by Kelly Meding
Lacey was kneeling next to Aaron, who was hog-tied, blindfolded, and gagged. As she worked at the knots on the ropes, Aaron didn’t struggle, didn’t even move. They wouldn’t have bothered tying him up so well if he was dead, but that didn’t stop a brief flare of dread from clenching my guts tight. I scanned the alley—no Ethan.
“He’s alive,” Lacey said without looking up from her work. “Damn it, these are tight.”
“Let me.” I nudged my way in and squatted down in the grime and muck. Bones and skin stretched as I elongated my fingers into thinner points, giving me an advantage with the knots. Lacey scooted away, and a moment later I heard her on the com, giving someone our exact location.
Thatcher crouched by Aaron’s head and gently removed the gag and blindfold while I worked the final few knots. I got him unwound from the ropes, and we arranged him more comfortably on his back. Lacey said he was alive, but I couldn’t help feeling Aaron’s pulse for myself. It was slow, but steady, and I rubbed his chest with my knuckles like I’d seen doctors do on television.
“Aaron, it’s Renee,” I said. “Wake up for me, pal.”
“I don’t feel any swellings,” Thatcher said, carefully prodding at Aaron’s head. I was silently grateful. Aaron and I weren’t really friendly, but Ethan loved him, so he needed to be okay.
Raven-Marco cried out again from the mouth of the alley, and the familiar rumble of a Sport engine was followed by brakes squealing. Then we were surrounded by activity, and I stepped away so Noah Scott could get at his brother. I stared down at the pair of them, unsure why the sight was so strange, until it hit me that Noah was out in a public street. Dahlia wasn’t in control.
Even more bizarre was the fact that Teresa had come with him, and she wasn’t saying a thing about it.
Gage was there with her, too, and Marco had shifted back.
“I have searched the other nearby alleys,” Marco said. “There is no sign of Ethan.”
“What about their car?” Gage asked.
“I smelled nothing unusual there or here, but your nose is more sensitive than mine.”
Gage closed his eyes. He breathed in deeply through his nose, held it, then exhaled slowly through his mouth. Repeat times four, then he blinked at us. He looked a little green. “The alley stink is overwhelming, but there’s nothing that stands out. No unfamiliar aftershaves or perfumes.”
He moved over to Aaron and did the same thing, trying to get some kind of scent marker off his clothes or the rope. When he looked up at us, he didn’t bother hiding his frustration. “Nothing.”
“Take Marco and Lacey back to the car with you,” Teresa said. “See what you can find there.” Her face was tight, outwardly calm, but I knew her too well. Inside she was falling apart knowing one of ours was missing.
Fuck missing. He was taken.
The trio left the alley. Teresa squatted next to Noah, who was still trying to coax Aaron awake.
“There’s no exterior sign of trauma,” Thatcher said. He’d moved a few feet away, as though afraid to intrude on our private moment of worry. I kind of respected that sensitivity (just don’t tell anyone).
“He must be drugged, then,” Noah said. “Aaron’s hybrid-Changeling ability makes it damn hard to knock him out otherwise. They’d have had to hit him in the head with a bowling ball.”
That mental image made me shudder.
“Let’s get him out of the alley, at least. Lying there won’t do him any good.”
Teresa looked up, right at Thatcher, her eyebrows arched in surprise. Surprise he was being helpful, or surprise that he’d beaten her to the suggestion, I couldn’t begin to guess. “Good idea,” she said.
Noah and Thatcher did the heavy lifting, while Teresa and I went ahead to open the back doors of the Sport. At the moment, Noah didn’t look like he could lift a toddler, let alone half of a grown man—just like Dahlia earlier, he was pale and looked like he had the flu. Something was definitely up with Double Trouble, but now wasn’t the time or place to ask.
Maneuvering Aaron inside the Sport was a sight to see—he was nearly six feet tall and had to weigh in at about one-seventy—but Noah and Thatcher managed. I pulled a blanket out of the rear compartment and tucked it under Aaron’s head. He was filthy and reeked of the alley, and just as Noah knelt on the floor next to him, he let out a pained groan that got our collective attention.
“Aaron? Come on, wake up, bro,” Noah said. “Fight it.”
Score one for Changeling physiology.
It took nearly a full minute of face-scrunching and head-twisting for Aaron to pull loose from the sedative’s hold and get his eyes open. I had a bad angle of his face, but I could clearly see the relief on Noah’s. Aaron mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
Noah looked pained. “We aren’t sure.”
Where’s Ethan?
Aaron tried to sit up, only to fall back against the seat with a grunt.
“Give yourself a minute.” Noah pressed both palms down on Aaron’s chest.
Aaron clasped one of Noah’s wrists and said, “Need to find him.”
“We will. What do you remember?”
“Body in the street. We stopped. Got out. This.”
“Setup,” Teresa said, more to herself than to him.
Aaron made a noise that was probably his version of No shit, really?
“But why only Ethan?” Thatcher asked. “Why not take both of them?”
“One is easier to manage than two,” Teresa replied. “It’s also possible they weren’t sure who or what Aaron is, so they didn’t want to risk trying to handle him. Ethan’s abilities aren’t a secret.”
