Cassidy Jones and the Luminous (Cassidy Jones Adventures Book 4) (4 page)

Dad glanced up from his laptop to give Nate a look. Behind me, I could feel admonishment rolling off Mom in waves. Nate liked living on the edge.

“Nate, dear,” Mom said, in a super-sweet voice, “would you like orange juice?”

Nate, you are in so much trouble
, I sang in my head, smirking around the bagel lodged in my mouth.

Glancing at Mom, Nate straightened up in his chair. “Uh, no. Thanks, Mom.”

The sounds of “Soul Sister” suddenly sang from Ben’s cell. He looked at the text and grinned.

“Cool!” His thumbs punched out a reply. “Drake, this is Leroy. He’s flying in tomorrow.”

“Is he making an episode about The Lake Washington Monster?” I guessed.

Leroy Rays was the host of the hunting show
Big Game
. After a run-in with a supposed Sasquatch—me—he had started another cable show:
Monster Hunters
.

“Yep!” Ben beamed and sent his text. He lived for supernatural stuff.

“I look forward to seeing him.” Dad’s crystal-blue eyes combed the news on his laptop. With his golden-blond hair, clean-cut features, and million-dollar smile, he looked every bit the successful news broadcaster. “We’ll have to schedule an interview with him. Cassidy and Nate, you might be interested in this.”

Dad started a video and turned the laptop around so everyone at the table could see the screen. The footage rolled from a still of Jared’s dad, Owen Wells. He stood next to a man a bit taller than he, with deep-set eyes, a cleft chin, and a weather-beaten complexion. On the other side of the man stood a girl my age. She was gorgeous and exotic-looking. She had bronze skin, almond-shaped eyes, and a beautiful head of raven hair. Her dark, silky locks shone even on the laptop screen.

The man introduced her as his stepdaughter Ashlyn. “Patrick Grimm, Owner/CEO of Luminous Water” flashed at the bottom of the screen as he talked about some charitable work his company was doing for the homeless. Grimm had a Southern accent, and the more I looked at him, the more I pictured him in a flannel shirt, gripping an ax like Paul Bunyan. Seemed to fit him better than the swanky Armani suit and tie he wore.

“What’s Jared’s dad doing there?” I asked, noting that Ashlyn looked like she wanted to crawl under a rock. I could hardly blame her. I wouldn’t like a news camera in my face, either.

“He’s Patrick Grimm’s lawyer,” Dad responded.

“So he’s making sure his client minds his p’s and q’s,” I guessed, studying Jared’s father.

