It turned out that Ava stalking me and everyone I cared about was actually a good thing for once. I hadn’t kept too many tabs on Bianca, and that was totally my fault, but it also kinda felt like I’d blinked and summer was over, then I lost two months of my life that I’d never get back. Whatever Ava was doing during those two months was beyond me, and quite frankly, the empty diner littered with broken glass and spots of blood makes it hard to concentrate.
And seemingly, the NOPD came by to stick some loosely tied tape on the front doors and went to grab something to eat, but I guess with the city in the state that it was in, I didn’t blame them for focusing on bigger issues, even though to me, this was the biggest problem I’d faced in a while. Where’s Bianca? All I got in return for my searching was more broken glass, burnt to a crisp fries in vats of oil in the back, and the lingering stink of blood in the air that wasn’t coming from my backpack. I set Ava down on a table and breathed in deeply, catching the smell and following it toward the bathroom, where it kept getting stronger and stronger until my stomach tensed.
It was still early enough in the morning to make the shadows long through the blinds over the windows, silent enough for every sound my sneakers made crunching over bits of broken glass to announce itself to the entire diner. Fear isn’t something I’m used to anymore. Not with the past few months under my belt. But I was getting used to feeling ill, sick with nerves, because Bianca’s dead body would engrave itself into my mind forever, and I don’t think there’s any number of people I can save to ever wash my hands clean of that kind of guilt. So I breathed out slowly and braced myself before I entered the bathroom, because there’s a trail of blood leading toward it all over the floor, a trickle in some places and a dash in others, like someone tossed a bucket of red onto the old carpet.
When I finally open the bathroom door, there’s nothing inside of it. I stood in the doorway, hand on the door itself to keep it open. No puddles of blood or dead bodies, no limbs or weird creatures bursting out of the toilets and the sewers underneath them. Broken mirrors to my right and cracked tiles under my shoes, but…not good enough, whoever tried to hide it. I could smell the disinfectant on the tiles, and when I crouched, doing something I thought I’d never do, and put my nose close to the tiles, they reeked of chemicals and fresh soap.
And something else. Something strange. Something that made my nose tingle.
But nothing I’d ever smelt before, at least, not anything I could put my mind to.
I sighed and rested on one knee, searching the bathroom for literally anything that I could find that would help me look for her, but the broken glass and cracked tiles had been a staple of this joint since before last night.
So even if there was a fight, I couldn’t tell when it had been, anyway.
“Are you sure you’re not lying to me again?” I asked Ava, sitting back down in the booth and bringing her out of the bag. I set her on the table and pulled down the plastic bag I had kept her inside, because, you know, I kinda didn’t want her blood soaking through my backpack. “Because in case you haven’t noticed, nobody’s here.”
She blinked slowly, opened her mouth, stretching her jaw, then said, “I watched you, your mother, and the few friends you’ve got for weeks on end to make sure I knew as much as I possibly could about you. So no, I wouldn’t be lying to you, Rylee, because in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a body right now and wouldn’t really benefit from not having your help!” I fold my arms and watch her pant, even if she doesn't have the lungs to do that. Eventually, she calmed down enough to say, “I’m sorry about that. The past several hours have been…a little uncomfortable. And from what I can see, it looks like someone had come here looking for someone. Her.”
I tensed my jaw a little. “And how sure are you of that?”
“You can judge me all you like, but I grew up having to learn to watch my tracks and the hairs that could get my head put on someone’s mantlepiece. The shattered glass inside and outside of the diner means the fight or the struggle kept going until it suddenly didn’t anymore. No blood outside, either, so nothing that cut or hurt.”
“So you’re telling me she got kidnapped and got swept into the night?” I said quietly.
“I’m saying that I can’t really tell.” Ava sighed, making blood sputter out from the stump of her throat, but nowhere near as much as it had been before. “The people you’re working against are efficient and deadly. The Talon does not take people and make a show out of it, and considering the mess all over the place, they were in a rush.”
The Talon, I thought, rolling the name around my mind, but nope—no bells. For the past few months, it kinda felt like I was a tourist in my own city, with how much stuff went on without me ever finding out about it all.
I leaned forward, elbows on the table. “But they’re some kind of assassin guild, right? What scares them?”
If she could have shrugged, she probably just would have. “Other guilds…the SDU…maybe even you.”
