Charly leapt from the boat and launched into a flurry of jabs and punches, bouncing between two of the thugs. One man already lay sprawled on the ground from Odeon’s staff, who wasted no time simply getting the job done.
“Grab the case of money, Shiro,” Holly shouted. The man she held onto was struggling against her. He was stronger than she thought he’d be. She tightened her arm against his throat, but his fingers were digging into the muscles of her arm as she attempted to choke him into submission. “Odeon!” Holly didn’t want to pull the trigger. She’d killed before, but at this range, it would be grotesque as well as dangerous.
Odeon spun. He’d taken out one man. Charly had engaged two others. Shiro was running after the thug with the case of money, who’d taken off as soon as the fight began.
“Take him out, Odeon, please.” Odeon danced close to her, his movements graceful and lithe.
“Duck.” He swung and his staff connected with the head of the thug Holly had been restraining, narrowly missing her own head.
“Help Charly, take out her two, then get back on the boat, both of you.” A ball of aether energy erupted behind her, hissing and spitting electricity as it ate through a layer of the bridge’s support stones.
She looked around and spotted a Shadow Coalition member across the water, standing on a stairway, aiming a gun at Holly.
She cursed and jumped away as another aether projectile burst behind her.
Odeon knocked out one of the men engaging Charly, freeing Charly to knock her opponent into the canal with a series of spinning kicks.
“Back on the boat, back on the boat. Come on! We’ll pick up Shiro on the way. I’ll hold off the guys with guns,” Holly said, aiming wildly at the SC baddie who’d paused on the stairway and was aiming at them again. She pulled the trigger, hoping to stop her opponent from shooting again. Her bullet exploded in a violet explosion of rock and energy near the SC thug. He descended the stairs again then paused to take aim. Holly jumped onto the boat and shot at him again. Charly leapt in and started the boat and steered away from the side of the canal. Odeon landed beside Holly who was taking another shot at the SC thug on the far side stairway She needed to keep him engaged until they were out of range of his gun.
A crowd had gathered on top of the bridge, watching as Holly and her crew floated down the canal, with Holly exchanging gunfire with the Shadow Coalition thug. Ahead of them, Shiro still chased after the foot soldier with the money.
The boat was faster than Shiro and his quarry, and soon Holly had left the range where her bullets reached the thug that had been shooting at them.
They neared Shiro.
“What do you think, team? Should I shoot at him? Make it easier for Shiro to grab the money?”
“I’d always opt for shooting. But that’s your call, Holly,” Charly said.
“Hang on. Get us close, Charly, and I’ll hit him with my club.”
“Hey Shiro, need a ride?” Charly asked.
Without pausing, Shiro leapt into the boat and sat down, gasping for breath. “Thank you. I shall now pass out.”
A few more feet and they were floating alongside the thug with the case of money. He wasn’t a Shadow Coalition member, so he worked as a kidnapper. Holly considered shooting him. Would it be a loss? He was a wretched person. She wanted to hurt him.
She bit her lip. “Take him out, Odeon.”
“Gladly, Holly Drake.” Odeon leapt onto the canal-side walkway.
The thug yelped and fumbled at his waist, suddenly deciding his gun was necessary. Odeon swung once. His club connected and the thug fell into the water. Holly reached out and scooped the case of money off the water, where it floated. Odeon jumped back into the boat, causing it to rock wildly.
Charly stared at the ripples and bubbles where the kidnapper vanished into the canal. “We just gonna leave him in the water?”
Holly shrugged. “He probably won’t drown.”
“Unfortunately.”
“You guys done yet?” Darius’s voice came over Holly’s earpiece.
“Oh, and how’ve you been? Having a relaxing time in the Mirage?”
“It’s really plush. You guys know that, right? I almost fell asleep.”
“God, you’re a bastard,” Shiro laughed.
FIVE
“WHY can’t you just keep living here with us?” Lucy asked. She was Holly’s niece and she was currently sprawled across the bed in the room that had been Holly’s.
