Changeling (32 page)

“Always prepared?” Ethan asked.

“Good thing, too,” McNally replied. Her mouth twisted into a frown, and her age-lined eyes took stock of his injuries. “What happened to you?”

“Took a flying leap out a closed window.”

“Next time I recommend opening it first.”

Ethan smiled.

“Have you heard from Gage or Simon?” I asked.

“No,” McNally said, “but I did hear part of a retraction on the radio. Cipher was released and the rest of you are no longer wanted for questioning in the near death of Detective Pascal.”

“Good, then she’s keeping her part of the bargain.”

McNally cocked her head to the left. “She who?”

“Really long story, and I promise we’ll fill you in later, but we have to go.” I snatched the first aid kit from her and tossed it to Ethan. She started to protest. I put my hands up to ward it off. “I’m so sorry to scoop and run like this, Agent McNally, but the less you know right now the better off you’ll be.”

King and Noah started loading Deuce into the backseat of the idling sedan. I’d have preferred the trunk and crossed mental fingers no one pulled us over (or attempted to pull us over, because no way would I stop for a cop today). Ethan dug into the medical bag, probably in search of high-potency painkillers.

I grabbed McNally’s arm and tugged her a few feet away. “Can you promise me something, Agent McNally?”

“Of course, Ember.”

“If anything happens to me today . . .” I had a hard time getting past those words. It voiced my greatest fear: I might not pull this off. The only way to save Jimmy and Aaron’s lives might be to sacrifice my own.

“Ember, you don’t—”

“No, I do. If anything happens to me, please tell Teresa I’m sorry. About all of this.”

“It isn’t your fault.”

“Believe me, it is. If I weren’t a part of her life, of all of their lives, none of this would have happened. Teresa wouldn’t be shot. Marco wouldn’t be, uh, missing.” Shit, I hadn’t communicated that part. I didn’t really want to think about it; I was much too close to falling to pieces as it was. Reliving his loss
(it seemed such a stupid, unworthy word for what had happened to Marco) hurt too much. A person could only handle so much pain at once without imploding.

“Please,” I said. “Just promise you’ll tell her.”

She furrowed her sleek eyebrows and nodded. “I promise. But you promise me you’ll do your damnedest to tell her in person. Tomorrow. When all of this is over.”

I forced a smile. “Promise.”

“Okay.”

King and Ethan had already overtaken the backseat, their rug-rolled burden propped between them. Noah stood by the passenger-side door, leaning on the roof of the car. Watching. Waiting.

This ends today.

With that mantra in mind, I strode toward the driver’s door. It was time to get this started, because Ranger or Recombinant, lives were on the line, and nothing was more important than that.

“Dahlia?” Agent McNally called out.

I stopped, turned. “Yeah?”

“Where’s the nearest bus stop?” she asked, so deadly serious in tone I just stared for a long moment.

And then I started laughing.

Twenty-six

Home Invasions

A
quick inspection of our previous hideout uncovered nothing more useful than a broken kitchen door, an overturned chair, and the rumpled sheets and an empty bed where Kinsey had been. A thin trail of blood stained the hallway carpet. He and Jimmy had been taken quickly and without fuss, thanks to my stolen image—an image gleaned after a chance jostling the day we answered a summons to Sunset Boulevard. Had I ever met the real Liza Forney?

Gage called back as we returned to the car. He was out of jail and not being followed, which was good news for us. I turned the call over to speaker mode and gave the cell to Noah so I could back out of the driveway.

“What about Simon?” I asked. “Have you seen him?”

“No,” Gage replied. “And if anyone else has, they aren’t saying. Cleared or not, everyone is still suspicious of me.”

“They’re going to be.” I shifted back into drive and coasted down the quiet street. We’d seen no sign of Simon since the parking garage incident. Only a few hours had passed, but it
felt like a week. A terrifying thought wormed its way into the front of my mind—what if he was a Changeling this whole time, too? Maybe the real Simon Hewitt had been absorbed into the body and consciousness of Queen or even Deuce, and he was lost to us, as well. Just like Marco.

