The Lost Causes

by Jessica Koosed Etting

  “Sabrina, you need to be careful,” he said in a low voice. “Promise me. I don’t want you chasing after this guy. Whatever possessed you to do that —”

  “What would you have done if you were me?” Sabrina interjected. “Just let the guy go? I couldn’t. I was so close to seeing his face.”

  Nash didn’t reply right away. When he spoke, his voice was serious. “And you could have gotten yourself killed doing it. Whoever he is, he’s extremely dangerous. Promise me this won’t happen again.”

  “I can’t,” Sabrina said. “Not if I’m being honest. I keep thinking about all the sick and twisted things he could do with the serum. If I got that close to him again, I’d do the same thing.”

  Nash was silent, though his hands continued working into her shoulder blades.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m making your job harder again,” she added.

  He turned her to face him, planting his gaze on Sabrina so fiercely that her whole body shivered. “You think that’s really what I’m worried about.”

  “You’re … not the easiest guy to understand,” she answered honestly.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want anything to happen to you?” Their faces were just inches apart. Sabrina’s pulse raced.

  “I don’t know,” she breathed.

  “Let me lay it out for you. If something happened to you, I would be destroyed.”

  He suddenly brought his hand up to her cheek, and before she had time to analyze what was happening, he was kissing her. Softly at first, then with more urgency. She’d never kissed anyone like this before. His fingers were in her hair, on her face, grasping her hips. She brought her hands under his shirt, bringing him closer, pressing her body against his, the intensity almost too much to handle.

  “Sabrina …” Nash murmured into her neck, igniting a chill down her body.

  “Don’t stop,” Sabrina urged, breathless.

  “We can’t,” he said, but his lips found hers again, his arms wrapped around her shoulders until he pulled away. She brought her lips back toward his, but after a beat he pulled away again.

  “We can’t,” he repeated more firmly, his breath still coming fast.

  “Why not?”

  Nash looked at her, their bodies still enmeshed. “It’s wrong on so many levels. If anyone ever found out —”

  “I wouldn’t say anything.”

  He shook his head with a rueful smile. “I’m sorry. Believe me. I really am.” Suddenly, he stood up. “You should get to sleep. Let me show you where the bed is. I’ll stay on the couch.”

  He led her back to the bedroom, equally as sparse as the front room. “You can stay in here,” Sabrina said, feeling guilty for usurping his bed and secretly hoping he’d change his mind. “Nothing has to happen.”

  Nash’s eyes raked over her again. “Let’s not test that, shall we?”

  He propped up the pillows and handed her a shirt from his drawer. “Is this okay to sleep in?”

  Sabrina nodded wordlessly.

  He stopped at the door. “Let me know if you need anything, okay? Don’t worry about waking me.”

  Sabrina nodded again and nestled into the soft sheets, tinged faintly with the scent of Nash’s shampoo. It was only once she closed her eyes and began to dream that the girl from the woods, her almond eyes urgent, began swirling around in her unconscious, her words echoing.

  You can’t trust them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “I should try again,” Gabby said. It was almost midnight, and she and Justin were sitting on top of her comforter, Devon’s red-and-black flannel shirt in the middle of them.

  “Are you sure? You just tried five minutes ago. Maybe you need a break,” Justin replied.

  When she didn’t have a vision the first few times, she wasn’t too discouraged. The same thing had happened with Lily’s prescription bottle before she finally saw something. But then she got the text about Sabrina’s accident and the urgency became even clearer.

  “I need to keep trying. We have to find this guy. After what happened to Sabrina —”

  “We’ll find him. But you’re putting way too much pressure on yourself.” Justin was trying to hide his anxiety for Gabby’s sake, but what happened to Sabrina had rattled him, too. With Gabby’s parents out of town, he refused to leave her house that night and he kept glancing out the window every few minutes. He never said why, but they both knew he was looking for the white van.

  Justin stood up, presumably on another excursion to the window, but he tripped over an overstuffed box of Gabby’s trophies beside the bed.

  “Are these all from ice-skating?” he asked, picking up one of the dusty gold-colored statues. “You’ve got so many in here, you could fill a museum.”

  “I just packed them up,” she answered. “I’m finally going to throw them out. I should’ve done it years ago.”

  She was surprised yet relieved to find she had zero emotional attachment to those trophies when she’d thrown them in the box the night before. They just reminded her of giving up everything for her parents’ approval and then her subsequent fall from grace when the trophies stopped coming. Throwing them out felt like a final act of liberation from her OCD — and from that girl she had let herself become for way too long.

  “You think you’ll ever skate again?”

  “Maybe just for fun. I hated those competitions.” She’d never said that out loud to anyone, but confiding in Justin was as easy as saying it to herself. “I want to find something else I really like now.”

  “Besides me?” Justin said, grinning.

  Her cheeks burned pink as she smiled. “Yes, besides you.”

  “So what else do you like to do?” he asked with such intense curiosity that it made her realize just how much she liked him.

