by Matt Betts
Empty. The house had an old couch that Deena barely recognized in the living room, a few cups in the kitchen by the sink and some rolled up sleeping bags in the bedroom that she and Avi had used the last time they were there.
The place was just as much of a dead end now as it had been years ago.
40
Deena at 20 the first time around
The first time Deena and Avi made love, it was a frenetic and frightening experience for both of them.
Five years before the incident on the plane, when the Shadow Energy shorted out Deena’s shit, she had just completed a job in Miami, an easy target that required very little in the way of her power. She used her bare hands, enhanced by the terrible energy within her and strangled a rival hit man named Ford from another organization. It was her first major solo job that didn’t involve plain old stealing or breaking and entering. Her heart was pounding the entire time and sweat was streaming down her neck from the heat and the fear that enveloped her.
And it was exhilarating.
After she felt the last rise and fall of Ford’s chest, she watched the focus leave the man’s still-open eyes. Something about it satisfied a need inside her that had been steadily building since she was in her early teens. She looked at Ford one last time and felt the stiffness in her arms release. The dark shapes receded and forced themselves back into a tight circle that resembled a smiley face.
Deena had taken the man, as planned, to the men’s room of an upscale Italian restaurant under the guise of some wild sex act that Ford had readily and eagerly agreed to. She left him dead in a stall and walked as calmly as she could out the front door. From there, she ran to the rendezvous point in the back alley, out of breath and shaking with excitement. Avi pulled up and took her away like clockwork, the way all his plans tended to work, and they raced off to the nearby hotel they’d reserved; a good hotel for a change.
On the brief ride, they said little except to confirm the successful completion of their task. A small time crook with high hopes of walking away with a piece of Marsh’s territory was no longer breathing. It was all business and clinical.
“Hungry?” Avi asked.
“Starving.”
Avi stared ahead. “Want to stop for something, or get room service?
“I’m thinking room service.” She was starving, but she wasn’t thinking about food. She couldn’t help but stare at Avi as they drove the streets of the city to the hotel. He had been forced to work with her and be her handler when she moved on to more complex jobs. Earlier on, she’d worked with Harper doing the petty stuff under the supervision of Wallace.
The elevator whisked them up to their floor in record time. Avi slid the key card, and tossed his things on the floor when they stepped through the door.
A suite. They both said it would be good for their cover, but they were actually sick of the rat holes and roach motels they were used to hanging out in. Sure, it drew less attention, but it was nasty. This time they were going to stay in style.
Deena grabbed him immediately, kicking the door shut behind her.
Avi tried to say something. “Deena, wait…” But Deena’s mouth was already on his. The adrenaline of the evening’s activities coursed through her veins, stronger than the Shadow Energy that had pushed her along from day to day. She pinned him against the wall and kissed him harder, not wanting to break the contact between the two of them. After a moment, Avi began to kiss back just as urgently.
Deena had been working with Avi without really thinking about him in anything other than a professional manner. They’d been working together for nearly two years and there had been tension between them, but everything had always been playful and mostly harmless. Everyone flirted with Deena and she loved flirting back. Occasionally it had gone somewhere, but never anything serious, or memorable. She’d been far too nervous about making sure she pleased Marsh with the way she conducted herself in every aspect of her criminal endeavors. Besides, the men who made unwanted advances were aware that there were consequences.
Tired of waiting for him to do it, she had both of their shirts off by the time they made it down the hall to the main bedroom. As she watched him unbuckle his belt, she began to have feelings she hadn’t had before—she didn’t think they were really sexual, but more like the ones she had when she got excited about fighting and attacking someone. They were overwhelming and she ran to grab Avi. The momentum knocked him, pants still around his knees, onto the bed with her on top of him.
“Christ, you’re going to play rough, are you?” Avi asked.
Deena didn’t answer, she couldn’t. Her body wasn’t reacting in any way that she could control. A line of shooting pain briefly made its way up her spine and as she tried to focus on Avi and what they were about to do. She could feel a bubble of darkness emanating from her and enveloping them. She couldn’t hear anything or see anything outside the shroud that surrounded them, only the very startled and frightened Avi that was trapped inside with her. She couldn’t pause to decide if the bubble was real or something she was imagining and she didn’t want to. She also wasn’t sure if the look on Avi’s face was pleasure or terror.
If it was fear, he got over it.
41
Deena stared at the inside of the front door of her childhood home and felt weird about standing there without her sister. The home wasn’t the same without her. Harper was always the responsible one, the one who got the good job that put food on the table when Dad didn’t remember to come home and make dinner. Deena had the label of flake long before that. In school she was in ballet, then theater, then a punk band, then she started painting. That was just the first half of freshman year. Before working for Marsh, she’d never held a job long; most of the time it was just a few months at most. And here she was quitting again.
She’d thought it through this time, though. It wasn’t like when she left the burger place because the manager was a skeev. Or when she quit the copy center because the ink smelled nasty. Those were high school jobs, gigs she had when she didn’t have a care in the world, or responsibility.
