"Ramon, what's wrong?" someone called from outside the bedroom, then the door was flung open. Roberta stood in the doorway, looking down at Kayla on the floor, and Ramon, wrapped in a blanket, on the bed. She began to laugh.
"It's not funny, Berta," Ramon began indignantly. Carlos appeared in the doorway, looking over Roberta's shoulder, his hair still dripping from the shower and a towel wrapped around his midriff.
His eyes darkened when he saw Kayla, and she felt a shiver run down her back. This is going to be bad. He's furious, I can tell by his eyes.
"Where did you find her?" Carlos demanded of Ramon.
"I don't know, she just appeared, I woke up and she was here."
Carlos crossed the room, reaching down to grab Kayla by the shoulders and hauling her to her feet. "Where have you been, all this week? How did you get out of Luis' house?"
Kayla shook her head. Carlos' eyes narrowed, and he raised one hand. "You will talk to me, girl! You'll—"
"Carlos, stop it!" Roberta caught Carlos' raised hand, held it tightly in her own. He glared at her; to Kayla's surprise, Roberta glared right back at him. "She came back, right? That's all that matters. She is here now."
"But she's—"
"Carlos, you've dropped your towel," Roberta observed tartly, and Kayla quickly averted her eyes. "Go put on some clothes."
With a last fierce look at Kayla, Carlos stalked away, slamming the bedroom door shut behind him.
"And you, Ramie!" Roberta turned on him. "What were you doing with this girl in your room?"
"Roberta, I didn't do anything!" Ramon protested.
Yeah, that's the pity, Kayla thought. If he hadn't yelled so loudly . . .
"You didn't do anything because you didn't have enough time to do anything!" Roberta countered.
"'Berta, that's not—" Everything blurred around Kayla, dizziness suddenly overwhelming her. She leaned against the wall, shaking her head.
Roberta said something terse in Spanish to Ramon, then to Kayla, "Girl, you're pale as a ghost. Come, I'll make you some hot chocolate, you'll feel better."
"Just a second . . . I'm not feeling so great . . ." Everything was spinning too fast. She closed her eyes and swallowed, wishing it would all just go away. She heard the sound of the bedroom door opening; Carlos and Ramon's voices, speaking in quiet Spanish.
"Where has she been for the last week?" Ramon asked in English.
"I want to know how she got into your room," Roberta said, "when I know she didn't come through the front door. How did she get up to the third floor and get inside without opening a window? The window's still locked, Ramie, from the inside."
The dizziness cleared, slowly. Kayla straightened to meet Carlos' level gaze.
"She's a bruja, she can do many things," Carlos said, looking at her with expressionless dark eyes. "And now we have her back."
Kayla sat next to the living room window, sipping from a steaming mug of spicy hot chocolate, listening to Ramon and Carlos arguing in Spanish across the room. Roberta sat near to her, watching her intently.
"Why did you come back?" the Hispanic girl asked suddenly.
Kayla looked down at her mug, not answering.
"I don't understand it. I know you don't like Carlos . . ."
That's the understatement of the century, Kayla thought.
" . . . and you never wanted to be here at all. So why did you come back?"
I wish I knew. I must've wanted to come back here, or the Unseelie Queen would've sent me somewhere else. And what happens now?
"It's settled," Carlos said, standing up. "Ramie will take you to the apartment. You'll be safe there, safer than here. We'll need to keep some homeboys there to protect you all the time."
"Listen . . ." Kayla began, then faltered, seeing the look in Carlos' eyes. She marshaled all the courage she had—which isn't much, she thought. "Carlos, can we . . . can we talk about this? I don't . . . I don't want to be a prisoner, locked up somewhere. I want to go home. Please. That's all I want."
Carlos stood silently, looking at her with unreadable dark eyes.
Ramon broke the awkward silence. "You don't know what's happened in the last week, querida. The bastardos have been coming around here all the time. None of us can go out alone. It's very dangerous. I think Carlos is right, you should go to the safest place we know. There are many lives depending on you."
But I don't want these people depending on me! she thought. I just want to be what I was before, just plain, ordinary Kayla, no one special, no one that anyone cares about.
"You're going to live in the apartment," Carlos said in a tone that allowed no argument. "And Ramon will stay with you. He can watch over you. And Fernando will be there too," Carlos added, as Ramon grinned at Kayla. "Just to watch over Ramon!
"But first we'll stop at the hospital, where you will heal our people. It's too dangerous to leave them there; the policía won't let us guard them. There's no one to make sure that the bastards don't come after them. And there's no way we can leave them guns to defend themselves with. We'll go there and you'll heal Luis so he can leave the hospital, then take you to a safe place."<T>
"But—"
"No more arguing," Carlos said, cutting off Kayla's words. "That is what we're going to do."
