From her phone: “You need to cross the road.”
“Not with this traffic.” An eighteen wheeler rushed by, and for a second, the rumble of its tires and engine drowned out all other sounds.
If the woman was watching, she’d know Daisy couldn’t cross. Not here, without a light. “You bettah tell me who the fuck you are! Or I’m hanging up. Got it?” Damn it, Daisy worked hard to rein in her foreignness. To not sound as different as she looked. But she could only concentrate on so many issues at once.
“Listen to me, Daisy Reynolds. The Burner cannot touch you.”
How did this weirdly foreign woman know her name?
The volume of the woman’s voice increased. “Cross the road! Now!”
Daisy jumped the curb and her feet hit the hot asphalt between two parked SUVs. She ducked out carefully, looking at the traffic. Three cars screamed from one direction, but if she ran, she’d make the center median. She’d have to wait there until the traffic flow on the other side thinned.
Behind her, the weird man yelled at the woman with the dog. The little animal growled and snapped.
Every day of her life, Daisy thanked the universe for making dogs, and today was no different.
A rickety old truck rolled by and Daisy dashed out into the street, running as fast as she could, and snagged a street sign in the median. She swung around it, slowing herself, as car after car flew by on the other side of the road.
She was out in the open now, and the homeless guy yelled something she couldn’t hear. He jammed his fingers in the air like he was trying to pop bubbles floating around his head.
Something rustled on the other end of the call. The woman must have moved.
Daisy’s fingers tightened around her phone. What was she doing? Why was she listening to this woman? What if this woman and the homeless guy were working together?
“I am not like him.” More mind reading from the woman. “I am not like you, either. You are Mutatae, Daisy. A Shifter. The man chasing you is Ambustae. A Burner.”
Shifter? Her mom used to read her fairytales about shapeshifters. But that was more bullshit, just like killer cyborgs.
Another noise, like the woman rubbed up against something, floated through the phone. “That need of yours to make sure you do right? To be good? You must cross the road and offer aid.”
Daisy’s breath stopped halfway into her lungs. Her stomach pushed upward, into her chest. The woman hadn’t called because Daisy would be “important in the future.” She called because she knew Daisy would never knowingly let someone suffer.
And knew that a seventeen-year-old in a weird-as-fuck situation was probably weirded-out enough to do as she fucking commanded.
The traffic spread out. Behind her, the homeless guy dashed into the road.
“Run now, Daisy Reynolds. I fear that Burner is about to draw the attention of people who will interfere in matters they cannot, and a good man—and his family—will suffer if you do not listen to me. He needs your help. Your help. You must, this one time, do what you were meant to do.”
Again, Daisy’s feet moved on their own. They slid over the concrete of the median and into the road. The sun’s heat baked down on the black waves of Daisy’s hair, and up through the ground under her boots. She smelled the world once more—the stink of bad fried food mingled with the wafting drafts of department store perfumes from the mall on the other side of the road. The chemical-medical odors of the clinic in the strip mall in front of her. All the exhaust from the cars and buses.
And the scary, weird smell of burning acid coming off the homeless guy.
When she glanced back, looking at the creepy douchebag and not where she was running, she saw it again. Red eyes.
Her heart almost pounded out of her chest.
Maybe he really was the ghoul the woman said he was.
He closed in and hit the median just as she darted into oncoming traffic. Close enough that if he grabbed for her, he’d get a tight grip around her elbow for sure. And she wouldn’t get away.
She had a ghoul after her. What was happening might be bullshit but the homeless guy smelled different. Smelled unreal and very, very dangerous.
“Show me I made the right decision calling you, Daisy.” That’s all the woman said. Just spoke words meant to convey do it right.
Because people stink. And people do weird shit. And there was a good man across the street who needed help as much as Daisy did.
