I spun around and glared at Raikidan. “Be quiet.”
He didn’t hold eye contact with me. “Sorry…”
I grumbled and opened a filing cabinet. The files, to my surprise, were organized. Normally they were pretty chaotic, as if they were just thrown in there to be forgotten about. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see anything that would help us. My lack of reading ability may have contributed to that, but usually important documents had a way of sticking out to me, regardless.
I looked at Raikidan when I realized he wasn’t searching. Instead, he looked out the window. “What’s wrong?”
He shook his head. “Just a bad feeling. You keep searching. I’ll keep an eye out.”
I went back to searching, but my pace was much quicker, matching my now-increasing pulse. Raikidan was always on edge on assignments, but this time was different. He was now paranoid, and it was making me paranoid. My heart stopped when a siren went off. It wasn’t from this building, but I had a feeling I knew which one it was from. It wasn’t long before more sirens went off around the compound.
I slammed the cabinet shut. “Shit!”
I dashed to the window just as Raikidan was climbing up to the roof. He hauled me up when I was almost there, but I didn’t protest. We needed to get out of there. Raikidan held a steady but fast pace as we jumped from roof to roof. As we ran, I searched desperately for one of the others’ active signals.
“Laz, is that you?”
My heart leapt at hearing Ryoko’s voice. “Yes, it’s me. Are you guys oaky?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. Sorry about that. They tripped a room and I walked into it.”
“Don’t worry about it. We just need to lose them.”
“Easier said than done.”
“What do you mean?”
“The information we were given was wrong,” Rylan called in. “This place was crawling with soldiers to begin with, and now there are more.”
“Then we need to stay in these small groups and try to blend back in with the city.”
“It’s the only thing we can do at this point. Good luck.”
“You as well.” I cut the signal to my communicator and signaled Raikidan to follow me.
I changed the direction we were heading and I picked up the pace when some soldiers spotted us. I jumped down into an alley and attempted to find a place to hide, but there was none. There wasn’t even a dumpster as a last resort. The soldiers were close so there’d be no way we could leave this alley on the ground, and I didn’t trust my ability to climb to get me out of sight fast enough.
My brow furrowed when Raikidan handed me his bandana, and his clothes changed to his Guard uniform. My breath caught when he boxed me in against the wall.
“Change your clothes,” he ordered.
“W–what are you doing?” I asked.
“Just change your clothes and hide the bandana. We don’t have time to argue this.”
I hesitated, but when a soldier shouted, my mind had been made up for me. I ripped the bandana from my face and had my clothes change. Once I looked like a shaman, I slipped the bandanas behind my back, inside the cloak, and tied them to a small pouch I had made with the armor. My heart raced as Raikidan continued to tower over me. He didn’t move or speak. He just stared at me as he boxed me in.
Just as heavy boots echoed close to the alley, Raikidan caressed my cheek. “Laz’shika—” Several people ran into the alley and shone lights on us. Raikidan growled and held up his hand to shield his eyes. “Do you mind?”
The soldiers lowered their lights, allowing us to see better. I kept my head low as if acting embarrassed, but Raikidan didn’t move as the soldiers stood there staring at us. “What the hell do you want?”
“We’re looking for some rebels,” one of the soldiers informed us. “They came this way.”
“Well as you can see, we’re the only ones here, so why don’t you get lost? I’m a little busy here.”
The soldier was not too thrilled with Raikidan’s attitude, but another soldier pulled him back to speak quietly in his ear. “Just leave him be. He’s a Guard and she’s not. You know their weird rules. If they’re found out, they’re in a lot of trouble. You can’t blame him for being defensive.”
The soldier sighed and motioned for the others to move on. “I apologize for the intrusion, and don’t worry, we won’t rat you out.”
Raikidan only watched them leave. Once sure they were gone, he moved away from me and I let out a sigh of relief. Raikidan made a motion for me to follow and I complied.
Once I knew it was safe, I spoke. “That was smart.”
“Sorry I did that to you. It was the only thing I could think of,” he apologized. “I may be helping you with overcoming your closeness avoidance, but I didn’t mean to put you in that kind of situation without consent.”
“How did you know they’d react that way?” I asked.
He smirked. “I hear things.”
I chuckled. I couldn’t help but like the fact that even though it put me in such an uncomfortable position, he had used what he had learned to get them to see what we wanted them to see. I wasn’t even sure where he had learned that bit of information. I didn’t know they thought that. It was dumb, but a lot of things the soldiers here thought shamans did or didn’t do were pretty dumb.
“You might want to tell me where a safe house for us to go to would be,” Raikidan advised. “I have no idea where I’m going.”
I laughed and moved a little faster so I was leading him. There was one close by. I didn’t have a key to it, but there was supposed to be one hidden on the front porch. I prayed it’d be easy to find. I just wanted to get home.
Chapter 20
Raikidan and I sat close together on the couch, sharing my Library book. I was letting him pick the topics to see what was going on in his head, but I was also distracted, making it hard to keep the book going.
