Nineteen
Kris
She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever touched, and the saddest person I’d ever met, and I didn’t want to let her go. I couldn’t.
Afterward, I lay on my side next to her, one hand splayed across her stomach, trying not to think about her scar and what it meant. What he’d taken from her. What no one would ever be able to give her again.
I hated how helpless—how useless—that scar made me feel. I was supposed to prevent that. I was meant to save Sera’s baby. Her future. I was meant to spare her the grief she was still mired in, and maybe, if I’d actually done that, we would have come together in a moment of triumph, instead of shared grief.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” I stared down at her profile, no more able to look away from her than I was able to stop touching her.
She turned to look at me, and her eyes were damp. “Only if I get to ask one in return.”
“You can ask, even if you don’t want to answer my question. And that’s okay, if you don’t want to. I don’t have any right to ask.”
“Just say it.” A hint of a smile rode the corners of her mouth, but it was forced. It didn’t match the sadness in her eyes. “You’re making it worse, with the buildup.”
I shouldn’t ask. It was none of my business. But I had to know, for purely selfish reasons.
“Who is he?” My thumb twitched over her scar on the last word, surely an unconscious, nervous movement.
Sera frowned, and I saw the moment her confusion cleared. She’d thought I was asking about the killer. Or maybe about the child he’d taken from her. “My baby’s father?” she whispered, and all hints of that earlier smile were gone.
“Yeah. But you don’t have to...”
“His name is Ben. But he doesn’t matter. Really,” she said when I started to object. Of course he mattered. He’d lost a child, too. “He didn’t want the baby. He didn’t want me. We weren’t involved, beyond that one time. I don’t even know how to get in touch with him anymore, so maybe this was meant to be.”
“No,” I said, and she looked so relieved I wanted to kiss her. “This wasn’t meant to be.” I was meant to stop it. I’d failed Sera before I’d even met her.
“My turn,” she said, and I let her change the subject because we both needed it. “What was it like, being with Noelle? With a Seer?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded. “Okay. Um... Going out with Noelle was like going out with Cassandra. The Cassandra.”
“From Greek mythology?”
“Yeah. The one who could see the future, but couldn’t change it.” Only what Noelle and I did together couldn’t really be called dating. There were no true meals, no movies and no Valentines. We stole moments from the real world, and we stole them shamelessly. We tried to pause time and live in a single second forever. In a heartbeat. In a glance. In that quick breath between desperate kisses. And every single one of those stolen moments happened between one o’clock and three o’clock in the morning. In my bed.
“But it wasn’t all sex,” I said, and Sera almost looked relieved. “Kori thinks it was, but Elle and I also talked.” More accurately, we’d whispered. We’d laughed. We’d teased. And one time, Noelle had cried. “Then, eventually, inevitably, she fell asleep. And that’s when things got weird. Every single time.”
“She started talking in her sleep?”
“Yeah. And now that I can look back on it with a little perspective—I’m wiser now, in case you didn’t know—I think that may have been the point for her all along.”
“But it wasn’t for you?”
I shook my head. The prophesies weren’t the point for me. Not then. Not until after Elle died, and I started wondering why I’d felt compelled to write down everything she said. “For me, she was the point. Being with her. I know she didn’t love me, but when she came home, she would let me pretend.”
“Home from where?”
I shrugged. “Wherever. She always left. But then she always came back, eventually.” I’d never talked to anyone else about Elle. Not like this. Not even Kori. Sera was the last person I’d expected to confide in—telling one girlfriend about a previous girlfriend rarely goes well. Not that either of them had officially accepted the title.
But that was the thing about talking to Sera—I always wound up saying more than I’d meant to. She charmed it out of me, as if I was a snake in her basket.
Which sounded kind of dirty, in retrospect.
“Did she ever say what it was like?” Sera still watched me, from inches away. “Seeing the future?”
