“It may compromise his current job,” Mr. Blackbourne said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “We try not to submit Academy details about jobs via text or phone calls. It’s too easy to intercept.”
“Isn’t there a secret code or signal you could use?”
“Not now,” he said. “Especially since Volto went silent. We secured ourselves as much as possible, but it’s limiting now when we aren’t sure where he might be. If we use code, it’ll be obvious.”
“So no Bat Signal?”
Gabriel cracked with laughter. The others grinned, except for Mr. Blackbourne, who simply said, “No. We need to talk to him in person.”
“Do you want him to come back?”
“We want to tell him to hurry with his job, without compromising it, and without alerting anyone else as to why we need him back. We just need to know if he’ll be back in time to take this new job or if we need to tell them to go to someone else. Everyone else either can’t do it or they’re busy.”
It took me a moment to think of what to do, but after I had it, I dipped my fingers into my bra, pulling out my new iPhone in the pink case. The old one had cracked. I couldn’t remember how many phones I’d been through the last few months. I punched a message at the screen.
“What are you doing?” Kota asked. “We said not to ask him directly to come back.”
I finished my text and sent it. “I didn’t.”
Mr. Blackbourne gave me a scrutinizing look. “You just sent him a text?”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrowed. “I wish you would have shown it to me first.”
My phone vibrated to life in my hands. I checked the screen. “He’ll be back tonight.”
The room silenced. Did they not expect me to help? Isn’t that what they asked me to do?
“What did you say?” Dr. Green asked.
I shrugged, holding out my phone, allowing them to read the screen.
Sang: “Miss you.”
Silas: “7.”
“That means he’ll be back at seven, right?” I asked.
Surprised filled each of their faces. Victor was gawking. There were smiles on the other faces, and Mr. Blackbourne’s stood out the most, a millimeter at most, but dazzling me with its warmth.
It was Kota who finally nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“Is that all you needed?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’ll uh...guess I’ll go see what North and Nathan are up to—”
There was a knocking, loud enough and hard enough to feel like the house was shaking. Immediately after, the doorbell rang twice.
The boys never knocked. Marie didn’t have to. I checked with the others as to who it could be, as if they could see through walls.
They stared back with the same surprised expression.
Kota stood and came forward. “It’s probably just the mailman.”
I nodded, and started to turn around to head back downstairs. Kota went with me, followed by Gabriel.
“Don’t we have a camera out there?” Gabriel asked.
“It’s a guy,” Victor said above us from the top of the stairs. He had his phone in his hand and he was tapping at it. “He’s turned the wrong way though.”
“Shouldn’t I just answer it?” I asked.
“And what if we’re wrong and it’s an ax murderer?” Gabriel asked. “Or the police?”
Why did he have to say that? At the last step, I hesitated for a second before touching down. Kota crashed into me, put his hands on my hips and eased me down the last step.
I started for the door, but Kota took my arm, tugging me back. I checked behind me, and Mr. Blackbourne and Dr. Green were at the top of the stairs. Victor was ahead of them on the stairs, but waiting.
Another ring of the doorbell, and Kota checked through the peephole. His head jerked back and his expression changed to something grim. He looked back up the stairwell, pointed to Mr. Blackbourne and Dr. Green and waved his hand in a shooing motion.
The two of them immediate retreated to my bedroom.
I imagined they still lingered, listening and waiting. Who was it that Kota had to ask them to back away?
Kota opened the door, stepping back.
Mr. Hendricks stood on the front porch. He glowered at Kota instantly and then looked at me.
My heart thundered and my hand fluttered to my throat as I took a short step back. What was the principal doing here? Forcing myself to be polite, I spoke. “Hello? Did you need something?”
“I didn’t realize you had...company,” Mr. Hendricks said. His shaved head and criticizing eyes and broad stature made him look even fiercer outside of school. He wore brown slacks, a white collared shirt, no tie or jacket like he usually did, so he looked a little different.
