Two hours later, the girls were still walking around looking at clothes rather unenthusiastically. The officers were getting antsy. Osh, dressed in his high school getup, was flirting with a saleslady.
I navigated my shattered screen and called Ubie, wishing I could run over and get the screen switched out. We were so close, the store barely a hundred feet away. But conducting personal business during a stakeout was often frowned upon.
“What do you think?” Ubie asked me.
“I’ve noticed a pattern. I need to talk to the girls.”
“Now? Charley, you could blow the whole op. If he sees you with her—”
“Which is exactly why I’m going to make it look like a total coincidence. This is a mall, after all. It’s not unheard of to run into people you know.”
He let out a loud sigh as he thought about it. “I guess it won’t hurt.”
“Okay, I’m heading in.”
I bought a scarf off another kiosk just so I’d have a bag to carry around, then headed toward Amber and her friend.
“Amber!” I said, rushing to her for a hug. “What are you doing here?”
Amber’s expression quickly changed from shock to elation. Girl was good. “We’re just shopping. Looking at cute boys. You know, the usual stuff.”
“Indeed I do. I’ll let you girls get back to it. I have a couple of more things to pick up. Tell your mom hi for me.”
“Okay.” We hugged again, and I whispered in her ear, “Have fun. Try on silly hats. Dance to the Muzak. Stick out your tongue. If I’m right and he’s here, he won’t be able to resist commenting on it.”
“You’re right,” she said as realization dawned. He seemed to only text when she was behaving in a certain way or dressed a certain way.
When I let her go, she nodded that she understood.
I gave Brandy a quick hug, too, and hurried off.
The girls started picking up the pace. They tried on sunglasses and hats and sprayed cologne on one another while Reyes and I scanned the crowd, but still nothing. Not until Amber raised her shirt like she was going to flash a cute boy walking by did she get a text. And it was not a nice one.
Joe didn’t seem to appreciate Amber’s sense of humor when he said, Raise that shirt again, and I’ll rip it off you and wrap it around your neck.
I resisted the urge to pump my fist. But I did do a mental Woohoo!
Now the real challenge began. And Amber did beautifully. She looked at the text and burst out laughing, just like we’d instructed. Then she showed it to Brandy, and they both laughed.
I was so proud of her. Pretending to laugh when you were filled with terror was not easy. I’d had to do it before.
After they sobered, they headed toward the food court. But in their haste, and as afraid as they were, Amber forgot to put down a perfume bottle she’d picked up. An alarm rang out, and her eyes rounded.
No.
A saleswoman hurried forward. Amber didn’t know what to do. She glanced around, the terror she was trying to suppress evident on every plane of her face.
My heart broke for her. We would, of course, explain, but the sting would be a bust.
Seconds before the saleswoman reached them, Osh raced by on a skateboard, snatched the perfume out of Amber’s hand, and sped off. When the woman got there, she seemed confused.
Amber improvised beautifully when she pointed to Osh. “I think that boy stole something.”
The woman hurried to call security. And I almost collapsed in relief. Osh didn’t know it yet, but that boy was getting a big fat kiss.
The girls, after almost fainting from relief, continued to the food court, sat at an outside table, and began talking about the text again, pointing at the phone and laughing.
“Come on, Joe,” I said, whispering under my breath.
A second later, another text came though.
You won’t be laughing when I spread those skinny legs, bitch.
Oh, yeah, he was angry.
Two of the cops stuck to the girls like glue while I surfed the crowd. If he was in it, I’d feel the anger. A strong emotion like that would be hard to miss.
Ubie’s voice came through. “Anything, Charley?”
I could only shake my head. I did a complete circle and got nothing. What the hell? He had to be here.
I glanced up toward the second floor but saw no one really watching, besides Reyes. He’d taken up position overhead to get a bird’s eye.
