Heroes 'Til Curfew

  I stayed invisible, trying to move around as much as I could to avoid his punches, but it was hard to move much. He was a heavy guy and I was pinned under him. My arms were free but it was all I could do to try to deflect him from punching right through me.

  I heard a hollow, metallic pounding to the left. Poe and I both looked. Vivian and Richie were running hand-in-hand across the metal cabinet doors that fronted the fryers and grill.

  Poe slammed into me again, a full body slam that drove all the air from my lungs. Joss and Maddy had lost their hold on the freezer door and slid down the wall into him. Joss didn’t waste any time going to work on the guy. Maddy crawled out of the way, up onto the front of the nearest fryer. Joss pulled Poe up enough for me to get out from under him. I tried to hold onto him, to hold him still for her, but he flung me off. My head smacked against the floor tiles next to us.

  I saw Richie leap from the front of the grill, over the swinging door to the dining area. He landed, impossibly, on his feet on the adjacent wall.

  A moment later, everything shifted again, sending us tumbling and sliding along the equipment toward him, grasping for hand-holds.

  “Wherever their feet touch, that’s ‘down’!” Joss shouted. “They’re manipulating gravity!”

  Somehow that made everything make sense. My stomach settled a notch.

  Maddy was below me, her fingers dug into the crevice between the grill and the fryer. Her feet weren’t too far from what was now the floor, but she didn’t let go. Poe let go of his handhold, kicking her hard in the head just before gravity took him down. He landed on his feet, but when Maddy lost her grip she flailed, trying to stop her slide, and fell through the swinging door.

  The room abruptly tilted back to floor-normal. I saw Poe, Richie, and Vivian make the shift neatly as it happened, landing on their feet as I felt myself falling again. Something hit the floor on the other side of the room and I whirled toward the sound. Joss was near the center of the room now, facing the freezer. The second hinge bolt was sliding out of place.

  Poe almost ran through me as he passed and I was too taken by surprise to grab him. I followed, but not fast enough. I called out to Joss. Right before Poe’s fist would have plunged into her kidney, she sidestepped, grabbed his arm and used his momentum to throw him forward.

  “I’ve got this!” she called. “Get Matt!”

  I did what she asked, not pausing but running past them into the wall. I started trying to force the door open, feeling the room start to tilt again, feeling myself being pulled backward. I yanked desperately on the door and it gave. Everything righted and I felt like my feet were firmly on the floor again.

  Now I could see Matt pushing from the other side. He squeezed into the space.

  “Maddy’s out in the front room alone,” I told him as he wedged himself through. “I don’t know if she’s okay. You need to get away from these guys and get to her. Out the back door and around the building. Do it!”

  Richie was barreling toward us. Matt cleared the door and we both stepped out of the way. Richie crashed against it, slamming it shut again. Then, in a fluid movement, he squatted, back-flipped, and landed on his feet on the back wall of the kitchen.

  The room shifted and we were all tumbling toward the back wall.

  “Don’t think!” I yelled at Matt as the drawers in the kitchen island opened and it rained utensils. “Just get to the door!”

  Matt tried to boost himself up onto the front of the huge refrigerator, but Vivian was already standing on it. She kicked him in the face and he fell back. I grabbed her boot and yanked hard, jerking her off her feet. “Go!” I yelled at Matt.

  He scrambled back up as I pulled Vivian toward me. She squirmed, kicked, and swore, and Richie jumped me. I had gone visible to get Matt and forgot to phase out again. I rectified that, at least, as I lost my grip on Vivian’s ankle and the room tilted again.

  As I tried to find my balance I looked around for Joss. I couldn’t see her. She and Poe must have been dumped out into the other room. I needed to get out there.

  Richie kicked me forward. I slammed into the fridge, bashing my knees before my feet went out from under me and I sprawled half on top it. Then the room tilted back toward the deep freeze. As I fell backward, I saw Vivian above me, her body curled and braced in the big sink. Matt was on the side of it, clinging to some exposed pipes and holding on for dear life.

