Angels and Assassins 5: The Shadow Read online

  The Shadow

  Angels and Assassins (Book 5)

  K. Alex Walker

  Jessica Watkins Presents

  Copyright © 2020 by K. Alex Walker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be assumed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part III

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Also by K. Alex Walker

  About the Author

  Stay safe.

  The first time ever I saw your face

  I thought the sun rose in your eyes

  And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave

  To the dark and the endless skies

  The first time ever I kissed your mouth

  I felt the earth move through my hand

  Like the trembling heart of a captive bird

  That was there at my command...

  - Roberta Flack

  Chapter One

  Xara Merritt winced with each step she took, but she kept her pain safely tucked inside. She didn’t want her friends to know that their high school’s most popular fashionista wasn’t capable of walking home in a pair of simple, strappy sandals.

  It wasn’t like they were stilettos.

  These had chunky heels that matched perfectly with the plaid fitted dress and short-sleeved black blouse she was wearing. She’d designed and sewn the dress to match the surprisingly fashionable fabric her neighbor had been keeping to make curtains.

  They would have been awful curtains but made a hell of a dress.

  “You sure you’re okay, Xara?” her friend, Anika Mosley asked, looking down at the shoes. “Your feet are starting to swell.”

  Xara flicked her wrist, and even that small motion somehow made her feet hurt worse. “It’s not the shoes. Foot swelling is natural. It’s why you try on shoes at the end of the day. No matter the type of shoe, your feet still swell.”

  “And that’s why you try on new clothes right after a nap,” Valerie Ferguson chimed in.

  They all lived in the same neighborhood, but Valerie had been her best friend since preschool, despite the fact that their mothers had never so much as had a conversation. Their duo didn’t become a trio until freshman year when Xara’s popularity exploded and Anika had finally found them worthy of friendship.

  “Your stomach shrinks when you sleep,” Val added.

  Xara didn’t know if the claim was true, but she nodded in agreement. The nod helped to hide the fact that it felt like the straps on the shoes were splitting her skin open.

  She wasn’t sure she would do this again, walk home after school in anything with more than a half-inch heel. One day, when she had her own successful fashion business, she’d create a line of cute flats.

  For now, she suffered for the sake of beauty and to keep up the persona of the sweet, popular girl virtually impossible to hate.

  She hadn’t sought out popularity and, on most days, didn’t want it.

  However, because of her creativity in fashion design and a sketchbook even her elective teacher had coveted, it had naturally been thrust upon her.

  In truth, she would have preferred not to be seen. It was easier to hide flaws when no one was checking for you in the first place. It was stressful enough to have to keep up the image of being the admired, intelligent, and ever positive almost eighteen-year-old when, at home, there were times when it was virtually impossible to smile.

  They turned the corner onto Anika’s street and a crowd in the middle of the road stole Xara’s attention. She recognized the iconic formation of a high school fight going down, the circle of excited bystanders waiting to see carnage to add a thrill to their otherwise dull teenage lives. She even recognized who was fighting—Anthony “Ant” Peoples.

  Even if she hadn’t made out his picked out ‘fro, she’d know it was him because it was always Ant whenever a fight broke out.

  He fancied himself a bad boy, hitting puberty before the rest of their entire class and shooting up from five-four to six-one in a single summer. But she’d grown up with Ant. When no one was looking, he had a big heart and loved hard. The way he treated his grandmother was a testament to the gentleman he kept hidden within.

  Why he chose to hide it was likely part of some sort of male code she would never understand, or it was the only way he knew how to express himself after his alcoholic father left him behind following a woman.

  Ant traveled with three lackeys—Kev, Monty, and Jimmy. All three were currently in an arc around him like a hip-hop entourage, facing the same direction and staring at the same person.

  “Isn’t that the new kid?” Anika craned her neck and stepped out into the middle of the street to peer through the crowd. “The Japanese one.”

  Xara could see him now—straight dark hair, tan skin reddened by an angry flush, blood pooling around a purplish-black cut on his lower lip.

  “How do you know he’s Japanese?” she asked.

  Anika shrugged. “Isn’t it all the same?”

  Valerie broke out into a hop-skip to get closer to the action. “Yep, that’s him. Beat his ass, Ant!”

  Xara hurried to catch up, groaning through the pain tearing through the muscles and other tissue in her feet. “What’d he do to you, Val?”

  Val shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “So why do you want Ant to ‘beat his ass’?”

  “Because he probably did something to Ant.”

  Ant stepped forward and swung a hard right hook in the kid’s direction.

