The Other Side of Envy: The Ghost Bird Series: #8 (The Academy)

by C. L. Stone

  “So, Mr. Morris didn’t tell him where we were? I mean we met him after school.”

  “I think they don’t stay in touch all the time,” he said. “Mr. McCoy thought he was tracking you down and being smart, so why did he have to talk to him? He’s operating on his own, and only uses the others when he needs.”

  “He must have informed Mr. Morris at some time.”

  “We had to figure out a way to get him to back off because he was getting too close. The longer he chased us, the more angry he got. It wasn’t until he felt he lost you that he started calling out to Morris and the other person he’s got working for him.” He moved in the shower, the wet tiles squeaking a bit as he shifted. “He’s desperate. They’re hoping the longer he goes without being able to get to you, the more he’ll slip up. He’s got to be close.”

  “How did they find us at the hotel?”

  “Phone signals from the others,” he said. “Eventually, we let McCoy catch up to Luke with the phone. He realized you weren’t with us and left.” He grunted. “Fucker is after you for some reason. He’s telling Morris you’re dangerous.”

  “I heard him,” I said. “Morris was talking to Kota and North and me. He...”

  “Don’t trust him,” he said.

  I nodded. I believed it now. With McCoy hunting me and Morris willing to help even after I warned him about McCoy, it meant he didn’t believe me. Or didn’t want to. Maybe he’d known McCoy longer and trusted him over a girl he didn’t know. I didn’t have an answer, but I would make sure I let Mr. Blackbourne make decisions on how to handle Mr. Morris from now on. “Kota gave him an address. One to the Academy.”

  “It was a lie,” Gabriel said. “Mr. Morris has someone looking at the place now. They’ve spent all night tracking you down and they’re still out there somewhere. Although now they’re following a fake Sang. Hopefully they’ll be able to keep them away for a while.”

  My heart dropped. A while. How long could we keep this up? “Who was the girl?”

  “Another girl from the Academy. Someone about your size. She doesn’t really look like you up close, but with the right wig and clothes, anyone trying to look in on her through a car window or from a distance might not notice. She’ll stay at the hotel tonight with the others. Then someone will drive her around the city tomorrow. Wait for McCoy to fuck up somewhere. We want him to talk to Hendricks, and vent, maybe tell us what he plans to do with you. We’re hoping he’ll dish the dirt on Hendricks and what he knows while in a conversation with him.”

  She’d spend the night with them? They’d be alone in a hotel room with another girl. I knew I couldn’t think of it that way.

  She was helping. She was Academy. I needed to remember that.

  I sat back against the mirror. “Why?” I asked. “What could McCoy do if he found me? Why is he chasing me so late at night, like he’s going to do something?”

  “Because Kota talked to Morris,” he said. “When McCoy finally called him, Morris told McCoy what he said. McCoy thinks we’re spreading lies about him, messing up his reputation. He wanted you before, but now he’s really pissed. So we’ve got to get you out of the way for now. But now they’ve got Mr. Blackbourne following McCoy. See? He’s in deep shit now if Mr. Blackbourne’s the one hunting him.”

  Uh oh. Was that better? “Will that make a difference?” I asked.

  “Sure will,” he said. Gabriel shifted in the shower and I could tell he was applying soap and scrubbing off the makeup. “Once he gets any information he wants from McCoy, they’ll snap him up. Of course we have to do it carefully now. Mr. Morris is on his side. And Mr. Hendricks is waiting for information. If we snag him too quickly, they’ll know it’s us. We need to do it right.”

  It seemed like a crazy idea. “Do I stay out of school until then?”

  “Tomorrow, yes. After that, I don’t know. This other girl is supposed to draw them away and make it look like you’re driving around downtown on your own all day. She’ll have a couple of people with her, maybe another girl or two. You and I have to float around outside of town. We’ve got one burner cell phone to use in that bag. The battery isn’t in it so there’s no GPS signal unless we turn it on. It’s just for emergencies.”

  We were completely out of reach of the others. “Then what? We spend a day away and then?”