  My back hit bottom again and knocked the wind out of me with a grunt. Richie groped around and found my jacket, started pulling me up. Above us, Matt stretched hard, got hold of the doorknob and popped the door open. Richie and I fell over onto the floor as Matt scrambled out of the building and the door slammed closed behind him. I swung wildly at Richie, landing a hard punch to his face. His hands fell away from me and I bolted through the swinging door into the front room.

  Poe had Joss by the front of her jacket. He slammed her back into the ice cream freezer, and her head whipped back with the force of it, slammed into the Plexiglas. He raised his fist and brought it down hard, but she was able to shift out of the way. His hand burst through the glass beside her head. He jerked it out and raised it to try again.

  I rushed him, plowing my shoulder into his ribs and taking us both into the scatter of tables and chairs in the center of the room, but we hardly had time to get untangled from the furniture before the room shifted. Everything slid, tables, chairs, the dishes on the shelves behind the counter, and us. The noise seemed tremendous. Most of it, including me, piled into the alcove at the back of the shop that led to the bathrooms.

  Joss was clinging to the frame of the broken freezer she’d been pinned to and Poe was hanging onto one of the booths as I was trying to claw my way up from the tangle of tables and chairs. Blood ran into my eye and I raked my sleeve across my forehead. Richie’s foot crunched above me, shoving a chair leg hard against my ribs. I reached up for him, but couldn’t quite reach. He yelled out “Dice!” as he reached the other side of the room.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but I saw Poe lever himself up onto one of the booths and wedge himself between two seats, under a table. Joss saw it too. She climbed around the freezer, getting as much of her body within its frame as she could. “Hold on to something!” she called out.

  Richie vaulted into the corner booth. As I finally heaved myself to the top of the pile and could see around the corner, he leapt from wall to ceiling. As soon as the room’s gravity followed his movement, he jumped to the other wall. I was bashed around in a circle—like dice in a cup. It was all I could do just to try to catch myself and stay clear of as much of the furniture as I could, let alone try to find some way to brace myself. The furniture stayed in the alcove because Richie never touched the front wall of the store that would dump it out.

  A table that would have hit me in the face stopped, flew away. Joss was hurling tables and chairs in Richie’s direction. He must have been dodging them as he ran around the walls.

  “Joss!” I yelled, “pitch it through the window!”

  The table whizzed away, flying across the length of the dining area, smashing through the huge front window with a horrendous crash of shattering glass.

  Everything just kind of stopped.

  I tumbled down the pile of tables and chairs, unable to try to climb down. My legs felt weak and shaky when my feet hit the ground, and I hoped they were going to stay under me. Everything hurt.

  “Well,” Richie said, jumping down from the table, “I guess you figured that one out.”

  “It only works in a closed system?” Joss asked.

  “Whenever a door opened, the floor was the floor again. That’s why he had to slam the freezer door shut.” I said. “But there’s no shutting that window.”

  “No, there’s not. Your boyfriend’s just so smart,” Vivian said from the door to the kitchen. Poe moved around us to go to her side. Richie was following suit. “So we’re done here.”

  “Just like that?” Joss asked.

  “Sure
. What did you think it was, fight to the death?”

  “What was the point?”

  “Maybe we just wanted to see what you could do. It was almost impressive. I’d like to say that the Syndicate has a place for people like you but…I just don’t think you’d fit in.”

  “The Syndicate?”

  “I think we’ll take that as a compliment,” I drawled. I knew stuff about Marco’s family background that Joss didn’t, had a better sense of what his ambitions were. And even though I didn’t know, this didn’t really surprise me. Except for maybe the fact that they would bother.

  “Whatever,” Vivian sneered back at me.

