The Healing Power of Sugar: The Ghost Bird Series: #9 (The Academy Ghost Bird Series)

by Stone, C. L.

  Gabriel was pushing the button to call Kota when I reached forward, grabbing his arm and shaking him. “Wait!” I said in a hurry. “Don’t call.”

  “What the fuck?” Gabriel asked. “Why not?”

  I showed him my case. “This isn’t my phone.”

  “What are you talking about? Of course it is.”

  “I scratched the case,” I said. “I dropped it.”

  “Sang, you drop your phone all the time,” Gabriel said. “We just put new cases on.”

  “Yeah, well, I haven’t gotten another case since then. Now mine is smooth.”

  Luke and Gabriel looked at each other for a moment. Luke refocused on the road, but pulled his phone out and held it up to examine it. “Mine looks normal.”

  “How would you know if someone replaced it?” Gabriel asked. He looked back at me. “Are you sure?”

  “It was scratched at…when we got food,” I said, holding my hand to my temple, trying to remember the last time I’d paid any attention to my phone. It was at the diner earlier, when I had put it into my bra, and had noticed the scratches then. “I was holding it, and I felt the ridges. So unless you all changed the case in the last couple of hours without me knowing...”

  “No,” they said together, and then shared looks again. Confused, uncomfortable looks.

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow, slowly. “How do we know if these are ours? No one got near us?”

  “We were looking for Mr. Morris in that one busy shop,” Luke said. “There might have been someone else while we were distracted. And it doesn’t take much to be in a crowd and your phone gets stolen.” He flipped his over and then back again. “Mine…wasn’t in my front pocket.” He spoke through his teeth now. “I’m an idiot. I didn’t put it in my front pocket. Someone could have switched it if they wanted.”

  “Who?” Gabriel asked. “Volto?”

  Luke shrugged. “I don’t think so. Wouldn’t we have noticed if Volto walked by in a white mask? We were already on the look out for him. Does Volto work for Mr. Hendricks? We’ve never established that.”

  Gabriel pushed his back into the seat and adjusted his sweater, putting his phone into the cup holder. “Well, shit. We’re going to have to drag Victor down here.”

  “Let’s just get to…” Luke paused. “Where should we go?”

  “We should get to Kota,” I said.

  We were silent for the rest of the ride. Pulling into Sunnyvale, everything seemed normal. Being only one in the morning when we got in, all was still quiet like when we’d left earlier.

  We parked at Nathan’s house, not wanting to scare Erica. We got out, leaving the bags in the car.

  “I’ll go,” Luke said. “Let me wake them up. I’ll have them come over. You two go inside.”

  It didn’t take long before Kota and Nathan were standing in Nathan’s dining room with us.

  Kota walked in, tired-eyed, but yet with concern on his face. He’d known where we were, but if we were back and panicked enough to wake them and call them over, he had to know something was wrong.

  Nathan rubbed at his face. “What is it?” he asked. There were still lines across his face from his pillow. His reddish hair was a mess. “Why are we getting up? I don’t want to go.”

  “Sang’s phone was stolen,” Gabriel said, before I could. He had mine and his, and he put them on the table together. “Maybe mine, too, but I can’t be sure. It looks the same and I’m afraid to use it.”

  Nathan blinked at us, looked at the phones and then back at us. “It’s right there,” he said, pointing to mine.

  Luke sat down with us, and we went over what had happened, going shopping, possibly seeing a Volto, finding Mr. Morris and then Mr. Hendricks and the others, how they’d disappeared.

  “We didn’t even notice our phones might have been switched out, Sang did,” Luke said. “She dropped hers recently and had scratches or something?” He looked at me, questioning.

  “Yeah,” I said. “They were still there when we ate before we went to the mall. Now my case is smooth again. No one replaced it. It had to have happened at the mall.”

  Kota brushed a palm across his forehead. He took his phone out, pushed a button, and then held it to his face. “Calling Mr. Blackbourne,” he said.

  Each of us grew quiet, waiting for Kota.

