Intrigue lit his handsome face. “Lay it on me.”
“I can make us invisible.”
He blinked several times in rapid succession. “Excuse me?” he said finally, confused. “Did you just say you could make us invisible?”
“That’s exactly what I said,” I confirmed. “It’s something I learned to do when I was in high school. There were times ... well, after Katrina, the crime rate was really high. A lot of people fled and never returned. My grandfather always knew we would return, but some of the people left behind were desperate and it wasn’t the safest place to hang out.
“Anyway, when I was walking home from high school one day, these two guys started following me,” I continued, my stomach clenching at the memory. That was one of the few times in my life I’d been utterly terrified. “I felt them behind me and knew they didn’t have good intentions, but there weren’t many places to hide.”
Braden reached over and grabbed my hand but otherwise remained silent.
“I just remember thinking at the time that I wished I was invisible,” I continued. “The next thing I knew, the guys were blowing past me and talking to themselves. They couldn’t figure out where I went. I was still there ... I was just invisible.”
“Wow!” He made a face and shook his head. “That’s amazing. Can you make both of us invisible?”
“Yeah, but only for a few minutes. We have to get on the playground, find him, and try to talk to him as quickly as possible. I haven’t been able to sustain the spell for an extended period of time. At least not yet.”
“Hey. I’m game to try. I always wanted to be invisible ... mostly because I wanted to sneak up on my brothers and punch them when they weren’t looking.”
“I’m never going to understand your family.”
“We’re not so bad.”
ULTIMATELY, BRADEN FELT IT best to move his car one street over. We parked, joined hands, and cut through the woods. I waited until we were at the border of the schoolyard to whisper the spell, and then in a leap of faith, Braden walked with me onto the playground.
He was full of bravado, but I recognized that he wasn’t certain the spell would actually work until we breezed past the playground monitor without earning as much as a glance.
“Can she hear us?” he whispered, his face full of awe.
I nodded, never releasing his hand. “There.” I inclined my chin toward the swings. “Granger is over there.” I picked up my pace and hurried in his direction, being careful to avoid the other students. They couldn’t see us, but if one of them accidentally ran into us, there was likely to be a panic, and that’s the last thing I wanted to happen.
Granger was listless as he sat on his swing. He didn’t pump his legs and enjoy himself like the other kids. He didn’t vigorously sign to indicate he was paying attention to the conversations taking place around him. Instead, he stared into nothing.
It made me unbelievably sad.
“Hey, Granger,” I murmured as I knelt in front of him. “I know you can’t see me. You can’t hear me either, which is good. I just need to sit here for a second and get a look inside your head. I wish I could ask permission, but I don’t think that would go over well.”
“Not at all,” Braden agreed, keeping his gaze on the playground monitor. “She’s not even looking in this direction.”
“Why should she? She has no reason to believe we’re here. She also has her hands full with all these kids.” I exhaled heavily and flashed a smile for Granger’s benefit before I remembered he couldn’t see me. “This is kind of weird. It feels invasive.”
“Just get it over with,” Braden instructed. “We need to talk to Carroll. If he’s still hiding in that kid’s head ... well, we need to figure out why and see if there’s anything we can do about it.”
“Yeah.” I believed that with my whole heart. “Here we go.” I lifted my hand to hold it as close to Granger’s head as I could without actually touching him, which I figured would freak him out. My fingers were barely in the air when the boy spoke.
“You don’t want to do that,” he said calmly, a cold dread gathering in my stomach as the boy’s empty eyes latched with mine. “I won’t let you out a second time.”
I was flabbergasted. “You can see us?”
“I’m stronger than you think. You don’t want to continue involving yourself in this. If you do, I’ll have no choice but to force you to stay away.”
“You’re Ryan Carroll.”
“I am ... who I am.”
“You’re Ryan Carroll,” I repeated. “I don’t understand this, how you got in his head or where you’ve been all this time. I can’t let you stay there. You don’t belong. You’re taking over a life that’s not yours to claim.”
“The boy is better off with me.” Carroll sounded sure of himself. “You can’t save him. It’s already too late.”
“I have to try.”
“You’ll fail.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ll regret it.”
“I guess that’s a risk I’ll have to take.”
“You’ll die,” he hissed, fury emanating from him in waves. “I’ll crush you, rip the life from you and add you to my collection. Is that what you want?”
“The ghosts. You call them your collection. Why? What did you do to them?”
“It doesn’t matter.” His voice was full of menace. “You cannot stop this. You can’t change things. The only thing you can do is volunteer yourself for annihilation. Is that what you want?”
“You talk big,” I countered. “I don’t think you have the strength to back it up.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see, huh?”
“If you insist. You’re running out of time. With every passing minute, I get stronger. You’ll lose ... no matter what that crackpot you call a grandfather taught you.”
I was caught off guard. He seemed to know more than he should. I found that ... interesting. “We’ll be back.”
“Go ahead. You can’t touch me.” His eyes were derisive as they landed on Braden. “Your kind definitely can’t touch me. I made sure of that.”
