“Silence is easy,” River said. “Try it.”
“If it were easy,” Camilla said, “it’d be your mom.”
“My mom is your mom.”
“So? I never liked her.”
“When we get back,” Cole whispered to me, “I want to take you on our second date.”
“How romantic of you,” I replied with a grin.
“Romantic...desperate to get you alone. Same thing.”
“And what are we going to do on this second date? It’ll be hard to top the near-death experience.”
He glowered at me. “You love premature joke-ulation, don’t you?”
“What can I say? It’s one of my many charms.”
“Well, tonight you’ll see one of mine.”
He’d basically just thrown a match inside me. Suddenly I burned and ached in the most delicious way. Had he just assured me that he would—that we would finally go all the way?
Concentrate! “You keep hinting about your plans for me. Tell me—”
“Nope. Too late,” he interjected a little evilly. “You’ll have to wait to find out what I meant. We’ve reached our destination.”
Dang it! He was right.
River parked in the east lot, out of view of the warehouse. We planned to start at the bottom of the apartment building and work our way to the top, knocking on every door we came across.
“We’ll take floors one and two,” Cole said to Gavin and me. To Jaclyn and River he said, “You’ll take floors three and four.”
“What about the rest of the gang?” I asked.
“They’ll be patrolling outside to make sure we aren’t ambushed.”
Or, in other words, keeping Kat out of the building and Frosty from going cray-cray on some poor, unsuspecting witness.
The building was a bit run-down, with paint peeling and threadbare carpet. There was also a musty smell in the air. Old dust, as if cleaning wasn’t always a priority.
The first floor proved unfruitful. On the second floor, however, we knocked on a door at the end of the hall, with a window overlooking the warehouse. An angry-looking man answered. He was a little shorter than me, his sandy-colored hair shaggy and unkempt. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips chapped. He wore a stained, wrinkled T-shirt that read Always Give 100% Unless You’re Giving Blood and pants way too tight for his bulky frame.
We hadn’t asked the man about the night of the murders, yet still he thrust a phone in my direction. “Here,” he snapped, “it’s for you.” And then he shut the door in our stunned faces.
A jolt of confusion. I tried to make sense of what had just happened.
Cole tensed.
Gavin palmed a gun, as if he expected the phone to explode at any second.
Tentative, I held it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Ali Bell. It’s nice to chat with you again.”
Shock blasted through me. “Ethan?”
“The one and only.”
Cole didn’t need to hear any more. He slammed into the apartment door, wood shards raining to the floor as the thing ripped from its hinges. He and Gavin marched inside.
I leaned against the wall to maintain my balance. “What do you want?” And how had he known I’d show up?
“My sister.”
Isabelle, a fifteen-year-old girl dying of cancer. “We don’t have her.”
He laughed bitterly. “I know. But Anima says they will bring her back—if I bring you in.”
Wait. “Bring her back. As in...”
“She died, Ali,” he said, his pain crackling over the line. “It was horrible. Painful.”
My shoulders drooped. Another loss. “I’m sorry, I really am.”
He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. “But not from the cancer. Killing her was the only way to save her,” he rushed to add. “We injected her with the zombie toxin. Her spirit rose, as we knew it would. But we controlled the environment and captured it. Now we’re keeping it locked away and her body preserved.”
We, he kept saying. As if he and Anima were one. How was I supposed to respond to that? To any of this?
“So...” Ethan cleared his throat. “This is the part where I admit that I have Justin and some slayer we caught trying to rescue him.”
Knew the first. Hadn’t known the second. My heart sank all the way to my feet.
Cole and Gavin stomped out of the apartment, their expressions equally dark. Cole shook his head, and I knew what he was telling me. The guy had somehow escaped.
“I’m willing to do an even trade,” Ethan said. “You for the boys.”
Please. He’d double-cross me in a heartbeat. “There’s no way—”
“Think about it. Keep the phone, and I’ll send you proof of life. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
Click.
Chapter 22
FOLLOW THE
BLOOD-SOAKED ROAD
As we ransacked the Anima guy’s apartment, I told the boys about Ethan’s trade suggestion. Their responses?
Cole: “Sure, we’ll trade you. In never.”
Gavin: “Going to kill that boy so dead.”