Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel)

by Rachel Vincent

  “I never told them I knew.” A slight shift in the shadows and the squeal of bedsprings told me she’d folded her legs beneath her on the mattress. “They clearly didn’t want anyone to know, and I sure as hell didn’t want to hear about it, from either perspective. So I left it alone. But I had no idea it went on as long as it did until he showed me the notebook. Three days ago.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Then I kind of wished I hadn’t.

  “What was she like?”

  Kori leaned forward, her palms propped on the edge of the bed, and I could see her face now, still heavily shrouded in shadow. “Noelle was...a puzzle. I knew that even before I knew I should be putting the pieces together. You’re kind of like her, in that respect. But only that one.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. “He loved her?”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “Did she love him?”

  Kori hesitated. “Maybe. In her own way. But things with Noelle were...complicated. We didn’t know it at the time, but in looking back, I don’t think she was ever really a normal kid. Because of her Skill. I don’t think she did anything—including my brother—without a reason related to something she’d seen in prophesy.”

  “So...she used him?” That bitch. My own thought surprised me, but I refused to let myself overanalyze it.

  “I think she really did care about him, but yes. She used him. For multiple...things. But I’m not sure he actually understands that, even now. I’m also not sure he’d want me to tell you any of this,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “Then why are you?” I whispered back, my feet on the floor now, so the chair couldn’t spin.

  “Because he doesn’t always know what’s best for him.” She paused and seemed to reconsider. “I take that back. He almost never knows what’s best for him.”

  “And you do?”

  She shrugged. “I know it’s no better for him to keep living in the past than it is for Gran.”

  “And by ‘the past,’ you mean Noelle?”

  Kori frowned. “I mean all of it. Kris is a man on a mission that can never be fulfilled, without a time machine. He can’t go back and save Elle from a bullet. He can’t go back and save Kenley or me from the Towers, and no matter how many kids he shuttles from one safe harbor to the next, he can never undo what happened to Micah.”

  “Kids?” Micah?

  “The kids he works with.”

  “How do kids fit in with bail bondsmen and private collectors?” Something wasn’t adding up...

  Kori frowned. “That’s what he told you? That he rounds up criminals and collectibles?”

  I nodded slowly. “So it’s not true?” My chest ached. He’d lied to me.

  “Oh, that’s true, but it’s only half the story. Kris is a smuggler.”

  “A smuggler?” Pieces were falling into place in my head, but the big picture wouldn’t come into focus. “A...kid smuggler?” Were those the kids Gran was talking about? “So he is a kidnapper?”

  Kori shook her head. “No, he’s a liberator. And they’re not small kids. They’re mostly teenagers. Kids who’ve just discovered their Skill and are at risk of being ‘recruited’ by the mafia.” The bitter scowl that accompanied her air quotes spoke volumes about her own recruitment. “He gets them out of the city and helps place them with families in the suburbs. Families with Jammers. Like you. To keep them safe until they learn how to hide themselves.”

  Holy crap. “And does Gran...cook for them?” Suddenly the four huge cans of marinara made sense.

  “She did, before he had to take away the knives and stove knobs. She’s only truly with us about half the time now.” Kori shrugged. “Of course, all of that’s on hold now while we’re here helping Kenley break her bindings.”

  “He didn’t tell me.” Why didn’t he tell me? “Does that mean he doesn’t trust me?”

  Another shrug. “He’s just really careful. It’s his life’s work, and a lot of people would get hurt—or killed—if the wrong people find out.”

  People, like the Towers.

  “Kenni and I didn’t know about it until our bindings were broken. He couldn’t tell us, because we’d have had to report it.”

  I was still mulling that over when she sat up straight and her face receded into the shadows. “I think I know why you can’t stop me from traveling into the closet,” she said, and girl-chat time was obviously over.

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t give a shit whether or not I can travel into the closet. When you stopped us earlier, it was because you really didn’t want us to go without you. Right?”

  I nodded. I could see where this was headed. “So, I’m only going to be able to stop people from using Skills I really don’t want them to use?”

  “At first? Yes. But you’ll get the hang of it with practice, and for now, the good news is that if someone’s Skill threatens you or someone you want to protect, I’m guessing you really won’t want him to use it. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s test the theory.” She stood and grabbed my hand, then leaned forward to kick the bedroom door closed, cutting off most of the light from the hall. Which left us standing in almost total darkness, thanks to the thick drapes. “I’m guessing the place you want least in the world to be right now is...your parents’ den.”

  My hand clenched around hers and my heart tried to claw its way up my throat.

  “That’s where it happened, isn’t it? That’s where you saw him on top of your sister? Where you heard her screaming? Where you realized what he would do when he was done with her? Right?”

  “Kris told you?” My voice sounded hollow. Dead.

  Kori shook her head, but I didn’t so much see that as feel it—movement in the dark. “I read the police report.”

  Then she knew the rest of it.

  “It’s none of your business,” I whispered, but when I tried to pull my hand from hers, she only tightened her grip.

