dead woman in my head.
“Cas,” Rio said by my ear.
I shook myself. I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed the lapse. The last thing I needed was Rio dragging me back to Simon for brain help.
“We need to focus,” I said.
“What do you want us to do?” asked Pilar from the phone, reminding me I was still on the line with her.
I tried to gather my thoughts.
“You and Willow Grace come here,” I said after a moment. I was guessing Checker’s machines were automatically locked now, and the cops might very well be coming to execute a search warrant on the place. Without the additional computing power—or our computing expert—it didn’t make sense for us to split locations.
I tried not to feel like we were deserting Checker.
I hung up the phone and turned to Rio to ask for a status report on his search, but someone tugged at my sleeve.
Fucking Tabitha.
“Is Checker okay?” she asked. She sounded like she was about to cry.
“Go ask—I don’t know. Your dad or your sister,” I said shortly, waving a hand after Diego.
Or your sister, chittered the voices in my head. Usually being a day late on my sessions with Simon wouldn’t have shoved me to teeter so far on the edge. But with old memories chipping at my psyche …
I just needed to hold on. Long enough to get Arthur back. Then my brain could go to hell.
Tabitha still hadn’t moved, staring at me with glassily anxious eyes.
“Beat it!” I yelled.
She scrambled away and vanished.
“Hey,” someone said.
I turned. It was Matti, the Black twin with the dreads. “Don’t talk to our sister that way,” he said, poised on his toes like he wanted to fight me.
“This is all shitty,” Roy said beside him. “It’s shitty for all of us. But we don’t stand for that sort of thing, you hear? Not ever.”
I almost wanted to laugh in their faces. They were—what, standing up to me? What the hell kind of a thing was that?
They continued to stare at me, balanced in defiance like they expected me to take a swing at them.
Fight—I saw the man from the wellness center, with the mask of his old face, standing like a referee between me and a blurred opponent. An anticipatory grin slashed that face, and he brought his hand down between us with a shout. I felt myself surge forward—
“Cas,” Rio said, blinking me back to a single reality.
“Get out,” I ordered the twins. They glanced at each other, and Matti visibly swallowed, rocking back from me a few inches. “Now,” I said.
They left.
Finally alone with Rio, I slumped into one of the dining chairs and let my head hang down.
You’re never alone, sang Valarmathi, from the depths of my brain where she’d been banished. Or you’re always alone. Whichever is the greater hell.
“Cas.” Rio had pulled up a chair next to me. “Cas. Keep yourself here.”
I took a deep breath. “They. Are fucking. Overwhelming.”
“I can keep them away, if it aids you,” Rio said.
Nobody can keep them away, added the dead woman. They’ll find you wherever you go.
This was fucked up. I could face down armies, and couldn’t handle four kids and their dad without starting to crumble? I even liked children, usually. But this was … a lot of them. And right when I needed to have zero distractions, with Arthur still missing and kidnapped, and now Checker locked in an interrogation room and all the enemies in the shadows we still couldn’t track down—
I squeezed my malfunctioning brain in a death grip and pushed myself up to standing.
“Thanks,” I said to Rio. “Now, tell me where you’re at. We need to get Arthur back right fucking yesterday.”
Then if Valarmathi wanted to take me down with her, she could have me.
* * *
PILAR, WILLOW Grace, Rio, and I had redoubled our efforts viciously against the four laptops on the dining table. I’d kept an eye on Rio when he met Willow, but he hadn’t seemed perturbed—not that he ever did. But he hadn’t said anything to me about her, which I took to mean that he agreed she was an unlikely threat.
I tried to put that all out of my head and concentrate.
Willow Grace did seem to be fully on board now. She’d made notes and lists for the rest of us regarding everyone she could think of who might have had any argument with Teplova. The list was long, and Pilar had taken over cross-referencing it against the doctor’s more hidden research files.