“I only asked her once. She said it was like sitting in this old tire swing in Gran’s backyard. Did you ever swing in one?” I asked, and she nodded. “Remember how you could twist, and twist, and twist, then grab on tight and let the rope unwind? The world would spin around you, and you could only catch glimpses of things flying by? Elle said seeing the future was like that. Scary, and breathless, and never quite enough, but more than anyone could ever truly make sense of.”
Sera tried to hide a yawn. “Sounds...disorienting.”
“I’m sure it was.”
We were quiet after that, and I was starting to think she’d fallen asleep, until she snuggled closer. “Tell me a secret, Kris. You know all of mine.”
“What do you want to know?” I would tell her anything.
“I want to know about Micah.”
I exhaled slowly, breathing through an ache I could never really ease. “Who told you?”
“Kori told me about the kids. Why didn’t you? Don’t you trust me?”
“Now? With my life.” I squeezed her hand, trying to demonstrate the truth through touch. “But I couldn’t afford to trust you at first, and since then, there just hasn’t been time, between stealing back your pictures, and looking for Kenley, and getting shot at, and hiding from Julia Tower.”
“There’s time now,” she whispered. “Tell me about Micah.”
Another slow breath. Then I launched into a retelling of my biggest shame. “I was nineteen. Gran was getting too old to work, and I thought I was doing the right thing. Helping pay the bills. I took whatever jobs I could find, and I didn’t ask questions. It was easier to pocket an envelope full of cash if I didn’t ask why the jobs were off the record.
“Micah was the last of those jobs. A thirteen-year-old caught in the middle of a divorce battle. His mother had custody. His dad wanted him back. They told me the mother was abusive. That he’d be better off with his dad, but that Micah couldn’t see that yet, so I had to take him while he was sleeping.
“I did.” I swallowed a lump the size of a baseball in my throat. “Three days later, I heard Gran cussing at the television. Micah’s picture was on the screen. There was a picture of his parents, too. They weren’t divorced. The dad wasn’t the man who’d hired me.
“The coroner said Micah died of massive hemorrhaging. He was left on the side of the street. Gran said that was bullshit. She said it was a syndicate object lesson. She said that’s what they did to kids—to anyone—who refused to fall in line. They gave the poor kid conflicting orders and let his body tear itself apart in front of an audience.”
“Oh...” Sera’s voice carried little sound, but infinite pain.
“It was my fault. I took him from his bed in the middle of the night and gave him to the mafia.”
“And now you’re trying to make up for it.” She didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. She didn’t absolve me of the blame, or belittle my responsibility with platitudes.
I shook my head. “I can never make up for it. All I can do is try to stop it from happening to someone else. To anyone else.”
“That’s what you were doing when Kori and Kenley joined the syndicate?”
My exhalation tasted as bitter as it sounded. “Ironic, huh? In trying to save strangers, I let my own sisters fall.” I closed my eyes. “I believed Kori when she told me she had it under control. She joined the syndicate to protect Kenley, who was coerced into joining a few days before. Kori made me promise not to tell my grandmother that they’d joined, and she made me promise to stay away from them. She said she could handle it. That they’d serve their five years, then get out, but that if Tower knew she and Kenni were close to me and Gran, he’d use us against her. And vice versa.”
“So you stayed away?”
I nodded. “I stayed away. I thought I’d be making things worse by getting involved. Worse for them, and worse for the kids I was working with. And in the beginning, that was probably true. If I’d known what was going on, I would have joined the syndicate instead of Kori, but she didn’t even tell me until it was too late, and then there was no one else left to take care of Gran. But if I’d... I don’t know. If I’d done things differently, maybe I could have kept Kori out of the basement.”
Maybe I could have prevented whatever put that haunted look in her eyes and made her scream at night.
“You couldn’t have stopped it.” Sera was hardly awake, yet she sounded certain. “You can’t stop stuff like that from the outside. Sometimes you can’t even stop it from the inside...”
