“No?” I looked up at him and sipped my latte. “Common Grounds, dude. You really going to start some shit here, with him staring right at us?” I nodded toward Oliver, who had his arms crossed and was watching us with so much intensity I was surprised some of us weren’t catching fire. I sipped my latte, and waited. This nonviolence thing was kind of fun, because I got to see Billy squirm without breaking a sweat.
Only problem was, Billy wasn’t all that smart, and he punched me in the face. Just like that, a sucker punch to the jaw.
I dropped my latte and came up out of my chair in a single surge of muscle, my fist clenching even before the news of the pain hit my brain like a sledgehammer. Counterattack was instinctive, and it was necessary, because nobody, nobody got to hit me like that and not have a comeback.
I was pulling back for a real serious hit when I heard Theo Goldman’s voice say, clear as a bell, Twenty-four hours.
Hell.
I gulped back my anger, opened my fist, and blocked Billy’s next punch. “You owe me a latte,” I said, which was something I hadn’t exactly expected to say, ever. The table was a mess, spilled coffee and milk dribbling off the edges of it. My heart was pounding, and I wanted to punch all of these guys until they were too stupid to move. This time, holding back didn’t feel good; it felt like losing. It felt like cowardice. And I hated it.
But I sacked up and walked away. The table was theirs. Now they had to clean up their own mess.
Outside, the air felt sharp and raw on my skin, and I leaned against the bricks and breathed deeply, several times, until the red mist that still clouded my vision started to clear up. My fight-or-flight reaction had just one setting, I was starting to realize; that wasn’t smart. It was fun, but it wasn’t smart.
Eve came running out, still in her apron. She saw me standing there and skidded to a stop. “Hey!” she blurted. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “He’s too wimpy to break anything except his own hand. Doesn’t throw from the shoulder.”
“No, I mean—Jesus, Shane, you just . . .” Eve stared at me for a second, and I thought she was going to say something that would make me feel a hell of a lot worse, but then she threw her arms around me and hugged me hard. “You just did something totally classy. Good for you.”
Huh.
She was gone before I could explain that it wasn’t really my choice.
Classy? Girls are weird. There’s nothing classy about getting sucker punched and walking away.
But I guess today was about fighting myself, and God help me, I was kind of winning.
? ? ?
I had a date late afternoon to walk Claire home from campus; she didn’t really need the escort, but I enjoyed pretending she did, and spending time with her was always a plus. I had a lot to make up for, with Claire; I’d lied to her, and when things got dark on me with the fight club, I’d gone dark on her, too. She hadn’t deserved that, or any of the terrible things I’d said, or thought. It was going to take some real effort to get back to where we were, but I was determined to make it happen.
And normally, I wouldn’t have let anything interfere with that, but as I was passing the empty house on Fox Street, the second from the corner, with the broken-out windows and the ancient, peeling paint job, I heard something that sounded like muffled, frantic crying. It’s a cat, I told myself. The place was a lifeless wreck, and the yard was so overgrown that just getting to the barred-over front door would have meant a full-blown safari, with the added benefit of thorny weeds, possible snakes and poisonous spiders, and who knew what else. I’d feel really damn stupid if I ended up snakebit to save a cat who wasn’t even in trouble in the first place.
But it didn’t really sound like a cat.
In Morganville, the principal survival rule was always keep walking, but I’ve never been one for that strategy; it’s soul-sucking, seeing people hurt and doing nothing to help. Goldman was right—I did have a savior complex—but dammit, in Morganville, people sometimes did need saving.
Like, most probably, now.
I sighed and started pushing through the tangle of waist-high weeds toward the house. The front door was a nonstarter; I could see from here that the padlock was still intact. Whoever had found a way in had done it with at least a small bit of stealth.
The windows were still full of jagged glass, so even if someone else had gone in that way, I wasn’t about to try it—and I didn’t need to, because the back door was standing wide-open, a not very inviting rectangle of blackness.
I could hear scuffling now, and the crying was louder. Definitely being muffled. It was coming from upstairs, and from the thumps, it sounded like there was a fight under way.
The stairs creaked and popped, alerting anybody who was paying the slightest attention that I was on the way, and I wasn’t surprised when a girl of about fourteen appeared at the top of the steps, gasping and sobbing, and plunged past me toward the exit. She looked relatively okay, if panicked.
The boys—two of them—at the top of the steps weren’t much older than she was. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. Local kids, but nobody I had on my radar.
They looked real surprised to see me.