Book One

by K. C. Archer

  “Hey,” Teddy said softly. “Everything okay?”

  “Just tired.” Molly smiled again. “These new exercises.”

  “Are they worth it?” Teddy asked. “Even though they’re keeping people’s emotions out, I can’t help but think they’re keeping other stuff out, too.”

  Molly looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not picking up on things you used to. You haven’t mentioned anything about the case—”

  “Not everything is about the case, Teddy.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Look,” Teddy started, “Jeremy told me about what happened last year.”

  Molly chewed her lip. “I’m looking for a clean slate. Same as you.”

  “But is it worth jeopardizing your health?”

  “I . . .” Molly said.

  Teddy studied the faded blue carpet on the library floor, trying to find the right words. She didn’t know how to voice what she was feeling. Concern, of course, but also frustration, maybe even suspicion. Months ago, Molly would have known without Teddy even having to try.

  Dara wove through the stacks toward them, her signature silver bangles clinking. “Hurry,” she said. “Jillian’s got something.”

  Jillian hunched over the table, her face so pale it looked practically white. Pyro stood next to her, his arms out as if he planned to catch her in case she fell over.

  “She slipped Marlena’s ring onto her finger, and this happened,” Dara said.

  Jillian heaved as if trying to catch her breath after running one of Boyd’s obstacle courses. Her hands traveled to her neck, clawing at something invisible there. In a high, thready voice not her own, she whispered: “I can’t breathe.”

  Teddy lurched forward. “We’ve got to—”

  Pyro caught her arm before Teddy could shake Jillian out of the trance. “Marlena can’t breathe,” he said. Then his gaze shot to Dara. “Do you think we can ask her questions?”

  Dara nodded. “I saw something like this once in my grandmother’s shop.”

  Pyro leaned forward. “We want to help you, Marlena. Nod if you’re listening.”

  Jillian gasped. She was struggling for air.

  “Someone strangled you,” Pyro said. “Was it Corey?”

  Jillian’s eyes rolled back in her head. Her body trembled as she drew shallow, labored breaths.

  “Was it Corey?” Pyro asked again.

  Jillian stopped breathing.

  Teddy rushed forward, grabbing her by the shoulders. She lifted Jillian’s blond curls and pushed two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse, then waited before she felt the faint beat of Jillian’s heart. Jillian opened her eyes and gasped. “Did I fall asleep or something?” she said.

  Pyro placed a hand on Jillian’s shoulder. “Nice work. Jillian, you just communed with Marlena.”

  “I did?”

  Every step forward felt like a step backward. Sure, Jillian had connected with Marlena, but that hadn’t made the way any clearer. Teddy had been so sure at the start of the assignment that casework would be straightforward. Follow the clues. Find the bad guy. But the more they studied the facts, the murkier they seemed.

  Teddy glanced nervously from Jillian to the other Misfits. “So, we’re sure that Marlena was strangled. Even if the coroner wasn’t. That’s something,” she said.

  *  *  *

  The Misfits’ lucky streak continued the next day, when they returned to the library to reexamine the kits. They split up again, this time each choosing a different clue from each kit. It wasn’t long before Teddy looked up to find Jeremy quietly standing over her desk, a grin on his face.

  “I’ve got something,” he said, tossing the copy of Romeo and Juliet on top of her crime-scene photos.

  “What?” she asked.

  “He didn’t do it,” Jeremy said. “Corey is innocent.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Jillian demanded. The group had gathered around them.

  “I held the book before, but I didn’t get a clear picture of Corey from it. Or what I got was all muddled. So I went through the book page by page. I mean, look at Jillian. She went all in, right? I read each annotation. No flashes or anything, but I got a feeling: whoever wrote these notes didn’t kill anyone.”

  Teddy slumped back, silently processing. Dara swung around to look at Jillian. “What do you think? You channeled Marlena. Is Jeremy right?”

  Jillian’s brow furrowed. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I’m not sure. I only know how she died.”

