Fatebound Read online

  I shielded my eyes from the headlights as Justin and I swept toward the trunk. We each grabbed our backpacks, slinging them over our shoulders as Cupid and Hercules closed in on Kilby at the front. I glimpsed Cupid’s tiny wings flitting, his bow already nocked with a signature arrow.

  “I’ve got this,” I heard Cupid say to Hercules.

  “Stop. No, don’t!” Kilby said, hands going up just before he grunted. Through the windshield I spotted an arrow sticking out of his chest.

  “Oh, come on,” Hercules groaned. “It’s been almost an entire day since I’ve had a fight.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said as Justin and I came up alongside the car, “there’ll be more. Trust me.”

  There was no way Kilby was alone. I’d bet the rest of my mortal life on it.

  As we passed Kilby, his eyes glazed and his body went momentarily limp. I glanced back as we threaded past cars. “What did you make him desire?” I said to Cupid.

  “The first woman he comes across,” Cupid said, floating beside me. From somewhere he’d summoned his tiny cloud, which carried him with admirable speed.

  “Wasn’t I the first woman he came across?” I asked.

  Cupid’s dimples emerged. “The first human woman. You’re something else—something better.”

  Well, that was a change from the way I usually heard people talking about Others.

  When I looked back, Stein had thrown his entire body over the hatchback behind ours and was thrusting his hips into it with manic fervor. The entire car rocked on its suspension, and inside, I could swear I heard screaming.

  “You just tramatized some poor woman,” I breathed as we jogged.

  Cupid shrugged. “All’s fair in love and war.”

  Justin had taken the lead, Cupid and I were at the center and Hercules brought up the back. We moved fast, threading past cars and weaving to avoid hitting side-view mirrors.

  People rubbernecked as we passed, but no one else stepped out of their car. That was the single point of relief in all this—we were the only people on the road.

  “There’s the exit,” Justin said, pointing at a tiny rectangle of light ahead. It looked miniature, impossibly far off.

  As we neared, some of the cars looked much bigger than the rest. Military-size, in fact; I counted four of them in separate lanes, all even with one another. “Justin,” I said.

  “I see them.”

  “Do you think …?”

  “Oh, I think.”

  “How should we handle it?” As a former soldier in the World Army, Justin’s tactical knowledge surpassed mine by a mile. Especially when it came to their tactics. As I said it, the white brake lights on two of the trucks we were approaching flashed, and their wheels angled toward us.

  This was because of the tracer in Justin’s Mustang. They had seen where we were headed and planned to block us in at the tunnel.

  “They’re moving to trap us,” Justin said, mirroring my thoughts. “We need to get through before they do.”

  “What in Empty Hell did you two do to bring in a literal army?” Cupid said.

  “I took something of theirs,” I said, out of breath. Actually, somethings. I took secrets, I took my research and I took Justin. I knew which was more valuable to them—the knowledge I had taken with me—but I knew which was more valuable to me.

  The man. The human being.

  I didn’t even know if I could call him a “human” anymore. Ahead of me, he ran differently, his legs like pistons. He’d been mixed with Others—multiple Others. Parts of him had been changed, modified. What made humans human and Others Other?

  Maybe, I thought as we approached the military vehicles now angled to pin us in, it’s in how you think of yourself. If you have a little of both in you, it comes down to your choices.

  As we came close, Justin stopped and took my arm. We veered left, cutting into the next lane of traffic. Here, another of the vehicles was maneuvering to pin us in. And it moved way faster than we were.

  We neared, and Justin yelled, “Slip around!” He took the lead, and let me go as he angled his body sideways between the military vehicle and the SUV, just sliding through.

  But the rest of us wouldn’t make it.

  “Justin!” I called.

  He glanced back, already half a dozen feet beyond the blockade of military vehicles. A door opened between him and me, and a booted foot stepped onto the mudguard.

