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THE CHAMPS-ELYSéES

“ Y ou understand your part?” The deeper, more masculine voice was uncompromising, hard. His eyes filled with so much light, they were nearly glowing as he stared at her from the dark. “We don’t have much time.”

She blinked at his face.

It made her vision blur, that face.

It shone like a pool of mercury, like a mirror turned to water. Whenever she tried to focus on it, though, it rippled, as if a large stone had been thrown in.

He seemed almost invisible this close. He looked like a ghost, a mirage.

She wanted to touch him, see if he was real.

She tore her eyes off him, instead.

She looked down at the long gun that lay in the case at his feet.

The gun was real, concrete. It was something solid, something she could wrap her hands around. She almost wished that was her part in all of this. She almost wished she could see the whites of their eyes from further away, where they couldn’t hurt her.

“That’s not possible.” His voice remained flat, uncompromising, unwilling to indulge her whims. “You know it’s not. This is better. This is better, to look them in the face. I’ll get anyone you miss.”

“Promise?” she asked softly.

“I promise.”

She exhaled, and nodded slowly.

The words he’d spoken echoed in her, inside and out.

“You understand your part?” he repeated.

She stared at the gun in fascination, her throat tight, but the emotions there were difficult to define, to pin down in any way. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t grief. It felt like a profusion of things she couldn’t feel because there were simply too many of them. She didn’t want to label them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to feel them, either. They were too much.

It was all too much.

This would silence it, though.

This would finally silence it, forever.

She wanted it to be over.

She wanted the screaming to finally stop.

“ Y ou’re sure?” Black growled to his tech expert. “How far?”

“Maybe twenty-five yards,” Alisha said. “Forty max, and that’s assuming there’s a lag between the cameras picking up their faces and the confirmed ID. I’m not familiar enough with this software to give you exact numbers.”

Black’s strides lengthened over the pavement, and I fought to keep up.

Alisha walked to my left.

Angel and Cowboy walked to my right.

Dexter was just in front of us, matching strides with Black.

Nick walked on their other side, probably restraining himself from moving a lot faster than all of us. He wore a long black coat that swirled around his legs, making him look even more vampiric than usual. A midnight-black umbrella hung over his head, shielding him from the sun, along with a hat, dark sunglasses, and leather gloves. He walked with a ghost-like glide that got him stares even apart from the odd getup he wore, and his bone-white skin.

Every now and then I glimpsed his eyes behind those shades and saw them glow a dark, deep, scarlet red.

For once, he didn’t seem to notice the stares.

He didn’t seem to care.

His eyes darted all over the road, moving faster than any human or seer eyes could move. His vampire eyes could see a lot more too, I knew, even in the daylight. He could see spectrums of light human beings couldn’t see at all.

Alisha had managed to tap into the Parisian police network.

She and Nick got footage of Jem and the girl leaving via the Metro station below the airport, which they took to the center of Paris.

They’d been on foot ever since.

Now Alisha was walking, head-down, moving surprisingly fast as she wove around pedestrian traffic. She never seemed to take her eyes off the tablet, which she’d connected to her hand with a magnetic glove. Her eyes followed lines and dots along the screen that should be showing her the location of Jem and the girl.

She’d used the city’s facial and gait recognition software to create a profile, nailed it down after the next few hits in the sunlight, then at various angles, and once she was confident, she turned them into different-colored tracking dots to make them easier to follow now that we were out on the street.

We’d been following them for over an hour.

We’d followed them here, to the Avenue des Champs-Elysées , which was crowded and filled with open stores. The streets were full of people, likely in part due to the lovely spring weather, which still carried a bite of cold in the air, but coupled with enough sunlight and blue skies, it was enough to lure people out of their winter hiding.

I would have killed to be like the rest of them, tourists and Parisians alike, window-shopping and ducking in and out of stores with no real place to be.

As it was, I barely saw faces or window displays as we moved like ghosts through the crowd. I knew at least two seers in our group were pushing people, here and there, not to notice us, and especially not to notice Nick, who stood out significantly more than the rest of us.

We’d finally, nearly, caught up with them.

“Nick?” I murmured, knowing he’d hear me.

He didn’t look back, but a muscle in his cheek twitched.

“No,” he said, his voice a touch hard.

His eyes were a lot better than the rest of ours.

How was it he couldn’t see them?

“Could they be in one of the stores?” Angel murmured from next to me.

Alisha heard her and looked over. “This won’t show elevation, but that might explain why the trackers are no longer moving. It’s likely the program simply froze the dots where they were last seen on the street…”

She trailed, her eyes intent on the screen.

“Wait!” she called out suddenly. She held up her other hand. “Wait! Stop!”

She looked around, her eyes scanning both sides of the wide avenue.

We were getting close to the Arc de Triomphe, which was now only a few blocks away. The iconic arch loomed over Black, Nick, and Dex’s heads as we all slowed our progression northwest on the busy street.

