My whole body shivered, and for once it wasn’t from fear. “My parents didn’t get married like that,” I said. “Mom said they’d been together a couple of years, and then one day Dad proposed. Mom said yes, and after that, they decided they were married. She said that’s as good as it gets when you don’t exist on paper.”
Kalif looked over at me. “I don’t think my parents even did that much. I’ve never even heard them use the word married. So the only wedding my dad’s had that I know of was to that other woman. Technically, I suppose she’s his only wife.”
Ugh. The last thing I wanted was to end up like any of them. But when everything in our lives was so ephemeral, all I wanted was for the two of us to create something real. “Okay,” I said.
He hesitated. “Okay?”
I took his hand again and squeezed tight. “That was my answer. Okay.”
Kalif smiled, even though his fingers were trembling. “Okay,” he said. He paused. “If you couldn’t tell, that was mine.”
I smiled. “We should have talked about this a while ago.”
He shook his head. “We haven’t exactly had a moment to breathe, have we?” His face turned serious. “Did you want that formal proposal? Because I can’t give you a ring.”
That was true. Identifying jewelry was definitely out. I couldn’t afford to own something like that, under any circumstances. Even if I never wore it, it was too much of a risk.
Kalif ran his hand over the back of mine. “Here,” he said. And with one finger, he traced a circle around my ring finger, leaving a warm, tingly feeling in its wake. “It’s not physical, but it’s there.”
Tears stung my eyes. Even with our lives coming to pieces around us, he could always find the romantic thing to say.
“You aren’t going to hassle me about Damon anymore?” I asked. “Make me promise never to speak to him again after this?”
Kalif shook his head. “No. You’re right. I trust you. I just forgot for a while. I figure I can get used to him, if he turns out not to be a psychopath who’s in on the plot to execute us all.”
“And if he does,” I said, "at least I have you to watch my back.”
“Ditto,” he said.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “You better survive this,” I said. “Or I’m going to kill you.”
“Deal,” he said. And I wished that, like the stories, true love really did conquer all.
In real life, though, I knew we were going to need a hell of a lot more.
We sat there like that for a few blessed minutes before Kalif’s phone rang. My stomach sank as Kalif reached for it. What would it be this time? More mysterious people watching my mother?
Kalif looked at the caller ID. “It’s my mom,” he said. He didn’t sound thrilled to hear from her, and I couldn’t blame him.
But he answered it. He had to. “Hey,” he said, and listened for a second. He stepped away and went through the steps of their verbal ID. I should have been piecing it together in case I ever needed to fake it, but with things as they were, I couldn’t bring myself to use my spy training as a weapon against Kalif.
“She’s right here,” he said. “I’ll put you on speaker.”
He punched a button, and I heard Aida’s voice, fuzzy and distorted. “I can’t talk long,” she said. “But I was looking through my father’s email and I found something.”
I sat down on the end of the bed. Kalif put his hands on the back of his chair.
There was no way this was going to be good news.
“What did you find?” Kalif asked.
“They’ve been reaching out to their shifter contacts,” she said. “They sent out five emails that I could find, asking their people to look for you two, your father, and Jory’s mother.”
I dug my nails into my palms. Aida shouldn’t know about Damon, and I gave Kalif a warning look. I didn’t want him to tell her.
“Okay,” Kalif said. “We’ll be extra careful.”
“Could you tell where any of the contacts were?” I asked.
“I can’t,” Aida said. “Kalif?”
“I would only be able to tell from replies. Did anyone answer?”
“Yes,” Aida said. “A few of them did. Do you want me to send them to you?”
“Don’t do anything,” Kalif said. “I’m mirroring all their email offsite already. It’s more secure than your position, and I can access it from here. I’ll take a look.”
I put my hands on my knees. Knowing where the shifters were coming from might not help much, but at least it would give us an idea of how many people would be circling in on us immediately.
“Is that it?” I asked. “Nothing new on the lead at the hospital?”
“No,” Aida said. “I haven’t turned up anything yet. I need to go.”
And we needed to move. Staying in one place too long was just asking for one of the many people on our tail to find us. We still hadn’t cycled out that rental car. “Thanks for the heads up,” I said. “And watch my mother. Because if anything happens to her, the deal is off.”
“I know,” Aida said. “I’m doing what I can.”
I took the phone from Kalif. “Make sure it’s enough.”
It didn’t take long for Kalif to track the emails to general geographical sources. Two of the responses came from the east coast, and two more of the emails had no replies. The last came from an ISP in Sacramento.
Kalif looked at me, letting me say it first.
I sighed. “Could be Damon. We know he was in the area around the time this was sent. What was the reply?”
Kalif pulled it up. The response was brief.
I’ll look into it. Might have a lead for you in a day or two.
“Doesn’t look good,” Kalif said.
This time, he didn’t sound jealous, just honest. And he was right. “I’m going to try something,” I said. “Don’t freak out.” And I pulled out my phone and dialed Damon.
He picked up immediately. “Miss me already?” he asked.
