There was a sudden, short burst of gunfire, and I felt a searing pain tear through my lower right side. In his surprise, the soldier I had taken the grenade from had accidentally fired several rounds from his rifle, and one of the bullets had nicked me. The force of the impact made me lose my balance, and I fell onto my knees, but I kept a tight grip on the grenade.
“Don’t shoot him!” shouted Ms. Decker.
It hurt like hell, but it was just a flesh wound, probably less than half an inch deep. Besides, my telekinetic power had already drained the instant I touched the grenade so I hardly noticed the difference as my blood seeped into my clothes. Pressing down on the wound with my left hand, I forced myself to stand back up. Then I brought the grenade in my right hand up to my mouth and pulled out the pin with my teeth.
I noticed Ed Regis had removed his head bag.
“Ed Regis,” I said, spitting out the grenade pin, “get up and lower the ramp.”
“Major Regis,” Ms. Decker said warningly, “if you stand up, you’ll die.”
“He dies, I drop this,” I said, holding up the grenade and trying not to let my pain show. “We all die.”
Ms. Decker smiled. “I’d die for my king any day.”
“This could be the day, then,” I replied evenly.
Ed Regis decided to chance it, cautiously standing up and walking over to the ramp control. The soldiers seemed to be at a loss as to what to do. Perhaps these four weren’t converted, but merely stumbling along under Ms. Decker’s fanatical command. The ramp slowly opened, revealing a pitch-black night sky. I desperately looked around for parachutes, but saw none.
“I can’t let you go, Adrian!” shouted Ms. Decker. “Come on, you had your chance. You’re bleeding. You can’t fly. Give it up!”
The pain was getting to me, and I couldn’t help wincing a little.
Ms. Decker said in a calming tone, “Come on, kid. Just hand me the grenade and let this little girl heal you. You don’t want to die here.”
Kid? Little girl?
My eyes met Alia’s for a brief moment, and then I looked at Ms. Decker again. “Do you know why Alia and I are still alive, Ms. Decker?” I said slowly through clenched teeth. “It’s because people like you keep underestimating us.”
I tossed the grenade into the cockpit.
Once you release its lever, a grenade explodes in about four seconds. Alia used a quarter of that time to knock the pistol out of Ms. Decker’s hand. The soldiers, distracted by panicked shouts from the cockpit, didn’t notice Ed Regis bash Ms. Decker’s head against a wall or see him pull Alia out of her seat. By the time we heard the explosion, we were in freefall.
“Addy! Addy, where are you?!” Alia yelled into my head.
“Here!” I shouted hysterically over the howling wind. “Alia! Close it! Close it! Close it!”
But I couldn’t see her anywhere. Nor could I see Ed Regis. I was alone, and I wasn’t even sure which direction was up. All I knew was that I was falling, drained by my blood and unable to fly.
I felt Ed Regis’s firm hand on my right arm. He pulled hard, and I found myself next to Alia. Ed Regis kept the three of us close together as my sister, hair whipping about her face, healed the gash in my right side. How she managed to focus her power as we wildly spun around and around in midair is something only she would know, but soon I felt the pain in my side disappear.
I was still being drained by the blood on my body. I tore off my sweatshirt and used the clean part of it to wipe myself until I felt my power return. The freezing night air was biting into my skin, but the pain helped me focus my telekinesis as I saw a sea of lights below, rapidly approaching.
We were over a city! There were buildings below us!
“Hang on!” I screamed, grabbing Alia and Ed Regis by their shirts.
They didn’t need telling.
For a fleeting instant, I had a wild, insane image of us splashing down into some expensive hotel’s rooftop pool, but that didn’t happen. We instead smashed into an open dumpster in a back alley. I did all I could to telekinetically break our fall, but add Ed Regis’s weight to Alia’s and my own, plus the fact that I had just recently been shot and was still being slightly drained by some dried blood left on my skin…
“You both alive?” moaned Ed Regis. “Alia? Adrian?”
“Addy?”
“I think so,” I mumbled feebly.
