Stolen

She couldn’t pretend to—not at all. So she said nothing. Nathan turned, smirking. “Demon got your tongue?”

  She pressed her lips tight.

  “He had it earlier, didn’t he?”

  Julia’s eye twitched, the way it did sometimes when she was on the verge of getting really upset, but she kept her jaw locked.

  Nathan was half-turned toward her, walking kind of backwards. And yet, it looked like he was strutting, he was so confident, so in-your-face with his I-know-more-than-you-do bullshit. And then he said it. “If you knew what I know—”

  “I wouldn’t be a prick about it!”

  His dark eyes darkened; his lips curled like a snarling dog’s. “He’s a killer.”

  “No he’s not.”

  “He is.”

  “He’s a nice guy.”

  “He’s a monster.”

  “People change.”

  “He can’t.”

  “He did.”

  “He did not!” Nathan’s back was to her now, but Julia guessed his face was red. His neck looked like a fire hydrant. “Hunters aren’t people. They’re killers. Murder is their life.”

  “Cayne—”

  “IS!” His voice was like angry thunder. It echoed up and down the hall, and Julia felt a flash of fear. “He’s worse than shit. I know, I tell you. I know.”

  “So do I.”

  “No you don’t!” Nathan spun. “So what if this Hunter hasn’t killed anyone for a decade? Do you think after thousands of years of murder he just changed? That he’s not a Hunter anymore?”

  “He’s not! And he’s not a thousand years old, either.” Julia felt triumphant; clearly Nathan didn’t know what he was talking about.

  He waved his balled-up hand. “Listen to me for once! Whatever you think you know is lies. He’s using you.”

  “For what?” Nathan muttered something she couldn’t hear, and Julia itched to slap him. “I’m telling you, Cayne is the only reason I’m alive.”

  “He’s the reason we couldn’t find you,” Nathan snarled.

  “He was the one who brought me here to Washington.”

  “He killed our trackers!”

  Julia jerked to a stop as a wave of ice traveled up her body. She remembered what the pretty girl on the dream train had told her. She remembered the bikers, with their weird dead eyes and zombie-like movements. Quietly she asked, “What are trackers?”

  Nathan’s face was flushed when he turned.

  “Tell me.”

  He glared. “Trackers are Chosen who have agreed to be…reanimated. Our fallen brothers who agreed to serve as vessels for The Three. We sent one when someone here foresaw the attack on your home. He was defeated by an unknown source. We sent two more, when you were near California. Both disappeared.”

  Julia’s ears rang and her whole body trembled. “Those things almost killed me.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  She shoved her casted arm in his face. “One of them broke my wrist!”

  “Impossible,” Nathan said. “They’re servants of the Brotherhood. They would never harm one of us.”

  “They did!” Julia cried. Nathan watched her warily, like he thought she might snap at any moment. “You really think it’s fine to send two crazy zombies to kidnap someone?”

  “They were sent to escort you home,” he said. “Sent by The Three themselves.”

  “Then those Three are some sick freaks.”

  Nathan’s face turned tomato red again. He drew a slow breath and turned on his heel, marching down the hall at a brisk pace. After taking a moment to collect herself, Julia followed, wondering what would happen if she socked him in the nose.

  She was fantasizing about doing just that when Nathan stopped at a hazy glass door—one on a row of many identical glass doors. He pushed it open and stalked away. Julia watched until he disappeared in a haze of pearly light. The glow made it impossible to tell if he went into the wall or around a corner, but when she felt sure he was gone, she leaned against the smooth stone wall and took a deep breath.

  Then she pushed through the door and glanced around the room. The pale walls glowed a little; there were, of course, no windows. A simple pine bed sat between two simple pine nightstands, and a dark gray rug covered the floor. The bathroom was stark white except for its brassy fixtures.

  Julia leaned her aching body against the sink. She felt like she might go crazy, not knowing where Cayne was. All her life, the Holy Grail had been finding out why she was different. Now it seemed to matter so much less. She folded her arms around herself, picking at her cast with the fingers of her good hand.

  How was she going to do this? How would she ever find him? And…until she did? She bit her lip, refusing to cry.

  She turned the sink faucet to hot and stared into the mirror. It might have been her imagination, but she thought it had a murky quality—a pearly glow that was almost an aura. In another place, it might have been cool, but here it made her feel like she was being watched. She washed her face quickly, thinking about the Chosen. With their gray uniforms and hive-like ‘base of operation,’ they reminded her of ants. Or cult members.

  And what about the cult leaders? The Three. If she wanted to get Cayne back, if she was unable to spring him herself, would she be able to convince those Three? What were they like?

  She dried her face and looked down at her clothes, but she wasn’t seeing dirt and blood. Her mind flitted back to Nathan and his accusations. She thought about Cayne, imprisoned here, imprisoned for coming with her to Washington, imprisoned for helping her.