“Desperately,” I said, voice full of sarcasm—and back to my higher-than-normal pitch. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kalif mouthing the word, but he smiled, like it was a joke.
Which it was, and I was glad he could see it.
“Hey, I wanted to ask you something. I heard that Wendy and Oliver have been trying to get other shifters to look for us. Did they contact you?”
“Yes,” he said.
I blinked. I hadn’t expected him to admit that, even if it was true. “They . . . did?”
Smooth, Jory. Way to sound like you’ve got it all together.
But Damon didn’t mock me. For once, his voice was serious. “Yeah, I got an email from an account they’d traced before. I still watch it, in case they contact me again. I got an email basically offering me safe haven for bringing you in.”
I looked at Kalif and nodded. He stood and leaned closer to the phone, to listen.
“It’s a trap, right?” I wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t walking into one right now. “For both of us, I mean. They wouldn’t really give you—"
“They probably would,” Damon said. His voice turned wry. “Why, worried I’m going to turn you in?”
“Always,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “Now you’re thinking like a shifter.”
Now. Implying that I hadn’t been before. “Hey,” I said. “For all you know, I’m casting my net to bring you in. Had you thought of that?”
The laugh fell out of his voice. “Sweetie,” he said. “Of course I had. That’s their goal, you know? Make it so none of us trust each other if we’re not already on their side.”
I took a deep breath. “So they’re winning?”
“Depends,” Damon said, "on what’s going on inside your head.”
I let my breath out as slowly as I could. It made sense—the Carmines were fighting a psychological war. If they isolated all of us, we’d be much easier to capture and kill, or force to work only for them.
&n
bsp; That was true. If my parents had been alone, they’d have died in the Carmines’ basement. But instead they had someone to look for them.
They had me.
I shivered. I didn’t want to be alone in this. But I would be if I let them scare me out of trusting the people by my side.
“Thanks for being honest,” I said.
Damon laughed. “See? Maybe they’re not winning, after all.”
But an evil voice in my head whispered: if he’s working for them, then they just did.
Twenty-four
Kalif snapped his laptop shut. “Let’s go,” he said. “We need to move. All this bad news is making me nervous.”
We switched hotels, this time using personas of a middle-aged couple who bickered about whether they wanted a room with a view close to the elevators, or an isolated room overlooking the parking lot. For once, it felt comfortable to argue with Kalif—part of an act we were performing together.
“The traffic will keep you up all night either way,” I snapped at him. “Pick your poison.”
“If you’re so worried about it,” Kalif said, "you pick.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not going to blame me when you can’t sleep.”
“I’ll blame you anyway,” Kalif said, slouching with his elbows on the counter. “We’ll take the one by the elevator.”
“Done,” the clerk said, typing something into the computer.
When we got up to the room, neither of us even bothered undressing. We just dumped our clothes on the floor and fell asleep in a tangle on the hotel bed.
I woke up in the morning, clothes wrinkled, but mind clear.
We had work to do—lots of it. I elbowed Kalif.
He groaned and rolled over, rubbing sleep from his eyes. While he used the bathroom, I pulled our phones out of Kalif’s computer bag and laid them on the table, taking inventory. We still had several new ones yet, so we didn’t need to replenish.
If the Carmines were looking for Kalif and for me, they might have emailed me again. I picked up a fresh phone and used it to log into the email they’d used to contact me before.
They’d sent me a single message.
Jory, it said. You don’t have to run. You don’t need to be afraid of us. Bring our grandson back and we’ll add you to the fold. Despite what you think of us, you’ll find safety here, and work worthy of your talents.
It was signed by Oliver Carmine.
Kalif stumbled out of the bathroom and I showed him the email, then powered down the phone. The GPS was off, so even if they could somehow trace the fact that I’d checked the email, they shouldn’t be able to find me here.
But I still wanted to get rid of it. “I’m going to find a Dumpster,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I put on my middle-aged persona and took the stairs down, running them to burn off fear. If Damon was right, the Carmines might be serious about their offer. They wanted to punish and eliminate shifters who broke the rules—who killed normal people or who risked exposing our kind. They knew I hadn’t done that. The gravest sin I’d committed against them was to break my parents out of their custody.
Maybe they saw me like they saw Damon—as a questionable agent who might still be brought under their control. Life might actually be safer working for them. But I couldn’t live with them looking over my shoulder. I couldn’t work for the people who killed my father. And I doubted bringing Kalif back would be enough for them. They’d try to use me to get to my mother.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found a set of Dumpsters in the alley behind the hotel and dropped the phone in, listening to the satisfying clunk as it hit metal at the bottom.
I paused there, leaning against the stucco wall next to the Dumpster, catching my breath.
The goal of everything I was doing wasn’t just for me to be safe. It was to find safety for all of us. To do that, we had to get away from the Carmines, not work with them. Damon was right. They wanted us to distrust each other. They were trying to sow seeds of doubt and fear, to pit us against each other to make their shelter seem like the only safe option.
