Dead Endings Book 2 (Dead Leads): Chapter 5

They met on the corner of Park Avenue and East 84th Street before the 3 P.M. end-of-school bell. Gabriella set them each to watch over the main exits of the school while she took the corner for the widest view. If anyone was going to sense him coming, she would.

The plan, if one could call it a plan, was to follow him until they reached a halfway decent spot where Gabriella could pull him aside and slip the band over his aura. She also (and Cailen thought this rather optimistic of her) hoped to have another talk with him. If no such opportunity arose, or if his parents appeared, they would just abort and try again the next day. Cailen gave their chances of success even money, but her gut said that it wouldn’t go as smoothly as Gabriella thought it would.

Cailen slouched against the concrete wall of the residential apartments across the street from the Park Avenue exit and fiddled with her phone. The decrepit flip model had no Internet, games to speak of, or even all the buttons on its keypad, but she did her best to look engrossed as the shrill bell sounded.

The tone faded away and was soon drowned out by the squeals and hoots of children swarming from the school doors. She scanned the crowds. Nothing yet.

Her phone dinged, startling her. The text was a single question mark from Everett.

She rolled her eyes and replied, “N/Y.”

More students pushed and skipped through, dividing into smaller streams. Some got onto waiting school buses, others ran along Park Avenue. She could barely make out faces in the gaps between the vehicles, but there would be no hiding the dark maelstrom from her if the kid did step outside.

Her phone dinged again.

“Now?”

“STP TXTNG. JST WTCHHHhhhhhhh…” In her annoyance, she’d pressed the 4 key right into the mechanical innards of the device. The “H” continued unabated even when she hit the power button. Cailen took a deep breath to keep from throwing the phone against the sidewalk and slipped it back into her pocket. She looked to Gabriella to try to catch her eye when someone familiar walked through her line of vision.

Cailen hesitated. No name nor where she knew the man from came to mind, but the sight of him tickled at her brain. She watched as he walked past the stone balustrades at the south end of the school.

Hmmmm…

There was still no sign of the kid, so she waved to Gabriella. The woman gave her an inquiring look. She shook her head and pointed down the street. Cailen then signaled for her to wait where she was and jogged across during a break in the traffic to follow her intuition.

Zagging between two illegally parked cars, Cailen slowed and scanned the path for the black T-shirt and curly blond hair she had spied before. It took her only a minute to find him in the river of people. He was quite tall and moved slowly as he scribbled something in an open notebook.

Cailen was about to follow him when he suddenly spun on his heel and came straight toward her. Adrenaline singing in her ears, she turned and dropped to the sidewalk as if kneeling to tie her shoe. She wasn’t sure why she had ducked, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Just who was he…?

He passed her without stopping, eyes intent on whatever it was he was writing in his notebook. Cailen waited a moment more, then trailed him at a discreet distant. For once she was grateful for her unimpressive height. She blended right in with the kids still milling around the school.

The man strode quickly to the Park Avenue exit she had been watching before. There, he stopped and looked into the building. In the distance, Cailen could see Gabriella crossing the street to Everett’s side. The curly head bent to hear whatever it was Everett was saying.

Cailen looked back at the man. He had stopped writing and was now wearing a strange smile on his face. He seemed amused at something. The twisted smile tugged again at Cailen’s memories. It was right on the tip of her tongue when she saw it.

Black light and roiling clouds… The death balloons bobbed out from under the stone archway. There were three again, all attached by silvery strings to the young boy below them.

The air seemed to press down on her. Thick and charged, it filled her ears with a kind of silent cry. Cailen resisted the urge to retreat and wrenched her eyes away from the spectral miasma. The man was writing again. She got up on her tippy-toes to try to make it out, but whatever it was was short and sweet. He then tore out the page and folded it into a neat square. Cailen watched with skyrocketing curiosity as he walked right up to Aiden and handed it to him.

The boy stopped waving goodbye to someone inside and turned to the man. He took the note with a puzzled expression. Then he read it. Aiden’s smooth forehead crinkled like it had at the coffee shop. The man pointed up, smiled. Aiden’s answering smile was radiant.

Without a word, the man with the curly blond hair nodded at him and walked away. Cailen hesitated, torn between following Aiden, who was now zipping down the street toward Gabriella and Everett’s position, and taking off after the man. She had only just turned to pursue the note-giving stranger when a screech followed by a resounding crash changed her mind.

People started screaming.

Cailen sprinted back the half-block to the corner. There at the crossing, she found several cars tangled into a smoking knot of metal. Two of them had T-boned a smaller vehicle, and a shiny yellow cab lay upside-down by the curb, wheels still spinning.

Smoke poured from the three upright cars. The occupants were shouting, and people rushed to their aid. Cailen saw Gabriella among them and left that mess to her. She knelt down by the open window on the driver’s side of the cab while others tugged at the back doors, trying to free the passengers.

Glass pricked at Cailen’s palms as she crawled through the space where the window had been.

“Hello?” she asked. A limp arm bumped against her head. Cailen grabbed the wrist, and her fingers came back slick with blood. The man to whom the arm belonged made no sign he knew she was there. Gently, she followed the limb up until she found the juncture where the neck was. She felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one that she could tell.

“You’re going to be all right,” Cailen said against all evidence. He didn’t reply.

Through the thumps and bangs of the other rescuers behind the plexiglass divider, Cailen became aware of an overriding ticking sound. Or at least, it felt like a sound might. Low and resonant and steady as a metronome, it seemed to suck sound out of the cramped space.

Cailen’s death sense began to prick.

“Dammit,” she hissed. “Don’t just… Don’t die! Just hang on five minutes! An ambulance will be here any sec, I promise!”

The absence of sound became louder.

Cailen twisted her neck, trying to look into the man’s face to shout more encouragement, but silvery motes were already drifting off his sightless eyes. Angry, furious at the mess it had all become, she reached for the wavering light. It slipped and trailed through her grasping fingers. She ground her teeth in frustration and reached out again, but this time with her gut.

“Just…stay!” she yelled at it and pulled.

The light flicked. Encouraged, she pulled harder.

It was like Ethan, almost. She could feel the essence leaving the dying man, touch it like she had that evil son of a bitch when she’d trapped him within her. But…it wasn’t the same. Her grip was too loose, and the threads too insubstantial to hold. They dissolved under her touch. Cailen watched in defeat as they soon completely disappeared.

A hand seized her ankle, making her jolt.

“Back out!” said a woman’s voice. “I’m a doctor!”

Cailen sighed and reversed, more mindful of the glass this time. When she was clear, she sat back and relayed the bad news.

“No offense, but I’m going to check to be sure,” the woman said and wriggled her way in.

“None taken,” Cailen said softly.

A familiar pair of toned, brown legs came into view.

“Are you all right?” Gabriella asked.

Cailen looked up at her, then down at her bloodied hands. She met her friend’s eyes.

“Not really,” she said.

To be continued in Chapter 6.