by Cecily White
“Hey, how’s Bud?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject. “Still in Baton Rouge?”
“No, he came home yesterday, as soon as he got my message telling him not to come home.”
“Typical.”
“Tell me about it. Elder Akira finished interrogating us last night, but Bud and Henry are both still in lock-up at school. The Elders aren’t technically allowed to hold Bud since he hasn’t done anything wrong. But—”
“But they know he’d help me if he could.”
“Yeah. Katie thinks they’ll probably wipe his memory. And Henry—” She groaned. “Wow, I wish I’d seen it. According to Alec’s dad, Henry grabbed a broadsword at the interrogation and started screaming that he was the one who helped Jack break you out. Said if they wanted to stop him, they’d have to kill him. It took like four tranquilizers and a stunner charm to bring him down.”
“Sounds major.” I paused to crack open the bathroom window as a stereo blared to life behind Lisa. “Where are you?”
“At Alec’s house. His dad’s got a secret phone line.”
“Tell her I got detention for defending her honor,” Alec shouted in the distance.
“Did he really?”
“Well, he got detention, but mostly for calling Akira a closed-minded troglodyte,” she said. “Chancellor Thibault made them drop the rest of the charges against us. They didn’t even freak about the arsenal break-in since it was allegedly an attempt to stop Henry. Pretty gullible, right?”
“That’s grown-ups for you.” Much as it killed me to think of poor, sweet Henry in lock-up, at least I knew my friends were okay. That was something. And who knew, maybe Jack had a back up plan to break Bud and Henry out. I wasn’t putting anything past him.
“Lis, ask Alec if his dad can do anything for Bud. And Henry, too. Losing Smalley is going to be hard enough. He doesn’t deserve to rot in prison for the rest of his life.”
“I will,” she promised.
We fell into a semi-awkward silence. In the background, I could hear Matt and Alec sparring while Katie urged them to take it easy. It was hard knowing how little they could do for me…and how little I could do for them. I think Lisa felt it, too. Neither of us wanted to admit that, overnight, my friends had morphed from a vibrant part of my life into a useless piece of history—like turning the page of a book to find the rest of it suddenly blank.
“I should probably go,” I said.
“Yeah, I know.” She was quiet for another moment, though the line stayed open. “Look, the Chancellor’s trying to work out a deal. Immunity for Mr. Smith-Hailey and a stay of execution for you, in exchange for your surrender. It’s not ideal, obviously, but we can always break you out later.”
“Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind,” I said. I was about to hang up when another thought occurred to me. “Hey, Lis, if you needed to get a copy of your birth certificate, what would you do?”
“I’d ask my mom. Why?”
I stared at the phone. How can some people be so smart and so dense at the same time? “Let me rephrase.” I tried again. “If you were a seventeen-year-old fugitive with no access to your parents and you needed to see your birth records—”
“Ahh,” she said, “that’s harder. Guardians don’t keep records about stuff like that…you know, because of the Great Books and all.”
“Right. Of course.” Seriously, was I the only one who had no clue about the stupid Great Books?
“You could try Louisiana Vital Records,” she suggested, “but they’ll probably need a parent’s signature. Same for hospital records. There’s always the Guardian Internet Database, but that’s a lot harder to pick through. Is this about your alleged twin brother? Oooh, do you think he’s hot?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t just say that.”
She gave me her Internet passcode so I could bypass the human lockouts without tipping off any trackers, and quickly hung up the phone. If I didn’t get some coffee soon, my execution would be a non-issue since I’d perish from caffeine withdrawal. I milled around the bathroom until my stomach began to rumble, then went back into the bedroom to watch Jack sleep some more. It sounds boring, I know, but if you saw the guy, you’d understand why it wasn’t.
He was amazing when he slept. His body held a faint luminescence that seemed to intensify the closer I got. I found myself playing with that glow—holding my hand over his heart until I could feel the strands of light, then tugging at them until they glowed brighter. Even his face lost its careful diffidence in slumber. He looked so much more like the relaxed future-Jack I’d seen in my visions.
So weird.
I remember reading somewhere how human beings cycle so many carbon atoms during their lifetime it was not only possible, but probable, that every human on the planet contained a carbon atom that once belonged to Jesus of Nazareth. Or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elvis. I always thought that was cool. It gave me some bit of comfort to think of all those people, all that history, being inside of me. I tried to time my inhale with Jack’s exhale, so I could take in as many of his carbon atoms as possible.
Jack had been asleep over four hours when impatience finally got the better of me. We had less than two days until he was supposed to die and our leads were nil. With Lisa’s passcode, all I needed was a few minutes on a computer and I might be able to verify the story about my supposed evil twin. Even if I couldn’t, at least I’d be able to hunt down some clues, right?
So far, we’d been thinking about this as a serial murder case. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t the whole story. If what Bertle said was true, then the first crime wasn’t murder at all. It was kidnapping. So, if I could find out who had access to my mom around the time of my birth, and who had opportunity to alter the birth records, then maybe I could figure out who was doing this now. It wasn’t much, but it would give us a starting point.