I squeezed the steering wheel, squeaking the smooth leather beneath my hands. Noah noticed and put a gentle hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t entertain those thoughts right now. I had too many other things to entertain. Simon would turn up in an unexpected place. Isn’t that how these things worked? You lost a friend, thought you lost another, and everyone ended up safe and sound, after all?

You’ve been to the cinema too many times, Dal.

“Dahlia?” Noah asked, nudging me.

I snapped out of it, returning to the problem at hand. “What?”

He gave the phone a gentle shake.

“I’m sorry, Gage, say again?” I said.

“I asked how you got Forney to drop the charges,” he said.

My mouth became so dry I had to swallow twice before managing a response. “We made a convincing argument.”

“You’re lying.”

How could he tell over the phone? Could he really hear the way my heartbeat sped up? Oh, wait. I was a terrible liar. Even I heard the way my voice cracked.

A stop sign came out of nowhere. I smashed my foot on the brake pedal. Something thumped hard against the back of my seat and made an angry grunt. Noah braced his hands
on the dashboard, dropping the phone in the process. The odor of burning metal tingled my nose; McNally needed to get her brake pads checked.

Pay attention, dammit. You’re going to get someone
else
killed.

“What was that?” Gage asked, the sound muffled from the floor.

Noah felt around beneath the seat and retrieved the phone. “Dahlia needs to go back to driver’s education,” he said.

“What about Forney, Dal?”

I checked both ways, even though it was a four-way stop, and then proceeded. I felt eyes on my back and looked up, catching Ethan’s steady gaze in the rearview mirror. Silent and supportive, sad and strong, and urging me to tell him.

So I did, starting with the escape from the parking garage, my car theft, regrouping at the Jarvis house, and setting out to search for the others. I told Ethan’s side of things: the fight with the pyro, Renee’s injuries, and meeting up at the Base. Our new plan and the call to Jimmy. The realization that at least one other Changeling existed, besides the brothers.

After a moment’s consideration, I decided to alter the events slightly. “One of them attacked us at the Base,” I said. “She has some sort of control over the earth, but we managed to subdue her. She’s tied up in the backseat. There are two of them, though, and we used her for leverage against the one who’s been masquerading as Liza Forney. That got her to let you go.”

Silence for two more blocks, and then Gage said, “Well,
that’s starting to make more sense. I didn’t buy her almost killing her own partner just to set us up, but now I do.”
Now that it’s not really her.
An implicit statement with which I agreed.

“Hey,” Gage said, as if it had just occurred to him. “Is Marco with you?”

My hand jerked, nearly taking the car off the road and into someone’s hedge. I looked into the rearview, at the half-image of Deuce’s sleeping face. Speckled with dried blood, her nose swollen. Technically? “Yeah, he’s with us.” I winced just saying the words.

“Okay, then.” Either I was a better liar than I gave myself credit for, or he was distracted. “So what’s the plan?”

He was asking me? “I’m still waiting to hear back from the other Changeling—Queen—” I said, “about where to trade her sister for Jimmy and Aaron.” And me. “We need to get you.”

“Listen, Liza Forney’s apartment isn’t far from where I am. We might as well kill two birds with one stone. Meet me there. If your contact hasn’t called yet we’ll check out the place and compare notes.”

I looked at Noah; he nodded. “Okay, what’s the address?” Gage gave it to me. “We’re only a few blocks from there. Wait outside, and I’ll see you in a minute.”

“Okay.”

Noah closed the phone. A tremor danced up my spine.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” Ethan asked.

“Because,” I said, negotiating a right turn onto a busier street, “no one should be alone when they hear this kind of news.”

Gage took it
well. Or he simply refused to process it and locked the pain deep down where it couldn’t bother him. Either way, he stared blankly at me for several long, tense seconds, absorbing the fact that one of his oldest friends was hidden somewhere deep inside of the unconscious Changeling called Deuce. Hidden and likely gone forever.

He closed his eyes and worked his jaw. He took a deep breath in and exhaled hard. “I see,” he said, opening his eyes. Anger radiated from their silver-flecked depths. Fatigue drew dark circles beneath them, accentuated by the shadows of the underground parking garage. We had met on the lowest level of Forney’s building, and I’d taken a moment to spill my guts on the things I couldn’t say over the phone. Everything except the massive reboot of my own personal backstory. “How long?”

