![]() “Told you I’d come through,” her quarry said. Then voices, too indistinct for even her hearing to decipher, yet her extra sense filled in the conversation as if she were right there. Deep below, she heard a door open, its hinges oiled yet still enough out of alignment to let out the very softest of metal-on-metal squeals. Like a ghost in the night, she descended the stairs, the soft rubber soles of her stalking boots making no noise on the concrete steps. At least four in addition to her prey, and possibly more. A jumble of emotions, images, and disjointed thoughts reached her mind when she lowered her shields. Likewise, the two floors below were also silent and empty, but below the ground floor, she felt the presence of people. Bats, mice, and a flock of pigeons were the only living things in the floors above. Without a sound, she moved to the empty hallway and found the stairwell.Ĭlosing her eyes once more, she felt her surroundings. Footsteps sounded down below, but it was her innate mental ability that told her the man she was following was feeling satisfied, secure, and anticipating a hefty payoff. Inside, she paused to sense her surroundings. ![]() A beat-up window, loose in its frame, yielded to a moment of her attention and the lithe figure lightly rolled into the rundown structure. Nika leapt to the same building her quarry had entered, hitting the outer wall of the third floor without a sound. She crawled up the wall at about the same speed an Olympic sprinter might cover the one-hundred-meter race on flat ground, flowing around the corner and then leaping to the next building over.īelow, on the the street, a dark figure lugged a baby seat up the steps of yet another building, pausing to unlock the heavy, unmarked doors and scurry inside. Her face swiveled as she acquired her prey, then she leapt twenty feet up the side of a building, Clinging to flat brick and crumbling mortar. Nika of the Coven, Guardian, and Vice President Of Corporate Negotiations for Demidova Incorporated, stood frozen, listening with five supernaturally acute senses and a sixth sense that was just flat-out supernatural. Up close, blonde hair and white skin suddenly lightened the pool of blackness. Thirty feet away, a dark shadow appeared for just a moment, then slid into the gloom cast by the bulk of the nearest building. She stood utterly still, soaking up the night, her milk-white skin seeming to pull the light into it. The darkened car sat for a moment, as if watching, then the driver’s door opened and a slim female figure rose from inside briefly illuminated by the soft interior lighting before the door thunked shut.ĭressed in black slim-fit jeans, black calf-high boots, black shirt, and a black leather jacket, the woman’s pale skin and blonde hair stood out in the faint luminescence of the few widely spaced street lights. It swerved into a shadowed lot between two buildings and shut down, the rumble of its powerful engine dropping off into the pings and tings of cooling metal. The Mustang prowled the beat-up streets between hulking old buildings, nosing deeper into the old industrial area. A few, a very few, were still just warehouses, if not visibly busy ones, and now, in early spring, the nights were quiet and empty. Many other abandoned old industrial buildings had been converted to thrift shops, antique stores, flea markets, artist lofts, cafés, and architectural salvage shops. At least four of the giant old multistory buildings had been converted into elaborate, twisting, creepy scare houses that drew eager visitors by the thousands during the month of Samhain. ![]() During the entire month of October, the evenings would see it filled with hundreds of young people seeking the thrills of some of the largest, most extensive Halloween haunted houses in the United States. This time of night, West Bottoms was quiet. The car was a new model, maybe only a year or two old, and rumbled with tightly restrained power as if it balked at traveling so slowly. The midnight blue Ford Mustang rolled down the exit ramp and off the busy highway, entering into Kansas City’s old warehouse district, known locally as West Bottoms. ![]() Knowing the thoughts of those around you seems like a wonderful gift, but I imagine the truth of it would be a mixed bag. ![]()
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