Well, no one really knew where Noelle went after graduation. She just kind of disappeared about the same time I was turning my life around. But...
“Elle came back more often than the rest of you,” I told Kori as I turned the pages of my notebook. “And when she was in town, we’d just pick up where we’d left off.”
That was all my sister needed to know. She didn’t need to hear about ice cream in bed, and all-night Abbot and Costello marathons, and the conversations we’d had when Elle was awake.
She didn’t need to know that every time Elle left town again, she’d sneak out of my bed in the middle of the night, with no note. No goodbye. It might be months before I saw her again. Once, it was years. And she’d arrive just as suddenly as she’d left. With no warning.
Until she stopped arriving.
“You found it?” Kori’s voice brought me back to the present, as if time was a rubber band being snapped against my skin.
It stung.
“Yeah. Here.”
She followed my finger to a passage written in blue ink, nearly eight years earlier. Noelle had been twenty. I’d been twenty-two. “Take the girl in the yellow scarf.” Kori looked up at me again. “That’s it? Just, ‘Take the girl in the yellow scarf’?”
“Yeah. It meant nothing until today, when I saw Sera standing there in that yellow scarf.”
Fresh skepticism swam in my sister’s eyes. “How do you know she meant this girl? This yellow scarf? Is she seriously the only girl in a yellow scarf you’ve ever seen?”
I thought about that for a second. “Yeah, actually, I think she is.” The only one I remembered, anyway. And that had to mean something, right? If I’d seen another girl in a yellow scarf, I hadn’t noticed her, and that had to mean something, too, right? “Anyway, I know because the moment I saw her, I thought of this. And not just my handwriting, blue ink on white lines. I thought of the night Noelle said this. The night I wrote it down. It just felt...” Right. “It felt like this is the girl Noelle wanted me to take. So I took her. And as bad as I feel keeping her here when she wants to leave, I can’t let her go until she’s done whatever she’s supposed to do, or I’ve done whatever I’m supposed to do. Or until I know whatever Elle wanted me to know.”
But Kori clearly thought I’d lost my mind. “Kris...”
“Don’t. I’m not crazy. Do you have any idea how many people have died because I couldn’t figure this out?” I closed the notebook and laid one hand on its ratty cover. “Because I don’t. I have no idea how many people I’ve failed to save, like I failed to save that crossing guard.” Like I’d failed to save Noelle. “I don’t know, because I can’t figure most of these out. This is the first time I’ve even come close to seeing what she wanted me to see, and I’m not going to give up on that.” I wasn’t going to give up on her.
“Is this about that boy? Micah?”
An old, bitter pain rang through me at the mention of his name. I hadn’t consciously thought about him in years, but his face was never far from my memory. “No. This has nothing to do with him.”
“Because you know, you can’t punish yourself forever, and no matter how many kids you shield, you can’t bring Micah back.”
No. I couldn’t. But I could stop it from happening to the others. To the kids most in danger of being headhunted by the Skilled mafia. Kids like Kenley, who’d barely been in college when she was extorted into joining the Tower syndicate. Kids like Micah, who’d been delivered into their own personal hell by people like me, who didn’t ask enough questions—who didn’t care enough to ask the right questions—and became unwitting, unbound cogs in the very machine I wanted to destroy.
But for once this wasn’t about Micah.
“This is about Noelle, and the things she saw, and the things I’m supposed to do. There’s a reason she said those things in my bed. There has to be. Destiny doesn’t deal in coincidences.”
“But Kris...Noelle didn’t say these things to you.” Kori spoke with a firm voice, as if that might make her assertion easier to believe. “She said them to no one. In her sleep. We don’t know if Elle ever remembered a word of this.” She took the notebook from me and flipped through it aimlessly. “She wasn’t trying to saddle you with some kind of heroic mandate. She was just...sleeping.”
I’d thought about that possibility over and over since Noelle died, and every time, I came to the same conclusion. “Did you ever hear her talk in her sleep?”
Kori shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of times.”
“Exactly. You didn’t hear much of it because even when she came for your sleepover, she slept in my bed. I think she fell asleep with me on purpose.” She started to object, but I spoke over her. “Think about it, Kor. She could have snuck back to the sleepover as soon as she had what she’d come for. But she didn’t. She stayed with me—she slept in my bed—for a reason.”
Kori looked as if she didn’t know what to say.
Then, she looked as if she had too much to say.
“You’re telling me—with a straight face—that you think Noelle slept with you off and on for six years so that you’d record her prophesies in a notebook she didn’t even know you had, then drive yourself nuts for the rest of your life, trying to figure out what she was talking about, when she didn’t even know she was speaking? Seriously?”
Well, when you put it like that... “Yes.”
“Kris...”
“Think about it, Kori!” I set the notebook on the nightstand and turned to face her more directly. “No one knows what Elle knew, and most of what she said only makes sense years after the fact. Maybe she did know about the notebook. Maybe she wanted me to keep it. Maybe she knew I was going to write in it before I knew I was going to write in it. Hell, maybe she knew she wasn’t going to be around long enough to do anything about all the stuff she saw, and this was her way of asking me to take over for her.”
