Twisted (7 page)

IT NEVER GOT DARK IN THE CITY.
Not really dark the way it had in other places. Like Connecticut

He strolled down the sidewalk, careful never to touch
anyone he passed. He didn't like to touch people.
He didn't like to be touched
.

The sun was already going down, but the sky overhead only shifted from blue to a kind of dingy yellow as the lights came on. It wasn't anything close to real darkness. After only three days in the city, he still thought the dirty, nearly starless sky seemed terribly odd.

He craved the darkness.

He moved off the sidewalk and headed down the curving path that led out under the trees. A handful of children were still indulging in a few last minutes of play, but there were parents on hand to watch and a policeman standing at the edge of the playground. A pair of street musicians were putting away their instruments and counting up handfuls of change and folded bills.

They were scared. All of them were scared of the coming night.

He could feel it, almost taste it
. For a moment he had a desire to rush into the center of them, screaming and waving his arms, just so he could watch them scatter. He fought down that desire.

No matter how fun it might be to see them run, it wasn't his reason for being in the park. There was important work to be done—a higher purpose.
Nothing could be allowed to get in the way of that purpose
.

He walked on, passing two more policemen on his way to the chess tables. Like the playground, the boards were almost deserted. Two men still squinted at a game in the failing light. At another table an old man slowly packed away his chess pieces.

The old man looked up as he passed. “You wanting game?” he said. “I will play you.”

“No, thanks, Gramps.” The idea of playing this guy actually made him smile. The man was ridiculously ancient, with sun-spotted skin and flyaway tufts of white hair. Beating him at chess couldn't possibly be a challenge.

Killing him would be even easier.

It would be a mercy, really. Put the old fool out of his misery. Maybe he would do it. Not as a main course for the evening, but just as a warm-up exercise. Something to keep his fingers busy.

The old man shuffled away, and the moment passed. Pointless, anyway. It was no fun without a real struggle.

He moved away from the tables and down the tree-lined paths. Even in the middle of the park there was nothing that approached
true darkness
.

But under the trees and in the shaded places, it was dark enough for his purposes.

The form on the ground didn't even look like a girl. It barely looked like a person.

DEATH DIDN'T LEAVE MUCH OF A
permanent stain. Not on the park, at least.

Gaia reached out and caught a strip of the yellow tape in her hand. Crime Scene—Do Not Cross.

As if yellow tape created some magical force field that could keep everyone away. Gaia wondered if police tape had ever stopped anybody in the history of the world from jumping into the middle of a crime site. The temptation was just too much. Even when you weren't stalking a stalker.

Considering how everyone had been talking up the murder at school and in the papers, Gaia had expected to find the park swarming with cop types. She had thought there would be uniforms keeping back the crowds. Whole squadrons of trench-coat-wearing detectives combing the ground, examining every blade of grass for a clue like a
flock of investigating sheep.
There should have been technicians spreading fingerprint powder. Flashing lights. Enough doughnuts to soak up a swimming pool of coffee.

Instead
there was only this dark patch of grass.
If there had been detectives, they were long gone. There wasn't a single cop left to keep people from ignoring the warning on the flimsy yellow tape. No one had even left behind a doughnut.

Losers.

Still, Gaia had a hard time stepping over the line. It wasn't like she was afraid of getting caught. Gaia didn't do afraid.

Maybe it was some new desire to be a law-abiding citizen. She wasn't sure. But the idea of going across the tape, going to the place where, the body had been, made Gaia feel weird.
Like something way down inside her wasn't quite as solid as it should be.
Squishy.

She stood there and took a few deep breaths of evening air before the squishiness started to fade. After all, there was nothing out there but grass.

Gaia ducked under the tape. Inside the magic line the ground was all dented and bumpy—like it had been walked on by a herd of elephants. Maybe there really had been hundreds of detecto-sheep here after all.

The grass in the field was soaked with dew. By the time she'd taken a dozen steps, Gaia's sneakers were soaked through and cold water was making little burping noises between her toes.
A lovely way to start a long evening.

Almost dead center in the field she saw the rough outline of a body marked in white. Just like in the movies. Only this line wasn't made from tape. It was powdered, chalky stuff, like they use to mark the baselines at a ball game.

Somewhere in the back of Gaia's head, random associations started to fire.

Strike three. You're out. Game over.

When she considered where she was standing, this seemed more than a little sick. But Gaia had never claimed to be in complete control of what went on in her head.

She stood with the toes of her wet sneaks almost touching the crumbling chalk line. The form on the ground didn't even look like a girl. It barely looked like a person. It was just a rough outline with something like a hand pointing one way and two blocky leg things shooting off the other end.

Despite all the violence Gaia had seen in her life—
despite all the violence she had caused
—there was something about this scene that gave her pause. She wasn't scared; she just felt ill. Ill and numb and . . . responsible. And sad. Where there had been a girl with warmth and memories and a smile, there was now just chalk and dew. It was almost too much for her.

Gaia turned away, wanting to block out the images of premature dying, but her eyes were drawn back as if some unseen thing were pulling her.

Gaia was no big believer.
She didn't go in for ghosts, or voodoo,
or little leprechauns with colored marshmallow cereal. If people wanted to call themselves witches, that was cool with Gaia as
long as they didn't expect her to believe in witchcraft. She might be an overmuscled, fear-deprived, jump-kicking freak girl, but Gaia didn't skim the tabloids for predictions or use a Ouija board to communicate with the dead. For all the weirdness in her life,
she knew where to draw the line between what was real and what was not
. Or at least, she thought she did.

But the area inside the police tape gave Gaia a bad feeling. Something worse than a mugging or robbery had happened there. And Gaia could still feel it.