  “Hold up right there, Isabella,” a voice said, and Sergeant Johnson’s shaved head appeared from the depths of the vehicle in front of me. He didn’t have a weapon out, but I knew from the times I’d seen him training Justin how many he was probably hiding on his body. None of which mattered, anyway; no doubt he could take me down with his bare hands.

  The other vehicles were unloading now, doors opening and World Army soldiers stepping out. They hadn’t sent a brigade—they didn’t want to draw more attention than this, I realized—but they’d sent enough.

  Enough to trap us here in this tunnel before we could disappear into the city.

  “Merda,” I hissed, stopping hard.

  A pair of hands slid around my waist and legs, lifted me up like I weighed nothing. I was pressed up against a massive, bare chest, and I was about to scream when I looked up.

  “Not to worry, Isa,” Hercules said—when had he started calling me Isa?—and in that moment we were airborne. He had leapt onto the trunk of the car on our right, ran us up over the hood and launched us off the roof and onto the street beyond the military blockade.

  Justin, probably wanting to out-man Hercules, jumped over the cars entirely, landing by our side.

  “I am carrying Isa,” the legendary warrior said.

  “And you’re half-god,” Justin retorted. “Whereas I’m just a boy.” He gave Hercules a mocking glare.

  Cupid floated alongside on his cloud, launching arrows as he went. “OK, boys … we’ll have a pissing contest when we’re not being hunted by an army.”

  We came into the rectangle of light where the tunnel ended, the clouded sun bleeding over us, and Hercules pelting forward with me still in his arms. I spotted Justin as we blew by; his face bore a mixture of frustration and awe. But he didn’t stop running.

  Behind us, a man yelled something unintelligible, drowned out by the acoustics of the tunnel and the honking and the engines. But I knew what it meant: Get them.

  Ahead, the city street arrowed into the distance, branching off at right angles to other streets. Streets upon streets upon streets, all of them punctuated by buildings rising pencil-straight into the sky. And, of course, the endless lines of brake lights clogging the road like an artery.

  We had made it.

  “The Big Apple,” Hercules observed as casually as if he were taking a little stroll, and not racing with me in his arms. “Wait, where is the apple?”

  A mosquito’s buzz sounded by my right ear, and a sharp pain bloomed in my shoulder. When I jerked my head left, I found a black dart sticking out of my arm. A tranquilizer? I wasn’t sure; I had never seen anything like it. Past Hercules’s shoulder, I spotted a sharpshooter kneeling atop a car, taking aim.

  “Duck!” I yelled at Hercules as I yanked the dart out of my arm.

  Evidently he trusted me, because he reacted as soon as I’d spoken, dropping to one knee in front of a car. Cupid dropped down with us. A millisecond later, a second black dart whizzed through the air where we’d been.

  Justin appeared, dropping down with us. “Did that sharpshooter get you?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. This wasn’t the time to upset him. “We need to take a left at the next light.”

  “What’s left at the next light?” Cupid asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “But I can guess.”

  In the next second, Hercules rose, carrying us to the end of the block and just missing the edge of a building as he brought us around the corner. As we passed onto the side street, I glanced over Hercules’s shoulder. Justin appeared after us, and
I didn’t see any darts sticking off him or wounds to speak of.

  “You good?” I called back to him.

  He raised one thumb in the air as he caught up. The sweat rolled off his forehead in rivulets.

  “Please put me down,” I said to Hercules.

  “Are you certain? No offense intended, but I can carry you faster than you can run right now.”

  “I’m certain,” I said as Hercules lowered me to my feet. “Because right now, I’m probably the only one here who’s capable of hailing a cab in under a minute.”

  Years of living in Rio had made me a city encantado—or, at least, one capable of taking advantage of the natural advantages of being a young woman in a city. One of which was stepping to the sidewalk’s edge and lifting my hand in the air.

  My arm went up, I met eyes with the first oncoming taxi driver, and like a law of physics, he pulled over alongside us.

  Hercules, Justin and Cupid stood stunned on the sidewalk (well, Cupid floated). “How did you do that?” Justin asked.