  Gabby considered it for a minute. “I used to love creative writing. But I had so many rules for myself when the OCD started that it was too stressful to keep up with it. The only things I could manage to write were papers for school.” All the short stories she’d written were in an untouched folder on her computer. She remembered trying to finish one a few years ago, but she hadn’t been able to write a sentence without going over it a dozen times.

  “Well, if you want to start back with it, you’ve got some pretty great material from the last two weeks,” Justin said.

  He was right. But it was only a good story if it had a good ending. She eyed Devon’s shirt. Maybe now that Justin had distracted her for a few minutes a vision would come. She picked the shirt up, clinging to the worn piece of fabric like a lifeline. She closed her eyes.

  Nothing.

  When she opened them, Justin could easily read her frustration.

  “You’ve got to relax. You’re psyching yourself out, Gabs. You’re too in your head,” he said. He grabbed a stuffed bear off her shelf and started tossing it in the air like a ball. “This happens all the time in football. Coach Brandt always says, ‘Keep your focus away from the uncontrollables.’ ”

  “Uncontrollables?”

  “All the things that are out of your hands. Like when I’m on the field, I can’t control the crowd, or the outcome of the game, or who the coach puts in.”

  “And I can’t control when my visions come.”

  He sat back down next to her. “Exactly. So focus on something else. You can control your thoughts. Think about something other than having a vision and maybe it’ll come to you.”

  “How do I do that, though? If I’m not thinking about having a vision, I’m thinking about what happened to Sabrina and then I immediately think about how I need to have a vision again.” She sounded as frantic as she felt.

  “Lie down, close your eyes and go to your happy place,” Justin instructed. “Then in ten minutes, you can try again with the shirt. I’m not letting you try again until you relax.” />
  Maybe he was right. She lay down and let her head sink into the pillow. Where was her happy place?

  Justin moved closer and brushed back a jumble of her hair that had fallen over her eyes. The sweetness of the gesture — a sweetness she never saw him bestow upon anyone else but her — incited an eruption of butterflies in her stomach. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d pulled him closer and pressed her lips onto his. Nothing in her life had ever felt as good as kissing Justin. She grabbed him, pulling his body on top of hers, and for a split-second, he stopped kissing her. The look in his eyes suggested Gabby’s sudden brazenness had surprised him as much as it had her. But then he was kissing her again. She shivered with a desire she hadn’t known she was capable of.

  Her hands reached for his shirt, about to pull it off, when her phone buzzed loudly next to her, jarring them both. She forced herself to pull away to glance at the text. It was from Z requesting a vision status update and it instantly brought Gabby back to reality.

  “We should stop,” she whispered, finding it difficult to speak. The only thing better than Justin kissing her, was a shirtless Justin kissing her. But she had to refocus. “You said I can try again for a vision after I relax for ten minutes, right?”

  “Did I say that? I think I meant we should do this for ten minutes instead.”

  She grinned, then planted her hands next to her sides to keep from pulling him back on top of her. “I think I can relax now.”

  “Well, that makes one of us,” he grumbled, but then smiled and kissed her forehead. “You can do this, Gabs. Go to your happy place and I bet in a few minutes you’ll be relaxed enough to try for a vision again.”

  She closed her eyes. Her happy place was easy to find. He was sitting right next to her.

  * * *

  A few hours later, she woke up with a start. When did she fall asleep? She sat up and tried to get her bearings. The room was bathed in early morning light. Her attempt to not focus on the uncontrollables must have worked better than she expected. Justin was asleep next to her, and she was actually grateful her parents had left her alone in the house. They probably wouldn’t even notice if a guy slept over. When they left for Denver, all they said to Gabby was to remember to set the alarm.

  She reached across the bed for her phone to see what time it was, but her fingers grazed Devon’s shirt instead. As soon as her hand touched the worn flannel, she was no longer in her body. She was in Devon Warner’s body, at last.

  She was lying on the ground, outside, in the darkness, gasping for air. She could feel his body was freezing cold, yet at the same time, it was burning. What was that smell? It was like rancid beef.

  And then she realized what it was. Devon’s body was on fire.

  She felt her fingers, Devon’s fingers, claw at the dirt, trying to sit up. It was useless, though. Devon wasn’t going anywhere. He was on the edge of consciousness.

  She froze when she saw a man coming toward her. It had to be Devon’s killer. She couldn’t make out his face because he was too far away.

  Stay awake, Devon. Please don’t pass out.

  She strained her eyes to see the figure, but Devon’s eyelids were so heavy … She willed him not to shut his eyes. The second he did, she was afraid it would be the last time.

  The figure stepped toward her just as her eyelids fluttered closed. She felt the man reach into Devon’s pocket and pull something out. It had to be the serum. Devon couldn’t move and he was panting, trying to say something. He finally managed to whisper to the man who was inches from his face. “‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.’ You were my only one.”

  “I’m sorry it had to end like this,” the man replied.

  Open your eyes, Devon. Open your eyes.

  Just as the man turned, Devon’s eyes opened. The man was walking away, but Gabby tried to memorize as many details as she could. He was wearing faded jeans and a green windbreaker. And just as she’d thought, he was holding the large vial of serum in his right hand.