  “So no, really,” Joss said, “that’s it? You’re not going to warn us off your turf or some lame shit like that? Tell us to leave Marco alone?”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything, dear.” She jerked her head and her two goons went into the kitchen ahead of her. Poe held the door, staying right by her side. She turned back to us. “Well, except maybe that you might want to check in on your dad’s store on your way home. You know, do a security sweep. Make sure all’s well.”

  Chapter 14

  Joss

  As soon as we heard the back door slam, Dylan grabbed me for a quick, hard kiss. “Are you okay?” he demanded, looking over my hands.

  I swiped up a wad of napkins from a dispenser that was attached to the top of the counter and pressed it against the cut on his head. “Asks the guy who just got out of a blender filled with metal furniture.”

  “Just bruises. Where’s Maddy?”

  “She got out before you came in. Matt?”

  “He went out the back. Joss,” he said, stopping me in front of the door. His voice was concerned, soothing and serious, “what do you think she meant?”

  I didn’t want to think about it. I think Vivian and Dylan expected me to go tearing off for the Army/Navy to see what had happened, but I wasn’t. Whatever it was I was too late to stop it, and now I really didn’t want to know. My head ached from using my Talent against Poe and my body hurt from the beating I’d taken. I was tired and I just didn’t want to cope. Didn’t want to face the fact that I’d been lured here by Matt’s dilemma while Marco used the distraction to do something to my family, knowing I’d be too busy to catch him at it.

  I pushed through the door and walked away from Dylan. I heard him following me across the little deck and down the two wooden steps. Matt and Maddy jumped up from where they’d been sitting on the edge of the porch, but I ignored them. I was tired and I just wanted to curl up in my bed and forget about all of this.

  I turned toward the Army/Navy.

  The others walked with me. Dylan answered a few questions and then they were silent until we passed the midpoint entrance to the mall.

  “Where are you going, Joss?” Maddy wanted to know. “The car’s this way, remember?”

  “I gotta go check on something. You guys go home. Drop Dylan off, will ya?”

  “I think you got hit on the head,” he said, picking up the pace to get ahead of me. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Eleven. Give or take. You should go home and put ice…everywhere.”

  “Don’t be like this, Marshall,” he said quietly, falling into step beside me. He looked over his shoulder and talked to the twins. “Vivian said something about her dad’s store. We need to check it out. You guys should get home.”

  “No way, we’ll go with you,” Matt was talking too loud. “What did she say?”

  “Awesome,” I muttered.

  The store was dark. Like most merchants, we had a few lights we always left on, but it was completely dark inside the shop. I had my keys in my hand, even though I knew I wouldn’t need them.

  “I need to check the alarm system,” I told them. “Wait out here and keep an eye out.”

  Of course that worked on the twins, but Dylan followed me inside as I pushed open the door and walked in. No annoying beep from the motion sensor, and that felt eerie and wrong. The next thing I noticed was the smell, a weird mixture of cleaners, scent cover, gun oil—I was just guessing based on what was at hand. The combination made a stink all its own and there was no way I could pick out individual odors.

  The alarm box was still powered. “It’s been disarmed.”

  “Huh?”

  “Someone’s keyed in the right code.”

  “How many people know it?”

  “When I was at Dog-Eared, Marco said something about Angie opening the safe. Decoding or cracking stuff like that—that’s probably her Talent.”

  “Bitch.”

  Dylan said it like a girl would. I smiled a little in spite of myself and his hand stroked down my hair, squeezed my shoulder.

  “We need to get to the back room, see if we can get some lights on.”

  We couldn’t really see anything, and the gloom got deeper as we neared the back of the store. As I got colder. We had to move slowly, picking our way through all the stuff we couldn’t see on the floor.

  I had to shove at the door to the store room. There were piles of boxes behind it. They must have gone out through the back. It was completely dark back here.

  “Hang on, I’ve got a lighter.”

  I could feel Dylan behind me, reaching into his pocket. I touched his arm. “Not yet, you’ll ruin your night vision. I can find the box.”

  “Be careful.”