Jared had his father’s dirty-blond hair, angular face, and athletic build, but that was where the similarities ended. Where Jared was noble and trustworthy, his father was a snake. He’d left Jared’s mom Eileen when Jared was three. That was all I knew about him. Jared rarely talked about his dad.

~~~

As was our routine, I texted Emery that Nate and I were leaving for school as I collected my stuff from my room. By the time Nate and I ambled onto our front porch, Emery was waiting at the end of our English Tudor’s front walk. That morning, he wasn’t alone.

“Hey,” Nate called to Emery and his father, jogging ahead of me.

I lingered behind. Gavin and Emery noted me doing so, with identical amused expressions.

Emery was the spitting image of his father. The same jet-black hair, black, intelligent eyes, milky complexion, and chiseled good looks. The only thing six-foot-four-inch Gavin had on Emery was four inches and muscle mass, both of which I had no doubt Emery would one day match. As it was, he wasn’t one of those tall, scraggly high school boys. Emery was mature beyond his years, in more than just physicality.

Emery and Nate were in the midst of exchanging high-fives when I finally joined them on the sidewalk. Gavin smirked.

“You were busy last night, Cassidy,” he remarked.

I shrugged. “Just in the right place at the right time.”

“You’ve made a habit of that,” he observed.

Unlike my parents, Gavin didn’t mind my protecting public safety. More accurately, he didn’t mind me exercising my abilities. My superpowers fascinated him. I could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes, which would often become calculating as he watched me perform one of Serena’s physical tests, or when Emery and I would playfully spar in their family’s basement. Sometimes Gavin joined in—but, with him, the fighting wasn’t for fun. He would give it all he had, executing every lethal move he knew, and he was extremely innovative.

Once, during sparring, he had swiped a hammer from the floor and hurled it at me. I’d caught it by the handle. As Serena scolded him for the dirty trick, he’d just leaned against a support beam, catching his breath, and stared at me. Sweat was beading on his forehead; behind, those gears turned and turned.

“So, how’s the remodeling going?” I asked to change the topic. So I’d intervened in another crime. Big deal. I motioned to a dump truck piled high with dirt and the white van with “Marathon Construction” painted on the side.

The “remodeling” was more like Bruce Wayne’s construction project when he’d had the Bat Cave built. Right now, the Marathon workers—with the help of shovels, wheelbarrows, and a jackhammer—were digging out a secret room, which would eventually serve as a laboratory. They also were digging a tunnel underneath the street to connect our two basements. That way, we could go back and forth between our houses without witnesses. The secret laboratory also would act as a safe room, if worse came to worst.

Frankly, I didn’t know if this project was legal, even though Gavin had obtained building permits. We didn’t ask how, just like we didn’t pump him for information about the Marathon Construction workers. They were a shady-looking crew. Nate and I had decided that whomever they really worked for must have owed Gavin a big favor. But we kept our theories to ourselves.

About a month earlier, Dad had queried Gavin about them when he couldn’t stand it any longer. Gavin had looked at him squarely and warned, “Drake, don’t ask.” And Dad didn’t. Where government operatives are concerned, it’s best to keep questions to oneself.

“It’s coming along,” Gavin answered vaguely, a typical Phillips. He cast a glance at Emery and Nate. “You boys can grab a shovel this afternoon and help speed things along.”

“Sounds like a blast,” Emery remarked cheekily while he checked his email on his cell.

“Whoa! Wait a sec.” Nate held a hand up and eyed a wheelbarrow, as though someone had had the gall to scrawl his name across the mound of dirt it held. “You mean,
we
should haul dirt?” He flipped his thumb between himself and Emery. “No offense, Gavin, but you’re missing the obvious. Think speed, strength
,
and
not
boy.”

“Wimp,” I said.

“No argument there, if it gets me out of shoveling.”

“Well played, Nate,” Emery ribbed as he punched out something on his cell’s keypad.

“You’re a master at shoveling, son, and I don’t mean dirt.” Gavin gave my twin a playful dope-slap. “I’ll see
you
after school. Bye, kids.”

Gavin crossed the street to their Victorian and asked one of the workers, Cristiano, a husky, shifty-eyed man who was unloading an air compressor from the van, “How about a cup of Joe?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.” Cristiano grinned and waved a bottled water at him.

His smile was a bit of a surprise. Cristiano was hardly the smiling type.

“Hey!” Miriam Cohen called from her porch, two houses down from mine. “I thought I’d missed you!”

“Run,” Nate advised Emery.

I backhanded Nate’s chest. He made an
umph
sound, as though I’d knocked the air out of him.

“Careful,” he said, rubbing his chest. “I’m delicate.”

His poking fun at Miriam’s obsession with Emery was getting old. But, as she bobbed toward us, I couldn’t imagine why Emery wasn’t enthralled with her. Dark, smooth curls bouncing off slender shoulders, dazzling smile on an animated and classically beautiful face, cobalt-blue eyes that glistened like deep seawater—How could any boy resist her?

“When are you going to admit that you’re madly in love with me?” she brazenly demanded of Emery, probably waking up a few neighbors in the process. She squeezed his cheeks between her hands, creating fish lips and causing his black-framed glasses to lift on his nose.

I nodded. Yes, if in Emery’s shoes, I could resist her, too.

~~~

I locked gazes with the most beautiful set of chocolate-brown eyes in the world—limpid, soulful, and fringed with thick, black lashes. My heart thumped like a rabbit.

Jared’s sculpted lips curled at the corners into his slow smile. I had spent long hours lost in daydreams about what it would be like to kiss those succulent lips.

“He’s looking at you like he wants to gobble you up, like a coconut pie,” Miriam observed, and not quietly at that.

Chuckling, Jared continued to his table across the room, while Emery said under his breath, for my ears only, “And you wonder how I can resist her?”

I glanced at him, stumped. I couldn’t recall ever asking him that.

“Coconut pie—
yum
,” Dixon Pilchowski butted in, giving me a lecherous look. His toady, Rodrigo Perez, sniggered.

I glared across the table into Dixon’s mean, smug face, furious that he’d made me blush.

His mocking eyes slithered to Emery. Crossing his arms over his broad chest, he leaned back in the chair and attempted to stare Emery down. All at once, Dixon became uncomfortable and glanced away. Typical bully.

