He drops down just before I pull the trigger, so I don’t bother taking the shot. I need this bullet. It’s my very last.
Mason rises to his feet in a movement so fluid that I wonder if he, too, was ever a dancer. He moves across the dirty ground, littered with used condoms and needles, and kicks the door in. Bits of wood splinter and dig into my skin, but I barely notice the pain, blue-painted fingers curling around the edges of the opening as I drag myself out and throw my body into Mason.
Maintaining close contact with any one of the men will help reduce my chances of being shot. But grappling with Mason is not the same as grappling with Russ. He manages to get a hand free, hitting up against the bottom of my chin and causing me to bite my tongue. Fresh, hot blood fills my mouth as he throws a punch that likely would’ve burst my eyeball if it’d made contact. Instead, I manage to avoid it and his fist flies into the wall.
Four against one. Odds that normally wouldn’t scare me. But Mason is different. Russ is dangerous. The other two men are just add-ons at this point, but even they’re a step-up from the Charter Crew’s best and brightest.
An elbow hits me in the chest before I register that Mason’s changed his tactics. He’s trying to drive me toward a broken window this time, likely in the direction of additional GMP members. I turn and grapple the edge of the staircase, hauling my body up through a break in the spindles and finding my feet even as Russ fires several times in my direction.
Drywall dust fills the air, clouding the few lit spots in the unending darkness of the building. There are so many like this in Prescott. Havoc knows them all. Even before I trip over the first body, I know we lost a few members of our crew in here today.
There’s nothing I can do to help the dead, so I don’t stop. Instead I continue up the stairs until I hit the metal door that leads to the roof, shoving through it with both palms and surveying the space around me.
About ten years ago, the city started changing its zoning laws to allow buildings to be built closer and closer together. The apartment next door is practically within touching distance. Neither of them is particularly tall—about five stories—but a fall from here would kill me.
I tilt my head to one side, trying to calculate the odds.
The sound of pursuit behind me makes the decision relatively easy. I’d rather risk falling to my death than end up in Mason’s grasp. I’d be lucky to simply die at his hands. Chances are, if he can, he’ll take me alive and try to torture Havoc’s secrets out of me.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I pull in a deep breath, remembering that day in the studio when I danced for Bernadette like a beast performing some sort of primal mating ritual. I open my eyes again, lips twisting up in a smile. That’s what I did, didn’t I? Danced. Begged. Pleaded for her to let me touch her the way I’ve always dreamed of.
That’s what drives me when I take a few steps back, brace myself for the jump, and take off for the edge of the roof. Even though it kills my knees and makes me wish I were hopped up on painkillers, I flex my muscles and leap, landing on the gravel surface of the neighboring roof.
Agony screams through me, rippling from the carefully rebuilt knobs of my knees, but I ignore it. I’m used to pain. So used to it, in fact, that when I see it in others—Bernadette’s face, for example—I find it beautiful.
Breathtaking, really.
I don’t bother rising to my feet, crawling over to a nearby hole and lowering myself into the ruined space until I’m standing on a nest of pine needles and wet drywall. It smells like must and piss in here—typical Prescott—but there’s something else, a strange clove and smoke smell that gives me just enough warning to avoid getting my head blown off.
Ducking into an open door, I put myself behind a brick wall, my mind assessing what I just saw.
Mason was there in the dark, in the opposite building. There’s a broken window on both my side and his. Likely, right now, he’s climbing between the two spaces. That’s what I’d be doing, after all. If he’s anticipated my movements to a T, then we clearly calculate our next moves in a similar matter.
I heft the handgun from my hoodie pocket, eyes traveling the length of the room, sweeping across the ceiling. I won’t be caught unawares from above, not the way I surprised those men in the hallway. I reach up and adjust the skeleton mask on my face. Like everything else with Havoc, we create our own traditions. Skeleton faces and wolf howls and a girl that’s too wild for one boy to possess on his own.