As she fell asleep on my arm, I realized she was talking about herself. She’d tried to save her sister. She’d tried to stop it from the inside, and instead, she’d lost everything.
I wanted to give her something.
I waited nearly an hour until she rolled over on her own because I didn’t want to wake her up. But as soon as she was on the other side of the mattress—all but one small foot, resting against my shin—I snuck out of bed and turned off the lamp, then stepped into my jeans and crept downstairs, this new need still only half-formed.
On the bottom step, I groaned when I saw the light shining in the kitchen. Shit. I’d hoped to keep this new detail of my relationship with Sera private, at least until I knew how much she wanted everyone else to know.
Also, I’d wanted privacy for my new errand. But that wasn’t gonna happen.
Gran never woke up in the middle of the night, unless she was...confused—or someone turned on the TV—and I really didn’t feel like pretending I was still a twenty-year-old college dropout. Not with Sera still sleeping without me in the bed that could hopefully now be described as “ours.”
“Gran?” The living room floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet.
“It’s just me,” Ian said, and I was relieved for a second. Until I realized that unlike Gran, he probably wouldn’t forget me sneaking out of Sera’s room in the middle of the night.
Ian sat alone at the table, tapping on Vanessa’s laptop keys with two fingers. I crossed to the cabinet over the sink and took out a bottle of whiskey—the only alcohol in the house—and a short glass, then sat down next to him.
“Kori will skin you alive if you drink the last of her whiskey.”
“I’ll blame it on you.” I unscrewed the lid, and his brows rose. “Fine. I’ll pick up more tomorrow. I need to take Sera shopping anyway.”
Ian eyed me over the open laptop with a quiet smile. “So...you and Sera?”
I swallowed a groan as I poured two inches into my glass. “Please tell me no one else heard...”
“The walls are thin.” Which I knew all too well. “But Van only went up to bed ten minutes ago, and Kori sleeps more soundly than I do—until the nightmares.”
“Are they getting any better?” Kori’s nightmares made me feel useless, because I couldn’t fix her any easier than I could fix Sera.
Ian nodded. “Slowly.”
“What’s with the computer? You finally joining the twenty-first century?”
“Kicking and screaming.” He sighed. “I’d much rather read a newspaper, but they’re in short supply around here, so I’m stuck using this thing. Van showed me how to use a search engine, but all I’m getting are pop-up ads and the same ten results, every time I click ‘go.’” He turned the computer around and demonstrated.
I laughed. “Click on ‘next page’ for the rest of the results. There are more than ten thousand of them, but you just keep refreshing that first page full.”
Ian took the laptop back and frowned. “Oh. Thanks.”
“Shopping for an apartment? Are you leaving us?”
“It’s for me and Kori. For after we get Kenley back and things settle down.”
“You think she’ll want to stay in the city once all this is over?”
“I think she’d be bored in the Outback, and I’m not leaving here without her.” He glanced at my show of skepticism and exhaled slowly. “We’re going to end it, Kris,” he confessed at last. “Not just Julia and the Tower syndicate. Cavazos, too. Kori can’t go on with her life knowing that other people are still suffering the same things she went through. This won’t be over for her until they all fall down. And if they don’t...well, she’ll die trying to make it happen. We both will.”
“And after we take down Cavazos?” Because they weren’t doing it without me.
“Then we’ll head to the West Coast and fight the good fight with a view of the ocean.” Ian shrugged. “At least that’ll keep us busy.”
That it would. And they wouldn’t be alone.
“So, what’s with the nightcap?” Ian closed the laptop with a soft click. “Post-coital regret?”
“Not even kinda.” I would never regret a single moment I’d spent with Sera. Except for kidnapping her. “I just need to think.”
“Do you find that easier, staring at the bottom of a bottle?”
“Not always.” I sipped from my glass, relishing the mild burn.
He pushed the computer toward the middle of the table. “You’re more like Kori than you know.”
“I’m older,” I insisted. “Which means she’s more like me.”