“The SWAT incident,” I said. “I’m not sure how. We didn’t really get into specifics before she tried to kill the rest of us.”

“How could we not have known?”

Noah found it necessary to reply to the rhetorical question. “It wasn’t an illusion you could see through. I know how it works when I do it, and the girls seem even more powerful. More in control of their abilities. You become that person. There’s no distinguishing the bodies from each other, and the stronger of the two minds is always in control.”

Gage pivoted toward Noah, raising one hand as if to poke him in the chest. He stopped, holding back at the last minute. “Is there any way to reverse it? To release a host intact?”

Noah frowned, looked thoughtful a moment, then glanced over his shoulder at King, who still sat in the backseat of the car, babysitting our hostage. King lifted one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug.

“I don’t know, I’m sorry,” Noah said. “If there is, we were never taught how. I can’t separate the absorbed mind from my own.”

Gage wilted in a heartbreaking transformation. I reached out. He jerked away, striding halfway across the parking garage. He stopped, hands on hips, shoulders hunched. Shaking. Ethan brushed past me and limped to his friend’s side. They conferred quietly, a conversation not for my ears. I wasn’t one of them anymore, was I? No longer a Meta, never a Ranger—my entire history altered in less than an hour with heartbreaking finality. I hadn’t asked Ethan to keep it a secret, but would he really hide something so important from Gage?

Noah’s hand slipped into mine. Our fingers twined. I held on tight, fighting the overwhelming urge to curl up in a little ball and sob until the pain in my gut went away. Until I was numb and nothing hurt anymore.

“We’re running out of time,” he whispered.

“You’re right,” Gage said, looking over his shoulder at us. He must have been using his hearing to its fullest to have caught that. He rubbed his eyes. “Let’s go check out Forney’s apartment.”

King stayed behind with Deuce. Ethan needed to rest his injured legs, but he refused to stay in the car. Our quartet rode an elevator up to the eighth floor. The building was well maintained, while showing signs of age—worn carpet,
stained chrome, peeling paint, and rubbed varnish. The elevator chugged along slowly, creaking its way from floor to floor, making me wonder if it would ever get all the way to eight. Like many other buildings on this side of West Hollywood, it was an old hotel converted into cheap flats—the only way many of them survived after the tourist industry went kaput.

Gage led the way down the hall, and I was eager to let him resume command. I preferred following orders. In that way, I supposed, I wasn’t unlike the two female Changelings, blindly following orders from their mysterious Overseer. Was that a Recombinant trait?

A television set blared through the door of a neighboring apartment, vibrating the floor with the sound of a car chase and flying bullets. My skin crawled. After being in one of my own, I could never think of those sorts of chases the same way again. Not without remembering the overwhelming fear, the sight of broken glass and blood, the burning brakes, and the ping of bullets off reinforced metal.

In front of Forney’s apartment door, Gage closed his eyes and let his senses loose. His nose wrinkled and his nostrils flared. His mouth twisted into a grimace. “There’s a body in there,” he said. He tried the doorknob, but it didn’t turn.

“Want me to get the door?” Noah asked.

Gage stepped aside. “Be my guest.”

Noah pressed his palm flat next to the brass knob. Wood crackled, metal squealed. The entire locking mechanism shot backward into the apartment, leaving a gaping hole the size of a fist, and the door swung open.

The air was hot and stuffy, closed up without ventilation. We followed the faint odor that had offended Gage into the one-room apartment. A single bed and two-seater sofa took up most of the space on one side of the room. A small refrigerator and two-burner hotplate served as the kitchen. Heavy blue curtains blocked out light from the room’s balcony doors. Old food had gone to seed on one corner of the cheap dining table, contributing to the funky odors. Clothing spilled out of a scarred wooden dresser, and more still from the mirror-door closet.

There was no body, though, which became more apparent as we moved into the center of the room. It had one other door, across from the closet.

“Bathroom,” I said.

Gage squared his shoulders and opened the door. I stayed in the middle of the room, uninterested in seeing another dead body (or human slipcover). I’d had my share, thank you very much. He pushed the door open halfway, reached in to turn on the light, and peeked inside. The odor became stronger. My stomach gurgled.