  It failed to connect, and he stumbled forward, having thrown his entire body into the punch. When he stumbled, the kid grabbed Ant by the shoulders and lifted his knee into Ant’s stomach.

  The crowd collectively oohed.

  A few of them grabbed their own stomachs.

  Ant went down, first to the knees of his last-season jean shorts and then to his face on the asphalt.

  The blow thrust his lackeys into action and Xara watched, mouth slightly parted, as the kid stepped around, through, and behind them, forcing elbows and fists into jaws and noses. Each blow caused a resounding crack to echo throughout the humid mid-afternoon, and each crack pulled a matching groan from the bystanders, glad they didn’t have to experience the pain themselves.

  While the kid was distracted fighting Kev and Monty, Xara noticed Jimmy crack a glass Coke bottle on the side of the curb. He surged toward the kid, wielding his weapon like a medieval soldier running into battle.

  “Hey, kid!” Xara pushed through the crowd toward the center of the commotion. “Kid, behind you!”

  Jimmy raised the bottle.

  She bent her right knee, hopping as she slipped off a shoe, and launched it.

  The chunky heel careened across the fighting space and smack
ed Jimmy dead in the center of his nose.

  The sensation caused him to drop the bottle, grab his face, and screech when he noticed blood on his fingers. Jimmy had been an easy bleeder since elementary school.

  The kid finished Monty off with a left hook to the jaw and Kev with a headlock he nearly didn’t let Kev tap out of. When he released, Kev joined Ant and Monty on the ground, all three wiggling like earthworms.

  Jimmy sprinted home, slapping tearful curses into the air.

  The crowd quickly disbanded and continued making their way to their respective houses, buzzing loudly about what had gone down.

  Anika and Valerie appeared at Xara’s side.

  “What was that?” Anika asked. “You know him or something?”

  Xara found she couldn’t look away from the kid, and he was staring right back at her. His bruised lip looked much worse than it had just moments ago, and there was a shiner circling and swelling around his left eye.

  Henry, Kentucky was only so big, so she knew he lived a few houses down from her, and it appeared that he lived alone.

  Rumor around town was that he’d been such a burden to his parents, they’d cast him off to finish his senior year in Henry.

  “Xara.” Anika slapped her arm. “Xara!”

  “Hmm?” She looked between both girls. “What?”

  “What was,” Valerie motioned to the shoe in the middle of the street, “that? You don’t even know this kid and you’re defending him over Ant? We all grew up together. Your loyalty should be with us.”

  The kid finally broke his stare, searched the ground, and snatched his backpack from the pavement. Trampled and torn sheets of paper littered the ground. A couple of textbooks lay open, pages to the sky. They were only a few days into the school year and Ant had already found himself a target to bully.

  At least, he’d assumed this kid would have been a target.

  The way the kid had handled himself, she was sure Ant wouldn’t be messing with him again anytime soon.

  She hobbled forward, passing her shoe, and bent to help. He grabbed her wrist before her finger could grace a single piece of paper.

  “So I can’t help you?” she asked. “You’re too good for help?”

  He stared at her, brows drawn and face tight, but then he released her wrist. When she went to pick up the paper again, he didn’t stop her, but his gaze seared the side of her face as he studied her every movement.

  After they collected all the papers, he stuffed them back into his backpack, whirled around, and started off.

  “Um, you’re welcome.”

  He stopped. His shoulders lowered. When he looked back at her, his anger had softened.

  “Xièxiè.”

  She smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  He hesitated a moment, scanning her face.

  “I work at a daycare center a few days a week,” she explained. “The kids there, they watch this preschool show where they’re taught Mandarin Chinese. ‘Thank you’ is one of the things they learn.”

  “Guess you learned it too,” he said.

  Valerie came running up, Xara’s chunky, strappy heel in her hand, and pulled Xara by the arm. “Let’s go, Xara. You know how your momma gets when you’re even a little bit late.”

  “I’m Xara,” Xara called after the kid.

  Anika hurried up and grabbed the other arm. “Come on, Xara. Let’s go. It doesn’t matter what his name is. He can’t do anything for you, and you damn sure can’t do anything for him.”

  Chapter Two

  Michael Huang sat on the porch of a house he’d moved into, a week ago, in the middle of small-fucking-town Kentucky along the outskirts of hicks-where.

  It was supposed to provide good cover.

  They’d tried large cities, Asian countries, the European countryside, the UK, Canada, and more recently, the West Coast over in California. Each and every time, they’d been sniffed out.

  Tracked.

  Hunted.