  He hadn’t done the terrible things Nathan alleged—had he? He’d said he was a Hunter, and it was true she didn’t know much about his past, but that didn’t mean he was a murderer. She remembered what he’d said about the aftermath of his exorcism, so long ago in Scotland.

  I killed them. Most of them. Enjoyed it, too.

  But wasn’t that normal? It was good that he had killed them. What those men had done to Cayne had been a sin.

  What about his comments after that?

  That’s my nature. It was with me when I was a child, and it’s still there. That wasn’t even the surface. I could tell you things to make you—

  Make her what?

  At the time it hadn’t seemed to matter. She told herself it still didn’t. He was Cayne, and she trusted him. She would always trust Cayne. He had earned her trust.

  She needed to see him. Tonight. With the disappearing walls and doors and floors, it was going to be hard to get to him, but she would do it somehow.

  Julia showered quickly, pausing only to watch Cayne’s blood run off her fingers and swirl into the drain. The slash across her abs was a scab now, not even a full-fledged cut. Odd, she thought as she slid into a squishy gray bathrobe: She wished she had a deeper wound, something to prove to herself that the past twelve hours had been real. That scab looked like it might be gone by morning, and with things starting to feel like her own freaky version of Inception, she needed something to ground her.

  Julia returned to the bedroom and fell onto the hard mattress, lost in a mess of anger, fear, and loneliness. Loneliness more than anything, because without Cayne, the whole world felt empty.

  The feeling was beginning to get to her when she heard a soft hiss like a steaming teapot, and then a girl stepped through her wall.

  Chapter 4

  It was her. Meredith. The girl from Julia’s train vision-dream at Rosa’s house. She was taller than Julia—maybe 5’6—and, as Julia had dreamt her, curvy in a way that all guys loved. She gave a loose and friendly wave, like she had no idea how attractive she was or didn’t care. Then she blew a giant bubble. It stuck to her commercial-smooth cheeks in a web of stretchy pink.

  “Hi’ya Jules,” she said. “Want some?” she asked as she licked the gum back into her mouth. She reached into the pocket of her short gray skirt. “Bubble Yum.” Her dark eyes rolled. “One of the world’s great evils.”

  Julia blinked.

  Th
e girl grinned, jacked her thumb back toward the wall. “Did you like my trick?”

  Trick? She forced herself to swallow back a burst of fear and look the pretty girl straight in the eye. “Who are you?”

  The girl smiled slyly and stuck out a glitter-nailed hand. “Meredith.”

  Yep, she knew that much. But… “Have we ever met before? In real life?”

  Instead of answering, Meredith nodded down at herself, at her gray skirt and her gray shirt and her gray sneakers. They were made of scrubs material, like everything here, but something about the skirt seemed off.

  “I had to make this thing myself, like with a needle and thread.” Meredith mimed the sewing motion. “It used to be pants.”

  Julia folded her arms over her chest when she realized she was wearing just a bathrobe. “Um…I should probably—” she nodded back toward the restroom. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Not a problem.” Meredith leaned against the bedpost and pulled out, of all things, a deck of flashcards. She looked ridiculous holding them. Like a model with a calculator. “I’m learning German,” she said, as Julia walked backwards.

  “German?”

  “Yep.”

  When the girl didn’t volunteer anything more, Julia just nodded—feeling like she had fallen down the rabbit hole. “Well… Okay then.” She turned and took a few steps toward the bathroom. Then she whirled back around, suddenly remembering the girl’s words in her vision. She’d said Nathan was cute, hadn’t she? Julia shook her head, like that could clear it. “So you’re here to…”

  “Start the sacrifice. For your initiation?” Meredith’s gaze bored into Julia’s, and Julia’s stomach felt like a bubble about to burst. The laughter that followed was surprisingly hearty for such a girly-girl. “We won’t sacrifice you. Yet! Duh-duh-dunnn.” She mimed a drum roll. “Really, though, I thought you might like a tour.”

  “Yes! I mean…I guess that would be cool.” Julia walked into the bathroom with blazing cheeks and visions of finding Cayne’s prison.

  Before she could gather herself, she realized her clothes were gone. Like, missing. In their place were (guess what?) a pair of loose gray scrubs, a scrubby shirt that fit her like a bag, and a pair of dark gray sneakers just like Meredith’s.

  Crap! The loss of her clothes wasn’t that big a deal, but her All-Stars… Her eyes actually stung thinking about them. She would have to get them back—pronto.

  …But what if she couldn’t?

  As she shimmied into the creepy clothes, she wondered how likely it was that Meredith could help her get to Cayne. Hopefully very. And if the girl couldn’t? If she really was some kind of Nathan spy?

  She took a big deep breath, because it was that or Freak Out.

  When she got herself together and swung the door open, she found Meredith perched on the edge of the bed, bent over her flashcards.

  As soon as Julia walked into the room, she straightened.

  “Um…did someone steal my clothes?”

  Meredith nodded, one quick bob. “That would be a Trainee.”

  “Trainee?”

  “Kid.”

