Broken Shadows

by A. J. Larrieu

  He hadn’t been listening to me. “What? Oh. Fine. I’m fine.”

  “Well...see you Wednesday?” I remembered what Malik had said, about making Paulie control himself, but I couldn’t bear to see him so desperate, and he was about as dangerous as a baby rabbit.

  “Yeah.” He downed the rest of his double in one shot. “See you, Mina.” He slouched out. I hoped he would find somewhere quiet to give himself a break.

  The next morning, I let myself sleep in. I always let myself out of practicing the day of a gig—if I didn’t have it down by now, there wasn’t much point. It didn’t help my nerves. I spent the day in an anxious haze until Jackson told me it was time to go.

  My palms started sweating the minute I walked into The Standing Room. Jackson put his hand on my shoulder, and I was too distracted to stop the connection. My skin warmed and buzzed where he touched me.

  “Be careful,” I told him.

  “You’re going to do great.”

  I grumbled and tugged at my shirt. I’d gone back to the shop where I’d gotten the red silk dress. The same girl was at the register, and she recognized me right away. The picture Jackson had taken of me was up on the wall behind her next to a glossy magazine spread from 7X7 and a set of shots of a couple wearing white linen in what looked like an automotive junkyard.

  “I need something sparkly,” I’d told her.

  I’d walked out with a fitted cream-colored shirt with fine gold thread embroidered in lines down the bodice. It was almost like a corset it fit so snugly. It was also sleeveless. The better to steal Erica’s powers. Jackson took one look at it, bit his knuckle and said, “This is killing me.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m going to throw it away after this.”

  “Thank God.”

  It had seemed easy, talking about this in Jackson’s pristine living room, but now that I was in the close, warm bar surrounded by people with guitars, I was questioning the wisdom of our plan. Erica was nowhere in sight.

  Jackson put his hand on my lower back and propelled me toward the sign-up table.

  The guy manning it gave me a once-over and stared at my fiddle. “That’s different.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “’Course not.” He smiled. “What’re you gonna play, Mozart?”

  I bit down on my tongue so I wouldn’t launch into my lecture about how composers didn’t cease to exist after 1791. Behind me, Jackson gave a cough that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

  The guy gave me a slip of red paper with the number seven on it. “You get five minutes. Come around back when number six goes up.”

  “Come on,” Jackson said. “I’ll buy you a drink. Take the edge off.”

  “What edge?” I wiped my palms on my jeans.

  Jackson steered me to the bar. He ordered me something I didn’t catch the name of, and when it came, I discovered it was some kind of mixed drink involving cranberry juice. I could taste the vodka through the sweetness. There must’ve been a lot of it.

  “I do have to be able to play without staggering.”

  “This’ll just loosen you up.” He was scanning the crowd, looking for Erica. I was starting to worry she wouldn’t show. If I’d gone through all of this for nothing, I was going to be really angry at someone. I wasn’t sure who, but someone.

  They called the first performer. A blonde with a twelve-string and a slim, reedy voice that somehow still worked for the bluesy love song she was singing. She was followed by a guy who tried—and failed—to cover “Come Together,” then a duo who sang an off-key version of something I didn’t recognize but didn’t play well with close harmony. Three to go. Still no Erica.

  “What if she doesn’t come?”

  “She’ll come.”

  The next two performers blurred by. I watched the door for Erica, thinking maybe, if she didn’t show, I could get out of here. Maybe I wouldn’t have to play after all. It shouldn’t have made me feel so empty to think of it. Then, as number six—a guy with an Ovation six string that looked as though it had been through the entirety of the sixties—took the stage, she came striding through the door.

  She didn’t see us. She walked up to the sign-up guy and they shared a complicated handshake and a smile.

  Number Six was finishing up to anemic applause. Time. I turned to Jackson.

  “You haven’t tried to talk me out of this.” I’d only just realized it, now, when I was about to step onto the stage. We’d been practicing for days, discussing the plan, the pitfalls. He’d never tried to stop me. “Not even once.”

  “Maybe I finally figured out you can take care of yourself.”

  The applause for Number Six died down. The guy at the signup table was waving frantically at me.

  “You did?”

  The sign-up guy had gotten up and started in my direction.

  “I think we’d better get up there,” Jackson said.

  “Thank you.” I wasn’t sure what for, maybe it was for more than I could put into words. But there wasn’t time to figure out how to say it. The sign-up guy reached me and tugged me forward up the rickety steps to the platform.

  “Too late for stage fright now,” he said, and he propelled me into the spotlight.

  Jackson followed. I spared a glance at him as he sat down behind The Standing Room’s barely adequate resident keyboard. Then I looked out at the crowd.

  The room wasn’t big, but it was packed. Half the people there were waiting for their turn onstage, and I was betting the other half were waiting to watch the friend they’d come to support, but I didn’t care. I settled my fiddle under my chin and looked back at Jackson.

  He smiled at me, and he was the only person in the room. I forgot about Erica and the drugs and the men who’d tried to kidnap me. I forgot there was a crowd of bored people dividing their attention between their drinks and their conversations and me. I smiled back, tapped my foot three times, and we began.

