shoes that no small-town housewife would be caught dead in.
I wanted to scream into my comms unit and call for backup, but I had no comms. There was no backup. And Macey was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-four
The road from Roseville had never felt so long. In the hours that passed, the mansion had never felt so big. And I had never felt so stupid as when Bex and Liz and I went room to room, floor to floor, searching for Macey.
Covert Operations Report 0500 hours
Operatives Morgan, Baxter, and Sutton conducted a detailed search of the Gallagher Mansion, following the textbook grid pattern of detection. (They were sure about this because Operative Sutton brought along the actual textbook.)
"I know she made it back," I said for what must have been the hundredth time, but I had to keep saying the words. It didn't matter that neither Bex nor Liz needed to hear
them. "I tracked her footprints down the tunnel…She came back that way—I'm sure of it. She left her wig by the door with the rest of her disguise, so I dropped mine there too and went looking for her. …" I looked at Bex and Liz, not even trying to hide my panic as I begged them to believe me. "I know she made it back!"
I wanted Liz to cite the incredible odds in our favor that Macey was fine. I expected Bex to tell me that everything was going to be okay, but instead she just stared at me and asked, "Scale of one to ten, how mad was she?"
We were in the library, but there were no girls among the stacks. The clock in my head was telling me it was almost five in the morning. The fire in the fireplace was nothing but a pile of smoldering embers—the only light in the room. I thought about Bex's question, slowly realizing that mad wasn't the word. Mad could be handled by challenging Bex to a good sparring match in the P&E barn. Mad goes away with a good night's sleep.
"Not mad," I said, shaking my head. "It was more like she was—"
"Heartbroken." Liz's voice was so soft I barely heard it, and even now I'm not sure if she knew she'd said the word aloud. We'd been looking for Macey for hours, but something in the way she sank onto the spiraling staircase made me realize that, somewhere along the way, Liz had gone missing too.
"When Macey found out, she was heartbroken," Liz said again, and I knew she was right.
"Yeah," I said, turning to her. "Heartbroken."
"Oh, I'll break something when we find her…" Bex's accent was coming back in waves. "She's gonna get herself snatched right up if she keeps acting this bloody stupid. Running about the country on her own …"
"You don't get it, do you?" It was the first time I'd ever heard Liz raise her voice, the first time I'd seen her skin so deathly white. Even Bex stopped and stared. "I mean, look at you—look at both of you! You don't know what it's like. You…belong," Liz said, as if Bex and I were at the core of an ancient secret and didn't realize it. And I guess, in a way, we were.
"You." Liz turned to Bex. "You go all over the world with your mom and dad, tracking down arms dealers and staking out terrorists during summer break."
Bex started to protest until she realized that what Liz was saying wasn't an insult and, furthermore, it was absolutely true.
"And you," Liz said, spinning on me. "Cam, your mom is the headmistress…Your aunt's a living legend…" For some reason I felt my cheeks flush red. "You guys don't have any idea what it's like to be…normal. And then one day someone tells you that the toughest, most elite, most amazing school in the world is in Roseville, Virginia"—Liz's voice had taken on a very dreamy quality, but as she settled her gaze on us, her words turned to steel—"and they want you."
I thought about what she'd said and realized that there'd never been a moment in my life when I'd doubted whether or not I could become a Gallagher Girl. For Bex, the toughest barrier was geography.
"Yeah," Liz said, reading our expressions. "I'd always been pretty good at school." It was probably the understatement of the century, but I didn't dare interrupt. "People always told me I was smart—people always said that I was special. But Macey…" Liz's voice cracked. My eyes were going blurry, and even Bex looked as if she were about to cry. "What have people always told her?"
I didn't want to think about the answer to that question—not then. Not ever. So the three of us sat surrounded by books and secrets and the light of a dying fire, finally realizing that we were the only people in Macey's life who knew not to judge a girl by her cover.
"We've got to find her," Bex said, starting for the door. "Now."
But I was already way ahead of her, pushing forward, riding a wave of exhaustion and terror; instinct driving me forward as I prayed that I was wrong.
I could hear them following behind me, their footsteps echoing on the old stone floors while Bex called, "We've looked down there already."
But I just ran faster through the abandoned halls, past empty classrooms and dark windows and, finally, down the stairs that led to the long basement corridor—to the place where, in a way, it had all begun.
There were no windows there. The corridor was dark, the stone floors were rough, but still I ran toward the place where my mother had brought us more than a year ago and told us the truth about Macey.
As I stopped in front of the tapestry that showed the entire Gallagher Family tree, I tried to imagine how many times I'd disappeared behind it, but I knew that our trip that night had been the most important journey that that passageway had ever witnessed.
I was breathing heavily, almost afraid of what I'd find, as Bex and Liz appeared beside me.
"She's here somewhere," Liz said. "She's got to be. She's…"