Oath Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  “Would it help to remind you that your computer died a noble death, in defense of both our lives?”

  She snatched her bag from me, busted laptop and all. “No. That wouldn’t help. If I’d never met you, my life wouldn’t need defending.” With that, she turned and marched into the living room where she sat next to Hadley, pretending to watch TV while silent tears rolled down her face.

  Kori gave me a silent, brow-raised look as she pushed the closet door closed behind me.

  “I don’t think she likes me, Kor.”

  “Yeah, I can’t figure that out. You’re the friendliest kidnapper I’ve ever met.” My sister shrugged. “She probably hates puppies, too.”

  * * *

  That night, after Anne and Hadley had gone home, Vanessa loaned Sera something to sleep in and Kori dug out an extra toothbrush from the linen closet and told her to help herself to any toiletries she needed from the bathroom. While Sera showered, I sat backward in my sister’s desk chair, conferring with Kori and Ian in their bedroom.

  It was nearly twice the size of mine, and the bed looked all rumpled and...used. I tried not to think about that. At all. Ever.

  “I asked Van to do a search for murdered families with a survivor named Sera,” Kori whispered, even though we could all hear the shower running. “If she doesn’t find anything in the immediate area, she’ll widen the search.”

  “She won’t find anything local.” I laid my arms over the back of the chair, my voice almost as low as hers. “Sera’s definitely not a city mouse.”

  “Or so she’d have us think.” Kori’s gaze narrowed on me. “Do you believe her?”

  “About everything? No. About that? Yes. Anne says she’s hiding something, and we have no reason not to trust Anne. But I believe Sera doesn’t know the city and truly has no clue about the Towers.”

  Ian sank onto the love seat in front of a large window. My room had only one small window, and no couch. “Do you trust her?”

  That was a more complicated question. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s kind of a ‘no’ by default.” Kori shrugged. “Either you trust her, or you don’t.”

  “I don’t trust her yet.” But I wanted to. And I wanted her to trust me.

  Ian pulled Kori down with him on the couch. “Maybe we’ll be able to once we figure out who the hell she is.”

  “Crossing my fingers for Vanessa on that account,” I said, and Kori gave me that same I’m-laughing-at-you-but-you’re-too-dumb-to-know-it grin she’d been using on me since the sixth grade.

  “Cross your fingers for yourself.” She glanced at Ian and he smiled. “If I had any money, I’d bet that you’ll get her talking long before Van can dig up anything reliable.”

  “Kor, Sera hates me.”

  My sister’s smile refused to die, and if it weren’t so good to see her happy—even at my expense—I might have tried to rid her of it. “Maybe. But you’re the only one she’s really spoken to so far, other than Hadley. That has to mean something.”

  But I had my doubts.

  Ian shrugged. “Either way, we’re safer with her here, unless she’s a mole planted by Julia Tower.” But if that were the case, Anne would have known Sera was lying.

  “We may be safer. But Kenley isn’t,” Kori said, and the mood in the room sobered instantly. We hadn’t forgotten about her—not even for a second—but hearing her name brought all our anger, fear and frustration to the surface.

  Ian put one arm around her. “We’ll get her back, Kori. But there’s nothing we can do for her tonight, and we won’t be much good to her tomorrow without some rest. So kick your brother out of here, so we can all get some sleep.”

  “Get out, brother, so we can all get some sleep,” Kori said, obviously struggling to maintain the illusion of optimism.

  I stood, already backing toward the door. “You have to stop using ‘sleep’ as a euphemism.”

  I closed the door on their soft laughter and began my first-floor security scan, specifically checking on the window Ian had covered, which now felt safer than the ones that still held glass. Then I checked on Gran, who was snoring on her left side, and on the hall closet, which stood wide open, lit from within by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  All the other rooms held a single infrared bulb in a floor lamp with no shade. We kept them on all the time as a security precaution. They shed no visible light, but kept the darkness too shallow for shadow-walkers to utilize.

