“You ungrateful little bitch!” She bounced back faster than I could believe, brow furrowed in anger, both fists clenched and ready to swing. “I was trying to help you!”
My heart thumped painfully and my fists rose—I was too busy being scared of the tall man to be scared of her.
Kris jumped between us. Ian pulled Kori back with one arm wrapped around her waist.
“What happened?” Kris’s gaze bounced from me to his sister.
“I’m fine. Let me go,” she said, and Ian let her go, but stayed close. “I was trying to help her. I did help her. She blocked me.”
They both turned to me for my version. “That crazy bitch tried to shadow-walk me into my parents’ house. Where they all died.” Where I’d lost everything.
“Kori!” Kris looked furious.
“I wasn’t really going to do it.” She crossed her arms over her chest and huffed in exasperation. “You know I can’t go that far in one shot.”
She couldn’t?
“I was just going walk her into the hall closet, but she had to think I was taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go, or she couldn’t block me.” She turned to Ian. “It’s just like what you did for Kenley to help her break my binding. She had to really want it. Same principal, right?”
“That was an emergency, Kori,” he said, in that way he had of making quiet words seem more important than shouted ones. “Most people don’t respond well to the shock-and-awe approach.”
“What the hell were you thinking?” Kris demanded, and his arm slid around my waist. Maybe I should have pushed him away, to prove I could stand on my own, but instead I scooted closer, and his arm tightened around me, and I realized he wasn’t trying to protect me—he was standing with me.
“I was thinking that she had the balls to do what needs to be done, no matter what that requires.” Kori gestured angrily as she spoke. “She’s the one who wants to charge into enemy territory, and we can’t send her in unprepared. She has to be able to use her Skills.”
“Kori...” Kris started, but she cut him off, her anger clashing with his.
“Listen up, all of you.” She stepped away from Ian and addressed us as a group—as if she were in charge—and my blood boiled. “None of you know what Julia’s capable of. Not like I do.”
“She can’t hurt me,” I insisted, clinging to that very thought.
Kori turned to me, eyes narrowed, studying me. “She can’t physically hurt you, or order someone else to. But there are many kinds of pain, Sera. What that man did to your sister? What you saw? Julia can and will make that happen all over again. Maybe to someone you know—she’ll pluck your best friends right off the street, if she can find them. She’ll make you watch them tortured, for no reason other than to see you suffer. To make you remember what you would do anything to forget.”
My friends? College felt like a lifetime ago. My friends were a universe away—I hadn’t seen even one of them since the funeral. But they weren’t beyond the Towers’ reach. “Why would she...” My question had no end. I couldn’t say it.
“To make you give up your birthright. To illustrate what a heartless bitch she really is. Because she’s premenstrual. Because she’s bored. Because she can. She doesn’t need a reason to cause pain, but she has plenty of them to choose from.”
“We won’t let that happen,” Kris swore. Then he turned on his sister. “Get out.”
“You’re sending a lamb to the slaughter, Kris. You all need to listen to me.”
“And you need to back the fuck off and get out of here!”
Kori blinked, stunned. Then she glanced at me and backed slowly toward the door.
“If Sera goes in there and her plan falls apart—hell, even if it doesn’t fall apart—they’ll use every weapon at their disposal to break her. And her weak spot is pretty fucking obvious.” Her hand found the doorknob and one foot landed over the threshold in the hall. “She needs to deal with that shit before she goes in there, or they’re going to rip her heart out and serve it on crackers.”
With that, she stomped past Ian into the hall and out of sight.
“I’m sorry,” he said, when she was gone. “She really does mean well. And she speaks from experience you can’t even...” He stopped and studied me for a minute. “Well, maybe you can imagine. Her approach was wrong, but her heart’s in the right place. She really was trying to help.”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept his apology, in part because it wasn’t his to give. But his point lingered. And I suspected he was right—they both were. Not that I was eager to go home again. That house was haunted, if not by ghosts, then by memories. By loss. And if I couldn’t face my own memories, how the hell was I supposed to face down Julia Tower?
Seventeen
Kris
“You sure you want to do this now?” I slid the full clip into place in the handle of the .40 Sera had confiscated from Mitch. “You’re entitled to a break, you know.”
The warm, early fall breeze blew a long dark strand of hair across Sera’s forehead. “Screw that.” She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and secured her hair in a casual ponytail at the base of her skull, then laid her palm over the gun I’d set in front of her, barrel aimed down our makeshift firing range—a card table in the backyard, fifty feet from a fresh paper target tacked to an old, dead oak tree. “Sitting around thinking about what can’t be changed won’t help. I need something to do. I need to do this.”
“No one expects you to get over everything you’ve been through just like that.” I pressed the last 9 mm round into the clip for the gun I’d borrowed from my sister.
“Kori does.”
“She doesn’t expect you to get over it. She expects you to deal with it. She’s not over all the shit she’s been through, either.”
