by Lori Bond
The rest of dinner concerned my future education. Will would teach me basic LANCE agent stuff, and Arthur would train me to use my knight once her breastplate had been refitted. No one thought I could go to school. There wasn’t a school secure enough to protect me from the Dreki, and no one wanted to even think about endangering the other students. Ginny decided she’d find me either a good online program or tutors. No one appreciated my suggestion that I drop out and get a GED.
“Do you think you could pass the GED at this point?” Arthur asked. Unlike Ginny and Will, he at least took my suggestion seriously. “I mean, I’ve seen your grades.”
I tried to brush past this reminder that I’d been a part of Arthur’s life even when he hadn’t been in mine. “What about them? I get A’s and B’s in every class. I had a whole bunch of pre-AP and one AP class this year.”
Arthur shoveled another bite of lasagna in his mouth. “That’s my point. I don’t think you realize how hard the GED is, Princess. I took it two years ago, and even I had trouble. You only get about two minutes to answer each question, and you need to remember everything that might come up in high school. I mean everything from stuff you forgot after ninth grade to things you don’t even cover until you’re a senior.”
“You took the GED,” I said. The doubt dripped out of my mouth the way the sauce dripped off my fork of lasagna. “I thought I read somewhere you went to a swanky boarding school.”
“The swankiest.” Arthur made a face like his food had gone bad, but I figured it was the memory of his school. “I took the test to see what I was asking of my employees. Keep Consolidated has lots of jobs, both manufacturing and desk, that don’t require a degree. We did used to require a high school diploma or GED though. At least, we did until I almost failed it. Now, you take a job specific test to see if you can do the work. If a coder can pass Ginny’s test, for example, they’re in, no formal schooling required.”
“That’s unusual.” My entire life, all my teachers had drilled into us how we wouldn’t be able to work without a college degree.
Arthur shrugged. “I’m an unusual man,” he said through a mouth full of food. “I run an unusual company.”
“You run?” Ginny slammed her fork onto her plate with a clank.
Arthur reached over and patted her hand. “Ginny runs an unusual company for me.”
“That’s better.” She looked only the tiniest bit appeased.
After dinner, I went to my room and drew for about an hour. Even though my new style of visions had changed from the ones I’d grown up with, I hoped drawing them would still help purge them from my system. I drew and colored in a picture of Cassie kissing the Defender. The picture made me smile; the two seemed so content with one another. Arthur and Ginny looked like that when they thought no one could see them.
After I finished Cassie’s picture, I drew a quick, rough pencil sketch of Vortigern sitting behind his cup of coffee. I gave the coffee mug more detail than I did Vortigern. The second I finished, I wadded up the sketch and threw it in the trash. This wasn’t a vision I wanted to remember.
There was one other vision I didn’t want to remember, but I couldn’t bring myself to draw Will with a bullet in his head. That future might not have come to pass, but the image still disturbed me. I paced my new room back and forth. Like everything in Arthur’s home, the room was huge. I walked laps around the room, twenty steps for each side, but I still didn’t feel better.
Finally, I decided to just see Will for myself, to see him alive and safe. I stepped into the hallway and realized I had no idea where he might be. He’d mentioned moving in next door to me, but had he meant my current room or my old room? Was he in the room to the right or the left?
I wandered up the hall, wondering which door to knock on. I didn’t have to wander long. The door to the right of my current room had a new, hand-written sign taped to the front: Will’s Room. No Keeps Allowed. (This means you, Arthur.)
I grinned. The sign hinted at a more whimsical side to the serious LANCE agent. Of course, you rarely see the whimsical side of a person during Dreki attacks. The fact was I knew nothing about Will Redding except that he was super-hot and knew how to save my life. He could be a practical joker or a secret bassoon player. He could be anything beneath the Agent Redding persona.