Kori exhaled slowly, apparently struggling for patience. “Fine. Let’s assume you’re right. Why on earth would she have wanted you to kidnap Sera?”
“Maybe she wanted you to trade her for Kenley?”
Kori and I both glanced up to find Anne standing in my bedroom doorway. We hadn’t even heard her open the door.
“No.” I stood to pull her into the room, then closed the door behind her. I wanted to know how much she’d heard, but I didn’t want to ask, in case that led to more questions from her. “Elle wouldn’t want me to use her as a hostage. Or to give her back to people willing to kill her.”
“You don’t know that.” Anne brushed long red hair over her shoulder and leaned against the closed door with her arms crossed over her shirt. “Elle would do whatever it takes to protect the people she loves, the rest of the world be damned. Look what she did to us to protect Hadley.”
I frowned, and Anne clarified: “Don’t misunderstand. I love Hadley, and I wouldn’t give her up for anything in the world. But Noelle never asked me if I wanted to be a mother. She never asked me if I wanted my husband to be murdered. Or if Liv wanted to be bound to that abusive bastard Ruben Cavazos. Or if Kori wanted to be put in the middle of the whole thing, then shot and locked up. Noelle didn’t give any of us a choice about any of that. She just stacked the deck, content to let the cards fall as they may, so long as Hadley was protected. Who says she wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice Sera—some stranger none of us even knows—to help Kenley?”
“She wouldn’t.” I refused to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. “She was just doing the best she could with what she had. She never asked to be a Seer.”
“None of us asked to be what we are.” Kori pushed pale hair back from her face. She looked tired. “And a large part of what and who we are now is because of Elle plucking strings and pushing buttons behind the scenes.”
Anne nodded. “Besides, Kris, you have no idea what El
le knew about Sera. Maybe Hadley’s right. Maybe she’s not who she says she is.”
“She hasn’t told us anything but her first name,” Kori pointed out.
I turned to the Reader. “But you said she was telling the truth about that, right?”
Anne frowned and her gaze lost focus, as if she were seeing the kitchen from twenty minutes earlier, rather than my bedroom from the present. “I didn’t read any untruth from her, other than about the favor she thinks the Towers owe her. But I didn’t really read much truth in the rest of it, either. It was more like... Well, it was like most of the time I got no reading at all. Normally I would assume that means the speaker is telling the truth. But in this case...there’s just something weird about her.”
I grasped at the straw she’d unintentionally handed me. “Okay, Anne doesn’t trust her, so we shouldn’t let her go yet.” I turned to Kori. “That’s two against one.”
Anne rolled her eyes. “You realize you’re now supporting both sides of the argument, right?”
I shrugged. “Whatever it takes. I need her. We need her.”
The Reader exhaled heavily. “If we’re voting, we should include Ian and Van.”
Kori shook her head. “We’re not voting. We’re letting her go.”
“You’re not in charge, Kor.” I stepped in front of the door again. “I can’t let her go. Not yet.”
Kori glared up at me, something dangerous shining in her dark eyes. “Then kill her.”
I blinked at my sister, waiting for the punch line. Because surely that was a joke. We only kill those who pose a threat.
But no punch line came.
“Kori, I’m not going to kill her.”
She shrugged, looking up at me. “Then let her go. Those are your options. You kidnapped her, scared the crap out of her, bound her hands, then tied her to a chair. There’s a very good reason she doesn’t want to be here. So put her out of her misery. Release her, one way or another.”
And that’s when I understood. Kori had spent six weeks locked up in Tower’s basement. She doesn’t talk about it, but we all know she was tortured. Of course she would be in favor of letting the prisoner go, regardless of the extenuating circumstances. Even if the prisoner wasn’t really a prisoner.
“I’m trying to help her, Kori. And I’m trying to let her help us.” Even if I didn’t understand the specifics of either scenario yet.
“Listen to me.” My sister stood on her toes and leaned closer so that I couldn’t possibly misunderstand. “We. Don’t. Lock. People. Up.”
“I’m not—”
But before I could figure out how to finish that sentence, Kori’s phone buzzed. She pulled it from her pocket and frowned. “Olivia’s freaking out about something. I’ll be right back.” She reached past me for the doorknob, and I only let her through because getting her out of the house for a while seemed like a good idea. “While I’m gone, you either let Sera go, put her out of her misery, or convince her to stay of her own volition. If you can’t get the job done, I’ll do it myself.”
I glanced at Anne, who could only shrug while Kori stomped down the hall, then down the stairs. “She’s right.”
I groaned. “Why do you always take her side?”
“I don’t.” Anne crossed her arms over her chest. “As you might recall, she once kidnapped my daughter. But this time, she’s right, and if you don’t make a call, she’ll fight you for it.”
“I know.” I sank into my desk chair again and glanced up at Anne. “My very earliest memories is the day my mom went into labor with Kori. As they were leaving for the hospital, I begged them to bring home a baby brother for me. Life’s been screwing me ever since.”