“You both have big hearts. The only difference is that she hides hers behind guns and a foul mouth, and you hide yours behind guns and a smile. So...where’s the smile?”
“I must have left it in bed.”
“Sera’s?”
I took another sip. “You all seem to be forgetting that it’s actually my bed.”
“Not when she’s in it,” he said, and I had to concede the point.
I drained my glass, then set it down and studied him critically for a moment. “I need to talk about what just happened with Sera. You game?”
Ian chuckled. “Of course. Should I reciprocate, to cement our friendship?”
I flinched. “Please don’t do that.”
That time he laughed. “I promise that was an empty threat.” He poured another inch into my glass. “So. What’s up with you and Sera?”
“Everything. Up there, we just—”
He put one hand flat on the table between us, and the gesture felt very much like a stop sign. “I know what you did. No need to elaborate.”
“Not that. Well, there was that, too.” I frowned, wondering if I should start over. “But this isn’t about sex. Before that, she showed me something. She let me in.”
“Still sounds like we’re talking about sex...”
“Well, we’re not. I owe her, Ian.”
Ian frowned and crossed both arms over his chest. “Was she that much better than you in bed?”
“Ha, ha,” I said when his grin told me he was kidding. “She likes me, Ian. I think she likes me a lot, and I don’t want that to change.”
“What makes you think it will?”
How could it not, once she found out that I’d failed to stop what happened to her?
“I was supposed to do something, a while back.” I took another sip from my glass, then started over from the beginning. A beginning I hadn’t even realized our story—mine and Sera’s—had until that moment. “For years, I’ve been wondering about Noelle. About why she picked me. My bed. My ears. My pencil. I’ve always felt like there must have been a reason, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t make any of the lines make sense, and I couldn’t stop anything they warned me about. I couldn’t even understand the warnings.”
“And now?”
“Now...” I frowned and looked up from the table to meet his gaze. “I know this sounds crazy, but I think it was about Sera all along.”
His dark brows rose. “You think Noelle slept with you off and on for six years because of Sera?”
I shrugged. “Well, I hope she had a more personal motivation for the sex part of the equation, but I think she stayed and talked in her sleep with me because of Sera. Her name’s all through that journal, Ian. Noelle warned me over and over, and I couldn’t see it. I was supposed to stop him. I was supposed to protect her and her family. I was supposed to save her baby, and her body, and her future.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, just to underline my certainty. “Maybe Elle knew I’d wind up with Sera. Maybe she didn’t. But she knew I was supposed to be there three months ago when that bastard shoved a knife through her belly and through her baby.” I drained my glass while he stared at me. “The problem is that I didn’t know.”
“I take it Sera doesn’t know, either?”
“No. I’m going to tell her. I have to tell her. But first I need to give her something. I need to show her how sorry I am. I need to make her believe that I’ll never let something like that happen to her ever again. I want her to know that I can protect her, and that I’m so fucking sorry I wasn’t there when she needed me.”
“Kris, you didn’t even know her.”
“But I was supposed to know her. I was supposed to protect her.” I picked up my glass again, but it was empty. “Ian, I think I love her.”
He blinked. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know how to tell.”
“Okay, so what do you know?”
“I know that she’s like a light in the dark, and I’m a bug drawn to her flame. She’s more sad, and beautiful, and determined than anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like...a human superlative. She’s the most...everything.”
Ian’s brows rose, and I knew what he was thinking. “I sound like a sap, don’t I? I’m not, though. I’m not blind, or deaf, or stupid. I know she’s not perfect. She yells at me, and hell, she tried to stab me. She kicked me out of my own room, and nearly made me break my nose on the closet door. And she lied to us all about being Jake Tower’s kid. Sometimes I’m not sure whether I should kill her or kiss her. Is that crazy?”
“You’re talking to the man who fell in love with your sister. If ‘crazy’ were a deal-breaker for me, I wouldn’t be here. This whole house is crazy.”
