Breed of Innocence (The Breed Chronicles, #01) (2 page)

He chuckled. “Come on. Up you go.”

Rolling to my side, I sat up. He held out his hands for me, but I only eyed him. He made a face, then motioned for me to take his hands. I did, but I kept my gaze locked on his face. His fingers wrapped around my wrists and he pulled me to my feet like I weighed nothing. I almost went soaring again and struggled to stay on my feet.

“Thanks,” I said, taking in a deep breath. As I exhaled, I spun around and kicked out.

Mr. Holt pivoted out of the way a split second before my foot would’ve connected with his groin and I ended up hitting his thigh instead. He managed to grab one of my arms, but I pulled free and took off running again. I frowned as his laughter followed me.

Twenty feet from the main road, I saw a car and started waving my arms. A black sedan slid to a smooth stop in front of me and I yanked the door open. My gaze went to the driver, then to the man in the backseat. I hung my head, shook it slowly. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

The driver was the second man from the house, the one who’d disappeared. I had no idea who the other one was. They both wore similar, weird smiles, like they knew the punch line to a joke someone forgot to tell me.

The man in the backseat looked up at me. “Hello, Miss Hall,” he said, his hands resting on his lap.

I turned around and ran nose-first into a hard chest. “Good try,” Mr. Holt said, winking at me. “‘A’ for effort.”

“‘A’ for abysmal failure,” I muttered.

He reached around me and opened the back door. His hand went to the small of my back. “Let’s go.”

I stared at the car and planted my feet. “I am
not
getting in there. You said you weren’t cops, and you’re definitely not social workers, because they don’t make it a habit of chasing people down, which means I don’t have to go with you. I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you’re probably perverts or something. Either way, I’m not saying anything and I am
not
getting into—okay, in we go,” I said as I was nudged—almost gently—into the backseat.

Mr. Holt shut the door and then got into the passenger’s seat in front. When the driver pulled back onto the road, I looked at the man beside me, crossed my arms over my chest, and glared. He had brown hair with spots of gray, and he seemed like the oldest of the three, with a kind of quiet authority. He was probably the boss or leader.

“Now what?” I asked him.

Bossman turned his body toward me slightly and studied me for a moment with a smile on his face. “Aren’t you at all concerned?”

I wasn’t really. Not yet. Bordering on pissed, but not scared yet. They didn’t seem threatening, at least not in the we’re-gonna-kill-you-and-dump-your-body-in-a-swamp kind of way. After spending the last year in a house surrounded by people who pretended to be something they weren’t, I trusted my instincts. And despite what Mr. Holt said, they had to be cops. Fishface or one of the Tadpoles had probably called in some trumped up complaint about me, hoping to get me kicked out of the house or thrown in juvie. Either scenario would’ve gotten me away from Mrs. Gill, so it would’ve been a win/win in their book.

Mine too, now that I thought about it.

“What do you want?” I asked instead of answering his question.

“I have a proposition for you.”

And they were back to being perverts.
Great instincts, Jade.

“Thanks, but I’ll pass. My body isn’t for sale.” My hand inched toward the door handle. “You can drop me off here.” When the car didn’t slow, I grabbed the handle and yanked on it. It didn’t budge. Something cold crept its way up my stomach, to my throat. I took a deep breath.
Don’t panic. You’ll get stupid if you panic.
I pushed the nausea and panic down, and in a voice that was calmer than I thought I could manage, said, “Stop the car.”

The two men in the front seat laughed. It wasn’t very scary, but it was annoying.

Bossman shook his head. “We don’t want your body, Miss Hall.” His eyes, a dark brown, seemed to lighten, and the sides of his mouth curved upward. He didn’t
look
like he was lying. “At least,” he continued, “not in the way you’re thinking.”

I kept my hand near the door. Worse case scenario, I’d just punch out the window and jump.

My eyes narrowed. “Then what
do
you want?”

“We want you to come work for us, for lack of an easier explanation.”

