“That man is in there getting under Cady’s skin,” I told the dog, feeling about as agreeable as she did. “He’s hurting her.”
“Mom can take care of herself,” Jude interjected. “She’s the great Cady Bennett. She laughs in the face of danger and cantankerous relatives.”
I kept my focus on Duchess, whose expression was mutinous. “Someone doesn’t like being boxed in,” I murmured. “Someone doesn’t like surprises.”
Free looked from Duchess to me. “Someone doesn’t like changes that are out of her control.”
Free’s observation hit me harder than it should have. Pushing down the unexpected emotions roiling in my gut, I snagged the hose from Jude and tossed it to Free. “Splash around a little,” I told her. “Let Duchess come to you.”
Obligingly, Free ran her hand back and forth beneath the spray. Duchess cocked her head to the side, but Free knew better than to so much as look at the dog. Instead, she flicked a stream of water at me.
I jumped back, landing in a crouched position. A rumble made its way up my throat—a laugh. Free got a wicked gleam in her amber eyes and advanced on me slowly. Feeling like Saskia on the verge of a run, I dodged.
Play.
I needed this, and Free knew it. She feinted toward me, then, with an evil expression on her face, pivoted and turned the hose dramatically on Jude.
Full blast.
Jude shrieked like a banshee, sputtered, and fell smack on his haunches—in that order. “You know, of course,” he said, soaking-wet hair drooping into his face, “that this means war.”
An instant later, the three of us were grappling for the hose. I came out on top—but only for a second.
“Take that, you fiend!”
Jude wrapped his arms around my middle. Free went straight for the flying tackle. It didn’t take Duchess long to decide she wanted in on the action. NATO jumped out of the tub to join in, and soon, all five of us were soaked through and soaped up.
Jude climbed to his feet, holding the hose high. “This will not stand!”
I’d just taken a spray straight in the face when I heard the sound of footsteps to our left. I went instantly silent, even as the human part of my brain overrode my instinctual response. I knew those footsteps—light and even, unafraid. There was no threat. No reason to stop playing.
But just like that, the day’s events came roaring back.
I turned toward Cady, and she raised an eyebrow at the fact that Jude, Free, and I were all soaked to the bone.
“Good job,” she told the bloodhounds as they bounded toward her. “You gave the miscreants a bath.”
Part of me wanted to pick up the hose and aim it at Cady. I wanted to play. I wanted to give her what Free and Jude had just given me. But I couldn’t banish the words missing and child any longer.
“One to ten?” I asked Cady. She was the one who’d invented the shorthand—for nightmares, for flashbacks, for times when I needed out. How bad is it, one to ten?
“I’d say I’m sitting at about a six.” Cady shifted her attention from me to NATO, who was bounding toward her. “Don’t even think about it, mister.”
I squatted down and let NATO jump up on me. I was already soaked, and I deeply suspected that Cady’s six was a normal person’s nine.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” I asked. Missing and child were loaded words for Cady, just like they were for me.
My foster mother looked at me the way she had when I was small and angry and caught in a fight-or-flight cycle that neither of us could break.
“I’m not going,” she said. “We are. Get packed.”
I’d never been a person who cared much about material things. I didn’t have prized possessions. I wouldn’t have thought the idea of leaving home—the house, this room, my bed—would bother me.
A few hours ago, I’d been gnawing at the bit to get out.
But now that we were going someplace else, someplace new with new people and new rules that most humans never had to explicitly learn, I had the urge to put my back to the wall and hunker down. As I stared at my empty suitcase, I thought about the way Cady had said that Saskia would blow through most of her certification.
Not sociable enough. My fingers found their way to a patch of loose fabric on my bed. Does not play well with others. I stroked the threadbare cloth. Once upon a time, it had been a blanket. When Cady had first brought me home, the blanket had lived in Silver’s crate. It had been years since Cady had stopped crate-training the dogs, years since I’d stopped spending my days holed up in Silver’s crate while the German shepherd stood guard outside. The blanket wasn’t just ratty now—it was shredded.
