Jared shook his head. “Don’t start.”
“Come on, play your favorite CD for Kennedy.” Lukas smiled and turned around in the seat like he was confiding his darkest secret—or his brother’s. “And I do mean CD.”
Jared elbowed him. “Whatever. The van’s old.”
“So is that CD.” Lukas pressed a few buttons and 1980s music blasted out of the speakers.
It sounded familiar. “Is this from a movie?”
They all burst out laughing.
Jared hit the volume control with his free hand, managing to turn it down a notch for every three Lukas turned it up.
“Make it stop,” Priest whined. “My ears are bleeding.”
Lukas finally gave up and let Jared shut it off, but even Alara couldn’t keep a straight face. “It’s the theme song from this old and totally lame movie called The Lost Boys.”
“It’s a good movie,” Jared shot back, his face flushed.
Priest cleared his throat and did a bad imitation of an adult’s voice that sounded a lot like my math teacher’s. “I hear the soundtrack’s pretty good, too, kids.”
“You’re lucky I can’t weld.” Jared tried to look annoyed, but his mouth turned up at the corners.
Priest tossed his torch on the seat next to me. His name was soldered into the metal handle.
“Is Priest your real name?” I’d been curious since the first time I heard it.
He grinned. “No. It’s kind of an inside joke.”
“Another joke? I’m not sure I can take it.”
“This is a good one,” Lukas said. “So the first time I watched him build a gun, I said it seemed like a crazy specialty for the descendant of a priest. Even an ex-priest.”
Priest pulled his hood over his head. “And I said building vengeance spirit hunting weapons is a religion, and I’m the high priest. Except I can hook up with girls.”
Everyone started laughing. It felt like we all stopped holding our breath at exactly the same moment, and we were regular kids again—driving home from a party to raid the fridge. Instead of wishing we still had a place to call home.
Priest flipped through his journal and ran the blue glass disk over the pages, hoping to decipher lines of hidden text. “You see anything?”
I didn’t, and we both knew it.
We were sitting at a booth in a diner outside of Baltimore. After two waffles and a cup of coffee spiked with cinnamon, I felt like myself again.
Lukas stirred his strawberry shake with a straw. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Alara rolled her eyes. “What did you expect? You’re drinking a milkshake for breakfast.”
“Want the rest?” He pushed the glass in her direction.
She eyed the glass like it was full of motor oil. “You know I don’t eat pink food.”
“Are you allergic to strawberries?” I asked.
“No. I just don’t eat anything pink,” she said, like it was perfectly logical.
“Why not?”
Alara gave me a long look, and emptied what had to be the tenth packet of sugar into her coffee. “In my family, pink symbolizes death. I would rather eat a rat.”
Priest pointed at her cup. “With extra sugar.”
Jared sat alone at the counter, staring out the window at the nothingness you see when you’re too lost in thought to see anything else. I wondered why he was sitting alone. Why he seemed to set himself apart from everyone else, like he was the one who didn’t belong.
He caught me watching him, but didn’t turn away.
I walked over to the empty seat next to him. “Can I sit?”
“Be my guest.” Jared’s army jacket was balled up in his lap, and he was wringing it between his hands.
For a moment, neither of us spoke, the silence building a bridge between us.
“This is my fault.” I needed to say it out loud.
“It isn’t.”
I looked out the window, my stomach twisted in knots. I was embarrassed to face him. “You guys were safe in the warehouse until I showed up.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “We’re never safe, not really.”
“At least you had a place to sleep.” I felt responsible for everything that had happened—even my mom’s death. What if I led the demon to her somehow, the same way I led the vengeance spirits to the warehouse?
Jared rubbed his eyes, and I realized how tired he looked—the kind of tired that went beyond a lack of sleep. The kind that came from carrying something you couldn’t put down, or share. “No one told you the windowsills were salted. I’m the one who screwed up.” Jared dropped his head and leaned forward so I couldn’t see his face anymore. “It’s not the first time.”
“Because you didn’t tell me?”
“No—” He put his hands behind his neck like he was shielding himself from an unseen attack. “Forget it.”
He reached for the coffee cup, and his T-shirt slid up, revealing a tattoo of a bird on his upper arm. It wasn’t a raven or a hawk—the type I would’ve expected to see inked on the skin of someone like Jared. The bird looked almost delicate.