  “We go back,” he said. He turned the shower off and then stood still behind the curtain. “We’ll stop by the hospital first to get news and more instructions. Our only job now is to stay out of Charleston and avoid being seen too much just in case. Can you bring the bag?”

  I jumped off the counter to go get his bag so he could change and then we could talk face to face.

  By the time I got back with the bag, he had the door closed. I knocked and he reached out with one hand. I smiled as I hooked the bag over his fingers. I had been in a towel before and he’d open the door right up. Gabriel was more modest with himself than he was with me.

  Gabriel came out dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, his hair still damp. He glanced at me and wrinkled his brow. “Are you okay in that to sleep? Do you want a shower?”

  I grimaced at the shower comment. I was too tired now to even give myself a hobo bath. I looked at my clothes. The sweater was soft, long so it covered my butt. The jeans were tight though. “I can take the jeans off.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. He moved to one of the beds to remove the bedspread and prep the pillows. This room wasn’t as bad with the bleach. Maybe it meant they didn’t use as much of it. I wondered if that was good or bad.

  I peeled of the jeans and then slipped in between the sheets next to Gabriel. Gabriel reached to turn off the light by the bed and then hopped up and turned all the lights off in the room.

  In the dark, I heard as Gabriel got into the bed next to me.

  At first, I was hesitant to reach out to him. I’d done so on the bike, but I’d had to so I could hold on. Now, I wasn’t sure. Had I made him mad before? It was hard to judge his mood. Was he still cranky?

  He stretched out on his back until his arm crossed over me. I got an elbow in my arm. “Oy,” he said. “Oh my god, Sang. I’ve been running around all day. I’m so fucking tired.”

  “Sleep?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He turned over and shifted until he had his arm partially around me. “Fuck me. I want to talk to you but I’m too tired. There’s so much going on.”

  His comforting arm was what I needed. I snuggled into him. He rested his head on the pillow beside me and kissed my forehead. Once we’d wiggled close to each other, he rested his head against mine.

  “Gabriel?” I said quietly. I wanted him to sleep, but I couldn’t help it. So much had gone on and I needed to know. “Did...did North find you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Dumb shit. He thought I was leaving the Academy for some reason.”

  Uh oh. How much did I need to admit? “Luke...said you’d gone rogue.”

  “He said we’d abandoned the original plan and went to go grab another girl that looked like you.” He lifted his head slightly, looking into my eyes. “He didn’t say rogue. Who said rogue?”

  I needed to tell him. Keeping secrets wasn’t working. If I needed to tell anyone the full truth, it had to be Gabriel. “I was talking to Liam on your phone.”

  “Huh? So he said? How did he know?”

  “He said Luke said you’d gone rogue.”

  Gabriel was quiet for a minute and then he pulled away, putting a hand on his forehead. “Oh my god. I was in the middle of coming up with the new plan and I told Luke to tell him to shut up because we were...I forget what I said exactly, but I was saying fuck this noise about the plan. He probably thought I meant his…Lily’s…whoever. Their plan.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly. “I was worried. I showed the texts to North.”

  “Well, probably good you did,” he said. “We needed him to pull this off. We needed a third, see? Someone outside to go in with the girl that looked like you. I forget h
er name. She’s a brat, though. She kept piling up favors. ‘You’re gonna owe me a whole lot of favors after this.’ Geez. I wish I’d never worked with her, but she was the quickest one to respond. I’m glad Luke stole her bubblegum.”

  I broke out into a laugh, imagining Luke picking a girl’s pocket just for her gum.

  “Anyway, North yelled at me a lot, but then he came up with the plan where I got to kidnap you and he and the others stayed behind.” He reached out and pushed a lock of hair back behind my ear.

  That didn’t sound like North. “North didn’t want to do this himself?”

  “No. He called it a birthday present from the team.”

  I was quiet for a long moment. Somehow in the midst of all the chaos, North devised a way to get Gabriel and I together for the evening. He knew I’d been worried about him.

  North. I pushed my hand over my heart. He’d helped me. Us. He said we were in this together. My eyes watered, and I wished I could thank him. “Happy birthday,” I said softly to Gabriel.

