HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
AT HOME, THE TENSION DIDN'T EASE. WHEN I GOT THERE, THEY WERE all sitting in front of the TV, the flaming McDonald's already on CNN. They'd already told Noah and Ben what happened. There was a lot of pacing and cursing and screaming at the sky, a mind-numbing soundtrack, set to the background track of a newscaster talking about our mistakes.
Anything that attracted attention was a failure. We killed people — and saved them — and disappeared and used powers and did all kinds of things that would get us talked about, but no one ever talked. Today's adventure had been a particularly horrific fuck-up.
Groggy, scared customers and workers all stood in front of cameramen, telling a story of a shapeshifter and a man being thrown through a window, and any number of other bizarre occurrences before the restaurant caught on fire. Interestingly, not a one mentioned the man in a suit who appeared and kidnapped a girl. No, no. Somehow he had covered that up.
My hope was that nobody believed them. Sam's little nosferatu cougar shift in the middle there really helped us out. It was the one thing no one could believe and, thus, seriously injured the eyewitnesses' credibility.
"Any theories about the girl?" I asked.
"It's time to go after him," Sadie said. "I'm tired of this. I know what we need to do, and I need no one in this room to get angry about it when I say it. Deal?"
"Deal," I said, wondering how pissed off Everett would get when he heard it.
"Deal," Ginny said.
"Deal," Ben and Noah said, who'd follow her anywhere.
"Well . . ." Everett said. God, he didn't know when to quit with her.
She went on anyway. "We're going to L.A. as planned, and then after we get Everett more powers, we're splitting up. Everett goes to Canada to dole out those powers to the Red Bloods, and Ginny goes to train everyone how to use them. And then the four trackers — Noah, Ben, Mark, and I — we find Raven, we find Sam, or we find where he goes, or we find something that will help us."
Everyone nodded, but Everett had that look. The one that said he was going to talk to her, to tell her what he didn't like, to level with her. So when she walked out of the room to get her things so we could leave for L.A., and he went after her, I stopped him.
"Don't do what you're about to do," I said.
"You don't get it because you're the chosen one," he said.
"I do get it. She wants travel light with someone who has the skills to help her. And she wants everyone else to maximize their potential. You now have the most valuable talent among us for obtaining power, cultivating it, transferring it, and she needs you to do that. She doesn't need a babysitter, Everett. She needs us to do what we're good at. We track. With your new power? You train. Don't take it personally. If anything, be excited that you're valuable enough to have a reason to stay home instead of just being relegated to staying away. And if your ego needs stroking, then tell yourself she needs you to not be there so she doesn't get distracted and want to hook up with you instead of doing what she needs to be doing. Tell yourself whatever you need to. Just don't go do what you want to do right now."
Everett sighed, tension all over him. "I hate it when you're right." He went outside, leaving Sadie alone.
Sadie emerged from Everett's bedroom as I still stood in the hall. "Nice speech," she said. And as she got close to me, she put her arm around my waist and her head on my shoulder. "Thanks."
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WE GOT TO L.A. AROUND 8, WHICH GAVE US ENOUGH TIME TO GET A HOTEL AND for the girls to get dressed in whatever they thought would assist in this acquisition trip. It took them hours.
Ginny appeared in my room first. She had on this dress that looked like someone had wrapped her in a hot pink bandage, giving extra care to the neckline to make sure she came out of it. Over it, she had on some kind of sheer, ripped T-shirt that hung off her shoulders and exposed a good part of her lace bra, which made its way out from under the dress. She wore boots that came up just past her ankles, and I couldn't help but notice how much distance there was from the top of the boot to the bottom of the skirt. Not to mention the six-inch platform heel on them that made her look over the top of my head. Her eyes were smoky and dark, and she rocked this big, messy hair thing that made me just this side of worried.
"You're speechless, aren't you?" she said giddily.
"Uh . . . yeah." Seriously, what was I supposed to say? She was my sister.
"Hell and I'm your sister! Imagine what everyone else will think!" she said. She stood in front of the mirror and primped a bit, one hundred percent in love with the persona she'd created.
"Can I ask why?"
"It's all part of the plan to lure the supernaturals out, in places seedy and shiny. We have to attract their attention if they're going to follow us down dark alleyways, don't we?"
"Dark alleys?"
"Not just me! Sadie too. Duh. Nothing attracts attention faster than two girls dancing all up on each other."
I broke out laughing. "You talked Sadie into that?"
"You bet I did. Then she's going to tell Everett and make his head explode," she laughed, mimicking the words with giant hand motions of Everett's head exploding.
"What's she wearing?" I asked.
Ginny looks back at me, her eyes narrowed. "Why do you want to know?"
"Curiosity?"
"A little patience wouldn't kill you."
A bit later, Sadie texted me and said to meet her in the lobby. We'd planned to leave Noah and Ben at the hotel, but they protested. "At least let us be backup," Noah said, and I wondered where he'd heard that term.
So the rest of us were waiting for the car to come around when Sadie and Everett emerged from the elevator. Everett's hand was locked tightly in hers, and he looked a little less than relaxed. Sadie, on the other hand, was doing an excellent job of ignoring the looks of those around her to pretend she was comfortable with cleavage halfway up to her neck. Her look was more conservative than Ginny's, but it was somehow still enough. She had a straight up bustier on, and her chest was nearly all the way out of it. To cover the scars, she had on a super fitted leather jacket that somehow managed not to detract from her bare chest, and her legs were covered in jeans so long and tight, you could hardly call them pants. She topped the whole thing off with a light pink peeptoe pump with spikes running up the back of the heel. Her hair was slicked back on the sides and high in front. Instead of Ginny's smoky eye, she had a simple black eyeliner that flicked up on the sides, and a pure red lip.
Suffice it to say I had confidence their plan would work.
Instead of saying something to Sadie that could be taken the wrong way, I said to Everett, "How are you handling this?"
"Less than well," he breathed through gritted teeth.
I clapped my hand on his shoulder, reassuringly, though I was mainly just screwing with him. Then I said, "Well, it's time to focus. Just think, they're the bait, and you're the kill. Okay?"
