Chapter 12
TWELVE
In the end, I was extra grateful for Kira, because without her I would have had to walk all the way home. Instead, she dropped me at the door of our building, then drove off to find parking.
I made my way upstairs, fighting to organize my thoughts, only to encounter a different kind of fight the moment I stepped out of the stairwell onto the fourth floor.
My neighbor from across the hall—the one who’d threatened to have us evicted—was in the hallway, yelling, along with two human cops, and… Kes.
Kes’s back was to our apartment door, and I recognized her stance. It was fearful, but protective. Our neighbor had legitimately become a threat, and Kes would allow access to our home over her dead body.
“We had nothing to do with that,” she was saying, as calmly as her clearly shaken nerves would permit. “You have no reason to suspect us, and there are sleeping children inside.”
“Ma’am, please…” One of the cops was trying to reason with the neighbor, but just as she had the night of the fire, she seemed utterly determined to blame us for something.
“I tried to tell everyone,” she screeched, her face blotched and her arms flailing with rage. “No one listened. The owner threatened me. He’s forcing me to move out. And now this. It’s revenge. But I won’t let you get away with it. Tell me what you’ve done with her!”
Her? Wait, so this wasn’t about the fire?
I didn’t have a whole lot of patience to spare, but neither would I let Kes bear the weight of this much unreasonable hatred, so I headed towards them with what I hoped was a pleasant and reasonable expression on my face.
“What seems to be the problem?”
One of the officers turned towards me. “Ma’am, do you live on this floor?”
I gestured to the door at Kes’s back. “I do. Right here, in fact. I wasn’t home last night though.”
That’s when the woman’s claws came flying at my face. I was almost too sleep-deprived to duck, but thankfully one of the officers caught her and pulled her off before she could draw blood.
“You took my daughter,” she accused wildly, and suddenly I noted her red, swollen eyes. “I know it was you. That’s why you weren’t home. You did something with her, and I’ll make you tell me!”
This didn’t seem like the right time to inform her that I hadn’t even realized she had a daughter.
“I wasn’t home,” I said evenly, “because I was at work. You can ask my boss. And once I left there, I was…”
Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t admit to a couple of human cops that I was looking for another missing kid, that my boyfriend had been poisoned, or that I’d been partially responsible for five dead fae and a handful of concussed turtles.
“…with a friend,” I finished. “I can supply the names and numbers of the people I was with last night if you would like, but I can assure you, I had nothing to do with your daughter’s disappearance.”
“Then you probably know who took her,” the woman hissed.
“How else do you explain this?” She shoved a sticker-covered laptop in my face and shook it.
“All those online games. I knew they were dangerous, but then I found out she was spending all her time with your kind. Talking about magic, and how much she wished she had it too.”
She abruptly clutched the laptop to her chest. “Corrupting my daughter with your lies. And now she’s gone.”
Something tugged at my brain… something about Monique and Jeremiah…
“How old is your daughter?” I asked suddenly.
“Only fifteen,” the woman wailed.
“Ma’am, we need you to give us more information,” one of the officers said. “Like what she was wearing, who she spends time with, and when was the last time you saw her. Are you positive she didn’t leave any notes?”
“You think I wouldn’t know if my own child left me a note?
” the woman exclaimed tearfully. “She was here yesterday, and now she’s not, so why won’t you question these people?
I’m telling you, they’re criminals. Taking advantage of the fact that they have magic and we don’t.
They can do whatever they want, and there’s nothing we can do to stop them.
There should be laws! Ways to keep ourselves safe from these monsters! ”
Ironic, considering that I was as human as she was.
“How about we talk about it inside?” the officer suggested in a calm, reasonable tone, and very gently began to escort her back towards her own door.
The second officer turned to me. “I should take your information just in case,” he said. “We’ll be in touch if we have any further questions.”
He didn’t sound as if he suspected me of anything, but maybe he had lots of practice sounding nonchalant. And he was human. Would he take my neighbor’s side simply because of that? Or would he believe my friends’ testimony that I’d been far too busy to abduct a teenage girl I hadn’t known existed?
Though if I had known, I might have thought about abducting her out of sheer pity.
Again, something I definitely should not admit aloud.
I gave him my name and number, then Kira’s, and he was walking away just as Kira popped out of the stairwell and jogged towards me. She eyed the retreating officer before raising an eyebrow.