“I know.” Sera watched as a brown rabbit hopped from a clump of overgrown bushes toward the woods at the edge of the property. I loved that we were far enough from downtown to have rabbits, at least until we scared them off with gunfire. “She has nightmares. Loud ones.”
“They’re getting better.”
Sera turned away from the tree line to frown at me, squinting into the sun. “That’s better?”
I nodded and picked up an extra clip next to the pistol on the table in front of me. “She hasn’t tried to gut anyone in her sleep in, like, a month.”
She thought I was kidding. I could tell from her exasperated expression. I decided to let her think that. And to warn her away from Kori and Ian’s room after dark.
“So, what happened with Ned the other day?” I said as I pressed the first round into the extra 9 mm clip. “You just freed him, with no clause to make sure he could never hurt you? Why would you do that? Especially after what you’ve already been through?”
She stared at the table, considering for a second before she answered. “It never occurred to me that he’d want to hurt me. I’d just set him free. I thought he’d be happy!”
“I’m sure he was.” I huffed. “He was a happy threat.”
“I’m not...wired that way.” She shrugged. “I don’t look at the rest of the population and see seven billion threats. I can’t live in a world where everyone’s my enemy. For my own sanity, I need to believe the monster who killed my family is just that. A monster. An aberration.”
“He is. But he’s not the only one.”
“I know, but...” She looked up at me, frowning. “I don’t understand how you can stand it, seeing enemies everywhere you look.”
“I don’t see them everywhere, but I am constantly aware that they exist, and that’s particularly true for you. Julia wants you dead, so all her people are your enemies. If Ruben Cavazos finds out who you are and that you’re here, he’ll want you in custody. That means that nearly everyone you meet in the city is out to kill you
or sell you to the highest bidder.”
“Even you?” Her eyes asked even more than her words did.
“No. Not me.” I took a deep breath, then spit out the truth along with a grin meant to disguise it as a joke. “I want to keep you.”
She smiled, just a little, and I had to clear my throat and look away before I tried to kiss her again.
“Okay, show me how to use this thing, or I’m just going to assume it works like they do in the movies.”
“Don’t. In real life, you have to reload when you run out of ammo, and you’re probably not going to be chasing bad guys across busy intersections while leaking blood from three bullet holes in your side. Ian’s pretty badass, and one was enough to drop him. But before you learn how to use this—” I picked up her gun, barrel pointed toward the tree line “—you need to know what it is and what it holds.”
“It’s a Glock 22.” She ran one finger over the side of the barrel, and I noticed that her attention to the gun seemed...fond. Not quite eager, but not afraid. “Says so right here.”
Okay, she had me there. “Do you know what that means?”
“Glock is the brand name. Twenty-two is the style number. Also says it was made in Austria, but I’m not sure that’s relevant.”
“Not for today.” I wanted to smile, but I resisted. This wasn’t a date; it was a lesson. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t noticed that her hair smelled like strawberries and her borrowed shirt—Van’s this time—was a little snug around her chest. “And what does this Glock 22 fire?”
“Forty-caliber rounds.”
“Which means?”
She rolled her eyes over my beginner-level questions. “It means that the bullets this thing shoots are four-tenths of an inch in diameter. If you wanna go bigger, you can get a .45 or a .50, but unless you’re shooting elephants or the walking dead, the .50 is probably overkill. On the smaller end, you have the 9 mm, which is measured in millimeters, obviously, instead of inches. That’s what that thing fires.” She glanced at the pistol I’d borrowed from Kori’s collection. “Or, you can get a .38. Or even a .22, like Vanessa’s.”
I stared at her. I couldn’t help it. Fruit-scented toiletries, tight shirts and gun talk—Sera Brant had just outed herself as the perfect woman. “I thought you’d never fired a gun.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then how do you know all that?”
Her brows rose and she looked just cocky enough to be intriguing. “I researched it while you were in the bathroom. Gran’s desktop should really be password protected.”
It would be, if she could remember a password from one day to the next.
“You read fast,” I said, and she grinned.
“I learn faster.”
“We’ll see. Using a gun is a little different from reading about them. Let’s start you on the 9 mm. It has less recoil.”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head firmly, her long, dark ponytail swishing against the back of her shirt. “Kori says you get to keep any gun you take from someone else, and I took this one from Mitch, fair and square. Which means it’s mine now. I want to learn on my own gun.”
“Fine.” Why are girls always so stubborn? “Your clip’s loaded, and there’s one round in the chamber. How many shots can you fire before you have to reload?”
She stared at the gun on the table, as if she might actually be able to see through the grip. “Um...fifteen in the clip, right? And one in the chamber. So that’s sixteen.”
“Close. Your clip actually holds seventeen.” A cloud passed overhead, and our shadows melted into the grass. “Plus one in the chamber makes eighteen.”
“Damn.” Sera frowned at the extended clip, and she looked so disappointed by her mistake that I had to stop myself from patting her on the back. “Okay, so what do I do?”
“Pick it up, but don’t put your finger on the trigger yet.”
Sera picked up her gun, and suddenly every bit of confidence her research had lent her drained, along with the blood from her face.