We took our time in the dumpster. I had completely exhausted my psionic power in our semi-controlled crash, and for a while, I felt so faint and dizzy that I couldn’t even sit up. Fortunately, the plastic garbage bags we had landed on had been filled mostly with kitchen leftovers, probably from a nearby restaurant. Several of the bags tore open when we hit them, which was disgusting, but at least the food scraps were soft and yielding enough to keep our bones intact. We had a few odd bruises and Ed Regis had twisted his right ankle pretty badly, but we were otherwise alive, which wasn’t so bad considering that we had just fallen out of an airplane.
Once Alia healed his ankle, Ed Regis got out from the dumpster and then carefully lifted Alia and me out, setting us on the cold, damp concrete in the dumpster’s shadow. Ed Regis sat down beside us, removed his jacket and put it around my shoulders. I had lost my sweatshirt somewhere in midair. I could tell Ed Regis was impatient to put some distance between us and our crash site, but I still felt too weak to stand.
“I hope that plane didn’t fall in the city,” I breathed.
“There’s no telling,” said Ed Regis, glancing up at the dark sky, “but it had a fair amount of altitude. Lucky for us. And lucky we landed in the garbage.”
That wasn’t entirely luck. I had guided us into the dumpster at the last second, but I didn’t feel like bragging. Alia was gingerly picking spaghetti noodles out of her hair.
“You need a bath,” I said to her mildly.
Alia glared at me. “That’s not funny, Addy!” she said dryly. “That’s not funny at all! And could you please, please, please stop getting shot?!”
“I’m working on it, Alia,” I said apologetically, “but no promises.”
Alia quietly drew herself closer to me and I put an arm around her shoulders. I noticed that she was still shivering a little as her adrenaline slowly ebbed away. Mine had instantly dissipated along with my power, leaving me spent but calmer. It was never easy reorienting your emotions after something like this. Even Ed Regis still looked a little shaken. We sat silently, listening to the distant sounds of people and cars on the busy road at the end of the alley. Alia eventually stopped shivering.
Ed Regis asked me if I was ready to try standing up. I still felt lightheaded and my legs were a bit wobbly, but I found that I could walk without falling over.
“You need to drink something and replenish your fluids,” said Ed Regis. “I think you lost a fair amount of blood there.”
“I’m fine,” I said as I buttoned up Ed Regis’s jacket, which was much too big for me but better than being shirtless on a cold night. “Let’s get moving.”
“Here,” Ed Regis said to Alia, “let’s get these things off you first.”
Alia still had her control bands clamped onto her wrists, and although the draining rods were retracted, the bracelets looked heavy and uncomfortable on her. They would also be a dead giveaway to anyone on the lookout for us.
Ed Regis looked around for something hard to break the plastic casings with. Alia reached into her pocket and pulled out Ms. Decker’s remote control. Studying it for a second, she pressed a few buttons, and her control bands snapped open.
I asked Alia in wonder, “How did you know where Decker was hiding that remote? How did you even know she had it?”
“She used it on me once,” replied Alia. “To shock me. It really hurt, but I saw where she put it afterwards.”
Never underestimate my little sister. I had learned that lesson more times than I cared to count. Tough luck for Decker.
Ed Regis was staring at me. “If you didn’t know that Alia
was going to get your control bands off on the plane, what was your original plan?”
“I didn’t have one,” I admitted embarrassedly. “I just figured that we didn’t have much to lose anyway.”
Ed Regis laughed. “Terry’s right. You really are crazy.”
By the way my sister was eyeing me, I could tell that she agreed.
“Hey,” I said to her softly, “if we can survive something like this, Alia, we just might live to be old.”
Alia looked like she was about to say something, but then just let out a resigned little sigh and smiled.
We soon discovered that we were in the same city as Wood-claw. Apparently the Wolves’ helicopters had taken us away from the city once, but then the plane had flown us back over it. If only we knew which direction it had been flying when its cockpit exploded, we might have gained a clue as to Randal Divine’s whereabouts, but no such luck.