The snort escaped before I could stop it. “I’m a sixteen-year-old living in a group home because no one wanted me. I’ve got ‘authority issues’—” I used air quotes. “—a bad temper, and an awesome attitude that no one else seems to think is all that awesome.” Turning in my seat, I crossed my arms again and raised an eyebrow. “What possible work could you have for me that wouldn’t require me going to jail for beating the—”

“It’s nothing illegal, Miss Hall,” he said quickly. All three of them laughed again and I felt like I was missing something. “In fact, after looking over your file, I think you’ll find our offer to your liking.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll love it.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Yeah, three guys offering something to my ‘liking’.
What’s next? Flying pigs? The apocalypse? Or, hey, maybe, Congratulations, you’ve just won a million—
“Wait.” I paused, then blinked at him. “What file?”

“We know what happened to your family.”

The air in my lungs evaporated, like I’d been sucker punched. I clenched my jaw. “You don’t know crap about my family,” I said through gritted teeth as my hands curled into painfully tight fists and my nails dug into my palms.

“I know your father, Robert, died in a car accident when you were four. I know your mother, Fiona, and older brother, Brian, died in your home two years ago this October, when you were fourteen. I know more about you and your family than you might think. It’s quite possible I know more than you, Miss Hall.”

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care, but my family is my business, not yours.” No one got to talk about them except me.

He shook his head. “I never introduced myself, did I? I apologize.” He indicated the driver first, then the passenger. “You’ve met David Walden and Peter Holt. I'm Director Greene. I run a facility called the CGE. It’s an organization that—”

“I don’t care,” I snapped. “Just let me out of the car.”

Leaning forward, Director Greene pulled a file from a leather briefcase at his feet. He flipped a few pages in before tossing it on my lap. His eyes, cool and unblinking, stayed locked with mine. “Your mother and older brother were both murdered in your home, two years ago this coming October. You were apparently in your room asleep when the attack occurred, though upon hearing screaming, you woke up and went to investigate. You were hurt, but somehow managed to get to a phone to call for help. The police report states that you claimed—”

“Shut up!” Fire boiled in my stomach until it moved throughout my body. My eyes heated. I didn’t need the reminder of that night. I didn’t need some guy—a freaking stranger—to tell me what happened. I remembered everything. “Just shut up! You have no right to talk about my family. You don’t know anything about them or me—”

“You claimed a monster killed them,” he said, continuing on as though I hadn’t spoken. “When you spoke with a psychologist afterward, he believed you were traumatized and saw your attacker as a monster because you viewed your family’s death as inhuman.” He paused. “The cops never found him, did they? Their killer? They never brought you in for a lineup, never followed up with you.” He shook his head slightly and his expression softened. Something that might’ve been sympathy shone in his eyes. “They never even let you speak with a police sketch artist, did they? Not because you didn’t see your attacker, but because they didn’t believe you. Because you didn’t describe a man in the report. You told them exactly what you saw. A demon.”

I turned my head away and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands to keep them dry, refusing to cry in front of strangers.

In front of strangers who knew too much.

The cops—and the shrink they’d made me see—had both tried convincing me that demons didn’t exist. But I knew what I saw. I knew what killed my family, even if I hadn’t found any concrete proof yet.

And I didn’t know what Mrs. Gill was up to, but she had a part in this. She had set this up somehow.

I stared out the window. “My family is gone.” I bit the words out, forcing them through a lump in my throat. I turned back toward him. “Monsters and demons aren’t real. They’re CG effects in movies or TV shows, or people dressed up in costumes with too much makeup on, walking around on Halloween to scare kids—”

“You don’t believe that and I think we both know it. I’ve talked with the woman who runs the group home—Mrs. Gill. She told me about your dreams, Miss Hall. She told me about the nightmares you still have to this day, even last night.”

Pain radiated up my jaw from clenching my teeth so hard and my fingers were cold. I glanced down, found them white. “You’ve never had a bad dream before,
Director Greene
,” I said with a note of contempt.

He gave a small nod. “Certainly.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“The big deal, as you call it, is I doubt everyone dreams of monsters. I doubt they all wake up in the middle of night and refuse to go back to sleep. They don’t spend their time researching demons. They don’t have knives confiscated.” He waited a beat, then added, “And I highly doubt they risk being thrown into juvenile detention by sneaking out to find them.”