And it was mine.
I bunched the fabric in my hands. Soft. Familiar. I wanted to be happy that we were going. It was a good thing that Cady had agreed to join this search—and a better thing that she was taking us with her. This was what I’d been training for. It was my chance to show her that Saskia and I were ready.
I could do this, and Cady wouldn’t have to face down her father alone.
“Hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
I glanced up, not the least surprised to see Free sitting in my second-story window. The day Jude and I had met her, we were nine years old. Free had hopped the fence, walked right up to the two of us, and suggested that we join her in rigging up some handmade hang gliders. I’d been on guard. Jude had been ecstatic.
Cady had vetoed the hang gliders.
And Free had taken it all in stride. She’d never said a thing—not a single, throwaway comment—about the fact that I didn’t speak in her presence for a year. She accepted Jude talking for me like it was normal.
The three of us had hang-glided off the roof the next year.
“You’re not interrupting, Free.” I let the fabric fall from my hands and back down onto the bed. Silver was asleep at my feet. Without even thinking about it, I burrowed my toes underneath her body. “I was just packing.”
“Packing traditionally involves putting one or more items inside the bag,” Free pointed out.
“Second-story windows,” I countered, “are not traditionally considered doors.”
That got me a smile. “Su casa es mi casa,” Free said lazily. “And that bag is still empty.”
I had a go-bag for search and rescue—we all did—crammed with the supplies we might need to meet whatever challenge Cady decided to lay out on any given day. But packing my personal suitcase was harder.
“It’s not that I don’t want to go.” To anyone who didn’t know me, my voice might have sounded flat. “I’m glad we’re going. Cady will find this missing kid. Saskia and I will help.”
It was easier, sometimes, to communicate things that I had already thought.
“Of course you’ll help,” Free replied. “You were born for search and rescue. And I…” Free let her legs dangle down toward the roof outside my window. “I’ll be here all by my lonesome.”
Cady had asked her to look after the place while we were gone. Free probably would have preferred looking after us.
Silver stirred at my feet. She stretched and made a loop around my legs. Finding me in one piece, she went to greet Free, then cycled back to my side. Free followed, and a moment later, she was sifting through the laundry on my desk.
“You’d tell me if these clothes weren’t clean, right?”
“They’re clean.”
“Pack this.” Free tossed a zip-up long-sleeved shirt in my general direction without so much as looking back. “And this.” The sweatshirt hit me square in the face.
I dodged the next projectile and began wrangling the clothes Free had picked out into my bag.
“Cady should have invited you to come with us.”
“Miscreants’ Creed,” Free countered. “Line seven. I solemnly vow to never say should.”
Cady had referred to us as miscreants so often growing up that the name had stuck. The Creed was ever-evolving, and Free was its self-appointed keeper.
&n
bsp; The words ought and rule were also verboten.
“It would be better if you came with us,” I tried again.
Free spared me a brief but dazzling smile. “I happen to agree.” She made a trip to my closet and returned with three pairs of cargo pants and twice that number of all-weather shirts. “But I think it’s safe to say that Mama Bear has other things on her mind.”
Cady had said she was at about a six. I didn’t always get the full range of human emotion—especially other people’s—but I did know fear and anger and want and pain.
Cady wasn’t any better at admitting weakness than I was.
“No moping.” Free pitched a balled-up pair of socks at my face. “Need I remind you of the Miscreants’ Creed, line four?”
“Never look down?” I asked.
Free zipped the suitcase shut. “We were born ready,” she corrected. “You’re going to be just fine, Kira. And I…” She paused for dramatic effect. “Well, like a good and proper Miscreant, I have some trouble to stir up. Take care of yourself, K.”
Free was already back out the window before I’d found the words to reply. “You too.”