  At the light box I let him flick on the lighter so I could find the right switches and just put on the few lights we usually kept in the shop at night. Just in case the cops decided to actually patrol the mall. When they flickered on in the stockroom, I couldn’t help but suck in my breath.

  Everything was trashed. I mean, from what we walked through to get back here, I figured out that they trashed the place, but I mean they really went to town on it. Water pooled on the floor in the door of the bathroom like they’d even tried to flush some of the stuff down the toilet until it couldn’t take anymore. There was hardly anything left on the shelves. There were boxes everywhere, and most of them had been hacked into. I doubted there was a single piece of saleable merchandise left.

  “The GOOD packs are gone.”

  “What?”

  “There were three backpacks at the back of that shelf, behind some of these boxes. Get Out Of Dodge bags. They had first aid kits, extra clothes, disposable cell phones, a little cash…That kind of thing. I don’t see them anywhere.”

  “Anything like…fake IDs, weapons?”

  “Multi-tool pocket knife kind of things. No guns. No ID.”

  “Okay, let’s move on then. Check out the front room.”

  He squeezed my shoulder and propelled me back toward the front of the store.

  It was pretty much the same story there. The knife cases were smashed and empty of anything but price cards and broken glass. The cash register wasn’t there; it must have been dumped on the floor behind the counter somewhere, even though we always left it open and empty. Remnants of clothing, shredded by knives, still hung on some of the hangers. Books ripped to shreds, packages trampled all over the floor.

  The pegboard wall Dad had reset last week was practically empty. Higher up on the walls, all the posters had been scribbled over with black spray paint.

  “What the fuck?”

  I followed Dylan’s gaze to the wall above the doors to the stockroom. A giant heart was spray-painted there and inside it read “DM + JM 4ever.”

  If I’d needed any proof that this was all about me, there it was.

  “I need to go home.”

  Dylan didn’t say anything, just put his arm around my shoulders and walked me out of the store.

  The twins were still waiting outside. They’d been watching us through the window and they started with the questions as soon as we opened the door.

  “Whole store’s trashed,” Dylan told them. “Just leave it at that. I need to get Joss home.”

  “We’ll drive you,” Maddy offered.

  We heard sirens approaching. I
should have thought that Vivian would send us over and then tip off the cops. But I wasn’t thinking so great right now.

  “Let’s move it,” Dylan said, taking me by the elbow and starting to jog across the mall.

  I went along pretty much in a fog. I felt like I couldn’t get too worked up about the fact that the police were on their way and that we were at the crime scene. Even my headache felt distant and unreal. I was just…hollow.

  Dylan sat right up next to me in the backseat, rubbing my cold hands between his. His knuckles were red and swelling, and one was cut open, a consequence of having to punch someone without the benefit of my Talent.

  I didn’t even realize that we were in my driveway until Matt was standing in the open door, holding out his hand like I was getting out of a coach or something.

  “Come on, Joss.”

  Dylan gave me a little nudge and I ignored Matt’s hand as I climbed out. Dylan slid out behind me and put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Want us to come in with you?” Matt asked.

  When I didn’t say anything right away, Dylan said, “Nah, probably better to keep it to a minimum. Thanks for the ride.”

  Matt chuckled. “Thanks for pulling my ass out of the freezer.” He turned to Joss. “I’m really sorry about…everything.”

  I just kind of shrugged and moved away from him up the walk. I dug my keys from my pocket, but dropped them when I tried to fit one in the lock. Dylan scooped them up and got the door open.

  We weren’t even in far enough to close to the door when Jill came barreling down the stairs, shrieking my name. She must have been looking out her window and seen us. She collided with me, knocking me into Dylan, and wrapping her arms around my waist.

  “Hey,” I said lamely.

  “You’re back!”

  “Yeah, looks like.” I didn’t know what to say to her. Jill could be pretty huggy, but I really wasn’t and she usually left me alone. I didn’t know how to detach her without hurting her feelings, so I just left her there.