She stood up and sighed deeply. She was pretty close to being back to normal and when she was recovering she couldn’t help but feel the fleeting thoughts of her youth. It wasn’t that she lost her memory of events and thoughts; she just couldn’t help but feel different as she snapped back to her proper age she. Usually, the magic only took a few months, maybe a year from her. This time it was a decade and a half, and as she got closer to her real age, her attitudes were not what they were. It was like a do-over.
The sound of tires on gravel made her move to the window and look out. Down the long driveway she could see a plain white sedan winding its way toward the house. The dull car didn’t look like something her sister would drive, but it certainly wasn’t one of Marsh’s hulking SUVs either. At this distance, she couldn’t see who was in it, and the dust didn’t make matters better.
Just to be on the safe side, Deena grabbed a set of steak knives from the kitchen and tucked them into her belt behind her back. She hated to carry weapons, guns especially, but it felt good to be almost fully recovered and she didn’t want to think about using her power.
The car outside came to halt and Deena peered out through a crack in the blinds of the kitchen window. The car was a good distance away from the garage, as though the driver had stopped that far away on purpose. Deena could only see the outlines of two people inside.
Deena’s cell phone suddenly rang and she answered it. She heard her sister’s voice on the other end.
“Hello?” Harper sounded winded.
“Hey. Is that you outside? Are you coming in or what?” Deena laughed when her sister answered.
“What?” Harper asked.
Deena watched the two figures in the car move about, gathering up their things before the doors started to open.<
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“I said are you going to sit in the car all day or get in here?” She realized that neither of the people getting out of the car had a phone up to their ear.
“Deena, I’m still at Marsh’s office. Stanley just freed me. Where the hell are you?”
Deena ducked back away from the window just enough so she could see the two men rising out of the sedan. She saw the dark clothes and she wondered if they were policemen, detectives, maybe. Their car was the right make, but they weren’t all stealthy or tactical like cops would be. They looked around and headed up the path that led to the front door. One of them, the tallest, seemed familiar and she wondered if she’d seen him somewhere, like Marsh’s office or the apartment building. They were briefly out of sight as the path wound behind some trees.
“I’m at our old house. And someone just pulled up.” She didn’t take more time to wonder who they were or what they wanted. She reacted by moving as far away from them in any way she could. Deena could hear the high-pitched noise of her sister emanating from the phone. She picked it up and whispered, “Someone unfriendly is here. Are you going to be OK?”
“God, no. We are at the top of the building basically. There are a whole lot of people between here and the front doors that would like to kill me,” Harper said.
“I will deal with these guys and drive straight for you when we’re done,” Deena said. And she hung up. She felt bad for leaving her sister hanging, but she’d call her back when this was over.
Deena slowly backed into the shadows of the hallway toward the bedrooms, still with her eye toward the picture window in the living room, waiting for another glimpse of the men. Did the police find the stolen car where she’d hidden it? She slipped one of the steak knives from her belt and let it rest in her hand, feeling the weight.
The silhouettes of the men appeared again through the front curtains, advancing slowly along the walk toward the front door. Her right arm ached and throbbed where the blotch resided. She looked down at it and found it had formed the vague outline of a dagger. She thought about how she would’ve handled such a situation in the last ten years. Just unleash her powers and end it all quickly. It would be so easy to cast a little spell to help her out, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She tried to think of baseball stats to keep her mind off of using the darkness, but she knew none, tried to recite poetry, but couldn’t remember anything but “Mary Had A Little Lamb”.
A firm double knock came from the direction of the front door. There were a few seconds of silence and Deena tried to hold her breath because it suddenly sounded so loud in her ears. She heard something else then, from the other direction, a snap behind her, not in the bedrooms but in the back yard. It was subtle, and if she was breathing normally, she might have dismissed it as imagination. As she tried to zero in on what it was, the knock at the front door became three quick pounds.
“Deena Riordan?” one of the men shouted. “This is the Ellis County Sheriff’s office. Open up, please.”
Deena thought about the noise out back and wondered if she should cross over to the kitchen. If there was one person out back, there could be more. There was another sound behind her, which she imagined as someone trying to break open a locked window without making a ruckus. Whoever was back there wasn’t horribly good at being stealthy.
“Sheriff’s office. Open the door or we will break it down.”
In the dark hallway, Deena looked at the crack at the bottom of the closed door, waiting to see if whoever broke in was using a flashlight or fumbling their way through the dark in the unfamiliar terrain. She didn’t see anything shining through. At least this guy was smart enough to know that.
She took one more pause to consider who these people were. They certainly weren’t as trigger-happy as most of Marsh’s men, but they could really be cops for all she knew. Her instincts said they weren’t. Then again she’d been rather messed up for the last several days and her decision-making abilities weren’t all they once were. Seemed strange to Deena that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t send more men, at least a few in uniform, to apprehend someone that they must consider to be a very dangerous fugitive. Surely they would’ve sent squad cars and deputies and, if handy, tanks. Police would be smart enough not to try to enter a house they didn’t know. What if their fugitive were lying in wait for them? No, that wasn’t the general law enforcement strategy.
