Fatal Sight (Harbingers Of Death Book 2) by LeAnn Mason (book club reads .TXT) 📕

it sucked that I wasn’t spectacular at anything. Unlike the other supes, I didn’t really have a physical advantage in any one way. No fins or wings or even sharp fangs or claws for fighting.

All I could do was scream and draw danger directly to me. At least, that’s how I’d been perceived at my initial deployment.

In the end, I was pretty sure the testers — maybe even the director him or herself — had just closed their eyes and jabbed at the pinboard of open spots. I won the lucky post no one else seemed ideal to fill.

And that’s how I found myself getting out of a taxi at an airport, ready to fly to my new team… wherever they were based. I had no idea if my new unit was waiting across the world. Or, hell, even Antarctica.

I could go for some time abroad, some distance from my last unit.

I’d never been on a plane in my life. You needed a government-issued, federally approved ID and all that. Good fakes cost a fortune, and I hadn’t had more than two nickels to rub together most of my years bouncing around alone. My parents and I had stuck to driving run-down beaters purchased with cash or boarding smelly bus after smelly bus, trying to lose a tail I wasn’t aware of.

Easy to get lost if you don’t know where you are.

I thought Seke meant the lesson as a warning in the sense of ‘get your head in the game’. But when you don’t care where you are as long as you’re impossible to find, the sage advice turns into a perfect descriptor for my life.

I had mixed feelings about getting as far away as possible from the HDPU, from Seke and his lessons. My mind slipped, drifting into one of the good memories I had of him before he sent me away...

There we were, staring at each other from the mirrored depths of the repaired wall in the bunker’s gym. My glacial irises were wide as they watched Seke position my body the way he wanted — like a mannequin or a marionette. Except... the touch that glided across my skin, never breaking contact, was much more a caress than clinical or necessary.

It was as if Seke wanted to touch me, to dive his hands over every tangible surface. I never would have believed it, but the soft, almost reverent look on his normally stoic face pushed the whimsical thought to the fore of my mind.

He just might…

“You ready?”

Fingers snapped in front of my face, though I couldn’t hear the sound over the gale-force winds ripping through the damaged cockpit and the terrified screams behind me.

I hadn’t even known my team was, in fact, aboard the same plane and not awaiting me at the landing gate until it had flown straight into a large flock of birds while climbing to cruising altitude.

The poor animals had effectively become projectiles, cannonballing into the craft’s windshield and turbine engines. Sadly, I suspected none of the decimated birds were Raven.

A few folks beelined for my seat and gave just their names briefly while my heart beat too loudly for me to hear and my brain screamed too nonsensically for me to process their words. My panic gave me some inkling of the disaster I was embroiled in, but once one of the harbingers unbuckled my seatbelt and pulled me out of my ready-for-crash stance, I saw the hole blown in the side of the craft when one of the engines exploded. It all clicked.

I wasn’t heading to the mission. This was the mission. This plane was going down in flames, hard and fast.

Guess the Air Unit skips orientation, just like the HDPU.

Or else, the director decided an odd-ball case like mine called for more hands-on tests to ascertain my fit.

“Let’s go, newbie. We gotta bail if we’re going to catch up to our charges.” Dave, I think he said his name was, my new captain, grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward the exposed belly of the plane. Such a mundane and ordinary name. Not like those of my…

Nope. Don’t do it, Aria.

The descent was so steep that it could only be described as a nosedive, making my legs’ stilted movement toward the tail nearly impossible. Debris littered the narrow aisleway. Many of the overhead bins were agape, luggage strewn this way and that. In many cases, they were missing from the storage area, having escaped to strike a nearby passenger.

I saw numerous spots and lines of red that I didn’t want to investigate the origins of as I continued to be towed through the meleé.

Little yellow masks bounced around violently on cords hanging from the ceiling above the empty seats. Although they might be providing oxygen to those who weren’t being pushed around the cabin, the masks didn’t quiet the screams. Fear was a thick and tangible thing among the passengers of Flight 380 to Fort Lauderdale this day, the feeling heavy and smothering like a wool blanket in July.

No one seemed to notice or care, at least, about the crazy emo chick being tugged along behind the stocky Native American — or maybe Latino — man whose hair was just as long as and possibly shinier than my own.

Dave had apparently prepared for this eventuality though and tied the black mass at the base of his neck so it didn’t whip around. My skin stung where loose tendrils of my own silver strands slapped my face and neck like the crack of a whip, and as if it all wasn’t bad enough, my hair tried to act like a curtain, obscuring my vision with every step.

Maybe it was better not to see the disaster I was currently embroiled in. The terror was a tangible thing. I hadn’t realized an emotion could have a scent, but there was more than sweat, blood, and piss wafting in the air that assaulted my nostrils.

“Fuuuck.”

“What?” Dave yelled back at me.

There was way too much