  Kota slowly pulled the phone from his face, studying it. “It’s still ringing?”

  Luke stood up quickly, hands on the table. “Again?”

  Gabriel leaned his head back and blew out an exasperated breath. “This is getting so fucking annoying.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kota asked. “It’s probably a…”

  “No,” Luke said, and then reached out, taking Kota’s phone from him, turning it off. “Something is wrong. I don’t know what, but our numbers aren’t working. We tried with these phones, but whenever we call, the number just rings and rings. They look like ours, but something isn’t working with them.”

  Kota sighed, picked up his phone again and looked it over. He poked at it and then frowned. “This isn’t my phone. My data is gone. The pictures.”

  We all looked at our phones again. Old messages appeared to still be there, but pictures weren’t.

  Luke sat down heavily in a chair and slumped forward, his shoulders rounding. “Kota,” he said. “I had notes…Now they’re gone.”

  “I had lots of photos,” Gabriel said. “And some recorded messages…”

  “It appears some data was transferred, but someone purposefully wiped certain items,” Kota said.

  Nathan punched the table and stood up suddenly, the chair sliding back, scratching loudly against the floor. “Are you…ugh. He got your phone, too?” He pulled his out, dropping it on the table with a clatter. “Is this even mine?”

  “We don’t know,” Kota said.

  “How is he getting to us?” Nathan asked, his angry voice getting louder. He raised a fist and shook it. “This is stupid! We’re getting our phones switched out from under our noses?”

  “Stop yelling,” Kota said in a calm, but commanding tone. He got up and went to the kitchen counter, where a simple house phone was sitting. He picked up the receiver slowly, looked at the buttons, and then put it back down in the cradle. “Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  He pulled the cord of the phone out of the wall, and brought it over. “Use this, but at someone else’s house. Just plug it in at a box somewhere. Not Sang’s old house either. Call Mr. Blackbourne’s emergency line. If that doesn’t go through, call anyone’s number you can remember. Charlie’s. Uncle’s. Anyone. I want you to get someone from our team on the line, directly. We need to find everyone right now.”

  With this, Luke took the phone and was out the door.

  From that point on, it seemed everyone was busy and on task. Kota went home to get a laptop, bringing it back to Nathan’s. He arranged a workstation on the coffee table and checked the camera feeds. He found Victor asleep at home. Then he managed to page Dr. Green and get him to respond by using the Internet. They were safe. He tracked as many as he could, but the computer could only bring so many feeds back at once before it slowed down, so he had to do one house at a time.

  At first, Gabriel and I were to write out what had happened at the mall and make notes of we could remember was gone from our phones. “Maybe there’s a clue as to why they deleted specific data,” Kota said.

  Once we were done, Gabriel and I sprawled out on the carpet on either side of the coffee table, waiting. The lack of sleep and stress was weighing heavily on me, but I was too worried to sleep. I needed to know everyone was safe first.

  Nathan sat by Kota’s elbow, watching what he was doing. He’d written his own notes, but hadn’t had much on his phone to begin with.

  Luke came back, walking in the front door, the phone in his hand. “I got Mr. Blackbourne,” he said. “I used the box outside of the house next to Kota’s. Mr. Blackbourne’s emergency line was untapped, at least. I told him eve
rything I could. He said we’re to stay here. I called North, too. He’s going to grab Silas on his way here.”

  “Does Victor need to stay at home?” I asked.

  “Victor’s the safest one right now,” Kota said, the glow of the laptop reflecting off of his glasses. “And Dr. Green. But I’m going to let Victor know he needs to go to the hospital, and with an escort. I don’t want to take chances. If Dr. Green has to stay at the hospital, someone needs to be with him. We’re on the buddy system at this point.”

  “What about Mr. Blackbourne?”

  “There’s a strong possibility he’ll be by to grab one of us soon.”

  “What do we do for now?” I asked. “What’s the next step?”

