by Clara Kensie
“A few weeks?” I cried. “No. Please.”
“Oh, no,” Kellan said. “We did things your way for eight years, Dennis. Your kinder, gentler way of doing things got us nowhere while the Kitteridge Killers roamed the country, murdering everyone. Now their kids are doing the same thing.”
He nodded to a small group of investigators with red badges hanging around their necks. “You, you and you,” he said, pointing to two women and a man. “Drop everything else you’re doing. You’re on my team now, and this case is our top priority. I’m tired of those Carsons killing people, especially our people. I’m not going to risk another murder.”
Kellan turned to Dennis, a silent message flying between them.
Dennis turned white. “No,” he said. “You can’t. Kellan, they’re just kids.”
“Those kids are becoming more and more unstable. Just like their mother,” Kellan said. “First they assaulted that motel manager in Tennessee, and now they used their psionic powers with the intent to kill. My order is completely justified, and Beverly Jacobs will support it.”
“What order is that?” Tristan said.
Kellan’s gaze swept to me, landing for just a moment, before he turned to the investigators. “When you find those Carson kids,” he said, “shoot to kill.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I blinked, unable to believe what I’d just heard. John Kellan had just ordered my siblings to be killed. Not found and brought back safely to me, not captured, not tranquilized. Killed. He wanted them dead.
Kellan shrugged into his black APR jacket and shoved a hat on his head. “I need to go tell Beverly Jacobs what the Carson kids did to her son,” he muttered. The APR employees parted as he left the boardroom.
“Wait! Please! You can’t kill them,” I cried, jumping up from the chair and pushing through the crowd, Tristan close behind.
Someone grabbed my arm, preventing me from running after Kellan. “Let me go!” I turned to see the person holding me back was Nathan Gallagher.
“Get your hands off her, Gallagher,” Tristan growled, then stood back with a gasp. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re blocking my premonitions. That’s why they haven’t been working right. I thought it was my fault. I thought there was something wrong with me. But it’s not me. It’s you.”
Nathan froze for one second, then his lip curled. “She’s Killers’ Spawn, Connelly. How can you be in love with that?”
Tristan roared, then flew at Nathan. Dreadlocks sailing, Nathan leapt upon him with both hands.
Dennis shouted, and Cole rushed in. As they tried to pull the boys apart, I slipped from the room and caught up with Kellan in the hall.
“They thought Aaron was trying to kill them,” I cried, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket. “It was self-defense. They don’t know the truth. Kellan. M-Mr. Kellan. Please.”
Kellan pulled his jacket from my hand, then strode away without a word. I rushed after him again, but this time it was Dennis who held me back. “Let him go, Tessa.”
“But he’s going to kill my brother and sister.”
“The board will never allow it,” he said. “The APR doesn’t kill people, Tessa. Unless...”
“Unless what?”
“Unless our lives are in jeopardy. Then we’re allowed to use deadly force. It’s been our policy since—”
“Since my parents killed Nathan and Melanie’s dads.” I sank against the wall. “And tried to kill you.”
Dennis sighed. “Yes.”
My siblings had already promised they would kill every person who came after them. And they had the motivation and the means to do it.
The APR employees filtered from the boardroom, rumbling amongst each other. Cole dragged Nathan out by the arm. They wore the same enraged expression. Nathan’s anger was aimed at me, but Cole’s was aimed at Nathan. “You’re a safeguard,” he yelled. “You’re supposed to protect people, not hurt them.” He shoved Nathan into a private office.
Tristan came staggering out, his lip bloody and swollen. I regained my legs and ran over, then gently touched his lip. “Are you okay?”
He grabbed me and drew me in. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you when you told me about Nathan, Tessa. You told me he hated you, and I defended him. I thought I knew him.” He glared at the office where Cole had brought Nathan, a muscle pulsing in his jaw.
I stopped him before he could burst into that office and attack Nathan again. “Tristan, we have to leave,” I said. “We have to go to Colorado. Now. We have to find Jillian and Logan before Kellan does.”
Sucking in air, he put me under one arm and wiped the blood from his lip with his other. “I’m sorry, Tessa,” he said, taking another gulp of air. “But you can’t leave Lilybrook.”
“You—” I stopped, frozen, mouth agape. “Even now? But Nathan won’t block your premonitions about me anymore. He wouldn’t dare. They’ll work now. You have to let me leave.”
“My premonitions have nothing to do with it,” he said. “My mom’s dream is still a threat.”
“But I’m the only one Jillian and Logan will trust. I’m the only one they won’t hurt.” I looked back at the crowd for support. They looked back at me, Killers’ Spawn, and they were unmoved.
Dennis included. “We can’t risk three dead Carson kids.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go with Kellan to talk to Beverly Jacobs. I’ll try to convince her to call off the shoot-to-kill order. Aaron is her son, but she’s a rational person. At this point, that’s about all we can do. Except hope that Jillian and Logan stay hidden long enough for us to figure something else out.”
He glanced at Tristan. “Stay away from Nathan,” he said. “Let Cole and the board deal with him.”
With a sympathetic squeeze of my shoulder, he rushed away to catch up with Kellan.
