Blood Bound by Rachel Vincent (23)

Twenty-Three

“Whoa…” Cam stood and stomped toward the kitchen, then turned to face us again, stiff with anger. “You let me think she might be mine, when she isn’t even yours?”

“I’m sorry.” Anne set the glass down and turned in her chair to face him. “It never occurred to me that you’d think that. I honestly haven’t thought about…that night—the party—in years, and I hadn’t done the math in my head, because… Well, because the math isn’t real. She’s not really five.”

“So…who’s her mother?” I asked, while Cam ran cold water into a glass at the sink.

Anne studied my expression, as if she was testing it for sincerity. “You really haven’t figured it out?”

“No!” Even as I answered, I was silently grasping at straws, looking for clues I might have missed, fully aware that there were probably some things she couldn’t tell me. But I came up empty. “How could we have?”

Anne sighed and picked up her glass again, but just held it, as if she was testing her own willpower. And this time when she looked at me, her damp eyes were bottomless wells of pain mixed with relief. “Olivia, she’s Elle’s daughter. How can you look at her and not see Noelle?”

Stunned, I sat back in my chair, and on the edge of my vision, I saw Cam slowly lower his glass of water. I hadn’t seen it—we hadn’t seen it—because we weren’t looking for it. We hadn’t been looking for Noelle.

Cam refilled his glass, then sat down on Anne’s other side, across the small table from me. “Why do you have Noelle’s daughter? And how did she get a daughter? And where the hell is she?”

All valid, important questions, but the rapid-fire succession only added to the chaos. “I think we can deduce how she got a daughter,” I said, then returned my attention to Anne. “But as for the rest of it, we’re truly in the dark.”

“Okay.” Anne drained her glass, then slowly swirled the ice standing in the bottom. “A few days after that party—the party—a woman showed up on my porch with a baby.”

“Seriously?” Cam asked, and Anne nodded.

“Just like she’d stepped out of a movie. She had a baby in a car-seat carrier and a letter from Noelle, asking me—begging me—to take care of her. That was it. No time limit. No ‘I’ll be back for her soon.’ Just ‘Will you please take care of my baby,’ and ‘Will you please not tell anyone that she’s mine unless it’s necessary for her safety.’ That, and a list of her vital statistics. And, of course, I had to do it. Not that I would have just left Hadley on the porch, but you know, because of the binding, I didn’t have that choice.”

I frowned, trying to puzzle through an inconsistency in her story. “But how did she…” And then I understood what probably should have been clear earlier. “You didn’t burn the second oath. Noelle did.”

Anne nodded. “That’s the only thing I can figure, anyway. Otherwise, she would never have been able to ask me, even through a letter.”

“Why didn’t you come to me for help? I could have tracked her!” And maybe I could have prevented all of this…!

“Because I couldn’t!” Anne sat straighter, her animated gestures fueled by frustration. “You’d have asked about the baby, and I couldn’t tell you she was Elle’s! I did try to find her, though. I’ve hired Tracker after Tracker over the years, and no one’s even gotten a single blip on her signature. No sign that she’s even alive. And she’s not. She can’t be. She would have come back for her daughter, if she were still alive.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, trying to sort through information swirling around my head. “Noelle gave you her baby?” It was part question, part repetition of the facts in an attempt to understand them. “She just…what? Sent the babysitter over with her only child? Why?”

“I don’t know. The sitter said she was their neighbor and she’d agreed to watch Hadley for a few days, while Elle went home to see her parents. Elle said she hadn’t told them about the baby yet, and she wasn’t sure how they’d react.”

“I thought you said Elle’s parents are dead,” Cam said, turning to me.

“They are,” Anne answered for me, picking up the glass again, staring into it as if she could see the past in the melting ice cubes. They’d died in a wreck our freshman year in college, leaving Elle and her older brother no choice but to sell their house and take out loans for school. “And we spent that whole New Year’s weekend with her, and she never told anyone she had a baby.” Anne shrugged. “She never told me, anyway. I’m assuming you didn’t know, either.”