I nodded. “This place is crazy, and we’re gluttons for punishment, you and I. How we’ve survived Gran, and Kori, and Sera is beyond me. I wouldn’t want to face any one of them in a dark alley on a bad day, and we’ve got them all under one roof. Kinda makes you think Kenni and Van have the right idea, huh?”
“If you’re changing teams in the middle of the game, I’m gonna have to cheer you on from the stands, man. My compass points toward women. One woman in particular.”
I laughed. “Glad to hear it, for my sister’s sake. And no, I’m not changing teams. Far from it.” In fact, the heading on my own internal compass was steadier than I’d seen it in years. Instead of pointing to the entire female gender, it now seemed to be singling out Sera. Only Sera. And... “The thing is that for the first time since Noelle, I’m not scared to do this.”
“To do what?” Ian unscrewed the cap from the whiskey bottle and took a short gulp. Bonding with me had driven him to drink, after only a quarter of an hour.
“To be with her. In every sense, not just the biblical. Although that was—”
“Stop there...” Ian warned, tilting the bottle up again, but I hardly heard him.
“She’s like this living fire, jumping and sparking, and lighting me up even while she casts fierce shadow all around us, and when I’m with her I can totally see how fire could be the source of all life, because that’s what she is. She is life. She burns with it. And I want to kill everyone who’s ever laid a cruel hand on her.”
I hadn’t realized I was clenching my empty glass until Ian shrugged and pushed the bottle my way. “So do it.”
Glass clinked as I poured. “Do what?”
“Kill him. We both know who you’re talking about. Find him and kill him.”
“I can’t.” Well, I could, but... “She wants to see him die. And I don’t fucking blame her.”
Ian frowned, as if I’d started speaking gibberish. “I didn’t mean now. I’m just saying that if you want to prove you can protect her, give her what she came here for.”
“That’s the plan, but I can’t do much until I know who the bastard is.”
“Just give it a little more time. Before she went to bed, Van was making a list of possible suspects based on Sera’s description and details from the crime scene. She’s planning to show mug shots to Sera tomorrow. If they can identify him, Cam and Liv will be able to find him.” He shrugged. “Then you can do what you do best, which will be giving her what she wants most in the world.”
“You think killing is what I do best? Did you learn nothing from whatever you heard through the thin walls?”
“Ah. Humor as a defense mechanism. I know that tactic well.”
I didn’t bother denying it. Nor did I own up to what was really bothering me. I was supposed to stop Sera’s bad guy before he killed her family. Killing him as an afterthought wouldn’t give her back what she’d lost.
“No use stressing over it now.” Ian pushed his chair back from the table. “There’s nothing anyone can do until Sera’s had a chance to look at the mug shots.” He stood and pushed his chair in. “I don’t think you have anything to prove to her, though. She likes you. We can all see that. So just don’t kidnap her anymore and keep doing...whatever you did upstairs, and you should be golden.”
After Ian went to bed, I poured another inch of whiskey and pulled Vanessa’s laptop into position in front of me. Ian might not have understood computers, but I understood them well enough to find Van’s search history and the files she’d worked on most recently. After three minutes of clicking links and opening documents, I found what I was looking for, though probably only because she’d made no effort to hide it. A series of six mug shots taken from a police database she shouldn’t have had access to, compiled and labeled with both a number and a letter designation. Three files later, I found the code key, which provided each paroled—and one escaped—criminal with an arrest record, labeled with those same letter/number combinations.
I stared at the pictures, wondering which—if any—of these men had smiled at Sera as he drove his knife into her. Which of them had shot her parents, then stabbed and violated her little sister? Which man would I have to kill to see that rage in her eyes replaced with a sad peace that would grow a little less sad and a little more peaceful every day?
But their pictures told me nothing, except that all of them had light eyes, pale skin, and dark curls of various lengths.
