The metal railing came up to the middle of her rib cage, but that was no big deal. She’d always liked to climb, even though she fell a lot. Everyone—her mother, the doctors and teachers—said she didn’t have good coordination because she had something called “FAS,” but she didn’t know what that meant and she didn’t care. Sometimes she got hurt when she fell (once she even broke her arm), but she didn’t care about that, either. If she wanted to climb on something, or over it, she was going to do it and that was that.
There were metal bars going up and down beneath the railing that made it kind of hard because her shoes kept slipping back down to the concrete. Having to try over and over again made her mad but she kept trying, being what Daddy called “too stupid and stubborn to stop.” She didn’t know what that meant, but he always laughed at her when he said it. Eventually Danielle just hooked her arms around the railing, swung one leg back and forth to get some momentum going, and hurled her lower body up as hard as she could.
Got it! One leg, the knee bruised from banging against the bars, managed to come up high enough so that her foot hooked over the railing. She hung there awkwardly, but she wasn’t about to let go and fall, not after all this effort. She heard Miss Anthony shout something, but the teacher had chased that boy almost to the end of the bridge before catching him, and she was too far away to stop Danielle from doing anything.
It was hard but Danielle dragged herself up—everyone was always saying she was really strong. She wobbled on the railing for just a second like her body was deciding which way it would go, so she leaned the other way until she half fell on the other side. It wasn’t a good landing—she was off balance and there wasn’t much of a ledge to stand on—but she still managed to hang on to the top part of the metal with one hand. Miss Anthony was shouting a lot now, and so were some other people, but she didn’t know who they were. One was some guy running down the bridge’s sidewalk toward her. He was a lot closer than Miss Anthony, who was kind of big and couldn’t run very fast anyway, but Danielle had been taught not to listen to or talk to strangers so she didn’t pay any attention to him.
The bird made a sort of cooing sound at her, and that made Danielle realize it was waiting for her. She didn’t like dogs or cats, but she was good with birds. Always before the birds had been smaller and in cages, like the green one her grandmother had, but Danielle didn’t think it made much of a difference either way. This one was big and kind of dirty gray with spots, but maybe it just needed a bath. When she caught it, she would take it home and give it one.
The man on the bridge was almost to her, and now she could hear him shouting, “Stay there! Don’t move!” Danielle wasn’t sure but he was probably someone Miss Anthony knew, and the teacher had sent him down here to get her. That was great, but it wasn’t going to happen before she got her bird.
Still holding on with one hand, she leaned over and tried to grab at it, but she wasn’t close enough. It didn’t move, so it must be tame and it was just waiting for her. Down below was greenish-brown water—the river—and there wasn’t much room for her feet, which she had to kind of shove between the concrete and the bottom of the fencing along the side of the bridge. She was a little dizzy from being so high above the river, but she wasn’t scared because she was a really good swimmer. Once she’d even swum all the way across the kiddie pool at the school by herself.
The bird cooed at her again, a sure sign it was friendly. Danielle turned her head and saw the man on the sidewalk was almost upon her, just a short distance away. He yelled something at her but she wasn’t listening, and when he lunged forward and tried to seize her hand, she did a quick sideways shuffle to take herself out of range. She was almost there, so she leaned over and grabbed at the pigeon, then jerked backward in surprise when the idiot thing pecked at her.
“Damned bird,” she said. It wasn’t the first time she’d cursed, especially using this particular word. She’d heard Daddy say it many times, and even Mom, although that was usually after she’d had her customary six-pack every night. If the pigeon was going to peck at her, she didn’t want it, and she would let it know that, too, before she climbed back onto the sidewalk.
Still holding on with her left hand, Danielle bent at the waist and swiped at the mean pigeon, intending to give it back what it had given her. Bad idea—instead of just taking off, the bird flew straight up, right into her face. She let go of the railing and flailed at it angrily as it blocked her eyesight. Something scraped at her wrist and she registered the feeling of feathers and claws against her cheeks, and then it was gone.
And so was her grip, her tenuous position on the narrow strip of concrete, and everything solid below her feet.
Suddenly the murky green water below her didn’t seem so far away after all.
HE MISSED.
He couldn’t believe it, and for a stunned second, Casey froze, staring at his empty fingers and the vacant spot where the dark-haired young woman had been only a moment before. The older woman who’d been running toward them started screaming and there were shouts from other people from both directions on the bridge, someone bellowing about a life preserver. A memory of something Gina said at lunch flashed through his mind—
“You can swim, right?”
—and he vaulted over the railing without thinking about it twice.
It was the longest twenty feet in his life—not that he’d ever previously jumped off anything this high—and the fall seemed like it took forever. The woman had gone under and he couldn’t see her, although the surface of the water was churning madly. Was she trying to come back up? Could she swim? The way she’d been acting made him think she was mentally handicapped or something—
Then he smacked feet-first into the cold, nasty-colored water and forgot about everything that had happened above the river itself.