I paused, then pinched the bridge of my nose. “I need you to slow down by a dozen one-liners, Av’, and tell me you’re joking about the possible multiple guilds that might want to get their hands on Bianca right now.”
“Did you miss the part about them being afraid of you?”
“They can join the club and pick a number,” I said, waving her off, because oh, trust me, they would be, and should be, fucking afraid of me once I found them. So much as a hair on her head… “Which other guilds?”
Ava thought for a while, then said, “The Order of Secarius, House Salamander, Eden’s Room,there’s about a dozen who might want to get their hands on her, but work like this? It’s the Talon and nobody else. They ran after they got what they wanted, and if I was going to deduce the amount of drying blood on the floor and our arrival, I’d say that either you scared them, or someone had come along and forced them to leave. I can’t be sure, honestly.”
I groaned and thumbed my eyes, trying to think of what I should do next. Getting rid of Ava crossed my mind, because it was instinct at this point, but I also needed to get a move on, and she seemingly knew this city a lot better than I did. Can’t go knocking on all of those guild’s doors, hoping for an answer. That wastes time. Lucas would have known what to do, and that’s what I would have said a few weeks ago, but the worst part is that he kinda would have known what to do, and would have also known why they wanted Bianca so badly in the first place, too.
But it was easy to fall into that trap again, needing people like him and dad to fix my problems.
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Which, according to me, they’d done nothing except make them even worse.
As a Hail Mary effort, I glanced at the ceiling, and of course, whoever left a few hours ago had made sure that the cameras weren’t here anymore. The perfect crime at an even more perfect time, because the police were too busy to figure this out, and so were the SDU. A kidnapping right now meant almost nothing to most people, simply because there were still giant Kaiju organs splattered over some of Lower Olympus, and skyscrapers-turned rubble to dig people and dead bodies out of, so…yeah, fine, I guess here I was, doing this whole thing on my own again.
All that the brewing annoyance in my stomach did was make my fist tighter and the whine in my ears louder. I forced myself to relax and breathe, blowing air at the ceiling and relaxing my shoulders. “Why?” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Why take her?” I asked quietly. “Her mom is the dean of Olympus U. Her dad works with retired Capes. If the Claw or Beak or whatever their name is wanted cash, then they should have twisted their arm’s more and gone for her parents instead.” I shut my eyes and let my brain work everything over. “But a guild like that wouldn’t need money, and if they wanted leverage, sure, then take her, but they would have made an announcement, and according to you, they’re not that type of business. So…why? Bianca’s a D class. She’s not even a superhero to begin with either, so why even bother taking someone who doesn’t know anything about this freaking city?”
The silence answered me, because those were all the right questions with not enough answers.
“Maybe,” Ava said, “it’s because of her brother.”
I slowly opened my eyes and looked at her. “What?”
“Well, Ben Ross was a known name just before his untimely death,” she said, which was a fancy way of saying her father murdered a teenager so badly that there was hardly anything left of him. “Bianca would be—”
“No,” I said, shutting that down. “Bianca never knew what Ben got up to at night.”
“Then maybe it’s to draw you out instead. Ben’s dead, but Olympia isn’t. They know enough about you to figure that you’ve got a relationship with her of some kind. They might be afraid of you, or they might want you.”
You’re lying to me, aren’t you?
I stood up and grabbed a handful of her hair, picking her up as I walked outside. She asked questions, got jittery as we broke into the brisk winds, then screamed when I threw her into the sky. Up and up she went, parting the clouds like a bullet. Before she came down, I was up there with her, catching her by her dangling spinal cord.
She panted and blinked furiously as I held her upside down. “You’re playing with me, aren’t you?”
“I-I don’t—”
“Ava, you’re a head. I can hand you over to the SDU and they’d have a freaking field day with you.”
“Rylee!” she cried when I threatened to drop her. “I don’t have a reason to toy with you! I don’t—”
“You told me that these people have been watching me, right? That means they know who I really am, right?” I bring her up close to my face, glaring at her. “That means they know just as much about me as you do, and suddenly, out of the blue, you come crashing through my window like a godsdamned coincidence, telling me all the things I want to hear that’ll get me and you working together. Is that it, you wanna play a game, Ava? Wanna get me to jump through hoops again now that you’ve got nothing else left?” I scoff and throw her up again, tossing her so her stump of a throat landed on my palm, making her wince. “Is that what you want from me? You want me on this wild little goose chase that’ll slowly put you back together as I take out the Talon for you, giving you power?”
