Page 11 of Vicious
I instantly corrected my direction, away from the captain, who didn’t seem to notice me. My heartbeat stuttered. Sweat trickled down my sides. My muscles tightened in preparation to run, but I willed myself to chill, begged the involuntary hitch in my steps to appear as a result of the crumbled cobblestone. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe I needed to drop that word from myvocabulary.
I turned left down a narrow pathway off the main road as nonchalantly as I could manage. A moment later, so did the footsteps. I took another path on the right past the next building. Technetium, molybdenum. I mapped my location as I turned corners and charged ahead on the periodic table in my mind so I wouldn’t get lost, starting with iron, because I always started with iron. Tantalum,halfnium.
The footsteps still followed, echoing loudly on the narrow pathway betweenbuildings.
From the open door of a building I’d just passed, a familiar voice floated. “Name.”
I skidded to a stop and whirled around. Ten feet away, the hem of a black cloak billowed behind another building andvanished.
Allowing myself only a slice of relief, I barged into the building with the voice. The air tasted hot and thick with body odor and alcoholic fumes. A mounted teralingua head stared blankly from high on the opposite wall, its gray velvet fur dull in the low light. A long slab of wood butted up close to one wall, and several crossbeams attached the floor to the ceiling in X patterns. Bales of hay dangled over narrow ledges about halfway up the high walls, above which were several boarded-up windows. Broken tables, chairs, and an explosion of glass littered the floor. Slumped over the broken furniture lay several unconscious bodies. In the middle of it all stood Mase and the back of someone I didn’trecognize.
Mase’s gaze snapped to mine over the other person’s shoulder, the tension in his face softening a fraction. "Whathappened?"
“I should ask you the same.” I skirted past the figure standing in front of him—a female, not human, older with lines fanning across her temples. She stared at me as I passed, and I stared rightback.
Her hair, pulled back in a long ponytail, matched the color of her albino skin. Twin gray-scaled streaks cut down the center of her forehead between large yellow eyes and down her nose, mouth, and chin. Scales and white hair. She looked an awful lot like a Saelis, minus the extralimbs.
She wore a dark brown leather duster that skimmed her chunky boots made for ass-kicking and a burnt orange-colored button-down shirt. Various sized knives were strapped down her pants, and blood smeared the knuckles of both her hands. Mase’s too. It appeared I’d missed a barbrawl.
"Parker's here, Mase,” I hissed. “He's looking foryou."
“What?” He winced then dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling, his molars clenched tight. "Fuckme."
“That just about sums it up,” I said. “Randolph sent him on a goose chase, but we need to go.Now.”
“I thought he was dead.” He shook his head and swallowed thickly. “I saw him on our ship during the hauntings, and I thought he was a ghost. You saw him?Here?”
The panicked sound of his voice snagged the air from my lungs. I nodded, a sense of helplessness knotting myinsides.
Thud. thud. Something was coming with heavy footsteps. A long, bulky shadow slanted inside thebar.
Shit. Was it the black-cloaked figure? Or was Parker here already? I hurried to Mase’s side, and he walked us backward, away from the door. With whoever it was about to block the door, we needed to find another way out, but there wasn't anywhere to go. The windows on the second landing were boarded up, and there wasn’t a back entrance that I couldsee.
The couple-of-scales-short-of-a-Saelis female marched up to me, her yellow gaze glued to my face, and opened her mouth to speak. Needle-sharp fangs filled her mouth. “What areyou?”
Holy Feozva, now was not the time forthat.
Thud. Thud. The shadow lengthened across the floor of the bar. We had seconds left before whoever or whatever entered thebar.
“We climb.” Mase pointed up and lifted a boot onto a crossbeam to climb up to the landing and a boarded-upwindow.
Thud.Thud.
The female alien swung herself between Mase and me and slammed us up against the wall with her pale hand on each of ourshoulders.
Before I could hiss a death threat, a presence darkened the doorway, throwing all of us into deep shadow. Parker ducked inside. His footsteps vibrated an icy chill over the floorboards, up through my boots, and into my quaking knees. His four minions followed, and all of them squinted into the dim light even though we stood right there by the faded cracks in the stonewall.
The alien touching Mase and me held still. I shallowed my breaths and did thesame.
Parker and company moved across the bar, their boots snapping on broken glass and what remained of the bar’s furniture. His cracked blue eyes skated right past us. Was he blind? When the nearest of his gang was within kicking distance and didn’t appear to realize it, I dared to shift myhead.
On the other side of the alien, Mase glared at Parker, the tendons in his neck stretched tight. The alien still held to his shoulder, but she kept her gaze pinned to me, likely still fishing for an answer to her question. She had to be doing something to us, blending us in with the wall with her scaled, lizard-like touch. But why? And who wasshe?
I nodded toward the doorway where one of Parker’s guys still stood. We could mow him over and make a run for it while the others’ backs were turned. But on the floorboards in front of the guy, something crackled and zigzagged, white likelightning.
“Mason?” Parker called, the bottom of his black trench coat swirling around his ankles. “I know you’re in here. I could smell your need the second you dropped down here, even over the river bean stand. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? She’s missed you, you know. And I know you’ve missed her somethingawful.”
His words sank into my chest with the weight of a heavy chain. She? Who was he talkingabout?