  Upstairs, Van was clicking away at her laptop in the room at the end of the hall, and I knew without asking that she wouldn’t get much sleep, in spite of the late hour. Not with Kenley missing. But at least she’d found something constructive to do with the time.

  When I was sure everything was secure and everyone was safe—except for Kenley—I headed into my own room. Then stopped cold with my hand still on the doorknob.

  Sera stood naked in the middle of the floor with her back to me, a towel in her left hand, a T-shirt in her right.

  For about half a second, I had a stunning, unimpeded view of one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen. She was slim, and soft and every curve on her body seemed designed to fit into my hand, or under my lips, or into my mouth...

  Then she half-turned and saw me, and if she hadn’t choked on surprise, she’d surely have screamed loud enough to break every pane of glass in the house. Fear flashed behind her eyes for just an instant, replaced almost immediately by blazing fury as she dropped the shirt and clutched the towel to her chest, its hem grazing her toes.

  “Get out!” she screeched, and my confusion manifested as anger, which I probably had little right to express.

  “This is my room.”

  “Oh, Kris?” Kori called from the room next door. “I forgot to tell you I gave Sera your room. Sorry!” But she wasn’t sorry. That was not the tone of regret.

  “You gave her...” Irritation burned in my cheeks and I turned to Sera, who’d wrapped the towel around herself and was tucking the loose corner between her breasts. I’d never wanted to be a towel so badly in my life. “So you’re not...”

  She rolled her eyes, one hand resting on the footboard of my bed. “You can’t be serious. You thought I came up here to throw myself at you?”

  I shrugged and leaned against the doorjamb, scrambling for composure to hide any sign that I’d liked what I’d seen. “It’s happened before.”

  Her glare grew colder and she crossed both arms over the front of the towel, a secondary barrier between the two of us. “I promise, if I throw something at you, it’s gonna hurt.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to think? There’s a naked woman in my room.”

  “A woman you kidnapped, interrogated and conscripted into your mission, then dragged into the line of fire. Again. You’re supposed to think, ‘Gee, the least she deserves is a place to sleep and a little privacy.’”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. “So, what...” I asked, loud enough for Kori to hear. “I get the couch?” We all knew she was listening in anyway.

  “Unless you think you can talk Gran out of her bed,” my sister called back, and I could still hear repressed laughter in her voice.

  “This is because I’m a guy, right?” I crossed the room and grabbed the duffel bag I’d been living out of for more than three months. “Girls never take the couch.” And Ian and Kori wouldn’t both fit on the one downstairs, which only left me...

  “You’re such a gentleman.” Sarcasm dripped like venom from Sera’s lips. “I’m floored by your hospitality. Now, would you please get the hell out of my room so I can put some clothes on?”

  “No one’s stopping you.” And instead of leaving, I started loading my stuff into my bag. My stuff didn’t amount to much—deodorant, a comb, a bag of unshelled peanuts I’d been munching from for two days.
>
  I was halfway down the hall, the door already closed at my back, when I remembered Elle’s sleep journal. Shit. If Sera found that, she’d think I was rude and crazy.

  At the bedroom door again, I knocked twice. “Fair warning. I’m coming in.”

  “Just a second,” she called. And that meant she was still naked. Or still partially naked. Maybe pulling her shirt over her head at that very moment.

  My imagination was good and my memory was even better, and I couldn’t purge the mental image of her facing away from me, tugging a T-shirt over her bare back, where it hung down to hips that could make a man weep.

  “Okay. Come in.”

  I opened the door. She was fully dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. Damn.

  “What, one invasion of privacy wasn’t enough?” She propped both hands on those hips, and my gaze stuck there for a second. “Three strikes and you’re out.”

  “So, I get one more?” I was kidding. Trying to make light of the fact that my subconscious seemed determined to sabotage my efforts to not think about her naked by constantly showing me images of her naked. But she didn’t look amused. “Sorry. I forgot something.”