  “I know. I’m sorry for what happened to your family, and for invading your privacy. But if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t know where they lived, and I wouldn’t be able to take you there now. He’s not there anymore, Sera. I can take you back there, and he won’t be there.”

  “No.” I tried to pull my hand from hers again, but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Good. Stop me if you can. This will be a good test. But if you can’t block me, just remember that he won’t be there when we get there. No one will be there. You can go back there this one time and put the whole thing behind you.”

  But that wasn’t true. I couldn’t go back there. And even if I could stand to be in that room again, being there wouldn’t fix anything. Not as long as he still had a pulse.

  “I’ll be right there with you. No matter what happens, this is a step in the right direction.” She tried to pull me forward, but I wouldn’t move. I couldn’t. So she pulled harder, and I stumbled after her. One step. Two. Three, and we crashed into Gran’s dresser.

  “Shit!” Kori dropped my hand to clutch—whatever had banged the dresser.

  The bedroom door flew open behind us, and I whirled around an instant before the overhead light blinded me. “What’s wrong?” Ian demanded as Kris pushed past him into the room.

  “She did it.” Kori was smiling—beaming—like she was proud of me, or maybe proud of herself, but all I could hear was what she’d said before. In the dark.

  I can take you there.

  All I could see was the tall man with the curly hair. Blood leaking from my sister’s stomach to pool on the floor. The tall man’s creepy grin as he lurched after me and grabbed my shoulder, his knife already dripping...

  “Kori tried...” I said, but I couldn’t finish it. “She tried to...” My arm took over when my tongue failed for a second time. My fist crashed into her jaw and Kori stumbled backward into the dresser.

  “You ungrateful little bitch!” She bounced back faster than I could believe, brow furrowed in ang
er, both fists clenched and ready to swing. “I was trying to help you!”

  My heart thumped painfully and my fists rose—I was too busy being scared of the tall man to be scared of her.

  Kris jumped between us. Ian pulled Kori back with one arm wrapped around her waist.

  “What happened?” Kris’s gaze bounced from me to his sister.

  “I’m fine. Let me go,” she said, and Ian let her go, but stayed close. “I was trying to help her. I did help her. She blocked me.”

  They both turned to me for my version. “That crazy bitch tried to shadow-walk me into my parents’ house. Where they all died.” Where I’d lost everything.

  “Kori!” Kris looked furious.

  “I wasn’t really going to do it.” She crossed her arms over her chest and huffed in exasperation. “You know I can’t go that far in one shot.”

  She couldn’t?

  “I was just going walk her into the hall closet, but she had to think I was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go, or she couldn’t block me.” She turned to Ian. “It’s just like what you did for Kenley to help her break my binding. She had to really want it. Same principal, right?”

  “That was an emergency, Kori,” he said, in that way he had of making quiet words seem more important than shouted ones. “Most people don’t respond well to the shock-and-awe approach.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Kris demanded, and his arm slid around my waist. Maybe I should have pushed him away, to prove I could stand on my own, but instead I scooted closer, and his arm tightened around me, and I realized he wasn’t trying to protect me—he was standing with me.

  “I was thinking that she had the balls to do what needs to be done, no matter what that requires.” Kori gestured angrily as she spoke. “She’s the one who wants to charge into enemy territory, and we can’t send her in unprepared. She has to be able to use her Skills.”

  “Kori...” Kris started, but she cut him off, her anger clashing with his.

  “Listen up, all of you.” She stepped away from Ian and addressed us as a group—as if she were in charge—and my blood boiled. “None of you know what Julia’s capable of. Not like I do.”

  “She can’t hurt me,” I insisted, clinging to that very thought.

  Kori turned to me, eyes narrowed, studying me. “She can’t physically hurt you, or order someone else to. But there are many kinds of pain, Sera. What that man did to your sister? What you saw? Julia can and will make that happen all over again. Maybe to someone you know—she’ll pluck your best friends right off the street, if she can find them. She’ll make you watch them tortured, for no reason other than to see you suffer. To make you remember what you would do anything to forget.”

  My friends? College felt like a lifetime ago. My friends were a universe away—I hadn’t seen even one of them since the funeral. But they weren’t beyond the Towers’ reach. “Why would she...” My question had no end. I couldn’t say it.

  “To make you give up your birthright. To illustrate what a heartless bitch she really is. Because she’s premenstrual. Because she’s bored. Because she can. She doesn’t need a reason to cause pain, but she has plenty of them to choose from.”

  “We won’t let that happen,” Kris swore. Then he turned on his sister. “Get out.”

  “You’re sending a lamb to the slaughter, Kris. You all need to listen to me.”

  “And you need to back the fuck off and get out of here!”

  Kori blinked, stunned. Then she glanced at me and backed slowly toward the door.

  “If Sera goes in there and her plan falls apart—hell, even if it doesn’t fall apart—they’ll use every weapon at their disposal to break her. And her weak spot is pretty fucking obvious.” Her hand found the doorknob and one foot landed over the threshold in the hall. “She needs to deal with that shit before she goes in there, or they’re going to rip her heart out and serve it on crackers.”