  “It was a beautiful thing,” Cupid observed.

  “Why has this yellow vessel stopped alongside us?” Hercules asked.

  “It’s not a ‘vessel,’ Herc,” Cupid corrected. “It’s called a car.”

  I groaned and opened the back door, swept my hand forward. “Would the three of you please get in?”

  When I’d slipped into the front seat and the other three into the back, the driver stared around at all of us with wide eyes. In the back, Cupid sat sandwiched between Justin and Hercules, who looked like a balloon that had been shoved into a space way too small for it. “You’re all on the same fare?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  “Times Square.”

  “Anywhere in Times Square?”

  “The square.”

  “Like … the center of it?”

  “Exactly.” I turned to stare out the back windshield. The nose of one of the military vehicles had just appeared at the edge of the cross-street, was stopped at a red light. I didn’t know if they had seen us pile around the corner. “Please just drive.”

  We drove. I dropped into the seat to pull my jacket off and roll the sleeve of my shirt up. My arm had begun to throb, and while whatever they’d shot me with wasn’t a tranquilizer—I wasn’t feeling tired—I knew they had done something to me. Something bad. I felt different, less capable.

  “They know we’re in the city, Isa,” Justin said. “We can’t just go stand in the middle of Times Square in broad daylight.”

  “I know,” I murmured, gingerly pulling my sleeve up to reveal the wound. A red puncture sat high up on my arm, a rash already blooming around it. No one had noticed, and I wasn’t about to bring it up. Justin didn’t need any more worries, and right now, what we most needed was to get to safety.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Cupid observed, pointing out the windshield. Above us, the sun had already fallen beyond the line of the city. It cast a soft, early evening light through the taxi.

  I should have been calmed by it; instead, my eyes kept darting toward the back windshield. We didn’t seem to be followed, and yet …

  “Where is the big apple?” Hercules insisted.

  The taxi driver and I met eyes. I shook my head at him, and he focused on the road.

  “Egya told us to wait until nighttime,” Justin said.

  “So we hang out in a McDs until then.” I rolled my sleeve down and pulled my jacket back on.

  “They know to look for these two.” Justin pointed at Cupid and Hercules. “We’ll be way more conspicuous now. You need to change again, Isa.”

  And by “change,” I knew he meant I should shift into another illusion. It was my best defense, a camouflage I’d used my entire life when I’d needed to disappear, to go on the run. And as an encantado who ended up in a lot of bad romances, I’d had to do more running than I liked.

  “I will—” I began. I was cut off by Hercules, who pulled on the door handle. Without a word, he pushed the door open as we drove. Then he rolled out into the street.

  Chapter 9

  Outside, Hercules somersaulted across the asphalt and swept up to his feet in one motion. His fist came to his hips, and his chest jutted out as he pointed with one hand straight up the side of a building.

  We all stared at him from the car. “Is he doing a superhero pose?” Justin said.

  “Who is that guy, man?” The driver pulled us to the curb. The cab’s open door swung with the motion. “Is he crazy?”

  “I’m so sorry.” I reached into my backpack and yanked out $50 in cash. “Please, take this and don’t mention any of what just happened.”

  He eyed the bills. “Those aren’t U.S. dollars.”

  I stared at the money. We hadn’t even thought to exchange any of our Canadian bills for American. I reached back in, pulled out my Amex card. “Here.”

  As the driver processed my card, I rolled down the window and cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hey, get back in the car!”

  Hercules glanced over. “I’ve found them.”

  “Found who?”

  “The Hesperides.”

  I followed his gaze up to a massive pink-and-gold advertisement on the building’s side. On it, three nymphs stood in various suggestive poses around a gleaming silver pole. One of them lay atop the lettering at the bottom of the advertisement, which read: NYMPHOS.

  “That’s them,” Cupid said from the back seat. “Can’t miss those Hesperides.”

  “Really—Nymphos?” I murmured. “A bit on the nose, isn’t it?”