  I stomped past her to the nightstand and quickly realized she wasn’t going to look away while I removed the very private contents. But I guess I deserved that, considering how much of her I’d seen in the past five minutes alone.

  Sera watched me shove the notebook into my bag, but didn’t comment. “Night,” I said as I closed the door behind me for the second time, and if she replied, I couldn’t hear her.

  For almost a minute, I stood outside the room, leaning against the door, fighting the urge to go back in. To say...something. Something brilliant, and funny, and without any kidnapper or peeping-perv overtone.

  Whatever it took to make her stop hating me again.

  I couldn’t stand knowing that a couple of hours earlier, she’d smiled at me in the thick of enemy territory, yet here, where she was safe, fed, clothed and tucked into my bed without me, she hated me all over again.

  But I was all out of brilliant and I’d never been very funny, so with a frustrated growl, I clutched Elle’s notebook to my chest, pushed memories of both her and Sera from my mind, and stomped down the stairs to where the only arms waiting to hold me belonged to the cold, lumpy couch.

  Nine

  Sera

  I slept like crap in the unfamiliar bed, and twice I woke up to the sound of someone crying, but I was too tired and disoriented to tell who it was.

  Several hours later, I woke to find myself immersed in some kind of twisted Rockwellian family portrait. The kitchen table was crowded with stacks of pancakes, piles of bacon and three different kinds of syrup—none of them sugar-free. While Gran refilled mugs of coffee with a grease-stained apron tied around her waist, my new, heavily armed acquaintances loaded plates with fat and processed carbs, then headed into the living room to seats that seemed to have been assigned long before I’d joined the gang.

  They spoke around full mouths, tossing out ideas about where to look for Kenley, speaking over one another, traipsing in and out of the kitchen to refill plates the whole time. I gave up trying to follow the conversation after a few minutes, and the second time a strip of bacon was snatched from the platter an instant before I would have taken it, I started guarding my breakfast with my elbow, like a basketball player.

  “You have to be quick around here, if you wanna eat.” Gran patted my shoulder, then tossed a grease-soaked paper plate into the trash. “A little aggression doesn’t hurt, either. I swear, it’s a miracle Kenley never starved to death, timid little thing. Not that they’d’ve let that happen. Kori always fixed her plate first, then ran her out of the kitchen so she wouldn’t get trampled.”

  My family had been smaller. Quieter. Healthier eaters. Yet despite the differences, being surrounded by someone else’s family made me miss mine desperately.

  After breakfast, I helped wash the dishes, then settled into a chair at the deserted table with my ruined computer bag. I’d been sorting through the remains of my memories—my mother’s photographs—for about ten minutes when Gran put a fresh mug of coffee on the table in front of me and asked me how long I’d known her daughter Nikki. Vanessa came to my rescue by distracting her, and I retreated back into my shell. Remembering. Mourning. Staring into the faces of my past around the bullet holes shot through several of the irreplaceable photographs and into my computer.

  Vaguely, I heard life going on around me. Kris and Kori argued as if they were still in middle school and Ian played peacemaker as though he’d been born for the job. Vanessa alternately fretted over Kenley and raged at the bastards who would dare lay a hand on her, swearing vengeance with a furor I could never have imagined from the delicately grieving girlfriend the day before.

  Olivia, the Tracker, stopped in for a bit to plot with the others, but then she was called away, either by Ruben Cavazos, her mafia-boss employer, or Cam Caballero, her mafia-employed boyfriend. I wasn’t sure which. I didn’t really care. All I could think about was that my vengeance had been put on hold while I sat there with nothing to do but remember, passively shielding the motely gang of violent do-gooders who’d promised to do violent good for me. Eventually.

  My coffee had long since grown cold when Kris pulled out the chair next to mine and sat without asking or waiting for a welcome. “You okay? You don’t have to sit in here by yourself, you know.”

