I shuffled closer, pretending to look at my phone, but Joe Stalker was so busy watching the girls, she paid me no mind at all when I stopped right beside her table.
It was a kid. A young girl probably no older than Amber. Chubby with short dark hair, curly and unkempt, and ghostly white skin, she looked more like a book nerd than a girl capable of such hatred.
What the hell? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was just pissed off at her parents for not buying her the latest copy of Seventeen.
She bent to type out a text, then looked up, waiting.
The whole team got it at the same time. I’m going to stab you in the face, cunt.
Oh, no, she didn’t. She did not just use my beloved CU Next Tuesday in a negative, nonempowering way. We girls needed to stick together, not reinforce a derogatory stereotype. I bit down, vowed to have a little talk with Little Miss Miffed about her contradictory use of one of my favorite words and tried to lace this new information together with what we already knew.
First, she was a kid. For a kid, her grammar was flawless. Even though she didn’t text like a typical teen, we still should have picked up on that fact. It never even occurred to me. Then again, maybe that was part of her game. To make the stalker seem older. Smarter. More cunning. To scare Amber even more.
Amber looked at the latest text and laughed again, doubling over, mirth shaking her shoulders.
The girl exploded. Her temper skyrocketed out of control. I saw the glint of metal a mere second before she stood and headed toward the girls. This was going down.
My pulse accelerated like it had rocket boosters. Without another moment’s hesitation, I gave the signal. Which was basically jumping up and down and waving my arms.
The team rushed in, knocking people out of the way to get there. They’d pulled their badges out of their shirts to let people know who they were. I followed the girl, pointed at her, and yelled, “Knife!” just as she turned on her heels and plunged it into my stomach.
* * *
The sensation of cold, hard steel slicing through skin and ripping into muscle wasn’t the first thing that registered. What registered first was the fact that the girl embraced me with her free arm, and whispered, “Eidolon says hi.”
I stood stunned for several long moments, wondering if I’d inadvertently stopped time.
But when she slid the blade out of my stomach, reality sank in. Along with a sharp burning sensation that had my knees buckling.
People were screaming around us when Reyes appeared behind the girl. He reached up, took hold of her head, and was a microsecond away from snapping her neck when I cried out to him.
“Reyes, no!”
It was the look on her face. Pure, unadulterated horror as she looked down as her hands. Her blood-soaked hands.
He bit down and pushed the girl aside hard enough to send her sprawling across the floor. Then he rushed to me. Braced me against him. Closed my jacket, and ordered, “Shift.”
I blinked up at him. Felt another set of hands at my shoulder and waist. Began to crumple again.
Engulfed in flames of rage, he jerked me back up, pulled me roughly against him, and put a hand behind my head, cupping it. Holding it steady. We stood like that for a long moment, our faces centimeters apart as someone called my name. Garrett maybe.
Then Reyes spoke, his voice deep and soft and unhurried. “Shift, Dutch. Now.”
And I did. But just barely. I let my molecules drift apart. Scatter. Then realign. Knitting the cells of my body back together.
When I solidified completely, the pain had vanished.
He eased his hold and waited to make sure I could stand. I nodded and he back away while I zipped up my jacket. It was one thing to heal my flesh. Healing my clothes was another thing altogether.
Amber ran up to me then, distraught and confused. “Aunt Charley, are you okay?”
I nodded and took her into my arms, only then noticing the blood on Reyes’s shirt. I’d tell the cops the girl cut me, but not bad.
Amber looked back at the girl the cops had pinned to the ground.
“Her?” she asked, surprised.
The officers had the girl facedown, one of them securing the knife and phone. The girl didn’t struggle. Probably in shock. And pain. It couldn’t have felt good to have a two-hundred-pound male officer on your back. The female officer bagged the evidence and cuffed her, then they hauled her to her feet. They were not gentle with her. The girl’s pale face showed the horror she felt inside.
When the girl gained her footing, her gaze locked onto Amber’s.
Amber shook her head and took a step back. “That’s … no, that’s … it can’t be her.”
I took her arm. “Amber, do you know her?”
