A Bone to Pick, page 12
How did you do that, Jason—what did you do? Did he grab Ian’s ring thinking he could heal himself now? He couldn’t be working with Tell. I edged along, watching him.
He came to the street corner, and turned left and away... as the light changed and let me cross to close in on him.
I trotted toward his back. Yes, that was him in the shirt, with the right height and the dark hair, and the slight, pained lurch to his walk. Three people stood between us, then two. I dashed forward.
My footsteps or something must have warned him—he dodged ahead of my grasp and looked back.
His face was tight, set.
I said “Alright, what are you doing—”
He ran. A wild dash away, not fast enough. I charged after him.
He broke into a gap in the crowd, and twisted off to the side, but I saw it and spun to match him.
My feet slipped.
I skidded, toppled in what felt like slow motion. What did he lead me into, where’s he going— Jason dodged around me, and in the instant he passed close I drew on the last drop of the Bones’ power. Inside Jason was a flicker of pride.
I hit the pavement.
Pain-wrung, breath-short, I hauled myself up. Jason was still pushing on ahead, and I charged after him.
A bright yellow taxi rolled toward us.
He must have spotted that too. It was all I could think, before Jason flung himself into the street ahead of it and brought the cab to a squealing stop. I rushed after him, but the bruises flared in my knees and Jason ducked in through the door.
Then the cab tore around in a U-turn and peeled away.
No, no, no! I ran down the sidewalk, gasping, clinging to one thought: the cab had turned, and the more I saw of which way it went, the more I’d know about its destination. I stumbled and wove through the sidewalk’s crowd, straining for glimpses of that yellow on the far side of the street.
I saw it reach the next corner and keep going. Then, just seconds later, it came to a side street and twisted away, out of sight.
When I made it to the edge of that side street, it was long gone. The breath whooshed out of me to leave me sagging on my feet.
Jason was gone, and fighting for last glimpses of the cab’s route was wasting my strength, with all the twists and turns he used.
He could be heading anywhere, for anything. He could be anyone, and he’d been right beside us all along, I’d fought for him...
I spun around and slammed a foot into the tire of a car.
The pain lashed through my toes, the alarm blasted in my ear, people around me stepped back and stared. Just making something hurt, this time, made the helplessness scatter for one brief moment. I stomped down the sidewalk, steps jarring my legs again and again.
Jason had left me in the dust. That didn’t prove he’d attacked Ian, but the thought drowned out any other explanations.
A black car on the street swung toward me, lurching across the lanes—and I saw a man inside pointing, more men crowded inside. Tell’s men.
I whirled and dashed down the street. My body dodged between figures again, my gaze raked the storefronts for a place to hide. But how’d they get here, did Jason call them? One shop looked closed, another had kids near it—everything my gaze could catch on was wrong.
A knot of cheerfully-chattering people clustered around the sidewalk, and I dove in among the thick of them. That car, that harmless-looking black car, was closing in—would they dare shove right into the crowd? They had before, when they shot up Eagle Square.
No good... I ducked behind one tall man, and crouched low, hoping it gave me some concealment from that car. The nearest faces started to turn and pull back from me—but I dropped low and slid under a parked SUV.
Grime slid on my fingers, the smell of oil pressed in around me. Beside me, tires rolled into view, slowly closing in.
“We’ve got your friend!” a harsh voice called out. “Wants to see you.”
A lie, I thought—Jason was one of them. Or he was innocent, or this was them betraying the backstabber... but I’d seen him riding away, safe...
The thoughts, the fears, pressed at me like the weight of metal all around. Somehow I kept still, kept breathing, until the black car rolled slowly away.
The questions lingered after them. Did they have Jason or not?
—Or Ian, or Lucy?
I twisted out onto the sidewalk again, took a long look around. The only threat in view was curious, nervous glances from the people that muttered and edged back from me.
I grabbed my phone, but Lucy didn’t answer. The phone rang and rang—I tried to check the security apps I’d loaded onto it, but my fingers shook too much, and yet I had to call them. And there was no answer—
“Hello? Adrian?”
“You’re okay?” My voice came out too fast.
“Sure. I just got Ian away in time. You were right, I think that was them tracking us to the shop.”
“Yeah.” The word lodged in my throat. “Because...”
Because Jason told them.
Except I couldn’t say it. It could have been them tracing my card, and Jason selling us out just didn’t fit. He’d fought those thugs beside us, he’d been shot at by them, he’d been cut up.
Shot at—
Ian’s voice cut in “He sold us out, that’s why.”
“I don’t believe that,” Lucy said. “Listen, I have another possibility. What if he took that ring to use it? I mean, not for himself, but to help someone Ian had just said he’d given up on helping? Someone Jason was reminding us about...”
Hope had my fingers shaking as I brought up the phone’s map. And Stadt General Hospital, and the bystander who’d been shot beside us, lay in the path of that cab’s turns.
“You could be right,” I said. “I remember the place, I’ll see if I can find him there.”
“You? You’re not leaving me out of this. You don’t even have the patient’s name—it’s Lawrence Neal, by the way. I’ll meet you there. If Ian listens to reason, that is.”
