“Is she okay?”
Doctor Schilling nodded, “Yes. Actually, I’m more worried about Skye than Spring. Skye looks to me like she’d barely holding herself together. Spring’s extraordinarily task-oriented, and as long as she has control of her tasks, I think she’ll be fine. Once Spring shook off the drowsiness, she was wide awake and alert. She started having anxiety, which Skye informed me was normal. Before I administered any kind of med, Skye had her snapped out of it. Their supplies had arrived, and Skye guided her in that direction. Now Spring is calm. I’ve been monitoring her ever since, and she’s fine. She’s hyper-focusing on organizing colors. At first she couldn’t handle an interruption, but now she’s even talking to me as she does it.”
Sebastian replaced his earpiece and strapped the watchband on as the doctor finished with the temporary bandage. He pressed the button for Ragno’s connection, as he thought two things: Skye hadn’t slept at all, and, although he didn’t have time to wonder about medical curiosities such as hyper-focusing, he was relieved that Spring was okay.
As he entered the living area, his eyes slid over the large screen television. It was tuned to the weather report. Volume was muted. Agent Reiss stood at Black Raven-style attention, hands at his side, back erect, eyes on him. He released him with, “Good morning,” but Sebastian’s attention wasn’t focused on Reiss.
Skye was pulling a pan of golden-brown cupcakes out of the oven. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail and loosely braided. She wore jeans that hugged her long legs, a deliciously snug pink cardigan, with white-pearl buttons, and socks. The pink sweater was a shade darker than pastel and almost the exact shade of her nipples. That thought confirmed for him how much of an asshole he was, because all he really wanted to do, at that moment, was unbutton her sweater and close his mouth on her breasts.
I am, admittedly, a total dick.
Dragging his eyes off of the swell of her breasts, he looked at her face. No make-up covered her natural beauty. She glanced at him and gave him the same calm and reserved look she’d given him the day before, when he had first met her. Underneath her cool reserve, there was a bit of stress in her eyes, but he had to look close for it. Her eyes shifted to the pan of muffins, her glance at him a mere passing thing, as though nothing had happened between them, as though her world hadn’t fallen apart in the last twenty-four hours. As though there was no attraction between them, as though she wasn’t exhausted and frightened.
Damn.
She was good.
Not good enough to fool him, though. He’d escorted enough people through war zones to spot the signs, when someone who was typically smart and brave was drawing upon immense strength and trying like hell not to show that they were afraid. Closer examination told him her eyes weren’t quite as quick as they’d been the day before. When they returned to his, they held his gaze for a long second. Her eyes were shiny with fatigue and more than a little redness, as though she’d been rubbing them. She drew a deep breath, the same kind of breath she’d taken when she had figured out the windows wouldn’t open. It was the sort of breath someone took when fighting through anxiety.
She said, “Good morning,” as she turned to place the pan on a wire rack. Her hands were shaking. More than imperceptibly. She was just as close to her breaking point as she’d been the night before. Maybe closer.
Next to the wire rack, a prior batch of muffins stood in neat rows on the white-granite counter. She’d been up and at this for a while, being everything Spring needed her to be—brave, on-the-surface calm, and even baking muffins—when what she needed was a long night of sleep.
What Doctor Schilling had been focused on, and was once against focused on, was Spring, who wasn’t paying attention to them. Spring stood at the long dining table with Candy lying on the rug, under the table. The dog’s eyes were focused on him. Spring’s headphones were on. Her back was to the room.
The two hundred three-inch, clear glass, stackable bowls that had been on Skye’s list for the safe house were in neat rows on the right side of the table, spaced with precision in twenty rows of ten. The bowls weren’t touching, but were separated all around by not more than a quarter of an inch. Bags of assorted jellybeans were on the far right, along with ten larger glass bowls. Tiny tubs of pigment sat next to the jellybean bags. Icing, in different shades of yellow, orange, and red, was in the larger bowls. Spring, dressed in black leggings and a light blue turtleneck, with her hair back in a loose braid that matched her sister’s braid, was sorting the jellybeans by color into bowls. She focused on the icing, dropping tiny spoonfuls into bowls. Each time she added to the bowls, she used a colored pencil to write on the tablet that he’d pulled from her backpack the day before.