“Should’ve been more careful,” Aaron said. “Shit.”
“He’ll be fine,” Noah said. He sounded as if he believed the words, but he might have been humoring his brother. He swiped the back of his hand across his forehead—was he sweating? “He always is.”
That sounded more like Dahlia coming through. She and Ethan were practically in each other’s pockets lately, and the dual panic she and Noah must be sharing had to be overwhelming. I couldn’t imagine sharing a body and mind, much less having two sets of emotions to deal with at once. I could barely manage my own emotions most days.
Teresa’s cell rang, and she stepped away to answer it. “Hey, Simon,” she said before she moved out of earshot.
Good grief, Andrew was going to freak out when he realized his big brother was missing. The kid was eight. He’d been through too much already, was too damned young to have seen the shit he’d seen. Sure, kids were resilient during and after a crisis, but we carried that baggage for the rest of our lives. Mine was still firmly strapped to my back with a big old Fucked over and sold out by her own parents written on it in permanent ink.
Thatcher was tracking Teresa with his eyes, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was thinking along the same lines, worrying about Andrew. And Caleb, too. Both boys were attached to Ethan, and both deserved a safer life than the one they had. I’d never disagreed with that part of Teresa’s vision for a united Meta community. Children deserved a chance to grow up happy and safe, no matter who their parents were. Hell, if we were judged by our parents’ actions, the Rangers would have drowned me in the creek like an unwanted puppy and been done with me.
Instead, they saved me and gave me that happy, safe childhood.
For a while.
“Simon has a security camera outside of his house,” Teresa said once her conversation was over. “But we’re too far away for it to have seen anything. Simon’s coming out to read the area, though, see if he can pick up any emotional backwash.”
“What about the kids?” I asked.
“His housekeeper is going over to sit with them for a little while.” Just in case hung off the end of her sentence.
I had nothing to contribute to their search, so I hung back while Teresa headed over to the other Sport, where Gage and Marco were still poking around. They were too far away to hear anything, but close enough
at half a block to still see clearly. And Gage was very clearly frustrated. He even pulled away when Teresa tried to touch his arm, and that rarely happened. Those two always used to be like peas and carrots, and lately they were more like the same ends of a magnet, pushing each other away.
“If you don’t let me up right the fuck now, I will hit you!” Aaron’s snarled statement bounced out of the Sport’s interior.
“Fine,” Noah snapped back. “If you fall on your face, I’m not picking you up.”
“Fine.”
Thatcher’s lips twitched, and when our eyes met he mouthed, Brothers?
I nodded. I’d forgotten he didn’t know our twisted history with the Scotts and their Changeling halves.
Aaron stumbled out of the Sport and right into Thatcher, who grabbed his arm and kept Aaron from falling face-first to the pavement. “Take it easy, kid,” Thatcher said.
“I’m not a fucking kid.” Aaron pulled away and only managed to fall sideways against the side of the Sport. He was smart enough to stay put, though, and use the Sport for support while he got his bearings.
“Then stop acting like one. Calm down and think.”
Aaron glared. Thatcher had a point. Aaron had known Ethan a few months; Teresa, Gage, Marco, and I had known him for twenty years, and we were keeping our shit together in order to find him. He didn’t get to be more upset than the rest of us.
Déjà vu, honey.
The same thing had happened back in June when Teresa was shot by . . . well, Aaron, technically (but that’s a long damn story), and Dahlia about had a fit. Dahlia, who’d been part of our group for all of six months, who didn’t have our shared history, who’d never trained to be a Ranger. I’d seriously resented her grief and fear, and I was resenting Aaron’s, too.
Unfair? Maybe so, but that’s the way it goes.
“What do you remember about the person in the street?” Thatcher asked.
Aaron’s face scrunched up. He looked ahead of us, toward the other Sport, like it held the answers he needed. “A woman or girl, from the body shape. She was angled away from us, down, so I never saw her face.”
“Tall or short?”
“Short to medium, I guess. Her legs were bent.”
“Hair?”
“Not sure. She was wearing a knit cap, I think.”
“Clothes?”
Aaron rubbed his forehead and left a smear of grime behind. “Jeans, sneakers. A baggy T-shirt, maybe blue. Nothing that stands out.”
“She could have been Bethany Crow,” I said.
“That makes sense,” Thatcher said. “It leaves Landon as lookout, and it’s fairly easy for a telekinetic to drug someone from a distance. He could send in a syringe and depress the plunger without ever being seen.”
“But why take Ethan?”
“It’s possible my son, or the people who took him, are trying to get my attention again. He and Aaron made themselves targets by being out in the city alone.”
“Hey!” Aaron said.
Thatcher gave him a hard look. “You stopped to help a stranger on the street without first reporting it to someone at your HQ. You went out in the open. Perhaps they took advantage of your desire to help others, but regardless, you both made very amateur moves tonight.”
Aaron flushed dark red, and I half expected him to take a swing at Thatcher. Instead, he strode off toward the group at the other end of the block.
Inside the Sport, Noah heaved a sigh. “Aaron already blames himself, you know,” he said from his spot on the floor. “He calls it the big brother prerogative. Makes him a little unreasonable sometimes, especially when someone he loves is in trouble.”