* * *
In the bedroom, Kayla stuffed her other pair of jeans into the plastic shopping bag, throwing in some socks after it.
God, why did I come back here? I'm never going to get free of Carlos, ever. . . .
"Querida?"
Kayla turned to glare at Ramon. "What do you want?"
"I wanted to see if you needed any help getting your things together. You sound like you're a little angry?"
"A little angry? Look, I don't want to talk to you about it! You're as bad as Carlos—you just think of me as a walking medical kit, not a person!"
He moved closer, taking the shopping bag from her hands. "You know I don't think of you as that. I'll take this to the car. By the way," he said as he walked to the door, "your leather jacket is in the closet."
Kayla opened the closet door. She yanked the jacket from the hanger and pulled it on. The warm smell of leather touched with a hint of Ramon's aftershave surrounded her. This is what I'm going to be, she thought. As tough as leather, as hard as the studs on this jacket. It's what I have to be.
There were several safety pins on the dresser. She took out the silver hoops and dropped them into her jeans pocket. She fastened a safety pin in each of her ears, then followed Ramon downstairs to the car, where Carlos and Roberta were already waiting.
They were halfway up the steps to the hospital entrance when Kayla stopped, unable to walk any further.
"Come on, it's too dangerous to stand out here," Carlos said impatiently, glaring at her.
The sensation of pain and fear emanating from the hospital crawled over her skin, tightening around her throat. She couldn't speak, almost couldn't breathe. "Ramie," she whispered, "I don't want to go in there. It hurts too much."
Ramon took her hand, his fingers tight around hers. "I don't like hospitals, either," he said. "You can do it, querida. I know you can."
"Come on," Carlos urged, looking around nervously.
Holding onto Ramon's hand, Kayla walked through the hospital doors. The emotional noise hit her like a fist, and she nearly fell. Ramon's arm was around her shoulders, holding her upright.
She moved blindly, holding onto him with all her strength, unable to see or hear anything with the cacophony raging around her. Her vision cleared, and she saw that they were in a deserted corridor. There was a policeman seated on a folding chair outside the closest room, watching them with narrowed eyes.
"We're here to see Luis," Carlos said to the policeman, not bothering to disguise the hatred in his voice.
The policeman glared back at Carlos. "No visitors, homeboy. Visiting hours won't start for another couple hours."
"Please, he's our friend, can't we see him?" Roberta pleaded.
The cop's expression softened a little, looking at Roberta. "Okay, okay, but only for a few minutes. And only you two, the girls. The boys will have to wait outside."
"But—" Ramon began. Carlos put his hand on Ramon's arm.
"That's fine," he said quietly. "Kayla is the one who needs to see Luis, not us." They sat down to wait outside, as Roberta and Kayla went into the room.
Inside the hospital room, Luis was asleep in his bed. A bandage covered him from his shoulder down to his waist, and a drip line was connected to his wrist, the IV bag hanging from a rack next to the bed.
Kayla touched him lightly, trying not to awaken him. She could feel the wound beneath the bandage, the track of the bullet that had shattered his collarbone. They'd fitted the pieces back together, but the bone would take months to heal.
But I can change that. I can heal him.
She closed her eyes and let the magic move through her.
She didn't know how long she stood there, lost in the magic. The world vanished around her, and all she could feel was the sensation of the magic coursing through her. She carefully knit the shattered pieces of bone back together, drawing the pain away from him as she worked. When she was done, she sat down abruptly, feeling all the power draining away from her and leaving her an exhausted, empty shell.
Luis opened his eyes and smiled at her and Roberta. <W1%-12>"<|><D%0>'Berta, it doesn't hurt," he murmured sleepily.
"Sleep for a few hours, Luis," Roberta said gently. "When you have the chance, just walk out. Leave your door open so you can hear when the policeman goes to have a doughnut break, and just walk away.
"I will, 'Berta," Luis said. He smiled at Kayla again, closing his eyes to drift off to sleep.
"You did well, Kayla," Roberta said, smiling. Kayla stood up unsteadily; Roberta held out her arm, and Kayla leaned on her gratefully.
They walked slowly from the room. In the hallway, Carlos looked at Roberta with an unspoken question in his eyes. She nodded.
"Now we'll take you to the apartment," Carlos said, glancing at Kayla.
The street looked like a war zone, much worse than any neighborhood she'd ever seen before, with abandoned cars left like corpses on the pavement. Children played between the rusting hulks. The kids ran for the sidewalk as Ramon drove Carlos' car down the street. He parked the car in front of an ancient-looking apartment building.
