wasn't still fleeing, it was only from ignorance. That thought sparked another in a little cascade of mental dominoes.
"Hey," I said. "How did you know where to find us?"
"I called her," Aubrey said, sounding something between defensive and surprised. "That was the plan wasn't it? We settled in, then we called Karen."
Her contact number had been on the report, it was true. And I'd had the lawyers cc all the guys. I'd assumed that I would be the one to make contact, since I was the one with Eric's cell phone. It wasn't anything I'd explicitly said. It wasn't even something I'd really thought about, and yet something about it unnerved me. Something about Aubrey choosing this moment to take initiative with one of our plans. With seeing those pictures of Karen and being moved to call her.
Karen's perfect blue eyes flickered between me and Aubrey, reading the subtext like it was written in foot-tall flaming letters.
"I should have confirmed with you," Karen said to me. "It was thoughtless of me."
"No," I said, waving it away with a laugh. "No, Aubrey's right. That was absolutely the plan. I just didn't know we'd done it." I picked up another crawfish and snapped its head free. "It's cool."
"Good that he did," Ex said, maybe a little more sharply than was strictly needed. "If Karen hadn't arrived in time to intervene, things could have gotten ugly."
I felt the urge to defend myself, but I wasn't quite sure what from. I wanted to say that I'd been holding my own against the rider. That it was just fine with me that someone else had called Karen and told her where we were. Without telling me. I didn't have a problem with any of it. Chogyi Jake coughed once, then folded his hands on the table. His sweet, enigmatic smile could have meant anything.
"There's more than enough room for ugly still to come," Karen said. "Glapion knows we're here. We don't have a lot of time if we're going to do what we need to do."
We turned toward her like sunflowers on a bright day. Even me.
"The victim is going to be Glapion's other granddaughter. Not Daria, but Sabine," Karen said. "We can take it as given that Sabine isn't going to accept the idea that her loving grandmother is about to become a soulless killer."
"How do we address that?" Ex asked, and I was a little disturbed by the we until Karen smiled. I was being paranoid and territorial and weird. I was tired. None of this was her fault.
"Normally, I'm a strong advocate of people's freedoms and right to self-determination," Karen said. "This is an exception."
"We kidnap Sabine," Chogyi Jake said.
"We do," Karen said. "And when she's safe, we get the grandmother, extract the rider, and kill it."
Chapter 4
FOUR
"We need to know where the girl's going to be," Ex said. "When, where. What kind of protection. Does Grandma Glapion have guards on the girl."
"And a van," Aubrey said. "Something like Chogyi Jake's old clunker. No windows. That'll be important, right?"
Karen held up her hand, palm out. The smile at the corner of her mouth deepened slightly.
"We can't just go snatch the girl off the street tonight," she said.
"The more time we take-" Ex began.
"The more prepared we are when it happens," Karen said. "Let's say we do the thing right now. Go get the girl, throw her in the back of a rental. Great. Now we've got an angry teenage girl in the car. What exactly do you plan to do with her? And keep in mind, we're actually committing a felony when we do that. The police aren't going to take 'we're protecting her from her demon-ridden family' as a serious defense."
"And," Chogyi Jake said slowly, thinking through the words as he said them, "it isn't as though the rider is without resources. It found Jayné even before she knew where she was going to be."
"The Sight isn't encyclopedic," Karen said. "Daria doesn't see everything, and what she does see, she often won't understand. But yes, we can assume that Glapion will foresee at least some of our plans."
Aubrey leaned forward, brow furrowed. Ex frowned and crossed his arms.
"We need a safe house," I said. "Someplace we can keep her. And we'll want to put wards on it. Like what Eric had on the house in Denver. Something to make us hard to find. Chogyi Jake? You were the one who kept those going. Do you think you could do it again?"
There