“Maybe Millicent is protecting something else now,” I said.
“If part of the Shift is with her, you know what that means.” Priest shook his head.
“It’s in the well,” Lukas finished.
Alara threw a napkin over the offensive pink shake. “Then we should get going sooner than later.”
Jared nodded at the TV mounted on the wall. “I vote for sooner,” he whispered.
The volume was turned down low, but an orange news ticker ran across the bottom of the morning show feed: AMBER ALERT—KENNEDY WATERS, AGE 17. LAST SEEN AT HER HOME IN GEORGETOWN. My yearbook photo smiled back from the screen.
I strained to hear the newscaster’s voice. “Kennedy Waters is seventeen years old, five foot four and one hundred twenty pounds, with long brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen on November thirtieth at her home on O Street, in Georgetown.” A shaky camera panned my street and stopped on what was left of my front yard. There were cops everywhere—red and blue lights flashed in the background.
Jared dropped the van keys in my hand and gestured at the door without a word. Then he walked up to the register and ordered a cup of coffee to distract the waitress while I slipped out.
From the front seat of the van, I watched Jared flirt with a woman old enough to be his mom, while Lukas casually gathered up the journals. Alara put on her black leather jacket, and Priest stuffed his gadgets and screwdrivers in his backpack.
If you didn’t know any better, they looked like four regular teenagers grabbing coffee on their way to school—the guy no one knew anything about because he wouldn’t let anyone get close, the kid genius who skipped three grades and still knew all the answers in Calculus, the girl all the guys wanted to date but were too intimidated to approach, and the boy-next-door who had too many secrets but was too sweet not to trust. But I knew they were all those things and none of them.
They were part of something bigger.
As they walked through the glass door, for the first time I imagined that I was part of it, too.
CHAPTER 18
A Good Mother
The abandoned estate was a few miles outside of Middle River, its perimeter marked by a barbed-wire fence nailed into a row of scarred birch trees. A gate secured by a rusty chain blocked the dirt road leading up to the house. Whoever lived here definitely hadn’t wanted any visitors.
Lukas opened the storage space in the floor of the van. Priest grabbed a nylon rope and an EMF, while Lukas unearthed a pair of bolt cutters. Considering that Priest traveled with his own blowtorch, bolt cutters weren’t a shock. Alara used them to cut the chain.
Jared tossed the broken links in the dirt, and she leaned in and whispered something to him. His eyes darted in my direction.
“It’s safer for everyone,” Alara said, a little loud.
“What’s safer for everyone?” They were obviously talking about me.
Alara crossed her arms. “I think you should wait here.”
I thought about Lilburn, and the way I froze instead of running when Lukas told me to get out of the house. “I know I made some mistakes—”
“Mistakes?” Alara snapped. “You almost got us all killed last night.”
My throat went dry. She knew.
Lukas turned to Alara. “What are you talking about?”
She looked right at me. “Who do you think broke the salt line?”
I wanted to sink into the ground and disappear, but I deserved whatever Alara dished out. I thought about Markus’ journal entry, and the way one misplaced line had been the difference between controlling a demon and unleashing one. My ignorance could’ve cost them their lives. Despite the millions of pointless images and textbook pages my memory had recorded over the years, it couldn’t help me with the one piece of information I had actually needed.
“She didn’t know.” Jared answered before I had a chance to say anything. “It was an accident.”
“I should have—”
Jared cut me off. “I told her not to say anything. There was no point.”
Why was he defending me?
Lukas leaned against the van, watching his brother. “You still should’ve told us. Secrets are dangerous.” The way he said it sounded like a threat.
Jared didn’t respond.
“I—I’m so sorry,” I stammered.
Priest stepped between them. “We’ve been training for years, and Kennedy only found out about all this a couple days ago. There’s a learning curve.”
“Look at her.” Alara said it like an accusation. “She belongs at a football game with a plastic cup in her hand.”
Lukas walked over and squeezed her shoulder gently. “It was an accident.”
Alara shrugged him off, and they stared at each other until they seemed to arrive at a silent agreement. But she still didn’t say a word as we walked toward the gate that stood between us and the hill leading up to Lilburn. Or when we stepped over the broken chain snaking through the dirt like another line I shouldn’t cross.