The Halfling (Aria Fae #1) Page 10

  “Whatever,” Andrea mumbled.

  Pushing my will on her mother—Who was also a broken creature, because really, aren’t mean people always?—and raised my eyebrows. Her brown eyes narrowed, but she turned away, gripping Andrea by her bicep and pulling her down the sidewalk.

  I watched them go, then started on my way back to my apartment. I still had an hour before I had to be at Roses. On the walk, I ran over my actions of the day, and came back to my original feeling toward it all—ashamed. For the first time, I looked beyond my feelings of betrayal by the Peace Brokers, and wondered if maybe they hadn’t been justified in treating me the way they did.

  Maybe, I, too, was a broken creature.

  See how the rain clouds of my mind just roll in? It’s a disease, really.

  Once I was back in my apartment, I wallowed in my despair for a while, grunting angrily as I knocked out a couple hundred sit-ups. Then I went to the refrigerator and promptly turned into a raccoon, eating as much as my now-sore belly could hold. This was my normal depression routine; work out like a machine, devour anything that resembled food.

  It didn’t make me feel any better, and I was still in my foul mood when three o’clock rolled around and my shift at Roses began. Luckily, Rose seemed to pick up on my vibes, and didn’t bother me much as I completed all the tasks expected of me. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all, really, until we were shutting down the shop at six.

  “Is there anything else you need me to do, ma’am?” I asked, giving the counter a final once-over with a cleaning wipe and tossing it in the trashcan.

  Rose gave me her motherly smile, and I wondered if she had any children, or grandchildren, even, but somehow thought it rude to ask.

  “I think that’ll do it, Aria,” Rose said, and paused. “You okay?”

  I nodded, maybe a tad too eagerly. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She looked over the rim of her wire glasses at me, her warm gray eyes telling me she didn’t believe this. “It’s just you’ve been awful quiet today.”

  Sighing and adjusting the backpack on my shoulders, I heard myself say, “I got into a fight today at school. I hurt the girl kinda bad,” and resisted the urge to slap myself in the forehead. I had no idea why I’d just told Rose that.

  To my relief, she just nodded, biting her lip, as she did often when she was thinking. “Did she deserve it?” she asked.

  I was caught so off guard by the question that it took me a couple seconds to respond. Then, I nodded. “Yes, ma’am, she did… but that doesn’t make it right.”

  Again, Rose gave a single nod. “Then don’t fret over it, dear. The fact that you know that means you’re already way ahead of most people.”

  Swallowing, I thanked Rose and left the shop. As I stepped out into the smelly city air, I found I was smiling.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Your dad let you out?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at seeing Sam standing outside my apartment building door.

  “Pfft,” she said, as she brushed past me and into the building. “He passed out an hour ago. He won’t really be up again until morning.”

  I couldn’t help it, so I read her aura as she said this, and saw that she had gone numb to her father’s behavior, which was probably for the best.

  We climbed the four flights of stairs, and once we were inside my apartment, she pulled a brown bag out of her backpack. “I brought food,” she said, smiling.

  I returned the gesture with a grin of my own. “Samantha Shy, you know the way to my heart,” I joked.

  I laid out a blanket on the floor and we ate the sandwiches and chips she’d brought atop it, as I didn’t have the room or the money for a table and chairs.

  “So,” Sam said, “You stopping that armed robbery last night was pretty cool, huh?”

  I leaned back against the wall, letting out a slow breath and crossing my hands behind my head, looking hella cool. “Yep,” I said. “I suppose it was.”

  Sam hesitated a moment before going on. “So… you want to keep doing it, then? Going out and helping people? Making the city safer?”

  Raising an eyebrow at her, one corner of my mouth pulled up. “Well, when you say it like that… Yes, I’m in.”

  “It’s dangerous, Aria.” Sam was dead serious now. “Like, stupid dangerous.”

  “Uh, yep. I get that… but I’m more durable than humans. I heal faster, too.”