“One of the dots is moving again,” Alisha said, her voice louder, sharper, so the rest of the group would hear her. “It’s back on the street. I think it’s the girl.”

She stared for another second, manipulating the map with two fingers.

“There’s some kind of interference,” she muttered. “And I’m still not sure about the lag on the ID, but a street camera last caught her… there!”

She pointed straight ahead, on our same side of the street, where I only now noticed a crowd of people clustered around the windows and doors of a massive building with stone columns out front. They looked like they were waiting to get inside, pressed eagerly towards doors that hadn’t yet opened. Some event appeared to be happening there, likely a grand opening, given the red, gold, and black balloons that covered the entrance.

My eyes shifted up the stone columns, then I flinched, staring at one of the higher walls in disbelief.

“Black!” I said.

He looked at me sharply, and I pointed at the moving and shifting insignia on the side of the stone building. It was a flaming R, the animated sign surrounded by a circle that rippled and sizzled in the crisp morning air. Blood red with black details and gold highlights, it looked like a cross between a sign for a futuristic spaceport and a burning cattle brand.

It was Lucian Rucker’s insignia.

Black’s jaw hardened. He looked at Nick, who was peering out cautiously from under his umbrella at the same symbol on the wall, his expression holding something like shock.

“What the fuck––” Dex started to say.

When the building’s glass doors exploded outward onto the street.

T he shockwave hit, nearly instantaneously.

The sound and pressure temporarily blew out my ability to hear––or to think.

I more felt the rumble and crash of thunder as I stumbled back.

Debris and glass and hot wind knocked down dozens in the crowd.

For a few seconds after, I couldn’t hear anything, not even the screams.

Ringing in my ears, the labored sounds of my own breaths, booms that followed the first one like echoing firecrackers, made it hard to know which direction to run. Abruptly, my vision and my hearing began to clear.

Not entirely, of course, but enough to remember where I was.

Screams erupted on all sides as smoke billowed out of the gaping hole in the massive storefront. Before I could react to the thunderous echo of that first blast, alarms exploded from all the nearby buildings and on the street’s PA system.

I’d already hit the deck in pure reflex by then.

I’d yanked Angel’s arm down with me, and both of us landed painfully on our palms on the sidewalk. I felt that sidewalk shiver under my hands as windows cracked in a nearby storefront, raining down more glass shards.

Most of the screams still came from in front of us, on the street, but I could hear them erupting from tourists and shoppers behind us, as well.

Black and Cowboy had their guns out, and were scanning the street on both sides, half-crouched as they searched through faces in the crowd. Nick stood up straight, and stared directly into the black clouds of smoke billowing out of the wall.

I’d just started crawling towards the nearest storefront, Angel right behind me, when the second blast hit.

It shivered the sidewalk under my hands. I clenched and tensed my whole body, and bit my tongue in reflex as I ducked down my head.

It was a good thing I did.

The window close to me and Angel blew out from the stress of the second explosion. Both of us flinched and crouched lower, Angel letting out a shocked cry when glass rained down all over us. I gasped as glass flew by and sliced cuts into my neck and arms and the side of my face. I lowered my head and arms still more, protecting my head as best I could. I felt something slam into my thigh and glanced down with a flicker of worry that I’d have a glass shard sticking out of my leg, but it was a piece of concrete from the window frame.

Nothing was embedded in my leg, thank Christ, but it would leave a hell of a bruise.

It also hurt like hell, but at least I wasn’t bleeding out on the sidewalk.

“Get back!” Black bellowed at us, waving an arm. His other hand still gripped his gun.

I was confused at first.

Then I heard it.

I ducked as a bullet from a rifle ricocheted off the sidewalk somewhere up ahead.

The gun’s report echoed between the buildings a breath later, loud even with the continuing rumble of the aftermath of the two explosions. I could still hear things falling inside the store up ahead, crashes and what sounded like pops and small explosions that made me think of fire. Interspersed with that now were those higher-pitched cracks from the rifle, steady and somehow methodical-sounding as they broke through the noise.

I raised my head higher.

Whoever was firing, they weren’t shooting at me.

The gunshots were aiming at something further ahead.

If I had to guess, the shooter had positioned themselves directly across the street from where the building exploded.

They appeared to be shooting into the crowd.

I watched bullets scatter and panic the surprisingly large number of bodies that remained upright in the rough area of the storefront. Smoke continued to billow out between the stone pillars, but some of it cleared enough in gusts of wind for me to catch glimpses of the area right by the gaping wound left by the shattered windows and twisted metal.

Bodies were strewn across the sidewalk like bloody, broken dolls.

Chunks of window frame and cement lay in the street. I saw manikins dressed in charred clothes, burning wooden stands and broken tables, chairs and glass and stone rubble. A smoking cash register lay sideways next to scattered electronics and burning signs. Phones, laptops, and tablets covered much of that part of the street, along with what looked like a copper door, bent nearly in half from the explosion.