No, they can’t! Jason’s still dangerous, it still looks like he’s attacked Ian once already. But I squelched that flash of worry and said “Okay, Just... be careful around him.”
I hung up and started walking. I needed to get there fast, but I couldn’t call for a ride and then just sit and wait in the open, on a street that Tell’s men had come down once.
A scowl twisted my mouth. What I needed was my bike back, and that meant trying to explain this to Detective Poe.
I forced myself to keep to a steady walk, nothing that stood out from the crowd around me in case that car came back. If I just stayed alert, and found a safe place to make that call... and Jason was actually headed to Stadt and I had any guess what to do about it...
A quiet alcove beside a shop wall offered a safe pocket of cover. I stepped into it and sat down on the pavement, and felt the cool of being out of the afternoon sun. I pulled out my phone.
“I think they’re gone,” came a voice just inches behind me.
I jolted forward, twisted half-around in a crouch to look back.
Maya stood against the wall, flattened into that tiny space behind where I’d sat, grinning at me. I hadn’t felt so much as a puff of air when she’d appeared.
“You... you think they’re...”
Then the gasping settled, and my thoughts did too, enough to grab at what I needed to know.
“Did they get Jason?” I asked. “Or, was he meeting with them?”
She frowned. “Not that I saw.”
“Thanks. We should talk, just not now.” I straightened up, looked down at my phone and tapped a quick request on the ride app. Then I turned for the street.
She said “What are you doing? All day something keeps coming up between us, and now you want to walk away from me?” Then she added, “You do remember my magic makes that impossible now,” and I could hear the smile in her voice.
Or it was a threat. I looked back at the small woman, standing “trapped” against the wall with so many ways to outmaneuver me... if I pushed her away.
Softly, I said “It’s just, you’re keeping some dangerous company now.”
“You did first.” She didn’t even hesitate.
I tried teaming up with the Duvals to rescue you! And now Jason and Ian were springing their own surprises—except that had been going well until Maya and the Duvals brought the Mob down on us—
No. I unclenched my fingers; this might be my one chance to understand where Maya really stood.
“What are you doing?” I tried. “Looking for more magic?”
“Why else would I tell you I was? But you really did it, you found someone who knows actual healing?”
Once I told her that, would she grab Ian away, or help me? This wasn’t just the girl I’d tried to protect, she’d freed the Duvals, and with her magic she could vanish or trap me in place or push me a dozen different ways. I didn’t even have a hint of the Pulse left.
“I don’t know how real it is,” I said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work at all.”
“He could be conning you.”
That matter-of-fact tone brought a defense rising in my throat, but her voice was already going softer:
“Still, I want to believe, don’t you? I’ve had friends hurt who could use that help. And I know you’d do anything to keep from losing someone.”
Maya looked away, stole a quick sidelong glance back at me. She knew me pretty well.
She added “And the Duvals want it more than we do. To save the woman who helped raise two of them.”
“I met Mrs. Weems,” I nodded. Then, carefully, I risked saying “But, it was the Duvals who put her in danger by challenging the Mob. And, I’ve seen how their way of chasing magic means simply forcing people to hand it over.”
“I know,” Maya sighed. “I guess I owed them something, and Sybil and I go way back. I’m trying to give them a better way than that.” She stopped, looked straight at me now. “Or are you thinking about how the Eye tried to force me into giving up my secrets?”
“It crossed my mind.” And Maya had attacked an enemy of her father’s, and gone after Beltram too, and turned the Duvals loose... but she’d saved me, too many times. We’d saved each other.
Her voice sharpened. “So, do you really think I’d go there now?”
And her gaze shifted away from me again, still watching me but not squarely now.
Still, she’d openly asked me if I considered her a threat. Standing this close, I could only answer one way.
“I know you won’t. I know it.” That brought a smile from her—and I realized that could sound like a verdict from the Pulse. “It’s just, all these complications around you now. They worry me, you know?”
“I do get that. It’s not like when it was just us, trying to keep each other alive.”
“I know.” Our voices had gone softer—there was a whole city street behind me, but I had no idea what it sounded like now. The last time Maya and I had stood this close, we’d been racing through the streets on my bike. Or kissing.
She said “Besides, me joining up with the Duvals is your fault. I’m just following your example,” and she grinned.
The smile faded a moment later.
“So where are we at now?” she said. “Are we both after that healing’s secret, so we can share it together?”
Now I wanted to look away. Instead I managed “The... the healers are in a vulnerable place right now, in a lot of ways. Keeping them safe has been keeping me busy.”
“ ‘Busy’? Jason just ran out on you, and you asked me if he was meeting with the Mob.”
I winced—I had been letting my cards show, what I had of them. “It’s just, they were all just starting to trust me. I don’t know what’s going on now, I just want to handle it myself for now.”
It was the gentlest, most heartfelt plea I could make, not about her or them but simply what I needed for myself.
Maya shook her head.
“You mean you’d shut me out if it added even a tiny risk you wouldn’t save them? Think it through—could you really do that?”