  His uncle, who’d stepped into the role of his father since he was ten years old, had been the one to suggest he move to Henry, KY on his own.

  The four of them—his uncle, aunt, and cousin, Yàn—moving together had been too large of a group, and the last time they were found, Yàn had come close to getting hurt. They’d spent so much time living as brother and sister, she felt like his real sister, so he would have never been able to live it down if she’d gotten hurt.

  Now, he was here, in the middle of virtually nowhere and in a town with a population of less than eight-thousand. From what he understood, they were heading back north across the border.

  It had only taken him two days since enrolling at the local high school to get into his first fight, fifteen days sooner than in Fremont.

  In Canada, the people were nicer, so it had taken him an entire year there.

  In Taiwan, eight weeks and six months in the UK.

  He hadn’t seen mainland China since the four of them left eight years ago.

  He’d moved to Henry under the guise of being a troubled teen his “parents” needed help with, with the understanding that he would be living alone, and in the hope that the small-town feel would help calm his aggression.

  There’d been no sympathy from the school officials who’d all looked, collectively, like they were tired of every last high schooler’s shit.

  It was hard to blame them.

  The fight he’d gotten into today had been because some kid named Ant asked him his name, he didn’t answer, and that pissed Ant off.

  Mike pressed the soles of his Nike slides against the wooden porch railing and tipped his chair back, bored. He didn’t have a TV, didn’t feel like reading or watching a movie, and he’d finished his homework while tuning out the teacher in a different, even easier class. He’d already written a letter to his aunt and uncle that he’d drop off tomorrow in the large blue mailbox he passed on the walk to school.

  A year here, alone, was going to be brutal.

  He could already feel it, like hundreds of ants biting his skin. He wasn’t certain he wouldn’t give himself up if they found him again this time. Running was wearing down on his body, tearing at his psyche.

  He didn’t have the strength to do it anymore.

  The man who’d killed his parents was the type of man who would stop at nothing to make sure their entire family was wiped out. It was, after all, what he’d been ordered to do.

  There would never be any “normalcy” for him or even a chance to let his guard down, so it made little sense to Mike to remain in hiding when death seemed much more preferable to a life of constantly looking over his shoulder.

  It was a life he loathed almost as much as the man who’d forced him into it.

  Hollowed clicks on the pavement caused his left ear to twitch. He leaned forward in the chair, set the legs on the porch floor, and looked toward the sound.

  Aww, hell.

  Her.

  It was her.

  Mocha skin. Dark eyes. Pouty mouth. Hair that swept against a café au lait birthmark the shape of a diamond in the middle of her back with each step she took.

  Xara Merritt.

  He was familiar with the dynamics of high school. They really didn’t change much across cultures.

  There were popular kids, nerds, jocks, emo kids, and those who didn’t really give a damn about social structure and did their own thing. He always inadvertently fell into the last group.

  Although he hadn’t been trying to, because of those social dynamics, he’d still learned this girl’s name.

  Henry wasn’t exactly a rich kid type of town. The neighborhood that fed the school was filled with middle-class, blue-collar working folk. It was the neighborhood where his house was located, paid in cash by his uncle for less than .01 percent of what the house he’d grown up in had cost.

  The residents kept mostly to themselves. Ant was the only one who’d troubled him so far, but this girl was the one who unsettled him.

  Xara Merritt traipsed aroun
d school with people flocking to her as if trying to sip her popularity and get drunk on her aura. Even if he hadn’t been trying to see her, he would have anyhow.

  She lit up a hallway like a fucking lantern.

  When she smiled, it was hard to look away. And the girl was always smiling.

  It made him sick.

  There was no reason for any human being to be that happy all the damn time.

  And then, those heels. She was always wearing heels. They made her ass perk up and pushed her height nose to nose with his. Even now, the girl was still wearing the same outfit she’d had on earlier. Normal people didn’t go for walks through their house, much less outside, dressed in that snug of a dress or in shoes like those.

  It was dark and his porch light was off, so she didn’t see that he noticed her looking his way when she walked past. Her arms were crossed in front of her body, hands gripping each elbow. Her gait was slow, and she didn’t seem to have a destination in mind.

  Mike was pushing up out of his seat before he realized it. Either the girl was completely naïve or didn’t care what happened to her.

  The neighborhood wasn’t the worst, but they only had about a half-hour of daylight left. There was no outrunning an attacker in those death traps on her feet.

  Blood warmed his face when he heard a familiar voice call out to her in the dusk.

  “Xara, you sticking up for chinky-eyed motherfuckers, now?” Ant appeared in front of her, blocking her path.

  She took a step to the right.