“Yeah, Gregory called in a favor.”
My tone immediately dropped ten degrees. “Hey. Robert likes coming over to see my mother. Gregory doesn’t have to call in a favor for him to do it.”
“All right, all right. Calm yourself down. That’s not what I meant. Of course Robert likes hanging out with your mom. I meant he called in a favor for him to cover for you. Robert is going to keep your mom occupied with a movie while you sneak out with me at nine thirty. Then he’s going to offer to check on you later and tell your mom you’re asleep.”
I was speechless for a moment. They’d seriously thought this through. “Wow.”
“So, if you can, I suggest you take a nap before I come over since you’ll probably be up past your bedtime.”
I rolled my eyes as though he could see. “Okay, Dad. Thanks for the advice.”
He made a kissing noise through the phone. “All right, see you soon.”
“See ya.”
Setting my phone down on my nightstand, I picked up my book and stared at the page I was on. I sighed. I hated when Patrick was right. After marking my spot with a bookmark, I set the book back down and exchanged it for my phone to set an alarm for ten after nine. Then I plopped back down on my comfortable pillow and shut my eyes.
Two hours later I woke up feeling groggy. I probably could’ve slept six more hours. After staring into space for a moment, I crawled off my bed to check my face in the mirror. Just a few mascara smudges around my violet eyes. Easily fixed with my finger. But my hair was another matter. I tried to tackle the mass of tangles with a brush but ultimately gave up and settled for a ponytail.
I traded out my bright blue shirt for a much more inconspicuous black one and then glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Only five more minutes and Patrick would be at my window.
I decided to find my mom and Robert and at least make an appearance since they wouldn’t be seeing me the rest of the night. I needed to plant the seed of me being tired, too. That way Robert’s report of me sleeping later would be convincing.
I didn’t have to search long. The sounds of crashes and explosions filtered through the house from her room. I rapped on her door twice. At first, I got nothing but laughter as a response. Then my mom’s voice came through. “Come in.”
I found them sitting all cozy together on her bed watching a movie. They took turns grabbing fistfuls of popcorn from a giant bowl, and she was grinning from ear to ear as if they were enjoying a private joke.
When my mom faced me, Robert took the opportunity to throw a popcorn kernel at her. It bounced off her forehead and landed on the carpet.
She smirked at him. “You’re picking that up later, you know.”
“The dog will get it.”
“We don’t have a dog.”
Robert shrugged. “I’ll get you one.”
My mom rolled her eyes and shook her head. She smiled as she returned her attention to me. “What’s up, sweetie?
I smiled at their lighthearted banter. “I was just going to tell you I’m pretty tired.” I surprised myself with a believable yawn. “I’m probably going to crash early, so I’ll just see you tomorrow.”
“All right, sweetie. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I nodded a little too vigorously. “I’m just really tired. First day back from spring break and all. School really wore me out.”
“That’ll do it,” Robert said seriously. “My kids were always that way after a long school break when they were still in high school.” He focused on the TV again, effectively dismissing the conversation and my mother’s worry. Man, he was good at this stuff. Years of practice, I’m sure.
“All right, well, get some rest then.” My mom grabbed another handful of popcorn, and I took that as my cue to leave.
I shut her door quietly and retreated to my bedroom to put on my shoes. Two seconds after the last shoelace was tied, there was a light rap on my window. Patrick’s perfect silhouette cast a shadow through my blinds. Right on time. I grabbed my bag and jacket, raised the blinds, and opened the window.
The cool night air hit my face and a zing of excitement zipped up my spine. But I was also nervous. Besides the domestic violence incident, a robbery had to be my most intense shadow hunt so far. Guns may even be involved. Okay, guns were an almost definite probability.
The drive was short and landed us in the Circle K parking lot just as Gregory pulled up in his car. Kyra sat in the back and Zane, I assumed, in the front.