“Rylee, I—”
“Shut it,” I snapped. “Ava, I’m gonna ask you one question, and you’re gonna tell me the truth. OK?”
She swallowed, making blood dribble between my fingers.
“How did you know I’d be back? And why did it just so happen that the Talon got Bianca last night.”
Literally in the same few hours that I crawled out of that tunnel and into the streets again. It felt too scripted, too put together, because suddenly Bianca had a week before she supposedly gets killed, and it just so happens to be this very week? The same week I came back, and not the eight other weeks I wasn’t even here?
Whatever the Talon really wanted, Ava knew about it. I’d just been waiting to see how she’d lie to me.
Ava’s mouth worked silently, and it only started moving when I shoved my fingers into her mouth and threatened to split her apart like a bad melon. She coughed and spluttered, then said, “Rylee, I wouldn’t work with them. They’re the reasons I’m in this predicament to begin with! They stole what little I had left, then butchered me, separated me, broke me apart like bread and fed their animals with my dignity. I only escaped them because of my affinity with the shadows. I was forced to wait outside your window in the alleyway for weeks on end, hoping you’d come back everyday. I don’t know why the Talon chose last night, but my guess? They want something from you as well. They want you to follow them into the deep shadows of Lower Olympus and get lost in their web of secrets.”
“You’re full of shit, and that’s amazing considering you’ve got no gut.”
I guess in some ways, you never really had one.
“Please,” she cried out, and that actually made me pause, because I’d never heard Ava make such a pathetic sound before. “Rylee, please. Believe me or not, the fact of the matter is that Bianca is in danger. You can kill me again and again, as many times as you want, trying to make me tell you whatever it is that you want from me, but that won’t change anything. I have nothing more to gain than my body, and that’s the only fucking thing I’ve got left. I’ve no home. No family. My father is dead or missing and his legacy was burnt to the ground because I was so afraid of every little bump in the night, thinking that I was this…this person that I wasn’t.” She breathed out shakily, then met my eyes, squinting in the backdrop of the rising sun. “I’m not you. Your heritage towers over this city, whilst mine is lost somewhere in the smog and the filth on those streets, trickling into the gutter like the rest of the dead my father cast aside. To be frank with you, Rylee, you’re the only thing I’ve got left in my life. That and whatever shred of dignity I have left in knowing, maybe hoping, that at least one day I can actually be someone.”
I stared at her, the wind making my hair snap against my cheek. “You’re saying everything right.”
She looked away, her face pained. “I suppose I don’t deserve your trust.”
“Kinda happens when you stab people in the back over and over again.”
“Then let me have this one final chance,” she said, looking at me with eyes so full of bloodshot regret that I lowered my arm and stopped digging my fingers into her throat. “To at least prove to you that I’m of some value.”
I sighed, because getting a knife twisted in my back has been the story of my life so far this year. I didn’t believe the words she said, and I couldn’t bring myself to, anyway. Something still felt off. Wrong. But every minute I spent arguing with her here meant a minute that Bianca could be getting hurt, so here came the tough decision time, rearing its ugly head once again. It had been in the sky when we’d first properly met, and here we were, meeting again, saying words that almost made it sound like we’d both changed, but at the end of the day…
Well, we were still a vigilante and a gangster’s daughter, weren’t we?
“Where?” I asked her quietly. “Where would they have taken her?”
Ava blinked slowly, then said, “I’ve got an idea of who might know.”
“Do you trust them?”
“With my life.”
I grunted. “So that means I can’t.” I know what I said about turning a new leaf, about a new Olympia taking center stage, but if I had to wring a neck or two to get what I wanted, then… “And if you lie to me, Ava, I swear, if you lie to me one more time, there’s going to be a brand of agony you’ve never felt before coming your way, and trust me, a lot of people are gonna get hurt because of you if you so much as twist a single sentence. Is that clear?”
Ava tried to nod, which was a weird sensation on the palm of my hand. “Trust me, she’ll know.”
And here we go again, trusting a criminal so I can do the right thing.
What a way to start Christmas.