Unbidden but welcomed, the fog rolled in to numb me as Tristan and I walked outside to his car, he keeping me tight under his arm. He stood tall, chest thrust out, full of confidence now that he could depend on his warning premonitions again.
Tristan drove us back to the Connellys’ house. It would have been so easy for him to turn left onto Main Street, then left onto the highway, then west to Colorado. My yellow getaway bag was still in the trunk of his car.
But no. He turned right onto Main Street, then right onto his street, then parked on his driveway and led me inside. “We just have to wait, and hope,” he said. “You just stay in Lilybrook where it’s safe. My dad and I will deal with Kellan. I’ll fix everything. I promise.”
I nodded, but I was tired of waiting. And hope, I’d learned, was useless. Hope wouldn’t save my brother and sister. Promises wouldn’t save them either.
Only action would save them. And Tristan, in his desperate attempt to keep me safe from Deirdre’s dream of tiny houses with silver-walled rooms, refused to let me take action.
I wasn’t going to hope. I couldn’t just sit back and let Tristan fix things for me anymore. I didn’t care about staying safe. I didn’t care about Deirdre’s dream. The only thing I cared about was Jillian and Logan.
With Marmalade on my lap, I watched as Tristan opened his laptop and did some more research. I nodded at his promises that he would fix this for me, that all I had to do was stay here in Lilybrook where it was safe.
But none of it sank in.
My getaway bag was in the trunk of Tristan’s car.
That one was useless.
But I had another getaway bag, a denim bag I’d used for eight years while my family was on the run. Jillian and Logan had it now. They’d taken it with them when our parents sent them away that last night in Twelve Lakes.
I knew how to find my brother and sister. But there was only one person who could help me, and I had ruined her life.
* * *
Tristan didn
’t go to Heron University the next day. He was going to the APR, to try to convince Kellan to withdraw his shoot-to-kill order.
I, on the other hand, told Tristan I wanted to go to school.
“I can’t leave Lilybrook anyway,” I said. “And there’s nothing I can do about Kellan. If I try to convince him to change his mind, it’ll just make him more determined not to.” I wrapped my arms around his chest. “I may as well go to school. I know you’ll fix this for me.”
Placated, he lifted my chin and kissed me tenderly. “I will,” he said. “I promise.”
I even let Deirdre drive me to school.
Instead of heading to my first period art class, I waited for Melanie Brunswick at her locker. She paused in her steps when she saw me, then continued forward. Her hair was down and she wore her usual Doc Martens with black tights and a black skirt.
We stared at each other awkwardly. We both had reasons not to trust the other. My parents had murdered her dad. Tristan had broken up with her to be with me. Her best friend was Winter Milbourne, who hated me. And her uncle had just issued a shoot-to-kill order on my brother and sister.
But she was the only person who could help me save their lives.
“Melanie,” I said, drawing a breath and thrusting my chin, “I need your help.”
“Me?” she said, opening her violet eyes wide. “Do you want me to talk to my uncle? He’d never listen to me.”
“No. Don’t talk to your uncle,” I said, then leaned in closer. “You find lost things, right? That’s your psionic ability?”
“Shh.” She looked over her shoulder at the other students in the hall, then softly said, “Yes.”
“How do you do it?”
She stepped closer to me. “I just need to know what you’re missing,” she said. “Then I see the item in my head. It works best with items you have an emotional connection to. Like jewelry. So if you lost your earring, I could tell you if it fell off at a restaurant or if it’s in a drawer somewhere. If you only lost a tube of lipstick, I probably couldn’t find it.”
Perfect. I had a huge emotional connection to my missing item—a connection that meant life or death.
“I lost a bag,” I said. It was my getaway bag, but I didn’t call it that because I didn’t want her to know I was looking for Jillian and Logan. Her uncle would read her mind, or Winter, and they would thwart my plan. “Can you find it for me?”
“What does it look like?” she asked.
“It’s a denim bag with a shoulder strap,” I said. The hallway was becoming crowded as more students stopped at their lockers or made their way to their first period class. “Light blue. Scuffed and worn. It has a zipper across the top.”
“Is there anything inside?”
“Not much. A pair of jeans, a sweater, jogging clothes, a hairbrush, a toothbrush,” I said. “And a book. Anne of Green Gables.” Tristan had given it to me in Twelve Lakes. He’d even signed an inscription inside the front cover. But Melanie didn’t need to know that.
“A denim bag with a shoulder strap. Clothes and a book inside,” she repeated. “Okay. I’ll look.” She closed her eyes.
I stood still. Bit my lips to stay quiet. Let her concentrate. A few feet away, a boy slammed his locker shut, and I shushed him.
Melanie tilted her head, furrowed her brow. “There is no bag.”
“Yes, there is,” I said. “I saw it a few weeks ago.” I had seen it in a vision in the motel room in Tennessee. Jillian was going through it, crying and reminiscing.
She only shrugged. “It must not exist anymore. Otherwise I would see it.”
“Why wouldn’t it exist anymore?” I asked. “How can something just cease to exist?”