“Sir,” Agent Reiss said, at the stove. “Eggs, ham, and toast?”
He looked at Reiss and shook his head. “Coffee first. Small splash of cream.”
He was half listening to Ragno who was giving him a run-down of the negative news reports that Black Raven had received during the night and her expectations of what the news show was going to reveal. He couldn’t tear his eyes off of Spring and her project. After Reiss handed him a mug of steaming coffee, he walked closer to the table.
“Not too close,” Skye said. “She needs space.” He stopped dead at mid step, even before she added, “Please.”
Yesterday, he’d have stepped closer just to irritate Skye. Today, he listened. Potentially provoking Spring into an anxiety attack wasn’t something he wanted to do again, and Skye didn’t need more irritation.
At first, the array of colors seemed chaotic. But as he sipped his coffee and studied the table and its contents, he realized that the only color-chaos was in the bags of jellybeans that weren’t yet sorted. The larger bowls contained icing in different shades of red, yellow, and orange, and only jellybeans in those shades had made it to the smaller bowls. In the grid of two hundred bowls, the spacing of bowls with jellybeans seemed random, and there was icing in some of the bowls in between.
Spring turned to him, slipped her earphones off, and gave him the same sweet smile she’d given him the day before. “Hey, Sebastian. I’ve got something for you,” she said, pointing in the direction of the kitchen counter, where one lonely bowl, full of opaque white jellybeans, had been banished.
He chuckled.
“I sorted out the daydreams first. But remember, only three at a time. Or groups of three. Never more than three groups of three.”
He glanced into her clear blue eyes and wondered how the hell such a simple gesture could make him feel so damn happy. “But I want the cinnamon ones.”
“No,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Sorry. You can’t have fire.” She shook her head. “But why fire? Yesterday you said blossom was your favorite.”
“Well,” he chuckled, because he hadn’t remembered which red flavor he had claimed as his favorite. He was dead certain, though, that he hadn’t used the words blossom or fire to describe any of the jellybeans. “Well, can I have those?”
“No. I told you no rosy ones. Especially not blossom or fire. Blossom is the brightest. See?” She pointed to a small bowl on the table that contained the brightest red jellybeans. “I need them both for my color palette.”
He nodded to the table. “What are you doing there?”
Before she could answer, Skye said, “Spring, don’t you want to eat breakfast now?”
Spring’s attention went from Sebastian, to Skye. A bit of her smile faltered as she stared into her sister’s eyes. Without answering Skye, she glanced at Sebastian. “Are you eating now?”
“There’s only one correct answer,” Skye said, eyes on him, and now she wasn’t trying to hide her exasperation.
He was unused to his dining habits meaning anything to anyone, but he remembered that Schilling had said Spring was waiting for him to eat. “Yes,” he said to Spring, but holding Skye’s gaze with his own, “I’m starving.” He turned back to Spring, and said, “Let’s eat together.”
She clapped he
r hands. “Yay. I was waiting on you. I like my eggs scrambled, but not too hard. How do you like yours?”
“Exactly like that, and plenty of them,” he said, nodding to Agent Reiss, who started cracking eggs into a bowl. Focusing on Spring, he said, “That’s quite a project.”
“Well, I’m going to do icing flowers on the cupcakes, you see?” She handed him the sketchpad, as she described the types of flowers she planned to put on the cupcakes.
As he listened to her, he glanced at the flower drawings and saw arrows from each petal to words. He spotted blossom, fire, sun, and other words that he supposed were descriptive of certain colors in Spring-speak, but in the real world they needed interpretation. Next to each word there were numbers. It was more fun to look at the light in her eyes than to try to make sense of the gibberish in the sketchpad, so he focused on her. “The numbers correlate to colors?”
She nodded. “But it’s way more complicated than that. You see, the numbers correlate to letters in the words that describe the colors, and we have our own words for colors. So you need to know a lot of information before the numbers can mean anything to you. We worked on it for years-”
“Spring,” Skye said, “Sebastian isn’t interested in the details.”