  Sam’s eyes grew wide behind her glasses. “You have healing capabilities?” she asked.

  I laughed. “You’re such a nerd. I’m not a videogame character. Yes, my body heals. Yours does, too. Mine just does it faster.”

  Sam threw her hands up. “Why the hell wasn’t I born a Halfling?”

  Shrugging, I said, “Why wasn’t I born a computer genius?”

  That same excitement from the previous night filled her face, and it would be a lie to say the thought of feeling the rush of good emotions like I had when I’d saved the liquor store clerk didn’t make my pulse beat a touch faster, too.

  “We’re, like, the perfect team. We need a team name!”

  I rolled my eyes, still laughing. It seemed Sam was endlessly amusing to me. I’d never met anyone like her. Then again, I was pretty sure she could say the same about me.

  “Again with the name thing,” I joked. “I think it’s better to be nameless. Like shadows… or ghosts.”

  “You might have something there,” Sam said. She pulled her laptop from her messenger bag, opening it up. “I want to show you something.”

  I scooted over beside her, looking at the computer screen. Sam clicked on a folder, and a map of Grant City popped up. It was dotted with red spots in different locations, some of them larger than others.

  “This is a map of the city,” she confirmed, “and these red circles you see here mark all the places where attacks and incidents related to Black Magic have taken place. The bigger the circle, the more activity.”

  She pointed to a tiny red dot not too far from a cluster of others. “You see this one?” Sam asked.

  I nodded, my throat growing tight as Sam’s sudden dark feelings washed over me. I’d become so relaxed around her in such a short time frame that I’d let my guard drop more than usual.

  “That’s my mom,” Sam whispered. “That dot is where she was killed… I really don’t even know what she was doing there in the first place. It’s not in a route she should have taken.”

  When I placed a hand on her shoulder, Sam shook her head and continued. “You see these areas here?” she asked, pointing to the screen. “Those are the triangulations between the hotspots. Potential sources.”

  “Of Black Magic?” I asked.

  She nodded. “This drug is new, and it’s being produced right here in Grant City.”

  “You want me to take on a drug kingpin?”

  “No… I want us to take on a drug kingpin. Is that any crazier than anything else in your life?”

  I considered this. “I guess not.”

  Sam’s face turned away from the screen and her blue eyes met mine. “Aria, it’s totally cool if you don’t want to do this. I won’t think any differently of you.”

  My answer came easily, as if it was something long ago decided. “I’m in,” I said. “I mean it. So what’s the plan?”

  “Well,” she said, pushing her glasses up on her nose, “there’s only one way to get to the top of a ladder.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You start at the bottom and climb your way up, rung by rung.”

  I nodded at the screen. “So these larger red spots are where the highest activity is, right? Is that where I should start? Just go and what, knock some heads together?”

  “Who’s at the bottom of a drug kingpin’s ladder? The street dealers, right?” Sam’s eyes were practically gleaming now, and I could tell she’d thought a great deal about this. “The street dealers are the lowest level, the soldiers, but if you take them out of the picture, the money flow stops, and when the money flow sto
ps—”

  “Those on top of the ladder climb down to see what’s going on,” I finished for her.

  “Precisely,” Sam said.

  “Will this help you heal?” I asked, the words slipping free of my mouth before I was even aware I was going to speak them. I swallowed as Sam just stared at me, and added, “One of these people likely played a role in the death of your mom… Will this help heal you, Sam?”

  After what seemed like a lifetime, she shrugged. “I don’t know, Aria… Will it help you?”

  I stood, stretching my legs and arms, rolling my neck. “I guess we’ll find out, huh? Either way, it’ll help Grant City. And from what I’ve seen, someone needs to.”

  Sam stood too, moving her computer over to the counter and putting her communication device in her ear. I grabbed mine out of my pocket and did the same, slipping my black jacket on and pulling its hood up over my head.