“Okay, first of all, respect the gun, but don’t be scared of it.” The only person I’d ever taught to shoot was Kori, back when we were still just kids. And nothing had ever scared Kori, least of all guns and the power they lent her. “Fear undermines your confidence and ruins your concentration. The gun isn’t going to do anything you don’t make it do.”
“Okay, but what about the rules?” Sera still looked nervous. “Aren’t there some rules?”
“Several. At the gun range—ours is homemade, but it still counts—you always keep your gun pointed downrange. At the target. If you never aim it at anything else, you can never shoot anything else. And you’ll notice that downrange for us also means ‘away from the house.’ That’s very important.” Behind our target trees was a small hill, perfect for catching stray bullets before they could hit anything else.
Sera nodded, still holding her gun, elbows locked, lower lip between her teeth.
I took the gun from her and set it down. She needed to relax. “Outside of the gun range, there are two kinds of rules. The first kind is the law, which tells us not to shoot people. Or even threaten to shoot people. Those rules are optional, depending on the situation and how many witnesses are likely to testify against you.”
Her eyes widened, and when the cloud retreated, she squinted at me. “You’re serious?”
“You’re not learning for sport, Sera. You’re learning to shoot because you understand that at some point—probably soon—you may have to kill someone. I don’t think you’d ever do that unless you had to, but you need to be aware, before you pull the trigger, that witnesses may not always understand that necessity. Sometimes that’s reason to hesitate. Sometimes it’s not.”
She nodded, obviously thinking it over. “And the other kind of rules?”
“Common sense. Draw first, or die. To do that, you have to keep your weapons—not just your gun—accessible at all times. Don’t button a jacket over your holster.”
“I don’t have a holster. Or a jacket.” Because she was still borrowing clothes.
“We’ll get you both. Next, never let anyone else see your thoughts on your face or in your bearing. If you’re obviously scared to fire, your opponent won’t take you seriously. In fact, he’ll probably just shoot you.”
“Okay...”
“The rest of the rules are easy. Never shoot the good guys, unless they become bad guys. Never shoot until you have clear line of sight, unless you have no other choice. If someone fires at you or someone you care about, shoot to kill. Don’t hesitate.”
“Shoot to kill. Got it.” But she didn’t look like she had that. Not yet. “Anything else?”
Wind rustled leaves on the trees behind our paper target, as if the woods had advice for her, too, and it might be better than mine. “Yeah. Personal weapons have a hierarchy. Guns trump knives every time, no matter how fast you can throw, slash or stab. Kori will tell you otherwise, but she’s wrong.” Unproven, at least. “Knives trump fists, unless you know someone who can punch through solid flesh. But Julia Tower’s weapon of choice trumps them all.”
“What’s that?”
“The truth.”
Sera frowned. “Are you being melodramatic? Or is that a joke? I don’t know you well enough to tell the difference.”
I wanted to change that. But it wasn’t the time.
“It’s neither. Julia has information you want. I know, because she always has information someone wants. That’s her thing. And it’ll be worse for you, because she knows more about the people you come from than you ever will. But if you let her start talking, you’re screwed from the start. She can make you cry with the truth faster than I can make her bleed with a bullet.”
“Good to know.” Though she didn’t look like she really believed me, and if that was the case?
??if no one had ever said anything to her that had ripped her heart right out of her chest—then I envied her.
“You ready to try that now?” I glanced at her gun.
She nodded, and this time she looked more sure.
“Okay. Pick it up, finger off the trigger.”
Sera blew a strand of hair out of her face, then picked up her gun. Her grip was nervous, but steady.
“Two hands. Like this.” I stepped behind her and lifted her left hand, showing her how to cradle the grip of her gun to steady her aim. I could have demonstrated with Kori’s 9 mm, but...I wanted to touch her.
“Don’t lock your elbows, or the recoil will throw your arms up. Let them absorb some of the force.” I slid my hands over her arms, testing her stance, glad she wore short sleeves, so I could feel her skin.
“Like this?” she whispered. I was so close I could feel her body heat through my clothes. Through hers.
“Just like that.” I whispered, too, then took that final step so that her back was pressed against my chest. I had no reason to still be touching her, but she made no objection and I couldn’t resist. “Now click off the safety. It’s that switch by your thumb.”
She started to turn the gun around to look for the switch, but I stopped her with a little pressure against her hand. “Always aim downrange, remember? Just feel for the switch. It’s there.”
Sera found the switch and pushed it with her thumb. “It’s off,” she whispered, and that time there was an exhalation on the end, smooth and soft, and I inhaled with her, breathing in the scent of her soap and shampoo, and beneath that, her skin.
“Now line up the notch on the back of the gun with the guide on the front of the barrel,” I said, and she made a minute adjustment. “Got it?”
She nodded. “What should I aim for? What...part?”
“The first time? Aim to kill.”
Her aim rose. She was going for the target’s head, like I’d known she would.
“Now, when you fire, it’s going to recoil. Don’t drop the gun.”