Red (37 page)

And I couldn’t call the police either. Or…I
guess it was more like I wouldn’t. These guys were Talents. No
matter how much I didn’t like them, I still had enough
us
against them
mentality that I wasn’t about to bring in the
cops. We Talents needed to police our own.

The cops would just report the whole thing
to the
National Institutes for Ability Control
. If NIAC came
to investigate Talents in Fairview again, it wasn’t going to be
good for anyone. We’d already had more kids taken away to the State
School in the last month than in the last few years put together,
and I did
not
want to draw any more attention to our town
than we already had.

I just wished these idiots felt the same
way.

I pushed myself back up and moved to the
next window, the one that didn’t have a view of much of the shop
because it was located behind a bookcase and piled with paperbacks.
I could see the latch in the middle, so it wasn’t a problem to
reach out to it with my mind and get it to turn. The fact that it
had been painted over at least once required a little mental elbow
grease, but I got it. I floated the piles of paperbacks down to the
floor before opening the window, so they wouldn’t fall and make
noise, and then I hoisted myself up and climbed in.

At the end of the row of bookshelves, I
peeked around the corner. They were still playing their stupid
game.

The first two would count it down, “Three,
two, one, GO!” and toss the books.

Then the other two would say, “Ashes to
ashes!” and “Dust to dust!” at practically the same time they
destroyed the targets.

Losers. I was debating what to say when a
girl rushed out of the center aisle into the middle of them to bang
on the door to the back room.
Yeah, hon, just step right in the
middle of a contest between the guy with the flame and the guy with
the—disintegration ray power.
Whatever. It’s not always easy to
come up with names for some of these Talents.

The door was yanked open and Marco stepped
out. My stomach did something unpleasant. Okay, I’ll admit I was
kind of scared of my nemesis. Call it post-traumatic stress. Mr.
I-Can-Bench-Press-A-Steel-Girder did almost kill me not too long
ago. When I looked at him, I imagined the feel of his hands around
my throat, right before Dylan tackled him and saved my life. I
so
did not want to take Marco on again.

“
You’re screwing up
Angie’s concentration, Bella. What do you want?”

“
Corey was feeling me up
again when I was out of my body.”

“
What?” came a voice from
the stacks. “She wasn’t using it.”

“
Cor, this isn’t a
date-rape opportunity, it’s a job. If you get your rocks off
fondling unconscious chicks, get some GHB and do it on your time.
Or take Sleepy, here, for a night on the town.”

“
My name is
Curtis
,” the freshman whined, indignant.

“
Like anyone cares,” Jeff
said.

“
Hey, you guys need to get
back to business. Now. Angie’s still working on the safe. Bella,
get your virtual ass back up to the roof and do your
job.”

“
Okay, but I thought you’d
want to know that some girl went down the alley and was looking in
the windows.”

“
What?” Marco asked, in a
dangerous tone that made the boys sit up, but didn’t seem to affect
Bella very much.

“
Yeah, dark-haired girl in
an army jacket? Looked kind of like Joss Marshall.”

Oh shit.
I pulled back behind the
stacks and started to move toward the window.

He came through the bookcase. I mean
through
the bookcase. One minute there was no one between me
and the window, and the next there was a shimmer to the air in the
form of a body coming out of the books. It grabbed me hard while it
was still fading back into Corey Danvers. He smiled at me as he
jerked me into the back aisle where everyone could see me.

“
And look what I
found.”

~*~

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from
Heroes ’Til Curfew.
The Talent Chronicles series introduces
a world in which kids with supernatural abilities must hide their
powers from a government that seeks to imprison them. This second
installment, as well as the first book,
Hush Money
, are
available in ebook and paperback at many online retailers. A free
short story,
Impulse Control
, is also available in
electronic form. Please visit
http://susan-bischoff.com/talent-chronicles for links and
information.