She disconnected the call. She should turn around as she tucked her phone into her pocket. Look at the traffic. But a deep little voice told her not to turn her back on the man the woman on the phone had called a “Burner.” She saw it in the strange set of his shoulders. He twisted his neck to the side in a way that should have popped vertebrae. He was about to snap his jaws at her like a confused coyote and Daisy knew you should never turn your back on a crazed animal.
Brakes screeched.
Daisy hadn’t been looking. She should have been looking.
The fender of the big black car hit her knee, the one she’d knocked against the bus shelter bench. Something snapped.
Something snapped bad.
And when Daisy Reynolds’s head slammed against the blisteringly hot surface of the road, her bad had only just begun.
Chapter Four
Metal hit metal. People yelled. The dog on the other side of the road barked. The sun blazed and Daisy fell over because she didn’t look before running into traffic.
Her phone rang again.
Her entire body picked up the vibration. The stupid thing screamed its ring tone from under the denim of her jeans but mostly she heard her own blood pumping in her skull. It sloshed around in there, like her brain sloshed when her head bounced on the pavement.
A car door slammed. More yelling. Shadows fell over Daisy’s face and she smelled a lot of fear. Anger, too. And confusion.
Then the sun backlit some huge guy who wasn’t the homeless man. Or she hoped wasn’t the homeless man. But the homeless man wasn’t as big. Nor did he smell sterile and antibiotic-y like a medical clinic.
The phone stopped buzzing against her hip bone, where it waited in her pocket.
Daisy’s brain sloshed and now a huge man with black hair and strange hazel eyes with green sunbursts in the center hunched over her as he yelled at a lot of other people.
He wasn’t the vicious homeless guy, thank God. But he still smelled different.
He should smell like a person.
And Daisy’s basketball-dunked brain stuttered out He’s weird too. He’s another kind of weird!
“Miss, can you hear me?” The huge man with the strange eyes was damn fine-looking, with a nicely-shaped square jaw and good, strong Spanish features. Even if he was obviously daddy-aged.
“Ummm…” she panted. She moved her lips and now she tasted something hot and metallic and bloody. “God damn it, I’m bleeding!”
“Don’t move.” The big guy’s hand splayed over her upper chest, just below her neck, and over her breastbone. “You were hit by a car.”
Fuck. “That bitch on my phone told me to run into the street.”
The man’s face hardened. “Who told you to run into traffic?” He glanced around, checking the crowd, like he was expecting a gang with guns to burst out of one of the cars. “Did you feel compelled by her voice to do as she said?”
“No!” Daisy groaned. “She said the guy chasing me is a… Burner?” She groaned again. “She said he’s dangerous and she sounded like she knew what was about to happen.”
The man with the sunburst eyes stood up for a moment, looking over the car right next to them. The car that must have hit her.
He swore in Spanish.
Her phone buzzed again.
Daisy’s leg hadn’t really hurt up until the damned phone started ringing again. But when it vibrated a second time, the tingle set off an earthquake of fire-hot pain through her entire lower body. “That’s her!” Daisy groaned and tried not to clench her jaw.
“Bitch!”
The man looked around again and reached into Daisy’s pocket. His fingers moved fast and he pulled out the phone. “No number.”
Another wave of agony rolled through Daisy’s gut and up through her lungs, into her neck, where it met the sloshing pain as it trickled downward from her brain.
The big man pressed the accept button on her phone and held it up to his ear at the same time he bent over Daisy again. He danced his finger over her forehead, then down the side of her head looking, she suspected, for blood.
His fingers felt hot. Not warm large-man-in-the-sun hot, but hot like a toaster.
And suddenly the slosh feeling in her brain stopped.
“Are you a Fate?” he said into her phone.
Just as fast as his fingers had started to heat, he pulled back from Daisy. His other hand clenched the phone. And the big guy’s face took on the slack, wide-open-eyes look of someone shocked by a surprise birthday party.
“I understand.” He wasn’t talking to Daisy. He watched the other side of the road. And he was talking to that bitch.