  “We can’t do anything right now,” Kota said. He blew out a small, tight breath, the sound almost a whistle. “We’ll have to come up with a plan. We don’t know all the facts, like exactly who took the phones. I’m going to work with Victor to pull our data, and see why they might want to take our phones in the first place. I want to figure out if mine was actually switched, or if the data got deleted remotely. I can’t picture my phone getting taken. Or Luke’s for that matter.”

  “I might have messed up,” Luke said.

  “I doubt it,” Kota said, lifting his head up with a tight smile. “The Luke I know wouldn’t get his phone stolen out from under him. Sang left her phone in a different spot than usual and someone took advantage of that and replaced it completely.”

  We speculated on the hows and whys, but no matter how we looked at it, there weren’t any answers yet.

  We continued to wait for a while, but Kota insisted that those who could sleep, should. It would be a while before Victor was set up to do the work required. “We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way,” Kota said. “We’ll need people sleeping in shifts when not actively on a job.”

  Luke, Gabriel and I went ahead and got into Nathan’s bed—me in the middle between them. We’d shared a bed before, but this time, we were all restless. Maybe it was the coffee and sugar still in our veins.

  I flipped over the pillow a lot, sinking my head down into it. The smells around me were familiar: leather, Luke’s sugar and Gabriel smelled like coffee.

  ♥♥♥

  I awoke to the smell of the ocean and of moss and berries.

  I turned onto my back, finding an arm under me, Silas’s, by the feel of the hard muscle. There was another arm over my hip: Victor. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know it was them. Sometime in the middle of the night, they’d come in and switched with Luke and Gabriel.

  Where were those two now?

  The room was quiet. The house seemed to be still. But I had questions and wanted to get up, but was still tired.

  I looked over at Victor, still sleeping, his lips parted like he was pursed to whistle but nothing came out. His wavy hair framed his face.

  I thought about what had happened last night. Our phones had been taken—swapped for others for no reason that we could figure out. Was there anything on my phone that was sensitive?

  Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Morris had followed us, possibly running off when we tried to approach. Jay and Rocky were there, too. Why? Or was it coincidence? Was it them that took our phones?

  The sudden bang of the door opening and knocking into the wall startled me to sit upright.

  Kota was in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a green polo shirt, although the shirt was a little askew on his side. He looked at me and gave me an apologetic look before he turned toward Victor. “Vic,” he said loudly. “I need you. Let’s go.”

  Victor groaned and then sat up before he coughed once. He was still wearing a white shirt and the black slacks, like he’d known to stay dressed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  “Mr. Morris is at the fake Academy school,” Kota said. “He broke in and is looking through files we planted there. We’re going to go in and check what he’s been looking at.” He smiled, his eyes bright, his chest puffing up. His face was tired, but he was eager. “Something’s happening.”

  I started crawling to the edge of the bed, when Silas reached for my leg and held on. “You don’t go, aggele,” he said. “Stay.”

  “But I want to know what’s going on,” I said. “What does this mean?”

  Victor stood, stretched and then walked around the bed, scratching at his face as he spoke. “They’re looking for dirt of some kind. They’re nervous.”

  “Exactly what I’m thinking,” Kota said. “They’re desperate. It’s causing them to take risks, like breaking into the Academy building on a holiday weekend. Mr. Blackbourne is keeping close to Mr. Hendricks, but we might need to give Mr. Morris some false info. Let’s see what they do with it.”

  They left, leaving Silas and I alone in the bedroom.

  I sighed, feeling useless at the moment. Could I sit here, knowing something like this was going on? I didn’t want to sleep anymore. I wanted to get to work on something. Anything.

  Silas breathed in deeply through his nose and then sat up. “Aggele mou,” he said, his voice deep, throaty. “You’re not going to sleep, are you?”

  “I’m awake now,” I said. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Stay put,” he said. “Behave. What they’re doing now is dangerous enough.”

  “Following Mr. Morris is going to be dangerous?” There were sounds deeper in the house now. People were walking around. The front door opened, closed. Things quieted. Kota and Victor had left in a hurry.

