by Ty Drago
“Well yesterday, one of the staffers, a woman named Moira, spilled coffee on herself in the Dirksen cafeteria. So I offered to get her jacket cleaned, and she jumped at the favor.
“On my way out though, I ducked into a restroom and searched the pockets. Sure enough, I found Moira’s ID badge. Then I took the jacket to the dry cleaners. Later, when Moira asked me about the badge, I played dumb, and she figured the cleaners would find it. So I knew I’d better do whatever I was going to do fast … before Security canceled the badge’s access.
“At the end of that workday, instead of going with the pages to Webster Hall, where they bunk us, I went to Hart and snuck into Micha’s suite using Moira’s ID. Then I hid in a closet in the senator’s private office. I was ready to wait all night, though I knew I’d catch all kinds of crap from Lex … he’s a proctor in the page program. Chances were I’d get kicked out and be sent home. But if I managed to find out the truth about Kevin, I figured it was worth it.”
This girl thinks like an Undertaker.
Jillian said, “Anyway, I was dozing in the back of the closet about three hours later when the office door opened and the lights came on. There were voices: Lindsay Micha and one of her staffers.
“They were talking about somebody named Cavanaugh. The staffer sounded worried about this person, afraid that … how’d he put it? … ‘The Mistress won’t be pleased.’ But Micha just kind of dismissed it.
“Then she started talking about Kevin.
“First, she complimented her staffer on ‘taking care’ of the situation, forcing Kevin to write the suicide note before drowning him. She laughed about it—actually laughed. I wanted to burst out of that closet and do … something. But I stayed put.
“The staffer warned that Cavanaugh wasn’t happy about the situation. But Micha told him, ‘I’m here and she’s in Philadelphia.’ Then she said, ‘Besides, she has Tom Jefferson and the Undertakers to worry about. And I think it’s time for Senator Micha to stop living in fear and show her face to the world again.’ Or something like that.”
“She mentioned me?” Tom said wryly. “I’m flattered.”
Jillian shrugged. “I’d already heard of the Undertakers. Some kind of underground youth group here in Philly. Some folks call you a street gang. Others say it’s more like a Merry Men/Sherwood Forest thing.”
“That’d make you Robin Hood, Chief!” Helene quipped.
Tom gave her a hard look, but the corners of his mouth twitched.
Jillian went on, “Then I did something that, looking back, wasn’t so smart. I peeked. I’m not even sure why. I just wanted to … I don’t know … see the woman who’d order Kevin’s murder. I can’t explain it.”
“I get it,” I said. “I really do.”
Helene added, “Lemme guess what you saw when you cracked the door.”
The girl stiffened. “There were … dead! Both of them! The staffer was seriously dead, just gray skin and old bones inside a fancy suit.”
“A Type Four or Five,” Tom surmised. “And Micha?”
“She was fresher, kind of … sticky. Her hair had mostly fallen out and her eyes had sunken in. But she still had lipstick on. I swear, I think that was the part that freaked me out the most … that something that looked so horrible would bother with …” Her voice trailed off.
“I call it the Holy Crap Factor,” I said.
She nodded. “A good name for it. Anyway, I freaked out and screamed. Then, knowing I’d been blown, I jumped out of the closet and bolted before either of them could react. Micha yelled for her staffer to stop me. And he tried. But I’m not that easy to catch.”
“No, you’re not.” Helene grinned.
“So you came to Philly,” Tom surmised, “with just the clothes on your back.”
Jillian nodded. “I headed straight to South Street, hoping to find Mr. P.’s dojo. But it’s gone now. Then those … things found me.”
“Well, you’re safe here,” I told her.
“I know,” the girl replied. “But Micha’s still there. She’s one of those Corpses you talk about … and she’s planning something. I don’t know what … but something.”
The chief said, “And we need to find out.”
I cleared my throat. “Um … actually Sharyn needs to find out.” Then, when they all looked at me like I’d sprouted horns, I added, “And I have to go with her.”