As they all stepped out, I got a look at Zane for the first time. If I was expecting anything, I wasn’t expecting him. Not that I knew how angels usually looked in their human forms since all I had to go on was Gregory. But I guess I’d expected someone a little more...perhaps, refined.
His dirty blonde hair was longer than Patrick’s and stuck out every which way as if his bathroom contained nothing but a bar of soap. On his gangly form he wore tight, slightly tattered jeans and a black, leather jacket. An eighties rock band logo peeked out from underneath. The most distinguishable characteristic about him, though, was that he seemed to be wound tightly to some unseen energy force that drip-fed him caffeine.
Though he was probably about the same age as Gregory—early to mid-thirties—he acted ten years younger. Seeing him with Gregory reminded me of Abbott and Costello or the guys from The Odd Couple. Zane would be the funny guy and Gregory would be the straight man.
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
Zane shimmied over to us a few feet behind Gregory and Kyra, dodging his head all around to scout out the place. Once we met up in a circle, he clapped his hands together. Excitement sparkled in his deep brown eyes and oozed out every pore. “So what’s the game plan?”
“Well, first you need to meet Iris.” Gregory gestured to me.
Zane pitched his head back and threw up his hands. “Oh, right! I’m so sorry.”
I stretched out my hand in front of me timidly. He flattened it between both of his and shook several times. “I was just so pumped about tonight, I forgot I hadn’t met you yet. Nice to meet you, Iris. You can call me Zane.”
“Nice to meet you too, Zane.”
Once I’d retrieved my hand from his grip, Patrick leaned in to whisper in my ear, “I told you. He really loves his job.”
I stifled a snicker and coughed into my jacket.
“All right.” Gregory became all business. The rest of us angled forward for a huddle of sorts. “If our intel is correct, we’ve got about ten minutes until this guy gets here. He will have a gun.” He directed that comment to me as a warning, but Zane took it as good news.
“Yes!” He balled his hand into a fist and thrust his elbow inward.
We all stared at him. “Is that a good thing?” I squeaked.
“It makes for more excitement! Am I right, Patrick? Or am I right?” He raised his hand for a high five.
Patrick grinned and complied by smacking his open palm.
Gregory squinted his eyes shut and shook his head. “Remind me why I called you, Zane?”
“Because this is heavy stuff, and you needed the extra angel power.” It was probably the most normal thing he’d said thus far.
Gregory shrugged and continued. “Okay, we’ll hang out in the cars until the guy gets here. Then once he’s inside, we’ll run over to those bushes and hide behind them.” He pointed to a vast tangle of bushes that could have concealed an entire NBA team. “It’s dark enough that nobody should notice us there, but we’ll still have a nice, clear shot of the store through the glass front.”
We nodded in agreement and waited for more.
“Now, once the clerk realizes what’s going on, he’ll probably push the panic button for the cops to show up. But sometimes they take several minutes to get here, so Zane and I will run in if things get heated before they show up, which is quite possible. Otherwise, we’ll let the police do their job.”
“What about the rest of us?” Patrick looked more than disappo
inted.
“Experience?” Gregory grinned with his eyebrows towards the sky. Patrick wasn’t having any of it, so Gregory dropped the act and opted for logic. “If you guys get shot, it’s bad news. If we get shot, we’ll survive.”
I cocked my head to the side, suddenly curious. “What exactly does happen if you get shot?”
Zane answered that one for me. “It hurts like hell. Or so I hear, I’ve never been there. But then we heal pretty quickly.”
After an awkward pause and another shake of Gregory’s head, I offered a reply. “Well, all right.” I didn’t know what else to say but I was really liking this Zane guy. I turned back to Gregory. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Iris, we’ll need you to try to listen to the shadow once he gets here so we can get an idea of his motives and how far he’s willing to take this.”
“Got it.”
Zane’s head randomly popped up out of the huddle. His eyes focused on something over our heads towards the store. “Uh...I’d say your intel is wrong, old buddy.”
