Mercedes Lackey & Ellen Guon - Bedlam Boyz

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Bedlam Boyz

Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon

Fout! Onbekende schakeloptie-instructie.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-72177-1

First printing, April 1993

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter One

Sunset Boulevard was a blur of lights and noise, too many radios and car stereos, too many

people talking and shouting and laughing. Kayla jammed her hands in the pockets of her denim

jacket and wished all of it would just go away.

At midnight, it seemed like everyone was on the street, all the weird and lonely and

“professional” residents of Los Angeles: the punks and the pretty boys in tight black leather, the

women in brightly colored miniskirts, the dealers with too many gold chains beneath their open

shirt collars. Ten feet away from where she stood, a nervous-looking blond man traded cash for a

little ziplock bag with a bored-looking guy in a cowboy hat; both men stepped back into the

shadows of the alley as a black-and-white LAPD patrol car glided past, like a silent shark

prowling through the late night traffic.

Liane and Billy were twenty feet further up the sidewalk, gawking at leather jackets in a

storefront window. She took her eyes off the panorama of the street around her, and joined them

at the window. “Nice stuff,” she commented, looking at a tailored leather jacket with metal studs.

The price tag said $249 . . . but it might as well have been a million dollars, she still couldn't

afford it.

She leaned against the cold metal bars over the glass and thought about stealing some aspirin.

Just the same as every night for the last few months, it felt like someone was pounding on her

skull with a hammer. The noise from the traffic only made it worse. “Guys, okay if we stop

someplace for some more aspirin?”

“Another headache?” Billy asked.

“It's nothing,” Kayla lied.

“You've been having headaches every day for weeks now,” Liane said. “Maybe we should

take you to a doctor. What if this is something serious?”

“It's nothing, guys. I'll get some aspirin, it'll go away. There's a QuickStart down the street,

we can stop there.”

A red convertible slowed on the street next to them, the man in the driver's seat calling out to

them. “Hey, chickies, want to party?”

Billy glared at the driver until he shrugged and looked away. The convertible pulled away

back into the traffic.

“We could've just let him buy us some dinner and drinks,” Liane said softly. “Nothing more

than that.” Liane had a hungry look in her eyes, the way she stared wistfully after the fancy red

convertible.

Kayla thought about the man, and that he had a hungry look in his eyes, too. A different kind

of hunger.

Billy shook his head. “He'd want something for his money, wouldn't he? And then we'd end

up in a situation like last weekend with you and Nick.”

Liane, already pale under the streetlights with her white-blond hair and very fair skin, turned

even paler. That had been an awful night, one that Kayla thought they wouldn't survive. Nick, a

local “businessman,” had been watching Liane for a few days. When Kayla and Billy were busy

buying Cokes from a street vendor, Nick told Liane that he wanted her to work for him. Billy

and Kayla weren't his style . . . Billy was too mean-looking, with that knife-scar on his chin and

that cold blue-eyed “Don't mess with me” look, a trick that he said he'd learned from his old

man, who was currently up for armed robbery in Folsom. Not at all like the pretty boys on

Melrose Avenue. And Kayla, with her long brown hair and green eyes that were too big for her

face, knew she just wasn't cute enough for the chickenhawks, either.

Liane, on the other hand, was drop-dead gorgeous, blond and with the face of an angel. And

she attracted men like a magnet. Especially slimeballs like Nick.

Maybe Billy telling Nick to go sit and spin wasn't the best idea, she thought. Billy and Nick

had screamed at each other for fifteen minutes. Nick had stormed away, and they were walking

down the street two hours later when he and some friends had pulled up in Nick's blue Chevy,

waving a pistol at them. It'd been a fast run through the back streets of Hollywood, with Nick

screaming curses in two languages at them, until they'd managed to lose him by climbing over

several fences and hiding in a gardening shed in someone's backyard.

But, even after a night like that, she knew that getting out of that latest foster home had been

a good idea. The lady who ran the place was nice enough, but her husband was slime, and he'd -

already started hitting on Liane, not even two days after she arrived there. True, every straight

guy with hormones tried to hit on Liane, she was just too pretty for her own good, but this place

was a foster home. It was supposed to be safe. Especially for someone like Liane, who was just a

little too quiet, too easily spooked by people yelling, and scared of crowds and people standing

too close to her.

Liane was quiet and shy, and it had surprised Kayla that the blonde girl had been the one

who'd first talked about running away, about how she, Billy, and Kayla could go out on their

own. It had started out easily enough, stealing enough money to take the bus from Orange

County to downtown L.A. From there, they went to Hollywood, mostly because Liane wanted to

see the Chinese Theater. It was Kayla who'd spotted the abandoned office building across the

street from Mann's Chinese, and now Suite 230 (formerly an insurance agency, by the stationery

they'd found in a closet) was their new home.

