by C. L. Stone
That was surprising. “Volto?” I asked cautiously.
He shrugged. “No way to know for sure. They were letting random reporters in the gate at different times and never even checked who they were as long as they held up a camera.”
“The news loves to watch Victor. Especially when he screws up,” Nathan said.
Silas shrugged. “I checked everything else. Mr. Blackbourne and I checked the house too. Even the dragon desk. Everything was untouched. We might have gotten lucky that he wasn’t interested in the party or didn’t use it as an opportunity to get in.”
Kota finally appeared back in the garage with the rest of us. He scanned the others who had arrived. “Where is North?” Kota asked them. “Wasn’t he coming along?”
“He’s having to stay with Uncle at the diner,” Luke said. “There’s something wrong with one of the ovens. He’ll be by later.”
“There’s quite a few of us here,” Nathan said, mostly talking to Kota. “I think we should split up. If you still want to go, the rest of us can start packing while someone goes with you.” He partially motioned to Luke, Gabriel, and Silas, as if giving him the option of his choosing.
Particularly not motioning to either himself or me. It didn’t matter if he picked one of us as long as the other was left behind.
Even if I did want to seek insight with Lillian as much as Kota did.
At this, Kota seemed to give some consideration to the options. “Luke, do you want to come with me?”
Luke dropped the hand at my back that had still been hovering and tilted his head curiously. “To do what?”
“I’m heading out to see Lillian.”
“Do we really need to?” he asked. “I mean aren’t we good to go as a group? We’re all in, aren’t we?”
Were we? My heart did a little flip in my chest, thinking he was right.
Wasn’t that what this was? We were working together to stay together now? Somehow in a moment, the way Luke spoke, it was like this had all changed. It wasn’t about seeing if we were all in, we were all in already. We just had to prove to other people that this was what we wanted.
In that short moment, I realized… it had finally clicked that they were all in this together. With me.
Kota waved his hand shortly. “I am. But not the point. I want to ask about the Academy and a few ways to handle the manager we’re with. Mr. Buble.”
Luke frowned. “Mr. Buble? Not him. Whose manager?”
Kota blinked. “You know him?”
He shrugged. “I know of him. I was talking to this girl who’s been teaching me how to… you know, pick pockets better… but she said something once about how Mr. Buble ratted out Lillian’s team to the Academy in the first place.”
My heart sunk. “Then we can’t tell him about us yet?”
Luke sighed heavily. “It was twenty years ago. Maybe policies changed. But back then, they were sure it was setting them up for failure. They kept putting them through testing. Insisted they were young and their feelings would change.”
“They don’t dictate who we date,” Nathan said.
“No, but they didn’t want to put them all on the same team. They sent Lily on missions with each of the guys and assumed at some point she’d split off with just one of them to make a couple team. They kept trying to team them one at a time with her on missions and assumed two would match up eventually.”
Would that be our future? To be paired off until I and one of the others moved on together? I couldn’t imagine choosing between them. However, Lily didn’t do that. They stuck together. Maybe it didn’t matter if they tried that with us.
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” Gabriel said. He tucked his hands into his pockets and his neck leaned forward, his eyes lowered as he considered. “I mean we’re kind of at the end of the high school thing, right? We could start doing some outside gigs again. And a two-person team can pick up all sorts of gigs.”
“It’s not what we’re designed for,” Kota said. “The benefit of a big team is getting to do bigger jobs that no one else is able to do as smaller teams. It’s what they need us for.”
“Maybe we worry too much,” Silas said. His voice was deep and seemed to reverberate in the garage. “Maybe if we’re almost done with the school, we should be on the lookout for the next job.”
“We might not be able to move on with Volto around,” Nathan said.
Kota drew a hand across, as if cutting us off. “First thing I’d like to know is how to handle a manager with our situation. I’ll trust Lillian’s advice but I’d like to talk to her in person.” He motioned to Luke. “Are you in?”
“Of course,” he said. “Although I’m getting tired of riding in the car so much.” He stretched his arms out wide, almost knocking me in the head. As if realizing what he’d done, he re-aimed his hand to the top of my head and patted down. “Was kind of hoping to stick around but if you’re going…”
“We’ve got to pack,” Nathan said quickly. “Long story, but Mr. Buble is expecting us to get things together.”
Gabriel harumphed. “He’s not taking her somewhere, is he?”
“No,” Kota said. “I’ll explain on the way if you want to come along, too.”
“Yeah, you go, Gabriel,” Nathan said, with some inflection of urgency in his voice. “We’ll stay here.”
I don’t know why he was insistent I stay for this, but it was obvious he wanted me to stay behind with him.
Gabriel rolled his head back and mumbled. “Fuck me. Back in the car. I’ve spent more time in a car than out the last few days.” He trailed off with Luke to the other side of the road, where Luke and Gabriel did a quick game of rock, paper, scissors to figure out who would get the back seat. Gabriel won, and it appeared he stretched out for a nap in the back.
I could almost hear Kota getting after him about putting on his seatbelt as the old klunker drove down the road and disappeared around the bend.
