Killer Spirit (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

Code Word: Interesting

By the time we hit the locker room, there was exactly half an hour until first period, and my only goal was to delay being glittered for as long as was humanly possible. It was bad enough that I’d actually agreed (under duress) to wear a cheerleading uniform to school. The last thing I wanted was to draw any more attention to my uncomfortably short skirt, the bright blue ribbon tied around my superhigh ponytail, and the fact that my current look was about as far from my trademarked antifashion combat boots as you could possibly imagine.

Somehow, I didn’t think blue body glitter would do anything to de-emphasize my predicament.

“You don’t stand a chance,” Zee whispered, patting me consolingly on the shoulder. The good thing about having a profiler on the Squad was that she was a little more sympathetic to my obvious torment than most of the others. The bad part was that she was so perceptive that she may as well have been psychic, and the very idea of psychic cheerleaders scared the crap out of me.

“I could make a run for it,” I said under my breath.

Zee shrugged. “You could try,” she said, “but the twins might take it personally, and then you’d wake up tomorrow with rhinestones glued to your eyelashes.”

I stared at Zee in complete horror, knowing that there was at least a ninety-nine percent chance that she’d accurately predicted the twins’ most likely course of action. While I considered the inhumanity of having my eyelashes defiled in my sleep, one of the twins snuck up on me, and before I could dive-roll out of the way, she had a hold on my arm.

“Hold still and close your eyes!” Brittany ordered.

I wondered briefly if keeping my eyes open would delay the inevitable glittering, but soon found out that nothing could stand between one of the twins and adorning my face, breastbone, and arms with a substance more or less defined as powdered girliness.

“So,” Brittany said, the edges of her lips pulling up into a devilish smile as she finished the job. “How’s your brother doing these days?”

First glitter and now this. She was really pushing her luck. “You do realize that I could kill you, right?” I asked. “With my bare hands and very little effort.”

“No killing members of the Squad.” Brooke issued a drive-by order in a tone so serious that it might have been amusing were it not for the fact that one of the “hottest” girls in school was asking me about my impossible, obnoxious, and supposedly endearing younger brother. Noah considered himself a ladies’ man, which basically meant that he was forever trying to charm older, unavailable girls who almost invariably had large, angry boyfriends who didn’t find Noah’s overtures adorkable in the least.

I’d spent years trying to convince Noah that he wasn’t irresistible, and for some reason, the twins—heck, the entire Squad—seemed to enjoy undoing all of my hard work. As far as I’d been able to tell, none of them (with the possible exception of Lucy, and I so wasn’t ready to mentally go there) were actually interested in Noah, but they got a kick out of flirting with him, just because they knew it irritated me. As for Noah, he’d spent more time moonwalking and victory dancing in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life, which was really saying something.

“You know, he
is
kind of cute, Toby.” Tiffany appeared beside her twin and gave me an impish look.

This went beyond friendly teasing, and there was no way I could let it stand. Even if we were, by some stretch of the word, friends, I had a moral obligation to discourage their feigned interest in my brother, for the good of the world as well as my own sanity. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to go with the truth. “Yeah, well, he kind of wants you guys to have a naked pillow fight in our living room.”

For some reason, the twins thought this was an absolute riot, which just goes to show that their mother probably dropped both of them on their heads repeatedly as small children.

“Ha-ha,” I said dryly. “My brother likes naked girls. Yes, very funny.”

They continued laughing and I decided it was time for a change of subject. Luckily enough, I knew exactly which direction I wanted to push this conversation. A few weeks earlier, I’d discovered something about one of our contacts in Washington that had rocked me to the core, and since then, I’d been trying to figure out which, if any, of the others knew about it. The twins were among the last on my list, and now seemed as good a time to broach the subject as any.

“Speaking of things that don’t involve my little brother”—I gave them each a look that, had it been any more pointed, would have been capable of drawing blood—“we haven’t heard anything from the Big Guys in a while.”

“Brooke talks to them all the time,” Tiffany said. “They’re the ones who told us about the TCIs. Obvi.”