It wasn't bad: running water, though no showers or bathtubs, and plenty of old carpet padding

to use for blankets. Kayla just wasn't certain how long all of this could keep working out for

them, though—she knew they were balancing on the edge, with too many people like Nick

waiting around to catch them if they fell.

Billy was the one who kept them together. Billy, who knew all about shoplifting and

jimmying locks and using Sterno to heat up cans of chili. He treated them like his kid sisters,

though sometimes Kayla caught him looking at Liane in a way that wasn't very brotherly. Kayla

knew that she and Liane would never have made it on their own without him. We're lucky he was

at that foster home, too, she thought. I don't think I would've been brave enough to leave there

without him. . . .

Billy's words broke into her thoughts. “Hey, Kay, there's the QuickStart. Didn't you want

some aspirin?”

“Yeah, sure.” Though she was sure that it wouldn't help. Nothing seemed to help, not

anymore. “You guys hang around up front, I'll get the pills.”

The headaches weren't the worst of it; she could live with the pain, not a problem. It was the

weird dizziness that hit her every so often, making her feel like she'd touched a live electrical

wire. She was sick with something, she knew that, but it didn't pay to worry about it . . . there

was no way she could go to a doctor, at least, not now.

They walked into the store, a brightly-lit building with rows of metal shelves, past a cheerful

woman who was chatting with the store clerk, a quiet-looking young man with shoulder-length

blond hair. Liane and Billy started looking through magazines near the front counter, and Kayla

moved to the back of the store. In the last few weeks, they'd refined shoplifting to an art, running

interference and distracting the people so one of them could walk out with enough food for

dinner. It was a lot easier than other kinds of theft. Kayla smiled in spite of herself, remembering

how Billy had climbed through an open apartment window only to find the occupant, a fat

middle-aged man, up to his neck in bubbles in his bathtub with several rubber ducks floating

around him. He'd yelled and Billy had practically fallen out the window, terrified but still unable

to keep from laughing.

The three of them still laughed about that one, but the time when Billy had gone through an

open house window and another guy had reached for a handgun next to his bed, that hadn't been

so funny. Fortunately for him, the gun hadn't been loaded, and by the time the guy had managed

to put some bullets in the revolver, Billy, Kayla, and Liane were already two blocks away and

still running.

Since then, Billy had said that they'd have to get by without any more breaking-and-entering.

Shoplifting, that was a good trick, though Kayla was getting very tired of pork-and-beans heated

in the can, chili, and stew. Sometimes she caught herself fantasizing about fresh-cooked food,

something that didn't come out of a can: baked potatoes, pancakes, or even bowls of oatmeal.

Anything but canned spaghetti.

She found the brand of aspirin she was looking for and checked the overhead mirror to make

sure the clerk wasn't watching—those mirrors worked both ways, if you knew what you were

doing—and slipped the package into her jacket pocket, smiling to herself. It was a quiet night, all

right, and once she took some pills to get rid of the headache, she'd be feeling fine. . . .

Gunshots shattered the silence.

Liane screamed a moment later, a sound that echoed through the store. Kayla didn't even

think about it; she ran toward the sound of Liane's scream and skidded around the corner of the

row of shelves, stopping short at the sight before her.

The woman was lying very still in a pool of her own blood, sprawled across a small potted

palm. The clerk's body wasn't in sight, but Kayla could see more blood sprayed across the wall

behind the counter. A man wearing a long leather coat stood near the doorway and smiled at her,

a military assault rifle clenched in his hands.

Not three feet away from her, Billy held Liane in his arms, both of them frozen with terror.

The man brought the assault rifle up, aiming at the three of them. Kayla brought up her hands

instinctively to shield her face.

Nothing happened.

He isn't going to kill us, Kayla thought with a faint wave of relief, and opened her eyes.

The man was staring at her. Directly at her, not at Billy, not at Liane. A split-second later,

she realized why: her hands were on fire. No, not exactly fire . . . it was a blue light that flickered

over her hands, lines of light that weaved and danced around her fingers.

She was too startled to do anything except stare at her hands and the pale blue light. A wave

of dizziness hit her, and that strange feeling of hot power, like electricity running through her

entire body—she could feel the hair on her forearms standing on end, her hands tingling faintly

where the light touched her.

Oh my . . . oh my God . . .

The light faded away. She stared at her fingers, and through them, saw the gunman shaking

his head slowly, as though he couldn't believe what he'd just seen.

Then she saw his hands tighten on the rifle and knew that in another split-second he'd shoot

them anyhow. . . .

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摘要：

BedlamBoyzMercedesLackeyandEllenGuonFout!Onbekendeschakeloptie-instructie.Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1998byMercedesLackeyAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorp...

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Mercedes Lackey & Ellen Guon - Bedlam Boyz

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