I looked up every so often to look at Ryoko and Raid as they sat next to each other on the other side of the couch, looking over a selection of car magazines. They were comparing current cars and prototypes, and even using what they saw to come up with some new, obscure vehicle that didn’t even make sense. Rylan wasn’t in the room, not that I was surprised. Ever since Ryoko admitted she was done waiting for him to make a move, he had started lessening contact with her and had now shut himself off completely, secluding himself. But, interestingly enough, Ryoko didn’t seem to notice.
She did, though, immediately start hanging out with Raid more, and of course he wasn’t protesting. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he had somehow gotten the upper hand, and he didn’t take it for granted, immediately going to work charming Ryoko with everything he had. It didn’t hurt that they actually had a lot more in common than I had first thought, and, strangely enough, his shifting control had gotten better almost overnight.
Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe Raid was a better match for her. Possible, but I wasn’t fully convinced. Only time would tell if he would be able to make Ryoko happy.
My focus moved off of the two when Seda made her way into the room. She paid no one but Argus any mind. He sat at the bar looking over some papers, completely oblivious to everything going on around him. I knew what Seda was up to. Before Shva’sika could finish healing Argus while we had been out on our failed assignment, the wound had gotten infected a little. My guess, it had been from the lack of sterile environment I had to work with when trying to get him cleaned up. This stalled the healing process until the infection disappeared, which happened to be last night. Seda was now just making sure it was staying that way.
“Seda, please, it’s fine,” Argus insisted, pushing her hands away. “You don’t have to waste your time worrying about me.”
Seda reached for his face again. “Shut your mouth and let me take a look.”
I chuckled. The moment her hands touched his face, he turned red. I wondered if she knew how she affected him.
“Your face is rather warm. Are you sure you’re okay?” she teased. Yeah, I think she knows.
Argus grabbed her hands and lightly pushed them away. “Seda, I’m fine. Thank you for your concern, but you really don’t need to be. The infection is gone and the wound is completely scabbed over.”
Seda’s smile faded. “All right, if you say so.”
I wanted to hit him with this book. What was it with the men in this house? I doubted Argus meant any harm, but he could have just let her check. It would have been the polite thing to do.
Seda grabbed something from the fridge and chose to leave, but Argus grabbed her by the wrist and held up one of the papers he was reading. She understood what he wanted and sat down next to him, which confused me. Is she actually upset by him rejecting her help and just helping him because she feels she has to, or does it not affect her like I think it does? Does she want to help him with what he’s working on?
Raikidan nudged me, pulling my attention back to him and the book. I looked at book as he tapped it and placed my hand on it to listen.
A voice came to me as several different ones, piecing a sentence together from different entries. “Are you not interested in what I’m looking for?”
It was interesting to hear, and I had no idea someone could do that, so I tried it myself. “I’m just distracted, sorry. Keep looking for something.”
Raikidan nodded, and the book responded to what he wanted to know. Unfortunately, my focus wandered back to Ryoko and Raid, and then Seda and Argus. I couldn’t help it. Something drew me to them, but the more I watched them, the more a weird feeling pricked at me, and I didn’t like it. I forced myself to focus on the book.
I shifted my weight a few times to try to get more comfortable, but it didn’t help me. Something was bothering me and I didn’t know what.
“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Raikidan before hopping over the back of the couch and heading to my room. Once there, my feet led me to my nightstand.
I knelt down and opened the bottom drawer, where I stashed all my photographs. I picked up a small collection of them and looked them over. The photographs I had picked up happened to be of Ryoko and me, over thirty years ago when we had still been in the military. She looked happy in these, and I had done my best at the time to be as well.
The ones after that added Rylan into the picture, and then Ryoko disappeared and it was just Rylan and me. My brow furrowed when I flipped through the photographs, and the pictures of him and me didn’t seem to end. Had I always had this many photographs of us? When I started to think the rest of the photographs were just of us, they switched to Xye and me, and it was that same deal. Every so often, someone else would appear in the photographs, or they’d go back to Rylan and me real quick.
I realized, for the most part, these photographs were of just Rylan and Xye with me. But why? I don’t remember having this many photos of them. And why were they making me feel weird? It was the same weird feeling I was getting in the living room.
My flipping stopped when I came across a photograph of Ryder and me. It was the same one Ryder carried on him. A smile crept onto my face. I thought I had lost this. Putting it on my bed, I filtered through more photographs. That was until I came to a photograph of me with a man that looked a lot like Azriel, but was also different. Tannek…
We stood close to each other, and both of us looked happy. I thought I put this away… My chest ached, and I forced myself to look through the rest of the pictures. There was a reason that picture was meant to be out of sight.
My heart stopped when I came to one I never thought I’d see again. It was a photograph of my mother and a tall, light-skinned man with a muscular build, green eyes with what looked to be a gold ring around the pupils, a shaved head that you could tell had once been red hair, and a red beard and mustache. They looked happy and close, and the photograph looked like one of them had taken it. Unlike their happiness, anger boiled up inside me, and I had to resist the drive to shred this photograph. I couldn’t shred it even if he was in it. I didn’t have many pictures of my mother anymore.