“This is highly inappropriate,” Kota said.
“This is a matter that can’t wait,” he said. He stepped forward, putting a foot in the hallway.
Kota started to step in front of him to block him from further access. “You should...”
“I don’t need permission to visit the home of one of my students,” Mr. Hendricks said. “But I wanted her to pass a message to you anyway, so you may as well be here.”
Kota raised his eyebrows. Gabriel eased forward, putting a hand at the small of my back. I hadn’t realized how my body rattled until his touch was steady against me.
Victor finished his descent down the stairs to stand beside Kota. “If you must,” Victor said, “we should go somewhere else. You should have called us directly. Or talked to Mr. Blackbourne.”
“What I have to say concerns all of you,” Mr. Hendricks said. “You should listen.”
“Would you care to step into the living room?” Kota asked, his face tight, not showing emotion.
As Mr. Hendricks entered, a thousand questions buzzed through me. The last time I’d been in his office, I’d been with Marie. Marie had let slip that our mother was in the hospital and our father was at work, but I don’t know if he really knew the entire situation. Why would he dare to show up otherwise? Would he have confronted my mother if she’d been here?
Mr. Hendricks went into the living room. Victor and Kota stood with him. Gabriel drew me toward the couch and I sat next to him.
“We’ve got a situation,” Mr. Hendricks said. He kept his arms drawn in tight against his body, like he wanted to stop himself from touching anything in the room. “It’s the homecoming game and dance.”
“Shouldn’t you have called Mr. Blackbourne about this?” Kota asked.
“He’s the one that you should be concerned with,” he said. “This bomber seems to have a particular interest in him. I need you to convince him to make it clear he will not be attending either the game or the dance, and to announce it publicly.”
“Why?” Kota asked.
“Because this game doesn’t just involve students. It’s another school, parents, and who knows how many others. A bomb threat on campus we can tolerate. The students deal with it, and the parents of our students know it happens, but nothing ever occurs. They treat it like a school prank. A bomb threat at a homecoming game would force the issue. The police will look closer when other parents threaten to sue our school.”
Victor cleared his throat. “So it isn’t bad enough the school is threatened, it’s when parents show up that it’s an issue?”
“Parents are always worse than their kids,” he said. “They’ll create a dramatic scene about it. At any rate, if the bomber is focused on Mr. Blackbourne, and he isn’t going to be there, then there’s no reason to target the game.”
“We’ll consider it,” Kota said.
“I’m not asking,” Mr. Hendricks said. He pointed a finger in my direction and addressed me. “I’ve talked to your father.”
My heart thundered and I sat up. Gabriel kept his hand at my elbow, nearly growling as he spoke. “What about him?” he asked.
I was grateful they were speaking for me so I didn’t have a chance to screw up.
“I know he’s at work, and that your mother is in the hospital. I told him specifically that I’d look out for his daughters.”
It was a bolt of lightning striking me. My father, maybe not knowingly, was working with the last person he should trust.
“Again, highly inappropriate,” Kota said. “You can’t threaten her.”
“This isn’t a threat,” Mr. Hendricks said coolly. “This is her welfare we’re concerned with.”
The beady look in his eyes and his assured posturing told me way more than what he was saying. He thinks he’s found his ace. He had control of me, and the boys who were fighting to protect me were playing into this. He wants them to react. I had to speak up, or this whole thing might play into Mr. Hendricks’s plan.
“Is that all you needed?” I asked. The boys instantly turned to me. Kota shook his head slightly. Victor’s fire eyes lit up with curiosity. Gabriel squeezed at my arm, urging me to be quiet, but I couldn’t help it. My lips started to move. I wanted to protect them as much as they wanted to protect me. “You simply needed Mr. Blackbourne not to attend the game or the dance?”
“And to make it known he will be somewhere else,” he said. “Anywhere else.”
He could have been setting Mr. Blackbourne up in a trap somehow. “What if this bomber tries to target the game anyway?”