“So what’s wrong and why did you want to stay behind?” Silas asked.
There was no getting around it. Nathan grimaced, showing a lot of teeth. “It’s something Sang and I found. We just wanted to double-check without Kota this one time.”
Silas raised a dark eyebrow. It was an expression I’d seen many times from North but Silas had a similar way to express his unhappy curiosity. “If you want a secret mission without him knowing, you’ll have to leave your phones behind.”
“We have to go to his house anyway,” Nathan. “It’s the perfect excuse right now. We need to gather anything of Victor’s we can find so he’s got clothes and other things. And we should prep almost everything of mine and Sang’s for moving. But in the meantime… we have to be on the lookout.”
The intensity in the air changed. I blinked heavily, reconsidering the necessity for some coffee to assist me with keeping up with the plan.
Silas tugged at the sleeve of the Red Sox jacket, revealing muscled shoulders and arms in a dark blue plain T-shirt. He carefully carried the jacket to the house. “Let me drop this off. And then tell me on the way over.”
Gemendo
(Groaningly)
Sang
Nathan filled Silas in while crossing the road.
Kota’s garage was empty of vehicles. What was left was an organized collection of tools of all sorts hung up on the right side on a pegboard, and toward the back were large metal shelves loaded with black plastic bins for storage, and one dog crate, kept near the garage door with an empty water dish and sleeping mat.
“Is no one here?” I asked. “Are we sure?” I wanted to triple-check.
“No one,” Nathan said. “Just Max.”
“Which is a good thing,” Silas said. “I don’t want to let Kota or anyone know just yet what you two think is happening.”
I grimaced. I didn’t want to think what I was thinking. I was sure Nathan felt similarly.
No one wanted to believe this.
A dog bar
k came from inside. Short. A small warning that Max was inside and could hear us and he wasn’t totally sure who was coming in. I followed them up the steps to the door. “So we aren’t telling Kota at all?” I asked quietly, as if fearing there were microphones and cameras here and he was watching us even now… and listening.
Silas spoke as he sorted through a keyring and found Kota’s green key. “I don’t want to be the one to tell him that you all thought his mother has been terrorizing us and the Academy for the last few months. That she might have killed Nathan.”
Nathan coughed shortly. “I don’t think me not paying attention to where I’m going when giving chase is her fault.”
“You were all for throwing Volto in jail when you didn’t think it could be Erica…” Silas said.
If it was her, she had a hand in a lot of bad things. She could have killed someone on numerous occasions.
Silas put the key to the lock in the door. “Let’s find out what’s really going on first before we start the trial.”
He opened the door, letting us into a small hallway near the back of the house. The lights were off, but further in the house there were plenty of windows letting in natural sunlight. Max greeted us, the Golden retriever putting his nose to Silas’s thigh, wagging his tail, happy to see us. He stuck his nose into Nathan’s hand and when Nathan warded the dog off, Max came to me. I gave him a gentle pat on his head.
I’d been in Kota’s house many times over the time I’d known him. I’d never done it when he wasn’t aware, or maybe it was just the intention we had this time. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe the mask we found in the back of his mom’s car had been planted.
It was highly possible, but asking Erica outright wasn’t an option. The real Volto would lie.
Not to mention the mask had been different this time. Before when Volto left masks as a calling card, they were very plain, cheap masks one could get at any costumes section of a box store. The one left in the back of Erica’s car had the voice changer mechanism at the mouth. This was Volto’s own mask we had, stashed in the back of Nathan’s closet to protect it.
The sinking feeling inside me had me worried we were right, I just really hoped we were wrong.
We never turned the lights on. As if we felt someone could be watching, we all tiptoed silently through the house, until getting to the hallway on the other side shared by Jessica and Kota’s mother.
However, when we got to Erica’s bedroom, we stopped just outside the closed door. No one said anything.
No one wanted to be the first.
When I was living in my old house with my parents, I had snuck into my parents’ bedroom many times while my ill mother was sleeping. Often it was a necessity, for survival in a house with a mother who often slept well into the afternoon and my sister and myself needed items from her room. Somehow, standing outside the door of Erica’s bedroom, this felt wrong. An invasion of privacy perhaps. The necessity I had felt sneaking into my own mother’s room didn’t feel the same as now.
Maybe because we were without Kota.
“I’ve been in there a few times,” Nathan said quietly, almost to the door itself. “But she’s usually in there.”
Silas stood closest to the door, but he waited. “If we ask her and she is Volto, she could lie about it. If we ask her and she isn’t, she will want to know what this is about. It’s the only way to get an answer without alerting her… or Volto.”
Nathan pressed his lips together. “God, I hope we’re wrong.”
“Me too,” I said in a quiet voice.
Silas sucked in a deep breath, his shoulders rounding out as he reached for the door and opened it.
The room seemed angelic as we entered. Light golden wood floors. Country French iron bed frame. White walls. There was a lightly stained wood dresser in front of the bed against the wall, with a television. There were ivy plants in small containers on either side, their dark green leaves flowing over their containers like curtains. A few of them swayed under the air pressure change of us opening the door and then stilled.
