“There’s no list,” Lukas said. “Each member of the Legion knows the name of one other member. They don’t have any information on the remaining three. It was a safety precaution to keep something like this from happening.”
There was no list, nothing conclusive to link my mom to this group. They were making this up as they went along. “My mom never mentioned any of this to me, and I just finished packing everything she owned. There was no journal.”
“Maybe she hid it somewhere,” Jared offered. “Our dad used to do that.”
“Okay. Then why wasn’t she training me?” I turned to Lukas, hoping he would be more reasonable. “You guys have known about all this since you were kids, right?”
“More or less.” Lukas rolled the silver coin over his fingers.
“Maybe you weren’t next in line,” Jared offered. He had no way of knowing how cruel it sounded to me. My mother was my only real family.
What if she had something else out there—something more than me?
With so little left to hold on to, I couldn’t let myself think that way. “There’s no ‘next in line.’ My mom wasn’t part of this. The demon must have made a mistake.”
Lukas tossed the coin in the air and caught it, closing his hand around it. “The only mistake he made was leaving us alive.”
CHAPTER 9
Liabilities
We rode the rest of the way in awkward silence. I couldn’t reconcile my life with the secrets Lukas and Jared were convinced it held. The all-night movie marathons and catastrophic cooking classes that left our kitchen draped in homemade pasta we never ate—those were the things my mother and I did together. There were no discussions about ancestry, religion, or the supernatural.
My father had abandoned me, taking our shared heritage with him. I didn’t know anything about him except that it destroyed my mom when he left, and I knew even less about his family. Church was equally alien, a place where my friends were trapped on Sundays while I ate chocolate chip pancakes in front of the TV. If my mom was a member of a secret society charged with protecting the world from vengeance spirits, then the world was seriously screwed.
Three unmarked streets later, Jared pulled over in an alley behind an overflowing Dumpster. Black fire escapes loomed above the doors like gargoyles. It looked like the kind of place where you’d find an underground club.
Why were we stopping here?
Jared grabbed a duffel bag from behind the seat and held the door open. It took me a moment to realize he was holding it for me. I climbed out, misjudging the distance between my foot and the step bar, and slipped. Jared caught my arm to steady me.
“Thanks.” I smiled without thinking. Something registered in his deep blue eyes—a gentleness I hadn’t seen before. It caught me off guard. But then it was gone, and he turned away without a word.
Lukas stood in front of a black metal door sorting through a bunch of keys.
Maybe this was a storage facility.
Five black dots that resembled the face of a die were spray painted above the lock, and a thick white line ran along the base of the door. It reminded me of the residue left on the streets after the snowplows came through.
Lukas noticed me staring and pointed at the symbol. “That’s a quincunx, a voodoo ward to protect the place.”
I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. “Do you keep valuable stuff here?”
He gave me a strange look. “We keep all our stuff here.”
It took me a second to realize what he meant. I tried to hide my surprise, but I didn’t know a lot of people who lived in warehouses.
Lukas gestured at the white line in front of the door. “Make sure you step over the salt line without breaking it. Spirits hate rock salt.” After the way the girl had exploded in my bedroom, that was an understatement.
As I walked inside, I prepared for the possibility that we were sleeping in a rat-infested building. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Exposed pipes ran along the ceiling and gray steel beams reached up from the floor. White sheets hung from a wire that ran the length of the building, dividing the enormous room into two sections.
A break between the sheets revealed four neatly made mattresses, and shelves overflowing with clothes and books. A brand new-looking couch and chairs sat next to a coffee table littered with papers and soda cans.
The floor vibrated from some serious bass, and I followed the sound of the White Stripes’ “Icky Thump” to the far end of the building.