He disconnected the call and stuffed her phone into his pocket. “She says the man following you attracted the attention of other people like her.” One of his hands dropped to her hip joint on the side where she’d been hit. The heat flashed through her jeans to her skin. “A triad she cannot see clearly. They will be here shortly.”
The pain stopped.
His hand moved lower. Another flash hit her body like someone touched her skin with a curling iron.
The pain in her knee stopped. “What…” He did something. He healed her.
“Act like you continue to hurt, but not so much that me carrying you would cause more damage.” Quickly, he hoisted her up in his arms, but he wasn’t looking at her. He watched the other side of the road.
“How am I supposed to do that?” How much weirder could this get? “And who the hell are you?”
Daisy smelled something new in the air. Something that wasn’t her own fear or her blood, or the exhaust from the cars or the sweat of the bystanders. No, she smelled the brilliance of a spring day. The soft warmth of the afternoon sun. Cleanness. Sweetness.
Daisy smelled ‘calm.’
The man was something different.
“I will not be calm!” she hissed.
The big guy blinked and stood with her in his arms, like he picked up a toy. Like she weighed nothing. “That Burner has your scent and the Fate told me that if I leave you, you will die. That means he will catch you. And eat you. Do you understand?”
She nodded. “The woman called him a ‘chaos ghoul.’”
He still wasn’t looking at her face. “That’s what he is.” He looked around, his eyes piercing and narrow. “My name is Alessandro Torres, young lady.” Sarcasm crept into his smooth voice. “It looks as if fate has brought us together.”
Chapter Five
When the woman who’d been driving the car that hit Daisy came near, the air filled with confusion and she started waving her arms around, causing a frenzy.
Daisy couldn’t see the homeless guy.
The big man named Alessandro Torres dropped his head low like he wanted to hide his face as he carried Daisy through the strip mall parking lot. With his foot, he pushed open the front door of the clinic housed at the end of the building. Carefully, he hoisted her inside.
The sun’s glare vanished as they crossed the threshold and a whole new brew of stink hit Daisy’s nose: Old people. That gross, foul smell that comes with sinus infections. Disinfectant. The weird industrial fabric softener smell on industrially laundered clothes and linens. The receptionist’s perfume.
Daisy hated clinics.
“Megan!” The big man nodded to the receptionist and carried Daisy through the lobby directly toward the door into the back of the waiting area.
The woman behind the reception window craned her neck, watching, but she moved out of view and after a second the door flew open.
“Dr. Torres.” Megan-the-receptionist stepped out of the way as two other women in scrubs ran up.
“You’re a doctor?” Daisy hated clinics, but for some reason she trusted doctors. Doctors and nurses and firefighters. But not cops.
He didn’t answer her question, addressing Megan instead. “She’s not that banged up but the guy out there in the denim shirt was chasing her. She’s terrified and disoriented.” Dr. Torres walked quickly down the hall. “What room is open?”
One of the nurses scurried ahead of them and flipped a couple of the colored flags outside a room halfway down the hall.
“Call 911. Tell them the clinic thinks the man is mentally ill. He threatened this young woman and she thinks he’s carrying a bomb. They need to stay back from him. At least fifteen feet. For their safety.” Dr. Torres set her on the narrow clinic bed in the narrow, beige clinic room.
Megan nodded. “What’s your name?” She patted Daisy’s arm like her mom had when Daisy was a kid and got a booboo, even though this Megan woman looked to be no more than twenty-five.
“Cindy, right?” Dr. Torres’s eyes said lie.
So Daisy lied. “Cindy Reynolds.” Best to lie with something close to the truth. The nearer the falsehood, the harder it is to find. Or at least that’s what her mom said.
“Go!” Dr. Torres shooed Megan out the door.
The moment they were alone, he turned back to Daisy. “The Fate said you don’t know your heritage, correct?”
“I’m Australian, but my mom says we’re not supposed to tell anyone.” Though here she was, telling this guy.