“Plus they sent us this really cool volumizing mascara last week,” Britt added. “It’s made by like NASA.”

I couldn’t begin to fathom why NASA would be designing mascara, but didn’t bother to ask Brittany if she was mixing up her acronyms. I had more important things on my mind. “Don’t you guys ever wonder who the Big Guys are?” I asked.

The twins stared at me, clearly not comprehending such curiosity.

I tried to put this in terms they would understand. “For all we know, they could be really hot or something.”

That got identical contemplative looks out of the two of them, until Brittany realized that our superiors in Washington were “probably like really old,” and then the two of them shrugged off the entire conversation and began to apply a second coat of glitter to my body, on the off chance that my sparkle had waned during the course of our conversation.

Each and every girl on the Squad was a master of deception, but the more time I spent with them, the better I got at reading the subtleties of their body language, their tones of voice, and their patterns of behavior. For the twins, worrying about my “sparkle quotient” was more or less the norm, and every instinct I had told me that all they knew about our superiors was that they had access to cosmetic prototypes that would have made other fashionistas drool.

Like the other girls I’d spoken to, save for one, the twins didn’t know anything about the man who’d been our liaison in Washington on our last mission. The only person I hadn’t spoken to about it was Brooke, and that was because Brooke and I didn’t talk. She issued orders. If I was in a good mood, I considered following them. Besides, I was positive that Chloe knew something she wasn’t sharing, and if Chloe knew the truth, Brooke did, too.

They just didn’t want the rest of the Squad to know it.

The fact that the twins were getting a little too personal with their glitter distribution kept me from dwelling on my little mystery too much. I was afraid that if I let Brittany and Tiffany continue with their dastardly glitter ways, I’d be sparkling where the sun don’t shine in no time.

“Don’t you two have somebody else to glitter?” I narrowed my eyes, and to my incredible relief, they stopped the glitter application to answer my question.

“Oh, no,” Tiffany said seriously. “You’re the only one who needs G.A.”

G.A.?

“Glitter Assistance,” her twin clarified.

When it came to makeup, the twins didn’t trust me to know my lips from my lids. You confuse eyeliner and lip liner once, and you’re branded for life.

As if they somehow knew that a brief makeup-related thought had crossed my mind, the twins whipped out tubes of lip gloss in synchronized motions, and before I could so much as threaten bodily harm, my lips were pink and shiny and tasted vaguely like strawberries.

It was times like these that I really needed to do something, anything, that made me feel like me. Not too long ago, I’d found out that I wasn’t the only Squad member who’d been cheerlead-o-fied upon joining up, and I didn’t want to get to the point where my cover became my identity. I was still me, and unlike Zee and Chloe, I had no desire to forget it and become somebody else.

“Anyone want to spar?” I asked. There was nothing like a good fight to make me feel like myself again. It must have had something to do with those “aggressive tendencies” my school counselors were always talking about. Luckily for me, one of the perks of being on the Squad was the amazing underground facility called the Quad. I was still finding my way around, but the week before, I’d discovered a first-class training room, with plenty of space for a little friendly hand-to-hand.

“School starts in twenty-eight minutes,” Tara told me.

I think she vastly underestimated my need to hit something. Or someone.

“That gives us at least twenty minutes,” I said. “Come on, who’s up for it?”

I glanced at Brooke, and for a long moment, she stared back at me. I recognized the thirst in her eyes. She was a competitor, plain and simple, and as odd as it seemed, a morning fight sounded just as good to her as it did to me. When I first joined the Squad, I thought Brooke and I were complete and utter opposites. I was the anticheerleader, and she was the poster girl.

These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.

“We’re wearing cheerleading uniforms,” Tara said, making an admirable stab at talking me out of what I’m sure she thought was a very bad idea. “And body glitter.”

“I promise I won’t hurt anyone’s glitter,” I said, my eyes still on Brooke. The last time we’d fought, she’d ended it before either of us had had much of a chance to win.

“Brooke.” Chloe Larson stepped in front of Brooke, effectively blocking me from her view. “I thought we’d go over the chant order for the pep rally. I think we may want to put ‘Clap Your Hands’ before ‘Stand Up, Up.’”