Gregory replied with a straight face, “We have the same intel, Zane.” We all lifted our heads to survey the right of the entrance where Zane was staring.
Sure enough, Zane was right. We didn’t have ten minutes. We barely had ten seconds. Our guy was headed straight for the front door as we were speaking. If the man’s anxious expression and determined pace didn’t give him away, the horrific, turbulent mass of darkness around him did.
Unlike anything I’d seen before, this shadow stretched and pulled in unnatural ways, if anything about the shadows was natural. A defined silhouette with a disturbing, half-formed face seemed to be wrestling to contain the large storm inside. The storm didn’t seem to want to be contained.
Kyra gasped as Patrick exclaimed, “That thing is massive!”
Even Zane was nearly speechless. All he could articulate was, “Whoa...”
I felt no empathy for the man yet, but I was morbidly curious what kind of sounds such a monstrosity would make. Luckily, my curiosity was enough to force open a sound tunnel fairly easily.
The hard part was making any sense out of what I heard. The cacophony that came barreling through the tunnel was the equivalent of two TVs blaring at me in either ear. Too much, too fast, and all garbled together. I couldn’t make any sense out of it.
Then something changed. The man couldn’t have heard us, but he halted in his tracks and stared at the ground. The warped face on his parasite scowled in our direction.
The sea of incoherent noise in my head grew louder as if someone had cranked up the volume on the TVs that threatened to blast my eardrums. I fought to keep my hands from springing up to cover my ears—it wouldn’t have helped anyway. Somehow I managed to catch a few random words through the loud roar like ‘stop,’ ‘later,’ and ‘turn back’. All the while, the distorted black form attached itself in every possible way to the man and pulled on him in the direction of the store’s entrance. I didn’t understand. Did the shadow want him to do the job or not?
The soon-to-be criminal had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk a few paces from the front door. He didn’t appear to be in any hurry to leave. In fact, he slipped his hand into his back pocket and gingerly pulled out a small square object.
Zane jumped up, ready for action, but Gregory yanked him back down. “Hold up. He just grabbed his wallet.”
The guy opened up the wallet. As he stared at something inside, the voices swimming in my mind softened and slowed as though the louder of the two TVs had been shut off or put on pause. For a few seconds I could actually hear something coherent. And what I heard was heartbreaking.
The voice was low, harsh, and weighed heavily on my spirit, dragging me down. I could only imagine what shadow must have been doing to the man it held captive. “She needs this money. She won’t hold on much longer. You know that. She needs her daddy to come through for her.”
The noise suddenly vanished. My heart, which had sunk into my stomach like a heavy stone, sprang back to its normal position. Without realizing, I’d closed my eyes during the shadow’s somber message. When I opened them, the dad was no longer on the sidewalk. He was walking back to his car.
“Did he change his mind? What’s he doing?” I shrieked.
“Let’s not chance it. He may be back.” Gregory motioned for us to follow him to the bushes.
From where we crouched behind the bush, we had a decent view to the inside of the store. Behind the counter, a young man who must have been the clerk on duty stared at a small hanging TV. No other costumers were inside.
I returned my focus to the man’s car. He’d just slammed the driver’s side door and was headed up to the store again with a black object dangling from his hands like loose cloth. A ski mask? Did he accidentally leave the mask in his car? That didn’t sound like something a seasoned robber would do.
He ambled over to the sidewalk that lined the store and stopped. He was several feet away from the door and out of sight from the clerk. What was he waiting for? To work up the nerve? As if to answer my question, he threw his eyes to the sky, raised his balled up fists, and then spun around to hit the brick wall.
This poor guy didn’t want to do this. From what the shadow had said, his daughter must’ve been ill and needed expensive treatment. He was trying to save his daughter. After realizing the sad reality of the situation, my empathy shot through the roof. At the same time, a different voice than last time, more deliberate and sinister, snaked its way to my ears with a different message. “Just put on the mask, go in, and point the gun at the clerk. They’re trained to give you the cash. You won’t have to hurt anyone. It’ll be easy. Now man up and get this over with.”