  “You call children Trainees here?”

  Meredith smiled, lopsided, like she knew just how ridiculous the whole thing was but wasn’t permitted to talk about it. “I don’t; they do. You and I are Candidates, FYI.”

  “What’s a Candidate?”

  Meredith slid the cards into a pocket on the butt of her skirt. “I’ll explain everything in just a sec. The bedrooms here make me seriously claustrophobic.”

  She stepped toward the door, then paused and turned, slow and dramatic, toward the wall. Julia’s mind said no, heck no, but her eyes saw Meredith’s foot and then her shin slide through, like a spoon sinking gently into butter.

  “Holy crap.”

  Meredith eased her thigh through. “Don’t freak out. It’s not that hard.”

  Julia was about to. Meredith stepped back into the room, grabbed her hand, and nodded at the wall. “Stick your shoe through. I’ll help you.”

  Slowly, Julia extended her left foot, and sure enough, the tip of her prison-issued sneaker disappeared into the wall, which dimpled like gel.

  “Shut the front door.”

  “Now try by yourself.” Meredith dropped her hand and Julia swayed, still balanced on one foot. “Focus on moving through the wall. Focus hard. Then just do it. That’s the only way.”

  Julia hesitated—unable to forget the girl’s wistful face when she’d talked about Nathan in the vision. “Did Nathan send you here?”

  “Shh! Go, go! And no, of course not. This—” Meredith gestured to Julia, then the wall— “is seriously against the rules. It’s called Floating, and only Shepherds and full-fledged Bishops can do it anytime they want.”

  “What’s a Bishop?”

  “After we break free.”

  With a little more coaching (and after a mid-wall freak out), Julia made it through the wall. It felt like drifting through extremely dense, cold fog. The experience disoriented her, so when she opened her eyes, she was a little stunned to find herself out in the hall.

  Meredith emerged rubbing her temples. “I’ve maxed,” she said, and when Julia frowned: “Too much Floating gives me an awful headache.”

  “Oh.”

  For a long and painful moment, Julia felt even more alone than she had before Meredith showed up. The girl seemed to think that they were friends, but—as Suzanne used to say—Julia didn’t know her from Adam’s housecat. She didn’t know anyone here, and now that she knew that Stained were Chosen, and Chosen was this, she really didn’t think she wanted to have anything to do with it. All she wanted was Cayne.

  Suddenly it seemed imperative that she knew exactly who Meredith was and what her motives were—particularly where they pertained to Nathan. She glanced up and down the tunnel-hall, seeing nothing and no one.

  “I know you,” she announced, holding her breath before spilling the next part. “I know I do, because I saw you in a—” Julia choked the word out— “vision.”

  To her shock, Meredith nodded. “My specialty is astral projection, but I can also sense things about people.” She rolled her eyes. “That sounds so stupid. What I mean is, I know what’s happening in real time, somewhere else. And I’m pretty good at reading moods. What’s your thing?”

  Meredith had started walking as she talked, moving through the hall in the glow of a warm light that seemed to follow her. Julia lagged behind, feeling dizzy. Genuine or not, she didn’t want Meredith knowing anything about her—at least not yet.

  “I’m surprised you don’t already know my thing,” she hedged.

  “I’m not a Bishop, or a Shepherd. I don’t know anything.”

  Julia stared at her feet as she walked, longing for her All-Stars. “If you don’t know anything…then why were you in my vision?”

  “I’m not sure.” Meredith shrugged. “Sometimes I just…find myself places. It’s kind of inconvenient.”

  Julia traced a finger down her cast. She could understand inconvenient. Her whole life had been one huge inconvenience, starting before her earliest memory, when her parents had died. The only thing that had been easy, had been good, was Cayne. And Nathan thought Cayne was some kind of mass murderer.

  Meredith slowed down and gave her a strangely caring look. “Hey, it’s okay. I promise. Ten bootlegged MP3s says I hate this dump as much as you do. Maybe more.”

  “How did you—”

  “Sensing people’s feelings, remember?”

  Julia had a horrible thought. “Do other people know? How much I…um, dislike being here right now?”

  “Dislike.” Meredith snorted. “You totally hate it. And no, Nathan and Drew don’t have my skill, and I’ll tell you how to ward off anyone who does.”

  “How?”

  “One thing at a time.” She smiled, a look of undiluted happiness. “I’ve waited on you for a while, bestie.”

  *

  Meredith seemed forthcoming, a
nd thanks to that forthcomingness, Julia finally got an explanation of who the Chosen were: the descendants of Methuselah, the oldest man to ever live.

  “He’s in the Bible, BTW. Genesis?”

  Harry and Suzanne hadn’t gone to church very often. The Raysons had taken her almost every Sunday, but Julia didn’t remember a Methusa-whoever. She shook her head.

  “Well, anyway, the point we care about is he wasn’t a man. He was some angel-human hybrid sent to Earth to help mankind. Not that we seem to do much of that.”