by H. D. Gordon
As I bit into my ham, egg, and cheese croissant like a wild dog, I said, “You don’t always have to feed me, you know?”
More of that gold on the edges of his aura, which was always dark and disturbed in the way that only a war-torn veteran’s can be.
“I know,” he said.
What I liked most about Thomas, besides him being devastatingly handsome, ever stocked with food, and his forbidden fruit status as a twenty-six year old and I only seventeen, was that he didn’t pass judgment. This was a rare quality among humans.
For this reason, and maybe for another I had yet to pin down, I often found myself spilling my soul to him. I’d arrived in Grant City at the beginning of September, and it was nearing the end of December now, but I felt as though I’d known him much longer. Thomas Reid was a good listener, another quality rare to most people.
Also, he’d seen too much strangeness for me not to enlighten him. He’d taken all my revelations remarkably well, too.
“So… remember when I told you about the Peace Brokers?” I asked.
His aura was edged with gold again, and he gave his head a small shake. “Aria, you told me you’re only half human and an excommunicated operative of a secret supernatural organization… and you think I forgot? Yes, I remember the Peace Brokers. What about them?”
I grinned sheepishly, but it vanished quickly. “They’ve reached out, asked for my help with something.”
Thomas said nothing, only pulled his hazel eyes away from the scene of the sun rising over Grant City, and looked at me. It was rare, the moments when he looked directly at me, and it never failed to snatch my breath away.
When it was silent for too long, Thomas said, “Why would you help them after what they’ve done to you?”
I bit my lip. This was the exact question I’d posed to Nick.
“Because the man they want me to help catch is dangerous, and he’s got a particular fascination with me. We’ve got uh… a history.” I swallowed. “And if I help catch him, they might let me come back. I could… I might be able to get my old life back. Go back to the way things were. Be a Peace Broker again. Be with my own kind.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes... I don’t know. Maybe?” I sighed.
Thomas took a moment to absorb this. “What do you mean the man they want you to help catch has a ‘particular interest in you’? What kind of history do you have with him?”
I felt my throat close up and tried to swallow past it. I’d never spoken to anyone about what had really happened between the Scarecrow and me. I’d never wanted to.
But I didn’t end up having a chance to answer, because just then the apartment building adjacent to ours exploded into a burst of flames, and Thomas and I sat stunned in our seats for a moment, watching as fire poured out of the windows and smoke billowed up into the still-dark sky.
It was so close that my hair lifted off my shoulders, my eyes squinting at the explosion. The sound it made seemed to shake the rooftop on which we sat, a blast that scraped across my ultra sensitive ears. My heartbeat jolted into overdrive, and I jumped to my feet.
Closing my eyes and focusing on my ears, I could hear screams coming from the inside of the burning structure, and the wave of fear that hit me from those trapped inside had me swaying back on my feet.
I went to leap over the edge of the rooftop, but a large hand caught mine, jerking me back on my heels, making me stumble.
“Aria,” Thomas said, knowing what I was going to do. “Don’t.” His hazel eyes stared up at me from where he sat, his usually blank and handsome face almost pleading. “Let the fire department come. It’s too dangerous.”
I swallowed, his concern over me touching my heart. “I have to go,” I told him, pulling my hand gently from his grasp. I looked back to the burning building. “Thomas, there are children inside.”
CHAPTER 4
I may be stronger, faster, and have better senses than a human, but I’m not fireproof, and the raging flames filled me with as much fear as they would any person. The only terror stronger, in fact, was that coming from the occupants inside the burning building. Their rush of emotions was so potent that it made my stomach flip to sense their auras, made my jaw clench against burning eyes.
The fire had erupted from the second story of a three-story apartment building, the people on the top floor in a terrible panic. I scaled the building right beside the one on fire, the heat of the flames making sweat bead instantly across my forehead, the billowing smoke forcing me to turn my face away and cough harshly. I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head and squinted my eyes against the irritant.
The training I’d received from the Peace Brokers before they’d banished me allowed me to clear my mind, to regulate my pulse, and to concentrate when most would want to panic.
Belatedly, the smoke alarms in the building began to blare, scraping across my sensitive ears and making my teeth grit in concentration. To my relief, I could sense the auras of those on the third floor, and all of them seemed to be making their way down to safety, not trapped after all.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have to go in.
Then, I heard it. The voice of what could only be a small child, a little cough wracking little lungs. My throat tightened, but I maintained my concentration, pinpointing the terrified and trapped pint-sized soul on the third floor of the burning building.
Taking one last deep breath of smokeless air, I sent up a silent prayer, and leapt onto the rooftop of the enflamed structure. I rolled when I landed, ending up in a crouched position, steady on my feet. It was instantly harder to breathe, the heat ten times more intense. The strengthening flames were lighting up the fading night, the smell of char filling the sky.
I shielded my eyes with my arm and moved toward where I sensed the girl’s aura, standing on the roof above where she must be. Leaning over the edge of the building, I saw a window only ten feet below, the sill of which was maybe six inches in width.
