“Thanks.” I don’t know what else to say.
She nods. “You know how to work the remote?”
“It’s been a while, but I remember the basics. Arrow means go. Square means stop.”
“And that one’s rewind. And this is pause.”
“Got it.”
“Yeah.” She stands there, arms hanging at her sides. Her mouth is twisted up like she wants to add something else, and there’s a heavy double line across her forehead. I’m pretty keyed up myself. Anxious to see what’s on the tape and not interested in bickering with her again.
“Got it,” I repeat, my voice heavy with “go away.”
She looks down at the bar, jangles the keys she has in her hands. “Mom’s not well. She . . .” She clears her throat. “She thinks Caleb’s dead.”
It’s hard to imagine Grace as anything less than the formidable woman who rules her criminal kingdom with an iron fist. But I remember how small she looked when we came back from Rock Springs, Rissa bleeding out. How vulnerable. Even then I wondered if losing another child would be the grief that would finally break her.
“I don’t think he’s dead,” I offer.
She looks up sharply. “How would you know? You saw the blood.”
“Because he’s with Kai. And you of all people should know that Kai wouldn’t let him die.”
She pulls back a little, blinking. Her hand unconsciously moves to her stomach. Her fingers flex over the spot where the monsters ripped her belly open. Hopefully she’s remembering that Kai saved her life, and that should mean something, should matter when she’s ready to throw him over as some sort of traitor.
She stares at me, her hazel eyes weary. Scared. “I hope you’re right. I really do.”
Once Rissa’s gone, I turn back to the bank of TVs. Take a deep breath. And pick up the remote. I press play. Hold it for a second, afraid to let go. The feeling of the button is a dull rubbery firmness that belies the anxiety of the moment.
“Better to know,” I tell myself. And let go of the button.
The picture comes up in triplicate. At first there’s nothing, just empty space and a camera trained at the door of the gatehouse, a good view of any vehicle trying to enter Grace’s compound. And then someone steps into frame. The back of Caleb’s head. There’s the sound of an engine, but the vehicle doesn’t pull in, staying out of the entryway and out of view. Caleb says something, and someone outside the frame answers. A female voice.
And then there’s another voice.
A voice I know all too well. It is the one I feared I might never hear again.
Kai’s voice is a soothing tenor. He’s the child of college professors, and it showed in the way he talked. Never nonplussed, an observational quality in the lilt of his words. It always seemed like nothing much bothered him. When we first met, I thought that was just Kai. Calm, cool, and collected. I wonder now how much of that easygoing facade was real, how much of that was a cover to hide some of the darkness that was haunting him. Even so, hearing his voice now, that same voice that pulled me back from getting lost in my own misery, rips my heart open.
I pause the recording to gather myself, and when the cool dark quiet of the bar has got me settled again, I press play.
A woman’s voice answers Kai. And then a murmured question from a new voice, not Kai or Caleb but masculine. So that means that there’s at least four of them, a man and a woman in the vehicle and then Kai and Caleb.
Caleb answers, sounding angry, and I catch a “ . . . fucking kidding me . . .” I can’t hold back the smile. That sounds just like what I remember of Freckles.
Kai again, soothing intervention. But this time his voice sends a chill dancing down my spine. It’s neither quite that easygoing tenor nor the crisp professor, but something else.
Something a shade deeper, a touch sharper. I know what it is. Bit’ąą’nii. He’s using his clan power. Kai once referred to his clan power as “a way with words,” but it’s more than that. Kai possesses the power of persuasion, making him as deadly as anyone with a firearm, maybe more. Because why shoot someone when you can talk them into shooting themselves?
Not that he would. Kai was unwilling to even hold a gun, much less kill someone. Maybe this time he should have.
I sit forward, punching the little button to raise volume. Hit it again and again until it’s as high as it will go. But without the visual cues, the audio feels distant, too garbled for me to follow.
Then the woman’s voice, and this time she’s arguing with Kai.
Impossible.
Kai’s power persuaded gods.
And then singing. Beautiful, soft and rhythmic, a lilting melody I recognize immediately.
Uneasiness churns in my gut. I’m pretty sure I’m immune to that singing, but I rapidly tap the button to bring the volume down to zero. No need to take a chance.
I know who’s got Kai. Caleb, too. Someone with powers of persuasion all their own.
I reach out to tap the pause button, ready to go share my discovery with the Goodacres, when Kai’s face fills the screen. My finger freezes, hovering.
Just like the first time I saw him, I let out a little gasp.
His face is still perfect, an impossibly unfair combination of flawless warm-brown skin, blue-black hair, graceful features. When he looks into the camera, I swallow hard. Last time I saw him, his eyes had bled out a liquid silver, something to do with his clan powers. A mystery that neither he nor Tah understood. Part of me expected to see those eyes, the eyes of a man so strange and powerful that he could come back from the dead. But instead his eyes are normal. No, not normal. Never just normal. Beautiful. A rich reddish brown that seem to even now reflect the warmth and kindness of the man they belong to.
He looks directly into the camera. Directly at me. Mouths a sentence I can’t quite follow.
And the feed shuts off.
Nothing but blank screens that, after a moment, bleed to gray rain.
I scramble to replay the video, watching it again. Not so much looking for clues as just waiting to see his face.
A second time, he looks into the camera, lips moving silently on a final phrase, ending in a blank screen.
I watch it again.
By the fourth time, when I pause the feed on Kai’s face, my hands are shaking and I’m holding back some emotion that if I let it out might shatter me whole. A joy that he’s alive. A fear that I’ve lost him all over again. Because I’ve figured out what he says in that final frame, and I know his words are meant for me.
I love you. Don’t follow me.
Six words. Simple words. Words that leave my heart stuttering in my chest, my breath coming short, but my feelings conflicted. Because the words don’t make sense. If he loves me, why would he tell me not to follow him? If he was going to leave, why bother to say he loved me? Kai is smart. He would know what those six words would do to me, how they would make me want to destroy worlds to reach him, how they would send me reeling toward something as terrible as hope.
Why would he say that? Why? Unless he really thought he was saying good-bye. A thought that sends me spiraling into a future I have no interest in living.
And there it is. Clear as a desert morning. I am not willing to give Kai up. No matter my posturing about letting him come to me, no matter my fears and insecurities. No matter what he’d done in the past. Tah said that Kai was mine now, and it’s true. But what he didn’t say was the other half of that. I am Kai’s.
And there’s no way in hell I’m losing him again.
I don’t even hear Ben come up behind me until she says, “Mama mercy, who is that?”
I shove my feelings down somewhere deep. Look over my shoulder at my new ward. Ben is staring at the screens, eyes wide and mouth gaping like someone just knocked her on the head with a hot-boy stick. I know the feeling.