Fernando stepped out of the car first, scanning the street quickly, then gestured to Ramon and Kayla. Kayla picked up the shopping bag of her clothes and followed Ramon up the creaking flight of stairs, through a hallway littered with stinking trash and abandoned children's toys, to an unmarked door on the second floor.
"You'll like staying here," he said, and Kayla thought he sounded like he was trying to be cheerful and failing completely. "You'll have a room to yourself, you won't have to share with anyone. It's not as crowded as Roberta's."
"Yeah, but at least Roberta's place was clean," Kayla observed, stepping over some garbage on the landing.
Ramon shrugged. "No one really lives here. We keep this place only for selling . . . what we sell."
"Drugs, you mean?" Kayla asked.
He unlocked the door and they walked in, Fernando following them. She looked around curiously. The living room was a little cleaner than the rest of the building, but completely without any furniture, except an old couch.
Ramon walked down the short hallway, glancing quickly in each of the rooms. He said something in Spanish to Fernando, who nodded. "No one has been here since we left," he added. "You will be safe here. If any other of the homeboys come here, stay out of the first bedroom—that's where they work. We don't sell drugs here, they do that downstairs. When someone wishes to buy, we lower baggies through the hole in the floor of the bathroom. That way, if the policía or someone else breaks through the downstairs door, there isn't anything around."
Ramon said something else in Spanish to Fernando; the other man smiled and left, closing the door behind him.
"Fernando's going to make sure everything's okay downstairs," Ramon said. "Later, he'll go get some groceries for you. I don't think there's anything but Coronas in the fridge."
"Great. I'm starving." She looked at the sofa, some of the springs poking through the fabric, and decided against trying to sit on it. Doesn't matter, I'm not going to be here very long. Ramon won't be that hard to get away from—a lot easier than Carlos. It's only about fifteen feet to the ground; I can jump out the window, that won't be tough at all. I'm not sticking around here, that's for sure. These guys can carry on their war without me.
The silence was becoming awkward. "So, do you make a lot of money selling drugs?" Kayla asked.
Ramon turned away, moving to the fridge without answering. She watched as he popped the cap off a bottle of beer. "What, the money's not good? I don't believe that."
He turned to face her. In spite of herself, Kayla took a step backwards. "You don't understand!" he said angrily, then shook his head and repeated quietly, "You don't understand.
"No, I don't," Kayla said.
He gestured for her to sit on the couch; carefully, trying to avoid the deadly-looking metal springs, she sat down next to him. He took her hand in his, looking down at her grubby fingers. He glanced up at her and smiled. "You need a bath, querida."
"Thanks for reminding me," she said wryly.
"Fernando will bring back some towels when he goes to get groceries; you can bathe later. Just put a towel over the hole in the floor, otherwise the homies downstairs may play jokes on you. Kayla . . . what do you dream of<|>?"
"I—I don't understand," Kayla said, a little confused.
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"I don't know." Kayla looked down at her hands. "Before everything . . . went wrong, before my parents disappeared, I wanted to be a doctor, I think. I don't remember."
Ramon nodded. "I've always dreamed of being someone who could make a difference. I wanted to be a lawyer, to change the way the law treats Hispanics. I studied hard in school, thinking that even though my family couldn't afford to send me to college, I'd get a scholarship and go.
"But what I didn't know as a kid is that the system, it doesn't let you do that. You go to school, but they can't teach you, not here in the barrio. They don't have enough teachers, or books, or anything. If you're lucky, you can stay in school through most of high school, like I did. Carlos wasn't so lucky, he had to quit school and work after Papa left.
"All they can teach you is that nobody cares. Nobody really cares. What they teach is that you can't win, that if your name ends in Z, all you can hope for is a job at McDonald's. The teachers don't expect you to get through high school, let alone go on to college. Most of my friends can't speak English, they can barely read, even in Spanish, they can't hope for anything better than a job as a night watchman or a cook.
"And then there are the gangs. You have to stick with your own kind, otherwise you're dead. They'll find you alone somewhere and cut you up. I was ten years old when they started carrying knives and talking tough. Junior high is worse. By the time I got to high school, it was a war.
"I quit high school after the first time I was stabbed, walking to classes one morning. I wanted to go back, but Carlos made me quit then. He said that they knew I was his brother, and he couldn't protect me at the school. Next time, he said, they'd kill me.
"But one of my teachers visited me in the hospital." Ramon's eyes were distant as he smiled, remembering. "Mrs. Webster. Mrs. Jennifer Webster. She was beautiful, with long dark hair and blue eyes. Such pretty blue eyes, like I'd never seen before.