  “Well, I’m sure,” Jeremy said. “So now we need to figure out who did do it.”

  Pyro scoffed. “A feeling? Right. What we need to do to prove he’s innocent is establish his time line. Make sure he has a solid alibi. That’s something his attorney failed to do in court. It left the jury open to suspicion to convict him. We should look through his Facebook photos of that night again.” Pyro rifled through some printouts documenting Corey’s social media activity in the moments leading up to Marlena’s murder, including a picture of him looking like any other clean-cut college kid: UCLA Bruins hat, ripped jeans, white shirt.

  “This is all we have,” Dara said. “It must be enough to get a read on Corey.”

  “Teddy will have to figure it out,” Pyro said.

  At the end of the assignment, one person from each team was going to San Quentin to question Corey McDonald. She knew, like she knew how a player next to her was about to fold, like she understood all the unknown things that came to her known, that she would be the one making the trip.

  Teddy looked at the copy of the book that Jeremy had left on the desk. She would need to know as much about Corey as possible to survive a trip into his mind. She just hoped Hollis Whitfield was a fan of Elizabethan playwrights, as she headed into the stacks to search under S for Shakespeare.

  As Nick gathered the kits for safekeeping, Teddy handed him the Whitfield copy. “Don’t forget the book,” she said while stuffing Corey’s copy in her tote bag.

  *  *  *

  Later, Teddy sat in bed with Corey McDonald’s copy of Shakespeare’s play. She’d never been one for poetry in high school, but she began to reread the text, quickly falling into the story. A dog-eared page caught her attention: “These violent delights have violent ends.” The friar speaking to Romeo. The passage was circled, highlighted. Teddy shivered. Did Corey know what was coming? Cramped notations in pencil and ink in the margins. Underlined passages. Notes for an essay in the back. If she could find out how this kid’s mind worked, maybe she could figure out how to gather his thoughts and memories into a structure she could navigate. She had to find his memory of that night. She fell asleep with the book on her stomach. She had dreamed of the yellow house in the nights since the midyear exam, but each time she reached to turn the doorknob, she found the chipped green front door locked. When she peered into the darkened windows, it looked as though no one was home.

  Tonight the dream began in the way it always did. As Teddy walked up the steps, she saw that the porch was covered in shards of glass. She looked up. A window was broken, the door ajar. She stepped inside.

  If before it had looked like someone was packing for a move, now the house looked completely abandoned. The little table was overturned; the picture of Clint and her parents was gone. Teddy made her way through the rooms, searching for something, anything. There had to be a reason she’d gotten inside tonight.

  She paused in a bedroom to the left of the hallway. Dust covered the wooden floorboards, and cobwebs laced every corner. Another dead end. She returned to the entryway, pausing by the door. She righted the little table, noticing a piece of paper she hadn’t seen before. Scribbled on torn white paper was a message in lean, loopy handwriting and blue ink: Be careful.

  Teddy sat up in her bed, knocking the book to the floor. When she bent to pick it up, she noticed a piece of paper flutter to the ground. Script. Blue pen. The note from her dream. How had it gotten in here? She must have missed
it before.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  COREY MCDONALD’S HEARING LOOMED—THREE months away, then two, then one—but otherwise, life at Whitfield continued as it had before. The Misfits survived Boyd’s cruel and unusual torture, completed Dunn’s psychic exercises, listened to lectures on police procedure, firearms, and forensics. There was one class that Teddy skipped: Empathy 101.

  Teddy decided to use her free time to practice telekinesis. Progress had been hard earned and slow going. Teddy understood that her telekinetic feats so far—the door, General Maddux’s wineglass—had been fueled by heightened emotions: anger, specifically. She would need to master her feelings in order to prove Clint wrong.

  She could now float a Ping-Pong ball around an empty classroom in Fort McDowell, but a gentle breeze could do the same. She’d recently entered a staring competition with a paper clip. If she was ever going to bend a bullet, she’d have to tackle metal objects.

