Chosen

by Ella James

  Carlin shrugged, then slumped down on the bed. As soon as she was down, she was up again. She tossed her arms out. “What a shady bastard.” The curl on the “r” was more intense than usual. “As for me, I want to try the slopes. Anybody else?”

  Mer held up a hand. “Let’s info-dump first. Anybody find out anything?” When no one spoke, Meredith sighed. “Well, I did. These people make money hiding sort-of, kind-of criminals. Like, white collar. Martha Stewart. Not convicted ones, but people who are being investigated. Not Americans, either. Sketchers from the EU.”

  “Lifestyles of the rich and shady,” Drew said drolly.

  “Exactly. So they have excellent security and they seem to be discreet. Discretion is on everyone’s mind, all the time. They feel strongly about it.”

  “Good to know,” Cayne said. “I spoke to someone with the resort’s security. They screen guests well. The only reason we got in was Carlin.”

  Carlin blanched.

  “Her Uncle Ferdinand is a guest here sometimes.”

  After a few more minutes of shared intuitions and a quick pull-back of the heavy curtains, it was decided: There would be no skiing, because they were in the midst of a blizzard, which meant there would be no flying (Cayne shrugged the storm off, but Julia ordered him grounded), and there could be no roof sleuthing at other resorts by other means because Edan had taken the van to the hostel, which the map said was two miles away.

  After a few minutes of debate, they decided to eat a late lunch at a Spanish restaurant on the west side of the first floor.

  “I hope they have real Spanish food,” Carlin said wistfully. “The cooks at the compound tried their best, but it was never as good as in Spain.”

  “Carlin, we’re in Switzerland,” Drew said, like he was breaking bad news, and even Cayne cracked a smile.

  “True, but I guarantee in this resort they will have a Spanish chef.”

  The conversation reminded Julia of group home field trips. One Saturday a month the older kids would go on field trips to places that at the time seemed fancy (one month, it was Graceland), and Julia has always felt that they stuck out like a bunch of sore, unwanted thumbs.

  The ornate hallways at House of The Gods actually were fancy. With Carlin’s bank account and Edan’s Edan-ness, they definitely weren’t a bunch of poor kids; here they were another kind of outcast.

  She wondered what these people would think if they knew they were hiding Chosen. Assuming, of course, that they knew what Chosen were.

  She wished she was just Chosen. She envied Meredith, Drew, and Carlin and the rest, although at the same time she was grateful for her friends. They’d stuck with her—and they didn’t have to. She wondered grimly how much longer they she would need them to.

  Her headache was mild enough that the Advil had helped a lot, but Edan had warned her it would get worse again. He said each time, there would be more pain to transfer. Meaning one day, he just wouldn’t be able to do it anymore. Her mind flashed a picture of the compound’s great glass pyramid; as quickly as it had sprung up, Julia reminded herself that the place was gone, and that even if it wasn’t she would never go back to The Three and their Chosen crazyland. She’d rather die.

  Meredith’s gasp interrupted her thoughts, and Julia’s initial bite of fear was replaced by something warm and fuzzy. One of Jess Stanton’s body guards was at the end of the hall, pushing open a door to a stairwell. At least he looked like one of them. Decked out in ragged black jeans, snow-crusted black boots, and an amazingly hot red and black flannel jacket, the guy bumped Julia’s blood pressure up a notch.

  Normally she’d never have the nerve to look someone that holy freaking hot right in the face, but her eyes didn’t give her an option. As her gaze caressed his deliciously sculpted nose, cheekbones, and chin, settling on his omniscient dark brown eyes, she decided no way in hell had she ever seen the guy before. His black hair bounced as he moved, a short—but not super short—cut that made his white highlights stand out.

  She only saw him for a second, bit Julia felt like a dirty cheater. He didn’t look like one of Jess’s body guards, so who was he? She remembered Cayne’s question that morning, and wished she’d had the presence of mind to open her sight. There was definitely something up with those hotties.

  Pretty quickly, Carlin was talking about getting his number, sending Mer into a long lament about how bad her hair had looked. “I need to find a ladies’ room.” Julia watched Meredith and Carlin’s backs as they walked, remembering what she’d always heard about girls: three’s a crowd.