"She knew I wanted to go to college, and she said to me: 'Ramie, you're bright enough, but you need to learn so much. You need to learn how to learn.' She convinced me to go back to high school. She'd spend an hour with me every day after her other classes, working with me, teaching me, helping me prepare for the SATs. She said that if I scored high enough, it wouldn't matter that I couldn't afford even the community college fees, that there would be scholarships to pay for my education.
"She was young and beautiful, and she cared about me. I think I was a little in love with her." His voice fell to a whisper. "But then one of the Bloods attacked her in the hallway early one morning. He cut her face . . . here." Ramon's finger traced a line down Kayla's cheek. "She had the most beautiful face, with those pretty blue eyes.
"I wanted to visit her in the hospital, but they wouldn't let me into her room because they thought I was a homeboy. Mrs. Webster never came back to the high school after that, not even to say goodbye."
He shrugged. "Carlos needed my help, especially when the T-Men started coming after us. So I quit high school again, to work with my brother and hang with the homeboys. What else is there for me?"
He stood up suddenly and walked to the window, looking out at the street. "I need to go take care of other business," he said. "Fernando will stay here and watch over you. Don't leave the apartment, it's not safe. You look very tired, querida," he added. "Do you want to rest?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "I think that's a good idea."
She picked up her plastic bag of belongings and carried it into the bedroom. The bedroom was almost as plain as the living room, with just a mattress and some blankets on the floor. She stretched out on the mattress and pulled the book about the magical white horses from the bag.
Through the open bedroom door, she could hear the clatter of a metal chain from the other room and Ramon's voice quietly calling to someone in the apartment below. I'll just rest for a few minutes, she thought. Just a few minutes . . .
They were walking on the wet sand, the waves surging only a few feet away. Little tongues of water trying to reach their feet. Kayla held tightly to Ramon's hand, hearing Elizabet talking about something as she walked near them, but the words didn't register. Just the way that Ramon was looking at her, that's all that mattered right now, his dark eyes glinting with hidden laughter, some kind of promise . . . The sound of gunfire awakened her abruptly.
She half-rolled to the floor, sliding off the mattress and onto the cold linoleum. The sound erupted again, echoing from the street below. Kayla crawled to the open window, peering carefully over the sill, just enough to see.
There were several cars parked in front of the apartment building, including the white Mercedes convertible with the trashed fender. She ducked back out of sight, not certain what to do next. There was nothing here she could use as a weapon, and no way out except down the stairs, past whatever was going on down on the street.
The apartment door opened and slammed quickly shut, and she heard muffled voices from the living room, speaking in fast Spanish.
"Querida?" Ramon called softly, and she ran out into the living room. Fernando was standing at the side of the door, a pistol in his hand. Ramon was reloading a small handgun, his eyes wild. "Go hide in the bedroom closet," he said to Kayla. "Stay low, don't get up for any reason.
"What's—" she began.
"They're trying to kill us all," Ramon said, his voice tight. With a start, Kayla realized that he'd been crying, that there were smeared stains of tear-tracks on his face. "Roberta is dead. They shot her and Luisa half an hour ago. They were trying for Carlos, but he got away. Someone must have told them about the drugs here—I don't think they know we're up here. Quickly, now, go to the bedroom."
Kayla nodded, too stunned to speak. She started for the bedroom, then all of them froze, hearing the sound of footsteps on the creaking stairs outside. Then the sound of a door being kicked in down the hall and a woman's shrill scream, combined with a baby's crying. "Shut the bitch up," she heard someone say from the hallway, muffled by the closed door.
Her own breathing sounded very loud in the silence, loud enough for someone to hear from miles away.
They could hear whispered words from beyond the closed door. Ramon pushed Kayla down behind the couch with one hand, his other hand bringing up the pistol to aim at the door.
The world exploded around her.
She screamed and huddled against the floor, as the room was filled with the noise of automatic gunfire. She couldn't hear anything but the endless sound of bullets ripping through the air around her.
It was over as quickly as it had begun, a sudden shocking silence. There was no other sound, only her own breathing. She crouched against the floor, unable to do anything but breathe.
Someone grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her up. Two young black men, one cradling a stubby machine pistol in his arms, were staring at her.
She looked down, and saw Ramon.
He lay several feet away, his hand still clutching the pistol. All around him was blood, staining his shirt and the floor. His eyes were open, staring blankly.
Oh God . . . oh my God . . .
Fernando was lying a few feet beyond him, a long smear of blood staining the wall where he'd been thrown by the impact of bullets, before sliding down to the floor.
She tried to pull away from the T-Men holding her. He was saying something, but she couldn't understand the words, nothing made any sense.
He brought up his hand and slapped her across the face.
The sudden pain snapped something in her. Her shock and terror giving way to something else: hot, deadly anger.
All right, you bastards . . .