Heroes 'Til Curfew

  Heroes ’Til Curfew

  Smashwords Edition

  © 2011 Susan Bischoff

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  http://susan-bischoff.com

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Art by Robin Ludwig Design Inc.

  Authors note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Titles in the Series

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Come Find me

  Impulse Control (excerpt)

  Red (excerpt)

  Glimpse (excerpt)

  The Talent Chronicles

  Hush Money

  Heroes ’Til Curfew

  Heroes Under Siege (forthcoming)

  Also

  Impulse Control (short story)

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the following talented people:

  Kait Nolan, gifted author and dear friend, who continues to be THE person who makes me finish what I start.

  Andrew Mocete and Claire Legrand for careful reading, enthusiastic feedback, and unconditional support.

  Stacey Wallace Benefiel who, as it turns out, is as awesome at beta reading as she is at crafting stories.

  Lauralynn Elliott, author and friend, who came in with an amazing, last-minute proofreading effort.

  Robin Ludwig, Robin Ludwig Design Inc., for a cover so exciting it made me want to write a book that was worthy.

  My husband, Les, who continues to put up with a lot.

  And my daughter, Briar Rose, whose boundless creativity is inspiring.

  Chapter 1

  Joss

  Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean no one’s out to get you.

  The thought went through my head in my dad’s voice—I was that well programmed. That’s why I’d varied my schedule, to throw off my stalker.

  As I walked down the brick-paved road that ran through the middle of the downtown pedestrian mall, my own boots were the only ones I could hear beating the pavement. The feelings I had weren’t the sensations of being followed and watched that I had become familiar with over the last month or so. Tonight was different.

  It’s not like I’m that kind of psychic. I don’t have any kind of extra-sensory perception or anything. It’s just that, since I was a little kid, my dad trained me to pay attention to my surroundings. At some point that kind of training turns to instinct—an instinct that warned me something was up.

  The economy of our town was not great, and downtown was especially bad. Yeah, here and everywhere else in the country, right? That left a lot of empty storefronts on the mall, a lot of darkened glass windows that showed my reflection as I walked by, a lone, dark-haired girl in a vintage army jacket and combat boots, faking confidence in her stride.

  Our store was at the far end of the mall and I had to walk the whole length of it to get home. I was happy when my dad started letting me walk home by myself, because I loved walking it, the feeling of freedom in the night air, the quiet, the glow of the converted gas lights. But making enemies, getting my ass handed to me, getting to walk around with a bruised face for weeks and all the attention that got me…that kind of thing changes a girl, I guess.

  I glanced over at the image of the confident girl who moved from glass to glass beside me, at the dark alleyways that opened up every few buildings, the looming, brick store facades, and the shadows under awnings where the attractive but weak lamplight didn’t reach. I listened hard to the sound of nothing—too much nothing, it seemed to me—and tried not to think about the cell phone in my pocket and of calling Dylan. Not because I was some useless girl, afraid of the dark and in need of rescuing, but just to hear his voice.

  As if I would have the guts to just call up Dylan.

  I passed by the fountain that they didn’t bother to put water in anymore, even in summer. More than one person had used it for a giant trash can during the day. Is that really any better than throwing your trash right on the ground? What’s wrong with people?

  I don’t know what it was that made me take a closer look as I walked by Dog-Eared. Mr. McGuffey closed the shop at five o’clock. He always said that after dinner his customers were all home reading, and he would be too. The lights were on low in the front of the store, like usual. Over the piles of used books stacked against the front windows, the tall bookcases created a maze through the shop and stacks on the floor encroached on the narrow aisles. But I guess that squeezing your way around Dog-Eared is part of its charm.

  There was a flare of light. Just a quick something that was gone almost as I noticed it. Definitely not right. Moving closer to the shop, I thought I saw a shadow of movement, so I decided to duck down the alley and see if I could see anything through the windows over there.

  Now I’ll admit it: it’s not a great idea for a girl, alone at night in a deserted downtown shopping area, to go creeping down dark alleys to peep in store windows where suspicious activity may or may not be taking place. But in my defense, I’m not exactly an ordinary girl, and I was just going to have a look anyway.

  Through a window I could see the wide aisle that ran across the back of the shop, in front of the door to the back rooms. In that aisle were four boys doing bad things.

  I recognized Jeff right off, even though his back was to me. Maybe it was the Neanderthal posture. Standing next to him was a smaller guy who looked vaguely familiar. Probably a freshman. Across from Jeff was a tall guy I didn’t know, who looked older than we were. Next to that guy was a sophomore, Nathan, who was in my gym class last year.