Don’t Fear The Reaper
by Michelle Muto

Grief-stricken by the murder of her twin,
Keely Morrison is convinced suicide is her ticket to eternal peace
and a chance to reunite with her sister. When Keely succeeds in
taking her own life, she discovers death isn’t at all what she
expected. Instead, she’s trapped in a netherworld on Earth and her
only hope for reconnecting with her sister and navigating the
afterlife is a bounty-hunting reaper and a sardonic, possibly
unscrupulous, demon. But when the demon offers Keely her greatest
temptation—revenge on her sister's murderer—she must uncover his
motives and determine who she can trust. Because, as Keely soon
learns, both reaper and demon are keeping secrets and she fears the
worst is true—that her every decision will change how, and with
whom, she spends eternity.

Excerpt

Tim pulled the drawer open, “The medical
examiner will be here shortly. There’s an autopsy scheduled—drawer
six, not you. Anyway, you’ve only got about five minutes,
Keely.”

Daniel turned to me. “You okay with
this?”

“
I need to see,” I said,
staring at the form draped under the sheet.

Daniel rested a hand on my arm. “You sure?
You don’t look so well.”

I forced a smile. “I don’t look so well
because I’m dead.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t
have come here.”

“
I need to see, Daniel.
I’m good. Really.” And I did need to see.

“
Five minutes,” Tim
reminded me. “Place the sheet over the body and slide the door shut
when you’re done. We can’t have anyone walking in and finding the
drawers open and you won’t be able to close them once the medical
examiner arrives.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Sure. No problem.”

“
Liar,” Daniel said.
“You’re gonna make one hell of a demon, Sunshine.” He and Tim
walked through the doors, leaving me alone.

I walked toward drawer number nine,
listening to the rapid breathing echoing in my ears, feeling the
cold draft from the cooler raise the flesh on my skin. It felt like
a horror movie. In the surrounding quiet, I heard my heartbeat
spiking in my chest and my runaway imagination heard another,
louder heartbeat from under the sheet. My hand extended in front of
me and I watched as it pulled back the sheet.

This was where a horror flick derailed from
real life. If this were some B movie, I’d scream as the body lying
on the cold slab of drawer number nine opened its eyes. It wouldn’t
be me, of course. It’d be the tortured and rotting body of my
sister, the ligature marks around her neck caked with blood. The
corpse would raise a broken, sheared finger at me, accusingly. It
would tell me that I should have been with her, should have saved
her.

But it was me.

Just me.

Despite the cold temperature of the morgue
refrigerator, I could detect a slight, rank undercurrent of
odor.

I stared at my body. I’d come all this way,
run off from Banning to find my sister. But, now, as I stood alone
in this chilly room, I had a chance to explain to my decaying
corpse why I’d taken my life. How that’d help, I didn’t know. Maybe
it was like some sort of obligation, some sort of letting go. Maybe
that’s why everyone else had gathered outside. This wasn’t making
peace with death, I wouldn’t go that far. But it felt close.
Resignation?

I brushed a hand across the arm of my
corpse. It was smooth and cold, the skin still pliable to my touch.
I wanted to apologize for never having graduated high school, gone
to college or gotten a real job—all the things Jordan and I had
talked about. I wanted to say I was sorry that I’d never move to
another city, get an apartment. The list appeared endless. I was
sorry that I would never get married, get a house, a dog, have
kids.

Grow old.

Instead, I’d grown cold. One of my eyes was
open—just a slit. The once mossy iris had turned a fetid, milky
green.

Me. Not me.

I withdrew my hand. I didn’t need to catch
my reflection in the surrounding stainless steel drawers to know
the body inside drawer number nine wasn’t me. Not anymore. I was
only seeing the waxy remains of what used to be me. The cadaver
shared the same dark brown hair, the same angled face, same high
cheekbones. But I had nothing else in common with the stiffened
corpse lying before me. Lividity had settled in, speckling the skin
near my back. Had my sister visited her own body, sitting and
taking stock of her former life? Of what should have been? Had it
been easier for her to just come see my corpse?