Nothing ominous stood out, at least.
We stood in the door, looking in. There was a closet door, partly open, and another door on the far side, the attached bathroom.
“We should start with the drawers, maybe,” Nathan said.
“Volto isn’t stupid,” Silas said. “And riffling through her things, we’re likely to disturb something she’d notice.” He motioned into the room where a laptop sat next to the bed on a side table. “We need access to that.”
Nathan nodded. “I should have thought of that.”
“Go get a USB port drive from Kota’s room. One of ours.” The inflection I suspected meant they were special Academy USB drives.
Nathan jogged back through the house.
While he was gone, I gently reached for Silas’s wrist just to touch him as it felt like it would calm my heart. “Would Volto leave evidence around? A laptop with information?”
“If she’s Volto, no.” He shifted his hand and squeezed mine gently in his, his larger hand nearly swallowing up mine. “But we’ll examine what she’s been browsing. It may give us some idea what she’s been thinking, which could lead us in the right direction and we can get access more easily to that without touching anything else.”
“You don’t think we’d find masks here?”
“If Volto is smart, he wouldn’t leave evidence around. Which is why I’m questioning the mask and why it was left in the back of her car.”
I shifted from foot to foot, concerned about all of this.
He tugged me closer with his hand holding mine, and planted a quick kiss on my nose. “I hope we laugh about this next week.”
It wasn’t long before Nathan returned with a small black USB stick.
There was a pause as we all looked at each other, as if daring the others to be the one to do it.
“If you stick it in, I’ll comb the data,” Silas said to Nathan.
Nathan frowned but went in.
It didn’t take long. He aimed the USB end correctly, stuck it in, and waited.
The stick lit up, first with a red dot. We all waited.
Suddenly the dot changed from red to green.
“Did it copy the whole drive?” I asked. “That quickly?”
“Just browser history, emails, and any documents and photos,” Nathan said. He recapped the USB stick and held it out to Silas. “Are you sure we don’t need anything else?”
Silas took the drive and stuck it into his back pocket. “No. It’s better if we get out of here. And we should get to doing what we said we’d do. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Kota’s too busy driving to notice more than us entering his house if he’s at all paying attention.”
Deed done. I didn’t like it. And we couldn’t just spend the time browsing the information. We had to refocus on the other task.
Leaving. For good.
Silas waved on Nathan. “Take this back to your house. And go look for some boxes. We’ll get Victor’s things here.”
Nathan nodded and hurried off. I heard him going through the back door and then on into the garage but after that, I couldn’t track him.
“Good,” Silas said, a beaming smile on his face replacing the disapproving frown. “Now I get you to myself for a little while.”
I was still anticipating Kota watching or even his mother possibly showing up to catch us. I couldn’t get over the feeling until we were upstairs and back in Kota’s room, away from the scene of our crime.
Silas went to the closet, peering in. “Do you want anything out of here?”
I stood beside him, but he was blocking the view of everything inside the closet. “We don’t need too much. We need Victor’s because he didn’t really bring any. Kota’s staying here, isn’t he? We’ll be back.”
Silas didn’t really answer. He just stared into the closet. “Eventually he’ll move. He’ll want to. If we all do.”
I touched his elbow. I wondered how they’d all feel about moving. Some, like Silas, lived with family. And like Silas, their family cared about them. This wasn’t going to be an easy move.
“And you?”
He turned, bracing his back at the frame of the door. “We all will. We need to. We can’t stay at home and do what we do. I can’t. My dad would want me either in college or in trade school. He’d prefer trade school. I can’t yet. I don’t want my dad to be alone just yet. But… soon.”
I bit my lower lip, thinking of what to say.
His hand rose up and with his broad fingers, he brushed a lock of hair away from my eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said.
“I can’t help it.”
He smirked and opened his arms.
I knew what this was. My heart raced, and I eagerly reached for him, and he bent over and picked me up, holding me by my butt, and he lifted me in a big hug.
I felt better like that, being held up, my body pressed to his and held close.
Except this time, he nuzzled into my shoulder.
He held me for a long time like that. Until he murmured against my skin. “Remember that time at the party and you and North got to play some sort of game in the closet?”
That seemed like such a long time ago. “Sort of. Seven minutes… something like that?” I didn’t even remember if it had a name but I thought it was that, from movies and books.
“We can spare seven minutes. Is it our turn yet?”
I giggled. We were technically in the closet.
In response to my giggling. He shifted, and suddenly the light was out and the door closed.
In the darkness, I fumbled, mostly because he partially dropped me when he closed the door and hit the light.
When I steadied myself, his nose met mine and nearly crushed it as he leaned in to kiss me.
I tilted my head, and for a moment, I remained still. I really liked his kisses when he started first.
He kissed me. Deeply. Surprising me with how deep he started, I only minimally moved my mouth because his thick lips and larger tongue seemed to swallow up any effort I put in. I liked it, enjoying his affections and letting him show me how much he missed me and wanted me.