  Jeff and the freshman each had a pile of books in front of them, and when I say pile, I mean it looked like they’d just gathered up an armload and dumped them on the floor. Nice. They were tossing these books, in sync with each other, into the air in front of the other two. Who would then d-i-s-i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-e them. No, really, I kid you not. I don’t know what Nathan was doing, but his book just turned to dust which floated down to the carpet. The older guy’s book burst with a brief flash of flame and then exploded into embers that glowed for a second before they joined the mess of dust and ash on the floor.

  I shuddered. Damn I hate fire.

  And fire in a bookshop? Genius. What a bunch of idiots. Did they want to burn the place down? Start a fire that would rip through all those stacks of books, choking the place with thick, black smoke, trapping them all in that maze of bookshelves as they crawled frantically along the floor, searching for the exit, while the temperature—

  I sat down hard in the alley and put my head on my crossed legs, taking deep br
eaths of dirty, old cement and the smell of my leather boots. It’s worth mentioning again: I hate fire.

  But what was I going to do, let them burn down the store with their stupidity? Besides the fact that not even stupid people deserved that experience, more importantly, there was Mr. McGuffey. He used to bring me some tattered picture book that was beyond selling every week when I was a little kid in the store with my dad. I totally owe my love of reading to my complete lack of a social life and the owner of Dog-Eared. So there was no way I was going to just walk away.

  And I couldn’t call the police either. Or…I guess it was more like I wouldn’t. These guys were Talents. No matter how much I didn’t like them, I still had enough us against them mentality that I wasn’t about to bring in the cops. We Talents needed to police our own.

  The cops would just report the whole thing to the National Institutes for Ability Control. If NIAC came to investigate Talents in Fairview again, it wasn’t going to be good for anyone. We’d already had more kids taken away to the State School in the last month than in the last few years put together, and I did not want to draw any more attention to our town than we already had.

  I just wished these idiots felt the same way.

  I pushed myself back up and moved to the next window, the one that didn’t have a view of much of the shop because it was located behind a bookcase and piled with paperbacks. I could see the latch in the middle, so it wasn’t a problem to reach out to it with my mind and get it to turn. The fact that it had been painted over at least once required a little mental elbow grease, but I got it. I floated the piles of paperbacks down to the floor before opening the window, so they wouldn’t fall and make noise, and then I hoisted myself up and climbed in.

  At the end of the row of bookshelves, I peeked around the corner. They were still playing their stupid game.

  The first two would count it down, “Three, two, one, GO!” and toss the books.

  Then the other two would say, “Ashes to ashes!” and “Dust to dust!” at practically the same time they destroyed the targets.

  Losers. I was debating what to say when a girl rushed out of the center aisle into the middle of them to bang on the door to the back room. Yeah, hon, just step right in the middle of a contest between the guy with the flame and the guy with the—disintegration ray power. Whatever. It’s not always easy to come up with names for some of these Talents.

  The door was yanked open and Marco stepped out. My stomach did something unpleasant. Okay, I’ll admit I was kind of scared of my nemesis. Call it post-traumatic stress. Mr. I-Can-Bench-Press-A-Steel-Girder did almost kill me not too long ago. When I looked at him, I imagined the feel of his hands around my throat, right before Dylan tackled him and saved my life. I so did not want to take Marco on again.

  “You’re screwing up Angie’s concentration, Bella. What do you want?”

  “Corey was feeling me up again when I was out of my body.”

  “What?” came a voice from the stacks. “She wasn’t using it.”

  “Cor, this isn’t a date-rape opportunity, it’s a job. If you get your rocks off fondling unconscious chicks, get some GHB and do it on your time. Or take Sleepy, here, for a night on the town.”

  “My name is Curtis,” the freshman whined, indignant.

  “Like anyone cares,” Jeff said.

  “Hey, you guys need to get back to business. Now. Angie’s still working on the safe. Bella, get your virtual ass back up to the roof and do your job.”

  “Okay, but I thought you’d want to know that some girl went down the alley and was looking in the windows.”

  “What?” Marco asked, in a dangerous tone that made the boys sit up, but didn’t seem to affect Bella very much.

  “Yeah, dark-haired girl in an army jacket? Looked kind of like Joss Marshall.”

  Oh shit. I pulled back behind the stacks and started to move toward the window.

  He came through the bookcase. I mean through the bookcase. One minute there was no one between me and the window, and the next there was a shimmer to the air in the form of a body coming out of the books. It grabbed me hard while it was still fading back into Corey Danvers. He smiled at me as he jerked me into the back aisle where everyone could see me.

  “And look what I found.”

  * * *

  Dylan

  “What time is it?”

  “Time for you to get a watch,” Eric told me.