“No clue.” I admitted. “How did the sitter know to bring the baby to you?”

“That’s where it gets weird…”

“I think we’re way past weird,” Cam said.

“Evidently Elle gave the sitter my address and told her to bring me the baby if she didn’t come to pick her up on time. And, of course, Elle never showed up. To my knowledge, she never showed up anywhere after the party.”

“What about the dad?” Cam poured a shot for himself before passing the whiskey to me. “Did the sitter know the father?”

Anne shook her head, while I debated having a drink. “That was the first thing I asked. The sitter said she’d never seen Elle with a man at all, and Elle never once mentioned the father. A couple of weeks later, the sitter called me and said Noelle was being evicted. So I went to the address she gave me and she watched the baby while I packed up Elle’s things. I went through everything, looking for some sign of where she’d gone, or who Hadley’s father is, but I found nothing. All her correspondence was from us—none of it recent—and all her old pictures were from high school, except for Hadley’s baby pictures. Most of those were on her camera or her laptop, and there isn’t a man in a single one of them. Just the baby, and a few shots of Elle with her.”

“She knew something was going to happen,” Cam said silently. And I decided I needed that drink after all. “Elle saw something and knew she wasn’t going to be there to raise the baby, so she arranged for you to take care of her.”

“Then she went back home to see everyone one last time….” I downed my shot, savored the smoothness of a whiskey I could never afford and poured another. “That’s why she told me about you and me when she did—she knew she wasn’t going to get another chance.”

Anne looked puzzled, but respected our privacy enough not to ask for details.

“So, she knew she was going to die, and she made arrangements for Hadley,” I said, eager to redirect the conversation. “But why would she want you to let everyone think the baby was yours?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I don’t know anything, other than what I’ve already told you. All I know for sure is that she gave me Hadley and asked me to keep her safe, and I’ve raised her as my own, and I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life—including Shen—and now she’s gone, and I’m not protecting her, and the only thing that hurts worse than my head right now is my heart.” Tears filled her eyes and threatened to run over as she pressed one hand to her chest so hard I was sure she was bruising her own ribs. “I’m so scared, and I don’t know how to get her back….”

“We’re going to get her back.” I rubbed Anne’s back absently, while my thoughts shot in a thousand different directions at once, then finally settled on one point. “Your head…” Her head hurt because she was no longer actively protecting Hadley, as Elle had asked her to. It would probably hurt worse and lead to systemic shutdown if she wasn’t already trying to get Hadley back. “Maybe this will help, at least a little.” I dug through my satchel for a bottle of Tylenol while Cam ran cold water into a fresh glass.

“What about the vital statistics?” he said, as Anne swallowed four pills at once. “You said she left you some information about the baby? What was the information?”

“Oh, um…” Anne rubbed her face again, thinking. “Her birthday. February eighth. She was almost eleven months old when I got her, but I had to gradually push her age back by another year to account for the pregnancy I never actually had, before I could get back in contact with anyone I’d known before. Elle also left me her blood type—she’s A positive. Her length and weight at birth. And potential allergies—Elle was allergic to penicillin and peaches, so she thought Hadley might be, too. Turned out to be a yea on the peaches, nay on the penicillin, thank goodness.”

“What about a birth certificate?” I asked, still hoping for a clue about the father’s identity.

“Nope.” Anne shook her head slowly, as if she was narrating a memory. “I had to pay for a fake one, just to get her enrolled in school.”

“Did Shen know she wasn’t yours?”

Anne shook her head again. “No one knew, except my parents, and I swore them to secrecy. I had to kind of back away from everyone I’d known for a while, to avoid questions I couldn’t answer, so for a long time, it was just me and Hadley.”

I couldn’t imagine how alone she must have felt.

Well, yes, I could. I knew all about being alone. But I couldn’t imagine being alone with a baby. Especially a baby that came with no warning and no explanation. And no instructions. Maybe that was why Elle hadn’t left her child to me.

Why she hadn’t left her with Kori was obvious.