  As I went over to my trunk, unlocked it, and removed my staff, I felt that familiar rush of adrenaline, and knew somehow that there was no turning back now. If there ever had been.

  Staring down at the magical weapon, I ran my fingers over the intricate carving in the wood. Then I tucked it into the back of my waistband and grabbed the black mask Sam had given me out of the trunk before shutting it. I slipped the mask on and turned back around.

  Sam was staring at me. “This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she mumbled.

  Laughing, I pushed up the window that led out to my fire escape and braced myself in the frame, welcoming the rush of air that blew stray strands of hair around my face.

  “Where to, Coach?” I asked.

  “Coach! I like that! That’s totally my codename.”

  I shook my head as her eyes went back to the screen. “All right,” she said, her gaze losing that light as though doused with a bucket of water. “Let’s go back to where it started. 33rd and Grand.”

  Watching her for a moment, I gave a slow nod. I knew from what she’d told me that this was the cluster of red dots nearest to where her mother had been killed, and all of a sudden this whole thing became personal for me. I didn’t just want to drown my own sorrows in adrenaline, and I also wasn’t only in it for the altruistic reason of helping to save Grant City.

  Just like that, I wanted to do this because Samantha Shy needed me to. And in all the worlds and all the realms, she was the only real friend I had. Maybe it was foolhardy and dangerous, and maybe the pond I was jumping into would turn out to be deeper than we’d anticipated.

  But I had to try.

  All of that was decided within the space between a butterfly’s wings. I gave Sam a reassuring grin that I wasn’t sure reached my eyes, and told her I’d catch her on the flip side as I leapt out my window and headed toward 33rd and Grand.

  As my feet hit the rooftop of an adjacent building, Sam’s voice spoke in my ear. “Be careful, Aria,” she said. “You don’t happen to be bulletproof… Do you?”

  I let out a small breath. “No, Sam,” I said. “I’m not.”

  CHAPTER 25

  It felt good to be running.

  No, it felt great.

  I would come to understand later that it was these moments right here that made the path I’d already started down an irresistible attraction. In these moments I dropped all my walls, stopped blocking it all out…

  It was as if when I put that hood and black mask on, the mask I wore all the time came off. When I went on these missions, I didn’t have to fit in. I didn’t have to pretend to be human.

  I could just be me, in all my Halfling glory. And I loved it.

  “You’re nearing 33rd and Grand,” Sam said in my ear, her voice tight.

  Slowing my pace, I let my stronger senses reach out around me, taking in the sounds, the smells, the feel of the place.

  But one needn’t be a Halfling to know that this was not the best of areas. In fact, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, it was even worse than where my apartment building was located. And because it was by the docks, the air had the added smell of fish.

  Pulling my hood down lower over my head, I spoke lowly into my ear bud. “What am I looking for, Sam?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary,” she said. “Something going down.”

  I suppressed the urge to chuckle at this unhelpful advice, but then, as if right on cue, my ears picked up the sound of hurried heartbeats, and a woman nearby screamed at someone to stay away.

  I took off in the direction of the chaos, which my ears told me was taking place in the alley behind the building across the street from where I was. It was just a squat brown square of a place; a shop for car repairs, and I used the dumpster sitting beside it to hop up onto the roof.

  “Friggin’ ninja,” Sam said in my ear.

  “Sam,” I warned, my voice hardly a whisper.

  “Sorry,” she said, and fell silent.

  I crossed the roof of the short building like a black cat in the night, and when I got to the other side, my nose told me of the trouble. From the individual scents, I could tell there were two men—one smelling particularly uncleanly—and a woman wearing an expensive but overdone perfume.

  Leaning slowly over the roof’s edge, my eyes confirmed this. Studying the scene, I saw that the woman from whom the scream had come was crying, the man with the bad stench gripping her upper arm with his left hand, a long rusted knife in his right.

  “Will she do?” asked the stinky guy. “I need a fix, man. I need one bad.”