Growing frustrated, I started to circle again. The girls kept up the game. I gave Amber the signal to amp it up, at which point they showed a total stranger the text and burst out laughing again. I needed this guy to go ballistic.
I felt anger here and there, but nothing anywhere near what he would be projecting. And then it hit me. Anger, yes. But it was more than that. I felt hatred and jealously and hostility.
Whirling toward the emotions that had now filtered through the masses and were bombarding me, I saw no one.
“What is it?” Ubie asked into the mic. I held up an index finger and walked forward through the crowd. Men of every shape and size sat around eating a variety of mall food, but when I finally spotted the source of the rage, I stopped short, unable to believe my eyes.
I shuffled closer, pretending to look at my phone, but Joe Stalker was so busy watching the girls, she paid me no mind at all when I stopped right beside her table.
It was a kid. A young girl probably no older than Amber. Chubby with short dark hair, curly and unkempt, and ghostly white skin, she looked more like a book nerd than a girl capable of such hatred.
What the hell? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was just pissed off at her parents for not buying her the latest copy of Seventeen.
She bent to type out a text, then looked up, waiting.
The whole team got it at the same time. I’m going to stab you in the face, cunt.
Oh, no, she didn’t. She did not just use my beloved CU Next Tuesday in a negative, nonempowering way. We girls needed to stick together, not reinforce a derogatory stereotype. I bit down, vowed to have a little talk with Little Miss Miffed about her contradictory use of one of my favorite words and tried to lace this new information together with what we already knew.
First, she was a kid. For a kid, her grammar was flawless. Even though she didn’t text like a typical teen, we still should have picked up on that fact. It never even occurred to me. Then again, maybe that was part of her game. To make the stalker seem older. Smarter. More cunning. To scare Amber even more.
Amber looked at the latest text and laughed again, doubling over, mirth shaking her shoulders.
The girl exploded. Her temper skyrocketed out of control. I saw the glint of metal a mere second before she stood and headed toward the girls. This was going down.
My pulse accelerated like it had rocket boosters. Without another moment’s hesitation, I gave the signal. Which was basically jumping up and down and waving my arms.
The team rushed in, knocking people out of the way to get there. They’d pulled their badges out of their shirts to let people know who they were. I followed the girl, pointed at her, and yelled, “Knife!” just as she turned on her heels and plunged it into my stomach.
* * *
The sensation of cold, hard steel slicing through skin and ripping into muscle wasn’t the first thing that registered. What registered first was the fact that the girl embraced me with her free arm, and whispered, “Eidolon says hi.”
I stood stunned for several long moments, wondering if I’d inadvertently stopped time.
But when she slid the blade out of my stomach, reality sank in. Along with a sharp burning sensation that had my knees buckling.
People were screaming around us when Reyes appeared behind the girl. He reached up, took hold of her head, and was a microsecond away from snapping her neck when I cried out to him.
“Reyes, no!”
It was the look on her face. Pure, unadulterated horror as she looked down as her hands. Her blood
-soaked hands.
He bit down and pushed the girl aside hard enough to send her sprawling across the floor. Then he rushed to me. Braced me against him. Closed my jacket, and ordered, “Shift.”
I blinked up at him. Felt another set of hands at my shoulder and waist. Began to crumple again.
Engulfed in flames of rage, he jerked me back up, pulled me roughly against him, and put a hand behind my head, cupping it. Holding it steady. We stood like that for a long moment, our faces centimeters apart as someone called my name. Garrett maybe.
Then Reyes spoke, his voice deep and soft and unhurried. “Shift, Dutch. Now.”
And I did. But just barely. I let my molecules drift apart. Scatter. Then realign. Knitting the cells of my body back together.
When I solidified completely, the pain had vanished.
He eased his hold and waited to make sure I could stand. I nodded and he back away while I zipped up my jacket. It was one thing to heal my flesh. Healing my clothes was another thing altogether.
Amber ran up to me then, distraught and confused. “Aunt Charley, are you okay?”