The robber turned away from the wall and concentrated on the sidewalk as if he could gather courage from hard cement. This guy wasn’t a killer or even a thief. He was a father. And he needed money so his daughter could live.
He took one last deep breath. In a few swift motions, he slid the ski mask over his head, flung open the door, and pulled a gun on the clerk.
Telling all I’d heard to Gregory and the rest didn’t cross my mind. Neither did fear of the guy’s gun. Somehow I intuitively knew he wouldn’t hurt me, or the clerk for that matter. I stood up and wrung my arm free from Patrick, ignoring the urgent calls of my name as I made a mad dash to the door.
Somewhere between the bushes and the front door, my aura burst forth from deep within. It blazed all over my skin like a raging furnace, fueled by adrenaline and my empathy for the man and his sick daughter. The burn from my aura was pleasant but severe. Brief but intense. I could feel the light strengthen and toughen me, preparing me for what I was about to get myself into.
By the time I reached the handle of the glass door, I had a solid, glimmering armor of light encasing me. I felt invincible.
I was about to reach for the handle when two hands landed heavily on my shoulders and pulled me backwards. As much as I didn’t want to, I turned around to find Patrick and Gregory staring at me. Patrick gripped my arms, refusing to let go.
“What were you thinking?” Patrick yelled. “Did you not hear what Gregory said earlier? He has a gun. You could get hurt!”
“Shh.” Gregory put a hand on each of us as though separating a fight and then looked at me. “Iris, what happened? Did you hear something?”
I tried to break free of Patrick’s grip while I glanced behind me over my shoulder through the glass. The father threw a bag at the clerk and pointed to the cash register with his gun. “I have to get in there,” I stated firmly as I squirmed with even more determination. “He doesn’t want to do this. His daughter’s just sick and he needs the money.”
Shock washed over both their faces and Patrick released his grip slightly.
“Did the shadow say that?” Gregory asked.
I took another peek at the man’s leech. I would have answered yes, but something told me that wouldn’t have been entirely correct. The so-called shadow twisted and pulled in odd di
rections as though trying to escape itself. And it finally dawned on me. I shook my head, wondering why I hadn’t realized the truth earlier. “No,” I reached for the door. “The emotional shadow trapped underneath the violent one did.”
Gregory’s eyes grew wide. He must not have figured that out yet. Somehow, coming to that conclusion before my angel mentor made me feel entitled enough to go on inside. But Gregory stopped me. “Hey. If you’re going in, then we are too.”
I threw a quick glance behind me to the bushes and barely made out Kyra still crouching behind them. Zane’s profile was taller since he was standing upright instead of hiding as he should’ve been. Poor Zane. He would have to miss out on this one. I turned back to Gregory and Patrick who were both glowing. “All right. Let’s do it.”
We pushed open the door together and immediately had a gun pointed at us.
“Stop right there,” the man yelled. “Don’t come any closer.”
I wasn’t an expert at robberies, but this guy’s pacing back and forth and shaky, uneven tone gave away his inexperience. He was in way over his head. I wanted to reach out and embrace him and tell him everything would be all right. But I’d have to take care of some business first.
I held out my hands in front of me like I’d seen in the movies. “Sir, we don’t want any trouble. I just want to talk to you.”
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, miss, but I’m kind of busy.” He gestured with his gun to the clerk who was still filling up his bag with the rest of the money.
There was no humor in the man’s voice, but I smiled at his joke, which threw him for a loop. He even lowered his gun slightly, but then remembered himself and raised it back up to point at us with new fervor. “I don’t want to hurt you guys, so just leave. Go out the way you came and pretend you didn’t see anything.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that,” Gregory said.
“Oh, and why is that.” He glanced back at the clerk who had slowed his pace to witness our confrontation. “Hurry up!”
Luminous Spirits (Shadow Eyes Series Book 2) Page 22