  One brick at a time.

  After a particularly painful session, Teddy returned to her room, threw her stuff down, and grabbed her towel, hoping for a quick shower before dinner. Jillian had other plans. She perched on the end of Teddy’s bed. “You missed a really interesting lecture today in Professor Corbett’s class,” she said.

  “I’ll have to get a copy of your notes,” Teddy said as she unlaced her combat boots.

  Jillian stood up. “God, you’re such a drama queen.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Clint ends your tutorials because he thinks you might hurt yourself, and instead of talking to him, or even to me, you decide to ignore it.”

  Teddy shrugged, hoping if she ignored that, too, Jillian would shut up.

  “Did you even listen in Empathy 101? It’s not all about you. We’re all struggling to master our psychic abilities. Since I’ve arrived at Whitfield, Ava has teased me for communing with animals. And then the one time I make a connection with an actual person, it’s a girl who was choked to death. I was terrified. And you didn’t even ask me how I felt.”

  Teddy slipped on her shower shoes. She didn’t want to be having this conversation right now.

  “And what about Fred?”

  “Fred?”

  “My hamster?” Jillian’s eyes were watery. “Who’s about to die? I told you when I came back after Christmas.”

  Teddy had never really had friends like Jillian before—friends who knew so much about her, who understood parts of her that she didn’t or couldn’t express. She flushed. She felt trapped, claustrophobic. She didn’t want to deal with Jillian or her hamster. She swapped her shower shoes for sneakers. “I need some air,” Teddy said.

  “You’re just running away from this? Friends argue, Teddy. It shows that you care enough about other people when you’re willing to fight for them.”

  Teddy heard the logic, but she preferred the first option: she was going to run as far as she could get on a very small island. Which really was not very far at all.

  *  *  *

  Teddy could complete the six-mile loop in just under an hour, which guaranteed that Jillian would be at dinner when Teddy returned to the room.

  Before coming to Whitfield, she’d never been much of a runner, but now she actually enjoyed the activity. She liked the island’s sloping vistas, quiet coves, historic buildings, and abandoned quarries. Once she found her groove, her body settled into a state that was almost meditative. Her thoughts emptied, leaving her aware of nothing but her breathing—until footsteps behind her intruded on her solitude. She cut a glance over her shoulder. Nick. For a moment, she considered speeding up.

  “Hey,” he said. He appeared at her side in running shorts and a baggy sweatshirt. His dark hair was damp and swept back from his face. He looked altogether different from the Special Agent Stavros who taught Casework. Different even from the guy she’d been alone with in the file room. Different but good. Really good. Probably not dissimilar from the way he might look stepping out of a shower. Here was the distraction Teddy needed.

  “Got a minute?” he asked. “Clearance just came through for the McDonald visit. We’re looking at next week for the one-on-one.”

  She kept running, risking a glance at him.

  “How’s the case going?” he asked.

  “We have some leads,” Teddy said, thinking back to Jillian’s spiritual communication with Marlena, as well as Jeremy’s assertion of Corey’s innocence. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had a breakthrough since she’d “borrowed” Corey’s copy of Romeo and Juliet. And now she had only a week to figure it out. “Who are the Alphas sending to San Quentin?” she asked, panting from the steep slope they were now running on.

  “Probably Kate Atkins.” He was out of breath, too. “I assume your team will chose you?”

  “Why would you assume that?”

  “Because you stand out.”

  She stopped running and bent to catch her breath. “Don’t do that,” she said. He stopped, too.

  “Do what?”

  “Be nice to me.” Especially after that fight with Jillian. She just wanted to be alone. She didn’t want to deal with people and their feelings.

  “Teddy—”

  “I mean it, Nick.” She let out a long breath.

  He nodded. “I’m not trying to make this difficult.” He held up his hands and took a step back. “I’m not doing it on purpose.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Look,” he said, “it’s hard for me, too. Okay? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Point is, we’re going to have to find a way to work together. And as long as I’m a teacher and you’re a student—”

  “Strictly professional,” she said.

