I doubted Jess knew everything her aunt thought. I posed the question I’d asked Jess before, this time with a different meaning. “Why’d you say all of this?”
“I can’t be everything to everybody,” she said. “My aunt wants one thing. My friends want something else. Push. Pull. I never get to choose. This morning, I am.”
I understood all too well what it felt like to have to do that. “What are you choosing, Jess?”
“The right thing,” she said.
I nodded. “Then answer one question for me: Is there a kid a little older than you with white hair among your number? A Watcher?”
“No,” she said. “I told you, it’s just me and my aunt in Portland.”
I held her gaze. “All of this has something to do with why y’all were at Ben’s last night. This is connected with the Angel of Death.”
She clammed up fast. “I should go.”
“You don’t want to be late, like Corey told you,” I said.
She turned on her heel and walked away.
I knew where she lived. I’d head there shortly, to talk with the aunt. Know your enemy. And gather as much intel as possible, because even if Faith and I ran, these Watchers might follow.
I’d go as soon as Red arrived to look after Faith. I didn’t want to leave Faith alone, but I couldn’t take her with me.
I turned to go back inside only to see her standing on the other side of the door, palms pressed flat against the glass. Eavesdropping. I’d bet a cool million she’d heard every word spoken between Jess and me. Her halo had flashed back to spark-filled red, heating up by the second. She looked ready to explode.
Chapter 3
FAITH LOOKED AT me with wary eyes. She didn’t move an inch as I approached the door, only pressed her hands harder into the glass, bleaching her palms white. She’d shrugged off her slicker and tucked the curled ends of her hair behind her ears, I saw. Droplets of rain still clung to the tops of her riding boots.
“Back up,” I said.
She did, just far enough for me to squeeze inside.
The classic rock playlist I’d started out with earlier had run its course, giving way to the old-school Michael Jackson streaming through the speakers. The rubber on the floor squeaked under the newly wet soles of my sneakers. In addition to its thick scent, I smelled feet. A quick look toward the cubbies showed me why: a pair of sweaty socks had spilled out of Ben’s pack onto the floor. He hadn’t noticed.
I moved to pick them up. Faith stepped in front of me and folded her arms across her chest. I tried to go around her. She sidestepped to block my path.
“It’s not what you think,” she said.
“You and the others aren’t trying to work some kind of magic against the Angel of Death?”
She blanched.
“I think I hit that one out of the park,” I said.
“This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”
“You planned to tell me?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s just—we’re still working on a theory, on logistics—and I wanted to wait until we had something real before I opened my mouth. Jess screwed that up.”
“She didn’t say anything about what you were working on.”
“She said enough.”
“You overhear all of it? How about the part where her aunt wants me dead?”
Faith fisted her hands in her hair. “I swear I didn’t know. I thought it was me.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What?”
“Jess never wanted me to go near her place. At first, I figured she was keeping me away from whatever Watcher magic was going on over there, like it was a trust thing. I had to earn it, and then she’d let me in. And then she opened up in a lot of other ways. We’re friends. We’re tight. But she still wouldn’t let me come over, and the way she talked about her aunt was all one-word answers in sharp tones. I thought her aunt didn’t like me.”
I followed the logic, even if it was incomplete. “You never wondered whether they had something to hide?”
“Why would Jess hide anything from me?” she asked.
Because they were friends. They were tight. “You put a lot of trust in her and the others. Too much.”
“I told you. We’re friends.”
She’d never really had friends, not like these. I understood the hell out of that.
“What about you?” she asked. “You looked crazy worried when I got here. Now you look like a cornered animal. What gives?”
I ticked off the trouble on my fingers. “The Angel of Death and the bloodthirsty aunt.”
She met my gaze. “And the past? It’s come back to haunt us again?”
Sunday. The Order. People we ran from. People who wanted her dead.
I nodded.
She took that in, moving to lean against the wall and folding her arms across her chest. When she spoke, her voice came out small and quiet. “I know what you’re gonna suggest, and the answer is no.”
No, she didn’t want to leave.
“I don’t even want to talk about it,” she said.
“I understand,” I said.
“How could you?” she asked. “You never act like it’s a big deal, leaving one place and going to another. You never act like starting over hurts.”
Because I had her welfare to worry about first. Because it hurt less to start over if you never put down roots. Because I’d never known any other way.
“Is this home?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“You want to make a stand? Even if it turns out badly?”
She mulled my question. “If that doesn’t happen here, it will somewhere else.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“I am?” She stared at me.
“I don’t think running is gonna solve our problems this time. I think we have to stay.”
Faith breathed in deep, then exhaled a shaky breath. “What do we do?”
“First we figure out why the world seems to be falling down all over us.” I had a hunch about what had started the avalanche. “I need you to answer a question for me, Faith.”
She waited.
“How much magic have you been using, working on all the Angel of Death stuff with your friends?”
“Why?”
“It’s not a trick question,” I said.
She studied her boots. “None.”
“You sure about that?”
“If I use my magic, then the odds that someone from the past could find me get higher. The odds that someone else bad will find me get higher,” she said. “I know. You drilled it into me.”