People seemed to be running in all directions now.

Some of them ran towards the smoking building, obviously wanting to help.

A number of the fallen were still moving but couldn’t get up. They screamed and thrashed and called out for help, eyes wide in pain and fear.

The gunshots confused and panicked that crowd even more.

They began pushing in and out on all sides, trampling and shoving and crashing into one another to get away or to continue running towards the burning store and towards the people crying out for rescue.

I pulled myself warily to my feet. Angel got up when I did.

I helped up Alisha, who had been next to me and Angel.

For the moment, at least, we three stayed in the entranceway to the storefront where we’d taken shelter. I pulled the gun I had in my ankle holster, and handed it to Angel. She stared at it in confusion for only a second, then her eyes clicked into focus.

While she checked the magazine and chamber, I drew the other gun I carried, the one I wore inside my jacket in a shoulder holster. After I’d checked my own gun, I handed Angel two magazines to go with the Glock I’d given her. She nodded thanks and shoved them into her jacket pocket. She looked a lot more awake now.

I was guessing I did, too.

“We need to get down there!” I said, over the sound of gunfire and burning inside the building ahead. “We need to help them!”

She nodded, her eyes showing full agreement.

I glanced inside the store near us to see people pressed up near the glass, eyes wide as they stared out at the chaotic scene in disbelief. I motioned for them to stay back, and a few obeyed by retreating deeper into the store. A few stared at the gun in my hand, obviously shocked, but when I read them in a quick scan, they assumed we were police, or maybe from some part of the domestic anti-terrorism force.

They weren’t entirely wrong.

Groups of people ran by us, most of them now headed east and away from the gunshots and fire. I saw a woman with six or seven shopping bags clutched in one hand, the hand of a child who looked roughly four-years-old in the other. She tripped and stumbled past us on high heels over the broken, glass-covered sidewalk, her hair falling out of an elegant chignon, gasping out little sobs as she ran and exhorting the child to keep up with her in rapid French.

Another rifle report echoed between the buildings.

“ELVIS!” Angel yelled at her husband.

My eyes followed hers.

Cowboy, (full name: Elvis Dawson Graves, although none of us but her husband and Black used any part of that), didn’t look over.

He stood partly sheltered by a magazine kiosk on the other side of the sidewalk and about twenty feet closer to the bomb site than where we stood. His posture fully straightened from his previous crouch as I watched. Cowboy kept his back to the curved green metal as he aimed his gun upwards at a target across the street, likely in one of the windows a few stories up.

He shot steadily, jaw clenched, blue eyes filled with fury.

I saw the man inside the kiosk staring at us, his eyes bugged wide.

“Get down!” I snapped at him, waving my hand. “à terre! Maintenant!”

His eyes bugged even wider, but he dropped down below the counter until I couldn’t see him anymore.

Another steady series of gunshots erupted from our side of the street.

I knew who it was before I found him with my eyes.

Black stood in the next store doorway down from us, shooting up at the same window as Cowboy. I flinched when a window exploded near where he stood, forcing him back. His jaw hardened as he peered out again, and fired back.

“BLACK!” I shouted, echoing Angel’s yells at Cowboy. “Goddamn it! Stop! He has the advantage! You’ll never hit him from here!”

Another window exploded next to Black, forcing him to back up even more.

“He’s warning you!” I snapped, furious with him. “Get the fuck back! Before he stops warning and shoots you for real!”

Black turned at that, his gold eyes flashing in the morning sun.

He looked at me, fury and frustration hardening his expression.

I saw him hear me, though.

I watched him contain and control his rage with an effort, right before he stepped back. He began stalking backwards in our direction, his gun still aimed upwards, his back towards us as he retreated.

“Elvis!” Black growled, once he got even with the kiosk. “She’s right, goddamn it. We need to find a way into that building. We won’t get him from here.”

“Where’s the girl?” A.J. yelled from behind me.

I looked back, and realized the rest of our group was divided among the next few storefronts behind us. Most of them had weapons drawn, too, but none I could see were firing. I wondered if anyone had been, apart from Cowboy and Black.

“Where’s Nick?” Kiko shouted then.

Black jumped at the question, then turned all the way around for the first time.

His gold eyes turned clinical as he scanned through all of our faces.

Cowboy squeezed off a few more shots, then he began backing towards us, too.

I watched Black as he finished accounting for everyone in our group before he turned back towards the bomb scene. He looked over the whole area and up and down the street and across the road with sharp jerks of his head.

He cursed under his breath in Prexci, the seer tongue.

I didn’t have to ask why.

I did my best to look, as well, even knowing it was likely futile. I looked everywhere I could along the street, hoping to glimpse a black umbrella, or a dark, billowing coat, or shocking white skin and sunglasses through the clouds of smoke.

I didn’t see anything that could have been him.

Nick was gone.