I knocked on the door and cracked it open when there wasn’t an answer. I stuck my head in, but Will didn’t seem to be home. His room was laid out almost identical to my old room with a queen bed, a small sitting area centered around a sofa, and a one person metal desk along the far wall. This morning, before all the craziness with visions, Will had claimed to move in, but I didn’t see any real sign that Will lived here. If it hadn’t been for the sign, I would have assumed this to be another empty guest bedroom.
I snuck into the room, but nothing happened. Alarms didn’t go off. Traps didn’t fall from the ceiling. Nothing. Will hadn’t mounted any special LANCE defenses.
The doors to both the walk-in closet and the bathroom were shut, but I didn’t feel like opening them. I assumed Will’s bathroom looked just like mine, and I assumed his closet was full of his boring gray agent suits. The guy probably didn’t even own anything else. Since he looked amazing in his suits, I shouldn’t complain.
I plopped down on the couch, intending to wait for Will to get back. I didn’t want to hunt him down, but I also didn’t want to go to bed without seeing, once again, that he was alive.
Laying my head down on the arm of the couch, I stared at the end table and the silver picture frame siting on it. Slowly, I realized that Will must have brought something with him after all. I sat up and picked up the frame to get a better look.
There were three kids in the picture, probably around thirteen or fourteen years old. Will stood on the right side, his arm around a Japanese girl. On her other side, a Russian boy held the girl’s hand. They all wore some sort of school uniform—black slacks and gray jacket for the guys, a black pleated skirt and gray jacket for the girl—with a LANCE crest on their jackets and little flag lapel pins on their collars designating their countries. Will wore a little American flag, and I had guessed the other two kids’ nationalities based on their pins.
The three kids had genuine smiles. I had never seen Will that relaxed even in informal moments like tonight’s dinner. Although, technically dinner hadn’t been all that relaxed with all the repressed tension from my little runaway attempt permeating the atmosphere.
The door to the bathroom opened, and Will stepped out in only a pair of boxer briefs, a towel ruffling his hair. It was a good thing I was already sitting since he was even more stunning in real life than I had imagined. Will had the kind of body and face that could have inspired Michelangelo’s David. I knew I was feeling inspired, and usually I only drew my visions, not from real life.
“Oh, hey,” Will said, noticing me staring at his half-naked body.
The blood rushed to my face. I’d probably been staring at him all bug-eyed, the way cartoon wolves stared at sheep. I wanted to hide my face behind the picture but with the amount of heat radiating from my cheeks, the thing might have burst into flames. “I thought you weren’t here.”
“So you were snooping through my room?” Will raised an eyebrow at me and disappeared in his closet.
“What? No,” I sputtered. “I was sitting here waiting for you.”
“It’s okay,” he said, reemerging in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. So, the guy did own normal clothes. “I’m going through your room tomorrow.”
“What?”
“Just kidding.” He grinned and threw his towel back in the bathroom.
Will sat down on the couch next to me. This was the first time he’d been this close when I wasn’t in the middle of a crisis. I was surprised to discover that my heart raced from the proximity even without the threat of imminent death. He tapped the picture with his hand, bringing my focus back from contemplating the nearness of his thigh. “This was a great day.”
“W
hat?” I had returned to the tongue-tied inability to form words in front of cute guys, an MO that had been such a hallmark of my social success at school.
Will took the picture from my hand, so he could look at it closer. Our fingers brushed, and I got a little electric shock. It wasn’t the magical kind of shock true love delivers in a novel. It was the normal kind of static electricity that hurts.
Will didn’t seem to notice. He had probably been trained to ignore any kind of physical discomfort. “This was a great day,” he repeated, staring at the picture. His mouth smiled, but his eyes looked sad. The day in the picture might have been great, but it didn’t take a genius like Ginny or Arthur to tell that things hadn’t stayed that way.
“Were those your friends at school?” I asked.