I tossed the picture angrily into the drawer and tried to calm myself by looking at the pictures I had already looked over. I picked up a few at a time to compare them. I had even managed to find some of just Rylan and Ryoko, but the angry feeling inside me didn’t go away. It felt like it was getting worse, but in a different way.
Close bonds. Sometimes people wanted more than just friendship. Feelings others had. Feelings I— I began stacking the photos back into the drawer. Feelings I was not destined to give into. I threw the remaining pictures into the drawer in a hurry when someone knocked at the front door.
I hurried out of my room and down the stairs to greet whoever was still knocking. I was taken by surprise to see a group of soldiers standing on the other side of the door when I opened it.
“Good morning, Miss,” the soldier who had been knocking greeted.
“Um, hi. Can I help you?”
“We’re just here for a quick inspection.”
“Um, all right, come on in.” I led the band of soldiers up the stairs. “Guys, we have company.”
By the time the soldiers had reached the living room, everyone had been ready for them, not that we had been doing anything out of the ordinary. Seda and Raid were the only ones who had to do something different, and all Seda did was activate the cloaking watch to hide her mask. Raid, on the other hand, had shifted into his dog shape and lounged across Ryoko’s lap.
“Go about your business, I guess,” I told the soldiers before sitting down next to Raikidan. “Just knock on closed doors.”
The soldiers accepted my invitation, and most of them went about checking. These inspections were getting annoying. They were happening a lot more now, thanks to some better organizing of troop location on someone’s part, and they were really put a damper on what we did sometimes. It was even worse when the soldiers who stopped by had a psychic in their group. We were lucky enough to be have been dealing with those who were on our side, but our luck couldn’t last forever.
Raikidan poked my sides playfully and I pushed him away. Taking this as a sign it was okay to be a pain, he grabbed a hold of my sides and began tickling me. The book fell onto the floor with a thump, but I was too busy to make sure it was okay. I failed miserably at getting Raikidan away, and failed even worse at keeping my laughter at bay.
“Rai, stop! Please,” I begged.
“Say uncle.”
“No.” The tickling increased, but I refused to give in. It wasn’t until he was on top of me, that I’d had enough. “Okay, okay, uncle. Uncle!”
Raikidan chuckled and let up on the tickling. I laid there for a few moments to catch my breath before sitting back up. As I did, I kicked him. Unfortunately, Raikidan grabbed onto my foot and ran a finger down it as a threat. I glared at him and yanked my foot away. He picked the dropped book up off the floor and pretended to use it as some sort of peace offering. Rolling my eyes, I moved closer to him to read.
“You’re such an ass,” I murmured.
“And you’re a pain,” he shot back.
“And the two of you together are a pain in the ass,” Ryoko teased.
Before either of us could say anything back, the sound of small feet thundered down the hall. “Mommy. Mommy, mommy, mommy!”
Genesis, looking like she had before Ryder had given us the growing plans, zipped around the couch. Around her neck was a necklace with a sun pendant Argus had made. After he and Seda had fixed the major kinks in the watch, he had gone about making a necklace and had Genesis test it, since it was getting hard making excuses about why she was never around when the soldiers came by.
“Mommy!” she cried again.
Ryoko smiled at her. “What is it, Genny?”
“There’s a scary man in my room.” She looked over at the hallway. “And he’s touchin’ all my stuff!”
Everyone in the room chuckled. She was so convincing.
Ryoko rubbed her head. “It’s just a soldier doing an inspection. You know that. They come around a lot.”
“But he’s touchin’ all my stuff!” she repeated. “Mommy, make him stop.”
Ryoko sighed and shook her head. After a few pushes, Raid hopped off her lap and she took Genesis by the hand to lead her back to her room. Raid scratched himself a few times before lying down with a sigh.
“Hey,” Raikidan whispered. “Did Azriel ever give you that raise?”
I sighed. “No.”
Raikidan grunted and went to say something, but a soldier who had stayed in the living room cut him off. “I know of a place you’d be paid better.”
I tilted my head. What was he up to? “And where is that?”
He strolled over confidently and leaned close to me on the back of the couch. “Well, you could go work at Midnight. We’d make sure you’d be paid well.”
I froze up. He did not just suggest that to me. Pig! My hand flew up and smacked him across the face. The soldier stumbled back, taken by surprise by my answer. I jumped over the back of the couch and slammed the door to the roof shut behind me in anger as I stormed up the stairs.
I plopped down on the sill of the roof and hid my face in my arms with a groan. Why were most of the men I came in contact with pigs? Was it just them, or were all men like that, even if they weren’t so open about it? I refrained from trying to rip my hair out. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted them to stop.
I looked up when something touched my shoulders. Raikidan knelt down in front of me, a look of concern clear on his face. I forced a smile to make it seem like I was okay, but it didn’t fool him.
Secrets Page 25