“You know I’m taken, right? Not that he wasn’t cute, but why did you give him my number?”
“Inside,” I said grimly, grabbing her elbow and tugging her towards my front door. “It’s a long story.”
By the time I caught her up on the drama, Logan emerged from his room, yawning and stretching as he stumbled into the kitchen in search of food.
He seemed to be in a relatively good mood, and I hated to spoil it, but I didn’t want him caught off guard by the upcoming move.
“Hey Logan, how was the sleepover?”
He rolled his eyes as he pulled out a bowl and a spoon. “It’s not a sleepover. We were just hanging out.”
“Okay, how was the hangout?”
He shrugged. “Good. I guess.”
The giant box of cereal I’d bought two days ago upended over his bowl, revealing a handful of crushed flakes and a few sprinkles of dust. “We’re out,” he said, setting it back on the counter. “Is there anything else to eat?”
Kes slipped past me to grab a loaf of bread from the counter and a jar of peanut butter from the cupboard.
He rubbed his eyes and started making a sandwich.
“Logan, I’ve just made arrangements for us to move out for a few days while the water damage is repaired. Think you can be packed by this afternoon?”
Half of the sandwich went in his mouth and was washed down by a gulp of milk. “Where are we going?”
“Well, here’s the tricky thing. I need you to not tell anyone.”
“Who am I gonna tell?” he grumbled. “I only know like one other person outside of us and Faris, and I don’t have a phone.”
Who was his one other person?
“It’s Niko’s son, Gio,” Kes explained quietly. “He’s also thirteen. They met a while back and hung out yesterday at Faris’s place.”
Niko was one of Faris’s bouncers—a troll and a super decent guy. But I hadn’t known he had a son. Between him and my neighbor, it was becoming clear that I needed to get better at making small talk with the people around me.
“Okay, then that makes it easy, I guess,” I told Logan. “You only have to keep a secret from one person. We’re moving into one of the apartments in Callum’s building. Just while the renovations are in progress. But we don’t want anyone to know where we’ve gone.”
“Because of the crazy lady across the hall?”
Drat. I’d hoped he wouldn’t pick up on her animosity. “No. Well, at least not entirely.”
“Because of the people who are still after Kes?”
“Yes.” It wasn’t like I could hide this from him.
He knew about Blake. Knew about the laws designating us as criminals for possessing stolen magic.
Knew that all of us were still fugitives in some ways.
And he’d been kidnapped along with Kes only a little over a week ago.
“It’s the next safest place for us. And you’ll be close enough to keep up your lessons with Faris. ”
“Cool.” He shoved the rest of the sandwich into his mouth and mumbled something that sounded a little like “I’ll start packing,” but also could have been “All of us are doomed,” or “You suck at planning.”
After he disappeared back into his room, I turned to Kes. “Where is Ethan?”
She pointed upwards. “On the roof.”
One of my favorite things about our building was the small rooftop garden area with tables and chairs for residents’ use. Ethan spent a fair amount of time there during the day—said it helped him stay calm and keep his magic under control.
I took a long look at her, checking for signs that draining Ethan consistently was more than she could handle, but she looked back with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m fine,” she said firmly. “I will tell you when I become un-fine. Now fill me in on everything with Callum.”
I kept it succinct, somehow stayed calm, and finished by explaining my strategy for the move. “If we go one at a time and take the bags separately, maybe no one will realize we’re gone until it’s too late to follow us.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. Ari and I can be packed quickly, then I’ll take her to the park like we usually do. Maybe plan a picnic lunch. If you can find a way to disguise the bags, we can meet you at The Assemblage sometime this afternoon.”
I almost protested the two of them being alone in the park for that long before I remembered… they wouldn’t actually be alone. And I’d made a bargain that it was time to make good on.
“Actually…” I paused, considering how I might present it in a way that wouldn’t freak her out. “I ended up seeing Shane last night, and I’ve been thinking…”
“Is this about the fact that he’s been stalking me ever since the kidnapping?”
My mouth dropped open. “How did you know?”
Kes leaned back against the counter, crossed her arms, and managed to look stern. “I walked up to the garden with Ethan, just to make sure there was no one up there who would harass him, and found Shane passed out in one of the chairs.”
Oops.
“It was pretty obvious what he was doing.”
“Did you talk to him about it?”