Ed Regis kept us to the back alleys as much as possible as we made our way to a public park several blocks from our crash site. He had been right about me lacking fluids, and I felt immensely better after taking a long drink from the park’s water fountain. Alia took care of our remaining bumps and bruises, including the nasty one I got on the side of my head when our car was shot up by the gunship.
“Sixteen hours, right?” said Ed Regis, referring to the hiding protection Rachael had given Alia and me. “It should wear off well before noon tomorrow. We just have to stay out of sight until then, and Scott should be able to find us.”
“How hard can it be?” I said.
We had no money, no weapons, no change of clothes and nowhere to go. It reminded me a little of my first days on the run as a child psionic, but there was an all-important difference here, which was that I wasn’t alone.
It wasn’t quite midnight yet. Ed Regis ruled out staying the night in the park as there were no decent hiding spots and someone might deem us suspicious enough to call the police. I suggested my old fallback of climbing a building’s fire escape and camping out on the roof, but Ed Regis pointed out that we could be spotted from above and that we wouldn’t have a viable escape route.
“What we need to do right now is blend in,” said Ed Regis.
We joined up with a small group of homeless people living out of some abandoned, broken-down cars. They probably saw right through us, but didn’t question Ed Regis’s claim that we were a family and that we had been recently evicted from our house. Ed Regis made it clear to them that we would only be there one night, and they kindly shared their food and drink, which was meager but much appreciated.
We were prepared to sleep out in the open, but one elderly man offered to let us stay in the van that he called home. He cleared out his clutter of cans and other junk so that there would be room for three in the back. Then he himself took the driver’s seat, which was broken and couldn’t even be tilted back.
“We can’t thank you enough,” Ed Regis said to him.
He smiled in the rearview mirror, showing a mouthful of chipped, yellow teeth. “Everybody falls down sometimes,” he said sympathetically. “You look like a nice family. I’m sure you’ll be alright in the end.”
That night, we stuck close in the van and slept very little. There was no telling when another team of Wolves might shine flashlights into our hiding place and drag us out like they did just hours ago, and while we might be just as powerless to stop them, we still had to be awake. Just in case.
Chapter 4: A Rapidly Changing World
We wanted to leave the homeless group at first light, but they insisted that we share their breakfast. One man even gave me an old sweatshirt which, though a little loose on me, was warm, comfortable and moderately clean.
As touched as we were by their generosity, I was relieved when we finally parted company. They had next to nothing, and yet they would help complete strangers for no reason at all, and here I was on a mission to kill the last surviving member of my own blood. Something just didn’t feel right.
We made our way back to the park. I returned Ed Regis’s jacket and we cleaned up as best we could at the water fountain.
Lifting up my sweatshirt, Alia carefully examined her latest work in the daylight. The gash in my lower right side had come back together pretty sloppily, leaving a long and messy scar.
“Sorry, Addy,” said Alia, running her fingertips along the uneven line. “The wind was really just too much.”
Alia wasn’t a reconstructive healer, but she nevertheless prided herself on precise healing. Personally, I didn’t care. It was just another scar.
We found a table at the end of the park’s picnic field. We didn’t have anything picnic-like to spread out, but at least it wasn’t a school day so we didn’t look too out of place here now that the sun was up.
“Just a couple more hours,” Ed Regis assured us. “Scott’s team is probably already out at our original rendezvous point. They’ll know something went wrong, and once your hiding bubbles fade, they’ll be here in a flash.”
That did little to alleviate my fears. Now we knew why we had been put on the police database. The Angels had taken control of our government, which was something we hadn’t expected for several more years at the earliest. This was no longer a war between two psionic factions. The longer we stayed in the open, the greater our risk of capture.
Ed Regis helped pass the hours by telling us stories of his youth. He had grown up on a farm, the oldest of three brothers, and he had some funny stories to tell, including one that involved riding a horse into his living room. I wasn’t sure I believed everything he said, but at least it was entertaining.