Then I realized—my siblings must have burned it. While my family was on the run, we’d always burned our things. Maybe Jillian and Logan had gotten tired of lugging my getaway bag around and burned it. I almost crumpled with disappointment.
“The book still exists though,” Melanie said. “I can sense the book.”
I almost leapt with joy. “Anne of Green Gables? Where is it?”
“It’s inside a bag. Not your bag. Another bag.”
“Where is that bag?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s dark inside the bag. But it’s moving fast. And there’s a humming.”
“Like the trunk of a car?”
Her face scrunched up. “No, it’s definitely not in a trunk. Too small and square. And it’s up too high to be in a trunk.”
“A small, moving, humming square that’s up high,” I said. “What does that mean?”
She opened her eyes and shrugged. “That’s what I saw. I don’t know what it is. Sorry.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter what it’s inside of,” I said with a sigh. “What I need to know is where it is. A town. I’ll even take a state.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “All I can do is see its surroundings. I wouldn’t know what town it’s in.” She looked down at her boots. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not very good.”
Frustrated, I rubbed my fingertips into my eyes. “No, you’re fantastic, Melanie. You’ve already been a big help.” Whatever that small, humming square was, it was moving. Which meant that Jillian and Logan were on the move too. “Will you keep looking? Once the book gets taken out of that square, you can describe its surroundings to me and I’ll take it from there.”
Hesitantly, she gave me one nod.
“Thanks, Melanie. Call me the moment you see it.”
The warning bell rang for first period and she looked nervously down the hall. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“You won’t. But call me,” I said. “Not Tristan.” I ripped a piece of paper from my notebook and scribbled my phone number on it.
She tucked my phone number in a textbook and rushed away, probably thinking I didn’t want her to call Tristan so she could win him back. But that wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want her to call Tristan because if he knew what I was planning to do, he would try to stop me.
Chapter Thirty
In art class the next morning, Mr. Vargas assigned us to do a self-portrait using oil pastels. I accidentally drew the Nightmare Eyes instead. I threw my paper away before anyone saw it and told Mr. Vargas that I’d try again tomorrow.
It had been an entire day since I’d asked Melanie to find my Anne of Green Gables book, and she still hadn’t found it. Every time I passed her in the hall, she shook her head. I kept my phone clipped to my waistband, but it never rang, except once, when Tristan proudly called to tell me I was about to trip over my shoelace on my way to chemistry.
My book was still inside that small, moving, humming square, and every minute that passed, my stomach knotted tighter with anxiety and worry. Dennis had reported this morning that Beverly Jacobs would support the shoot-to-kill order, but only if innocent lives were at risk. That was good news, but knowing Kellan, he wouldn’t wait to make that judgment. He would kill them the moment he saw them.
I stopped at my locker before Spanish to grab my textbook, when Melanie came rushing up to me.
“It’s on fire,” she said, slightly out of breath.
“What’s on fire?”
“Your book. It’s on fire.”
I clamped my hand over my mouth. “Inside that moving square?”
“It’s not inside that square anymore. It’s outside. On fire.”
Why would Jillian and Logan have kept my book this whole time, only to burn it now?
It didn’t matter why. For the first time since they went missing, I knew what my brother and sister were doing now, this very moment. Not in the past. Not in the future. Now. I knew what they were doing, but I still didn’t know where they were.
“Do you know where it’s burning?” I asked, try
ing to be casual, trying not to get my hopes up. “Like in a field, maybe?”
She tilted her head and closed her eyes. “It’s in a garbage can. Red. Near a brick building.”
I bounced on my toes with excitement. This was it. I was going to find my brother and sister today. “Do you see a road sign near that building? Anything that would identify its location?”
She scrunched her face in concentration. Then she exhaled, shoulders slumped. “It’s gone.”
I stopped bouncing, my heels dropping heavily to the floor. “What do you mean, gone?”
“The vision. It’s gone.”
“How can it just be gone like that?”
“Because it burned up,” she said, shrugging. “It doesn’t exist anymore, just like your bag. There’s nothing left for me to see. I’m sorry, Tessa. I know you wanted your stuff, but it’s all gone.” She started to walk away.
“Wait,” I said. “We can’t just give up because the vision is gone. Did you remember seeing any landmarks?” I prompted her. “Describe the building to me.”
She closed her eyes again, squeezed them tight. “Well, the building was brick. There was a sign over the door.”
“Do you remember what it said?”
“Something Coin-Op Laundry. Lano Coin-Op Laundry? Something like that.”
I whipped out my phone and typed Lano Coin-Op Laundry into the browser. “There are no results for Lano Coin-Op,” I said, “but there’s a Lako.”
“Lako,” she said, nodding with her eyes still closed. “Yes, that was it.”
There was no website for Lako Coin-Op Laundry, only an old yellowpages.com listing. The business was marked closed, but there was an address. 56 Boynes Street. Woodmoor, North Dakota.
I entered the address into my Google Earth app and held my breath as it zoomed in on a building surrounded by an empty asphalt parking lot. The trees at the edge of the lot were in full bloom. It was winter now, so the image had been captured awhile ago.