Catch Me When I Fall Read Free

hadn’t seen my best friend in months, and if I was going to be in the United States for god-knows-how-long, I didn’t really want to sit in my room all night by myself. There’d be plenty of alone time when I was holed up in a flat in Columbus. As long as we didn’t reveal ourselves to our charges, there was no rule that said we couldn’t exist amongst the living.
    “Yeah, man. I’ll change and meet you there.” Seth held his hand out to me for a fist-bump.
    When he evaporated from the room, I returned to my desk and opened the file.
    Replacement position for Jessica Atwol who was mortally wounded in combat, along with her understudy.
    Kayla Bartlett, 16, was referred to St. Mark’s Home for the Mentally Challenged by her mother, Meredith, a neurosurgeon at St. Andrews Medical Center. Her father died in a drunk-driving accident when she was ten-years-old. She claims that on her
sixteenth birthday she burned a man alive with her own hands. Her psychiatrist has diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression, and possible schizophrenia.
    Great. There wasn’t going to be a single night when the Nightmares didn’t try to invade. The beasts loved to pick on those with a tortured past, especially those that would be easy to break—like the insane.
    Following Giovanni’s rules, I lit the file on fire and tossed the papers in my metal rubbish bin. But those eyes—her eyes—never left my mind.

    After twenty minutes of waiting outside of
Bellandi’s
, Seth finally appeared. “You are the slowest Catcher I know,” I said.
    “Sorry, man. Giovanni caught me before I left and had me shred some papers. Took me five minutes to get the damn thing to work.”
    I opened the door to the bar. “Yeah, right. I know you were performing your beauty routine.”
    With a playful glare, Seth shoved me inside and then followed.
    Bellandi’s
was our usual place when we were both in Rome. The bar was the only one I knew that served my favorite British ale,
Worthington White Shield
, and Seth enjoyed the half-naked women parading around the room, serving the customers. It felt like ages since I’d been in here, and I relished in the familiarity of the place—the hardwood floors and paneling of the brightly-lit room; the drinks cabinet that covered the entire wall behind the black, marble-top bar; the lingering smell of cigarettes and whisky; and the heavy beats of music screaming out of the stereo in the far corner.
    Corporeal—if we touched anything while invisible, we’d go right through—we grabbed stools at the bar and watched the current
calcio
game.
    “Samantha’s been waitin’ for you to get back,” Seth said.
    I sipped my beer. “Has she?” I’d made the mistake of sleeping with her about twenty years ago after my mentor’s funeral. Even after being a lead for about sixty years by that point, I’d still been extraordinarily close to him, and his death had wrecked me. She’d handled the rejection surprisingly well when I told her the sex had been a mistake—hell, she had to considering I was
her
mentor—but our relationship was never quite the same after that.
    “You should give the girl a chance, Daniel. She’s a great Catcher, your understudy, not to mention beautiful—”
    “The fact that she’s my understudy is precisely why I shouldn’t. And I don’t feel for her that way. I’m enough of a gentleman to know she deserves more than that.”
    “Whatever, man. You’ve just been different. I don’t like seein’ you all, I don’t know, depressed.”
    The bartender replaced my empty beer with another, and I swallowed deep. It was true I’d been different lately, distant. But I wouldn’t say I was depressed. Tired of this afterlife, yes. Did I care if a Nightmare killed me? No. But I wasn’t suicidal.
    “Don’t worry about me,” I said.
    Seth shook his head and called for a second drink. As the bartender filled the glass, another group of Catchers walked through the door.