“No way,” Brandy said, as astonished as Amber.
“That’s Thea Wold,” Amber said. “Why would she send me texts? We see her every day at school. I say hi to her every day.”
Brandy nodded. “Amber’s nice to her. She’s, like, the only one in school who’s nice to her.”
“You aren’t?” I asked her.
Caught, she dipped her head. “No. I mean, I’m not mean or anything. I just don’t go out of my way, you know?”
“But I do,” Amber said. “Is this what I get for being nice?”
The girl had started shaking, and tears were now streaming down her face.
Amber put her head down, unable to watch, and I knew right then and there why she was on Beep’s team. She had an incredible heart.
“Amber, I don’t think this is what it looks like.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think—” I stopped, trying to choose my words carefully as Reyes and Garrett moved in to create a huddle.
Uncle Bob ran up, then. He took one look at the girl then hurried toward us to complete the huddle.
“I think she was being controlled.”
“Are you okay?” Uncle Bob asked first Amber and then me.
We both nodded and he wrapped an arm around Amber. Then he spotted the blood that had soaked down and into my jeans. His gaze darted back to mine, but I shook my head.
“She said something to me. She said, ‘Eidolon says hi.’”
“Okay,” Ubie said, “who’s Eidolon and why is he sending messages through a stalker?”
“I think he was somehow controlling her.”
The cops started to take Thea away. I yelled at them to stop and ran over. The gang followed, everyone except Brandy. I got the feeling she’d had enough for one day. She sank into a chair and watched from afar.
“Thea,” I said, trying to get her attention.
Her shock and horror were so plain on her face, she stared absently.
“Thea, what did Eidolon say? Did he tell you to do this?”
“I was so mad,” she said.
“At Amber?”
“At me?” she asked, appalled.
Her knees started to give, so we ushered her to a chair. Her hands had been cuffed behind her back. A fall face-first would not end well.
“Yes. No.” She shook her head, confused. “I thought … someone spray-painted the number fifty all over my mom’s Encore. And he said it was you.”
“The number fifty?” I asked.
Amber lowered her head. “They were calling her a moron. You know, like an IQ of fifty?” She looked at Thea, her expression full of empathy. “Thea, some people are jerks. Why would you think that I had anything to do with that?”
“Because … I don’t know.” She blinked and looked up at me. “I stabbed you.”
Amber gasped and Uncle Bob tightened his hold.
“I’m okay, hon.” I knelt in front of her. “Thea, what do you know about Eidolon?”
I felt the heat at my back. Reyes was fuming, but his anger had finally shifted off of Thea and onto the root of our problem.
As though really seeing me for the first time, she refocused and drew in a sharp breath of air. “Oh, my God, he’s keeping you busy while he searches for your daughter.”
I stumbled like she’d punched me. Reyes caught me, jerked me up, and spun me around.
He was going to explain. I could see it on his face. But the situation hardly needed an explanation.
“Go,” I said, the word a mere hiss under my breath.
Unable to dematerialize in front of everyone, he took off, so fast people barely saw him as he sprinted across the mall, darting in and out of the curious onlookers.
He was going to check on our daughter. I couldn’t go, because that was precisely what Eidolon was hoping for. He wanted me to freak out. He wanted me, the one lugging around the bright-assed light, to lead him to Beep.
I prayed he couldn’t follow Reyes in the same way. Surely, he couldn’t.
I put my hand on Thea’s knee to draw her back to me. “Thea, what else do you know? Is there anything—?”
“He was mad. When you got upset and”—she cinched her brows together, trying to understand her own memories—“when you dematerialized? You can do that?”
I offered a weak smile, but Amber was all over that, her lids a perfect circle.
“He was angry,” Thea continued. “He wanted you to rematerialize near her. Near your daughter. He was tracking you. But he said you were too smart. You went somewhere—anywhere—else.”
I had no control over my destination when I went to Scotland. Or did I? Was I truly trying to avoid materializing near Beep? And if I’d had absolutely no control, how did I end up at a house on the other side of the world that had a mystical closet exactly like the one in the abandoned convent here?