“Never say never,” Braden countered, gripping my hand tighter. “Come on, Izzy. We’re wasting our time here. We’ll come back when we’re ready to take him down.”
“That’s never going to happen,” Carroll hissed.
“We’ll just see about that.”
Twenty-Two
I was still shaken when we returned to the aquarium. We barely made it back to the tree line before my magic faltered and we were exposed. Braden managed to drag me into the shadows before the playground monitor saw us and raised an alarm.
“What’s wrong?” Cormack asked, instantly on alert. He sat in my work chair, his feet resting on the table, flipping through the journal Angelina had dropped off, while carrying on what looked to be an intense conversation with Oliver. All of that flew by the wayside the minute he saw us.
“We had an incident,” Braden replied grimly, leading me to the only empty chair in the room. “You guys really need more furniture in here,” he lamented as he forced a smile for my benefit. “Maybe a couch or something.”
“I’ll get right on that.” I rubbed my head, a headache threatening to start pounding away like a construction worker putting on a new roof. “I’m okay. I didn’t even expend that much power.”
“I don’t understand what happened,” Cormack started. “I thought you were going to check on the boy.”
“We did,” Braden explained. “He was on the playground. Izzy has a trick that can make us invisible. We’re totally re-instituting Grimlock Hide and Seek, by the way, because she and I will dominate. He was on the swings, acting as if he didn’t care about anything. Then he started talking and it was really creepy because he could see us even though nobody else could.”
“You’re talking about the boy,” Cormack stressed. “He’s the one you talked to.”
“He is the one
we talked to,” I agreed. “But Carroll is inside him. He’s taken him over. I don’t know how ... or why ... but he’s not leaving.”
“He uttered a lot of vague threats, but almost all of them were aimed at Izzy,” Braden supplied. “He recognized I was a reaper. He said ‘your kind,’ and it was obvious what he was talking about. He was much more worked up about Izzy’s presence than mine, though.”
“Maybe that means he recognizes her as a threat,” Cormack mused, rubbing his chin. “Carroll’s journal is extremely detailed. There are a lot of wild proposals in here. Some revolve around the gate.”
“Do you find that surprising?” I asked. “I mean ... he was pretty upfront regarding his interest in the gate. We simply need to figure out what happened to him ... and Washington. We’re sure Washington disappeared first, right?”
“Actually, we were just discussing that,” Cormack hedged, his eyes darting to Oliver. “It’s hard for us to put together a timeline because we weren’t present for the events. Oliver remembers the council showing up and acting concerned when Washington disappeared.”
“Acting?” I arched an eyebrow. “Why phrase it like that?”
“You’re good at picking up on verbal cues.” Cormack grinned. “Much better than my children. I see I’ll have to be careful about what I say in front of you.”
“You still haven’t answered the question.”
He let loose a heavy sigh. “Oliver is under the impression that there’s a chance — notice I stressed the word ‘chance’ — that the council only conducted the search for the sake of appearances.”
Oh, well, now we were getting somewhere. “I would love to hear the story,” I prodded. “That’s not exactly how he described things to me.”
“I was very careful when describing things to you,” Oliver shot back. “I didn’t want to lead you down the wrong path. When you started asking questions about Carroll and Peter, I didn’t know what to make of it. That was a very long time ago.”
“You’re a vampire,” I pointed out. “You’re going to live forever. That’s like the blink of an eye to you.”
“Not necessarily. But it doesn’t matter. I was friendly with Peter, but we didn’t spend much time together. Back in those days, it wasn’t exactly as ... welcome, I guess would be the right word … to be gay. I don’t think anything of speaking out regarding my life now, but back then I was much more careful.
“I didn’t announce my plans to him when I was leaving after my shifts,” he continued. “I designed things that way. Therefore, he didn’t share any of his personal life with me beyond what was reasonable. We did occasionally talk philosophy. You can’t spend hours upon hours with people in front of a gate that leads to another plane of existence without talking about death.”
“Did he seem afraid of death?” Braden asked.
“Everyone is afraid of death in their own way, even those who are ready to welcome it. There’s always a question at the very end. Peter didn’t seem any more afraid of what was to come than a normal person. He did, however, seem intrigued by the mechanics of the afterlife.
“You have to understand,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “He was the scientific sort. He didn’t really have what I would call a romantic streak. He was married, had a son, but he never talked about his family the way Cormack talks about his children.”
“And how does Dad talk about us?” Braden asked, suspicious.
“As if you’re the center of his universe and he would occasionally like to drop a bomb on you.” Oliver smirked at Braden’s amused reaction. “Your father is a professional man who likes things done a certain way. He’s also a sentimental man. He’s mentioned Lily five times since he arrived.”
“Well, she is the prettiest baby in the world,” Cormack protested. “She could be the baby on the Gerber package she’s so pretty.”
“I get what you’re saying,” Braden noted. “Washington was the detached sort. It wasn’t that he necessarily didn’t care for his family as much as he simply lost himself in the science and philosophy of the gate.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed. “He wasn’t a bad man.”
