A low chuckle behind her made Lana freeze.
“I knew you were faking it,” her dad said against the back of her neck.
As Lana swung around, she saw Jimmy standing just behind her father. He was holding his baseball bat.
“You let her go.”
Her father turned, his fist rising, and then Jimmy swung the bat, knocking it into the side of his head with a solid thunk. Lana bit back a scream as her father reeled into the wall and slid down it to sit on the floor, his head sagging against one shoulder.
Jimmy lowered the bat and looked at her as tears streaked his face. “Now you can get away. Go. Hurry.”
Chapter 1
Five years hadn’t altered much of Rowan Dietrich or New York City. The kid who had carried everything she owned in a backpack when she had left for Georgia still owned little more than the clothes on her back. She’d found friends, people who were as damaged and screwed up as she was, but the two most important had really been searching for each other, and now they were together and complete. They would have gladly gone on being her surrogate family, but she’d wanted more than that, more than they could ever give. Leaving them behind hurt, but Rowan knew she’d done the right thing.
If destiny did exist, she thought as she removed her helmet, being alone seemed to be hers.
November had iced the roads with slush and frozen puddles, and forced her to keep her speed minimal as she retreated to the alleys. A few hours earlier she might have smelled what passed as a festive fragrance here: roasted nuts hawked by sidewalk vendors too fat or too poor to care about standing out in the cold. After midnight, the vendors trudged home while the dampness of the river crept east. The unlovely, clammy fumes of the Hudson blended with the perennial sour reek of car exhaust, garbage, and decades of grime exuded by the streets. Not even Pittsburgh, one of the dirtiest cities Rowan had ever seen, stank like New York.
Something small with patchy fur and a long tail skittered across the road ahead of her. It might have been a very small, ratty-looking cat, or a very large, catty-looking rat.
This was a stupid idea.
Sometimes she’d smelled as vile as the streets, back when she’d been a homeless runaway. Living in the bowels of the greatest city on earth didn’t include regular bathroom privileges or ample opportunities to keep up her personal hygiene. No matter how often she’d washed, she’d soaked up the acrid, sour odor of the city until she thought she’d never be clean again. Sometimes it had been so bad she’d wondered if every night the city lifted some giant invisible leg and pissed on her while she slept.
Really stupid.
As for the sights, the Big Apple appeared exactly as she remembered it, a soulless gray and black labyrinth of concrete and steel, as cold in electric light as in the wells of shadow, as indifferent to her as she’d be to an ant. As she hooked her helmet to the lock she’d installed at the back of her seat, she wondered why the passing years hadn’t shrunk the city into something smaller and less intimidating. Surely any minute she’d start feeling at least a twinge of fond nostalgia for the place where she’d spent the worst times of her young life.
It wasn’t happening. She’d come back home unwanted and alone, and the city still didn’t care. Realizing nothing had changed didn’t chill her; resentment boiled in her chest.
Screw the Apple.
Her life had been polluted long enough by rage and fear of the things that had happened to her in this place without her permission. She’d come here to free herself of the past and finally face her fear. She would not be beaten into the pavement again by it.
Well? What’s it going to be?
She hadn’t been thinking about doing this when she’d left the interstate. She’d taken the exit thinking she’d just drive to the river, stop there, and have a look at the city from one of the docks. She’d reminded herself of all the excellent reasons why she had to stay on the Jersey side of the Hudson, and then she was driving through the Lincoln Tunnel and uptown into the theater district, her visor up, her eyes searching. For what, she didn’t know. She’d left nothing behind but her innocence and two graves.
Three, she corrected herself as some cold part of her brain did the math. The sisters are dead, and the old man is, too. There’s no one left who knows who or where or what I am.
In a few hours the Upper West Side would be choked with people and traffic, but in the predawn hours Rowan saw only a few cabs and patrol cars on the road, and some delivery trucks parked with their flashers on as they were being unloaded. Seeing the crates of produce and flowers being stacked on the hand trucks and wheeled into the groceries and restaurants made her stomach twist. When she’d been desperate, she’d stolen food off the back of some delivery trucks; seeing all that unguarded bounty still made her feel hungry—and ashamed.
Quickly she rode past a couple of pricey restaurants she didn’t recognize. The leather bomber jacket that had kept her warm during the long, icy ride now felt smothering.
Welcome home, Rowan. Here, have a little panic attack to go along with your sniveling. A garbage truck passed her, splashing her left leg with gray slush. And fuck you.