I nodded and took her into my arms, only then noticing the blood on Reyes’s shirt. I’d tell the cops the girl cut me, but not bad.
Amber looked back at the girl the cops had pinned to the ground.
“Her?” she asked, surprised.
The officers had the girl facedown, one of them securing the knife and phone. The girl didn’t struggle. Probably in shock. And pain. It couldn’t have felt good to have a two-hundred-pound male officer on your back. The female officer bagged the evidence and cuffed her, then they hauled her to her feet. They were not gentle with her. The girl’s pale face showed the horror she felt inside.
When the girl gained her footing, her gaze locked onto Amber’s.
Amber shook her head and took a step back. “That’s … no, that’s … it can’t be her.”
I took her arm. “Amber, do you know her?”
“No way,” Brandy said, as astonished as Amber.
“That’s Thea Wold,” Amber said. “Why would she send me texts? We see her every day at school. I say hi to her every day.”
Brandy nodded. “Amber’s nice to her. She’s, like, the only one in school who’s nice to her.”
“You aren’t?” I asked her.
Caught, she dipped her head. “No. I mean, I’m not mean or anything. I just don’t go out of my way, you know?”
“But I do,” Amber said. “Is this what I get for being nice?”
The girl had started shaking, and tears were now streaming down her face.
Amber put her head down, unable to watch, and I knew right then and there why she was on Beep’s team. She had an incredible heart.
“Amber, I don’t think this is what it looks like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think—” I stopped, trying to choose my words carefully as Reyes and Garrett moved in to create a huddle.
Uncle Bob ran up, then. He took one look at the girl then hurried toward us to complete the huddle.
“I think she was being controlled.”
“Are you okay?” Uncle Bob asked first Amber and then me.
We both nodded and he wrapped an arm around Amber. Then he spotted the blood that had soaked down and into my jeans. His gaze darted back to mine, but I shook my head.
“She said something to me. She said, ‘Eidolon says hi.’”
“Okay,” Ubie said, “who’s Eidolon and why is he sending messages through a stalker?”
“I think he was somehow controlling her.”
The cops started to take Thea away. I yelled at them to stop and ran over. The gang followed, everyone except Brandy. I got the feeling she’d had enough for one day. She sank into a chair and watched from afar.
“Thea,” I said, trying to get her attention.
Her shock and horror were so plain on her face, she stared absently.
“Thea, what did Eidolon say? Did he tell you to do this?”
“I was so mad,” she said.
“At Amber?”
“At me?” she asked, appalled.
Her knees started to give, so we ushered her to a chair. Her hands had been cuffed behind her back. A fall face-first would not end well.
“Yes. No.” She shook her head, confused. “I thought … someone spray-painted the number fifty all over my mom’s Encore. And he said it was you.”
“The number fifty?” I asked.
Amber lowered her head. “They were calling her a moron. You know, like an IQ of fifty?” She looked at Thea, her expression full of empathy. “Thea, some people are jerks. Why would you think that I had anything to do with that?”
“Because … I don’t know.” She blinked and looked up at me. “I stabbed you.”
Amber gasped and Uncle Bob tightened his hold.
“I’m okay, hon.” I knelt in front of her. “Thea, what do you know about Eidolon?”
I felt the heat at my back. Reyes was fuming, but his anger had finally shifted off of Thea and onto the root of our problem.
As though really seeing me for the first time, she refocused and drew in a sharp breath of air. “Oh, my God, he’s keeping you busy while he searches for your daughter.”
I stumbled like she’d punched me. Reyes caught me, jerked me up, and spun me around.
He was going to explain. I could see it on his face. But the situation hardly needed an explanation.
“Go,” I said, the word a mere hiss under my breath.
Unable to dematerialize in front of everyone, he took off, so fast people barely saw him as he sprinted across the mall, darting in and out of the curious onlookers.