Swallowing, but not hesitating, I swung myself over the edge of the building, gripping the ledge and dropping lithely down to the thin windowsill below, crouching immediately to maintain my balance. Having accomplished this without falling to my death, I breathed a small sigh of relief, but reminded myself that had been the easy part.
The glass of the third-story window I was leaning against was already growing warm, the flames spreading the way flames do; with wild abandon. Knowing I had zero time to waste, I tried to push open the window, only to find it was locked. Because of course it was locked. A touch of panic swirled in me, but I bit down on the sensation, made a fist, and punched through the glass instead.
This shattered the window, making me curse at the torn and bleeding skin over my knuckles. I hardly felt the pain, though, for all the adrenaline running through me, and as I swung into the burning building, the heat became nearly suffocating.
Now, it was admittedly difficult to focus, and suddenly my respect for firemen grew immeasurably. Sam and I could joke about how I was a hero all we wanted, but the true heroes were the ordinary people who put their lives on the line on a daily basis to save strangers in these situations. I was scared out of my wits, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
But there was a child’s life on the line, a child of no more than six or seven years old, judging by her aura, and scared or not, I couldn’t just leave her. I had to try.
My ears told me the fire trucks were only a couple of blocks away. My heart told me this was not close enough.
The floor was hot, the walls swelling, the room I’d swung into clouded with deadly smoke. The girl was in the room beside this one, crouched against the wall and too afraid to move.
I pulled my shirtfront up over my mouth and nose, got down and crossed the bedroom I’d entered crawling on my hands and knees. When I got to the door, I put a hand against it and found it hot. I took a breath, stood up, stepped back, and kicked the door open with all my might. It flew off its hinges and skidded out into the hall. With i
ts removal, intense heat rushed into the room, the flames working their way up through the ceiling just below.
It was hard to see, hard to breathe, impossible to think. Moving out into the hallway took more courage than I thought I had, but my feet obeyed the command and I moved toward the room I knew the child to be in. The little soul’s aura was rife with enough fear to make my stomach turn.
Flames licked at my face, heating up the left side of me, but I managed to keep moving. Twisting the hot metal knob of the door beside the one I’d exited, I pushed into the room where the girl was.
It was a dismal little bedroom, almost small enough to be a closet, and the walls were painted a fading pink that somehow served to make the space sadder, more despaired. The paint bubbled in places where the heat had reached it, making for a horror-movie effect. I glanced around the small room and located the child, my heart jumping up into my already tight throat.
She was a tiny little thing, adorable on a scale that almost made one’s heart ache just to look at her. She had the smoothest of chocolate skin, and puffy black hair that was tied in two clouds of pigtails right behind her ears. She was sitting against the wall between a multicolored plastic dresser and a matching toddler bed that I thought she might be a touch too old for. Her little knees were pulled up to her chest, her big brown eyes filled with fear and tears streaking down her beautiful face. A stuffed tiger was clutched tight in her hands, and she blinked up at me in terrified silence.
I moved over to her in a flash and scooped her up into my arms as though she were my own—and in that very moment, I supposed, she was. I gave her a smile, and ran a thumb over her cheek, brushing a tear away.
“I’m gonna get you out of here, sweetheart,” I told her. “All I need you to do is close your eyes and hold on tight. You think you can do that?”
She nodded, in too much shock to speak. She tucked her head against my chest, her little arms holding fast around my neck.
With her hanging onto me, I moved back out into the hallway, running through flames that threatened to scorch me and shielding the girl as best I could. A rush of heat and fiery blaze hit us and made me stumble, but somehow, I made it back into the adjacent room with the broken window I’d climbed in through.
Somewhere behind us in the hallway, there was an enormous crack and boom, the terrible sounds of structure buckling.
I rushed over to the window through which I’d entered, realizing with a sinking in my chest that we were not in the clear yet. There was no fire escape outside this particular room, and I couldn’t swing up to the roof with the girl in my arms even if I wanted to—which I didn’t, not with the building coming close to collapsing below it. No, we needed to get to the ground.
“I want my momma,” the little girl said, her voice muffled against my chest, her words wrenching at the muscle inside it. “I want my momma,” she repeated.
I held her close, trying my best to keep my wits about me. Leaning out the window, I spotted a drainage pipe about three and a half feet away that went all the way down to the sidewalk below. Looking back at the approaching flames, which had just begun to lick over the edges of the doorframe of the room we were in, I knew there was really no choice. This was the only exit.
I swallowed hard and held the girl out a bit so that she could look at me. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Maleia,” she said.
I gave her the best smile I could muster. “That’s a beautiful name. Maleia, everything is going to be okay. I’m going to take you to your mommy. All I need you to do is hold onto me, hold onto me as tight as you can, because I’m going to have to let you go so I can climb us down that pipe out there. Can you do that? Can you hang on?”
Big brown eyes stared back at me, her aura more filled with fear than it had likely ever experienced in her short life, and she nodded.
“Good,” I said. “Move onto my back, okay? And remember to hold on tight.”