But it wasn’t a safe option, and it never would be. I had to stop being so afraid all the time. I was playing right into their hands. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t stop mine from shaking.
I took the stairs slowly on the way back up to the room. When I opened the door, one of Kalif’s cell phones was ringing again.
I shut the door behind me quickly. It had to be Aida.
But Kalif squinted at the phone. “That’s the number I gave the hospital when I filled out your mom’s paperwork.” He handed it to me. “You remember your name?”
“Anne is my mother,” I said. “I’m . . . Amy? Amber?” This was the A names, coming back to bite me.
I answered the phone.
“Hello,” a male voice said. “I’m trying to reach Amber.”
Bingo. “This is she,” I said.
“Hi, Amber. This is Dr. Park, your mother’s physician.”
“Hi,” I said. “Is my mom okay?”
“She was admitted for a seventy-two hour stay,” he said. “But your mother decided to leave early. Have you heard from her?”
My breath caught. Heard from her? If she escaped, where the hell was Aida? “No,” I said. “You just let her check out?”
“She disappeared from her room,” he said. “We were hoping she would contact you, and you could bring her back in.”
My vision spotted. Kalif stood right next to me, steadying me with a hand under my arm. “I will if I hear from her,” I said. If my mother left the hospital, did that mean she’d given up on treatment, or was her safety being threatened? I needed to know more about the situation. “You really have no idea where she went? Don’t you have security cameras?”
“We do,” Dr. Park said. “But I’d really rather not discuss . . .”
He’d rather not discuss how his hospital screwed up and lost my mother. How the footage he was looking at made no logical sense. To be fair to him, it was a miracle she’d stayed this long. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll let you know if I hear from her.”
I hung up and leaned one hand on the table in front of me, using the other to check the email address where my mother knew how to reach me. Even if she didn’t have a phone number for me, she should have tried that, but the inbox was empty.
Had she just ditched me? Or had she gone to the apartment building where we’d agreed to meet up if we were ever separated?
Or did someone else catch up to her?
The room tilted. Kalif took my hand. “Your mom?”
“She’s gone,” I said. “What happened?”
“She may have just left. You said she didn’t feel safe in the hospital.”
“I know. But if she’d left, don’t you think she would have contacted me?”
“She has a way to reach you?”
I nodded.
“Okay, so if she left the hospital, what would be the first thing she would do, if it wasn’t to reach out to you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. She might go to our meet up spot, but why would she resort to that when she could just use the phone? “She told me she’d stay there, so there has to be a reason she left. Either someone took her, or someone threatened her and she split.”
Goose bumps broke out on my arms. Where the hell was Aida? “Get your mom on the phone. She must know something.”
Kalif pulled out the correct cell phone and dialed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Aida didn’t pick up. Kalif sent her a text message, but minutes ticked by, and she didn’t answer.
I swore. “She was supposed to be looking for that person who was skulking around the hospital. We shouldn’t have trusted her to do that. We should have followed up ourselves. I should have—"
Kalif’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. “Stay calm. If my mom wanted to hurt her, she would have done it before, right? My mom might just be tracking her, and can’t pick up because she’s
in a sensitive position. Or she might be in the middle of following our mystery person. We’ll follow up on it now. Let’s start with the hospital security. They might not be able to track her on the security tapes, but we probably can.”
He was right, but my mind flashed with images from the last time my mother disappeared—the security tapes we’d seen of her being blindfolded and gagged, the cuts on her face that told an even darker story.
If any of the people after us had her, she might already be dead. And I was the one who begged her to stay in the hospital. I should have known it wouldn’t help. I should have been there for her. I should have taken care of her, instead of ditching her for Kalif and running around chasing Mel.
This time it was her I was going to get killed.
“I wanted her to get help,” I said.
Kalif squeezed my hand. “I know. And we’re still going to help her, okay? But first we have to find her.”
“And make sure she’s okay,” I said.
He nodded. “Just like when your parents were missing,” he said. “You have to hope for the best.”
I tried to grasp that hope, but it slipped through my fingers. This one thought clouded my mind: the last time I had to rescue my parents, only one of them made it out alive.
Twenty-five
I wasn’t sure how long it took Kalif to isolate the security videos on his laptop, but it felt like an eternity. If he hadn’t already had a way in, I would have gone completely insane.
“Here it is,” he said finally. Kalif played the security video backward from the minutes before the nurse found my mom missing. Three people left her room in that time—all nurses, but I only counted two nurses going in. When Kalif slowed down the footage of the three exits, I noticed that two of the nurses appeared to be the same person—a Hispanic woman with floofy hair and wide hips.
The second time she left, she was wearing a hospital mask across her face—the kind doctors wear for surgery.
I scrutinized the image, trying to see the bit of a scar that stretched over her eyebrow, but the nurse’s hair hung down over her eyes in exactly the place that mark would have been.
I had no idea where Mom had gotten the mask, or the scrubs, but I wasn’t going to search through the tapes to find that.
A Million Shadows Page 22