He scowled and inhaled like she’d just said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Simple and fast: Burners are exactly what the Fate said they are—vicious, caustic ghouls.” He frowned, obviously more perplexed than angry, and glanced at the door. “You and I, we’re something else. We’re Shifters. Some of us morph. Some enthrall, which means they can make you do things.”
He quickly ducked his head out the door before stepping back to Daisy. “Some Shifters, like me, heal. Got it?” He pushed her gently to the side and looked at her hip. “Do your injuries continue to hurt? Do you think you are able to run?”
So the asshole chasing her was going to eat her. Daisy shivered. But her now non-wounds were proof this guy had a touch.
She answered his questions. “Um, yes, no, and yes.”
He grinned and checked her eyes. “So the concussion has eased, as well?”
She did feel clearheaded. “I think so.”
The doctor stepped toward the door again. “The woman who called you is a Fate.” He glanced over his shoulder, apparently listening for people moving in the hallway. “I’m pretty sure she’s a future-seer.”
“What? Burners and… Shifters… are weird enough. Now gods, too?” And she was one of these creatures?
“Fates are not gods.” Dr. Torres shook his head. “Your parents never explained your heritage to you? About activation and how to watch for creatures who might want to harm you?” He patted the pocket where he carried her phone. “Or about Fates?”
“No.” Her mom liked her secrets. “My mom and I keep to ourselves. She doesn’t want anyone knowing anything about us.”
“Someone should have told you.” Dr. Torres slapped the wall. “Where is your father?”
Daisy snorted. “Good question. Probably back home, in Perth.”
He looked her up and down. “Then there’s a chance your mother doesn’t know. That you’re Shifter on your father’s side.” He snorted like he thought it was funny.
“Hey! It’s not my fault I don’t know!” Daisy swung her leg, testing again for pain. “Or that I have some tool of a daddy who abandoned us before I was born.”
The doctor’s arms and shoulders clenched. “And now you have a Burner chasing you.”
“The woman said I’m future-important.” She jumped down from the exam table and rolled her eyes. Daisy put weight on her leg and it didn’t hurt, either. She stepped to the side a
nd back. Running wouldn’t be a problem.
The doctor glanced out the door again, but didn’t say anything.
“Ghouls. Gods.” Daisy stopped for a moment and attempted to center her mind. “Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. But will you at least tell me why he wants to eat me?” She took a step toward him, hoping. Dr. Torres seemed trustworthy, and it wasn’t just the doctor thing, either. He came across as protective. Daddy-protective.
Daisy sniffed the air but didn’t pick out any weird-smelling odors, or at least weird in a way that said this healing changeling god-person was obsessed-crazy like that Burner.
The doctor slapped the wall again. “This is why I tell my wife our daughter needs to know. A Burner might come after her. Or worse. Other Shifters, like you and me. Or Fates, like the one who called you.”
Daisy’s original sense of fatherhood was correct. This guy was a daddy. And his daughter was in danger because she didn’t know any more about this weird world than Daisy did.
A ping tightened in Daisy’s gut. A ping very much like the one she felt when her friend got a new car the day she got her license. Or the ping like the one she felt when her classmates talked about family vacations or traveling to visit relatives or Disneyland or the Grand Canyon.
Daisy knew what it was: Jealousy.
Flat-out, open-faced jealousy. Some other girl Daisy didn’t know had this man as her papa. And what did Daisy have? Nothing.
But right now, jealousy wasn’t going to help. “How old is your daughter?”
Dr. Torres leaned his head out the door. “Eleven.”
Just a kid. A new pang hit Daisy’s stomach, this one brought up by memories.
No little kid should be in danger. Not from people she didn’t know. Or from people she did. “These… Fates… are dangerous?” Daisy asked.
The doctor didn’t answer and closed his odd sunburst-green eyes. He breathed like he needed to keep himself calm. Like his thoughts were getting out of control and he had to do his best to pull them all together. Daisy had seen a couple of the rowdier boys at school do the same thing. The ones who went to counseling because they couldn’t pay attention in class. Most of them took meds.
Bonds Broken & Silent Page 3