Luc had packed us a mini computer pad with a satellite modem. It took a few minutes to activate the modem and link it to the Starbucks Wi-Fi across the street, then another minute to talk myself out of checking my email. No doubt the Elders had tagged my account. If I logged on, even for a second, they could find us. I stared at the Yahoo welcome page with the longing of a forbidden lover. It just seemed like torture, another scrap of normal I couldn’t access.
Resigned, I entered the web address for the Louisiana Vital Records Registry. According to the website, I needed to be eighteen, not a criminal, and willing to wait eight to ten business days for them to process my request. Or I needed my dad.
So much for bureaucracies.
I tabled that quandary for the moment and, using Lisa’s passcode, logged on to the Guardian search engine. If the Elders were tracking Lisa’s code, too, then they’d be able to see whatever I searched for. I knew I might only have a few minutes before they locked onto the transmission signal.
I typed in “Charlotte Lane Birth” and hit the search icon.
The hit came up instantly, though it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. “Charlotte Lane Heralds the Birth of a New Guardian Dream Team.”
It was an old Guardian Times article celebrating St. Michael’s “latest crop” of outstanding warriors. I watched carefully as a photo of my mom with a group of young Guardians digitized on the screen. Dad looked awesome with his battle garb and broadsword. He had one arm slung over her shoulder and an easy smile at his lips. Super badass. They wore the old Guardian uniform, before we moved to lightweight Kevlar gear. Black leather armor was stitched over every inch of the stretchy material, with panels of hard carbon along the forearms. Like Batman, minus the cape. It worked great if you were fending off an airborne demon attack, but the limitations in a sword fight were far from ideal.
The resolution on the photo was grainy, though I could still recognize a few of the others with them. Gunderman in the back row, with his floppy hair and lanky body. D’Arcy up front, caught mid-blink. Even Lisa’s parents grinned gleefully from the rear of the pack. My mother cou
ldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen in the picture, her face a bit leaner than I remembered. She smiled proudly at the camera, one hand intertwined with my dad’s, the other clasped firmly on the arm of the man beside her. He was tall and handsome, with wavy brown hair and a nice profile.
Mom’s Watcher.
Everyone liked to gossip about what happened between them—how Charlotte had betrayed him. As far as I could tell, none of it was her fault. She’d done nothing any other pregnant mom-to-be wouldn’t have done. Obviously, I didn’t know the details. Nobody knew the details.
My mom and dad were a couple all through high school. They’d gotten engaged, set a date for the wedding, hired a band, the whole nine yards. When bond assignments came up and Charlotte was given to a recent grad she’d never met, they were horrified. They postponed the wedding. They talked about leaving the Guardians, defecting to the human sector. But Mom couldn’t do it. As a child of Raphael, she had the mission in her blood. So Dad defected, and Mom bonded with Bobby.
Everyone expected Charlotte to leave Bud. I think even Bud expected her to leave. But she never did. They got married a year later, and she was pregnant in no time.
I wouldn’t have known anything about the accident if I hadn’t overheard them talking one night. My dad kept saying how it was the right decision to save the baby. How even though it crippled her bondmate, a child’s soul, no matter who the child was, was worth the sacrifice. I figured, for whatever reason, it must have come to a choice between risking the life of her unborn child or letting Bobby get brutalized by demons during a jump. She’d obviously picked me.
I had to wonder, did Mom ever regret it? If she’d known what bloodline she carried in her belly, would she still have sacrificed him—sacrificed her career—to save me? To save us?
According to my dad, Bobby moved away after I was born. He never said why, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He came back to the house once, I remember, years later. Dad tried to usher me off to bed, but I’d clung to the staircase railing, mesmerized. Before that night, it never occurred to me my mother was broken. I figured all moms had those bouts of silence, those days where their eyes stayed glazed and they couldn’t force themselves to eat. I had no clue, until I saw her with him.
She didn’t speak for weeks when he left again.
The words on the article scrolled down Luc’s computer pad, unread. It was the photo I wanted. If those people were my mom’s closest friends in high school, maybe one of them knew something about the kidnapping. Assuming that’s what it was. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine my parents willingly giving up their child…even if someone told them it was pure evil.
I tapped the download icon and waited while the image saved. Then I shut it down. About two minutes too late.
By the time I glanced out the window again, Starbucks was crawling with Guardians. Creepy Daniel stood with his back to the entrance, a dark gray duster thrown over his uniform. In his hand, he held a newspaper, rolled into a loose tube. No telling what was under it. A knife? A gun? Whatever it was, it didn’t look promising. Marcus stood beside him, blond hair whipping in the breeze like Fabio on a cover shoot. The rest of them scurried around, well-trained lemmings in trench coats, their own rolled-up newspapers clutched in hand.
So much for not striking around humankind.
Annoyed at myself, I stuffed the computer pad back into Luc’s satchel and started sketching out the containment wards to set up a portal. Jack was going to kill me when I told him I’d blown our safe house. Oh, well. At least we had plenty of time to get out before the cavalry figured out my Wi-Fi piggyback.
“Hey, Jack.” I gently touched his forehead, and he jerked awake. Probably not the best idea to startle a sleeping man with a deadly weapon in his hand.