Seven
Sera
After the Reader went upstairs to find Kris and Kori, her daughter sat next to me on the couch with a glass of chocolate milk. I tried to ignore her, not because I didn’t know how to talk to children, but because I didn’t know how to talk to that particular child. And because, honestly, I agreed with Gran—she was more than a little creepy.
For several minutes, Hadley sipped from her bendy straw and watched cartoons while I tried to puzzle out my next move. I’d decided there had to be an emergency exit, aside from the one I’d created from a broken kitchen window, which Ian was patching with a sheet of plywood. As far as I could tell, Kris and Kori were the only shadow-walkers in the house, so there had to be an easy way out for the rest of them. What if there was a burglary? Or a fire?
There was another way out. I just had to find it.
“Where’s the baby?” Hadley said from my left, but she had to repeat the question with a tug on my sleeve before I realized she was talking to me.
“I’m sorry?” Surely I’d heard her wrong.
Her big, round eyes blinked up at me. “Can I hold it?” When I couldn’t figure out how to respond, she continued. “Is it a girl baby or a boy baby? I love babies, but I like girl babies better.”
“Um...I don’t have a baby.” My foot began to tap. My knee jiggled on the lower edge of my vision.
“Then who is the cradle for?”
“What cradle?” My chest felt tight. I had to open my mouth to suck in more oxygen than my nose could handle at one time.
“The wooden one, on rockers.” Hadley frowned up at me, as if I were being intentionally obtuse. “You know. In the striped room.”
My stomach tried to launch itself through my torso and out my throat. I had to swallow convulsively to keep my lunch down. There was only one cradle she could possibly have assumed was mine. I twisted on the couch to face her fully. “You saw the cradle?” That last word cracked in half and fell from my lips in jagged pieces.
Hadley nodded.
“What color were the stripes on the walls?” I demanded, my voice both fragile and sharp, like a thin sliver of glass.
“Green and yellow.” Hadley frowned, as though she was trying to remember. “And purple. Light purple,” she said, and my next breath escaped on a sob.
My dad had been so thrilled to find out he was going to be a grandfather, despite the circumstances, that he’d given up his home office to make room for the baby, even though it wasn’t due for five more months. He’d painted the walls himself. He’d even gotten the cradle down from the attic, where it had been since Nadia outgrew it. That cradle had been in his family for generations. He was so excited by the thought of using it again.
“Where’s the baby?” Hadley’s question ripped me out of my own memories and back into the cruel new reality that had become my life.
“The baby...died.” In its mother’s womb. The day my sister and parents were murdered in their own home.
Hadley blinked at me in confusion, and for a second I envied her the shattered misconception that babies couldn’t die. Too late, I realized I’d probably ruined that for her.
Then the implication of what she’d just said hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest, and I leaned back on the couch, breathing through the pain.
Hadley had seen my house. She’d seen the baby’s room. For whatever reason, and despite the questionable accuracy of her earlier prediction, she seemed to be tuned into my psychic frequency. Or something like that.
Which meant that she might have more visions, or prophesies, or whatever. She might be able to tell me the name of the man who killed them. She might even be able to help me find him.
I might not need Julia Tower after all.
“What else did you see?” I demanded so suddenly that she gave a startled little yip and sloshed chocolate milk onto her lap. “Did you see a man in hiking boots? Do you know his name?” All the police had been able to tell me was that boots like his—he’d left bloody footprints all over the house—had been sold at hundreds of stores, all over the country. Ballistics found no match for the bullets he’d fi
red. He’d left DNA, but it didn’t match anything in the database.
They had suspects, but no smoking gun. My family’s killer was a ghost.
When the child only blinked her startled, teary eyes at me, I made myself take another deep breath and calm down. She had no idea what I was talking about. She probably didn’t even understand her own Skill yet. She was so young. We’d have to start with something more basic.
“Hadley, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Here.” I took her milk and set it on the coffee table, suddenly glad that Ian’s hammering obscured our conversation. “I just want to ask you a few questions. Is that okay?”
She nodded hesitantly.
“Great. Thanks. Hadley, how did you know that the cradle and the striped room were in my house?” It was actually my parents’ house, but that was close enough. She’d somehow associated me with what she’d seen.
Hadley only shrugged.
“Okay. Did you see anything else...about me?” She shook her head. “Anything else about the house?” I was scaring her again. My voice was too intense. My grip on her hand too desperate. “Did you see any of the other rooms?”
“Just...” She squeezed her eyes shut as if she was trying to see it all again in her head. “I saw the living room. There was a guitar—a wooden one—on this metal stand. By a chair. The kind that you can lean back and put your feet up on.” She opened her eyes and met my gaze, and seemed pleased by whatever she found there.
My heart ached with every beat. “That’s my dad’s guitar. And his chair.”
Except that guitar was gone. Destroyed. A bullet shattered it the night my parents died. The police believed my father was actually playing it when the attack started.
I’d buried him with what was left of it. Other than his family, it was what he’d loved most in the world.