  Gabriel rolled over, pulling me in again. “I don’t even care right now. Fuck it all. We’ve got a whole day to ourselves tomorrow. Maybe we’ll go to the aquarium. Or maybe up to Myrtle Beach. I wonder if the park is open this late in the year.”

  I sucked in some air to calm myself. “Where’d you get the bike?” I asked.

  “Went and bought it,” he said. “Did it after school. It’s what we were doing, leading McCoy around for a while. Lost him for a bit to see if he’d catch up.”

  “You...bought it?”

  “Yeah. For myself for my birthday. Spent nearly everything I had on it.”

  A Moped. Something North probably wouldn’t approve of. No wonder we couldn’t find it on that road. I rolled my eyes in the dark, amused, and eager to talk to North and laugh about it. He had been right. The muscle car wasn’t Gabriel’s style. We assumed he wanted a car. “So you like Mopeds?”

  “I didn’t want a full motorcycle,” he said. “I like this one. Custom made. I want to do some things to it. Dress it up. I’m thinking...I don’t know. I keep going back and forth on it.” He sighed. “I don’t want to think of it right now. I’ll be up all night.”

  I sighed and settled back into the bed. It’d been a crazy evening.

  Silence surrounded us. I still wasn’t sleeping though. I turned over in his arms. I swished my legs between the sheets.

  “Trouble,” he moaned. “Stop.”

  “Gabriel?”

  “Hm?”

  There was so much to ask him. Questions floated through my head.

  He squeezed me before I could come up the best one to ask first. He dipped his head close and kissed my temple. “You know, North talked to Luke and me. About…about the plan.”

  “Oh?”

  His fingertips brushed the skin along my arm. He traced it delicately, causing goosebumps, but I liked it when he touched me.

  “At first, he threatened me, saying if I left, you’d be heartbroken. Said that he left and you were crying because you thought I’d run off, and he was going to drag me back to you. Said if I ever left you again, he’d beat the shit out of me.”

  My heart pounded in my chest while the rest of me froze. I didn’t dare move or breathe. North said all that?

  “The truth is, I almost considered leaving,” he said quietly. “When I thought about it, I was sure it wouldn’t work. We’re young. We’ve been through a lot of shit. We think we know what we want. I didn’t know how I was so stupid before. Thinking we’d just go on like we’ve been doing.”

  “I was willing,” I said quietly.

  “It was North that made me think. He kept asking the same thing. ‘What do you want? How do you feel about her?’ I said I didn’t know. He called me a liar. I almost punched him.”

  I snuggled into him more. “Gabriel…”

  He tilted his head toward me, pressing his nose to my forehead. “Sang,” he said. “The thought of leaving, I hated it. My heart hurt. Bad. I didn’t want to. I told him that. He said that’s how you know it’s the wrong thing to do. If your heart hurts just thinking about leaving, don’t leave. He asked me how I felt about staying. I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t hurt.” He pressed his lips to my forehead then and as he spoke, his lips tickled my skin. “He said then it might be because the path isn’t clear, but maybe it was still in the right direction.” He kissed my forehead. “Motherfucker’s a psychologist.”

  I smiled. “I wasn’t sure how I felt about it,” I said. “It feels like a selfish thing to want.”

  “I feel selfish asking you to stay with me,” he said. “With just me. To maybe sign up as a couple team for the Academy. Or even just run off somewhere.” He pressed his palm against where he’d traced on my arm, rubbing, like erasing the imaginary lines. He started tracing again. “Fuck it all, Sang. Let’s just do it their way. Or our own way. I don’t want anyone else. Maybe we’re young and stupid and when we’re older, we’ll split up and blame it on being young and stupid. At least we tried it out.”

  I wanted to answer him. I wasn’t sure what we were in for, thinking to do it like this. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “All I know is, I want to stay with you. I’d like to stay with the team. I…I’ll try, but only if everyone says they want to. I don’t even know what it’ll mean.”

  “I don’t either,” he said. He kissed my temple again. “But who cares, right?” He shifted until he was propped up on an elbow, looking down at me, barely visible in the darkness. I was on my back, gazing up at him. He smoothed a lock of my hair away from my forehead, and then combed my hair with his fingers. “Who cares what it means? If you want us to stay a team, and we want to, too, then that’s what we do. They said stick with you, no other girlfriends for us. Well, fuck other girls. I’m busy. I can only handle one.”

