Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) (29 page)

I couldn’t help trying to keep an eye on the
girls to make sure the other two, who were just watching Poe swing
at me, didn’t go for them. Joss kept moving around like she was
trying to get the right angle of vision through the window so she
could use her Talent to work the handle on the door from the
inside.

“Go for the hinges!” I shouted at her. It
cost me. Poe used my voice to find my face and shot a glancing blow
at my jaw.

Not glancing enough. It whipped my head
sideways and my body followed, phasing back into view. Blood welled
in my mouth as I moved through space and space itself somehow
changed, making me nauseous and dizzy. A moment ago I had been
staggering to catch my balance with my feet on the wall. Then I
couldn’t keep my feet under me anymore. I was freefalling.

I landed hard on my back. Broken dishes and
kitchen implements slid down the wall to pile up against my right
arm. My feet were near the tiled floor but I was lying on my back
when Poe landed on me with a grunt. I winked out, but he was on me,
knew just where I was. He grabbed onto my jacket, held on with his
left hand, and started whaling on me with his right.

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.”