Equal Parts (19 page)

“Felicity?” called an oddly familiar voice, from only feet away from my door.

“Finn?” Slightly dazed, I wandered to the glass door and looked out.

Sure enough, there was the Golden Boy himself, at one with the smoke snaking across the ground towards me. Something somewhere was on fire.

“What are you doing here?” I asked through the glass, rather lamely.

One moment he was in the corridor, the next he was standing next to me, a trace of smoke the only warning I got of his teleportation.

“I told you I’d come back for you,” he said brightly. He seemed much perkier than the last time I’d seen him, though there were still shadows in his blue-gray eyes. In fact, they seemed a lot grayer than I remembered them to be. Weird.

Grabbing my hand, he teleported me out of the cell and into the hall outside, and then again into the foyer at the end, muddling my brain all which ways. The disappearing act wasn’t as sickening as I’d assumed – it just felt as though a slight breeze was at my back, and then I was standing somewhere different.

“You want to leave here, right?” Finn asked, apparently reading something in my expression. I looked up towards the hole in the ceiling, where thugs were shouting at each other. Finn seemed to read that curiosity, too. “I didn’t come alone; I’m not the only one in the city gunning for Achilles’s capture.”

Why did that thought make me a little ill?

“Felicity!” roared a voice from upstairs. My gut clenched. The door to the stairwell flew open, smoke billowing from its interior, and a figure appeared, parts of his shirt ripped, his hair a mess, but face-paint intact.

Finn moved in front of me, blocking me with an arm. “It’s over, Achilles. You’re finished. Funny, all it took was convincing the right girl to come home with you and give me a call when she’d finished with you. I think you’re getting sloppy.” I flinched at the reminder, and I’m sure it didn’t go unnoticed by either of them.

Achilles wasn’t looking at Finn, though. His eyes were fixed solely on me. For such a long moment, I waited for him to demand that I stay with him, to attack Finn, to pull one last rabbit from the hat and somehow prevent my leaving. I expected – almost
needed
– him to do something to cement how much he wanted me around.

But, of course, Achilles always did the exact opposite of what I expected.

“Take her,” he said to Finn, in a voice that grabbed hold of my throat and squeezed the air from me. “Just get her out of here.” When we didn’t move – Finn looked as though Achilles had announced his plans for a sex change – my captor bared his teeth, right as another gunshot echoed from upstairs. “
Get out! Now!
”

I forced myself to level him with a stare I hoped was as cold as I felt. He wanted me gone. Fine. That was fine.

Finn didn’t need any further encouragement. He looked out of the glass sliding doors, onto the street. A flash, and we were there. Another flash, we were on a hill. Another flash, we were outside some kind of mansion with a massive glass window at its front. Another flash, we were inside the mansion. Another flash, we were up the stairs. Another flash, we were in a nearby bedroom.

Understandably woozy, I staggered to the closest chair and collapsed into it, the hammer in my hand falling to the richly-carpeted floor.

So this was it. This was my daring escape from the city’s most degenerate criminal’s clutches. And I hadn’t even done anything to instigate it – it had been Finn, and Finn alone, to get me out of that cell.

“Where are we?” I asked, looking up at my … savior, I supposed.

“My place,” he answered, and crouched down to my level. “I know this is all pretty frightening for you right now, but I promise everything will look better in the morning, okay? Feel free to look around the place – take anything you need, there’s no one else here yet.” He pressed his palm to my cheek and I tried not to flinch.

“Please don’t kill him,” I heard myself whisper. “I know he deserves it, but … I don’t…” How could I explain? How could I possibly begin to justify my feelings – whatever they were – for Achilles to someone like Finn, whose sole mission seemed to be beating the living crap out of guys like Achilles?

“I won’t, I promise,” he assured me. “I have to go there, but I’ll be back soon. Try and get some rest.”

He looked out the doorway, and in a flash of smoke, he was gone.

Sleep was absolutely beyond me. But I didn’t want to explore the mansion, either, in case I ran into someone and had to explain my presence. Had I just traded one prison for another?

Inexplicably nervous, I went to push my glasses up my nose, only to find they weren’t there. I must have left them back in my cell. Damn.

I was free. Achilles had let me go, given me up
to his enemy. He could have fought Finn, could have negotiated somehow to keep me imprisoned, but he … hadn’t.

Why? Why had he just given me up so easily?

Not that I mind
, I reminded myself quickly. It was a good thing he had set me free. That was what I’d wanted all along.

Right?

Mind churning, I gave up trying to make sense of the last twenty-four hours and
settled for curling up on the bay seat by the window, looking out onto the grounds around the mansion. The first signs of sunlight were starting to show over the horizon, chasing the shadows away from the gardens, piercing the frost on the surface.

Too bad it couldn’t do anything for the frost around my heart.

Finn didn’t return until sometime in the afternoon, when I heard unfamiliar male voices downstairs. I hadn’t moved from my spot near the window, not seeing much point in trying to locate a bathroom, as I had no clean clothes to wear.

A knock came at the door, and though I knew who it was, I still jumped at the noise.

“It’s just me, Felicity,” said Finn, apparently sensing my alarm.

I tried to give him a reassuring smile, but it wasn’t easy. “Hi again.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I lied. I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Achilles. Of course, I couldn’t exactly
ask
– not without looking completely insane. After all, what kind of hostage cared about her abductor’s welfare? “I like your room.”
Lame.
So lame.

That earned me a crooked smile. “It’s the guest room, actually. We have a few of them. You can stay here as long as you like – for free, obviously,” he added hastily, as though that would seal the deal.

It took a moment for my situation to fully sink in. Holy
crap
. I had nowhere to go. My apartment had probably been closed off or rented out to someone else. I had no money, because I hadn’t worked in weeks. I had no job, thanks to my jackass boss who probably jumped at the chance to hire someone younger (and therefore cheaper) than me at the café.