~*~

For more information on where to buy, check
out Michelle’s website:
http://michellemuto.wordpress.com/

Descended By Blood
by
Angeline Kace

Brooke Keller is a high school junior who
never spent much time living in one place. She's finally in a town
long enough to almost snag the boy of her dreams, until her life is
threatened by a fanged man in his attempt to kidnap her. Brooke
begins a dangerous journey to find out who is after her and how to
stop them. Thrown into a world with powerful and prejudiced
vampires, Brooke must tap into the side of herself that she never
knew existed, at the risk of losing her life in order to save
it.

Excerpt

A twig snapped, and I jerked my head to the
right. I caught the glint from the eyes of a mountain lion creeping
toward us, his ears pulled back, teeth bared.

I froze, hoping we weren’t the prey he
stalked.

Kaitlynn shrieked. She grabbed my arm and
tried pulling me with her as she ran back to the cars.

The lion rose from his crouch and started
charging down the mountain straight for us.

We didn’t have enough time for both of us to
make it out of there alive, and the lion sped up at the site of
Kaitlynn running away.

I planted my feet. Something clicked inside
of me; heat coursed through my veins. My vision intensified, and I
could distinguish the areas of down between the lion’s coarse fur
as his muscles flexed and stretched.

I’d heard before that you shouldn’t look a
wild animal directly in its eyes, but my instinct screamed for me
to not turn my back on my attacker. I listened to my gut and looked
the mountain lion square into his charging eyes.

The lion and I connected on an intellectual
level: predator versus predator. Only I knew, and I deemed the lion
knew, as well, that I outranked him as the more fearsome predator.
How I recognized this, or how I knew the lion realized this, I
couldn’t fathom. I had never been hunting before, so this instinct
didn’t come from a belief that man ruled supreme on the food chain.
And this moment felt different somehow. It wasn’t man versus beast;
it was beast versus beast.

“
Stop!” I
commanded.

The lion skidded to a halt four feet in
front of me, his back fixed in its pre-lunge arch. He stared into
my eyes, his ears perked back, fangs exposed in a snarl and hackles
raised, but he didn’t move a centimeter closer.

I towered over him. My pulse pounded at the
sides of my neck; my shoulders rose and fell with my deep breaths.
My gaze pierced him, welding his toes and the pads of his feet into
the ground. Somehow, I had been able to force my command over him,
and when I told him to stop, I never considered that he would deny
my order.

The nerves along my scalp tingled with the
sensation that the lion hungered to attack me, but he
couldn’t
. The only thing holding him back from pouncing me
was my decree that he shouldn’t. My beast had prevailed as the most
dominant between us.

Panic filled my lungs at the realization
that something stirred within me and it caused me to look at myself
as a beast. I yearned for the retreat that Kaitlynn had made. I
yelled, “Leave!” before the lion could translate my hesitance and
continue his attack.

He hissed, spun around, and ran up the side
of the hill, tail flogging behind him. I studied his movements,
hoping that he wouldn’t change his mind and come back.

Kaitlynn rushed up behind me. “Brooke, let’s
go!” she pleaded, voice shaking.

I stood there, to make absolutely sure. We
had some distance to run before we’d get back to our vehicles, and
I wasn’t going to take any chances on being stuck in that lion’s
jaws.

The creature was almost out of the small
clearing and about to enter into the thick forest when a man
stepped out from between two spruce trees. Like a housecat, the
lion rubbed his fawn pelt against the man’s leg and purred. My
hypersensitive hearing digested the happy rumble cascading down the
hill. Over the purring, I heard the trill of crickets and further
out, the crunch of leaves underneath small feet. How was that
possible?

The man loomed, barely outside the shadows,
in a dark trench coat, smiling. His malignant stare reached my
eyes, and his smirk grew by spades.