Kelley Armstrong - Broken

The writing was a near-indecipherable scrawl, with a quarter of the words mangled. If I hadn’t known what it was supposed to say, I wouldn’t have made out half of it.

“Looks deliberately misspelled,” I said.

“That’s the general consensus with the other Ripper letters as well,” Jeremy said. “The spelling is erratic, with some words spelled correctly once, then misspelled-”

Clay slapped my upper arm. I spun so fast I almost tripped.

“Mosquito,” he said.

I glared at him.

“They have West Nile here, don’t they?” he said.

“Just like at home,” I said through my teeth.

“But at home you’ve been wearing that special stuff Jeremy got for you. You didn’t bring it, did you?”

“Clayton’s right,” Jeremy said softly. “I know the risk is minimal, but if you’ve forgotten the repellent, you really should be wearing long sleeves after dark. If you contract the virus, it can be passed on-”

“To my baby, I know. But considering what else I’m already passing on to my baby, West Nile virus seems the least of my concerns.” I shook my head, then leaned toward Clay. “Smack me again, and I smack you back. Maybe you can smack harder, but I dare to smack harder.”

A small smile. “You sure about that?”

“You wanna test me?”

“Uh-uh,” Jeremy said. “No smacking challenges. At least, not while you’re holding that letter. Here, better put it away. Looks like it’s already creased.”

I looked down. When Clay swatted the mosquito on my arm, my hand had automatically clenched on the letter.

“Shit!” I quickly straightened it. “There. No harm-”

The mosquito was still on the paper, now a squashed dark splotch. It must have bounced onto the paper before I’d clenched it.

Jeremy shook his head. “No matter. It’s dirty enough. I’ll take a closer look before we drop it off. Now roll it up. Quickly.”

“Before I drop it in the gutter and trample it,” I muttered. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“Wasn’t your fault,” Clay said.

“That’s right. It wasn’t.” I turned a mock scowl on him. “Bug killer.”

“Yeah, but I only killed it. You squashed it.”

“You didn’t squash it when you killed it?”

Jeremy sighed.

I looked at him. “And you thought we were ready for kids?”

“No, I just thought one more wouldn’t make much difference. Now, if I could have the bag please?”

I put it into my knapsack and handed it to him. He looked down at the knapsack-lime green with a daisy on the front.

“Hey, I didn’t pick it out,” I said. “You bought it; you can carry it.”

He took the knapsack with a slow shake of his head. “Let’s get this back to a hotel, examine it for damage and send it off to Xavier.”

Clay and I looked at each other, seeing our opportunity for a city run vanishing.

“Uh, Jer,” Clay said. “Elena and I were wondering…”

He stopped, eyes narrowing as he stared at something over my shoulder. I followed his gaze to a curtain of smoke rising from the road. It looked like sewer steam…only there wasn’t a sewer grate or manhole cover in sight. I walked over and looked down to see a hairline crack in the asphalt. Clay grabbed my arm and yanked me away.

“Don’t give me that look,” he said as I caught my balance. “You don’t know what that is.”

“An underground volcano ready to bury us all under a mountain of spewing lava?”

The smoke wafted up, a thin, slow moving line that dispersed before it hit waist level. Jeremy crouched for a closer look.

“Probably some kind of trapped steam,” he said.

Clay rocked on the balls of his feet, fighting to keep from yanking Jeremy out of the way too.

“I don’t think it’s West-Nile-carrying steam,” I said.

When Clay didn’t move, I laid my fingers on his arm. He nodded, but I could feel the tension strumming from him as he watched Jeremy.

“Jer?” I said. “We should probably get going.”

“Mm-hmm.”

He waved his fingertips through the smoke. Clay let out a strangled sound.

I tapped Jeremy’s shoulder. “We really should go. Before one of the residents notices the smoke. And us.”

“Yes, right.”

He pushed to his feet. Yet he didn’t move, just stared at the smoke, a frown-crease between his brows. Then his head jerked up, body going rigid. I followed his gaze and saw nothing, just the trees, leaves rustling-

“Clay!” Jeremy shouted.

Hands grabbed my arms and I flew backward, stumbling, then lifted, feet flying off the pavement, fingers tight around my upper arms, half shoving me out of the way, half carrying me. My back hit the low wall of a fence. A flash illuminated the night sky as a transformer overhead exploded in a shower of sparks. All went dark as my rescuer’s body shielded me from the falling cascade.

“Clay!” The voice came from above me, and as my brain cleared, I realized it was Jeremy, not Clay, who’d been shielding me, that he’d thrown me clear of a transformer…before it blew.

“Clay!”

“Over here,” came a voice beside us. “Where’s Elena?”

“She’s here.” Jeremy looked at me. “Are you all right?”

“Still seeing sparks,” I said.

I blinked and realized I was still seeing sparks because there were still sparks, on the ground, coming from a power line that had fallen from the exploding transformer…and landed right about where we’d been standing.

The line sputtered, then went dark…as did everything around it. I waited for my night vision to kick in, but the moon had disappeared behind cloud cover and I could only make out shapes.

“Whatever that was, I didn’t do it,” Clay said as he got to his feet.

Jeremy shushed him and motioned for him to stay still. Again, I followed Jeremy’s gaze. Again, I saw nothing. Then, twenty or so feet away, a shadow moved. I squinted, and could make out a dim figure crouched in the middle of the street.

I tried to move forward, but Jeremy’s hand clamped around my arm. I caught a whiff of something-the smell was downwind, but strong enough to carry. It was the stench of an unwashed body, mingled with the faint “off” smell of sickness. My brain jumped to the closest approximation it knew-a homeless person.

When I looked back at Jeremy, his eyes were trained on the shape, squinting, that same furrow between his brows. Something in his expression sent a chill through me. Without even looking my way, he patted my hand. Then he motioned for me to stay put, shifted into a stooped hunch and started forward.

I glanced at Clay. He was already moving toward Jeremy, but Jeremy shook his head. When Clay hesitated, Jeremy lifted his hand and firmly waved him down. A soft growl rippled through the air, cut short as Clay swallowed his protest.

Jeremy didn’t head straight for the figure, but circled to the left, trying to get downwind. I watched him, my gaze flicking between his dark shape and the other. It looked like a man, with an oddly shaped head, crouched on the road. His head moved, and I realized he was wearing a hat-a black bowler.

The man grunted. Then he pushed to his feet. A sharp grating sound, then the flare of a lit match. The light illuminated the bottom half of a man’s swarthy face. Thick lips, dark whiskers, a missing front tooth. The match sputtered out. Another strike of a match, then a snap as it broke and a tap-tap as the broken end hit and rebounded off the asphalt. Another grunt. Then the sound of hands rustling over fabric. Searching his pockets for more matches.

“Bloody ’ell,” he muttered in a thick English accent.

I could make out the pale moon of his face as he looked around.