  “I like to think we can be friends,” he said.

  She watched a bead of sweat drip down his neck into his T-shirt. Despite herself, she imagined the rest of its journey down his chest, abdomen . . .

  She’d proved today that she didn’t know how to be a good friend. Part of her wished that she hadn’t bailed after Jillian had asked her about Clint. That she’d stayed to fight, even though it had been uncomfortable. She promised herself that next time she would.

  “Okay,” she said. “Friends.”

  “As a friend,” Nick began when they’d settled back into their run, “I wanted to talk to you about why you’ve been skipping Corbett’s classes.”

  This again.

  “Make sure you go to the next one, okay?”

  “Fine,” Teddy said. “No more talking. Just running.”

  Nick smiled, flashing that killer dimple, and Teddy managed to stifle a groan. “See if you can keep up, friend.”

  Oh, she’d keep up, all right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE WEEK PASSED TOO QUICKLY. On the morning of the trip to San Quentin, when Teddy stopped in the main office to pick up a pass to leave the island, the secretary handed her a note. “Professor Corbett wants to see you before you go.”

  Teddy looked at the clock above the secretary’s desk. It was 8:51 a.m.

  “He knows you’re leaving at nine.”

  “Thanks,” Teddy said, trudging up the two flights of stairs to Clint’s office. This was the most important day of her psychic career so far, and Clint Corbett was going to make her late.

  To say that she’d been avoiding Clint would be putting it mildly. Everyone had noticed that she had skipped his monthly Empathy 101 class. Since the midyear exam, other than passing him without a word on campus, she had completely and totally ignored him. Her stomach twisted as she made the familiar journey down the hallway to his office. She checked to make sure her shield was up, sending another surge of power just to be safe, then knocked once.

  “Come in.”

  Inside, his office looked the same: books strewn about, papers everywhere. The chalkboard in the corner held evidence of a puzzle to be worked out, something about mass and velocity. The screw encased in glass, which Teddy now knew came from Sector T
hree, was on his desk.

  “You wanted to see me,” Teddy said.

  He looked up at her. “I heard you were going to San Quentin this morning with Agent Stavros and Kate. I assume you’re going to use astral telepathy to enter McDonald’s mind.”

  So this conversation was going to be all business. Nothing about what had happened between them. Teddy could keep it professional, too. “Yes.”

  “Are you prepared?”

  Teddy clenched her fists, trying not show any outward signs of emotion. She wanted to prove to Clint that she had her feelings in check. The truth was, no, she didn’t feel prepared. But if they were going to beat the Alphas and help Corey and Marlena, she had to at least try.

  The Misfits hadn’t gained any more insight since they had reviewed the kits. They were confident, from Jillian’s communion, that Marlena had been strangled and, from Jeremy’s psychometry, that Corey was innocent. Teddy had read Romeo and Juliet ten times since she had swapped the book. Her team thought that once she was inside his head, she’d be able to use his memories to find new evidence that would exonerate Corey—set an airtight alibi, identify another suspect. Then they could focus on finding the real killer.

  She was counting on Clint’s organizational strategy to help her. She was nervous that she would get lost inside Corey’s head, and the precious minutes she had in front of him would be wasted. Though she had seen random snapshots in Molly’s head, she’d never used the house inside anyone’s head but Clint’s. She’d never had to search for a memory, either. She didn’t know if she’d be able to synthesize what she knew about McDonald into a concrete structure, even. She reached for Romeo and Juliet, which she had tucked into her backpack that morning for luck.

  From reading Corey’s notes, she’d learned that he was a smart and thoughtful kid. Observant. And it was obvious he’d loved Marlena. Every line about Juliet had been highlighted. The famous speech about seeing Juliet for the first time had so many notations, Teddy could barely read it.

  Clint took off his glasses. “Teddy, this is about more than a competition between classmates. You’re doing real work now. This is why you’re at Whitfield. To help people.”