Two days after successfully stopping the cash drop, Holly was at Meg’s condo picking up the last of the few possessions she still owned. She’d found a condo to rent and was in the process of turning it into hers. She’d gotten a bed. A bed that was just for her. No one else had ever slept in it. No man could push her out of it or force her to rub his goddamn back when he couldn’t sleep. The sheets were clean and smelled fresh and she could wash them once a week or once a month, depending on her mood.
The point was: it belonged to her and no one else.
Lucy’s Druiviin friend, Charm lay next to Lucy, watching Holly with big bright purple eyes.
“Don’t you like living here?” Lucy pressed.
“I did,” Holly said as she folded the clothes Meg had bought her. Holly put them into the box that held the remnants of her former life. Letters, a few photographs, and the cards from her students. The musty smell of the past wafted up from the contents. Paper. Dust. Bitter memories. Some of the memories that flooded her senses were sweet. Did she still have the letters from Elan? Was there anything beautiful left from those years besides the children she’d worked with? She sighed and looked over at Lucy, giving her niece a soft smile. “But now it’s time for me to live on my own.”
“Why? We liked having you here. Charm liked having you here too, didn’t you?” Lucy nudged her friend gently with her elbow.
“Yes,” Charm said.
Holly glanced at the girl. They were around the same age in human years, though Druiviin calculated their aging differently, as well as the stages of children’s development.
“Thanks, Charm.”
“I need an adult around here who isn’t my mom or dad. They’re so serious about everything. You’re fun. And interesting.” Lucy gasped and covered her mouth.
Holly lifted her gaze from the box. Lucy’s eyes were wide and scared, as though she’d remembered something terrible. “And scary?” Holly finished for Lucy. It was easy to forget that Holly had killed her ex-husband, Graf, in a moment of self-defense. She’d done it in self-defense since then, as well, but Lucy didn’t know about that.
Lucy bit her lip. “Not scary. I just sometimes forget.”
“It’s better to forget, Luce. Someday you’ll maybe understand why.”
“I don’t need to know why. Even though I do. He was going to kill you. You did the right thing. I would have done that.”
Holly noted that Charm didn’t seemed surprised about the thin references to her killing Graf. So Charm knew. “I bet you would have, Luce. It’s better to surprise yourself with your strength rather than your weakness. I did what I had to do to survive. And now I have to live with that knowledge.”
Lucy wasn’t hanging around Holly for bits of sage wisdom or advice, but Holly had never gotten the chance to explain her actions to her niece. And sometimes she wanted that—to be understood rather than feared. She was moving out. Was there a better time for a dispensing of wisdom than now?
“What do you mean?” Lucy’s eyebrows stitched together in curiosity.
“You’re still young, Luce. The things you remember about your past only go back a few years. When you’re my age, the past stretches out far behind you like a road you’ve walked down. Everything you pass on that road you carry with you. Some of it you’ll forget as you keep moving. Other parts of it will be so driven into your brain that you can’t forget them. Sometimes they’re amazing moments of total awesomeness. Other times they’re the memories of something hard or terrible. You don’t forget them, and
they make you heavy or sad from time to time. I loved Graf, but he didn’t love me. And he hurt me. A lot. But there are these times when I just feel sad that the only thing I could do to stop him from hurting me was to hurt him so bad, that he couldn’t hurt me again. I should have left him sooner. I don’t know if that would have changed anything. And now I’ll never know.”
Lucy coiled a strand of her blond hair around her finger. “Why did you marry him if he hurt you?”
“I didn’t know that he would. When I met him, he was this handsome tough guy. A bit rough around the edges. And I knew he wanted to be a police officer. Your grandparents are retired cops, remember? Did you know that, Luce?” Holly waited for Lucy’s nod before she continued. “Well, maybe you didn’t know that they wanted me to follow in their footsteps like your mom did. I didn’t want to be a cop. So I thought, what the hell? I figured I’d pick someone that could do that for me. Plus I don’t know, Graf was this interesting, rugged kind of guy and a bit of a bad boy.”