  She sighed, and Cayne’s hand closed around hers. He’d been walking a step behind her, surveying the hall and probably Jess Stanton’s guard, but he’d somehow sensed her gloomy thoughts. He squeezed her hand and she squeezed back. Somewhere behind them, Drew cleared his throat.

  “Something to say?” Julia teased.

  “Get a room,” he murmured.

  “We have one,” Julia giggled.

  She turned around to look at Drew and, to her surprise, he winked.

  She grinned. The guy could be prickly sometimes, but he could also be a sweetie. Even though he wasn’t Cayne’s biggest fan, he always had Julia’s best interest at heart; he had from the moment they met, and Julia knew he always would.

  Meredith and Carlin swooped into a bathroom near the lobby, and Julia thought about their little group. It felt ‘off’ without Edan. Despite his shadiness, the guy had at least provided some badly-needed levity. Other than the concerns harbored by Drew and Cayne, everyone’s skepticism had lessened with time. It was true that if he was with The Three’s Chosen—distinguishable from the Swiss Chosen, or Swosen, as Edan had named them—he would have helped Adam and Co. catch Julia. Now that he’d run off with some snow bunny, Julia figured they should be lowering their suspicions rather than raising them.

  Drew went into the guys’ room, and she sat down on a bench, pulling Cayne with her.

  He narrowed his eyes. “Your head okay?”

  She forced a smile that made her feel like a horrible liar. “Doing just fine. I have a question, though.”

  “Toss.”

  She grinned. “It’s ‘shoot,’ but ‘A’ for effort. And my question is about Edan. I know you said you had doubts, but I kind of thought you guys had become friends. I mean, he freed you from the compound and you said he peeped in on you when you first got there. If he really is just an innocent man-whore, that was nice of him, right?”

  Cayne shook his head. “I don’t have friends. And I want you to know the only reason he’s still with us is I know that I could kick his ass.”

  Julia covered her mouth. “Cayne! You sound like…well, a teenage guy.”

  He rubbed his face. “If that’s the case, I’ll have to pay more attention to the way I speak.”

  “No, it’s cool. I mean, it doesn’t bother me at all. But it does bother me that you said you don’t have friends. What about me? And Meredith? And Edan, too. You do friendish stuff with him. Like Velcro-board chess, right after we got to Zurich.”

  Hilariously, the security guard named Henry picked that moment to strut up with his hand outstretched for Cayne’s. Striking a very good impression of a friend, he smiled and said, “Hey, man. You still up for the WoW tonight?”

  Cayne’s smiled, and it looked genuine. Drew walked out of the guys’ room, and Henry welcomed him into the conversation, too.

  Julia had played WoW before, and it was…interesting; but settling into a quiet nook with a good book… That would be relaxing. Maybe she could hang out with the girls, hit the bookstore, and go to bed early.

  She stood and mouthed “be right back” to Cayne, then turned and headed for the desk, where she hoped they could tell her the bookstore’s hours.

  She thought about what Mer had said and she opened her Sight, wondering about the nature of the desk workers. Curly was on duty again, wearing a crisp white resort shirt and sitting backwards on a fancy-looking wooden chair. The young-Norm-MacDonal
d look alike smiled his dimpled smile at a flatscreen that peeked out from behind a plant. His aura was pinkish red with a side of deep purple. Ouch—that didn’t look good. At some point, probably recently, he’d lost someone. She wondered who.

  His smile stretched into something more intense. Much more. Suddenly he jumped up, pumping his fist, and Julia froze, Cayne’s name a breath away from being screamed.

  “Come on, you little bitch! Fall, fall!” Curly cried. The girl beside him, a pretty redhead in an identical white shirt, started jumping up and down.

  “Go, go, you can do it,” she chanted she was from the United States. Somewhere in the Midwest. “Come on come on!”

  Julia glanced back toward Cayne, thankful none of the guys appeared to have seen her freak out, and then peeked at the girl’s aura—high-strung, sunshine colors overlaying more shallow tones.

  “This is it!” Curly cried, standing on the balls of his feet. “I’m going to do it.”

  “OMG are you serious.”

