Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [17]
It was even colder on the rooftops than it was down on the street, though that might’ve been my imagination, or the fact that I was moving much faster. Above me, the moon spun low across the sky and a few watery clouds hung from the stars like cobwebs. In my ears there was only the rush of the frigid air, and the pumping and thudding of my feet and my heart.
I slowed down a block away from my destination.
No sense in announcing myself.
I scanned the area with every jump, straining to see the streets and sidewalks that surrounded my building. They were empty as far as I could tell, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
I might have a transient, or I might have something weirder and worse on my hands. I hauled myself to a stop on the edge of the roof next door. I stalked as far as I could around its perimeter, and I thought that the side door might be open a crack.
It shouldn’t be.
I launched myself over the side and landed more carefully, almost silently, in the alley beside the door.
A bending on the frame and a crease in the metal showed where it’d been jimmied, and I was not reassured to note that the jimmying job appeared to have gone quite smoothly. Someone had popped it fast, and without a lot of struggle.
My stomach tightened with irritation and outright anger. Another pro?
The thought made me want to bite something until it stopped twitching. If I found another thief inside, he’d suffice.
(Yeah, or “she.” I’m not trying to be a hideous sexist with my presumption of a male pronoun. I’m a lady in a tramp’s game, that’s all, and no one’s more aware of it than me.)
I pushed my fingers lightly against the door, and it opened inward on hinges that gave only the faintest squeak. I didn’t move. I waited for the squeaked alert to settle into the silence, and I listened around it.
Upstairs at least a floor—maybe even two floors—I heard footsteps that were far too dense to come from an eight-year-old girl or her teenage brother. Upstairs, a man was moving with the kind of careful precision that thinks it’s being sneaky, but I heard it anyway. My ears are just like the rest of my sensory organs—exceptional, courtesy of supernatural enhancement—and Mr. Sneaky Feet did not fool me.
I closed the door behind myself and didn’t mind the creak so much since I was alone on that floor.
I figured I was alone, anyway. I extended my mind just a tad, listening with my piddly-but-occasionally-useful psychic senses for the heartbeat of something small, crouched, and concealed. No, Pepper wasn’t down here. She was upstairs someplace. At the very fringe of my perception, I sensed her heart fluttering like a canary in a coal-mine cage.
She was terrified, and becoming more so with every passing second. Wherever she was hiding, I hoped she was fully concealed.
I crossed the room lightly, dodging between the boxes and ducking past the crates stored on shelves overhead. I reached the stairwell door and gave it a swift but controlled yank, pulling it away from the frame and slipping through the opening. It shut itself behind me, tugged back into place by a set of fat iron coils that passed for springs.
It didn’t make enough noise to give me away, not to an intruder a full floor above.
Or so I thought—until he quit moving.
He froze and I froze, because I knew good and well that I’d been quiet even in my haste. So either he’d heard me, or he’d found something he wanted. But I didn’t get the feeling, from the eager silence that smothered the whole building, that he was examining anything. I got the feeling that he was waiting to hear that sound again.
If he’d found Pepper, everyone within a mile would’ve known it. That child can scream like no mere mortal I’ve ever met. I tell her that she must be part banshee, and I’m only half teasing.
Wherever she was stashed, her presence had gone