  “Not just following,” Silas said as he got up and stretched, letting out a satisfied noise. He had on boxer briefs and a blue T-shirt. He was all muscle, and as he stretched, his shoulders and arms flexed, and even his legs showed defined lines, showing his obvious strength.

  His black eyes studied me as I looked at him and I glanced away from his body, feeling embarrassed that I’d gotten caught staring. “So we do nothing?”

  “We stay here and act like we don’t know anything,” he said.

  “I always do that.”

  He pulled on his jeans and then zipped them up. “Do you want coffee?”

  ♥♥♥

  Saturday was a buzz of activity as the boys flew in and out of Nathan’s home. At first, I suspected I would go with them, but no, they left me behind every time.

  I did spend a lot of time preparing food—simple eggs, toast, and coffee for breakfast—and cleaning up and holding messages. I fixed what I could of a lunch, and then thought of what to make for dinner. When someone showed up, there was always food prepared so they could eat while they wrote down notes and conversed with each other with whatever updates they had.

  No phones this time. If we didn’t say something in person, it couldn’t be said. I was the one to relay coded messages whenever anyone came in. I told them where to go next when required.

  I was also to watch cameras. Kota set up the laptop for me. He had me watching the house, the street. “You’re keeping house,” he said when he showed me how to toggle between the feeds.

  I wasn’t so sure this wasn’t more than a way to keep me out of the way, but I didn’t mind. One other person was always with me, whether it was Silas, North, Kota, or any of the others. If they slept, it was at Nathan’s house, which seemed to have been turned into their base camp.

  Still, while we were there, everyone was on edge, locked onto a laptop or busy studying material, papers. Kota wrote in files when he got in.

  When Sunday rolled around, they were all still back and forth. No rest. The meeting they had planned didn’t happen. Too much activity from Mr. Hendricks and the possible leak in our phones made them overly cautious.

  On Sunday afternoon, I sat with Kota on Nathan’s sofa. The sky was overcast, promising chilly weather instead of rain. I’d made breakfast and had cleaned up after the others, but hadn’t readied anything for lunch.

  Kota was looking at his laptop. I occasionally glanced at the laptop he’d set up for me, sitting on
the coffee table. It showed our own street and our homes, but nothing was moving on the screen—nothing was happening. I sighed, loudly.

  “I know you’re frustrated,” Kota said, although he kept his eyes on the screen.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “Why am I just sitting here?”

  “Do you feel like you’re just sitting?” he asked. He looked up, turning his head toward me. “You’ve got one of the most important jobs here.”

  “Shouldn’t I go out and help?”

  “You are helping,” he said. “You told us about the phones. You made us aware they’d switched our phones out. You were the one who thought you spotted Volto. Don’t you see? If you hadn’t thought to go out and check, Mr. Morris and Mr. Hendricks could have followed you three for hours. You might not have noticed your phone being gone at all for a good, long time. And now that we are hyper-aware of Mr. Morris, we found out he was breaking into the Academy school. Now we’re trying to lay the groundwork to see what happens if he does find something interesting. We’ll be able to steer their plans to fail, whatever they are.”

  “But I’m just sitting here now,” I said. I was still in pajama pants and the T-shirt I’d worn since yesterday. Since no one was asking me to go anywhere, I hadn’t bothered to change. I was feeling like a frumpy mess, but what did it matter? “I’m the one at home making sandwiches while everyone else is out there getting involved.”

  Kota sighed, putting the laptop beside him on the couch. He turned toward me, holding out his arms. “Come here for a second.”

  I was pouting, but I couldn’t help it. The boys had come and gone for over twenty-four hours now, and here we were, half way through Sunday, and I was all the more restless to take action. It felt like my fault my phone had been lifted. How could I not have noticed? Perhaps if I’d put it into my bra like I normally did, it wouldn’t have happened. Luke had told me that putting it in there actually prevented people from taking it.

  With Kota signaling again for me to come closer, I leaned into him. He gathered me in his arms and kissed my cheek as he rubbed my back and held me. I curled my arms up into his chest, leaning into him in a cuddle. I was still frowning, but Kota was soothing my hurt feelings from getting left behind.