“Okay…” Cam sank onto the chair opposite me, looking more hopeless and frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “So, just to sum up, we need to find and free a missing child, but we have no idea where she is, no blood sample and only her first name to work with. Is that accurate?”

Anne and I glanced at each other, and finally she nodded. “Based on what I know…yes.”

“Based on what you know…” Cam mulled that over for a second, then looked up again. “But what do you really know? What do any of us really know? I mean, is Hadley even really her name?”

“Yes. It has to be.” Anne’s confidence in her statement never wavered.

“Why? Because you’ve been calling her that all her life? Because Elle told you in a note? What if Elle was lying? She lied to us all, that whole weekend, just by never mentioning the fact that she had a kid.” Cam leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, and the bitter resignation in his eyes scared me. “Maybe she doesn’t. Or didn’t. We don’t know for sure that Hadley’s hers, do we? All we have is the written word of a dead woman.”

“Hadley is Noelle’s daughter,” Anne insisted, and I recognized the fiery determination sparking behind her calm facade. I recognized it, and I welcomed it. “She had pictures of Hadley dating back to the day she was born. Why would she spend so much time, energy and money on someone else’s kid?”

Cam shrugged. “You did.”

“Yeah, and I’m not done doing it. Because she was Elle’s daughter, and now she’s my daughter, and her name is Hadley.”

“You can’t be sure of that….” I said softly, when I couldn’t find a flaw in Cameron’s logic, harsh though it sounded. “Not one hundred percent.”

Anne turned on me, and I could practically feel the heat of her anger. “Yes, I can. I am absolutely sure of that because I know how Elle must have felt when she sent her baby to me. She knew she was going to die, and her child was the most precious thing in the world to her, and I’ve been walking in those exact footprints for the past two days. Tower’s men will kill me to get to Hadley—they’ve already killed Shen—so I’ve been struggling with the same mental preparation for her future that Elle had to face. And if I know anything at all, it’s that no mother would prepare to give her daughter a new life—a life of lies meant to protect her—without leaving her with at least one truth. Hadley doesn’t know who her mother really was. She doesn’t know who her father is. She doesn’t know what Skill she’ll inherit, or if she’ll ever see her home again. The only truth she has is her real name—one quarter of it, anyway. The name her real mother gave her, and the only thing that can never be taken from her. And Elle would never lie about that.”

Cam and I stared at Anne, stunned by the power of her words and her absolute conviction. And finally Cam nodded. “Okay. We have one name to work with. I guess that’s better than no name.” But not much.

He didn’t say the last part, but I heard it anyway.

“Okay, here’s what I suggest.” I stood and started opening kitchen drawers in search of paper and a pen. “You two sit and think of every possible name Elle could have given her daughter. I’d concentrate mostly on middle names, since we have no idea who the father is, and she probably has his surname.” A child’s surname was entirely up to the mother to give—it could be hers, the father’s or any other random name she chose, though the rest of the world would almost always know the child by his or her father’s last name.

“I don’t know…” Anne said, as I plucked a black ballpoint pen from a disturbingly neat—and sparsely populated—junk drawer. “She has no pictures of the father, and there wasn’t a single mention of him in any of her personal correspondence or official paperwork. I don’t think she wants anything to do with him. And if that’s the case, why give the baby his name?”

Cam shrugged, and I continued my search for paper. “I think we’re skimming right over the most obvious possibility—Hadley’s father could be dead.”

I shook my head without looking up from the last drawer in the kitchen. “If he were dead, why would she hide his identity? Wouldn’t she want her daughter to grow up at least knowing her late father’s name?”

“Maybe she was trying to keep Hadley from his family?” Anne suggested. “In the absence of a will, orphaned children go to the next of kin. So maybe she didn’t like his family and didn’t want them to know about the baby.”

“That doesn’t fit the timeline,” Cam insisted, rounding the peninsula toward the fridge, where he plucked a magnet notepad from the front and handed it to me with a brief grin. “She named the baby eleven months before she died.”

I set the notebook and pen in front of Anne on the table. “So maybe she knew, even then. We have no idea how long she knew she was going to die.” And that was the root of the problem—we didn’t know what Elle had seen, or how long ago she’d seen it.