“We’ll have to deal with that if it happens,” he said. “But I don’t think he will. If Mr. Blackbourne isn’t there, this bomber doesn’t seem interested. There’s been ample opportunity for him to target places, but the names on the boxes are for Mr. Blackbourne only, in places he’d be, or the phone calls mention him specifically.”
The original bomb that had shown up arrived in the music room, the one class he had, with me. I hadn’t realized the others were targeted to him, too. Or Mr. Blackbourne didn’t tell me.
I looked to the others. I wasn’t sure if this was a trick, and I didn’t want to confirm. The request seemed simple enough. “You thought,” I said, “if you talked to me that I could convince him not to?”
“This is not just our school involved in this anymore.”
“We’ll see,” Kota said. “But calling her father and using him over her head can’t be done any more.”
“The school board is requiring that I keep you Academy students with us,” he said. “But she’s my student. I’ll do what I feel is necessary for her and for the safety of all my students.”
There was more to this. He was protecting himself somehow in his request. Maybe the bomb threat would lead to a deeper investigation, one that could expose him.
It was tempting to let it happen, if it really was just a threat and wouldn’t hurt anyone. Like before, where they were empty boxes and a voice on the phone, it seemed it was a small price to pay to finally figure out what Mr. Hendricks was up to.
“I’ll try to talk to him,” I said, when no one else was saying anything. “But I don’t know what will happen.”
Mr. Hendricks nodded. “I want to hear back from you Monday with an answer.”
Mr. Hendricks left the house, walking to a town car parked out front. We all watched him from the front windows.
He completely ignored the car across the street; one of his people watching the house.
“He knows my parents are gone,” I said as I lost sight of him.
“He’s way out of line,” Kota said. “And he’s getting nervous.”
“That’s good,” Victor said. “He’s likely to screw up somewhere now, isn’t he?”
“Fucking shit,” Gabriel said. “He’s showing up everywhere. Isn’t it bad enough we’ve got people following us? Why can’t we just expose him now?”
“Because if the police investigate, it’ll freeze those accounts,” Kota said. He scanned the street once more and released the blinds. He turned to the rest of us, and then looked up and called out. “All clear!”
There were footsteps on the stairs and then Mr. Blackbourne and Dr. Green appeared. Mr. Blackbourne frowned. “We heard,” he said. I imagined he meant he was listening in on one of our cell phones to hear the conversation.
“He acted like he didn’t know you were here,” Kota said. “I’m going to assume his people don’t know. But how do you want to handle this?”
“We’ll have to talk,” Mr. Blackbourne said, then looked at me. “We need you unavailable at this residence from now on. Next time we get a chance, we need to inform your sister. You aren’t home is always the answer.”
“What about at night?” I asked. “I mean I can’t always be gone.”
“Kota’s right,” he said. “He’s getting too familiar. This interaction between him and your father has to end. He may figure out he’s never home soon enough, and it might even lead to looking into you and your family situation.”
“We need to get her out of her family for good,” Dr. Green said.
“One thing at a time,” Mr. Blackbourne said.
For good. Several times, the boys mentioned me leaving, and for some reason, I always pictured I’d live here with my family forever. My mother, even while she was gone at the hospital, always seemed to be right behind me, watching, waiting for me to do something she thought was wrong. At night, I listened for her, and every creak of the house had me wondering if she was coming for me.
Since I started sleeping at Nathan’s house, I had new sounds to learn. It didn’t seem to matter where I was, the nightmares still followed.
But I had to put my own fears aside. “He’s after you,” I said quietly. I looked at Mr. Blackbourne, meeting his gray eyes. “This is a trap. If you show up, and there’s a bomb threat, it’s your fault. If you’re not there, and do what he says, he’s either setting a trap for you, or there’s something else.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said quietly. “We have a week to figure it out.”