“I wish I never had to.”
“I know,” she said.
Before we’d moved to Portland, she’d used her power only twice. The first time, I’d found out just in time that the Order was breathing down our necks. The second time, it’d been a disaster of almost deadly proportions. Since then, she’d kept her magic locked down. But temptation was strong. Stronger, the need to fit in.
If Jess was a budding Watcher, Corey could speak with the dead, and Ben was a shield, Faith would want to contribute. She had the kind of power that would wow the others, the kind of power that someone had paid the Order to take out of this world because they considered Faith too dangerous to be allowed to live.
Faith could talk to gods. She could hear them speak back to her.
There were a lot of gods in the world, some of them more powerful than others. Some who never walked among humans, and others who did. The gods were territorial. They stuck to places and people they liked and/or felt responsibility toward.
Faith had found a god once—or one had found her. The god hadn’t harmed her, but connecting with Faith lit her up like a neon sign to those looking for her. For us. We’d barely made it out of the city alive.
If Faith had pushed that memory away, if she’d felt compelled to help or wanted a greater sense of belonging—who could resist that? Her friends were doing it. And if they were, their magic should pro
vide some cover for hers.
“How are you helping your friends with Death if you’re not using your powers?” I asked.
“I run errands,” she said.
“Shoe leather express?”
“And my bike.”
“What else?”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I help brainstorm.”
“Faith—”
“All right,” she said. “I used it a little bit, just to check out who’s here. I was in a protective circle and I was with a bunch of other people with magic. No one found out. I was, like, invisible.”
I closed my eyes so tight, I saw bursts of purple and red on the insides of my eyelids.
“What?” she asked.
I looked at her. At the fear that tugged her eyes wider and pulled at the corners of her mouth. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Not using your power keeps you invisible. You tamped it down and after a while, I could pretend that everything was normal. That we’re normal.”
“What’s the bad?” she asked.
“It kept you ignorant.”
“I’m not—”
“Not like that,” I interrupted. “You’re whip-smart, Faith, and you’re a survivor. But because I didn’t want you using your magic, I didn’t teach you much about it.”
She dropped her arms to her sides. “But I know how it works.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But you don’t know about the consequences. The way some people use magic to hunt others, for instance. You know what a magical signature is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a flavor that’s unique to your magic. Even if you hid in a crowd of a hundred people—a thousand—someone looking for that flavor could zero in on you. Sure, those people provide interference, but not for long.”
Her eyes grew wider. “How long, Night?”
I sighed. “How many times did you use your magic? It wasn’t just a little, was it?”
“It was at first. But then, nothing bad happened, so I kept on. Like, nine, maybe ten times.”
“That’s more than enough.”
“Oh, God,” she said.
“It’s not your fault,” I repeated, slowly and clearly. “You didn’t know.”
“I should’ve,” she said.
“Now you do, so you can do better from here on out.”
She shook her head. “Does that even matter?” she asked. “If I get us caught—or worse—”
“We’ll deal with it,” I said.
She looked at my face and I could see she knew I meant it.
The door opened behind me. The chime sliced all the way to the heart of my ramped-up nerves. I jumped a half-inch as the chill damp rushed in, along with the strong smell of coffee and a whiff of tea tree shampoo.
Red had arrived.
His gravelly voice rolled over me, his southeast Texas accent faint but recognizable. “What’s wrong?”
I turned around slowly. “Nothing.”
He met my gaze with sharp green eyes, their corners crinkled with concern, his brow furrowing to match. Silver hair, shaggy and damp, brushed his shoulders. His silver mustache had the same scraggly look. He wasn’t old enough to have hair that color, and I’d told him so; he was only a couple of years older than me. He’d replied that his hair had started to turn when he was the ripe old age of sixteen. He’d had a shock to his system. He hadn’t elaborated.
This morning, he wore a pair of long, dark blue gym pants and a dark gray hoodie, unzipped just enough to show the collar of his white T-shirt and the very top of a tattoo on his chest—the fiery crown of a red heart wreathed in white and red roses, a symbol of the Catholicism he’d since given up. He wore black leather fingerless gloves, which he began to peel off, and he’d dragged in a soggy mat of fallen brown and gold leaves on the bottoms of his white sneakers. His halo was, as always solid, earthen.
“Doesn’t look like nothing,” he said, his accent growing a little thicker. “Well, you look all right, Night, but Faith here looks like the world’s about to end.”
His presence, his voice—everything about him—made me feel like I belonged. Just like his gym did, and, if I were honest, Red more than anything or anyone else was responsible for making me feel like I’d found something I didn’t want to lose.
“I’m glad to see you,” I said. “I need to run a quick errand. Can you keep an eye on Faith while I’m gone?”
He looked from me to Faith and back again. “You planning on telling me why?”
I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Red would be on the Watchers’ radar, too, but in his case, that was probably no big deal since he helped people. But the Order wouldn’t care about that. They’d figure he knew something about me and they’d do whatever they felt they needed to in order to extract information from him. And Sunday? Who the hell knew? On top of that, the Angel of Death was in town for God only knew what and God only knew why, and Red deserved to know that. I just didn’t want him to know it yet, at least not until I had more information to give him.
