a dark shade of gray and his eyes were shot through with black and red veins. When he looked at her it was with a kind of hunger she was unaccustomed to.
As soon as they had stopped in one of the Peachtree Tower crowns, he’d moved away and told her to keep her distance. She complied and asked what she could do. When he told her he needed food, specifically meat, she’d pulled down to the street and found the nearest restaurant. It turned out to be a New York style deli and she h
ad walked in like she owned the place, found a metal tray filled with pastrami, and a handful of kitchen towels, and then pulled back to the Peachtree rooftop with her stolen goods in tow.
Now, she sat with her back to a marble column, watching as Israel shoved handfuls of deli meat into his mouth like a ravenous lion. As he ate, she watched the color return to his face and the smaller cuts begin sealing themselves right before her eyes. After a minute or two of this, he looked up at her with a far less intense gaze and said, “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “No big.”
“Judging from this kitchen tray,” he said, tapping the stainless steel pan, “you didn’t pay for this.”
She shrugged again. “I don’t have any cash on me and I was in a hurry.”
“You just walked out with it?”
“No, I didn’t walk. Why would I ever do that?”
Israel shook his head as he chewed. “I’ll pay them back.”
“Suit yourself,” she said.
He continued eating. She watched in silence.
“So,” she said after a few minutes, “you’re…dead… now. What’s that like?”
“Who have you been talking to?” he asked.
“Warburton. She told me what happened. That’s got to be a total mind fuck.”
Israel nodded and started cleaning his face with the dish towels. “Yeah. I keep waiting to just freak out over it all, but I never do. That doesn’t seem normal to me. I mean, before all this, I’d get pissed and throw pens if my editor shit on a story I’d sent him or if the Bears played an extra crappy game or something. Now, though, everything is just cause and reaction. I can still feel things, but it’s like my mind is insulated against extreme emotions. I don’t get it.”
Erin nodded. “Does your junk still work?”
Israel paused for a second. “Did you really just ask me that?”
“Hey, properly working junk is important to a guy. Just saying.”
“Seriously? All the things that have gone down in the last couple of days and that’s where your mind goes?”
Erin shrugged again. “Just saying.”
Israel shook his head and gave her a laughing smile. “No clue. I was too busy wandering around in the woods to give it much thought.”
“I caught the last few seconds of that fight back there- before the little asshole tased you and the big asshole started pounding on you. You knocked that guy off his feet and he wasn’t small. I’m guessing there’s an upside to all this.”
Israel filled her in on the changes he’d gone through: the strength, the speed, the endurance, and the way it caused the hunger to grow in him. He didn’t talk about the deer or losing control of himself, though. He didn’t like thinking about it, and Warburton had probably told her already anyway. As he finished, he folded the dark-stained towels and stuffed them in his pocket.
“Wow. You’re like a dead Captain America.”
“You know, you can stop saying ‘dead.’”
“Oh. Is ‘deceased’ better?”
Israel gave her a pointed look.
“Sorry, it’s just bizarre. The lunchmeat seems to have fixed you up, though. You look like you again.”
He nodded. In truth, the hunger was still prickling at him, but it was at a much more tolerable level now. “Wish I could say the same for you.” He gestured at her face and said, “Who did that to you?”
Erin touched her face. In all the excitement she’d forgotten about her own bruises. “Oh, this. It’s nothing.”
Israel popped the last bit of pastrami into his mouth and settled back against the column directly opposite Erin’s. “Bullshit. What happened to you, Erin?”
So, without really intending to, she told him. She told him about being born to a drug-addicted prostitute. She told him about the parade of men who had come through her mother’s life and the things she’d seen them do to her mother and the places she’d hidden while it happened. She talked about her big brother, Tiko, and the things that had happened to him when he tried to protect his mom and her and the way he had changed one day in his early teens. She told him about finding her mother’s body after she’d overdosed, and how Tiko and she had gone on the run to stay out of the foster system. She told him how Tiko would dress her like a teenage slut- a Lolita, he called it -so she could lure men in and he could hit them with a pipe and take their money. When she got to the first time Tiko had forced himself on her, saying she owed him for taking care of them, Israel’s face grew dark with anger.