  “We must go there!” Hercules bellowed in the street. A taxi swerved around him, the driver laying on his horn. Hercules didn’t even flinch. “We must go at once.”

  I squinted at the poster. “That’s where the apples are?”

  He didn’t answer, but like an eager dog, he stared between me and what he wanted.

  I groaned. “Nymphos is a strip club, Hercules.”

  “Then we must go to this strip club.” He stepped closer to the driver’s side of the taxi and knocked on the glass. The driver looked at me, then rolled his window a couple inches down. “Where is Nymphos?” Hercules asked.

  “The … the strip joint?”

  “Yes.”

  “7th and 51st.”

  “How far is that?”

  “About ten blocks that way. You take a left up at the light.”

  Hercules nodded, straightened. He started down the sidewalk, and in the early evening of New York City, people stared at his almost-naked, bronze body. A woman walking her teacup dog walked by and did a double-take at the club hanging from his lion skin.

  We were getting far, far too much notice.

  “Get back in the taxi,” I begged. “Get back in and we’ll go to Nymphos.”

  Hercules paused mid-stride, glanced back. “We’ll go?”

  “Cupid swung the door back open. “Get in, big guy. You’re about to be questioned by the po-po for public indecency.”

  And so Hercules climbed back into the car. The side of the taxi sagged as he did, and when all four doors were shut, I leaned over and pushed the lock on Hercules’s door.

  “So now you want to go to Nymphos instead of the center of Times Square.” Our driver could barely hide his irritation.

  I made an apologetic face. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, we’d like to go to Nymphos.”

  “Those kinds of places don’t open until nighttime.”

  “We shall wait,” Hercules said, “until the Hesperides open their gates.”

  I gestured back at Hercules. “You heard the man. Take us there.”

  Ten minutes later, we stepped out of the taxi on 7th and 51st. Before us, a black-curtained set of windows encompassed one side of a building, a blazing neon sign lighting the street for yards.

  NYMPHOS.

  Hercules approached the door, which didn’t have an outer handle. He tried peering through the opaque glass, both hands cupped around his eyes. He kn
ocked once, set his ear to the glass.

  How had this man survived sixty-five days in the modern world?

  “They’re not open yet, Herc,” Cupid explained, floating to his side. “We need to wait a few hours.”

  “You saw them, Cupid. You saw the Hesperides in their traditional poses.”

  I scanned the block around us. It wasn’t as populous as the main thoroughfare some fifty feet off, but I still met eyes with a pedestrian, whose gaze slid past me to Hercules. She didn’t even notice Cupid.

  People were still staring.

  I stood next to Justin, my hand sliding into his. I could feel him shaking again; even so, I also felt his warmth. I squeezed. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know”—he shrugged one shoulder—“just unsuccessfully trying to process a bunch of Other genes spliced with my own.”

  “Hang in there.” I raised a finger, pointed at a barber shop near the end of the block. “How about that haircut?”

  He groaned. “Not the hair.”

  “And we can drop into that Gap to get clothes for me and Herc and Cupid.”

  Justin eyed them. “I doubt we’ll find anything big enough … or small enough.”

  I shifted from foot to foot; my arm was throbbing even more. “Mostly the goal is to get these two off the street.”

  Hercules pounded three times with his fist. “Hesperides! Open your gates.”

  Justin and I met eyes. “Right,” he said. “You take them to the Gap, I’ll get rid of my hair. We go into the strip club and find a private booth to discuss getting to Times Square and finding the resistance. Deal?”

  I pressed a kiss to his lips. “Deal.”

  Justin left for the barber, and Cupid and I managed to pry Hercules away from Nymphos’ door on the promise that we would return in two hours.

  When we came into the Gap, Hercules had to duck under the door as it belled. The woman manning the counter just stared, frozen with a blouse in mid-fold, her jaw slack.

  Still, palpable relief settled over me. We were relatively safe in here. I leaned toward Hercules, my eyes on the attendant. “That is why you need to wear clothes.”