“A bad boy?”
“Yeah, you know? There was something wild about him, which was interesting. You know anyone like that? Someone that doesn’t follow all the rules, lives the way they want, and says to hell with the consequences?”
Charm and Lucy exchanged a look and giggled. “There’s one kid like that. A boy we both think is cute.”
Holly nodded. “That’s how Graf was. Plus he was really into me. He brought me gifts all the time. There was this one time, he knew I wanted to learn to play the guitar. But I didn’t have the novas to buy one. He brought me one. And another time he got tickets to see a band he knew I adored. He was always doing that. Love-bombing me.”
Charm spoke up. “Ms. Holly, I don’t think either of us know what that is.”
“Love-bomb. I found out later that it’s what a person like Graf does to make you fall in love with them. I hated to come to terms with this stuff, you know? That there would be a person in the world that was afraid of not being loved because they weren’t the best type of person, so they work really hard to win your affection early on. They buy you lots of gifts and write you love notes and call you a lot, and they tell you too soon that they love you. If a boy ever does that to you? Run. Don’t trust him.”
Lucy and Charm watched Holly with wide eyes, their mouths gaping open. Charm had picked up on some of Lucy’s human forms of expression it seemed. She was sure that Lucy had done the same with Charm’s Druiviin tics, but Holly wasn’t as adept at spotting them.
“Why? Do you think that would happen to us?” Charm asked. “My mother and father are kind to each other. They bicker and sometimes drive me crazy. But father doesn’t hurt mother.”
“And Meg doesn’t hurt Gabe. That’s because a lot of people are civil. Decent. But there are others out there who aren’t.” Holly was finished packing the box up. She closed the lid and stood up. “You have to learn to trust yourself. If your gut is telling you something’s not right, listen to it.”
“Do human guts speak?” Charm asked, an element of surprise in her voice.
Lucy laughed. “I think she means a feeling. Not words.”
“Guts have feelings?”
“It’s an instinct. A sensation in your body that something is off,” Holly explained. As she left the room, she heard the front door open and close.
“Hello? I’m home!” It was Meg.
The girls followed Holly out of the spare bedroom and into the great room area. The appliances hummed. Evening light filtered in through the windows along the far wall by the door. Over the kitchen sink and counter, another window let light in from the exposed interior wall of the condo that gave the upper floors of the condo spire an airy, open feeling.
“Mom!” Lucy said, grinning. “Holly is moving out. It sucks.”
Meg wrapped an arm around her daughter and kissed her cheek. They were almost the same height. Lucy had been growing. Meg sighed. “I know.”
“Make her stay.”
“I can’t. Your aunt has always had a mind of her own.”
“It’s going to be boring here without her.”
Holly watched, grinning. “You’ll have more food. There’s that, at least.”
“Yes, that’s been my main concern. How much you eat.” Meg’s tone was laced with sarcasm.
“Well, I’m going to go to Charm’s is that ok?” Lucy asked. Charm hung back and observed, quietly.
Meg’s intense blue eyes studied her daughter’s face. “Are her parents there?” Meg’s scrutiny went to Charm. “Charm? Is one of your parents home?”
“Yes, Ms. Wolfe.”
“Fine, you may go, Lucy. But come home and check with me in an hour.”
“Great,” Lucy said, running for the door with Charm in tow.
Once they were out of the condo, Meg went to the fridge and began removing items.
“Drink?”
“Just a small one.”
“A small what? I have beer. Did you want to split one?”
“Er, no.”
“All I have is this porter,” Lucy said, handing a brown bottle to Holly. She got one for herself, popped the top, and began preparing a meal with the items she’d removed from the fridge. “Stir fry. With tofu. Will you stay?”
“As much as I’d love that, I only have a few hours to get myself situated at the new place, so I’ll pass.”
“Whatever you like,” Meg said, eyeing her sister.