Maleia shifted around to my back, her arms going around my neck and her little legs about my waist. With a hitch in my throat, I pulled my hood down tighter over my head and climbed out onto the six-inch window ledge, with the child clutching for dear life on my shoulders.
CHAPTER 5
The leap from the ledge to the drainage pipe was the worst part of all. If I missed, or lost my grip now, the little girl and I would fall to the pavement below, and probably to our deaths.
It was harder than I’d anticipated with her added weight, and I could hardly breathe past the smoke that was filling the night air and the pounding of my heart in my chest.
Crouching on the ledge, I stretched my right arm out as far as I could reach, my fingers brushing the pipe. I’d need to reach a little further, and with every second that passed, I felt my anxiety increasing.
Risking losing my balance, I stretched out just a bit further… and at last, reached the pipe, wrapping my fingers around it in a death-grip.
With a move that nearly stopped my heart, I swung us out into the open air, latching onto the drainage pipe with a sigh of relief that had me coughing on the smoke. The pipe groaned and shuddered under our weight. I reminded Maleia to hold on, and wasted no time climbing down.
The descent couldn’t have taken me more than a minute and a half, maybe two, but it felt like an eternity to me, and certainly to the terrified child on my back. When the soles of my shoes finally touched the pavement, I bent over double, clutching at my knees. Maleia was still attached to my back, and I could hardly process the fact that we’d made it.
I shifted her to the front of me, brushing away more of her tears and offering her a smile that made my lips quiver. “We made it, Maleia,” I said. “You did amazing.”
We were in the small alley beside the building, and on the street ahead, I could see the flash of red and blue lights from the police and fire engines parked at the curb. I could also hear the crying and screaming of a woman.
“She’s still inside!” the woman cried. “Oh my God! My baby! Please save my baby! She’s still in there!”
Slipping my black mask out of my pocket, I asked Maleia if she could keep a secret. She nodded that she could, and when I showed her the mask, she took it into her tiny fingers and pulled it over my head for me, concealing the top half of my face. Then she pulled my hood back over my head.
“I saw you on the news,” she told me. “My mommy said you must be a damn fool.”
The admission shocked me; the obviously repeated words making me chuckle at the same time as tears burned my eyes. “I think your mommy might be right,” I said, and the little darling smiled a smile that was missing the front left tooth.
I carried Maleia around to the front of the building, spotting her distraught mother on the sidewalk. When her mother saw us, she ran over to me and pulled the girl out of my arms, holding her close.
She stared at me with eyes as wide and as brown as her daughter’s. “Oh my God,” she said. “Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Praise Jesus. Praise Jesus.” She took my hands and kissed them. “Thank you so much. You saved my baby.”
I nodded, winking at Maleia when she turned her little head to look at me, and got the hell out of there before I could be spotted by the firemen or police, who were plenty involved with containing the flames.
A few minutes later, I was leaping back over the rooftop of my own building, which had a close view of the chaos taking place across the street and below, but was luckily far enough away to not be in danger of igniting as well.
Thomas Reid was leaning over the edge, staring at the scene with tight shoulders. When I landed beside him, his large hand came up and gripped at his chest, over the place where I knew his heart to be.
In a flash that nearly made me gasp, he was clutching my shoulders in his strong hands. “For the love of God, Aria,” he breathed. “Don’t ever do that again.”
This reaction shocked me so that I could do no more than stand there, staring up into his hazel eyes and at the tension and relief pulsing th
rough his aura. I found I had to swallow twice before I could speak.
“I… I couldn’t leave her,” I said, and the tone in which my voice sounded revealed how scared I’d truly been. “Did… did you see?”
His stare held me in a suspended state, his eyes an endless hall down which I could wander. His right hand lifted from my shoulder, his rough but gentle fingertips brushing my chin, causing the air to rush into my lungs and then stop up in my chest.
Slowly, just barely making contact, his thumb brushed down my cheek. I stood immobile as he gently pulled a few ashes from my hair, which was hanging onto its bun-status by the skin of its teeth. My cheeks were aflame, my blood afire as I realized that I probably looked like a hot ass mess right about now.
Of course, Thomas Reid looked like… Well, Thomas Reid—tall and imposing, dark hair and light hazel eyes, a strong jaw constantly adorned with a five o’ clock shadow… and too old for me with his twenty-six years. Not that he was even interested in me in that way, anyway.
In reality, this intense little moment between the two of us only lasted a handful of heartbeats, but I would examine the interaction in the days to come the way a biologist studies a curious cell under a microscope. I would replay it in my head like a YouTube video.
One held breath, that’s really all it was. Then Thomas stepped away from me rather abruptly, shaking his head just once, as if waking from a dream. I stepped out of my own little dream world and smacked right back down in reality.
“Alright,” I said. “Well, that was a… uh… awkward little moment we just shared,” I said, chuckling nervously and then resisting the almost overwhelming urge to slap myself on the forehead for this idiotic and embarrassing utterance.
I was rewarded for my efforts, however, because I saw that touch of golden-yellow fill the edges of Thomas’s aura, which I knew represented amusement. The hint of a half smile even played on his lips.