“Why aren’t they on top of us already?” Sunday asked.
Miguel kept pace with us, but the air around him stilled, as if he’d sent his spirit walking temporarily. He blinked a moment later. “The other Watcher is also down. Something in your friend’s magic at the basement door backfired on him. He’s out cold. No idea for how long, though.”
I’d take good news where we could get it. “I’m surprised at you.”
“That I haven’t taken off already?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I thought about it,” he said. “But the ancient Watcher might be able to track me, and if he does, better I’m not on my own. Two, if the chameleons are tracking me, better that they think I’m still on mission, not captured. And then there’s the bonus.”
“Enlighten us,” Sunday said.
“I missed you two.”
“Sure you did,” she said. “I mean, what’s a little torture between friends?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I don’t have any friends.”
Sunday rolled her eyes. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”
I didn’t care who felt sorry for whom. I only cared that the cavalry Addie had mentioned could swoop down on us at any minute. And that I had no idea where Red had taken the kids, or whether they were safe. And that because Addie had sold us out to Shadow, and she knew where we lived and worked, we had no safe place to go to. Nowhere to hide.
I reached for my phone. As I punched in my passcode, it buzzed with an incoming text from Red.
An address in northeast Portland. Nothing else for a hot minute. Then a single word: Dorothy.
As in The Wizard of Oz. As in the name of the blond Labrador retriever he’d had as a boy, the one who’d stayed by my side on the worst night of my life.
“Dorothy” was the verification word we’d decided on in case we were ever separated, in trouble, and trying to connect. No imposter would know that word or what it meant. We would never utter it under duress.
I passed the phone to Sunday. She took a look, then pulled out her own phone and called for a ride.
“The Watchers will be tracking us,” she said. “It would be better if we could lead them away from the others.”
A worthy thought. A smart one, even. At most, we’d draw the Watchers toward us and the others would have a shot at escape. Even worst case, it would split the Watchers’ attention—one group would go after Red and the kids, while the rest of them came after us.
“There’s just one problem with that,” I said.
“No way will Red and the kids run,” she said. “Even if Red ordered the others to go—even if he dragged them to hell and back himself to keep them safe—they would find a way to help us.”
I nodded. “They think safety is overrated.”
“They’re sixteen, so of course they think that,” Sunday said. “They’re only half right, though. Safety’s not just overrated.”
“It’s an illusion,” I said.
Twenty-five minutes later, an overly talkative Trailblazers fan of a driver who’d shown to pick us up in his baby blue Prius dropped us off on a quiet cul-de-sac in front of a white house with an enormous, curtained picture window and a yard full of bare, thorny rosebushes. I tipped him twenty in cash on account of the puddled mess we left in his cab.
We moved up the walk as a wary, weary unit, stumbling up the steps to a wide cement porch. On either side of the porch, rain barrels stood guard, taking on trickling streams of icy water from the rain chains that hung from the eaves. Tiny Christmas lights hung nearer to the front door, casting halos of light that made me feel as if we stood inside of a kaleidoscope.
I could see the defenses on the place. Nothing that would draw the eye of any normal human being, or even the curiosity of someone with magic. The shields hugged close to the wood and glass. They gave off no color. No sense of who’d placed them. Which meant that the person who’d placed them was a shield himself.
Ben had done it.
The door to the house opened before we reached it. Red held it open as we filed in, casting a worried glance at Miguel.
“You couldn’t have done something else with him?” Red asked.
Sunday shrugged. “As it happens, we need him.”
Red closed the door and locked it—two deadbolts and a hinged lock for overkill’s sake.
We dragged mud and leaves into the white-tiled entry. Peeling off our wet socks and stepping into the warm, dry living room felt like walking into heaven. If the rest of my wet self dripped all over everything, whoever owned or rented the place would have to live with that.
The house smelled like no one lived there—it had none of the layers that came from frying eggs and sleeping and showering every day. It sported a wood-burning hearth where Red had obviously been in the process of building a fire—the screen had been pulled back and away, and bunch of store-bought cedar logs had been dragged from a big, brand-new basket at the side of the fireplace, the big yellow band that’d held them together sliced open. The red brick mantel held a couple of tarnished pewter candlesticks and a pack of worn playing cards. No art graced the plain, white walls. The furniture consisted of four large navy blue beanbag chairs set in the corners and a worn navy rug.
None of the adults I knew would buy furniture like that.
Sunday pointed at Miguel, then at the beanbag furthest from the door. “Sit.”
He eyed the thing skeptically. “If I sit in that thing, you’re never getting me out of it.”
“Even better,” she said.
“Can I at least get a towel?” he asked.
“In a minute,” Sunday said. “If there are any.”
He screwed up his mouth in protest, but he did what she told him, sinking like a rock into a pool of Styrofoam pebbles. He pulled his long tail of hair over his shoulder, wringing out a ton of water onto the rug.
The living room butted up against the kitchen via a granite-topped bar, sans stools. The kitchen was wide and packed with stainless steel. It had a breakfast nook, too, which had been set up with a card table and folding chairs. I could tell from the glow behind the oven door that something was cooking, but I couldn’t smell it yet.
