Free Heroes 'Til Curfew (Talent Chronicles #2) by Susan Bischoff Page A

a few favors, I even would have put the fight and the
cracked rib behind us. Because we had history. But I was just done
with him now. When he got bored with that bitch—or she climbed back
up on her high horse and started ignoring everybody again—he could
just find someone else to watch his back for him because I was
done.
    A hand clamped down on my shoulder and I was
almost jerked off my feet before Poe steadied me again. He was
always showing off like that.
    “What do you want?” I asked him.
    “What do you want?”
    “I gotta talk to your boss.”
    “Oh yeah? Then ask nice.”
    “I don’t need your permission, jerk-off. She
asked me to meet her.” I should have known she’d have at least one
of her goons with her. It seemed like she never made a move without
at least one of them. Poe, the fat slob, was a strength Talent like
me. I wanted to go hand to hand with him, take him down a peg, but
lucky for him I had way too many important things to do. Since I
always had to do everything. The other one, Richie, was a tall,
skinny guy whose curly hair made him look like some kind of
overgrown Muppet. I had no idea what his Talent was, but I was
pretty sure he had one. Vivian wouldn’t waste time on him
otherwise.
    We rounded the corner into the faculty lot
in time to see the naughty nurse coming out the door. She pulled
the pins from her cap and pulled it off, yanking out the elastic
from her hair with the other hand. She shook her head, tossing wavy
red hair all over the place like she was walking through a
goddamned shampoo commercial. She flicked open a few buttons on the
dress, flashing some cleavage before she belted her little black
trench coat over it.
    Poe and I met her at the car where Richie
was already waiting. “Get in,” was all she said before Richie
opened her door and she sank into the front seat. Poe gave me a
shove toward the car, just ’cause he thought he could, but of
course it didn’t affect me at all. I got in behind the driver’s
seat.
    “What the hell happened last night?”
    “That girl I told you about. Joss. She gave
the guys some trouble when you called Tony and me away.”
    “You trying to blame this on me, Finelli?”
she snapped as Richie pulled out of the lot.
    Only ’cause it’s your goddamned
fault. “No, I’m just tellin’ you what happened.”
    “How’d the cops get involved?”
    “I dunno.”
    “My guys at the precinct tell me it started
when one of them was chasing a speeder. Guy was driving like a
maniac. More cars got involved but they couldn’t manage to box him
in.”
    “Sounds like Eric.”
    “He was on your crew, right? One of the ones
who left you.”
    “Yeah. He went with Dylan.”
    She nodded in that way she had of not saying anything while trying to make me feel like a bug. I
was really starting to hate the bitch. She went on asking
questions, going over what had happened, which was a total waste of
time. Thanks to her Syndicate connections inside the police
department, she was just asking me to repeat stuff she already
knew. So did she want to find out if I was going to lie about it?
Like I’m that kind of an idiot. Or maybe she just wanted to make me
say it all because she knew I’d be pissed off about losing the
lair.
    She was a hottie, but a real bitch on
wheels.
    “So what are you boys going to do now?”
    I hated the way Vivian called us “boys.” It
wasn’t like she was that much older than us. She just did it to put
us in our place, to remind us that she was hooked up with the
Syndicate and we were still knocking on the door, trying to come up
with a pay-off big enough to get in. I needed to get in with them.
I needed to get the hell out of this hick town and run with some
people who really knew about power and what to do with it.
    Tony and I had been trying to find an angle
for months, just doing little shit. Our family had connections, my
mom, his dad, but both of them had moved to Fairview to try get
away from the life. And once