He shouldn’t have been surprised at the temperature but he was. Today’s unseasonably cold weather had nothing to do with his expectations—those came from the previous couple of weeks, the tail end of summer where the thermometer had climbed into the low nineties. None of that was relevant. The source of the Chicago River was Lake Michigan, and the water temperature was maybe in the mid-sixties—damned cold. The impact, even feet-first, forced water into his mouth and nose with astonishing might as his own body weight drove him deep beneath the water. He clawed his way back to the surface, choking and spitting out the foul-tasting liquid, then jerked around in the water as he tried to find the young woman.
Nothing—she’d gone under and not come back up. Maybe she couldn’t swim, or because of the way she’d been positioned, maybe she’d been knocked unconscious when she’d hit the water. Casey dove beneath the surface and opened his eyes, then slammed them shut again when he saw nothing but dark shadows and his eyes instantly started burning. He’d never find her by sight.
Something splashed into the water behind him—a life preserver, tossed over the railing by someone on the bridge. He ignored it and dove again, keeping his eyes closed this time but extending out his arms in first one direction, then another. Nothing, but he wouldn’t give up—she was just a young woman, probably still a teenager. He would give everything he had to try and find her.
He came up, gulped for air, then went back under, again and again. Every time he came back up with his neck stretched and his face pushed toward the overcast sky, he shook the water out of his eyes and got a stinging vision of more and more people gathered at the railing so far above. A few more times and there were lights, red ones from a fire truck, blue ones from police cars—he could see them twinkling as they cycled. The cops were leaning over the edge and shouting at him; even though he couldn’t hear the words, Casey knew they were telling him to grab the life preserver and give up on the woman.
But Casey couldn’t, not until there was just no more of a chance, no more hope. He dove again and again, losing count, but finally he thought his hand brushed something off to his right. He was almost at the end of his breath but he lunged for
it anyway; his reward was tangling his fingerin something long and silky—hair? It had to be. He closed his fist in the mass and dragged it up to the surface with him.
He came up and got hit in the face by the wake of a Chicago Police boat. It took the captain only a few seconds to spot him and bring the boat around, about the same amount of time it took Casey to realize that he really had found the woman. The current had pushed the life preserver out of reach, so Casey hooked one forearm under the woman’s chin to keep her face out of the water and began pulling himself backward toward the vessel. When it angled alongside him, he turned and helped hoist her out of the water as the officers on board reached for her. In another minute he was also onboard, standing and watching as they laid her out on deck and began CPR and the boat began speeding back toward a docking area where an ambulance was waiting.
The two policemen working over her seemed to be trying their hardest, but she wasn’t moving. Casey stood there, bruised, out of breath and shivering under a blanket he hadn’t even realized someone had tossed over his shoulders. When the boat was at the side of the river, it took less than a minute for the paramedics to clamber down with a stretcher, get the woman loaded and strapped on, then take her off the boat.
When Casey started to follow, one of the officers, an older gray-haired man, stopped him. “Let them handle it, son. Do you know her?”
Casey watched them go and shook his head. “No. I just tried to save her.”
The cop nodded. “Okay. I’m going to need some information from you, then we’ll get you off the boat and find someone to take you home, or wherever it is you want to go.”
Casey nodded and cleared his throat. The river water had left a bad, oily taste in his mouth. They had pulled up next to a mini-park area, where lots of the downtown workers came to eat their lunches and enjoy the noontime sun. The ambulance was still there, the red, white, and yellow lights flashing almost hypnotically across its front. Instead of loading the woman into the back, the medics had stopped the gurney and were working over her just behind the vehicle’s open rear doors.
“Is she going to be all right?”
The police officer followed his gaze but didn’t say anything for a moment. “It’s not looking good,” he finally told Casey. “They’ll keep at it, but I’m pretty sure she was already gone when you pulled her out of the water.”
Casey’s hands clutched at the blanket. “She’s dead?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Disbelieving, Casey stared at the motionless wet body on the gurney.
He’d missed.
Fourteen
Eran was waiting for her when Brynna finished with her latest job. There’d been nothing special or complicated about the two-hour meeting, which had been a simple home purchase by a newly married Arabic couple; the husband’s father, who barely understood English, had kicked in the down payment and was a cosigner on the loan, so the seller’s attorney had insisted on an impartial interpreter. Everything had gone smoothly once the elder man had gotten over his reluctance at having a female translator; now their papers were signed and the deal was closed, and Brynna was looking forward to the weekend. She didn’t exactly work nine to five every day, but somehow she’d acclimated herself to the very human routine of Monday to Friday, even when Eran’s hours didn’t match hers. It was kind of amusing that in an existence spanning thousands upon thousands of years, only a few months among mankind could alter her outlook so much.
