Suit of Crows

Chapter 03

An hour and a half later, Kat was on a sugar high and an adrenaline rush from watching the telekinetic show up close and consuming more than half of the candy floss Aaron had smuggled in. He was somehow immune to sugar, so he was fine after picking at the other half. Good thing too because Kat required a chaperone while on a sugar high and he was the perfect candidate. She tended to do mischief when her impulse control was short-circuited that was petty and unplanned and somewhat malicious. Aaron could prevent her from doing that, for the most part. That was why she trusted herself to eat pure sugar in public.

Aaron herded Kat through the crowd of people, preventing her from picking any pockets by keeping her hands to herself in her sugar fueled craze. Faces flashed out at her, marks, easy ones, but each time she tried, Aaron prevented her from doing so. They had just gotten out of the seating area and passed people who were taking down the booths along the path when she spotted a pole with a generator on top. Kat wondered what would happen if she shut it off? The lights glittered off of the colorful translucent rocks, but would there be stars in the Ring? It was dark now, so it was possible, and she found herself burning with curiosity, itching to find out.

Kat twitched, fiddling with her cards as she stared fixedly at her new mark, shuffling and reshuffling, creating shapes and patterns between her fingers before reshuffling yet again. Aaron hugged her from behind, wrapping his too-big arms around her much smaller frame, sort of awkwardly maneuvering around her skateboard. Make no mistake, Kat was not small, she was five foot nine with an extra twenty pounds of muscle from high-skill skateboarding, Aaron was just that much more muscular. From three inches higher, he warned next to her ear, "there will be no mischief tonight, KitKat." Her cards stilled and she could have sworn that she could feel his smile hovering in the shadow behind her.

"But it's my birthday!" She whined. Kat felt vibrations through her back as he laughed and shook his head. "Come on, you bore," she patted his arm insistently. "Just once? I'll turn it right back on!"

Amused, he squeezed her just a bit tighter and murmured against her ear, "no, KitKat."

She pouted, sighed a drawn out, "fine," and finally acquiesced. Aaron slowly released her, careful in case she made a break for it, which, to be fair, she had done before. Kat snorted at his actions, carefully squared her cards, and slipped them back in her pocket before taking his proffered hand.

Aaron led Kat toward the gateway that would return them to the entrance they came from when Kat suddenly stopped in the middle of the crowd like an immovable anchor, Aaron's hand almost slipping from hers before he noticed. She felt eyes on her, not just normal eyes but the deliberate hair-raising sort of eyes, and scanned the crowd, looking for the source. Across the road, through a sea of moving people, was another who was anchored in place, just watching her. The man was older, probably late forties or early fifties, and so very familiar to her that Kat felt she ought to know who he was. She blinked; he lingered for a moment before disappearing entirely. An Enhanced of some kind. Somehow, she felt he was still nearby, but she couldn't see him anywhere. Weird.

Aaron pulled her back to reality by briefly squeezing her hand, a questioning look in his too-blue eyes. Kat shook her head absently; she didn't know herself. He smiled in that easy reassuring manner and pulled her the rest of the way to the gate. Kat turned to look back just before passing through and swore she saw the same man in the center of the crowd, watching her with those coal black eyes that raised an icy chill to settle in her very bones, until the gateway activated, and her vision was filled with a psychedelic kaleidoscope tunnel followed by a brick wall as it deposited her back in the plaza.

Aaron stumblingly guided Kat to a nearby sitting area, partially so they weren't blocking the gateway for the near constant stream of people and partially because he was too dizzy to walk straight and yet still trying to take care of his friend. He was that kind of person, always putting others before himself. Kat was pretty out of it and Aaron insisted on caring for her through his dizziness, waving his hand in front of her face to catch her attention. "Hey, you alright? You don't normally act like this on a sugar high. I haven't had to stop you from pickpocketing someone for like two minutes and it's weird."