had been deserted for a long time, which was something else I’d have to quiz Willow Grace about. Someone holding Arthur there, in one of the other buildings … it was possible, but I didn’t rate it as likely.
I ignored the possibility that I just wasn’t letting myself consider it. As I’d told Pilar, what would be the point in such thinking anyway? It wouldn’t help me find Arthur any faster.
I scanned the night for where we’d left the Yaris.
Pilar was, indeed, at her car. She had her CZ out, and there was no sign of Willow Grace.
“What happened?” I said.
“We got out okay. What happened in there? Tabitha, what—what are you—are you guys all right?”
“I meant, where’s Willow Grace?” I said.
“Oh! She’s in the car. Back seat.” She gestured at the car and cast a self-conscious look at Tabitha before tucking her gun away. “You can take over now,” she added to me.
I located Willow Grace’s profile in the back seat, still and placid, an idealized sculpture of a woman. Good. She had more answers to all this, and I was going to make sure she told me.
A sneaking apprehension wormed its way through my mind. If those answers intersected with my own history … Simon had warned me over and over that learning too much about my past would cause my brain to destabilize and derail itself. I’d felt firsthand what it was like for the shell of its old owner to come gabbling back—Valarmathi, she whom Simon had known and loved and saved by destroying her.
She was dead, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t drag me down with her.
Tough. You’ll figure it out. It’s Arthur.
If my mental health was the price to pay for rescuing him, well, that’s what I had Simon for. He could fucking earn his keep.
“Tabitha, sweetie.” Pilar took the girl’s hands in hers, drawing my attention back to them. “What are you doing here?”
“I’d like to know that too,” I said. I turned to face her, arms crossed.
“I—I wanted to help find Dad,” Tabitha answered.
“You almost got us killed.” If there was one extra shit complication I hadn’t needed tonight … “You know how you can help? By staying the fuck out of the way.”
“Cas! Shush.” Pilar sounded scandalized.
“No,” I said. “How the hell do you think ‘hey, Arthur, we rescued you but got your daughter killed’ will go down?”
Emotion surged, and something in me wanted to say a lot more than that, to yell at this too-reckless teenager until I lost my voice, because even the thought of giving news like that to Arthur wrecked me like I’d been run over by a semitruck. I wanted to be angry at him, not validate every decision he’d made.
Especially if my own old enemies were already responsible for everything that had happened here, screaming forward to hurt Arthur and his family.
Enemies I hadn’t had any hand in making. Ones I had no intel on, or control.
“You didn’t get me killed!” Tabitha protested. “You saved me. Unless that was—you with the—?” She made a boom gesture with her hands.
“No! No, no, no,” Pilar said. “That wasn’t us.”
“But it might’ve been, and you wouldn’t have known,” I snapped. “You work at cross-purposes on the same job, you’re going to get someone killed. And if you don’t know basic shit like that, you have no business breaking into places.”
Tabitha’s face fell as if I’d just told her she’d failed a test.
“Sweetie, how are you even here?” Pilar said.
“I went to Dad’s office.” She sounded like she was on the verge of tears. “Have you seen it? It’s a mess. And I searched around a little, but it seemed kinda hopeless, so then I went on the computer—I have the passwords because I do homework there sometimes—and I looked at his calendar. And he had written on next Sunday to ‘meet with Tabitha’s doctor,’ and that didn’t make any sense because I don’t have any doctor’s appointments ever except physicals. So I looked at his Internet history, and he did a search for this place.” She pushed her hands at the smoky ruin beyond the fence like she was a mime. “I figured it was code, like, he’d put our names so it wouldn’t look suspicious, but he knew it wasn’t really about us.”
Code to stop Checker from knowing, in case he happened to see Arthur’s calendar. Right. A mundane errand related to his kids wouldn’t look suspicious.
Fuck, this was a mess.
“No, I meant—” Pilar licked her lips.