“Which is why Oliver thinks it’s entirely possible that he didn’t read Carroll’s motivations correctly,” Cormack said. “He thinks that Carroll always had a plan for the gate. He thinks Washington always had a thirst for knowledge. Carroll used Washington’s thirst until it came to a breaking point.”
“So ... what?” Braden tilted his head to the side, considering. “Are we operating under the idea that Carroll killed Washington and fled? That’s how he bought himself enough time to disappear and enact whatever crazy plan he had? I don’t understand how this all fits together.
“Why would Carroll flee all those years ago and come back now? I mean ... how is he even controlling what’s happening? Why did he possess Granger of all people? Why kill the teacher? I don’t understand any of it.”
“None of us do.” I absently patted his hand as I ran my tongue over my teeth. “We really need to break this down and examine every angle. I think we’re missing something ... and it’s a big something.”
“I agree.” Cormack nodded. “I’m going to spend the afternoon trying to match dates between Carroll’s journal and the one Izzy found in the library. I don’t know that it will help but it certainly can’t hurt.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Braden said. “I’m guessing you need me to take you back home to do that.”
“I do.”
I pursed my lips and continued to rub my forehead. “I’m going to head back into the library. I can’t shake the idea that the closing of that part of the building had something to do with what happened to Washington.”
“How can you confirm that?” Braden asked.
“I have no idea. I simply don’t know where else to look.”
“While you’re doing that, don’t forget you still need to hire a replacement for Renee,” Cormack suggested, grinning at my downtrodden expression as he stood. “It’s hell being the boss, Izzy. You can’t, however, shirk your duties because you find the thrill of the mystery more invigorating. Both problems must be solved.”
I groaned but nodded. “Fine. I’ll look at those names, too.”
“I’ll be in touch,” Braden said, smoothing the back of my hair as he smiled. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing yet, but I’m guessing it will be manly and helpful.”
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “That sounds like a plan.”
“SO, WHAT’S GOING ON with you and the surliest Grimlock?”
Oliver waited a full hour after Cormack and Braden departed to ask the question that I knew was plaguing him. I did my best to feign interest in the personnel files I, but that didn’t stop him from starting the interrogation.
“Oh, geez. I knew you were going to ask that,” I muttered, rolling my neck. For some reason, reading employee histories on five people was enough to make me stiff and uncomfortable all over.
“Well, since you saw the question coming, you should have an answer waiting.”
“You would think, huh?” I flashed him a smile and then shook my head. “We’re ... dating.” I figured that was the easiest word to use to describe our new relationship. “That’s it.”
“Uh-huh.” Oliver didn’t look convinced. “Did you spend the night at Grimlock Manor again?”
“Maybe.” I avoided his gaze. “Why does it matter?”
“I’m simply curious.”
“I didn't realize we were at the part of our relationship where we were going to start sharing details of our sex lives. If that’s the case, perhaps you should kick things off. What does Brett look like naked?”
Oliver’s expression darkened. “Don’t change the subject. I get why you’re uncomfortable, but it’s really not necessary. Everyone with eyes realized where this was going with Braden. He’s been panting after you from the start, and you’ve been mooning over him since five minutes after you were introduced.”
&nbs
p; I took offense at that remark. “I don’t ‘moon’ over anyone,” I argued, frustration bubbling up. “I’m not the sort of girl who moons. That’s a dumb word anyway. You should totally pick another word.”
“Oh, well, I would be happy to. Um ... .” He put on a big show of tapping his chin and feigning deep thoughts. “You’ve been crushing on him something fierce. What? I’ve been alive for a long time. You wouldn’t believe the endless stream of movie jargon I’ve learned over the decades.”
I didn’t want to encourage him. He didn’t deserve it after playing games with information regarding my parents. Still, he was kind of funny. “Did you make me laugh this much when I was a kid?” I asked, choking on a giggle.
He nodded. “I did. I used to talk to you in funny voices and re-enact Where the Wild Things Are while reading it to you.”
My heart gave a little jolt. “You’re the second person to mention that book to me. My grandfather taught me how to read it myself because it’s all I wanted to hear when he first took me in. I guess I know why that is … you and my parents read it to me all the time.”
“That was definitely your favorite book,” he agreed. “You liked listening to any stories I had to tell, even if there was more truth than fiction associated with them. Your mother made me promise not to tell you anything too bloody. You liked horror stories … a lot. Sometimes I forgot your age and made them a bit too gruesome.”
“Well, I still like horror movies. There’s nothing better than curling up with a terrible movie during a thunderstorm.”
“Yes, well … .” He trailed off, seemingly lost in thought. After a few minutes, he cleared his throat. “Have you decided on a new worker? I know you’ve been busy … well, getting busy … but you really should make a decision.”
“I know. I’ve had other things on my mind.”
“Like?”
“Like a man who should’ve died decades ago talking through a small child. Like ghosts walking across the water and begging me to free them.”
“Like sex with a Grimlock.”
“Oh, good grief.” I couldn’t meet his gaze. “You make me want to smother you with a pillow.”
Only the Quiet Page 21