  Curly sort of tensed, his face focused on the screen. “I’m doing it now, Hannah. I’m doing it. Aaaaaannnd he slips in the grass, and Derdiyok gets a chance!”

  “Amazing, Ein. Totally amazing,” the girl said, covering her mouth. “He fell. He really fell!”

  “Yes, he did.” Curly—Ein grinned.

  Julia must have been around Chosen way too much, because all she could think was would it be possible for Ein to affect an athlete from a distance? That was a frightening thought.

  The red-haired girl—Hannah—shook her head. “Faust is going to be pissed.”

  Ein shrugged and held out his right hand. “Just don’t tell him, and half the francs are yours.”

  Grinning, Hannah clasped his hand. “Deal.”

  And Julia’s heart almost stopped. There, just below Hannah’s thumb, was a starburst, about the size of two half dollars, and the same shape and color as her own.

  Holy crap!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She spent all of lunch sitting on what she’d witnessed, replaying it over and over in her mind. She hadn’t seen many starbursts, but the ones she had seen—Mer’s, so big it covered most of her ribcage on her right side, and Carlin’s, a cute angel’s kiss on the bottom of her calf—looked similar: their color was a dark burgundy wine, no matter the Chosen’s skin tone; the edges waved, like an actual starburst, like a starburst sticker that said, “Wow!” inside, stuck on an A-plus test by an enthusiastic teacher. Julia knew what Chosen starbursts looked like, and by the time they reached their adjoining rooms, filed into the kitchen in the girls’ room, and watched Carlin work the cork off a bottle of sparkling juice, Julia was convinced that what she saw was real, and she was close to bursting.

  Meredith was in the middle of a story about one of her middle-school boyfriends—“had the craziest looking eyes; they were like, purple, and not fake contacts”—when she stepped a little closer to Julia, paused midsentence, then cried, “Aaaahhh, excitement! You have got to be kidding me!”

  Well, that was one way of sharing her news.

  “Kidding?” Drew asked.

  Cayne’s brows arched and Julia said, “I have news. I think this is it. This is the place.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Drew exclaimed.

  “Well…”

  She explained what she’d heard, and what she’d seen. When she finished, Meredith did a booty dance. “Holy crap, we have to know right now!”

  Carlin sighed, looking lighter than Julia had ever seen her. “I’m going to Spain,” she announced with a flourish. “As soon as I know this is the place, and Julia is safe, I want to visit my family.”

  “I’ll go to the roof,” Mer said, “since it’s still snowing too hard for Cayne to take Julia on a flyby. Wait, is there even a roof? Omigod I can’t believe this is it.”

  Cayne shook his head/ “There is a roof. But the pad is built on a platform that connects to the second floor. I saw it.” He glanced at Julia, frowning. “No tiger,” he said regretfully. “Just a top hat.”

  “Maybe it was small. I don’t think Monte ever said it was big. It’s totally worth a shot.”

  “What if you get caught,” Julia asked.

  “If I get caught, I’ll play on their feelings to get myself out of it.” At Cayne’s frown, she said, “If they’re angry, I’ll placate them. That kind of thing. Really easy.”

  “We should get Edan,” Carlin said. “He might be able to sense them.”

  Julia thought that seemed like a flimsy excuse, but apparently Meredith didn’t sense any ulterior motive. “Great idea.”

  *

  After a few more minutes of discussion, it was decided. Carlin and Drew were going to hoof it to the hostel. Or, rather, ride the swanky tram that apparently connected everything at the polka dot resort. Julia had missed that detail somehow. As Carlin put it, they were going to, “drag that man-slut” back to the adjoining rooms.

  “No more Mr. Playboy,” Meredith agreed. “The hussy came here with us, and he should have to stay with us.”

  “Exactly,” Carlin said happily. And Julia decided, for the first time, to be more tolerant of her Edan crush. He was exceptionally attractive—and it wasn’t just his looks. He had the whole sex machine vibe down to an art, and surely most girls would be susceptible if they didn’t know the odd aura and strangely creeptastic vibe lurking underneath his pretty surface.

  Meredith was going to sneak onto the roof, which she assured them she was adept at, being able to “always sense when people are nearby.”