  But I wasn’t alone. I was with my family, the only way I could be now. When I didn’t answer, he watched me in silence for a few minutes, and several times he took a deep breath, as if he might actually say whatever he’d come to say. But then he’d glance at the photographs and seem reluctant to invade my mourning ritual.

  Then, after several more minutes and another glance at his watch, he started talking.

  “Hey. I know this may not be a good time, but I have to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “I’m done answering questions.” I sorted a picture of Nadia in her third-grade Halloween costume into a stack of others from that year.

  “These aren’t personal, I swear. They’re work-related. Since you’re working with us now.”

  I exhaled and picked up a picture of my dad playing his guitar. My eyes watered. “Fine.”

  “What’s your range, approximately?”

  “My range?” I looked up from my pictures to meet his gaze and discovered, now that the major light source was the incandescent bulb overhead, that his eyes were more blue than gray—the sun had long since stopped shining through the east windows. I’d been staring at pictures for half the day.

  “Yeah. How far away from a person do you have to be to...jam him? His signal, I mean.” He closed his eyes and shook his head, then started over. “His psychic signal. How close do you have to be to a guy to make sure no one can Track him?”

  I glanced at the single foot of space separating us. “Not this close.”

  Kris’s cheeks actually flushed. Across the kitchen Kori laughed out loud and her brother glared at her. “I mean, assuming you’re at the center of a vaguely spherical psychic dead zone, for lack of a better term, what’s the diameter of your influence? How far can you spread your wings, so to speak?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Seriously?” Kori took the first bite of a candy bar, then spoke around it. “You seriously don’t know the extent of your own abilities?”

  “How is that possible?” Kris asked, and when I noticed Ian and Vanessa watching us from the kitchen doorway, I realized story-hour had commenced.

  I shrugged. “My family wasn’t Skilled. I didn’t even know I was Skilled until I was nearly eighteen.”

  Kris whistled, looking impressed, though I wasn’t sure why.

  Ian crossed his arms over his chest. “Steven and I knew practically from bir
th. But then, our mom was pretty paranoid.”

  “Our parents didn’t tell us until Kris started demonstrating Skills, but that was way earlier than eighteen,” Kori said, and I wondered how old they’d been when their parents had died.

  “That’s the thing.” I slid the photos back from the edge of the table so they wouldn’t fall, unsure of who to look at as I addressed the entire room. “I’m a Jammer. I didn’t accidentally walk through the shadows in my own room, or suddenly start calling my friends liars. Jamming is really a whole lot of nothing. Literally. I don’t even do it on purpose. It just kind of...follows me.”

  “So you can’t control it?” Vanessa’s gaze flicked to Kori. “Didn’t you say some Jammers can turn it off?”

  Kori nodded, still watching me. “And some can restrict or expand their zone. You probably could, too, if you tried it.”

  “Maybe.” But I’d never had any interest in narrowing my zone of influence, because I’d never wanted to be found.

  “So, if your family isn’t Skilled, how are you Skilled?” Van asked, and I remembered that she had no Skill. She probably knew less about the whole thing than I did. Though that hardly seemed possible.

  I picked up a photo of me with Nadia and my parents, and handed it to Kris, who studied it for one long moment, then passed it around. “My mom had me before she met my dad. She and my dad are—were—unSkilled, but my biological father wasn’t.”

  When everyone had had a look at my heartbreak, Van handed the photo back to me. Everyone was somber now, out of respect for my loss.

  “So, what about him?” Kris seemed to be studying my eyes, like he could read more in them than I would say aloud. “Your biological dad?”

  “I never met him.” And since Anne was gone, I had no trouble leaving it at that—a technical truth hiding an even deeper one.

  “Okay.” Kris cleared his throat, bringing us back on task, whatever that task was—and there was now obviously a point to this line of questioning. Which had turned personal after all. “Since we don’t know your range and we don’t have time to figure it out now, we’ll need you to come with us.”