She frowned, thinking he was being overly cautious. The answers were right there, and she wasn’t waiting three months to ransack her own apartment.
“Silas!” Karley shouted from downstairs. “Let her get dressed! I have to go to work!”
An old irritation pinched his brow. “Coming!” he shouted out the door, then softer, to her, “Your clothes have been washed and are on the chair.”
“Thank you.” Waking up naked was a small price to pay for clean clothes.
“I’ll see you downstairs, then.” Silas shut the door behind him with a soft click. From the hall came a muffled “Karley, did you throw out all my clothes?”
Peri listened to the garbled response, and when Silas’s steps were gone, she turned to Jack. “Where did you stash that list?” she asked hesitantly, thinking it was stupid talking to a hallucination who knew nothing more than she did. But there was no way she was going to hide for three months. Not when she had an apartment with five years of talismans just a drive away.
“You don’t know, sweetheart,” Jack said. “If you did, I’d tell you. But it has to be in the apartment. Get me in there, and I can probably find it.”
That didn’t make her feel as good as she thought it would, and she slid out from between the sheets, grimacing when Jack made a wolf whistle. It was just a hallucination, but thanks to a thousand forgotten memories, it was going to act just like Jack would, and damn her if she didn’t start to understand why she’d blinded herself for three years. He was perfect.
A perfect mistake, she amended as she pointed at the chair for him to put her panties back down so she could pick them up. “Jack, what do you think about Silas?”
Jack snorted. “You think he’s a mistake, too, babe,” Jack said, which made sense since, as her intuition, he wouldn’t know anything she didn’t already.
But it was still nice hearing Jack say it.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
“Canada?” Taf’s hand extended out the car’s window to Silas, who was standing resolutely on the curb, fake IDs in hand. The short spring coat he’d gotten from Karley was open to show his pinstripe shirt and tie. Karley, apparently, hadn’t thrown anything away. The tips of his hair from under his hat shifted in the faint breeze off the river, and his freshly shaven face was reddened from more than the cold. Angry, he wouldn’t look at Peri, stewing in the backseat.
“We can’t go to Canada. Peri needs her talismans,” Taf complained as she took Howard’s new ID and passed it over. “And what about the list? It’s our ticket back into the alliance. We can do this. Peri is fine!”
“Fine” was a relative term, but compared to the comatose, confused state she’d been in last night, yes, Peri was fine—and not happy about Silas’s argument because it made her feel vulnerable and she was tired of feeling like a porcelain princess. She, Taf, and Howard had already come up with a rough plan to access her apartment. It had evolved in the scant hour when Silas had been arranging their new IDs. It didn’t involve let’s-do-nothing Silas. Slipping him was step one.
Silas squinted down the street. It was noisy with early-morning deliveries and pedestrians, and he pulled his hat lower when a harmless, low-Q drone hummed over the parked cars. “Opti is camped out at her apartment,” he said as he handed in a second package. Taf took it, glanced at it, then handed it to Peri in the back. “We can try in a few weeks when they aren’t as attentive.”
Sara Washington? Couldn’t he come up with something better? Peri thought sourly as she eyed her new ID. Getting the pictures off their phones turned into passable IDs had been more difficult than it needed to be, since Silas had insisted on the enhanced driver’s license that functioned as a passport for ground travel between Michigan and Canada. All the better to hide you, my dear.
“Who put you in charge?” Taf protested. “It’s over ’cause you say so? Bull cookies! We need to do this before Opti finds the list themselves.”
Peri kicked at the back of Taf’s seat. In the front, Howard leaned across the center console. “Peri needs some time to recover,” he said, squinting meaningfully. “You’re going to hurt her feelings if you don’t shut up.”
Taf hesitated, then exhaled. “Fine. I like snow. Canada might be nice.”
“You’re coming with me,” Silas said, and Peri exchanged a worried look with Howard through the rearview mirror. “Howard can get Peri settled.”
“Whoa. Wait a moment. Where are you going?” Taf protested as Silas opened her door.
“We are going back to the alliance to try to clear up a few misconceptions,” he muttered. “They don’t like that I’m withholding you from them.”