Beyond that, a long hall led back to the bedrooms. The sound of conversation wafted from there. The kids. All of them, thank God.
I turned to look at Red. “You all right?”
He nodded. “You?”
“We got out,” I said.
“Addie?”
I shook my head. “She’s still with Shadow. I think she’s still alive.”
He set his hands on his hips and studied the floor for a moment before he looked at me again. “We need to plan.”
“At least for the short term,” I said. “Exit routes? Points of entry?”
“I’ll show you,” he said.
Windows in every room except the kitchen and bath, all of them working and locked for now. Two doors, front and back, both steel. No basement. Crawl spaces in the coat closet and the closet in the master bedroom, barricaded. A couple of trees in the backyard, along with the usual trash bins, so not much in the way of cover for an enemy. And all of it—the entire house and yard—under Ben’s magical protection.
It was a good short-term solution to a long-term problem.
“Whose place is this?” I asked.
“The kids’,” he said.
The kids. Including my daughter. “How’d they get a place of their own? They’re sixteen. How’d they do this without us knowing?”
Without my knowing.
“Belongs to Ben’s cousin,” Red said. “They moved out, but they’re not ready to sell yet. They’ll be staging the house to sell next week, but no one’s checking up between now and then. Ben went next door and explained that we’re watching the place. Neighbor knows him, so it’s not a red flag. No worries there.”
So, we’d be invisible to the Watchers, at least for a while. My wired nerves relaxed a hairsbreadth.
“If there�
�s trouble tonight, you take the kids and get out,” I said. “Leave the fighting to Sunday and me.”
“And Miguel?” Red asked. “He gonna help you, too?”
“His ass is on the line along with ours. He gets out of line, he’s dead.”
Red mulled that for a moment. “We’re not helpless, Night—me, or the kids.”
“It’s not about that,” I said. “I know you can fight.”
He mirrored by words. “It’s not about can. It’s about will. I’ll leave you here if you ask, even if it kills me to do it. I can’t control the kids if they’re not on board. They’re nearly grown, and they’ve got power in them. Besides, where would we go that the Watchers won’t find us?”
He was right. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. If the Watchers could track us by our shared angel blood, or if they could track Jess because she was a Watcher, running and hiding were off the table.
“We’ll do the best we can,” I said.
“And tomorrow?”
Either we waited for the Watchers to come to us, or we took the battle to them. “There’ll be blood.”
He swallowed hard.
I turned toward Sunday. “Can you keep an eye on Miguel?” I asked.
“Ten-four,” she said.
Red sighed. “I’ll get the fire going. There’s two take-n-bake pizzas in the oven. I just put ’em in. There’s more in the freezer if we want ’em.”
That would do well enough to stem the gnawing in my belly. No breakfast and no lunch plus mayhem had me ready to eat an elephant. “Thanks.”
He cocked his head toward the back of the house. “Don’t be too hard on ’em.”
I flashed him a wry smile and got moving.
They heard me coming. Faith knew my step, even if the others didn’t. They’d gathered in the farthest of three bedrooms, which appeared to have housed much younger children, judging from the scratches a bunk bed frame had made on the far wall and the blue-and-white twinkle-star wallpaper border. Whatever else had been there before, the kids had replaced it with brand new, plastic-stinking, full-sized air mattresses laid into the space like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The cobbled-together sheet sets gave me a headache just looking at them, mix-and-match Dalmatian spots and basketballs and green-checked flannel. A red banker’s lamp set on the floor lit one corner. A badly balanced black floor lamp with a white shade handled the rest of the illumination duties.
To their credit, every single one of the kids met my gaze when I stepped inside. They displayed no shame, no fear. Their posture telegraphed tension—hunched shoulders, hands curled into fists, crossed ankles—but not about me.
The anger I felt at their having done something like this behind our backs—behind my back—what did it mean when the lot of us could’ve ended up on the street with nowhere to go to ground? Instead, we were warm and dry and we’d have full bellies before long.
Every one of them had made a decision to join this fight. Faith had a deeper knowledge of the risks, having spent years on the run with me, but the others only had an inkling of what they’d volunteered themselves into. They’d taken the possibilities seriously. They’d prepared this place in a month’s time while it’d never occurred to Sunday or me that we might need this kind of contingency.
Faith scooted over on her air mattress to make room for me and waited for me to settle. She started to take off her purple sweater, but quit halfway, leaving the sweater arms empty at her sides.
“Thank you for all this,” I said, making sure the words touched all of them, especially Ben.
He hugged his knees to his chest. His long hair hid half his face. “You’re not still mad that I lied?”
“Sure I am,” I said.
“Well, that makes me feel better.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s normal,” he said.
“It should be,” I said. “Why didn’t you trust me enough to tell me about this place?”
He let go of his legs. They slid out long in front of him. He glanced at Jess.
She nodded.
He took a deep breath. “Because we thought we might have to hide Faith.”
“From whom?” I asked.
He didn’t answer the question. In not responding, he’d spoken as clearly as if he’d shouted my name out loud.
