him in the middle of the night?
What if this was some kind of emergency?
I pressed the accept call button, before I could overthink it and lose my nerve. “Hello? Anne?” I said, and for a moment, there was only silence on the other end. Then someone exhaled into my ear.
“The spider is dead,” a child’s voice said over the line, and I realized I was talking to Hadley. “The web is a trap.”
“What? Hadley? Is something wrong?”
“The spider is dead! The web is a trap!” she shouted, and her high-pitched scream skewered my brain, then bounced around the inside of my skull. “The spider is dead! The web is a trap!”
I held the phone away from my ear to save my hearing, and I had to half shout to be heard over her. “Hadley! Put your mom on the phone.” But she was still screaming those same two sentences. “Hadley!”
“Hadley!” Anne’s voice echoed mine from the other end of the line, and a plastic clattering followed as her phone hit the floor, but I could still hear the child screaming, and her mother trying to calm her down. “Hadley, what’s wrong? Who’s on the phone? Did you have a bad dream?”
“Anne!” I shouted, desperate to be heard over them both. I didn’t know what spider she was talking about, but I understood both “dead” and “trap.”
Something was horribly wrong. And the call had come on Kris’s phone.
I was still shouting at Anne, trying to get her attention, when my bedroom door flew open and crashed into the dresser against the wall. “Sera?” Kori had her gun drawn and aimed at the floor. “What happened?”
She stepped inside and Ian came in after her, similarly armed, and they automatically scanned separate halves of the room, looking for the threat. When they found none, their gazes returned to me, then slid down from my face. Which is when I remembered that I was naked. And holding Kris’s phone.
“It’s Hadley.” I held the phone out to Kori as I pulled the sheet up to my chest with my free hand. “She’s freaking out about a spider, or something.”
Kori set her gun on the end table, then took the phone and listened as Anne tried to calm Hadley. Ian turned around while I pulled my borrowed pajamas back on, and as I tugged the shirt into place, Kori handed the phone back to me. “They can’t hear us, and I can’t get to them until Anne turns off the infrared grid.”
Her house had state-of-the-art security, which—Kris had explained—Ruben Cavazos had paid for, in order to protect his love child. Noelle’s biological daughter.
“Is that Kris’s phone?” Van said from the doorway as Kori slipped past her into the hall, and I realized that my shouting into the phone had woken the entire household. “Where is he?”
“Downstairs, I guess.” I stood and held the phone a foot away from my ear, and could still hear Hadley screaming.
Kori stepped back into my room a minute later wearing jeans beneath the T-shirt she slept in, with her own phone in her hand.
“Anne still has a home phone,” she explained, pressing buttons on her cell.
I listened on Kris’s phone, and over the line, as Hadley’s screams quieted to a whimper, I heard the home phone ring. Something clattered against wood, and Anne said, “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Kori said from my room. “Turn off the grid. I’m coming over.”
“Just a second.” Anne’s voice was distant now, over Kris’s line. Kori hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket, then headed into the hall. A second later, her footsteps clomped down the stairs so fast I was surprised she didn’t trip over her own feet and plummet to her death. An instant after that, the closet door slammed, and I knew she was gone.
“Anne, can you hear me?” I said into Kris’s phone, and finally she picked it up.
“Who is this?” she said, and I could hear Hadley crying softly in the background, still mumbling about a spider.
“It’s Sera.”
“Where’s Kris?” she said. “Why are you on his phone?”
“He—” I said, but before I could admit to anything—which I wasn’t eager to do—I heard Kori’s voice over the line as she stepped into some shadow in Anne’s house. Almost at the same time, more footsteps raced up the stairs, and Vanessa stepped into my room again.
“Kris is gone.”
“What?” I said, but she could only shrug. That was the extent of her information. “Anne, I gotta go,” I said into the phone, then ended