“Here.” I tapped the notebook for emphasis. “Write down every possible name combination you can think of, and Cam can try them one at a time. Cross them off once you’ve tried it, otherwise, you’ll just repeat your efforts.” And I knew from personal experience how frustrating that could be. “Use Elle’s family names—her own, her mom’s, et cetera—and her friends’ names. Try everything you can think of.”

“What are you going to do?” Cam called, as I made my way toward the bedroom.

“I’m going to try Kori again.” Maybe if she knew what we’d just found out…

That was wishful thinking, and I knew it. We all knew it. But I dialed anyway. And just as I’d expected, I got her anonymous voice-mail message.

“Hey, Kori, it’s Liv,” I said, sinking onto the king-size bed I’d never slept in. “To be honest, I’m kind of banking on the assumption that you were following orders when you took Hadley, and that if you could have found a way around following that particular order, you would have. If that’s not the case, then…well, I guess more has changed over the last few years than I thought. But in case I’m right, there’s something you should know.” I inhaled deeply…and the machine cut my message off. The dial tone buzzed in my ear.

Damn. So much for a heartfelt message—short and sweet it is.

I called back, and again I got her voice mail. “Okay, I’m gonna keep this short.” Because I had no choice. “Hadley isn’t really Anne’s daughter. She’s Elle’s. She’s Noelle’s baby, Korinne. Elle knew she was going to die, so she left her baby with Anne and made her promise to keep it a secret. If any of us have ever meant anything to you—hell, if Elle ever meant anything to you—find a way to bring her back. Please, Kori. I’m leaving the bathroom dark for you. Will you please bring her back?”

That time when the machine cut me off, I was ready. I’d said what I had to say, including a direct request for her help, and beneath the mountain of my cynicism, there was a tiny blossom of hope, dying from lack of light, but deeply rooted. Within our four-sided friendship, Elle and Kori had always been best friends, like Anne and I were. Closer friendships within the whole. Even if Kori wasn’t willing to risk her job—not to mention her life—for me or Anne, or even for Hadley, she might be willing to do it for Elle.

For Elle’s memory.

Assuming she heard the message. But if she were listening to her messages, she would already have brought Hadley back, compelled by Anne’s request.

Anne looked up from the notepad when I sank into the chair next to her at the table. “Well?” she said, and the naked longing in her voice nearly killed me. Her hope was raw and obvious. It was her first line of defense, not merely a backup parachute cord, like the one I clung to privately. And when I shook my head in reply, her heartbreak and disappointment were just as raw and obvious.

“I left a message and told her about Elle,” I said, glancing at the first page of potential names, crossed off, ripped from the pad and dismissed once they’d been eliminated.

Anne looked up, still clutching the pen. “Try texting her. She’ll probably have the text read before it occurs to her that she shouldn’t finish it. You can compel her before she even realizes what she’s read.”

“Anne, that’s brilliant!” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket.

She shrugged. “That’s how Elle got me in the first place. In writing.” She held up the notepad full of names for emphasis.

I was halfway through a short, to-the-point text when Cam suddenly snatched my cell from my hand. “Wait!”

“What?”

“Don’t compel her in a text.” He backspaced over everything I’d typed. “That’ll only compete with her orders from Tower and make her self-destruct.”

Anne frowned. “You said her binding to us would supersede her marks from Tower.”

“I was wrong.” He handed my phone back. “I can’t believe I didn’t see this before, and I can’t elaborate, but her binding to him is just as strong as her binding to you two. That’s why she’s not listening to her messages. It has to be.”

“You said Tower probably told her not to listen to them,” I said, flipping my phone open again.

“I was wrong about that, too. He doesn’t know about her binding to you guys, remember? Why would he order her not to listen to a request from Anne when he doesn’t know Anne can compel her? She’s ignoring the messages on her own, because if she hears you make a request in conflict with her current orders, her body will tear itself apart, trying to do both at once. It’s a miserable way to die. I’ve seen it.”