And what about Lucia? I would have to call her at some stage, let her know I was okay. Same with my family – though they probably had no idea I’d gone missing in the first place.

“Felicity … I have something to ask you,” said Finn, closing the distance between us to sit beside me. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about what happened to you, and that’s more than okay, but I have to know … did they kill Skye? It’s just, after that day at the church, I got them the information for her, and I thought they’d released her, but I looked everywhere, and…”

“I’m sorry, Finn. I don’t know. I didn’t even know they had her before that day.”

“You really have no idea?” Finn looked so pale, so desolate. Was he really this compassionate? Or was he just playing up the whole good guy thing? I had no idea. The lines between good and bad had been blurred to indistinguishable by now. The genuine grief in his eyes tore at my heartstrings though, even though he had no right to have that effect on me. “Well, at least you’re safe.”

Oh jeez. He was so …
sweet
. Maybe I was too accustomed to Achilles’s ruthless approach to everything, but the whole nice guy routine kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Bad. This is such a bad sign. Stop thinking like that.

Without another word, I pressed a hand to his forehead, buried under all that dark blonde hair, and sent a sizable amount of sunshine from my chest straight into his skin. I was almost out of the stuff, but since I wasn’t going to be visiting the hospital any time soon, I didn’t need it anyway. Plus, it made me feel a lot better about disliking his compassion.

Finn fell back into the alcove wall, blinking wildly, his skin instantly regaining the glow I’d seen it with so many weeks ago. In fact, his whole body seemed to lighten before my eyes, the burdens rolling off his shoulders and vanishing into the air.

“Whoa” was his reaction. “What the hell was that?”

“There’s a reason I was abducted off the streets,” I said quietly.

Finn looked at me, and for a split second, I thought I saw the oh so familiar spark of hunger in them – greed for my power, for more sunshine, to cage me up and wring me dry.

But as soon as it appeared, it passed, and he shook his head. “Why did I just get the sudden urge to kiss you until you gave me more of … whatever that was?”

I couldn’t help it – I shifted away from him. Well, I guess his urge was better than the one to cage me in a cell until I was too weak to resist his demands. “Common side effect. The bigger the dose I give you, the more you want in the next hit. You’re feeling confident enough to do anything right now, yeah? Even confident enough to bribe me into doing it again.” I quashed the memories that threatened to rise with that statement.

He blew out a breath, clearly at a loss for how to react. Eventually he raised his eyes to mine and said the words I’d been dreading: “I think there’s a lot more to this story than I originally thought.”

Crap.

I didn’t have much of a choice; I told him the whole story, starting with being taken from the street, to my one-on-one with Molten, to the copies of Achilles at the church, to the car crash, and ending with being returned to my cell.

Of course, I left the rather private parts out – the drug-addled humping incident, for instance, and the bathroom kissing scene. Finn didn’t need to know about the other alter-ego I obviously harbored: a shameless hussy with a penchant for homicidal maniacs.

When I ended my account, he was slack-jawed and wide-eyed. I hoped I hadn’t scared him too much. I knew it couldn’t be easy, knowing he’d just saved a girl who wasn’t sure if she wanted to be saved.

“Felicity, I think we might need to get you into a psychiatrist,” he said after a while in a soft voice.

I immediately regretted telling him any of it. “Why? There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said defensively.

“
I
know that…” He clearly didn’t. “But – and I don’t want to be presumptuous here – it kind of sounds like you have –”

“
Don’t say it
,” I warned.

“- Stockholm Syndrome.” He said it anyway. Just when I thought I liked this guy.

“You don’t get to make that call,” I said hotly, getting up from the window. “You weren’t there – you don’t know, Finn! You have no idea what I went through!”

“You’re right, I don’t. That’s why I think you should talk to someone about it, to get it off your chest before it eats away at you! Wait, Felicity!”

But I was already out the door and storming down the hall. Everything from the past few days – the kiss, being rejected for another girl, being shut up in my old cell, being ‘rescued’ – hit me with a rush, and I knew staying here in this palace of a house would only make it worse.

I wanted out of the balance between good and bad. I was sick of being superneutral. I just wanted to be Felicity – no ties, no balancing the scales, no caring what either side thought of me. Neutrality was a disease that fed on moral weakness, and I was sick and tired of it.

“Felicity, you can’t go – if Achilles hears you’re out, he’ll hunt you down, and I can’t guarantee I’ll get to you again!” Finn called from behind me as I flew down the grand staircase towards the mansion’s entrance.

In a puff of smoke, he was beside me. “Please,” he pleaded. “I won’t bring it up again. I just don’t want you hurt.”

“You don’t even
know
me!” I yelled, uncaring about the way my voice echoed in the massive house. “You just don’t want to lose another pawn to your stupid-ass nemesis! Well, guess what, Finn? Some of us are sick of being caught in the crossfire. I used to think it was good versus evil, but it’s not, is it? It’s just the two of you playing one big game – you pretending to care and him pretending not to. Maybe you should both take a good look at yourselves, because I can see a whole lot of similarities between you. Thanks for the pep talk,” I snarled, and slammed the front door behind me on my way out.

Thankfully for my nerves, he didn’t come after me.

By some miracle, I made it to Lucia’s house in the center of the city in one piece. I had to catch a train a few miles away from the mansion, which was on the outskirts, and nervously sit through the ride into the city without a ticket, praying the ticket inspectors wouldn’t get on any time soon. I didn’t have my wallet, my phone, my keys, spare clothes – anything that could help me prove my identity. Plus, I stank to high heaven and was covered in grime from the smoke back at the police station.