Their arrest records didn’t say much more. All had been arrested for violent crimes within one hundred miles of her parents’ home, including multiple counts of rape, aggravated assault, murder and one other home invasion. Three had been convicted and served time—several years each—before being paroled. One escaped from a local jail, where he was being kept during his appeal. One was acquitted. One never went to trial, thanks to police error. Such was the state of the justice system—I knew men who’d done more time for drug charges and nonviolent robbery than any of the sick fucks the police had questioned in Sera’s case.
But none of that told me who to kill. Vanessa’s technical sleuthing was no more help than Noelle’s incomplete predictions had been. But maybe together...
I stood so fast my chair screeched across the kitchen floor, and for a second, I was afraid I’d woken Gran. But when no sound came from her room, I practically ran into the living room and hauled my duffel bag out from under the coffee table, where I’d been storing all the stuff I’d taken out of my room when Sera moved in.
Elle’s notebook was at the bottom. I pulled it out carefully, aware, as always, that the cardboard cover and flimsy paper pages wouldn’t last forever.
In the kitchen, I rooted through the junk drawer until I found a pen and a half-used pad of sticky notes, then I sat in front of Van’s laptop again, ready—no, desperate—to make sense of passages whose meaning had been eluding me for years.
There was no guarantee I’d have any more success this time, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was more prepared than ever to unravel Elle’s knot of prophesies, considering that this time I already knew not only what and where the crime was, but who the victims were.
All I needed was the perpetrator’s identity.
While everyone else slept, I spent the next two and a half hours reading that notebook all over again, from start to finish, flagging all of the promising passages with a sticky note. There weren’t many. Then I reread the suspects’ criminal records, wishing that, like Cam, I had a degree in criminal justice. Even an unused one.
But all I had was several years’ experience breaking and entering, Traveler-style.
Well, I had that, and I had Google. So I started doing image searches for the criminals Van had listed, as well as all of their aliases, hoping someone, somewhere had posted a picture of one of them with an identifying mark Sera had missed, or in a location or clothing that fit a passage in Elle’s notebook.
And finally, somewhere around four in the morning, I found a picture on a social networking site labeled with the second known alias of the fifth man on the list—the one who’d been arrested, but never went to trial. The man in the picture was shirtless, with most of his back turned toward the camera, and on the back of his left shoulder was a small tattoo of a tarantula, crawling up his body.
My heart beat a little faster and I flipped through the notebook, passing up all the passages I’d marked, in search of one I’d had no idea was connected to Sera and her family.
I still wasn’t sure they were connected. It could be a coincidence. But one night, about three years after Noelle and I first...got together, she’d started mumbling at about 1:40 in the morning, and I’d written what I could understand.
Spider, caught in the web of lies.
Was the man with the tattoos Noelle’s spider? If so, was Noelle’s spider also Sera’s smiling man? What was the web of lies—could it be Sera’s statement to the police?
It took ten more minutes of searching that same alias to find an image showing both the tattoo and the man’s face, in profile. But that was enough. It was him. One of the police department’s suspects in Sera’s case had a tattoo of a spider, and one of Noelle’s prophesies was about a spider. If that was a coincidence, it was coincidental enough to deserve investigation.
The suspect’s legal name was Chance Alexander Curtis. He sounded more like an Ivy League undergrad than a brutal murderer. But then, that fit Sera’s description, too.
I closed Van’s laptop and stowed Noelle’s notebook in the bottom of my duffel again. Then I borrowed the cell phone Ian had left in the kitchen to send a text to Cam.
It’s Kris. I need a favor.
His reply came two minutes later, while I was shrugging into my shoulder holster, over a mostly clean T-shirt dug from my bag.
Hell no. It’s 4 am & I still owe you a rt hook.
Oh, yeah. I’d punched Cam once, years ago, when I thought he was threatening Olivia. I was wrong, and he’d never let me forget it.
Turn off the light, or I’ll wake up Liv.