“So I like browsing the web, big whoop.” I shrugged it off. “I live in a house with eight other people who pretty much hate my guts and resent the fact I breathe the same air as them. I can’t say the feeling isn’t mutual.”

I thought of Lucy, one of my three roommates. She’d spent the last year making my life miserable, snitching on me about anything and everything. Real things, fake things—it didn’t matter as long as it got me into trouble. And she, or one of the other girls, had to have told Mrs. Gill about the dreams, because she wouldn’t have found out otherwise. She wouldn’t have cared.

“Even so.”

“It’s a group home. We’re not exactly the best crowd to begin with, you know? And I can bet you at least half of them—if not all—have a knife or two hiding somewhere.”

Because I knew I wasn’t the only one.

But I’d wised up and stopped hiding them in the room if I wasn’t in it. After a particularly nasty nightmare one night, I’d woken up with a knife clutched in my hand and blood streaming through my fingers. No one had seen me, but it’d been a close call. Having weapons of any kind was strictly against the rules, and getting caught with another one would have gotten me in a world of trouble.

He raised an eyebrow in silent query. “And?”

“And what?”

“The last thing? Sneaking out to look for demons?”

I laughed but the sound was strained, even to my ears. “It’s a group home,” I repeated slowly. “You try living in that place for a year. I bet you’d try to leave, too. Heck, give it a week and you’d be ready to run away.”

“I imagine I would. But aren’t the issues I raised the same reasons you’re in Mrs. Gill’s care to begin with? The foster families they tried placing you with were incapable of dealing with the fights, the demon hunts, the weapons.”

“So?”

He shook his head. “Don’t insult us both by lying. You know what monsters are out there, Miss Hall. You’ve seen them. You’ve seen what they can do, and you’ve tried finding them.”

“They’re not real. The thing—guy,” I corrected quickly, seeing his smug look, “was on drugs or wearing a mask. Just let me out. I want to go back!”

“You haven’t heard my offer.”

“I don’t need to hear it. I decline. I refuse. There’s absolutely nothing you can offer me that I’d—”

“What about the opportunity to catch the thing that took your family from you?” He met my stare and held it.

I’d been half a second away from executing Plan A and punching the window out. His words stopped me cold and had my hand dropping from the handle. “I don’t know what killed them. I don’t remember. I was in shock.”

“Stop lying to yourself. To me.” For the first time, his words were clipped and his tone harsh.

“There are no such things as demons. They’re just—”

“CG effects, yes, I know. That’s what you said before. I can help you find them, Jade.”

“I’ll tell you what I told Mrs. Gill and everyone else. I. Don’t. Believe. In. Demons.” I laughed again. “Did Mrs. Gill put you up to this? Is this her new way of trying to get rid of me? She can’t have me arrested, so she’s going to try to have me locked away in a padded room because she doesn’t like me?”

He sighed. “Mrs. Gill didn’t arrange this meeting, Miss Hall. I did. If I prove I’m not working with her, that I’m not trying to set you up, will you at least listen to my offer?”

“No.”

“Two hours. Give me two hours to prove it. If we’re right, you listen to my offer.”

“And when you’re wrong?”

“
If
we’re wrong, then you go back to the group home.”

“Wow! What a great consolation prize.” I slapped my hands to my cheeks. “I get to go back to the place I should be at now. Golly, thanks!”

Smiling, and fighting back a laugh, he shook his head and reached into his briefcase again. My hand went to the door immediately. He noticed the move and slowly pulled his hand back, clutching a white envelope between two fingers. He threw it beside me. When I made no move to touch it, he said, “Open it.”

I spared him a fleeting look, then stared down at the envelope. It was thick. Holding it away from me like it might explode, I carefully unfolded the top and peeked inside. My eyes went wide, my mouth slack. It was full of bills. I shuffled through it, found twenties and fifties—even hundred dollar bills. More money than I’d seen at one time ever. After another minute of ogling, I looked up. “You’re going to give me…however much this is…just to waste an hour of my time?”

“It will be a bit longer than an hour, but yes. In essence, I’m paying for your time. Nothing more, Miss Hall,” he added hastily, this time with a hint of annoyance. “And I don’t believe it will be a waste of time, but if you’re correct, then you’ll be compensated for it.”