Still, she kept talking. There were times when she wanted to stop, but it was the first time she had ever talked about it and it was like a lake finally shattering the cracks in an old dam. She told him how Tiko had started pimping her out and about the family motto. When she got to the part about her Awakening finally kicking in, she told him all of that too. She didn’t hold anything back, not even the details of her last meeting with Tiko. She told him everything right up until the time she had showed up in the parking lot. She wasn’t sure at what point the tears had started, but by the time she was finished they were falling like rain.
Israel sat and listened. He was unnaturally still until he rose and handed her the last of the clean dish towels. He stood next to her and stared out over the city. Downtown Atlanta wasn’t choked with skyscrapers like Chicago. It was spread out and broken up by interstates and highways that formed a kind a pattern in the urban carpet. As it grew later in the day, lights were already beginning to show here and there. The sun was creeping toward the horizon and painting the sky a brilliant, fiery orange.
“You really saved all those girls?” Israel asked.
Erin rose and stood next to him. “I guess,” she said.
“You really didn’t have to do that.”
“I know, right?” she said with a sniffle. “It’s just that there was this nagging voice in my head that kept telling me that isn’t what a good person would do. Pain in the ass, really.”
A smile flashed across Israel’s face. Then, more somber, he said, “About what happened with your brother.”
“Yeah, look. I understand if you want me to get out of your life. I can take you-”
“You did what you had to, Erin. I can’t imagine- literally cannot imagine -what it was like to live with that. I can’t and, frankly, it breaks my heart to think that you had to.”
Erin cast her eyes down and said, “I’m not looking for a pity party, Israel.”
“Well, tough, because I’m sorry you had to live that way. You were a victim and you fought back when you had the power to. I will never begrudge you that or blame you for what happened. What you did for those girls makes me proud to call you my friend.”
She looked up, fresh tears in her eyes. “So, yeah, friends then?”
“Yeah. We started this together and we’ll see it through together. I want us each to make a promise to the other, though, right now.”
“What?”
“We have to keep each other in check. Erin, the things we can do are terrifying. We can’t just run around doing whatever we want to whomever we want just because we’re able to. It’s like carrying a gun- we should only use it if we have to, if there’s not another way. We can’t let ourselves become the people who create victims, and I’m afraid it would be stupidly easy to do that now.”
Erin nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. So, what? A promise to give the other a swift kick in the butt if we get too crazy?”
“Pretty much. You in?”
Erin nodded. “Totally.”
Atlanta was lighting up below them- a blanket of lights twinkling in the fading day. The breeze picked up and grew cool, but they somehow found solace in its chill whisper.
“We’re still victims, though, you know,” Erin said.
Israel looked a question at her.
“Look, I love these new things I can do, but I didn’t choose them. Those Progeny dicks are the ones who did this to us. I keep thinking about that place we woke up in. Whatever they were doing
there was just fucking wrong, Izzy. It makes the guys I took on look like playground bullies. You said that victims fight back when they get the power to. I’d say we have that.”
“Sure, I suppose. But it takes more than that to go up against the kind of power you’re talking about. These people screw with the government on a regular basis. I don’t care how tough we are, we simply don’t have the resources we need to go against that. It’d be like the two of us trying to hold back a tidal wave. It’s just too big.”
“I know. I figure Warburton might have some ideas about that.”
Israel gave her his best mock surprised expression. “You want to work for Olivia? Forget teleportation. That’s the truly miraculous thing.”
“Yeah, well, I want to hit the Progeny back for doing whatever the hell it was they were doing. Warburton can help with that. She’s a means to an ends. It’s either that or sit up here whining about my shitty childhood.”
“Are you sure about this? This isn’t the kind of thing you do and then just walk away from. It’s not the kind of thing that’s ever truly finished. Besides that, I’m not sure the DGRI guys will be so down with that plan.”
“We can burn that bridge when we come to it. Thing is, we need to always watch each other’s backs. If it even smells like they’re going to try and lock us up, we bounce.”
“As plans go,” he said, “it’s not the worst, I guess. I would like to see if Allison can help me understand what’s happened to me. Ruining the Progeny’s day doesn’t sound bad, either. It can’t be worse than living on the run like this. Let’s do it.”
“Cool,” Erin said, turning her eyes back to the city.
Israel nodded. “So,” he said with a grin, “you want to be a su-”
“If you say superhero I will throw you off this fucking roof, I swear to god.”
“That’s my point: You keep taking us to rooftops. It’s all very Batman.”
“It’s a long way down, Israel.”
The grin broke into a laugh. “All right, where do you want to start?”
Awakened Page 17