“How about dinner?” Eran pulled his Mitsubishi away from the curb after they were both seat-belted. “And a movie.”
“A movie?” Brynna considered this. Eran had an extensive collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, and she’d watched plenty of them at his apartment since she’d moved in. They were an excellent and fast source of cultural education, and it was fascinating to see the way humans had evolved creatively as well as what they considered entertaining. “You mean in a theater?”
“Sure,” he said as he jockeyed for position in the heavy Friday afternoon traffic. Even in his personal car he had a police scanner, and he reached over automatically and flipped the switch to ON. “Just like a real date.”
“Is it safe?” She was talking about Hunters, but she didn’t need to tell him that.
Eran tapped the steering wel as he thought about her question. “I think so,” he said finally. “We’ll go to one of the mega-theaters, where there are a bunch of screens and lots of people. Hunters aren’t big on being seen by the general public.”
“All right,” Brynna said, although she still had her doubts.
Before she could get into it further, Eran tensed and reached to turn up the volume on the scanner. “Hold it—I think our guy is at it again.” He leaned sideways and pulled a light bubble out of the glove compartment, then slid it onto the dashboard. In another moment, a revolving red light, coupled with him leaning on the horn, began to cut a path through the downtown traffic. “But this time I think we have a chance to get our hands on him.”
BRYNNA FOLLOWED ERAN AS he moved with admirable speed down the stairs that led from Wacker Drive to the concrete park area bordering the river. There was a crowd of people down there—cops, ambulance personnel, a couple of bystanders. Off to one side was a woman whose red-rimmed eyes were stark contrast against skin gone white with shock; clustered around her were a handful of children of various ages, most of whom seemed to have physical characteristics pointing to some kind of mental disability.
About ten feet away from her and flanked by two police officers was the rescuer. Had his height and healthy stature not already clued her in, Brynna knew he was a nephilim the instant she got close enough to pick up his scent; even the river’s trash and greasy residue couldn’t cover the clean, fresh ocean scent that emanated from his skin. As she always did any time she was around a nephilim, Brynna thought it was a damned shame humans couldn’t enjoy their fragrance as she could.
Someone tried to stop Eran but a flash of his detective’s star-shaped badge took care of that. He dragged her forward and headed for the nephilim; at the last second Brynna pulled free and veered off, her attention caught by the ashen-faced young woman on a gurney just to the rear of the ambulance. She was hardly more than a girl and her facial features were slightly abnormal, like those of several of the other children. Her dark hair was fouled by the river water and her eyes had the dark shadows of death beneath them above lips blue with oxygen deprivation, enough so the color showed through the contraption over her mouth. The medics were working diligently on her, and Brynna was impressed with their stubbornness; one methodically compressed her chest while the other kept squeezing a sort of rubber balloon attached to a cup over the girl’s mouth. There was a lot of scurrying back and forth and a lot of talking, but everyone seemed too busy to notice her, so Brynna stepped up to the end of the gurney and touched the young woman on the ankle.
She’s angry, very angry at Miss Anthony and she doesn’t want to sit down and be quiet. She’s tired of being told to act like a grown-up because grown-ups don’t have any fun and she doesn’t want to be one. She’s really upset and she stomps her foot and screams right in the middle of the classroom. Some of the other kids—they are so stupid—are so surprised they start crying, and then the rest start shrieking with her, their voices getting louder and louder as they try to outdo each other and her, too. It makes her even madder that they’re doing this because they’re taking all the attention away from her, it’s her time to get Miss Anthony’s attention and to let her know that she’s not going to do what she doesn’t want to do. She’s so mad that she snatches at the thing closest to her. It’s a pencil cup, and when it tips over she scoops up the pencils and, still hollering as loudly as she can, heads toward the noisy, bratty bunch of kids. Miss Anthony is hurrying across the room but not fast enough to stop her from grabbing one of the boys and ramming the pencil into his eye. “Shut up!” she screams. “My turn, not yours!” But the others are making even more noise now, and Miss Anthony tries to
catch her and turn her, so when she does, she pokes Miss Anthony in the side of the head with a different pencil, and it goes in and in and in—
“Miss, if you’re not a relative, please step back,” someone said. “They need to load her into the ambulance.”
Brynna jerked when she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder but managed to stop herself before she did anything unpleasant. Thankfully her days of responding badly to an unexpected touch were over; she did as she was told and watched in silence as they hoisted the gurney through the open doors. They hadn’t quit working on her, but Brynna could tell that both hope and energy were starting to lag. She wanted to tell them to quit now, because the only way she saw a flash of anything in the future when she touched someone directly was in the “would have” realm—what “would have” happened if the person had lived and Brynna got her hands on him or her in that oh-so-short window of the just-demised time. This young woman was dead, and this time the nephilim-rescuer had failed.
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