Ever since Emery had humbled him for threatening Miriam, Dixon had been scared spitless of him. Everyone in the school knew about the incident, including Mr. Levy, our science teacher, whom I’d become convinced was inherently evil. A well-intentioned teacher wouldn’t assign the five people involved in conflict to the same table. It was as though he’d tossed a lit match into a barrel of gas and sat waiting for it to explode.

Mr. Levy had come to dislike Emery almost as much as he obviously despised Dixon, who must have represented every bully who had ever made Levy’s personal high school existence miserable.

His resentment of Emery was apparent in his thin, pinched face, which perfectly matched his sour disposition. His reasons why weren’t as clear-cut, however. I’d assumed that he’d sensed Emery was brighter than he let on. Just
how
bright would have probably blown Levy’s mind.

The bell rang, and right on cue Dixon slouched in his chair, setting his jaw and tucking clenched fists into crossed arms. Levy had trained him well. Dixon would remain in that position, not speaking, unless Levy decided to humiliate him.

I peeked over my shoulder at Jared. He gifted me his breathtaking smile. I never grew tired of that smile.

“Blackwell . . .” Mr. Levy began roll call.

Reluctantly, I turned back around. When Jared had transferred into my class for our second semester, I’d been ecstatic. Then Levy seated him at the table farthest away from mine. Like I said, the man was pure evil.

After roll call, Levy walked to the front of the room—in his odd, crabby, hunched-over, shuffling way—and grimly peered at the open textbook in his hands. Jerking up his head of stringy hair, he scanned the room, planning an assault. His thin lips turned up into a quivering smile; his hostile gaze rested on Emery.

“Mr. Phillips, you do realize that when you are absent, it is your responsibility to be prepared for class upon returning?”

Emery had played hooky the day before so he could track down a delinquent client for bail bond agent Riley O’Shea, his employer and former college mate. When Emery wasn’t keeping an eye on me or pretending to be a regular teenager, he often did skip tracing for her.

Emery gave Levy a cocky grin. “Yeah.”

My stomach tightened. The dislike being mutual, Emery dumbed himself down even more for this class, just to set Levy off. You’d think the old sourpuss wouldn’t have been worth his effort. But I’ve learned that, genius or not, a fifteen-year-old boy will behave like a fifteen-year-old boy.

“Since you have familiarized yourself with the chapter, as I observed you doing while entering the room—”

“Busted,” David Hsu whispered behind us.

I squirmed in my seat. Emery was in the habit of doing assigned reading while walking between classes. He thumbed through pages so rapidly that it had become the source of a joke among our friends. No one believed he was really speed-reading. I knew better.

“—Perhaps you could tell us which revered scientist is known as the Father of Microbiology.”

“Er, Einstein?”

Miriam giggled and reached around me to pinch his arm. “You’re naughty, Emery
Mendel
.”

Laughter rippled through the room. Our classmates caught on, teasing:

“I wonder who it is, Emery
Mendel
?”

“Emery
Mendel
, I’m clueless, too.”

“Emery
Mendel
, didn’t you read the chapter?”

“Silence!” Levy shouted. His puckered face displayed outrage, but his beady eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

I sighed, seeing another detention in Emery’s near future.

“Mr. Phillips, as your classmates
perceptively
deduced, you did not read the chapter. Since you are unable to find time to prepare for class, I need to create an opportunity for you—in detention,
this
afternoon.”

“Sounds fair.”

Mr. Levy’s gloating expression faded. “Let us see if your tablemates are better prepared.” He glared at the back of Dixon’s head. “Mr. Pilchowski, please turn around in your seat.”

Dixon mouthed a profane word and twisted around.

“Mr. Pilchowski, which protozoa can be distinguished by their unique slipper shape and by the cilia that surround them?”

“Paramec–”

“Incorrect,” Levy cut him off.

Emery tensed.

I considered the answer. “Paramecia” sounded right. The soft murmurs around me agreed. But Levy’s harsh expression dissuaded challenges.

His eyes skirted to the other side of the room. “Miss Ling, define ‘sporozoa.’”

Yue Ling visibly gulped and glanced helplessly at her tablemates. As she opened her mouth to speak, Emery’s deep voice resonated, and it was his true voice—incisive, confident, and mature—not the voice he had adapted for his act. “If ‘paramecia’ is wrong, what is the correct answer?”