Spring’s eyes widened as she glanced at her sister. She refocused her attention on him with a frown. “Are you just being nice?”
“No,” he said, giving Skye a hard look for hurting her sister’s feelings. Big sis was correct, but he didn’t want to burst Spring’s bubble. “I really am interested. You said we worked on it for years. Who? You and Skye?”
“Sometimes Skye. Mostly Dad though. And this is just one of the color palettes Dad and I developed. In this palette, the fireball palette, the icing matches the jellybeans, so the flowers will be super bright. I used ocean and forest for the first batch.”
“What colors are those?”
Spring paused and gave him a questioning look. “Guess.”
He paused. “Ocean’s blue, forest is green?”
“See, I knew you were smart. The main branch of each color family is usually easy, but the shades get way trickier. Anyway, I didn’t like the colors. So I had to start over. I thought I’d just use the different shades of red and pink-”
“So you do know that this,” he picked up a red jellybean, “is actually red.”
“Of course I do. I just call it something different. Anyway, I didn’t like the shades of reds and pinks, so I saved all of the icing, and now I’m starting again with shades of cardinal, sun, and rosy.”
He glanced at the table, looked at the shades of yellow, orange, and red, and said, “Wait. Which word describes yellow?”
“Cardinal.”
“Cardinals aren’t yellow.”
She clapped her hand and laughed. “Of course they aren’t. If secret codes were easy to figure out, it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?” He finally understood why the holly cake was turquoise and orange. In Spring’s world, with her color-code game, those oddball colors were simply an interpretation of the orange-red berries and deep green leaves. “Anyway,” Spring continued, “the jellybeans are just markers for the palette. We take the color of the jellybeans, translate it to a word, and then translate the words to numbers. The numbers are the code, and we go back and forth with numbers and words. The jellybeans won’t actually be on the cupcakes. The petals will be all different colors and tiny, so there will be lots of color on each cupcake, but not too much icing.” She paused for deep breath. “The cupcakes are pineapple almond and they’ll have butter cream icing. All full of almond and vanilla flavorings, and deep inside of each we insert one little squeeze of buttery, sugary, crushed pineapple.”
“Spring, you need to clear at least part of the table so that we can eat,” Skye said. “There’s enough space on the counter for the bowls. Why don’t we just remove the larger bowls from the table? That way we can sit at one end. I’ll help you.”
Skye approached the table, but before touching anything, she paused and glanced at Spring.
Damn, Sebastian thought. Skye is asking for permission. He caught Doctor Shilling’s eyes. She met his for a brief moment, before refocusing her attention on Spring. The doctor was standing about five feet from the dining area, studying everything that was happening.
With both hands extended, Skye reached for two large bowls, hesitating slightly before touching it. When Spring met her eyes and gave her sister an almost imperceptible nod, Skye picked up the two bowls.
The subtleties were lost on Agent Reiss, who walked up to the table, and reached for two bowls before Skye, Sebastian, or Doctor Schilling could say anything. Sebastian moved fast, grabbing Reiss by the shoulder and pulling him back, but not before Candy stood and snarled at him, as Spring screamed, “NOOOOOOO. NoNoNo. Don’t touch, don’t touch. Don’t touch. Don’t touch. Don’t touch.”
Holy crap, Sebastian thought. “Reiss. Back further away.”
“Spring,” Skye said, grabbing her sister and holding her in a bear hug. “He’s not going to touch.”
Agent Reiss stepped into the adjoining living room. Sebastian joined him and Schilling there, giving Skye and Spring space. As Spring’s ‘no’s’ devolved into a long, loud, one-word string, he glanced at Doctor Schilling. “I saw this yesterday. Skye says this kind of anxiety attack is typical.”
Agent Reiss looked like he wanted to run away. “I’m sorry. I was trying to help.”
Doctor Shilling explained, “There’s an order to everything she does. She’s got her own protocol.”
