Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  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.

  Twenty

  Sera

  The ringing of a cell phone woke me up, and it took me a second to realize I wasn’t hearing my own ringtone. And one more second to remember I no longer had a cell phone. After that, everything else came crashing in, and for a moment, my loss—that fresh remembrance of it—was too thick to breathe through. As it was most mornings.

  When I’d pushed it all back again, back into memory, where the pain was manageable, I sat up and turned on the bedside lamp, but Kris’s phone stopped ringing before I could answer it. The screen showed one missed call, from Anne.

  Kris. He’d been in my bed. Or rather, I was in his.

  I twisted, but I knew from the lack of warmth on my left side that he was gone before my gaze ever fell on the empty half of the bed. Still, the memory of the night before surged through me—shared grief, comfort through touch, and a mutual pleasure so perfect that in that instant, nothing else had existed. No pain. No fear. No memories. There’d been nothing but the two of us, and in that moment, I’d been sure we could actually be together. That maybe we were supposed to be together.

  But now he was gone, and the bed was cold.

  I glanced at the alarm clock and groaned over the numbers—it was barely five in the morning—then stretched to turn the lamp off again, when what I really wanted to do was pull on a bare minimum of clothing and tiptoe downstairs to curl up on the couch with Kris. But if he’d gone downstairs, he’d gone downstairs for a reason.

  So I burrowed farther into the covers and closed my eyes. But sleep didn’t return.

  Kris’s phone rang again, less than two minutes after the first missed call. I picked it up and scowled when I read Anne’s name on the screen again. Why was she calling him in the middle of the night?

  What if this was some kind of emergency?

  I pressed the accept call button, before I could overthink it and lose my nerve. “Hello? Anne?” I said, and for a moment, there was only silence on the other end. Then someone exhaled into my ear.

  “The spider is dead,” a child’s voice said over the line, and I realized I was talking to Hadley. “The web is a trap.”

  “What? Hadley? Is something wrong?”

  “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!” she shouted, and her high-pitched scream skewered my brain, then bounced around the inside of my skull. “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!”

  I held the phone away from my ear to save my hearing, and I had to half shout to be heard over her. “Hadley! Put your mom on the phone.” But she was still screaming those same two sentences. “Hadley!”

  “Hadley!” Anne’s voice echoed mine from the other end of the line, and a plastic clattering followed as her phone hit the floor, but I could still hear the child screaming, and her mother trying to calm her down. “Hadley, what’s wrong? Who’s on the phone? Did you have a bad dream?”

  “Anne!” I shouted, desperate to be heard over them both. I didn’t know what spider she was talking about, but I understood both “dead” and “trap.”

  Something was horribly wrong. And the call had come on Kris’s phone.

  I was still shouting at Anne, trying to get her attention, when my bedroom door flew open and crashed into the dresser against the wall. “Sera?” Kori had her gun drawn and aimed at the floor. “What happened?”

  She stepped inside and Ian came in after her, similarly armed, and they automatically scanned separate halves of the room, looking for the threat. When they found none, their gazes returned to me, then slid down from my face. Which is when I remembered that I was naked. And hold
ing Kris’s phone.

  “It’s Hadley.” I held the phone out to Kori as I pulled the sheet up to my chest with my free hand. “She’s freaking out about a spider, or something.”

  Kori set her gun on the end table, then took the phone and listened as Anne tried to calm Hadley. Ian turned around while I pulled my borrowed pajamas back on, and as I tugged the shirt into place, Kori handed the phone back to me. “They can’t hear us, and I can’t get to them until Anne turns off the infrared grid.”

  Her house had state-of-the-art security, which—Kris had explained—Ruben Cavazos had paid for, in order to protect his love child. Noelle’s biological daughter.

  “Is that Kris’s phone?” Van said from the doorway as Kori slipped past her into the hall, and I realized that my shouting into the phone had woken the entire household. “Where is he?”

  “Downstairs, I guess.” I stood and held the phone a foot away from my ear, and could still hear Hadley screaming.

  Kori stepped back into my room a minute later wearing jeans beneath the T-shirt she slept in, with her own phone in her hand.

  “Anne still has a home phone,” she explained, pressing buttons on her cell.

  I listened on Kris’s phone, and over the line, as Hadley’s screams quieted to a whimper, I heard the home phone ring. Something clattered against wood, and Anne said, “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Kori said from my room. “Turn off the grid. I’m coming over.”

  “Just a second.” Anne’s voice was distant now, over Kris’s line. Kori hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket, then headed into the hall. A second later, her footsteps clomped down the stairs so fast I was surprised she didn’t trip over her own feet and plummet to her death. An instant after that, the closet door slammed, and I knew she was gone.