She looked up from the line on the ground and did a quick check of the trees around her—just in case any werewolves or zombies were approaching. Then she laughed at herself.

Still, he could be out there.
Right there.

There was that whole bad film noir/cheesy paperback theory that criminals return to the scene of the crime.

It sounded like an idea dreamed up by a lazy detective or by some writer who didn't know where to go with the plot. Just sit on your ass, and the killer will come to you. In Gaia's book
that was way too easy to be true.

There was no real reason to think the killer might come back to this place. None at all. Gaia had the whole park to patrol. She couldn't stand here all night,
staring at an empty field. Glaring at the trees made about as much sense as her Sam obsession.

But when she looked again, something was out there. Right at the bottom of a bunch of little ash trees, stuck in a chunk of shadow was—something. Maybe someone.

The all-over sickness she had been feeling started to turn into the more familiar
let's-go-kick-some-ass buzz.
Gaia took a slow step toward the shape in the shadows. She squinted until her eyes watered. Was someone really there? She couldn't be sure. She took another step. It was so hard to see. The shape in the shadows could be a crouching person, or it could be a shrub or a trash can.

Then the shape moved.

HE WAS UP AND RUNNING BEFORE
she had a chance to blink. There was no reason to run, really. He could just kill her now.

He wasn't afraid of her.

But he was in the mood for a challenge. He wanted to run. Run until it hurt. Until
the air coming in and out of his lungs burned the delicate flesh of his throat.

He wanted her to feel the same thing.

And so he ran. There was no way she would catch up to him. Which meant no killing tonight. But that was okay.

He wanted to see what she could do.

GAIA'S LEGS WERE PUMPING EVEN
before her brain had finished realizing that it really was a person out there. Someone had been there in the shadows, watching her. Now the person was running. So was Gaia.

She made it out of the chewed-up field and jumped the police tape on the far side. For a moment she stood there, frustration tightening her throat.
It was a terrible thing to be ready for a fight and not find anyone to punch.

Then she saw the shadow guy again. He was a hundred feet away, cutting across the grass by the side of the path. Gaia started after him.

Then something strange happened.

The average Gaia-versus-bad-guy race lasted all of five seconds. It wasn't that she was Ms. Olympic Runner, but the same thing that made Gaia strong also made her pretty damn fast in a sprint.
Her father said it was part of being fearless.
That little regulator that keeps people from pushing their muscles to the absolute limit was absent without leave in Gaia. She could push her legs a hundred percent. Maybe further. Gaia could even push her muscles so hard that she broke her own bones.

Disgusting but true.

There was a price to pay for beating herself up like that, but the upside was irresistible—before Gaia began to fade, most losers were on the pavement.

Not this guy.
Shadow Man was fast.
More than fast. A real speed demon.

Gaia and the shadow whipped along the path through the heart of the park, jumped a hedge, and skirted a gnarled old oak. Gaia didn't gain a step. She could never get close enough to see more than
a hazy form in the distance.
Several times she almost convinced herself that nothing was out there but shadows—no man at all. But she didn't stop.

By now Gaia was solidly in the zone. Nothing mattered in the world but catching the guy in the shadows. The chessboards came and went in a blur. The playground. The sprinklers. Then they were out of the park,
powering north on Fifth Avenue.

In the back of her mind nagged the vague thought that she had no clear reason to pursue him except for the fact that he was running away from her. But the chase was on, and her instincts pushed her hard to catch him.

She zipped past knots of people and saw startled faces turning her way. A woman jumped back as Gaia thundered past. A guy dropped a bag of groceries, and apples went bouncing along the sidewalk.

Gaia didn't slow. They had been running now for a solid minute at a speed that would have been
impressive for a ten-second sprint.
Her chest heaved in and out as she tried to draw in all the air in New York.

Then she realized she was gaining on the shadow. Not much, but the gap was definitely closing.

Another hundred yards and she had gotten close enough to see that he was wearing some kind of long, floppy black coat. Not a trench coat, but something from a cowboy movie. A duster.

How could he run this fast in that thing?

Gaia followed as the duster flapped past the trendy crowd waiting outside Clementine's, past the glowing signs at Starbuck's, and on across fourteenth Street without even looking at the streams of passing traffic. Her heartbeat seemed to move up through her body with every step. One moment it was pounding against Gaia's ribs. The next it was
beating in her throat. The next it was
throbbing in her skull.

Shadow Man took a hard right onto a side street, then ducked down an alley. Gaia was right behind him. The gap between the two runners had closed to no more than fifty feet. Forty.

A mesh fence blocked one end of the alley. Gaia slowed a step, getting ready to fight, but the guy in the black coat didn't hesitate. He jumped up, landed one foot on a Dumpster, and sprang from there to the top of the fence. Two steps and he was over the ten-foot barrier.
He hit the other side running.

“What?”
Gaia gasped.

She might not get scared, but she was still quite capable of being amazed.

Gaia ran up to the fence, looped her hands in the mesh, and flung herself upward. She flipped head over heels and her feet came down on the top of the gate.
A very slick move.

Then the top of the gate sagged, and she fell.

The pavement wasn't friendly to Gaia's knee. She hit with a force that sent jolts of fire running up her thigh and set off flares of white light in her head.

Gaia stayed there for the space of two breaths. Then she got on her feet and ran again.

Black Coat had widened his lead on Gaia to a good hundred feet, but she soon had it back to fifty. He cut
right again, this time along University Place. Gaia followed.

The pair sprinted past a series of nightclubs. The door of each one spilled out different music, but Gaia went past them so fast,
they blended like notes in some insane song.
Disco high C. Jazz G. Bass blues.