A half hour after dropping that bombshell in Tom’s office, I escorted Jillian to the Moms so that the crew boss, Nick Rooney, could set her up with a bed. Afterward, I found myself wandering the corridors of Haven. My mother had stayed behind at the meeting to “discuss something” with the chief and, sooner or later, I figured she’d be “discussing” it with me, too.
I somehow ended up outside the Shrine.
Well, it used to be the Shrine—to my dad. These days my mother shared it with my little sister.
Where my mom had received kind of a mixed reception when she’d moved into Haven, Emily, my six-year-old little sister, had been welcomed with open arms. Officially, Tom had assigned her care—when our mother wasn’t around, of course—to the Moms. But these days, there seemed to be a waiting list of babysitters.
Yeah, I know that sounds a little crazy. Since when do teenagers want to spend time with Kindergarteners? I admit I was stumped for a while, too, until Helene explained it.
“All of a sudden your family is here, Will,” she told me. “But the rest of Haven’s not so lucky. A bunch of us have sibs at home who used to drive us nuts, but who we’d now give our left arms to see again. Hanging out with Emily reminds us of them.”
And it was true, I thought as I parted the Shrine’s ragged curtain, but it wasn’t the whole story.
Harleen Patel and Emily were playing Chutes and Ladders, the two of them sprawled across my mom’s cot. My sister’s tiny face was screwed up in concentration as she took her turn.
Across from her, however, Harleen wore a smile as wide as the world.
Innocence, I thought.
Harleen and I had been recruits together. But where I’d become an Angel, she’d stayed a Mom and seemed content with chores that kept her as far away from deaders as an Undertaker could get.
This was the first time I’d ever seen real joy on her face.
“Hi,” I said.
They both looked up. Harleen’s smile faltered.
“Will!” Emily yelled, jumping up and running to me. She threw her arms around my legs, almost making me stumble. “I missed you!”
“You just saw me yesterday!” I laughed.
She peered up at me with our mother’s eyes and said, very seriously, “But every time you go away, I don’t know if you’ll come back.”
I didn’t have an answer to that one.
“Well … I’m here now,” I stammered, scooping her up. “Hi, Harleen.”
“Hi, Will,” the babysitter replied. Her smile was gone now. “I was supposed to be here another twenty minutes.”
“Harleen’s been playing with me!” Emily chirped. “And before that it was Maria! And before that it was the Burgermaker.”
“The Burgermeister!” I laughed. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “He gave me a piggyback ride up and down all the halls.”
I grinned. “Sounds like fun.”
“It was!” Then her expression turned serious. “I wanted to find you, but the Burgermaker said you’d gone out.”
“I did.”
“To fight the bad people?”
Harleen, looking unhappy, put the game away. I felt a stab of guilt; I’d muscled in on her time.
To my sister, I said, “Um … I guess so.”
“That scares Mommy,” Emily told me. An accusation.
“I know it does,” I muttered.
“Mommy told Tom she doesn’t want him to send you out to fight the bad people anymore.”
I’ll bet she doesn’t.
“Tom didn’t send me this time,” I said. “I went on my own.”
What was I supposed to do? Promise her that I would always come back from every mission, no matter how dangerous? Or should I try to explain to her that I was a soldier, like our father before us, and that in war sometimes—often—soldiers didn’t make it back?
I looked into my sister’s heart-shaped face and searched for something clever and wise to say. Nothing came.
Instead, Harleen stood up and spoke. “Emily?”
The little girl twisted around in my arms to face her.
“Did I ever tell you how I met your brother?”
Emily shook her head.
“He and I were in kind of a class together … a training class. It’s where we learned all about the Corp … the bad people.”
“Corpses,” my sister told her. “I know what they’re called.”
Harleen nodded. “That’s right. You’re very smart. Well, one night at this training class, the Corpses came and tried to get us. But your brother took charge and got us all out of there and kept the monsters away until help showed up.”