  She took a breath, Devon Warner’s last breath.

  Her body shot straight up and her eyes popped open. She was gasping for air.

  She knew that green windbreaker.

  She’d seen it a million times at school. It was the jacket all the teachers had received after a school-wide retreat over the summer.

  Whoever killed Devon Warner was a faculty member at Cedar Springs High.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Nash’s hands flew over the keyboard, trying to keep pace with the mounting theories in his head. Even after several years with the FBI, he felt a need to prove himself. No one ever mentioned it explicitly, but the shadow of his father loomed large. Luckily, it was also what motivated him.

  He’d sprung into action the second the call came in from Gabby. The green windbreaker could be their big break. After he dropped Sabrina off at home, he went straight to Cytology to vet the Cedar Springs High faculty. He’d barely moved for the past six hours.

  They needed to narrow down the list of faculty suspects before the killer took off with the serum. Or before he did anything to the group. Or Sabrina.

  Sabrina. The person he’d been trying to avoid thinking about all morning. Bringing her back to his apartment the previous night had been an impulsive mistake. Nash hadn’t worked this hard over the last few years only to let it all go by breaking such a cardinal rule. Sabrina was an FBI asset. Agents don’t get involved with assets. He could and would be dismissed from the bureau if what happened that night ever came to light. He’d never had a problem sticking to this rule.

  But Sabrina wasn’t like anyone he’d met before. What was it about her that made it so difficult? From the moment their eyes first locked, he’d been hit with more than attraction. It was something more like awe. Or destiny. (Which Nash would never tell another living soul.) It was a feeling that the moment was bigger than just them. Part of him had hoped she wouldn’t get selected for the program so he could find out if he was right.

  As soon as she had been chosen, he shut those emotions off. He was good at compartmentalizing. If anyone knew how to separate emotionally, it was Nash. He’d learned that lesson early in life.

  And yet, she kept surprising him. She was bolder than he’d realized. He loved — and hated — how fearless she was. He’d never seen someone face danger so easily, even among a group of trained FBI recruits. But it also made protecting her almost impossible.

  The night before, when he’d pulled up and seen her smashed car, he’d feared the worst. Once he realized she was okay, he’d been flooded with relief — and that had made him capricious, reckless. He’d let his guard down.

  He would need to get back to a level of total detachment. There was a serum that needed to be found, a murderer who needed to be caught and a very clean line with Sabrina he knew better than to cross again.

  Patricia entered his office, her eyes on fire. “Do you have a suspect list? They’ll be here any minute now.”

  “I’ve got it narrowed down,” he answered. He looked up from his computer and blinked. He was about to propose something that he knew Patricia wasn’t going to like. “I think it’s a small enough number that you and I can take it from here. The five of them don’t need to be involved. We don’t want to put them in any more danger.”

  Patricia’s look was offensive on its own, but she added, “You’re being ridiculous. This is when we need them most.”

  “The suspect is a teacher at their school. You wouldn’t send trained agents into the field without giving them weapons —”

  “We did give them weapons. And the fact that it’s a teacher is a gift. They can investigate right out in the open because there’s nothing suspicious about them being at school. If we strolled in there questioning the suspects, it would be an automatic red flag. Whoever had the serum would bolt with it.”

  Patricia was solely c
onsumed with the dangers the serum presented. Didn’t she care if the group ended up dead as a result? Would they be just collateral damage in her mind?

  “What if one of them gets careless because they’re at school and they feel safe there?” Nash pointed out. “He knows about them. He was following Sabrina.”

  “We don’t have nearly enough information to know what really happened with Sabrina. Z’s paranoia with the van may have gotten to her, and Sabrina could have been chasing an innocent person who panicked.” It was a possibility, Nash knew that. But they needed to assume the worst.

  “We set up cameras around their homes just like you asked. That’s more of a safety measure than we do for most assets. We’ll make sure they stay safe,” Patricia said in a tone that was the opposite of reassuring.

  Nash had almost lost his chance to change her mind. “I think you’re too close to this, Patricia. You’re not seeing the kind of jeopardy you’re putting them in.” Regardless of his personal feelings for Sabrina, he had no doubts that he was being objective about his concern for her safety. For the entire group’s safety.

  “Perhaps you’re too close to this case, Nash,” she responded tautly. “Those five are the best set of assets the FBI has right now. The best chance we have of mitigating a disaster. This is a calculated risk. Besides, you know as well as I do that if an asset wants to continue their mission, it’s ultimately up to them.”

  * * *

  Andrew met the other Lost Causes in the Cytology parking lot. They wanted to have a word alone, without Patricia and Nash there. Once they entered that conference room, it would be straight to business. The only one missing was Sabrina, who had texted that she was running late. Andrew hoped she was okay after her car accident. Sabrina had assured them all by text that she was fine, but that was typical of her. Andrew couldn’t imagine her ever admitting she needed to take a day off.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Justin said, leaning his broad frame against the back of Z’s Range Rover. “The person who stole the serum and murdered Devon Warner is one of our teachers? How is that possible? How was he right in front of our faces this whole time and we had no clue? Some psychics we are.”