“Tower?” I asked, staring at my phone.

He nodded. “Standard sentence for divided loyalty.”

My stomach churned in horror. “So what can we do?”

Cam shrugged. “Ask her for help without compelling her to go against Tower’s orders.”

“Okay…” But that was much easier said than done, considering that I didn’t know what orders he’d given her.

I started typing again, and when I was done, I showed Cam.

 

Hadley isn’t Anne’s daughter—she’s Elle’s. Know u can’t return her, but we need help. Can’t track her w/no real name or blood.

 

Cam read it and nodded, so I hit Send. “Now it’s up to her.” I set my phone on the table and glanced around at the scattered notepad pages. “What’d you guys come up with?”

Cam answered from across the table, while Anne feverishly scribbled more name combinations on a fresh sheet from the pad. “Nothing yet. We’ve tried every possible pairing of Noelle’s name, her mother’s name, and yours, Anne’s and Kori’s. But we don’t know everyone’s full names, and we don’t know for sure that Elle used any of them. If she was smart—and she obviously was smart—she probably used a random name, to prevent exactly what we’re trying to do.”

“That’s the problem with having smart friends.” I picked up the sheet of eliminated names and glanced over it, trying to think of something they might have missed. But I came up empty.

A moment later, something clattered on the floor in the hall, and we all three spun around in time to see a small pink canvas shoe tumble to a stop in the middle of the living-room floor. But the hall was empty.

Anne was out of her chair in an instant and she had the shoe in hand before either Cam or I reached her. “It’s Hadley’s,” she said, fresh tears forming in her eyes. “Why would she send us Hadley’s shoe? Why isn’t Hadley wearing it? Is this some kind of warning?”

“Anne, calm down.” I took the shoe from her gently and pulled the tongue back with the opening aimed at the light overhead. “There’s something inside.”

She grabbed the shoe before I could stop her and pulled a folded sheet of plain white printer paper from inside. Cam and I read over her shoulder.

That was it. No signature. No introduction. But it was definitely Kori’s handwriting. We’d passed dozens of notes—maybe hundreds—in school during my life before cell phones, and her writing hadn’t changed since the seventh grade.

“What does that mean?” The note shook in Anne’s hand. “Is she taunting us? Why not just call or text?”

“She’s probably prohibited,” I said, rereading the note for the third time, trying to find more meaning in the sparse wording. “Tower doesn’t know she’s bound to us, but he does know we’re friends.”

“She can’t make a phone call, but she can throw a shoe down the hall with a note stuffed inside?”

“She’s using the loopholes.” And the shadows I’d left in the bathroom. I took the shoe from Anne. “It’s a given that Tower would ban her from calling or texting us, but who thinks to specifically forbid tossing a shoe with a handwritten note inside it?”

“So what does this mean?” She gestured with the shoe, and I noticed that her hands were still shaking. If I wasn’t afraid it would start to fuzzy her logic, I’d offer her more whiskey. “How is thinking like Elle going to help us find Hadley?”

“I think she means we have to think like Noelle to figure out Hadley’s name. So we can track her.” I shrugged. “She probably heard us talking from the bathroom.” Or maybe she just knew we’d try tracking Hadley—it was a logical assumption, considering that two of us were Trackers.

“Okay…so how does—did—Elle think?”

“Like a Seer,” Cam said. “Elle thought like someone who knew what was going to happen, but not how to prevent it. All she could do was prepare for it, and that’s what she was doing when she sent Hadley to you.”

“Oh, hell…” I whispered, and my entire body suddenly felt heavy with the weight of a startling understanding. I sank into the nearest chair, trying to wrap my head around the details as they tumbled into place, some more reluctant than others. “It wasn’t just that.”

“It wasn’t just what?” Cam sat on the couch next to my chair, his knees nearly touching mine, and he looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to take my temperature or pour me a shot. “What’s wrong?”

“It wasn’t just sending her baby to Anne. Noelle did much more than that to prepare for this.”