  “About a minute since the last time you asked,” Kat added. “Damn, Dylan. You know, at first it was cute, but it’s getting sad.”

  “Seriously, man. You’re all anxious to get over there before she gets out of work, and are you even going to talk to her this time?”

  “We talk,” I muttered defensively.

  “I never knew you to be this chicken-shit around a girl before.” Eric reached across the checkout counter and punched me in the shoulder, like the guy-punch was supposed to take the sting out of it.

  “He’s not chicken-shit, baby—”

  Why did it feel like a new low that I needed Joss’s crazy friend Kat to defend me?

  “—he’s just embracing the stalker lifestyle.”

  “I’m not a stalker! I’m just waiting for my moment.”

  “Oh, honey, no. A guy doesn’t kiss a girl and then wait around a month for his ‘moment,’ okay?” Kat was giving me air-quotes. Awesome. “You see Eric waiting around for some moment?”

  They then engaged in a PDA that might have gotten me fired from the mini-mart if Casey had come out of the back room and caught them. I had to clear my throat twice to break it up.

  “Lookit,” Kat said, digging her phone out of her bag, “I looked up stalker in the dictionary the other day. I’ll show you.” She pressed a few buttons and then held it up. “See?”

  Naturally, the display showed a picture of me. Nice friends. It’s enough to make a guy long for days of being best buds with Marco and being pressured into a life of crime.

  “If you want to walk Joss home,” Eric advised, “just go over there and say, ‘Hey, Joss, mind if I walk you home?’”

  “Oh yeah, ’cause that’s brilliant. Kat saw her lift a steel girder, like, three stories in to the air…with her brain. The girl tosses sofas like it’s nothing—”

  “Don’t forget how she ripped out all my kitchen cabinets!”

  “And there’s that,” I said to Kat. “So I’m supposed to go over there and offer to walk her home at night? Like she needs someone like me to look out for her. How stupid does that make me look?”

  “And yet you keep leaving here and racing over there to follow her home instead. If you’re so sure she doesn’t need you looking out for her, what are you doing?”

  “Maybe I just like the view.”

  While Eric had a laugh over that, I had to admit to myself that he had a point. It was stupid of me to keep following her home at night, thinking I could do anything to help her if trouble came looking for her. But then, I was all kinds of stupid over Joss lately.

  When I thought about it, and I thought about it way too much, it didn’t make sense for me to be protective of Joss. She didn’t need someone like me. But I couldn’t stop myself from feeling it, from needing to look out for her, and knowing I’d do whatever I could to help her—even if whatever I could do was pretty useless.

  It was like when I thought she was in over her head with Marco, and I found them with his hands around her neck. I didn’t think about the fact that he had super strength and was probably going to kill me. It was like that part of reality didn’t matter, didn’t even apply to me right then. Lucky for me, Joss was able to use her Talent to help me fight him back.

  Because that’s how lame I am, that I needed my girlfriend’s psychic ability to do my fighting for me.

  Except she’s not my girlfriend. Because that’s how lame I am.

  “Are these paying customers, Maxwell?” my boss asked me.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Casey,” Kat said with too much enthusiasm. “I just
love to shop here!” She made a show of browsing the gum selection in front of the register.

  “My friends just dropped in to give me a ride when Manny gets here.” Eric, for all his ribbing, was always happy to drive like a madman to get me from Casey’s Go-Mart over to Gene’s Army/Navy Store in time for Joss to get off work. Mostly because Eric was always happy to be speeding.

  “Ortega’s not coming. Something with his wife, water breaking, blah blah blah. Porter’s filling in.”

  “Porter?” Manny was always early. Partly because he was that kind of guy, and partly because I had told him I liked to leave ten minutes early and he didn’t mind getting paid for my 10 minutes. Carl Porter, on the other hand…

  “Mr. Casey, I really need to leave on time tonight.”

  “Well, I guess you’d better pray for a miracle.”

  “But—”

  “But nothin’, Maxwell. You know I’ve got a mean wife at home that’s scarier than any crisis you got. I get in the door five minutes late and she starts searching my truck for panties.”

  “Damn,” Eric muttered.

  “Never marry an insecure woman, boys, that’s my free advice of the evening. You’re here until Porter gets here, and that’s it. If he’s not here by ten, you can try calling Winters. “

  “Yes, sir.” I tried not to be too whiny about it, but in my head I was thinking how much freer my schedule was when I was living the life of a petty thief. I had lifted a fair amount of beer, snacks, cigarettes, and other merchandise from Casey over the years. Working for him, and keeping an eye on his stuff, was part of my new leaf-turning penance thing. But it was sucking right now.