“Something like that,” said Will, but he didn’t elaborate. I didn’t feel like I knew him well enough to push so we sat there in silence while Will lived in his memory. Shifting so that my back was now to the arm of the couch, I faced Will’s profile. I found it easier to breathe with the extra inch between us.
Will sat the picture face down on the sofa cushion next to him. He turned so he sat sideways too, facing me. “So, what did you need me for?”
“Uh.” The blood flooded back into my face.
“Did you want to talk about your training?” he prompted.
“Training?” With a monumental effort, I pulled my mind back into the room.
“I’m going to give you a sort of modified version of basic agent training. We’ll start tomorrow.”
That got me interested. “Like code-breaking and tailing?”
Will laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies. More like self-defense. You can’t always be in armor. Besides, I suspect that Ginny is a better code-breaker than all of LANCE put together.”
“True.” I gave Will an evil grin. “Ginny told me at dinner she’s teaching me to hack. We’ll see who can keep secrets then.”
Will raised his eyebrows. “I don’t remember her saying that. I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if she’d mentioned hacking.”
I waved away his doubt. “She said code, but this is Ginny, tech genius, best friend of the Viral Vixen, and wife to eccentric gazillionaire Arthur Keep. She totally meant hack.”
Will smiled for a second, but then he narrowed his eyes. “Why are you here, Elaine? It’s not to talk about training.”
I looked away, unable to meet his eyes.
“It’s about the vision, isn’t it? The one where I died?”
I didn’t answer. I picked at the hem of my tank top.
“It’s hard to see someone die, especially the first time.” Will’s voice dropped until he spoke so softly, I barely caught his words. “Especially when it’s someone you know.”
I glanced over, but now Will was the one not looking at me. He stared off into space. I wondered who he’d seen die. I wondered how many he’d seen die. I didn’t ask.
“Where did Vortigern shoot me?” Will turned back. He wasn’t mad like I would have been. He didn’t seem sad or resigned or anything other than a little curious.
I shook my head, unwilling to say, even though an imaginary bullet hole seemed to sit in the middle of Will’s forehead.
“Was it the heart?” Will picked up my right arm by the wrist and placed my hand on his chest over his heart. His other hand covered mine, pressing it firmly into place. “Feel it? Mine’s still here, still beating. Vortigern didn’t get me. Arthur and I saw to it.”
Beneath my hand I felt Will’s warmth radiating up through his T-shirt. I couldn’t feel his heart beating through all the rock-hard muscle, but it was a nice, dramatic gesture. Logically, I knew an alive Will had a beating heart. I didn’t need to feel a pulse to prove it. I left my hand there though. There was something comforting about Will’s solid warmth.
When I glanced back up, Will still stared at me intently. “It wasn’t the heart, was it?” Will glared at me. I tried to pull back, but Will still held my hand against his chest. “Vortigern shot me in the gut, didn’t he? That snake-skinned, dragon-loving jerk.”
“What? No,” I said, surprised by Will’s sudden vehemence. “It was in the forehead.”
Will shrugged, a relieved look on his face. “Oh, well, that’s fine then.”
This time when I pulled back, he let my hand go. “What do you mean, ‘that’s fine?’ You were freaking dead. Stone-cold-lifeless-eyed-dead.” I hugged my legs up to my chest as tight as possible and crushed my eyes against my knees. “So-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-laughs dead.”
“But a forehead shot, that’s a good way to go, Elaine.” Will scooted closer, wrapping his arms around my defensive cocoon. “It’s a clean, fast kill. No pain, no suffering. Did you know it can take up to twenty minutes to bleed out from a stomach wound? You’re just lying there writhing around in excruciating pain for twenty minutes.”
I turned my head until my cheek rested on my knee so I could glare at Will. “Is this supposed to make me feel better? That you died in a preferable way? You were still dead! Why does that not bother you?”
Will wrinkled his nose for a moment, thinking. “It’s my job.”
“Your job is to die?”