“So this might be our last week?” Gabriel asked. “Is it wrong to hope so?”
“We’ve still got a job to do,” Dr. Green said. He smiled, the amusement flickering in his eyes. “And I think we’re smarter than he is. Or do I give you boys too much credit?”
The only answer was to figure out what Mr. Hendricks was up to before it happened. Otherwise, I might be trapped in a school without the boys.
I wasn’t sure I’d survive without them.
Rebuilding
I left the boys to finish up their Academy discussions. I was tempted to linger, but I knew better than to listen in. Sometimes half listening was more dangerous.
But as I left the house, I wondered what else they needed to talk about that they couldn’t in front of me. Not only that, but Silas was out on a job and I hadn’t realized that was where he’d gone. I’d been with the other boys or at the diner, busy. It was hard to keep tabs on all nine of them. Now that I knew some of the secrets of the Academy, that jobs could be dangerous, it made me realize if they weren’t in front of me, they could actually be out there doing something which could lead to one of them being in the hospital, or worse.
While they often promised me that it was actually out of the ordinary for them to do things which were dangerous, I didn’t feel like I could fully believe it. Not when so much of what they did in front of me often resulted in one of us getting hurt.
With Mr. Hendricks after Mr. Blackbourne, I realized how close I was to possibly being the reason for the failure of their mission. Mr. Hendricks was using me to manipulate them. The only one he thought he had to get rid of was Mr. Blackbourne; he saw him as the most dangerous. Maybe he thought if Mr. Blackbourne left, the others would, too. I wasn’t sure how true that was.
Nathan’s house was a few doors down from mine on Sunnyvale Court. The single story brick house had a freshly cut front lawn and in the driveway was North’s black truck. The tailgate was down, and Nathan’s bathtub was sitting in the bed, tied into place for hauling.
The front door of the house was unlocked, and I walked in to the thundering crack of sledgehammers against drywall. I was
surprised I recognized the sound for what it was. Not for the first time, I realized how much I’d changed, not just in attitude, but in how much I’d learned in the couple of months I’d been around the guys.
I found Nathan and North in the bathroom, taking out the wall of the closet. Both had their shirts off, their hair sprinkled with dust. I stood back, out of range of their swings. Nathan was a half a head shorter than North, but every bit of his body was defined detail of muscle, and his shoulders were wider. With his reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, I thought the term ruggedly handsome fit him best.
North wasn’t as defined as Nathan, but his torso was very impressive. A thick mess of coarse hair trailed from the waist of his black jeans up to meet with his belly button. With his wild eyes and the dark hair, he was fierce, even when doing ordinary things.
As North moved, something caught my eye. There was a spot on his chest that looked like a deep bruise. I stared at it, because the shape was strangely familiar. I couldn’t recall...had I hit him at some point and leave a mark? Did someone else hit him?
North swung once more at the wall, bringing down the last of the wall, it crashing at his feet. He dropped the sledgehammer onto the tile, wiping at his brow with the back of his hand. He turned, his fierce brown eyes catching me staring. “What?” he asked, his voice deep and gruff.
Still, I couldn’t help looking at the dark mark. Now that he’d turned, it was black, but there was a thin line... of pink? And it was almost shaped like a heart. But it was messed up, too. The outline was irregular, and the center was only partially filled in with the black fading toward the center. “Did you drop the hammer on yourself or...” I started to ask, unable to finish because I couldn’t come up with another theory.
His eyebrows lifted in confusion. I drifted a hand out toward him, my fingertips brushing at the spot close to the mark.
He looked down, but quickly patted my hand away. “Stop.”
“I thought it was a bruise.”
“It’s not a bruise.”
“What is it?”
He grunted, and looked back at Nathan, who had stopped and was leaning with his back against the wall, watching us curiously. North turned back, lifted his sledgehammer over his shoulder and headed for the hallway. “I’ll tell you later,” he said as he passed and cut through the kitchen, heading to the door out to the garage.