Corey linked her skeleton-cameo be-ringed fingers and pressed her palms into the crown of her head. “It’s not like that, Night.”
“It’s one hundred percent like that,” I said. “Now I’m even more pissed.”
Jess held up her hands. Her brown eyes held barely contained fire. Her Watcher’s halo flashed blue fire that reflected her strength. “No, Night. This wasn’t—isn’t—about you.”
The hell it wasn’t. “You’re talking about hiding my daughter from me.”
“Why would we do that?” she asked. “You want to tell me?”
That question stopped whatever had been about to roll out of my mouth. Jess and the others would only feel the need to keep Faith from me for two reasons. One, they feared that I would hurt her—which was ridiculous. Two, they feared Faith would hurt me. I couldn’t imagine that.
But the Angel of Death and the Awakened? I had no idea what they might do.
I turned to look at my daughter. “Did you know any of this?”
She shook her head. “Not until tonight. Not until we got here.”
I rested my hands on my thighs. I was afraid that if I didn’t, they would start to shake. “Are you okay with it, Faith?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve already told them that. I get it, though.”
I did, too. “This really isn’t about me. It’s about the Angel. And the Awakened.”
Jess nodded. “You’re both”—she searched for the right word—“incubating something powerful. If I’m guessing, you think you have control over yours, Night, but what if you don’t? We know Faith doesn’t have a prayer with hers. What happens if something, well, happens?”
Corey picked up where Jess left off. “That chameleon came after you at breakfast, and his backup showed at the gym this afternoon. Who knows who else the Order might’ve sent. There’s a rogue Watcher at Jess and Addie’s house and the breakfast assassin is in the fucking living room.”
“Watcher’s not rogue.” Jess glanced down, playing with the hem of her purple T-shirt. She looked at me through her lashes.
“I know,” I said.
She uncrossed her ankles. The floor lamp reflected off the shiny surface of her white sneaks.
Corey dropped her hands to the mattress she sat on, braced her arms, and leaned forward. “My point is, that’s a helluva lot of stress.”
Faith hugged herself. “It’s making things unstable. It’s making me unstable.”
Ben nodded. “We saw your eyes at Addie’s. The gold in them. I saw it at the gym, too.”
“I don’t know what to do about it,” Faith said.
“We can start by checking out of the stress,” Corey said.
Faith bit her lip. “I don’t think that’s possible. We can’t just pretend none of this is happening.”
Jess frowned. “And our place to hide out isn’t a hideout anymore.”
“No,” I said. “But it’s what we have and, like I said, I’m grateful for it. We need a plan for tonight, and to regroup in the morning.”
“Will we be safe that long?” Corey asked.
Jess met my gaze. “She can’t guarantee that.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Sunday’s house is the fallback. Y’all know where it is?”
“The Watchers know about it,” Jess said.
Of all our places, it still made the most sense. “True, but it’s the best alternative we’ve got for a local place to meet up if we get separated. Addie hasn’t been there, so that has to count for something.”
“She won’t know anything about the protections. I didn’t tell her anything.” Jess blinked back sudden tears.
Jess didn’t trust Addie. That was the
only reason not to give her that kind of information.
The only reason I’d found out that Jess and her aunt were Watchers in the first place was because Jess had gone against Addie’s wishes and told me. Jess had heard warnings about me, but she’d also gotten to know me, so a lot of what she’d heard didn’t hold water. She’d chosen to trust me and, by extension, Sunday.
Fast-forward to the here and now. Jess knew that Addie had been ready to hand her over to Shadow. That the Watchers had an agenda for which Jess didn’t have all the details.
I sighed. In the Order, there’d been no such thing as trust, only missions and the threat of violence and death. Out here in the world, it ought to be different. I needed it to be.
“So it’s a plan,” I said.
The kids nodded.
Jess studied her fingernails, working on a question.
I thought I might know what she wanted to ask. “I’m not sure whether Addie’s okay. She risked herself to help me, to get Sunday and Miguel and me out. She asked me to take care of you.”
Jess swallowed. “Thanks for not lying to make me feel better.”
“Sorry that I can’t tell you for sure,” I said.
“She’s got a lot of power,” Jess said.
“She does,” I said. “She’s strong.”
Jess closed her hand into a fist. “I’m going to count on that as much as I can.”
I nodded. “We need to count on each other. Can we do that?”
Ben met my gaze. I could see the thoughts turning behind his eyes as he weighed possibilities. I understood that trust could get us all killed. The future would always remain unknowable, even if fortunes or prophecies provided clues. We could never truly know everything about each other. But if we couldn’t depend on each other, we’d be lost long before our enemies had a chance to end us.
He leaned forward, reaching for the center of the circle, an invitation for solidarity.
I placed my hand on top of his. One by one, the others did, too.
The blissful, greasy, meaty scent of pepperoni and sausage wafted in through the door. My stomach rumbled.
Jess laughed, granting permission for the others to join in. She led everyone toward the kitchen—everyone except Faith. She stayed right where she sat. I stayed with her.
Night Rises: The Awakened Magic Saga (Soul Forge Book 2) Page 9