“You should have observed that. We don’t just watch. We assess.” Sebastian said, automatically slipping into instructor mode. “If you don’t understand, ask questions.”
“She looks so normal,” Reiss said, “I forgot that she’s,” he paused, struggling for words, “different.”
Sebastian’s eyes met Skye’s. She was across the large room, but the flash of pain he saw there indicated that she heard the agent’s assessment.
“And that is a mistake you’re not going to make again,” Sebastian said, assessing Reiss, gauging the depth of concern he saw in the young agent’s green eyes, and deciding there was enough. “Correct?”
“You are correct,” Reiss said. “Sir.”
“Doctor Schilling,” Sebastian said. “While the sisters are in our care, Spring is your charge. Your one and only job from here on out is Spring; do you understand? Do everything in your power to make sure an incident like that does not happen again. Manage her world and all who enter it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now that Agent Reiss realizes the gravity of the situation,” Sebastian said, his eyes returning to Skye, who was comforting Spring and trying to quiet her as she broke into a fresh string of no’s. “Reiss will be your backup. Unless Spring doesn’t want him near her. If that’s the case, you’re to find a replacement for Reiss, someone both sisters find acceptable.”
“No, NONONONO,” silence. “No.” More silence. “I want to go home. To the bakery. I want Daniel and Sarah.”
The pain in Skye’s eyes, for a fleeting second, was palpable. “I told you we can’t go back there for a few days.”
Spring dropped her voice to a whisper and said, “I want to go to the lake house and I want to go there now.”
Chapter Sixteen
If his hearing hadn’t been so sharp, he wouldn’t have heard it, and if he’d been able to tear his attention from the sisters, he’d have missed Skye’s expression when Spring said ‘lake house.’
Her gray-green eyes flashed to Sebastian. Color drained from her face. She froze, as though Spring had tossed a ball in the air, and Skye was watching to see whether it would hit him. It did—smack dab in the freaking forehead and reignited his belief that Skye knew something that could help him find their father.
Whatever was at the lake house, he needed to know. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe, just maybe, that’s where Barrows had stored the backup that federal agents had never manag
ed to find. He could ask Skye, but the more direct route was to send an agent there and figure it out on his own. “Ragno. Figure out which of the Barrows’ family assets would be considered a lake house.”
“Will do,” Ragno said.
Louder, Spring said, “Please, Skye. Please. Can we go to the lake house now? Please? Pleeeeeeaaaaasssseeeee?”
The desperation that he saw in Skye’s eyes ice-picked through his heart. He wanted to help her placate Spring, but had no idea how. Well, he had an idea, because Skye had done that for her sister. He’d plucked them out of that world the day before. He couldn’t make their lives return to the picture perfect world of Creative Confections, if he couldn’t find their father.
“In a few days, yes,” Skye said. He watched her draw a deep breath, put her hand on Spring’s shoulder, and rest her forehead on her sister’s forehead. “But we can’t go today.”
“Sebastian,” Ragno said, “the report is starting.”
“We have so much to do here,” Skye continued, “There’s more than a hundred agents here, and tonight they’re going to have your cupcakes for dessert. If you’re going to make them look perfect, you need to get started now.”
Spring sniffed, looked at the cupcakes, and gave her sister a nod. “We need to bake more.”
“Can I help do that?” Doctor Schilling asked.
Skye glanced at her, “Do you have time?”
“Of course. I’d love to bake cupcakes,” she said, “and I’d love to watch Spring decorate them.” Schilling focused on Spring, and said, “Do you mind if I help?”
As Spring gave the doctor a small nod of approval, pulled her earphones on, and returned her attention to the bowls of icing, some of Sebastian’s tension eased. Skye needed relief, or at least a few minutes of quiet sleep, and Spring’s acceptance of Schilling was going to make that easier.
He reached for the remote, and turned up the television volume, as Reiss handed him a plate that was loaded with scrambled eggs and a fork. Evidently, the young agent had learned his habits and knew he didn’t normally sit to eat. Not while on the job, and he was always on the job.
Shadows (Black Raven Book 1) Page 25