“To prepare for what?” Anne dropped onto the couch next to Cam and they watched me like one of those three-dimensional images you have to squint to see just right—as if they couldn’t quite bring me into focus.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she saw, or how long ago she saw it. Maybe she knew that Tower would someday be selling Skills on the black market, and that he’d want her daughter’s blood for his project. Or maybe she just knew that someday someone bad would be after Hadley and that she’d have to be able to ask for help to protect her kid.”

“Yeah, we’ve established that,” Cam said gently. “That’s why she burned the second oath.”

I shook my head. “I think this goes back a lot further than that. How do you think she got the second oath from wherever Kenley hid it in the first place? If Kenley knew it was missing, she would have told us.”

“She saw it in a vision?” Anne said, and I shook my head again.

“It doesn’t work like that. She’s not—she wasn’t—a psychic metal detector. In fact, she was always losing her own stuff and borrowing ours, remember?” As teenagers, we’d theorized that her head was so full of the future it was hard for her to keep track of the present, and I’d never been more convinced of that than I was in that moment, with Anne and Cam watching me as if they were waiting for me to either start making sense or spontaneously combust. Was this how Elle always felt? As if she could speak until she turned blue, but no one would understand a word?

“What are you saying?” If the lines of confusion in Anne’s forehead grew any deeper, they’d be trenches. “She snatched the second oath a long time ago and didn’t tell anyone?”

“Yeah. Probably years before she burned it—because she knew someday she’d have to be able to ask you for a favor.”

“You’re saying that when we were seventeen, while you, Kori and I were daring one another to sneak into frat parties and make out with strangers, Noelle was making plans to protect her future daughter from a Skilled crime lord?”

I took a deep breath and dove in even deeper. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy, but I think this goes back even further than that. At least, it does for Elle. Do you remember the day we signed the original oath?”

Anne nodded, clearly impatient for me to get to the point. “I was twelve, not brain dead. That was the night I had my first kiss, at the back-to-school mixer. With Robby Parker. Who then told the entire male half of the seventh grade that my mouth tasted like dog shit smells.”

Cam looked as if he wanted to laugh, but he caught my censuring glance just in time and held it in. I turned back to Anne. “And after that?”

“After that, Kori went across the street into the park and filled a paper party napkin with actual dog shit, which she then shoved into his mouth in the middle of the gym, in front of the entire school. She got suspended, and I got the last laugh when Robby spewed dog poo all over his friends.”

That time Cam did laugh, and even Anne cracked a smile at the memory, in spite of the circumstances necessitating the trip down memory lane.

“And after that…?” I prompted.

“We went back to Kori’s house and swore we’d always be there to help one another. Her sister, Kenley, drafted an oath, and we all signed, then stamped in blood. Of course, we had no idea what we were doing—”

“Yes, but whose idea was the oath, do you remember?” I interrupted, when she seemed to be sidestepping my point entirely. “It wasn’t Kori’s—she’s more of a seat-of-the-pants revenge-taker—and it wasn’t mine.”

And that’s when Anne finally understood. She sat up straight and stiff on the couch, her eyes wide, staring at nothing and everything all at once. “Noelle…”

I nodded solemnly. “We were just goofing around—kids high on loyalty and revenge—but she saw what we couldn’t. And she must have known about Kenley….”

“Hell, she must have known about us all!” Anne’s stunned expression was starting to shift into amazement. “She must have known part of it, anyway.”

“Wait a minute.” Cam leaned back on the couch, arms crossed over his chest in an obvious display of skepticism. “You’re saying that a twelve-year-old kid saw sixteen years into the future and not only understood what she saw, but also understood how to prepare for it?”

I nodded. “And she knew how to nudge us into preparing for it.”

Cam’s brows rose, and I couldn’t tell if he was scared or impressed. Or both. “Well, it’s no damn wonder Tower wants her kid, if there’s even a chance that she’ll develop her mother’s Skill. I’ve never heard of a Seer that powerful in my entire life.”

Yeah. But look where it got her. Noelle had spent half her life planning for her own death and putting us in place to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to her daughter.

And we weren’t going to let her down.