With his arms still around me, Will shrugged. “Kind of. Do you know what the life expectancy is for a Conservatory kid like me? For a kid raised by LANCE, sent to their school, trained since the age of six?”
“The age of six?” I whispered, but Will didn’t hear me.
“Twenty-five. That’s the oldest most of us see. Twenty-five. If we don’t die in the field before then, LANCE retires the rest when we outlive our usefulness, and it’s not the sort of retirement where you live out your golden years in Florida. It’s not the kind of retirement where you live.”
I sat up, horrified. “But I thought LANCE was the good guys.”
“They are. We are.” Will’s arms dropped from around me. He was now too upset in his own right to comfort me. “But sometimes good guys do bad things for the greater good. So, yeah, when the time comes, it’ll be my job to die for the greater good.”
I grabbed Will in a bear hug—as if physically restraining him from that death. “Your job sucks.” I buried my face in his neck.
Will sighed. His arms crept back around me in a gentle hug back. “Yeah. I know.”
We sat there, me squeezing the life out of Will, Will hugging me.
It was an awesome moment, so Arthur had to ruin it.
“Unhand my daughter,” he yelled from the doorway.
“I should have locked the door when I came in.” I reluctantly pulled myself off of Will’s shoulder. Turning, I rolled my eyes at my livid parent. “You have got to get a new line.”
“What are you doing in here? You are supposed to be grounded.” Arthur stood there with his arms crossed, tapping his foot while he waited for me to walk over to him.
“I can’t talk to Will?”
“I’m pretty sure being grounded means no boys, doesn’t it?” For a second Arthur looked uncertain. After all, he’d only actively been playing father for twenty-four hours. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing in here.”
“I came to see if Will kisses as good as he looks,” I said, filling my voice with as much sarcasm as I could manage.
Behind me, Will made a choking sound. Arthur turned an interesting four shades of purple before all the blood drained from his face leaving it ghostly pale.
“Oh, good grief. That was a joke. Why do you think I’m in here? I wanted to remind myself that Will was alive.”
“Oh,” said Arthur. For a second he looked a little guilty, but it was only for a second. “Next time use the security feed to check. The sensors track his biometric data, so you can see he’s alive.”
“I will.” I decided not to be mad that the rooms were all being monitored, not when I would find this security feed useful. “I’ll check them every day. Did you know that for the next eight years, LANCE will keep sending Will on suicide missions, and
if he doesn’t die, they’ll just kill him off themselves when he turns twenty-five?”
“What?” Even Arthur looked taken aback, and nothing phased Arthur.
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” said Will.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed into little slits. “I have never trusted Stormfield or that nest of vipers. Young man, I may not trust you, I may not even like you, but I will not allow you to die while living under my roof.” Arthur stormed from the room yelling for Percival to get Ginny to hack into LANCE’s systems.
Will and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
“That took a surprising twist,” I said.
Arthur stuck his head back through the doorway. “And there’s no casually kissing my daughter while you live under my roof either.” He disappeared back into the hall.
I flushed, but Will gave me a mischievous grin. “Then, I guess we’ll just have to content ourselves to a serious relationship with no casual, only passionate kissing, right Elaine?” he said with a shrug.
As soon as I peeled my jaw off the floor, I fled the room.
11
WHERE I LEARN HOW MUCH I NEED TO LEARN
THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS DRAGGED OUT OF A DEEP SLEEP BY A banging on my door. Since this was the first decent night’s sleep I’d had since moving into the Rook, I groaned and tried burrowing my way deeper under my covers. Nothing made the horrible thudding at my door go away—not ignoring it or cursing at it.
Finally, I asked Percival if we were under attack, and if so, to tell the Dreki to come back at a reasonable hour.
“The Dreki have not penetrated our defenses, my lady,” Percival sounded insulted that I would think the Dreki would circumvent him. I didn’t point out they’d done it only two days before. “Master Will wishes you to join him for a healthy constitutional.”