My eyes widened. All my worries about pushing her away too far, and she still just grabbed onto the one thing I couldn’t ignore.
“Jason... ran off to Stadt General Hospital, is my best guess.” The words felt more like a surrender than a peace offering. “Catching up with him is my best chance of getting some answers.”
She laughed softly. “ ‘Catching up’ isn’t a problem.”
My hand felt hers close around it. I looked down in surprise—she paused there, her grip so warm, so tight—
The world broke apart. It burst, we burst into streams of hurtling motion that shot through it, flung through crazy movement that I endured because I’d felt it before, because this was Maya holding onto me, because I knew it would only be one endless instant before it settled again like a wild splash of water being un-splashed—
The world was real again. I had eyes again, blinking and trying to make sense of the lines, the streets far below us and the more distant sounds. My stomach should be heaving, but these impossibly brief transits had my insides settling again before they could even react.
“There it is.” Maya pointed down from the roof—that was it, we stood on a high building overlooking a whole other side of the city. “We could have aimed for midair and looked around while we fell, but I’m still learning this.”
“Ah... thanks?”
Her hand on mine grew tighter.
That gave me some warning as it all vanished again, as we swept across a more empty kind of space along what had to be a downward slant—
We stood on another roof, this one much smaller. Down below sprawled the mass of a busy building, and I forced my eyes to look for patterns in the ants—the people—swarming around the hospital.
Maya moved us a third time, just a whip-crack of down-angling motion before we stood at a quiet corner across from the entrance. I shook myself into walking.
After the space between teleports, the crowd we walked in among was steady as stone walls—only more noisy. They milled and flowed in all directions in the lobby, split into too many currents for someone like Jason to hide in. If they’d even let any strangers near a crime victim.
“This is about that man they shot? That looks useful,” Maya said.
She was eyeing what looked like the door to a small admin office. Her gaze stayed it as she led me around to a side corner, a sheltered spot to observe it.
Then a nurse flung that door open and stared around the corridor. From her angry looks around, something has lured her out, something that might be as simple as Maya’s telekinesis banging on the door.
Maya took a step back from me. And she vanished.
So she’d gone inside that room, trusting the nurse to stay distracted—I raced forward, reaching the nurse just as she began to turn back.
“Have you seen my niece? It’s not her fault, she’s eight and she gets bored...”
I kept the flow of excuses going until she waved me away with a warning to check with Security. When I turned away, Maya was already walking up to meet me.
She said “Sometimes the best tricks are the ones you’ve used the longest... but they’re still better with some new tools to work with. And a partner.” She handed me a plastic pass on a lanyard, and hung another on herself. “Lawrence Neal is on the third floor, Room 347.”
I grinned as we turned for the elevator.
Except... my steps edged me away from her. How close should I be walking, to someone who’d charmed me, turned the Duvals loose, and had three different forces of magic ready to twist up whatever she wanted? While I’d let the Bones run dry.
We picked our way through the people, up the elevator and on into the second floor. Voices rippled around us, of hushed worry broken by outbursts of fear or firm, contained words and steps from the doctors and staff. I searched those people for anyone with Jason’s modest height, or the pained hitch in his step, or just anyone keeping himself in or behind people and out of sight.
And if we do spot him? Scenario fragments spun through my head. If we were right and Jason was coming here, he’d still attacked Ian, and he already blamed me—and Maya—for too much of what he’d been through. I had to spot him first, or he could just duck away again.
Instead I spotted the broken-nosed mobster, lurking in the corridor two turns before the patient’s room.
He stood up in the crowd ahead, leaning on the wall and casting bored looks at the people who passed. I pulled Maya back, edged us back down the corridor, and he never glanced our way.
“Broken-Nose, up there by the wall,” I whispered to her. “He’s one of the ones who grabbed us—I don’t know if he saw us.”
“If he did? Then so much for all our work, to show them you weren’t on my side.” Her voice had the faintest catch in it, when she mentioned the work she and the Duvals had done at the flower shop. “If they’re here, they’re still looking for you. Or they decided to get rid of a witness.”
“Let’s hope not. But... they don’t have to see us together, you know?” The thought took shape as I spoke. “There are other ways around to that room. You just watch him, I’ll see if there are any others. If you can keep from getting in a fight here, anyway.”
“Look who’s talking.” Her smile widened. “So, now you’re trying to get rid of me?”
She said it as a joke, but that didn’t mean it was to her. I said “You didn’t want them to keep connecting me with you, right? Well, what if Jason sees us together? Or Ian? I’m still trying to calm things down with them.”
“And he’s got the healing. Just... try not to end up needing it?”
With that she stepped away and edged toward where Broken-Nose had been.
I turned and headed back down the corridor. There’d been a map on the wall that we’d glanced at before, so now I took a long look at the different ways around this floor, and snapped a picture before I moved on.
So I’d left Maya behind for now... or I’d left myself alone against any more of Tell’s men around here. Still, I’d come here to find people hidden in a busy building, and convince some of them I was no pyromaniac, and none of Maya’s teleporting and physical power would help untangle those.