“Understandable,” Thatcher said, “but he needs to be focused, or he’ll only hinder our investigation.”
I gave Thatcher a shrewd look. He spoke with a self-assurance that hadn’t been there before, and he stood a little straighter, more confidently. At some point he’d stopped thinking of this as something he was forced to help with and started thinking of it as our investigation. He’d become part of it, rather than an outsider looking in.
The corner of my brain that had always rebelled against including the Manhattan prisoners in anything we did stayed curiously quiet. Didn’t protest Thatcher’s inclusion or the way he’d handled Aaron just now. He’d been direct and useful. And for the first time since we sprang him, I didn’t mind Thatcher’s presence.
Not that I’d ever tell him so.
Seven
The Call
Three hours later, we had exactly zero leads on Ethan’s whereabouts and enough shared anxiety to keep Hackensack General’s psych ward busy for a month. No clues at the crime scene, no contact from the kidnappers, and no witnesses besides a couple of alley cats who weren’t talking. Teresa assigned Lacey’s squad to stay in New Jersey and continue searching (more to feel like we were doing something than because she expected actual results), while the rest of us headed back to HQ.
Minus Marco. He wasn’t in Lacey’s squad, and despite his valuable skill with computers, he chose to remain in raven form and search on his own. A tiny part of me hated him for that ability. Even if he didn’t find anything, he was doing something.
My stomach was doing something: rumbling, reminding me to feed it. I wanted to know what was going on with Double Trouble, but despite that and my hunger, I didn’t follow the others inside after we landed. I headed through the archway to the back field and sat down on the same bench Ethan and I had sat on—hell, was that really just this morning? A lifetime had passed since then, and we still felt miles away from solving this case.
Okay, so not completely true. Our suspects had names and backstories, but those things did us a fuck lot of good if we didn’t know where to find said suspects. They obviously had zero trouble finding us, and they knew exactly how to hurt us. If Teresa was the mothering heart of our group, then Ethan was everyone’s big brother. He had friends here and in Manhattan who were willing to fight for him—few of us could say the same thing.
No one was on the field now, and I had a clear view of the prison and its walls. For a while I’d been angry at Ethan for changing his mind about the Banes. He’d come to Manhattan a month ago to help Simon find a few missing prisoners, and he’d returned home with a new perspective on their situation. I’d lost my only ally in that argument, and I’d resented him for it. Resented everyone, actually, for being so willing to let go of everything the Banes had done. For forgiving them and wanting to work alongside them as fellow Metas.
Shades of gray scared me—black and white, Bane and Ranger, was easier. But how did I start to see those shades of gray, and see the Banes as my fellow Metas, when doing so felt like betraying the very thing that once saved my life?
A long shadow fell on the grass right before I heard fabric rustling. Someone was approaching from a wide angle, taking care to make sure I knew they were coming before they scared the crap out of me. I shifted around, intending to thank that person, until I saw Derek Thatcher walking toward me with a plate in his hand. My heart did a funny little leap that was probably just nerves.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
“Would it matter if I did?”
He smiled, and in the odd golden haze of twilight, I realized again he was actually kind of handsome. “Not in the least, since I’m outside and technically in your care.”
“Then join away.”
“Thank you.” He sat on the opposite end of the bench, leaving a comfortable space between us. “Teresa insisted I bring you this.” He held out the plate.
I eyeballed the roast beef sandwich, and my empty stomach clenched with want. I took the plate. “Thanks. I don’t know what Teresa would do with her time if she didn’t have us to mother over.”
“Difficult to guess. Possibly settle down and become a mother to her own children?”
The comment stopped me cold. Teresa had made an offhand comment to me a few weeks ago about wanting a family with Gage one day, when it was safe for
us. I’d said that I doubted it would ever be safe for us to be parents, when it wasn’t even safe to be ourselves. She’d bitterly agreed.
“She’d make a great mom,” I said, then stuffed my mouth full of roast beef. Heaven on rye.
“She does seem to have that instinct, despite her past.”
“What do you know about her past?”
He draped one arm across the back of the bench, angling his body toward me. “A lot of stories have been floating around the Warren these last few months. No one ever told us what happened to you kids after that final day in Central Park, not until January when our powers came back. Even then it’s only come to us in dribs and drabs.”
“So you know that since you and your pals killed all of our parents and mentors, we ended up in foster care?” He flinched, and instead of that giving me a sense of perverse satisfaction, I felt a pang of something else. Something kind of like guilt. But I didn’t let up. “And that some of us, like Ethan, were stuck in horrific situations until they aged out?”
“Yes, I know that.” His gray eyes burned with grief and anger, and I had to look away. “I lost everything in the War, too, you know. My wife and son, my freedom, my identity as a Meta. Gone.”
I put the plate down between us, no longer interested in the half-eaten sandwich. “I know that.”
Who are you, and what have you done with Renee?
“I remember you from that day,” he said softly.
“I’m kind of unforgettable.” I put my hand on the bench next to his and really saw my blue for the first time, so glaringly different from his rough, tanned skin. “People generally remember having seen the blue girl.”