Hidden Talents

CHAPTER ONE

Dusk settled over the city of Resurrection like a blanket of bad news.
That’s me, Ari thought, flexing her right fist beside her hip. Bad news with a capital B.

This wasn’t just whistling in the dark. Ari had been bad news to some people in her life. To her parents. To every teacher she’d had in high school. You’ll come to no good, they’d threatened, and she couldn’t swear they’d been wrong. Certainly, she hadn’t turned out to be a blessing to Maxwell or Sarah. Because of her, Max was in the hospital with too many broken bones in his arms to count, and Sarah was God knew where. But at least Ari was trying to change that. At least she was trying to be bad news to people who deserved it.

To her dismay, Resurrection, NY wasn’t what she’d been led to believe when she’d looked it up on the internet.

She stood on the crest of a weedy hill outside the metropolis, her presence hidden by the deeper shadow of a highway overpass. She’d been expecting a down-on-its-luck backwater. Storefronts stuck in the seventies. Maybe a real town square and a civil war battlefield. Instead, she found an actual cityscape. The skyline wasn’t Manhattan tall, more like Kansas City. Few buildings looked brand new, but many were substantial. They formed a grid of streets and parkland whose core had to encompass at least five miles. This was definitely more than a backwater. Resurrection reminded her of city photos from the early decades of the last century, when skyscraper meant something exciting. What could have been a twin to the Chrysler Building stuck up from the center of downtown, reigning over its brethren.

Finding the Eunuch among all that was going to take some doing.
You have to find him, she told her sinking stomach. If she didn’t, she and her very small gang of peeps would be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. At twenty-six and thankfully still counting, Ari had endured more than enough hiding. She was stronger now. She’d been practicing. Henry Blackwater, aka, the Eunuch, wouldn’t know what hit him.

“Right,” she said sarcastically to herself. She’d be lucky if she got out of here alive.

But faint heart never vanquished fair villain. Ari knew she’d been born the way she was for a reason. Maybe here, maybe soon, she’d find out what that reason was.