Five hours later, I’d spent four hours too many in the car. I was restless, tense, and hungry—and we were almost there.
Not that almost or there meant a thing to the part of me that equated car with cage.
Breathe in. Breathe out. I counted back from one hundred, one number per breath. One hundred. Ninety-nine. I stared out the window as we drove up a winding mountain road. Spread out in the distance, I could see nothing but unvarnished wilderness. Something about the way the mountain range cut into the sky made me feel vast, like the green of the trees and the crisp white snowcaps—the stone and dirt and water and air—were part of me.
Like I could get lost out there without ever leaving this car.
“Sierra Glades National Park,” Cady said. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand acres of mountains, foothills, canyons, and rivers—not to mention a forest that boasts some of the tallest, oldest trees on the continent.”
“Or as I like to call it,” Jude added from the passenger seat, “our new backyard!”
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Cady muttered as the town—what little there was of it—came into view. “We won’t be here long.”
Responding to Cady’s muttering, Silver lifted her head from my lap. Behind us, Saskia prowled, making use of the space Cady had cleared when she’d removed the third row of seats from her SUV. Pad sat calmly at the back window, ready for action.
As Cady pulled off onto a gravel road, Silver laid her head back down on my lap and plopped one paw over my leg, a clear order that I should stay put.
“I take it that our beloved grandfather is greatly revered in the town of Hunter’s Point?” Jude asked, continuing the steady stream of chatter he’d kept up for the whole drive. “For his wisdom. And his beard.”
“Unless something’s changed since I left, your grandfather doesn’t mix much with the people in town.” Cady didn’t elaborate.
“You don’t want to talk about him.” I meant that as a statement, but a question burrowed its way into my tone. Cady hadn’t told us anything about Bales Bennett. She had to have known that we’d overheard parts of their conversation, but she hadn’t so much as mentioned it—not once.
“We’re here to help with a search,” my foster mother said, her fingers tightening around the steering wheel for a split second before she forced them loose again. “That’s all.”
Cady was famous in search and rescue circles for training dogs, but as far as I knew, she hadn’t participated in an active search in years. Since she found me.
“I sense that this is something of a bittersweet homecoming,” Jude commented as Cady pulled in front of a cabin-style house and cut the engine. “Out of respect for the solemnity of the occasion, I shall refrain from confetti.”
Why did I have a feeling literal confetti would be making an appearance before long?
Ignoring Jude, Cady opened the driver’s-side door, and I took that as permission to open mine. Silver, determined to get the lay of the land, exited first. I tried not to notice the stiffness with which my aging companion jumped out of the car. It was ten or fifteen seconds before she turned back to me.
All safe, I could almost hear my self-appointed protector saying. Kira get out of car now.
I obliged. The second my shoes hit dirt, the tension that had been building inside me snapped like a rubber band. I closed my eyes and lifted my face toward the sky and listened. Birds. Running water, somewhere nearby.
I heard Jude let Saskia and Pad out of the back, and without turning toward them, I tracked their movements. Saskia stalked; Pad was more of a prancer, like a horse trained in dressage.
Another sound broke through. My eyes snapped open as I angled my body toward the source. Human. A boy—eighteen or nineteen, dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin that glistened with a layer of sweat—drilled a soccer ball into the side of the house.
Again.
And again.
Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe he wasn’t. When it came to strangers, my brain was wired to err on the side of caution.
Almost as if on cue, the stranger in question turned to look at us. Without missing a beat, he pounded the ball into the wall so hard that it rebounded over his head and into the woods.
I felt my nostrils flare but kept my lips pressed firmly together.
“I believe that is the traditional salutation of the Hunter’s Point soccer enthusiast,” Jude said, ambling to my side. Pad took up position just in front of us.
“Just curious,” I said to Jude under my breath. “Are you two protecting me from the stranger or the stranger from me?”
Jude remained suspiciously silent.
“Hello,” Cady called out.