With my .40 loaded and holstered, I shrugged into a light jacket, then killed the bulb in the hall closet—we still kept it on at night, so no one could sneak in—then stepped into the darkness and out into the living room of Cam and Olivia’s apartment.
The second I appeared, something clicked, and light flooded the room from a lamp in the corner. I squinted and found Cam with his fingers still on the switch. Before my eyes had even adjusted to the light, he reached to his left and flipped the switch on another lamp, this one without a shade.
Nothing happened. That lamp held an infrared bulb, to keep the room inaccessible to Travelers—like me—without keeping the house lit up all night. There was one in every room of our hideout house.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Cam crossed into the tiny galley-style kitchen.
“I know it’s late, and—”
“Actually, it’s early.” He pulled open the fridge and tossed me a soda from inside, then took one for himself.
“—and Liv’s asleep—”
“Not anymore,” Olivia said, and I turned to find her standing in the hallway in a tank top and short pj shorts.
“You better not be looking at her...anything,” Cam growled, and I couldn’t roll my eyes fast enough.
“I’m not. We were never a thing.” I turned back to her when Cam pretended he hadn’t heard me. “Liv, tell him we were never a thing.”
“We were never a thing,” she said, settling onto a stool at the kitchen peninsula, and I could tell from her mischievous grin that she wouldn’t leave it at that. “Except for that time in your basement...”
I popped the top on my soda. “That lasted, like, five minutes—we were just kids—and I never even got past her bra.”
Cam glared at me from across the counter, looking less and less like he wanted to do me a favor.
“Seriously,” I reiterated. “And it was a teen bra. She didn’t even have...”
He growled again, and Olivia looked a little miffed.
“Never mind. That’s why I’m here.”
Cam frowned. “You’re here because Liv was a flat-chested teenager?”
“I wasn’t—” Liv started, but neither of us looked at her.
“No. I’m here because I don’t want Liv. Like that.” I shook my head, struggling to straighten out my thoughts. I was sleep-deprived and too focused on what needed to be done to think through what needed to be said, to make the rest of it possible. “I don’t like her like that. I like Sera. I think I more than like her. So I need to go kill someone.”
“Have you been drinking?” Olivia pressed the power button on their coffeepot and Cam pulled a bag of grounds from the cabinet over his head.
“No. Well, yes, but I’m not drunk. In fact, I’m thinking clearer than I have in years.”
“I can tell by how you reek of whiskey and make no sense,” Cam said. “And did I mention it’s four in the morning?”
“Yeah. I figure that’s the best time to catch him unaware.” Also, I didn’t want to wait. I was kind of eager to put a few bullets in the bastard who’d taken everything from Sera.
“Catch who?”
“Sera’s smiling man,” Olivia said, and I realized I’d have more luck appealing to her, even though it was Cam’s Skill I needed. “She ID’d him?”
“No, I did. With Van’s help. Not that she knows she helped yet, but she will.”
“Sit,” Cam ordered. “Drink your damn soda and calm down. Either you’re skipping entire sentences, or I’m only hearing half of them.”
“I have a name. Chance Alexander Curtis. I need you to Track him, so I can go get the bastard.”
Cam looked suddenly interested, despite the hour and his general disinterest in me as a human being—turns out it’s difficult to replace that vital first impression. “No fourth name?”
“Not that I found. I don’t think he’s Skilled.” Most unSkilled people didn’t have that second middle name. Their parents didn’t know they needed it.
“Why are you doing this at four in the morning?” Liv asked, while the coffeepot gurgled and ticked. “And why are you doing it alone?”
“It’s kind of a surprise,” I admitted, and her frown looked almost amused.
“Most men surprise their girlfriends with roses,” Liv said, and I didn’t bother telling them that Sera wasn’t my girlfriend. Or the type to want worthless clipped flowers.
“This is what she wants. This is what she needs, and I’m going to give it to her.” I turned back to Cam. “Can you just tell me where he is? Please? I’ll owe you.”
“You already owe me.”