  I smiled, unable to help it. “The others…”

  “Listen,” he said, his palm touching my face. “I don’t know what they’ll think. Here’s the thing, though. Those that want to stay, they’ll stay. Those that don’t like it, they’ll leave. In the end, it’s those that stay that…well… if you want us to, we stick by each other. If it’s all of us, or if it’s only a few of us.”

  “But we can’t break up the team,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

  “If we’re going to be a team, we all have to agree to it, or we’re not a team anyway. We’re in this together or we’re not together. Right? I mean that’s how other relationships work. Sometimes you have twenty friends. Sometimes you outgrow a few and you end up with only two. You might gain new ones.” He leaned in and kissed my brow. “No matter what, though, I’m staying with you. If you’ll let me. If you want me to.”

  I reached out to him, wanting to hug him.

  He pulled me in, and his lips fell against mine.

  I wanted to talk more, but I melted into it the moment his mouth met mine. I answered him in a kiss instead of speaking out loud.

  Yes. I wanted to stay with him. I wanted to stay with the team. Mr. Blackbourne and the others were right. We couldn’t force it. We could only ask if they’d like to stay. If not…I couldn’t think of that now.

  Whatever path we were on now, we were in it together. I vowed to do what was necessary to ensure they were happy. Being with them was what I wanted. No Academy rules or requests could stop that.

  As Gabriel kissed me, I realized in that moment our happiness depended on two things: on staying together and ensuring the Academy could protect us. It might mean working with the Academy and proving to them, once we were ready, that we wanted to stay together.

  If I wanted to do that, I needed to face my fears. If the Academy wouldn’t be totally happy about our choice to stay together, we could at least prove ourselves in other ways.

  That meant looking into my past. The Academy would want to know. It would be required to join.

  I’d spend the day with Gabriel for his birthday, but as we snuggled close and drifted off to sleep, I knew that tomorrow, I’d t
alk with him about it. I’d want him to go with me to find the truth.

  I’d have to discover my past to gain the future I wanted.

  ~ A ~

  Gabriel Coleman sat in an observation room, watching as Sang and Marie Sorenson headed in to talk with Mrs. Sorenson. Sang’s features were grave, magnified by the dark circles under her eyes. It was one of the few times Gabriel thought of makeup for her face, only he disliked using it. Once she had a week or two of proper full night’s sleep, she’d get rid of those shadows.

  Her eyes were too beautiful to be shadowed. The green was too perfect a color to replicate in paint or inks. He’d tried many times, especially in the last week. Especially the other day when he’d been lost in his own thoughts and the only thing he could draw was her face, over and over, trying to get it right. Never doing it justice.

  The wall had a wooden rail, reminding him of a ballet barre and Gabriel gripped it, leaning so close to the window, that his forehead pressed against the glass. He’d smudge it, but he didn’t care. It was a small, one-way mirror meant for doctors to observe patients while they slept, or if they got tied down and went into a tirade.

  Mrs. Sorenson hadn’t attacked nurses physically, but from what Dr. Green said, she often was abusive, showing a narcissistic personality, belittling the nurse when she was alone but then when others were around, she played like she’d not said anything at all. Nurses felt safer going in as a group.

  It seemed even if Mrs. Sorenson wasn’t sick, she’d still be a burden to Sang and Marie. If they stuck together while visiting Mrs. Sorenson, they’d less likely have issues.

  This made it seem like Sang going in with Marie was a better idea. If they were together, maybe Mrs. Sorenson would behave.

  At least Mrs. Sorenson had been moved to the Academy hospital. She hadn’t had visitors since Mr. Sorenson left to be with his other family.

  Gabriel still wasn’t sure if this was a good idea or not. Sang hadn’t liked the idea of confronting her stepmother at all.

  She’d insisted, though. She was right: the Academy would make her delve into her past. If she learned it from her stepmom, or at least got started there, it’d be better in the end.