“He did?”
“Harleen …” I stammered, “don’t ...”
But she ignored me. “Yes, he did. At one point, he even offered to give himself to the Corpses so the rest of us could get away. It was, and is, the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.” She stroked my sister’s hair. “Your brother’s a hero.”
“No, I’m not!” I yelped. “Stop it!”
But again, she ignored me. “In fact, he’s the best kind of hero there is, because he doesn’t really get that he’s a hero.”
Emily stared at her, wide-eyed. Then she looked at me.
“So, instead of worrying about him,” Harleen said. “Maybe you should be proud of him. We all are.”
My sister hugged me fiercely, more fiercely than she had that day two months ago when I’d rescued her from her Corpse kidnappers. I looked at Harleen, and saw that her eyes were moist.
Lamely, I murmured, “Thanks.”
“Nope,” she replied. “Thank you. But, next time, let us finish our game.” Then she pushed past me and headed down the hallway.
At that exact moment, somewhere in Haven, something exploded.
Helene
“Tom … this is insane!”
Helene fidgeted in her chair—the only one left of their little meeting who was still seated. Will had gone. He’d delivered his message from “beyond” and then Tom had asked him to take Jillian over to the Moms. So he’d left, with both Helene and his mother looking after him, their expressions oddly similar.
After that Tom had stood up. Then Mrs. Ritter had stood up.
And that’s when the shouting started.
“You are not sending two children, one of them my son, into danger on the say-so of a boy’s dream!”
“I’m very sorry,” Tom replied. “But, yeah, I am.”
His dark eyes met the mother’s fierce gaze without challenge or anger, and it struck Helene—not for the first time—that the chief was more self-possessed than anyone she’d ever met.
“So you believe this story about an ‘angel’ and her ‘white room’?” Mrs. Ritter demanded.
He nodded.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Mrs. Ritter, since I was fourteen years old, I’ve been fightin’ a war against animated cadavers. I got a pretty open mind.”
“Tom, they’re just kids.”
Helene cringed. She hated it when people said that.
If only Tom would let her leave. She kept trying to catch his eye, to communicate to him that—right now—this was the last place she wanted to be. But he never even glanced her way, and she knew him too well to think she was being ignored. No, the chief wanted her here.
All part of the Mom Mission.
“With respect,” he replied, “if you still think that after two months of living here, then you ain’t paying attention.”
Helene flashed back on an incident last month. She and a few of the other Angels had run into a bunch of Corpses while on patrol. The subsequent fight had been a draw, but not what Sharyn called a “happy draw.” Undertakers had gotten hurt.
So, on returning to Haven, they’d headed straight to the infirmary.
Seeing them, Susan Ritter had taken immediate charge, throwing orders around and issuing everyone a bed. She’d treated Helene first, who’d been bitten—Jeez, how it had hurt!—on the arm and shoulder. While cleaning the wound, Will’s mother had turned to ask Ian for bandages.
But Ian had been busy at Sharyn’s bedside, stitching up a deep gash. Horrified, Mrs. Ritter had run over there but stopped short when she saw his handiwork. Helene knew Ian’s sutures firsthand. They were good.
Really good.
“Need something, Mrs. Ritter?” the medic had asked without looking up. Meanwhile Sharyn, in obvious pain, nevertheless offered her a wink.
“I …” The woman’s words had trailed off. “Bandages?”
Ian had turned to Amy, who stood faithfully at his side. “Can you get Mrs. Ritter some bandages?”
“Sure,” the girl had replied.
And then he’d returned to his stitching.
Now, Helene watched that same woman facing down the chief of the Undertakers, armed with the same stupid argument, towing the same stupid grown-up line: “Just kids.”
Anger flushed her cheeks.
Years we’ve been doing this! Years! Without an adult in sight! Why can’t you see that?
And I’m supposed to make friends with this person?