Brooke’s facial expression never changed, but I could almost hear her internal sigh as she realized that neither one of us was getting a rematch this morning. “Just a sec,” she told Chloe. “Lucy?”

“Yeah huh?” Lucy popped out of a nearby bathroom stall, and I blinked as the glare off her glittery chest struck me straight in the eye.

“Toby wants to spar,” Brooke told her. “Make it interesting.”

Lucy was little, perky, and happier than just about any person I knew. Needless to say, the happiest girl in the world wasn’t exactly my first-choice punching bag. Then again, I’d never seen her fight, and if there was one thing the past few weeks had taught me, it was that underestimating any of these girls was a very, very bad idea.

“You ready?” Lucy asked me, bouncing on the balls of her feet. I nodded, and beside me, Tara sighed.

“You want me to come with?” she asked.

I shook my head. I was pretty sure I could handle Lucy, and because it was Lucy, who’d always been nice to me in her own special Lucy way and who hadn’t, for instance, forced gloss upon my unwilling lips in the past five minutes, she wasn’t in any real danger from me, either.

Lucy bounded back into the bathroom stall, and then returned a moment later. “So how’s your day going?” she asked, coming up and hooking her arm through mine. “I mean, I know it’s pretty early, but so far, so good?”

I was glossed and glittered and on edge, and I had a sinking suspicion that I wasn’t going to be getting any answers about our superiors any time soon, but I also had an assignment, and the thought of tailing Jacob Kann after school was enough to make up for the rest of it. With any luck, I’d actually get to break into his hotel room.

“So far, so good.”

Five minutes later, we were in the training room, and Lucy was sitting on the ground doing a butterfly stretch, the soles of her feet touching each other, and her knees pushing down toward the ground.

I took a few deep breaths and warm-up kicks, and by the time Lucy bounced (literally) to her feet, I was ready to go.

We stood there for an elongated moment, looking at each other, and then Lucy flew at me. She was fast—I’d give her that much, and she knew how to put what little weight she had behind a punch. Despite the fact that I’d told myself not to underestimate her, the speed of the movement took me off guard, and she managed to catch the edge of my shoulder as I belatedly moved to dodge her blow.

Without thinking, I turned, absorbing the force and moving with it, and grabbed her arm. With a single, smooth movement on my part, Lucy was flying through the air, and I was reminding myself that I really didn’t want to hurt her.

Realizing she was airborne, Lucy somehow managed to turn her flight into a technically perfect front flip, and as soon as she landed, she came at me again. For several minutes, we got stuck in that pattern—Lucy advancing on me enough to punch or kick, me dodging and using her own momentum to throw her into some kind of twisting flip. After the first time, none of her punches or kicks touched me, and even though she seemed to be having a good time, I was starting to feel kind of bad and figured it was time to end things.

As she landed from her umpteenth flip, I moved forward, kicking low with my left foot in a motion meant to sweep her feet out from underneath her. She fell, but was back on her feet instantly, and as I tried to temper my reaction to her skill level, she managed to land a solid kick to my chest.

I grunted, spun, and came disturbingly close to throwing myself into a roundhouse. Keeping my head in the game, I short-circuited the movement. My roundhouse was not a thing to be taken lightly.

“Ummm…Toby?” Lucy’s voice was somewhat hesitant as she backed away from me slowly.

“Yes?”

“Remember how Brooke said for me to make it interesting?”

I nodded, relatively unconcerned. Lucy was good—definitely better than I’d expected, but there was a very real chance I could have taken her with my eyes closed.

“Toby?” Lucy prodded.

“I remember.”

Lucy smiled tentatively. “Just checking.” She moved quickly, her hands blurring with the speed at which she reached back and somehow produced two sharp, metal objects.

Throwing knives? What the…

And then we were fighting again, and instead of dodging Lucy’s punches, I was avoiding the thrusts of the knives. I grabbed hold of her left arm and twisted her wrist until she dropped the weapon, and then barely managed to duck before the knife in her right hand came whizzing at my neck.