  The cleaner smelling guy looked the perfumed woman over. He had sharp black eyes and a shiny baldhead. He wore a leather jacket and slacks, and from the buldge near his waistband, I could see that he was also carrying.

  “Did anyone see you take her?” he asked the junkie.

  The woman made a shift like she was about to scream, but the junkie shoved the knife up in front of her eyes and between rotted teeth, said, “Don’t even think about it, sweet thing. I’ll gut you.” He laughed hysterically for several seconds. “I kinda want to eat her face off. Ain’t that weird, Dyson?”

  The man in the black leather jacket backhanded the drug addict so hard that I felt my own teeth rattle. He wiped the gloved hand on his pant leg with a look of disgust, and then reached into his jacket. He tossed a little plastic baggie at the other guy, whose eyes lit up with dumb excitement as he took the drugs and scuttled off.

  From seemingly out of nowhere, two more men arrived, and the smell of the captive woman’s fear drowned out the cologne. The man with the dark eyes—Dyson—had removed his gun from his waistband and was holding the barrel to the woman’s temple.

  “You make any kind of sound,” he told her, speaking for the first time since I’d arrived, his voice deep and smooth, “and I’ll shoot you in the face and throw your body in the bay. Got it?”

  Tears continued to streak down the woman’s face, her mascara running and her lipstick smeared. She nodded her head, her black hair a mess atop it.

  Dyson gestured to the other two men, who also had those telltale bulges under their jackets, and they took the woman by the arms and began leading her toward the dock, where a medium-sized boat was docked.

  A car pulled up, and the dark-eyed man named Dyson got in the back seat, and the car pulled away.

  Running my hand over my staff and whispering the incantation, I hopped down off the building, my feet hitting the concrete with nearly no sound. My heart was pounding in my throat, my blood rushing in my ears, but my hands and feet were steady.

  Knowing that the men were armed with guns, the element of surprise was key here, and I knocked the first one over the head with my staff hard enough to put him out for hours. The second guy stood in stunned silence for a heartbeat, and by the time he thought to act, it was already too late.

  I swung my staff low, knocking his feet out from under him. He landed hard on his bottom, his eyes wide. His partner lay unconscious on the concrete beside him.

  When he reached for the weapon in his wai
stband, I knocked his hand away with my staff and gave him a swift rap atop the head.

  “Don’t,” I told him, putting a little bass in my voice to disguise it.

  I looked up at the woman, who was still standing there, gaping at me like an idiot. “Get outta here,” I said, wondering at why she’d need to be told that.

  She took off, and then it was just the still-conscious man and me. I raised the staff, my eyes locked on his.

  “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he spat.

  “It’s whom,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know whom I’m messing—doesn’t matter. Where were you taking that woman?”

  He raised his chin, his pudgy jowls locked tight. I resisted an eye roll and rapped him atop the head again, not hard enough to knock him out, but enough that I knew he saw stars.

  His arms were wrapped over his head now. “What the hell!” he said. “Quit it!”

  “Answer my question. Where were you taking her, and who was the guy who got in the car?”

  Something about this must’ve struck him as funny, because he gave a short laugh. “He’d kill me if I told you anything.”

  I used a little bit of my suggestive voodoo (it was funny how Sam’s names for things just seemed to stick) and asked again. I could tell by his aura that he was trying very hard to resist me.

  “I can’t,” he gritted out, and his eyes flicked toward the medium-sized boat at the end of the nearest dock.

  “Fine,” I said, and put him to sleep the same way I’d done his partner.

  His head fell to the concrete, and mine tilted toward the boat.

  “Sam, you there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “What’s happening?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said, heading to the dock with swift, silent steps, my staff held close at my side, ready. “But I’m gonna find out.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I crept across the wooden dock, out over the dark, cold water of the bay. Crouching low, my pulse beating strong in my neck, I sidled up alongside the boat. It was a twenty-footer, and the name Scarlett was written across the starboard side in red paint.