“It’s dangerous,” Mrs. Ritter said, crossing her arms and fixing Tom with a heavy-duty “mom” look that Helene felt sure, once upon a time, had frozen Will stiff.
It didn’t do a thing to the chief.
“I know,” he replied.
“How sure are you that you can even trust this new girl?”
“Jillian’s a friend.”
“When did you last see her?”
“Maybe four years ago.”
“When you and Sharyn were thirteen. And she would have been … what? Twelve?”
He nodded.
“That’s about the age that girls pick up the Sight. Not sixteen. How is it she just started Seeing Corpses three days ago?”
Not a bad question, Helene admitted.
But Tom, as usual, had an answer. “I was fourteen when I got my Eyes. That’s late. Real late. But there’s a reason for it: I started Seeing deaders at fourteen ’cause before then, there weren’t any deaders to See. The invasion hadn’t started yet. Same’s true for Jillian. This war started here. However the Corpses manage to get to our world, they do it in Philly. I think this Micha thing, whatever it is, is pretty recent … probably just since the senator stopped doing personal appearances. That’s why Jill only now got the Sight. ’Til recently, there just weren’t very many Corpses to See in Washington.”
Makes sense.
Then Tom asked Mrs. Ritter, “What do you think I should do?”
It was the first time Helene had ever heard Tom ask anyone for advice. Even Will’s mom seemed taken aback. “Well … I don’t think you should send your sister and my son to DC.”
“Who should I send? Helene here?”
They both looked right at her. She fidgeted some more.
“Of course not,” Will’s mother replied, though Helene thought her protest lacked conviction.
Better me than him. Right, Mrs. Ritter?
“Maybe Hugo?” the woman asked.
Hugo Ramirez was the only other grown-up who’d ever visited Haven—an FBI special agent who’d run afoul of Lilith Cavanaugh, the Queen of the Dead. Since then, he’d been forced to lay low. Ramirez knew the truth about the invasion and, worse, Cavanaugh knew that he knew. If he returned to his job with the Bureau, he wouldn’t last a week.
But in Susan Ritter’s eyes, Ramirez was
at least an adult. That meant he had to be better at doing Undertaker stuff than Undertakers were! Right?
Tom said, “That don’t work. Agent Ramirez is an asset. More’n that, he’s a friend. Thanks to his contacts, we got us equipment and supplies that we ain’t never had before. But he don’t have the Sight. Even if he could get himself set up in the Capitol somehow … he can’t See Micha for what she really is any more than you can.” He shrugged. “What good would it do?”
It would keep Will out of danger, Helene thought. And, despite everything, she found herself kind of siding with his mother on this one.
“The sad fact,” the chief explained, “is that we’re alone. The Undertakers. If it ain’t us fighting this war, it ain’t nobody. Straight up. End of story.”
He went to his desk. On it, a rusted wire basket bore a makeshift cardboard sign that read stuff for the chief to see in green marker. It was half filled with papers, mostly the loose-leaf, lined, three-holed variety. Haven had tons of that stuff.
Tom picked up the top sheet. “It’s from the Monkey Barrel. Alex wants some new equipment.” He took the next sheet. “This here’s from Alisha Beardsley, the Boss Chatter. We just got a shipment of encrypted satellite phones … another gift from Agent Ramirez. Twenty of ’em.”
“What’s a satellite phone?” Mrs. Ritter asked.
“Like a cell phone, ’cept it sends and receives straight to satellites instead of usin’ cell towers. More secure. Cell phones are easy to trace. These aren’t. It’s good news. Means no more wrist radios.”
Cool, Helene thought.
Tom smiled thinly and dropped both papers. “Just kids,” he echoed, looking hard at Will’s mother. “’Cept every single one of ’em had to split from their homes to fight the Corpses. Some of them, like Alex, saw their folks die before they escaped.”
“It’s terrible,” Mrs. Ritter admitted.
Then Helene said, “Maybe I should go to Washington.”