Ed Regis also told us how lucky we had been on the cargo plane. He strongly suspected that none of Ms. Decker’s soldiers were trained Wolves. They were probably just Angel Seraphim playing dress-up. It might have only been due to my VIP status with King Divine that Ms. Decker didn’t properly restrain us, but real Wolves would have certainly had us in chains and possibly drugged unconscious. They would have kept Alia drained regardless of her age or lack of combat powers, and they wouldn’t have been wearing grenades like that on an airplane. Thus, at least according to Ed Regis, our escape had been comparatively easy.
“I have a hunch the Angels don’t yet have complete control over the Wolves,” said Ed Regis. “Your Ms. Decker probably didn’t trust them enough to let them fly with us to Randal Divine’s location.”
“I hope that’s true,” I said, unable to keep myself from looking around nervously every few minutes.
Noon came and went, but Scott didn’t appear. Alia finally voiced the thought I had been too afraid to say out loud. “Something happened to them, too,” she said quietly. “They’re not coming for us.”
“Faith, Alia,” said Ed Regis.
Psionic hiding protection is neither visible nor tangible, and Ed Regis suggested that perhaps Rachael had given us a slightly conservative estimate on our time. But even he agreed that our protection must have worn off by now, and as the deep orange sun slowly slid behind the cityscape, Ed Regis announced that we would have to find another place to spend the night.
“But we’re no longer hidden,” argued Alia. “If Wood-claw isn’t out looking for us, then someone else is.”
“I know,” said Ed Regis. “If Scott doesn’t find us by sunup, we’ll have to start thinking about other options.”
Alia huffed. “What other options?”
“We’ll think of something.”
“Ed Regis is right,” I said to my sister. “One thing at a time.”
Alia looked as unconvinced as I felt, but we needn’t have worried. The moment we stood up to leave the park, we saw Scott and Rachael coming our way.
Alia let out a cry of joy in my head. I sensed she was about to break into a run, so I grabbed her arm and kept us at a slow walk. Scott would know by our powers that we weren’t Angel shape-shifters or anything, but we could still be part of a trap. I suspected that there were hidden Wood-claw Knights watching us, and it wouldn’t
be safe to do anything that could be misinterpreted.
Once we closed the gap, Ed Regis asked Scott, “Do you trust us or would you like to ask a security question?”
“We trust you,” Scott said calmly. “Do you trust us?”
Ed Regis nodded. “Not that we have much of a choice right now, but yes.”
“Where’s your car?” asked Scott.
“We lost it,” Ed Regis replied simply.
Rachael said, “Well, our van is parked just outside, and it has a hiding field so let’s not stay here.”
As we walked together toward the exit, I asked, “What took you guys so long?”
“I’m sorry about that,” said Scott. “We had some trouble getting Mrs. Harding’s permission to bring you in.” Then he glanced at our dirty clothes and added, “But I guess you guys had some trouble, too.”
“Let’s hear yours first,” I suggested as we left the park and headed to Scott’s white van, which was waiting for us on the curb, engine running.
Hammer, the snappish Knight from yesterday evening, was at the wheel. He looked even crankier now, and silently started driving as soon as we closed the doors. Scott rode beside him and Rachael sat with us in the back, putting cloth blindfolds around our eyes.
“Please don’t take those off until we’re inside the building,” said Rachael. “Especially Alia, since you’re still too young to use a mind-writer on.”
“Okay,” said Alia.
“So why did Harding want to keep you guys from coming for us?” I asked, closing my eyes and leaning back into the seat.
Scott explained, “There was a plane crash last night. You might not have heard about it, though. It wasn’t on the news. It was a military transport, and Mrs. Harding thinks that it might have been carrying Wolves. She put Wood-claw on high alert: no one in or out for a while.”
“Where did the plane crash?” I asked.
“Nowhere near Wood-claw,” said Scott. “But it’s still a serious issue for us.”
“I meant did it crash inside the city?”
“Oh, no, if that had happened, the press would have been all over it. Mrs. Harding said it crashed somewhere just outside the city limits. We don’t know much more about it, though. Mrs. Harding thinks there’s going to be a surge of Wolves in the city until they finish dealing with it.”
Guardian Angel (Psionic Pentalogy Book 5) Page 6