“Fine. You can punch me in the face, and I won’t duck or fire back.”
Cam frowned, and I was starting to think that was the only expression he had. “What am I, fifteen?” He drank from his can again, then set it down harder than necessary. “Chance Alexander Curtis?”
I nodded.
“Fine. Give me a minute.” He closed his eyes, and I sank onto the stool next to Liv, silently sipping from my can as she opened the laptop on the counter in front of her and began to type.
It took less than a minute.
“Strong signal.” Cam opened his eyes and met my gaze from across the peninsula. “East side, about two miles from the river.”
“Here in the city?” I’d expected him to be closer to where Sera’s family was killed. Closer to where he lived.
“Yeah.”
“Got a street name, or a neighborhood?”
“That’s not how it works,” Cam said. “There’s no GPS in my head. Just a signal, coming from a certain direction. I can gauge distance based on the strength of the signal. I could lead you to him....”
“That would take too long. But thanks.”
“6141 Holloway, apartment 4C. On the corner of Fourth and Holloway.” Olivia turned her laptop to face me. “A man named Glen Curtis has an apartment there, and his social profile says he has a brother named Chase. I bet that’s where he’s staying.”
“How did you find that?”
“Van’s been teaching me some tricks I’d rather Ruben not know about...” she said, and I nodded. The last thing I wanted to do was give Ruben Cavazos information he didn’t have to work for.
“Thanks.” I stood and drained my soda. “Can you get the lights?”
Cam turned off both lamps and Olivia closed her laptop. I stepped out of the thick shadows in their living room and into an alley near the corner of Fourth and Holloway.
There are very few circumstances under which I’d walk down the street in Julia Tower’s section of town in broad daylight. Fortunately, 4:47 a.m. wasn’t quite broad daylight, and the walk from the alley to Curtis’s apartment building only took a couple of minutes.
I jogged up three flights of stairs and made a mental note to stop ignoring cardio in favor of weight training—sometimes, even a Traveler has to run. And if Sera decided she wasn’t done with me after one night, cardiovascular stamina would certainly come in handy.
I paused on the landing to catch my breath. And double-check my clip. Fully loaded, with one round in the chamber. Then I found the door to apartment 4C, halfway down the hall.
If I’d ever been there before, or was more than passingly familiar with the area, I could have Traveled right into the apartment itself, assuming the Curtis brothers had left any of their lights off. But since I wasn’t, and this was an important job, I’d decided to play it safe and check the place out before popping in unannounced.
From the hall, I could hear no sound coming from 4C, but then, most of the building’s residents were probably still sleeping. So I closed my eyes and felt for a dark pocket within.
The whole damn place was dark. So dark I knew the Curtises were either completely unSkilled, or not at home.
I closed my eyes and shadow-walked into the living room. A single step later, my shin smashed into something hard, and I cursed in the darkness. Then cursed silently over my own stupidity.
Something clicked, and a single bright light flared to life, momentarily blinding me. Something moved on my left, but I couldn’t focus on it.
I pulled my gun, blinking furiously, but couldn’t see to aim. “Who’s there?”
“Who do you think?” an unfamiliar voice asked. And as my eyes began to adjust, a man came into focus on the floor, his head slumped forward, sitting in a puddle of his own blood.
Chase Alexander Curtis sat next to him, bound and gagged with duct tape—the dead man could only be his brother. I raised my aim to his chest, and his eyes widened in fear. Desperate, inarticulate sounds came from behind his gag. The smiling man was no longer smiling.
Unfortunately, his terror wasn’t directed at me. Curtis was looking over my shoulder.
Chill bumps popped up on my arms and dread churned in my stomach. But before I could turn to see what he was so scared of, pain slammed into my skull, and the room spun around me. I fought the loss of consciousness, but darkness surrounded me from the periphery, a betrayal by the very element I was born to embrace.
The last thing I saw before my eyes closed against my will was the woman’s hand that plucked my gun from my grip.