At the next traffic light she stopped, braced her boots against the road, unzipped, and stripped. As she tied the jacket by the sleeves around her waist, she saw that sweat had soaked the two shirts she wore beneath it. A faint blue glow showed around the edges of her sleeves, and the skin of her inner arms crawled. If anyone had touched her in that moment, she wouldn’t have been able to control herself.
Something was wrong, and the cause wasn’t her ugly memories of the city. She scanned the surrounding area until she spotted a small group of Latino kids tagging a building under construction across the street. Stylized letters spelled out Neva B Tha Same in jailhouse jumpsuit orange and radiation-warning yellow. Other, equally artistic graffiti riddled the bare cinderblock walls around them.
On her side of the road there was no graffiti. Not a single tag, gang sign, or rap sentiment anywhere on the brick walls between the barred windows and grate-covered doors, all of which belonged to some upscale place. White letters on the dark brown canopy over the main entrance spelled out a single name in elegant script: D’Anges.
Angelic? For the angels? Rowan wasn’t sure. Outside the terms used in gourmet cookbooks and magazines, her French sucked.
Red light turned to green, but she didn’t ride on, and the sound of her engine finally drew the attention of the graffiti artists to her presence. The boys turned en masse to hoot, whistle, and call out sexual invitations while palming their crotches.
The ultimate thug accolade. Relaxing a little, Rowan studied them. She knew from experience that teenage boys were often the most dangerous predators walking the streets, but something told her this bunch were mostly gab and grab.
“Sí ’mana.” The oldest boy, resplendent in his oversize football jersey and carpenter jeans, sauntered over. “I like your ride.”
Rowan checked his hands, which were grimy and speckled across the knuckles with yellow back-spray, but otherwise empty. No knives, no guns, no bricks, no tricks. “Thanks.”
“Muy melaza.” His eyes ate up her bike before squinting at her. “You take me around the block?”
So he could dump her ass and deliver her machine to his cousin’s chop shop? “Another time, maybe.”
“Coño.” He glanced back to smirk at the encouraging catcalls from his friends, and then shuffled closer. “So what you waiting here for? You need directions or something, mami?”
She noticed he bypassed ogling her tits to check out her ignition. So that’s the plan. “Do I look lost to you, hijo?”
“Mira.” Beautiful white teeth flashed against his dark face. “Maybe I take you somewhere, huh?”
As he reached to snatch her keys, she caught his wrist and jerked him closer. He wasn’t expecting that, but she needed his body to block her from his friends’ view. The leather sleeves encasing her forearms rippled as she looked into his eyes and saw the tiny reflection of her own face blur and change.
Inside Rowan’s belly, a burst of heat solidified and began to expand. At the same time a stream of images and words poured into her mind. Ruthlessly she searched through them until she found what she needed. “You’re being a bad boy, Juanito.”
“¡Alábalo que vive!” The boy’s eyes flew wide, until she could see the whites all around the dark irises. “Rosamada? Es tu?”
“Sí.” She didn’t know enough Spanish to command him in that language, but now that all he saw was the face of the girl he loved, he probably wouldn’t notice. “It’s too late for you to be out, ’Nito. Say good-bye to your friends and go home now.”
Juanito nodded, tugging something from his neck and dropping it into her lap. “For you. You wear it for me, Rosa.”
Rowan had to root between her thighs until she felt the metal links and retrieved the heavy chain. A gleaming, solid-silver crucifix hung from it. “Why are you giving me your ice?”
He looked past her. “Enero.” Without another word, he turned and trotted back to his friends.
Once upon a time Rowan had been a Catholic, so the cross didn’t give her the creeps. Seeing Juanito and his friends make the sign of the cross and kiss their thumb knuckles before they scattered did. She looked over her shoulder, but didn’t see anyone or anything but the dark windows of the restaurant.
What the hell had spooked them?
Rowan grabbed her helmet and pulled it back on. Enough was enough. In another day or two she’d reach Boston, where she’d been promised a good job and a cheap apartment. She’d never been there before, but she was ready to make a fresh start. If it didn’t work out, she’d hit the road again and move on. There was always another place, another job, another chance.
All she had to do first was break a promise. The one she’d sworn she never would.
The threadbare, moth-eaten blanket of winter night, which covered little and protected nothing, had effectively emptied out the alleys. When temperatures dropped, the usual residents deserted their dismal crate and cardboard-box niches. Sleeping outside when the mercury sank below twenty was an automatic sentence of death by hypothermia, so like the rats and strays, the homeless retreated to the relative safety of the subway tunnels, abandoned cars and condemned buildings, where the cold couldn’t kill them.