He was going to check on our daughter. I couldn’t go, because that was precisely what Eidolon was hoping for. He wanted me to freak out. He wanted me, the one lugging around the bright-assed light, to lead him to Beep.
I prayed he couldn’t follow Reyes in the same way. Surely, he couldn’t.
I put my hand on Thea’s knee to draw her back to me. “Thea, what else do you know? Is there anything—?”
“He was mad. When you got upset and”—she cinched her brows together, trying to understand her own memories—“when you dematerialized? You can do that?”
I offered a weak smile, but Amber was all over that, her lids a perfect circle.
“He was angry,” Thea continued. “He wanted you to rematerialize near her. Near your daughter. He was tracking you. But he said you were too smart. You went somewhere—anywhere—else.”
I had no control over my destination when I went to Scotland. Or did I? Was I truly trying to avoid materializing near Beep? And if I’d had absolutely no control, how did I end up at a house on the other side of the world that had a mystical closet exactly like the one in the abandoned convent here?
“But I just kept getting angrier and angrier. He told me the most horrible things. I texted…” She looked up at Amber. “I’m so sorry, Amber. I never—”
“I know.” Amber dropped to her knees, too. “I know, Thea. It’s okay.”
She shook her head. “No, I stabbed her. I felt it go in.”
“I’m not hurt, see?” I unzipped my jacket and lifted my sweater. My blood-soaked sweater, but underneath the skin was, well, also covered in blood but unmarred nevertheless. “Just a scrape,” I said to explain the blood.
“But, how? I felt it go in.”
I leaned toward her, bringing Amber with me. “Okay, hon, I’m trying to help you out here. You didn’t stab me.” I winked, the gesture about a subtle as an elephant in a pink tutu. “You with me?” I looked at Amber. “Both of you?”
Amber nodded and beamed at Thea. “It’s okay, Thea. My aunt Charley will make sure you get out of this.”
Ubie cleared his throat from behind us. “Oh, and my dad. Mostly my dad.”
A shy sense of pride widened his mouth as he helped us to our feet while the cops took Thea away.
I was still confused. Eidolon couldn’t
possibly have possessed Thea. As a god, he was too powerful. She would only have lived a few hours. A couple of days at the most. Then how did he get to her?
“I didn’t spray-paint her mom’s car,” Amber said to Ubie.
“Smidgeon, you think I don’t know that?”
Just then, Cookie ran up out of breath and took Amber into her arms.
“Where you been?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I got lost,” she said between pants. “I hate malls.”
I coughed to camouflage an inappropriate laugh. Uncle Bob did the same. Then he wrapped his arms around both his girls. Cookie leaned into him and Amber buried her face in his lapel.
“Are you sure you’re okay, smidgeon?” he asked her, smoothing her hair back.
Amber nodded. “I can’t believe that happened to my friend.”
“Can I put a picture on my InstaBlog?” Brandy asked, finally braving the crowd. When she raised her phone to snap a shot of the cops escorting Thea away, I gently coaxed her arm down.
“What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious. “Everyone does it.”
“I don’t,” Amber said, clearly upset.
Brandy had the decency to look embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Am. This is beyond serious, and I’m just … I’m being stupid.”
“Brandy,” I said, getting her attention. “Just out of curiosity, do you know who spray-painted her mom’s car?”
Brandy suddenly became fascinated with her shoes. “No.”
“Brandy, I’m sensing a lot of guilt.”
“It’s just, I saw a can of paint in Josie’s car. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything.”
Amber put a hand on Brandy’s arm. “If it really was Josie, I don’t blame you.”
“And who’s Josie?” Cookie and I asked at the same time.
“Only the toughest girl in school.”
Interesting.
“She has, like, this whole gang,” Amber added.
“Who are these girls?” Cookie asked. “I want full names and contact information.”
“They’re just girls, Mom. The local bullies, but they usually leave us alone.”
Brandy nodded. “Because we don’t give them a reason not to.”