Toxic (Denazen #2)(7)

Footsteps hammered the ground at my heels.

Close. Much too close.

I dared a look over my shoulder. It took a second—not even, more like a fraction of a second. A huffing and puffing blur of blond and black—Alex—then back to the front. But that fraction of a second cost me the head start.

With a brain-jarring stop, I collided with something big and dark. One of the guys from the house.

“Silly thing. She was trying to—”

Alex crashed into the other. “Get away? Yeah.”

Backing up, I forced a smile and hoped to hell it hid the piss-yourself-stupid terror I felt. Normally I didn’t scare easy, but after getting a first-person look into the hell that was Denazen? Let’s just say I wasn’t looking to take another tour.

Swathed in black from head to toe and blocking every inch of our path were the creepy Wonder Twins from the window. Goth carbon copies, down to the smudgy eye liner and scratchy black nail polish. They were both odd-eyed—one iris blue and the other brown—in opposite order.

I gestured between them. “Do you get many dates that way? ’Cause seriously, I wanna rip my ears off.”

The first one flashed me a tight-lipped smile and tipped an imaginary hat. “I’m Aubrey, and this is my brother—”

“Able. Yeah, that’s me,” the second finished. Up close, I could hear the slight difference in their voices. Able had an odd, almost accent. He didn’t quite pronounce his Ss right. They almost sounded like Zs.

Alex gave them a side-glare once-over. The guy’s version of checking out the competition. “You work for Cross?”

Able nodded like a dashboard bobblehead. He circled Alex, eyes narrow, but to my surprise, didn’t try to restrain him. “You’re not 98.”

“Sorry, no number here. Name’s Alex Mojourn.”

Aubrey frowned and folded his arms. No attempt at restraining me, either. Their lack of aggression made me nervous. It wasn’t right. “That’s—”

Able didn’t seem to share his brother’s disapproval. He smiled, winking at me like we shared some big secret, as a crack of thunder sounded above. “Disappointing? Yeah. Could be fun, though.”

“I’m guessing you’re Sixes. Is that your gift? Annoying people to death with your yapping?”

Alex rubbed his ears and scrunched up his nose. “Dudes—she’s got a point. The whole freaky exchange? It’s getting old.”

For a moment, no one said a word. The four of us stood there, simply staring at one another. The calm before the storm. The last few, tense moments before the birds hit the building. My heart hammered, and my muscles itched to run. The fact that they still hadn’t made a move had me tweaking like a junkie, and I knew it wouldn’t last. Something was about to go down. I could see it in their eyes.

They had the advantage because we had no idea what they could do. My gift was non-aggressive, and I’d bet nine of my ten toes they knew that. If you wanted an apple and had an orange, I could help you out. Beyond that, I was pretty useless. At the moment, anyway. Supposedly I would develop mad skills as a result of the Supremacy drug, but other than a few weird occurrences—things I’d been writing off as figments of sleep deprivation—there hadn’t been any signs of uberness.

Alex, on the other hand, wasn’t as useless. He was a telekinetic—meaning he moved things with his mind. That might present the twins with a bit of a challenge, but probably not enough to be of concern. They had to be packing serious mojo if Dad sent them in hopes of snagging someone like Kale.

After what seemed like forever, Alex was the one who made a move. I didn’t have time to be annoyed because he grabbed my arm and steered me around them. “We’re leaving. Tell Cross to suck me, will ya?”

He got four steps before turning on his heel and bolting toward the street, almost ripping my arm out of its socket in the process.

Behind us, one of the twins let out a high-pitched scream, followed by a double dose of creepy laughter. Oh, yeah. Leave it to Dad to find the crazies.

Crashing through the gate and into the front yard, we raced across the street. The motion sensor light next to Old Man Philben’s mailbox flickered to life, shining a spotlight on our path. He’d put it in right around the time he started telling the neighborhood about his alien abduction. Apparently, E.T. was interested in the contents of his red-white-and-blue bird-shaped mailbox.

Alex waved his hand in a frantic motion. Behind us, several of the neighbors’ garbage pails flew toward the corner of the old house where Able and Aubrey were rushing the gate. The pails collided with the twins and knocked them to the ground in a symphony of clattering metal and stinky garbage.

I tried to stop, but Alex nudged me forward. “Won’t stop ’em for long. Keep going!”

We rounded the next corner and ran like hell. By the time we made it halfway down the third block, it hit me. Something about this was wrong. I stopped short and ducked behind the side of Marlow’s Jewelry Store, dragging Alex with me. “Why were you at the construction site?”

“What? Why the hell does it matter now?”

“Why were you there? I haven’t seen you in months—smart move, by the way—then you just show up? Better yet, why did you follow me?” I poked him hard in the chest. Those creepy twins had approached the whole situation much too casually. Like they had an ace in the hole. An Alex-shaped ace. “Are you with those guys?”