“What?”
“This is so Holly. That’s all.”
“What does that even mean?” Holly took a sip of her own drink. It was dark and rich, with bourbon flavors, a bit of smoke.
“You’re moving out so quickly. You got your place and bam. Gone. You’ll probably never come back, even to visit.”
“Meg, come on.” Holly sat on a stool at the bar.
“It’s true. It’s what you did once you met Graf. I never even got to see you. Not so much as even going out with Gabe and I.”
“Most of that was Graf. Did it ever occur to you that I wanted to be around you? But, you know, Graf didn’t like it. If we went out together, it was a fight. Even seeing you, my own sister, he got jealous and would grill me over the things I said to you or Gabe. He read into everything. When we’d get home after being with anyone, he’d go through the conversation and verbally beat me up for anything I said that he didn’t like. ‘You told your mom that you don’t like your clothes. Is that some sort of slam at me?’”
“Did he actually say that once? How could he interpret that as a slight at him?” Meg asked as she sliced the tofu on the bamboo cutting board.
“Yes, that happened. And does there need to be a rational explanation? It was Graf. Maybe he thought I was complaining that he didn’t make enough money to help me afford new clothes. His logic defies logic. It was constant. I began to question my own intentions and sanity. All the time.”
Meg shook her head. “I’m so sorry, Holly. I don’t know how you lived with it.”
“It was difficult. I don’t know how I survived it.”
“Here, chop those. Even if you’re not eating, I’d appreciate the help,” Meg said, handing a bunch of carrots and a knife to Holly.
“Did you notice?”
“Notice what?” Holly asked, beginning to chop.
“This phase Lucy’s in. She’s worshiping you.”
Holly paused and thought about it. “So that’s what that was.”
“Yes, it’s funny. I noticed it the other day when she found out you’d gotten a place of your own. She got all sad, and I couldn’t even comfort her. Everyone she loves, she said, goes away in the end. I asked what the hell that meant. ‘Dad, Holly. Grandma and grandpa. Everyone just moves on or away.’”
“I’m not even going that far.” Holly pointed out, feeling a pang of guilt.
“You just won’t be here. And that’s a big deal to her.” The conversation was punctuated with the chopping clicks and clacks of their knives against the bamboo.
“I guess she
’s right, in a way. People do move and leave and life is just constantly in flux.”
“It’s a hard lesson for a kid to learn.”
“I’ll come around to see her,” Holly promised. “To be fair, Lucy is right. I am awesome.”
Meg gave Holly a bored look.
“I am.”
“Time to change the subject. How’s the work going?”
“Work. It’s good. You know how it is.”
“Dangerous. I worry about you.”
“That makes two of us. I worry about you.”
“I’m not chasing after people. I’m solving crimes.”
“Which sometimes leads to a chase.”
“Very rarely. Who is he, anyway?”
“He?”
“The one pulling your strings, Holly. The one who pulled my strings.”
Holly stared at Meg for a moment. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Do I know him?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Is he married?”
“Can’t say. Anything I tell you, you’d figure it out. The slightest detail would be too much. You’re a detective. And I am not an idiot.”
Holly finished with the carrots. Meg was working on a cabbage.
“I need this shit to end. The kidnappings. Gabe and I can’t constantly be body-guarding our daughter. But I will do it, even if it kills me because I have no time for myself.”
“She’s your kid. You should do that.”
“I know,” Meg said, pausing to take a drink of her beer. “You know what worries me? Charm’s parents. They’re naive. They let Charm walk around the city alone. It’s just not wise right now.”
“They’re Druiviin. Everyone is good. No one would hurt a child.”
“Doesn’t it make you wonder how their civilization got so advanced if they think the best of people? How does that work?”
Holly paused. She drank her beer and considered it. “I guess you just progress past a point where it’s beneficial as a civilization to hurt others? And then that propensity gets selected out of the gene pool? I have no idea. Speculation. I should ask Odeon.”
Hands of the Colossus Page 4