The floorboards creaked in the master bedroom and Deena made the choice to stop thinking about anything but survival. She pushed the door to the bathroom open and stepped into it. She paused there, waiting for something, anything to happen. She had always hated reacting to things; her preference was to be in charge of what was going on. Initiate and control the situation. This meltdown with her powers, though, had made her react, and react poorly, to everything that had happened since the plane. She could be back in control soon enough, she figured.
In the darkness, she gripped the knife loosely.
The door to the bedroom opened slowly and a man in a black jacket walked out. The jacket was a windbreaker. Deena grinned. Never wear windbreakers. They swoosh when you move. Stupid people.
The man appeared as the pounding on the front door started again. The windbreaker guy was short and held a shotgun in his hands. First the windbreaker, then the shotgun. Stupid people doing stupid things. The shotgun was a dumb move given the situation. She’d never been big on guns, but would’ve gone with a pistol in this case, due to the space constraints of the hallway. More maneuverability. Of course, the shotgun could kill everyone in the hallway with the blast radius, whereas a pistol could only hit in one specific area. But, if you were good enough, one shot was all it took. She hated that thoughts like that entered her head so easily still.
Another man came out of the bedroom behind the short man, and she recognized him as a nobody named Rollie. He handled collections for Marsh on the south side. Deena did the math in her head: Marsh’s people were here to drag her back, NOT the cops with some questions and NOT her sister come to collect her. It was someone else with guns sneaking up on her in the darkness.
She could feel her breathing get slower; felt a calm fall over her body. She moved by instinct, as if she were in a trance or performing some intricate dance that she had memorized all the steps to. She moved behind the half-shut door and waited. Within seconds the barrel of the shotgun appeared in her line of sight, as she knew it would. When the man was fully within her view, she kicked the door shut, leaving them in near darkness with only a shaft of daylight streaming through the windows to see by. Not that it mattered. The man tried to swing around to shoot Deena, but didn’t have enough room. The shotgun took up too much of his turning radius.
Deena used to the man’s sudden confusion to stab him below the armpit with her knife. The pain caused him to pull the trigger involuntarily. In the tiny bathroom, the roar was amplified in the confined space and the toilet exploded, baring the full brunt of the weapon’s discharge. Deena cursed herself for not being better prepared. She’d judged the man for bringing a shotgun into a confined space, while failing to make a plan for herself. Now she was alone in a bathroom with a shotgun-wielding man and at least three other men somewhere outside the door.
In the plus column, the man had taken his hand away from the trigger because of her stab which forced him to let go. Rather than drop the gun, the short man tried to swing it at her, hoping to do some damage that way. It was a clumsy jab and Deena used his momentum to bring her elbow up into his nose, causing a terrible crack.
Out in the living room a crack of another sort exploded forth. Deena guessed it to be the front door being kicked in by the men out front.
As the short man tried to recover from the blow Deena dealt him, he slipped on water and pieces from the shattered toilet and fell, taking Deena down with him. Deena grabbed at the shotgun, trying to wrest control of it from the man, not to use, but t
o keep him from getting off another wild shot that would either blind them or deafen them. Her hands slipped off, covered in blood from where she’d stabbed him. She managed to point the weapon away from herself and toward the door. The man flailed for control as well, with just as much luck.
The door flew open and Deena could make out the face of another one of Marsh’s men standing in the doorframe with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. Much wiser than his friend. She gave up her play for the shotgun and reached for another knife, the first had been lost in the melee somewhere. As she did, the short man took the opportunity to regain his weapon. He managed to grab the stock but only with his weak hand. As he moved for the trigger, his hand slipped and the gun went off. The blast caught the man in the doorway square in the chest.
The short windbreaker-clad thug let out a cry when he saw what had happened and froze for a second before he moved toward his accidental victim.
Deena took the opportunity to pull the steak knife across his throat. It was easy. It was natural. She was suddenly afraid she wasn’t as free from the darkness as she’d believed. The short man dropped to the wet floor among the shards of porcelain, bowl water and blood. She got herself into a crouch and listened. She could make out the shape of the other man’s body, which had fallen into the hall and the pistol he’d dropped just inside the bathroom.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” someone yelled from the living room. “You might as well come on out and talk. The place is completely surrounded.”
She knew it wasn’t. If there were that many of them, they would’ve swarmed the little ranch-style abode easily and overwhelmed her with sheer numbers. Or hosed the place down with gunfire. Better yet, they could’ve stayed out completely and given her the ultimatum from the safety of cover. Odds were good there were only the two of them left, though more could be coming. They probably couldn’t bring themselves to send many people to subdue a girl, even when they knew that girl was dangerous. Like the men on the train, they most likely were spread thin to find her, hold her, and wait for help.