  The opening bars were slow. As I played my way through the first verse, the bar got quiet. Jackson played his unfamiliar instrument softly, laying the chords down like the velvety strokes I’d wanted them to be. I knew he was in my head and I was thrilled by it. Second verse. I repeated the phrasing from the first, but faster. My body moved without me telling it to, my fingers found the strings like they were magnetized. Someone started clapping, and a few more people picked it up. Most of them were on tempo; some of them weren’t. I didn’t care. I raced through the final bar to the turnaround and dropped my bow to the sound of applause.

  Somebody slapped me on the back as I stumbled down the stairs on autopilot. “Damn, girl, you make me wanna like the violin!” yelled a man, drunk and happy about it. I only had eyes for Jackson. He joined me at the foot of the stairs, put his hands on either side of my face, and kissed me.

  It was one of those rare kisses that feels like a first kiss, a tentative beginning with a fast learning curve up to mouth-on-mouth, body-to-body fusion, nothing else in the room but the hot places where our skin touched. I nearly dropped my instrument. It took me a good fifteen seconds to remember what a bad idea this was, to lay down a mental barrier to slow the transfer.

  Stop it! I couldn’t say it, so I thought it as loud as I could. Jackson pulled back, and the world rushed back in along with the close, hot air of the bar.

  “You’re amazing,” he said. “I love you.”

  I stared right back at him. My brain felt like a bicycle with no chain. It wasn’t until Erica practically ran into us that I remembered why we were there.

  “Mina! You were awesome up there!”

  “Hey! I didn’t know you came here.”

  “Every month. I’m up next—Jimmy always saves a number for me. Will you guys wait for me?”

  This was almost too easy. “You bet.” I met Jackson’s eyes, an
d whatever had just happened fled out of them. We went to the bar.

  Erica played something bluegrassy and up-tempo on her guitar with another guy backing her up on keyboard. She did great—she was a pro, no question—and there were whistles and hoots as she let the last verse fade, eyes closed, lips close to the microphone. She smiled a slow, sweet smile as she got off the stool and took a charmingly awkward bow. It was getting harder and harder for me to believe she’d been behind my attempted kidnapping.

  “You rocked it!” I held up my hand for a high five, and bless her, she didn’t even pause. She slapped my palm and didn’t pull away when I held on and did an unnecessarily complex grab-and-snap thing. Thirty seconds. Just a little charge.

  “Thanks.” She grinned. “This is my boyfriend, by the way. Charlie Easton. The guy you replaced.”

  “Oh, hi. How’s your hand?”

  “Yeah, much better, thanks.” He wouldn’t quite look at me. I’d probably be embarrassed too if I’d shut my own hand in a car door. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I assumed I must’ve seen him around the speakeasy at some point.

  “Well, let’s get a drink or something. You guys usually stay for the rest?”

  “Sure,” Erica said. “There’re a couple of regulars who aren’t bad.”

  We found two more empty stools, and Jackson maneuvered things so I was sitting next to Erica. We ordered rum-and-colas, and I asked her about her music. She was happy enough to talk, and it kept her from noticing the way I kept accidentally brushing against her. I had to ground in little sips, or she’d notice. By the time she figured out what was going on, it needed to be too late.

  I struggled to come up with ways to keep her talking and distracted. “So, do you guys play other gigs besides with Malik?”

  Erica talked about other open mic nights in the city, encouraging me to come to some of them. Charlie didn’t say much to either of us; all he did was glare. Well, it wasn’t my fault I’d replaced him. I decided to ignore him. He polished off his drink and reached past me to point at one of the taps.

  “I’ll take a Fat Tire,” he told the bartender, and a memory fired like a signal flare in my mind.

  The night I’d been mugged.

  The gun pointed at me.

  The cracked skin on his knuckles. His voice, California accent, tenor.

  Easton. E.

  “Yeah, a pint,” Charlie said. My eyes went wide. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t push down the fear in my head. He heard it, I was sure of it, because he took the beer from the bartender and met my eyes for the first time that night.

  “I—I gotta go,” I said. “I gotta get out of here.”

  “Aww, come on,” Erica said, drunk and oblivious. “Stay another fifteen minutes and you can hear that drummer I was telling you about.”

  Charlie’s hands tightened. His eyes were boring into me as if he was mindspeaking, but I didn’t have to hear him to know what he was saying. Tell anyone and you’re dead.

  I backed away from the bar, unwilling to turn my back on him, and started running as soon as I hit the street. I’d gone four blocks before I remembered I hadn’t dissipated the energy I’d stolen, that the panic I was feeling was amped up by the adrenaline surge I got from grounding Erica. Jackson caught up to me moments later and caught me by the shoulder.

  “Look at me—you’re okay. Discharge it.”

  I placed my hands against the light post next to me and dissipated the energy fast. Sparks fired between my hand and the post and left scorch marks.

  “How much capacity do you have left? Are you tapped out?”

