Between Darkness and Daylight Read Online Free Page B

was as if he was in Ransom's skin—feeling the boy's confusion and tension, grappling with a woman over something—not just an observer feeling some of his nephew's emotions.
    And what was the boy doing outside the school at this time of day unless he was cutting classes…again?
    Damn it!
    Zane turned back to his office as the phone rang and reached for it with a heavy heart. After the recent spate of prank calls he’d been receiving at the school and at home—phantoms from his past position with CAPS resurfacing to haunt him—Zane didn't have a positive feeling about what or who was on the other end.

    * * * *

    Ransom sat alone in a musty room that was just this side of municipal-dreary, NYPD Blue- interrogation-room scary. Time-bitten wood furniture abounded—the table he sat at, the chairs surrounding it—all
    complemented by a soldierly row of scratched, dented, and mismatched metal filing cabinets.
    The place could have been mistaken for a large storage room but for the five-by-five cell that dominated a corner of the decrepit wood floor.
    Ran swallowed hard as he glanced at the steel monstrosity then looked away.

    Between Darkness and Daylight
    23
    He’d done his dirt before, especially since his mom had passed and he’d moved to the city—five-finger discounts here, graffiti and other vandalism there, a little pot with his friends behind the school before first period. Nothing violent though, and definitely never a breach of conduct as bad as assault and battery.
    It suddenly hit Ran that he was in serious trouble, more serious than he’d ever gotten into before. He’d never been arrested, never been "taken downtown." But of course, he’d never gotten caught at anything before today. He didn't know whether to resent or admire the Kung Fu Mama, whose resistance and skill had landed him in his current predicament.
    Snatch and run, that was all he had to do, and he’d messed that up as badly as his mother had messed up his life when she’d left him.
    He missed his mom, was angry at her, too, for getting sick and checking out on him. Sometimes both emotions ran through him concurrently, so strong that he didn't know whether he was coming or going, so confusing that he didn’t how he felt about her death.
    Ran tried to take his example from Uncle Zane. Man had been strong about everything. Ransom didn't think he had seen his uncle shed a tear or heard him utter a complaint—not during the wake, the funeral, or the burial. Through it all, he’d been cool, going about the business of the day, selling their house, moving Ran down to the city and enrolling him in the school where he now worked. Everything was done with clockwork precision, so fast and easy it made Ransom's head spin now to think how much his life had changed in the last 365-plus days.
    He wanted to be cool and unaffected like his uncle, but then again, not, because if he didn't cry for his mother, then who was he supposed to cry for? Ransom wondered if anyone would miss him as much when he died.
    It wasn't like he was old and grown like his uncle, or had more than thirty years on earth, with so many friends and connections. It wasn't like he had a wife, or even a girlfriend.
    Maybe his Uncle Zane would miss him, but Ransom seriously doubted it. Even his uncle wouldn't miss him, with the atrocious way he’d been behaving the last year.
    Who would?
    Ran put his head on the table, inhaled the moth-eaten smell of old wood, and cried for the first time since his mom died.

    24
    Gracie C. McKeever

    * * * *

    A little more than a year in New York and Nova had become
    complacent, desensitized to all the dangers that living and working around the city entailed.
    She hadn't noticed any of the things she usually did, oblivious to strangers who might have been watching her. She hadn't realized she’d been marked, dismissed, and followed several times over from the moment she’d crossed the street from her office building to walk the narrow caverns