As the boy began to make his way toward us, the tips of his fingers curled inward, a prelude to working themselves into fists, but his arms stayed dangling by his sides.
“Him from you,” Jude murmured as he took in the expression on my face. “We’re definitely protecting him from you.”
Pad went out to greet the stranger.
“Hello,” Cady repeated. “I’m—”
“You’re the daughter.” The boy bent to scratch Pad behind the ears, then rose again. “I’m supposed to be on my best behavior, so I suppose I should welcome you home.”
I felt, as much as saw, him cross the invisible threshold that put him within two arm’s lengths of my family. Saskia took a single, threatening step toward him.
“Easy, Sass,” I murmured. I followed my own advice, right up until the boy bared his teeth at Cady in a smile that didn’t strike me as friendly in the least.
“We heartily accept your dubious welcome!” Jude beamed at him. “I admire a man with pent-up anger and a casual disregard for even the most basic social norms! You do you, I always say.”
The boy came to a stop. There was nothing overtly aggressive in his posture. But that didn’t stop the part of my brain that had been on high alert since this interaction began from sizing up my opponent’s weaknesses.
Worse came to worst, I could go for his throat.
“We’re here for the search,” Cady said.
“You don’t want to be here at all.” The boy rocked back on his heels. “Believe me, Ms. Bennett, that’s perfectly, crystalline clear.”
“Crystalline,” Jude repeated. “An excellent vocabularical choice! I’m Jude. This is Kira. We will be your same-age peers today.”
The boy flicked his gaze away from Cady, just briefly. But he didn’t look at Jude. He looked at me.
“Gabriel.”
The boy didn’t introduce himself. An older woman, who’d just appeared on the cabin’s front porch, did it for him. She wiped her hands on a faded blue apron as she strode toward us. She was tiny and bird-boned, but moved like she was used to people getting out of her way.
When she reached us, she gently lifted a wrinkled, sun-worn hand
to cup Cady’s face. “It’s good to see you, Cady-girl.”
For the first time since we’d entered Hunter’s Point, Cady smiled. “Ness.”
The older woman pulled Cady into a long, tight hug, then reverted to business mode. “Cadence Bennett,” she said, pulling back, “meet Gabriel Cortez.” She turned her eagle eyes to the boy next to her. “Gabriel,” she said, her tone warning him to play nice, “has been helping your father run this place for the past year.”
“An altruist if I’ve ever seen one!” Jude sidestepped Cady to get a better look at Ness. “I’m Jude, and the lovely lady glowering in your general direction is Kira. Glowering is Kira’s way of showing love.”
The older woman arched an eyebrow at Jude. “I take it you don’t get your temperament from the Bennett side of your family tree.”
“I am, in many ways, an enigma,” Jude intoned. “At the moment, I happen to be an enigma who is wondering whether or not there are any cookies to be had in the near vicinity?”
Ness snorted. “That’s quite a nose, young man. I just finished baking a fresh batch. If you’re lucky, your friend won’t have devoured them all.”
There was a moment of silence and then Jude tilted his head to the side, like NATO the moment someone so much as mentioned the word t-r-e-a-t.
“What friend?” Cady asked.
I knew the answer to that question before Free sauntered out onto the porch, a cookie in each hand. I should have guessed, when she was helping me pack, that Free wouldn’t just roll belly-up and let us leave her behind.
“I brought the bloodhounds,” she informed Cady. “In case you need them. Or, you know, in case you need me.”
“Miscreants’ Creed, line nine,” Jude whispered in my ear. “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“Do I want to know how you beat us here?” Cady gave Free what Jude liked to call The Look. “Or how you knew where exactly we were going?”
“I could invoke my constitutional right not to incriminate myself,” Free mused. Being Free, she didn’t stop there. “But for argument’s sake, let’s just say that Jude can’t keep a secret, and once I knew where you guys were going, I might, hypothetically, have talked my way into a ride.”
The Lovely and the Lost Page 3