  For some reason, Meredith’s plans involved Drew, Carlin and Cayne getting new blizzard-wear, so Julia sat beside her friend on one of the beds, popping chocolate covered strawberries into her mouth while the others went to the first-floor ski shop. “I think it’s funny that Cayne didn’t question you. He just went with them to buy a snow suit.” Julia smiled.

  “I’m the boss, and I needed some time with my BFF.”

  “Ditto,” Julia said, feeling the warm and fuzzies. She twirled a strawberry’s green cap in her fingers, realizing how long it really had been since she and Mer had talked alone. She glanced over at her friend, who today wore a big pink hooded sweatshirt, form-hugging jeans that might have been leggings, and sparkly All-Stars she’d gotten in homage to Julia’s pink ones. Her hair, despite her earlier complaints, was beautiful and shiny, and she’d even managed to come up with eye makeup. “So…Carlin probably wants to look hot for you know who, huh?”

  “She’s got it bad for the hussy,” Meredith confirmed.

  “She really does.” Julia ran her tongue over her teeth to check for strawberry seeds, trying to decide how to broach her next question. In the end, she just tossed it out there. “So…does Edan give you a weird vibe?”

  Meredith shrugged, looking like the cat that ate the canary. “Hmmmm.” She dipped her strawberry into chocolate, chewed it, and licked the chocolate off her lips.

  Finally, she twirled a piece of hair and tucked it behind her ear and said, “It’s not him. I mean it’s not, like…his feelings,” she said slowly. “Those are usually in line with how he acts. I do think Jess Stanton might be an old flame of his or something, though, because seeing her made him really nervous.” She put her finger to her mouth. “Shhh. But there is something about him. Sometimes when I’m really near him for a while, I feel kind of…like there’s a dementor in the room.”

  “Holy crap, no way! Me, too! Just like a dementor!”

  Julia was waving her arms in the air, practically jumping on the bed, when Cayne walked back into the room. He gave her a hilariously skeptical look, set a walkie talkie on one of the glossy wooden tables, and swung a snow suit over his shoulder.

  One glimpse of the thing made Julia’s blood warm. On the outside, it would look just like an ordinary black suit: jacket and those overall thingies that Julia was too Southern to identify. But below that…on another hanger… Those things looked like long johns. And Julia thought long johns were very sexy.
/>   Meredith punched her in the arm, and Julia jumped. “Get a room!”

  She blushed and pulled her hair over her face, pretending to play with it. It

  Cayne shrugged, looking confused. Then he held it up. “Is this right?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Julia managed. “Mer?”

  “Yep, it’s right.” She pointed toward the bathroom and gave him a ‘get going’ look.

  Julia grinned as he walked by, imagining him in his clothes.

  “Julia, come out of it.” Mer snapped her fingers, and Julia realized Cayne had slipped into the room next door. “I said, what do you think it means?”

  “What what means?”

  “You’ve got it bad. Do you even remember what we were talking about?”

  “Err…snow suits?”

  “Edan,” Mer said with emphasis. “And his whole—” she waved her hands— “dementor gig.”

  Julia nodded, forcing the heat out of her cheeks. “I noticed it when I first met him.”

  “When was that?”

  Julia recounted meeting Edan in the halls after Dizzy and the… But before she could finish her story, Cayne came out, looking like a snow suit model or an Olympian. Possibly both.

  He met her eyes, correctly read them, and smiled like a leopard that’d spotted a yummy impala.

  “Guys!” Mer lunged off the couch, waving her arms in front of Julia, then jumping up and dashing toward the door. She glanced back at Cayne. “I can feel her feelings and yours are loud and clear! Take a cold shower, Fabio!”

  Carlin and Drew returned, and at Meredith’s urging, they fled into the boys’ suite to get changed.

  Cayne frowned. “Fabio?”

  “Some super cheesy male model.”

  Cayne’s frown deepened. “She thinks I’m cheesy.”

  Julia laughed. “No, it’s just an expression. You’re nothing like Fabio, which is a good thing.”

  Cayne required more reassuring, which just earned him more giggles as the others passed back through the room and then took off.

  “All the time you were hard on the outside and sensitive on the inside,” Julia teased.