“Easy,” I said. “Just a friendly wake-up call.”
Jack rolled over, his eyes squinting at the light streaming in behind me. He leaned back and stretched his arms overhead. “What time is it?”
“Almost ten.” I settled onto the bed beside him, cross-legged. As adorable as he’d been a few minutes ago, it was nothing compared to the sweet, bleary-eyed look of amusement in his eyes now. “What are you smiling about?”
He shrugged, his hands laced into a cradle behind his head. “You’re still here.”
“Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know. The mall? Eating omelets somewhere?” He tugged at my tangled red ponytail. “Hey, that’s a good nickname for you. Omelet.”
“Very funny.” I gave him a nasty look. “The good news is, despite my near starvation I didn’t abandon you to go on a breakfast run. And as you know, I consider that a rather large sacrifice.”
“I appreciate it. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, what’s the bad news?”
Faint clanging noises rose up from across the street. “Bad news?”
“Yeah, you said that was the good news. When someone points out the good news, they usually follow with the bad.”
“Right. Well, there are two things,” I admitted. “The first is I’ve been thinking—”
“God, help us.”
“About my dad. Lisa told me they’re holding him at the school,” I said. “So I had an idea about what we have to do next.”
He sat up and quit smiling. “The answer’s no. No way.”
“But it’s our best shot. We have questions. He knows the answers,” I said. “What are we supposed to do? Wait until the Elders wipe his memory? We’ll never find out who my brother is.”
“Ami.” Jack leveled me with a glare. “You’re talking about breaking into a warded, maximum security facility to rescue a guy who hasn’t picked up a weapon in decades. It’s suicide.”
“Not necessarily. We’ll have the element of surprise,” I countered. “They think I’m guilty. Guilty people run away. They’ll never expect us to come to them.”
“Because only an insane person would do that.”
“Look, if you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it. I’m all ears.” I paused, arms laced across my chest. “Come on, Jack, you know I’m right.”
There was turmoil behind his eyes. “But he’s a civilian.”
“Not entirely. He’s trained. Out of practice, sure, but trained. And without the Otrava, I’m sure I can shield him in a portal jump. If you get me in, I’ll get us out. Please?” I gave him the puppy-dog eyes with just a hint of tearfulness. It worked on teachers all the time, though usually my goals had more to do with late homework than felony jailbreaks. “Jack, I’m begging you.”
“Ami, he’s a defector.”
“He’s my dad.”
Jack opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. He knew I had a point. Or maybe he was just a sucker for tears. I didn’t care. I’d lost nearly everything that mattered in my life. It was time to reclaim my dad and my past and start solving the mystery.
After the world’s longest pause, he finally nodded. “Fine.”
“Fine? Really?”
“Yeah.” He threw off the covers and stood, grabbing his weapons belt off the bedside table. He looked grumpy yet determined, a sexy combination if ever I’d seen one. I was on the brink of launching myself at him for another hug when he asked, “So, what’s the other thing?”
“The other thing?”
“With the bad news,” he said, impatient. “There were two—”
“Right,” I said. “About that. We should probably get moving soon. There may have been a tiny security breach while you were sleeping. Not a breach, really. More of a hiccup.”
On the street below, the noises picked up. I could already make out the vague sound of Marcus shouting and Creepy Daniel swearing at no one in particular. Apparently, Jack heard it, too.
“Omelet,” he growled.
“Sorry.” I smiled apologetically. “But the good news is, I know a great place to grab some breakfast.”
Chapter Eighteen:
Undone
&nb
sp; We waited until full dark to move on St. Michael’s. Totally James Bond, right?
As soon as Luc pulled onto Prytania Street, I could tell things had changed at the school. Deep green palm tendrils draped over the wrought iron fence, their edges fizzing on contact with the warded metal tines. The usual faint glow around the perimeter was amped up and shimmering, a sign that the wards had been fortified recently. Most humans would assume the glow came from the twinkle lights strung in anticipation of tomorrow night’s commencement formal, but I knew better. Maybe the Elders wouldn’t be expecting us, but we were idiots to think they wouldn’t be prepared.
Luc turned his Porsche down a side street and pulled to the curb as Dane’s pick-up screeched to a halt behind us. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Dane yet. He seemed nice enough when we met, in a friendly puppy sort of way. He had a full head of shaggy brown hair and a round face that lit up when he smiled. Which he did a lot. I think we might have been friends if we’d met under different circumstances. Not so possible with the mega-weird vibe between him and Jack.
Jack tried to be casual about it but I didn’t miss how diligently he positioned himself between Dane and me. Every time I moved, even to gesture to a new target on the campus map, Jack reoriented himself so he filled the space between us. I tried to ask what was up, but he just muttered something about lunar cycles and violent werewolf mating patterns.
Violent werewolf mating patterns? Um, yeah. After that, I didn’t mind so much.
“So, cousin,” Luc said, cutting the engine. “This is how you want to spend your last night on earth? Really?”
“Luc, we’ve been over this. Bud has information—”
“Which you desperately need. Yes, it’s not for me to judge. Lord knows I’ve had my share of evenings crouched in the bushes with a woman. I’m merely wondering if you’ve considered the alternatives.”