  With that, she stomped past Ian into the hall and out of sight.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, when she was gone. “She really does mean well. And she speaks from experience you can’t even...” He stopped and studied me for a minute. “Well, maybe you can imagine. Her approach was wrong, but her heart’s in the right place. She really was trying to help.”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept his apology, in part because it wasn’t his to give. But his point lingered. And I suspected he was right—they both were. Not that I was eager to go home again. That house was haunted, if not by ghosts, then by memories. By loss. And if I couldn’t face my own memories, how the hell was I supposed to face down Julia Tower?

  Seventeen

  Kris

  “You sure you want to do this now?” I slid the full clip into place in the handle of the .40 Sera had confiscated from Mitch. “You’re entitled to a break, you know.”

  The warm, early fall breeze blew a long dark strand of hair across Sera’s forehead. “Screw that.” She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and secured her hair in a casual ponytail at the base of her skull, then laid her palm over the gun I’d set in front of her, barrel aimed down our makeshift firing range—a card table in the backyard, fifty feet from a fresh paper target tacked to an old, dead oak tree. “Sitting around thinking about what can’t be changed won’t help. I need something to do. I need to do this.”

  “No one expects you to get over everything you’ve been through just like that.” I pressed the last 9 mm round into the clip for the gun I’d borrowed from my sister.

  “Kori does.”

  “She doesn’t expect you to get over it. She expects you to deal with it. She’s not over all the shit she’s been through, either.”

  “I know.” Sera watched as a brown rabbit hopped from a clump of overgrown bushes toward the woods at the edge of the property. I loved that we were far enough from downtown to have rabbits, at least until we scared them off with gunfire. “She has nightmares. Loud ones.”

  “They’re getting better.”

  Sera turned away from the tree line to frown at me, squinting into the sun. “That’s better?”

  I nodded and picked up an extra clip next to the pistol on the table in front of me. “She hasn’t tried to gut anyone in her sleep in, like, a month.”

  She thought I was kidding. I could tell from her exasperated expression. I decided to let her think that. And to warn her away from Kori and Ian’s room after dark.

  “So, what happened with Ned the other day?” I said as I pressed the first round into the extra 9 mm clip. “You just freed him, with no clause to make sure he could never hurt you? Why would you do that? Especially after what you’ve already been through?”

  She stared at the table, considering for a second before she answered. “It never occurred to me that he’d want to hurt me. I’d just set him free. I thought he’d be happy!”

  “I’m sure he was.” I huffed. “He was a happy threat.”

  “I’m not...wired that way.” She shrugged. “I don’t look at the rest of the population and see seven billion threats. I can’t live in a world where everyone’s my enemy. For my own sanity, I need to believe the monster who killed my family is just that. A monster. An aberration.”

  “He is. But he’s not the only one.”

  “I know, but...” She looked up at me, frowning. “I don’t understand how you can stand it, seeing enemies everywhere you look.”

  “I don’t see them everywhere, but I am constantly aware that they exist, and that’s particularly true for you. Julia wants you dead, so all her people are your enemies. If Ruben Cavazos finds out who you are and that you’re here, he’ll want you in custody. That means that nearly everyone you meet in the city is out to kill you or sell you to the highest bidder.”

  “Even you?” Her eyes asked even more than her words did.

  “No. Not me.” I took a deep breath, then spit out the truth along with a grin meant to disguise it as a joke. “I want to keep you.”

  She smiled, just
a little, and I had to clear my throat and look away before I tried to kiss her again.

  “Okay, show me how to use this thing, or I’m just going to assume it works like they do in the movies.”

  “Don’t. In real life, you have to reload when you run out of ammo, and you’re probably not going to be chasing bad guys across busy intersections while leaking blood from three bullet holes in your side. Ian’s pretty badass, and one was enough to drop him. But before you learn how to use this—” I picked up her gun, barrel pointed toward the tree line “—you need to know what it is and what it holds.”

  “It’s a Glock 22.” She ran one finger over the side of the barrel, and I noticed that her attention to the gun seemed...fond. Not quite eager, but not afraid. “Says so right here.”

  Okay, she had me there. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Glock is the brand name. Twenty-two is the style number. Also says it was made in Austria, but I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

  “Not for today.” I wanted to smile, but I resisted. This wasn’t a date; it was a lesson. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t noticed that her hair smelled like strawberries and her borrowed shirt—Van’s this time—was a little snug around her chest. “And what does this Glock 22 fire?”

  “Forty-caliber rounds.”

  “Which means?”

  She rolled her eyes over my beginner-level questions. “It means that the bullets this thing shoots are four-tenths of an inch in diameter. If you wanna go bigger, you can get a .45 or a .50, but unless you’re shooting elephants or the walking dead, the .50 is probably overkill. On the smaller end, you have the 9 mm, which is measured in millimeters, obviously, instead of inches. That’s what that thing fires.” She glanced at the pistol I’d borrowed from Kori’s collection. “Or, you can get a .38. Or even a .22, like Vanessa’s.”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t help it. Fruit-scented toiletries, tight shirts and gun talk—Sera Brant had just outed herself as the perfect woman. “I thought you’d never fired a gun.”