Lost Souls (Cainsville 3.6)

The job you love.

The job you don't actually need.

Misplayed. Terribly and shamefully misplayed. He'd let his emotions run roughshod over his common sense. Unforgivable.

Take a moment.

Good advice, even for someone who did not normally suffer from emotional turmoil. No, especially for someone who didn't normally suffer from it...and therefore lacked the tools to deal with it.

Gabriel leaned back against a tree and closed his eyes to recover his equilibrium.

Olivia was fine. She was happy with the case. She was coming home.

Listing the positives. The reassurances. An old remedy to cure old anxieties, ones that didn't stay as firmly in the past as he'd like. It'd been over a decade since he'd left the streets, yet he would still lie in bed, waking from a memory, and mentally list his security blankets.

Gun taped under the dresser. Knife under the drawer. Cash under the bed.

I have enough money. I have enough food. I am big enough and strong enough and successful enough that no one and nothing can threaten me.

His mind tripped back to a time when his security blankets had been far more threadbare, worked threadbare by him constantly sorting them in his mind, pulling them out to remind himself that his situation was not as dire as it seemed.

A hundred dollars in my shoe. Another thirty in my pocket. Two dented cans of stew and three of Coke in my backpack. A school to attend. No one there is suspicious. I'm just another quiet student, keeps to himself, his mother sick at home. A good student who doesn't cause trouble, so there's no need to dig deeper and discover he doesn't have a home, doesn't have a mother. Not anymore, which is just as well.

Yes, add that to the list of positives.

Seanna is gone.

"Are you lost?" The voice sounds in his memory, and Gabriel surfaces in it, the closest he ever comes to dreaming: replaying old memories.

This memory came from a time not long after Seanna disappeared. A time when Gabriel had begun to realize her departure was not as positive as it seemed. At least with Seanna around, he'd had shelter. Now the landlord had figured out rent wasn't forthcoming...nor were the sexual favors his mother often paid in exchange.

It'd also been growing harder to fool Rose. Gabriel had been taking taxis to Cainsville--saying Seanna dropped him off on Main Street--but that cost far too much to do often, and when he called with excuses, Rose got suspicious.

He'd held out until school ended for the summer. Then he took off. Now he needed to find a place where he could squat long term, so he could re-enroll in a new school for September. Searching for a place made him realize how unprepared he really was. Weak, soft, sheltered even.

However bad things had gotten with Seanna, he'd never spent more than a night or two on his own, staying in a house where the occupants had gone on vacation and not bothered with more than rudimentary security. But he couldn't expect to find a house left vacant for months. Nor could he pickpocket enough to rent a room. As for just accepting transiency and quitting school, that wasn't an option. Seanna had stolen enough from him. She wasn't taking his future.

What Gabriel needed was a neighborhood with enough bolt-holes that he could rotate among them. Searching for that, though, proved how ill-equipped he was. Like a boy from the countryside thinking rural life prepared him for a year in the Alaskan wilderness. He'd been wandering from neighborhood to neighborhood, losing track of landmarks as night fell and--

"Are you lost?" the voice asked again.

A woman stepped from the ruined doorway of the empty building he'd been picking through.

"No," he said. "I'm fine."

"You seem lost."

She was young, perhaps in her early twenties. Light brown hair worn long and loose. Dressed in a blouse and long skirt. No visible purse or pockets, which meant she'd make a poor target for his light fingers.

"Are you lost?" she repeated.

He pulled himself upright. He was tall for his age, skinny but learning to compensate for that through bulky clothing, a broad stance and squared shoulders. He surreptitiously knocked mortar dust from his sweater.

"I am conducting an examination of local architecture as a summer project," he said. "This is an excellent example of the period."

Her lips twitched. "That sounds very proper. All grown up, are you, boy?"

He tensed at the lilting mockery in her voice. Her phrasing seemed odd coming from someone so young. The kind of thing an old man might say. Well, don't you speak all fancy, boy.