“It’s our mess,” I said. “Give us a chance to clean it up first?”
He studied me. Unlike me, he didn’t have a poker face. And despite my not giving away a single thing by my expression, he’d read between the lines of what I’d said more deeply than I wanted, and it was written all over his eyes and the set of his mouth. “How long do you think you’ll need?”
“Couple of hours,” I said.
He nodded. “All right.”
“Thanks,” I said. I looked at Faith, hoping she’d understand the question I asked with my eyes. Since she’d heard every word of my conversation with Jess, she’d know more than anyone what I would do next, why I needed to get it done.
She didn’t nod or say anything at all. Instead, she looked at the floor.
I walked toward the back of the gym to grab my pack and shrug on my hoodie. When I turned around, Faith had disappeared into Red’s office, but Red stood in the same spot, hands shoved in the pockets of his pants.
I met his gaze and held it as I walked back toward him, stopping only when I came very close and we stood toe-to-toe. This close, I felt something besides the impulse to survive. I felt him and his green and earth halo and his steadfast see-the-good-in-people trained on me—and something else, something primal flowing off of him and through me. A desire to protect. And just plain desire.
A flutter in my chest—and the same flutter lower down—answered. I kept any sign of it off of my face. I couldn’t open that door, not for real. Not with anyone. Flirting was one thing. Flirting was just play, and sometimes play could help you get what you wanted. Sex—or more than that—was something else entirely, and not a risk I could take with so much at stake.
“You want to tell me where you’re going?” he asked softly, keeping the words between us. Even if Faith stood at the office door, she was unlikely to hear anything except our voices.
Did he know what Jess was? What her aunt was? I thought he might have a clue if not the whole picture, but either way, I didn’t have the luxury of launching into an explanation right this minute, not if I wanted to have any hope of the element of surprise with Jess’s aunt.
Jess had warned me against her aunt’s wishes, thinking that was the best way to go about saving both me and her aunt. She might be having second thoughts if she hadn’t already. I wanted to arrive at the house before her conscience hounded her into confessing what she’d said.
“Not really,” I said. “At least not right now.”
“Text me if you think you’ll be late. Or if anything goes wrong.”
I raised a brow. “Wrong?”
“This isn’t any run-of-the-mill mess, and you’re leaving your daughter in my care.”
I nodded. “We’ll talk when I get back.”
He watched me walk out, the chime announcing my departure. My relief on clearing the door, then turning north to walk down the street to my car, was enormous. My instinct, the animal inside of
me, felt like a live wire, but my frontal lobes began to reassert themselves so I could feel something besides fear and the desperate need to survive, so I could think about what to say to Jess’s aunt and what to do besides rely on my assassin’s training to eliminate her as a threat.
The mist thickened to steady drops of rain that began to soak through my hood. A line of cars rolled past, tires kicking up spray, headlights puncturing the gloom. The wind gusted, rattling the branches of Japanese maples and the lone mimosa under which I’d parked my old blue Honda. Sliding into the front seat, I caught a whiff of stale corn chips and Sunday’s amber and vanilla perfume.
She’d been in my car. Not exactly a surprise, except for the timing. If I could still smell her scent, she’d been in here within the last hour at the outside, and probably closer to the last half-hour.
I checked the glove box, riffling through old parking meter receipts, petrified protein bars, and basic gear—tire pressure gauge, extra batteries, travel packs of tissues. I got out and checked under the seats, kneeling on the street and soaking through the knees of my pants. I went over the trunk. All the usual stuff remained—couple of blankets, a few bottles of water, first aid kit. The spare tire and the jack were where they were supposed to be. I looked under the car. No tracking devices. Nothing suspicious.
Sunday had searched the vehicle, but she hadn’t altered it in any way. She’d done it to get a bead on me. And to let me know she’d invaded more of my private space, my new life.
Slipping back into the car, I gripped the wheel hard enough to bleach my knuckles. My breath fogged the air, and in a minute the windshield would begin to fog, too. I started the engine and turned on the defroster as the wind gusted again. The mimosa’s branches scraped the roof like bony fingers.
Whatever Sunday had said to me this morning about staying away, she clearly hadn’t meant it. Maybe she sat in another vehicle on the street, waiting for me to pull out into traffic so she could follow.
In the pocket of my hoodie, my phone buzzed and chimed—incoming text from Faith, forwarding me Jess’s home address from the gym’s records.
I scanned the cars I could see in front and behind, on the opposite side of the road, all of them empty. I took no comfort in that. Pulling into the street, I took more care than I usually did to check for tails. If Sunday was back there somewhere, I couldn’t spot her. In fact, with the rain coming down, it was harder to see what I needed in order to drive the two miles south and east to Jess’s house, heading south past restaurants and coffee shops to Stark, then east past expensive houses and Laurelhurst Park, with its tall, exquisite Douglas firs and walking trails, plus a playground and basketball court.
Night Awakens: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 1) Page 4