  “No. No. I think I have a little more.” I wouldn’t be able to tell until I got my hands on someone.

  “All right.” Jackson looked grim. “I’m going back in there to get them.”

  “But Jackson, he knows. He knows that I know—”

  “That’s why it has to be now.” A dark blue van screeched to halt in the red zone beside us. Blue lights were flashing on the dash. I panicked for a moment—then James got out of the driver’s seat. He was carrying a gun.

  “Is he allowed to do that?” I asked, staring.

  “Not exactly,” Jackson said.

  James handed Jackson a second gun and a pair of handcuffs, which he took without comment. “Oh—and this.” James passed over a badge in a black leather case. “Ready?” he said.

  “Do we have a choice?”

  “Whoa. Wait. What is going on here?”

  Jackson turned to me. “We’re arresting them. If we let them go, they’ll tip off whoever else is involved before we have a chance to take them down. We have to neutralize them now. Will you wait in the back seat?”

  “I—”

  “I need you.” He leaned in close. “I need you to ground Charlie.” There was raw fear in his eyes. I knew what it cost him to ask me to be involved, to put me at risk.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  His eyes blazed with a fierce pride, and he squeezed my hip through the safety of my jeans. He turned to his father. “Let’s go.”

  I climbed into the van and watched while James and Jackson pushed through the doors of the club. I left the van door open, and so I heard when the chatter of conversation gave way to silence and screams. The sounds of breaking glass and flying furniture echoed in the street.

  It seemed to take hours for them to come out again, but it could only have been minutes. James had Erica, and Jackson had Charlie. Both of them were handcuffed. Charlie was bleeding from a cut on his cheekbone. A crowd of people followed them onto the street.

  “Fuck this!” Charlie was yelling. “They’re not even cops. Call the police!”

  People were filming the scene with their cell phones, taking pictures, making calls. Jackson kept up his march to the van. I clambered into the back and opened the doors for him.

  “What is going on?” Erica asked. “Jackson, why are you doing this?”

  “Quiet,” James said, his face set, and he guided her inside.

  “Call the police!” Charlie yelled. “Somebody call the fucking police!”

  There was a crowd of two dozen outside. Someone was bound to take Charlie seriously. We didn’t have much time. The back door slammed shut, and James and Jackson raced to the front seats, James behind the wheel. He pulled out of the spot and sped down the street while the crowd held their camera phones up behind us.

  “We don’t have long,” Jackson said as we rounded the corner. “Mina?”

  I looked at Charlie. He was fuming, glaring at me with death in his eyes. I was betting it was only Jackson’s presence that kept him from telekinetically attacking me. Erica was sobbing quietly in the back corner of the van.

  “Why did you try to mug me?” I asked Charlie. “Why were you waiting for me?”

  He set his mouth in a line.

  “Fine,” I said, and I grabbed his handcuffed hands.

  The buzz of enhancers raced through me, and I focused on the transfer. I had to get this done fast—I expected to hear sirens any minute. Charlie tried to twist away, but it was already too late. I knew I hadn’t grounded him completely, but I hoped it would be enough. Beside me, Jackson nodded, and his eyes went dark.

  “Shit,” he said, and pulled out a tranq gun like the one he’d given me. He shot Charlie directly in the chest. Erica screamed, but it was cut off short when Jackson shot her as well. She slumped sideways, eyes rolling back in her head.

  “What?” I said. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Simon.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “I should have known. I should have picked up on it.” James’s knuckles were white on the wheel. Twice already we’d heard sirens and had to pull into driveways and alleyways with the lights off. Erica and Charlie slept on.

  “I
should have known too,” I said. The way that junkie had gone after him—I should have realized. “Is she involved?” I nodded toward Erica, who was softly snoring.

  “No—but she’s on the pills. She doesn’t know Simon’s supplying Charlie.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We get out of sight, first. And then we go after Simon.”

  After another half hour on little-used surface streets, James pulled into a loading bay in the abandoned car dealership. Sebastian was waiting for us, the corrugated metal door half raised. He slammed it closed again as soon as the van cleared the entrance.

  “Any trouble?” he asked.

  “A little,” said James. “There’s going to be a mess to clean up.”

  “Do I need to swap the plates on this thing?”

  James nodded. “It could probably use a paint job too.”

  “What did you do? Set fire to the bar?”

  James wisely ignored this question and yanked Charlie out of the van while Jackson did a gentler job of carrying Erica to one of the workout mats on the floor. Sebastian stood over Charlie with his wings flared and his face like stone.

  “Wake him up,” he said to James.

  James exchanged a glance with Jackson, shrugged, and pulled a black case out of his shoulder bag. It contained a small syringe, and he injected the contents into Charlie’s upper arm. Sebastian leaned down until his face was only a foot from Charlie’s. His eyes fluttered, went shut again, and he came awake all at once.

  He jerked and tried to scramble back, but Sebastian held him in place with one hand, his wings stretching back like a dark umbrella. With his other hand, he reached into Charlie’s pocket and pulled out his phone.

  “Call Simon,” he said, and held it out to him.