Mania (2 page)

Two
Jack

The rumpled paper in my pocket felt like a branding iron waiting to mark me as a disappointment, a failure. Even from the grave, Dad was managing to give me challenges that felt impossible.

I scanned down the laptop screen that I'd already read three times, knowing that it held nothing that would help me figure this out. There was a simple truth here … either Dad had screwed up, or I was missing something important.

Moving to lean against the wall, I stared hard at all the lab equipment I'd managed to gather from Dad's warehouses over the last few weeks. He'd rented storage spaces throughout Oakville and kept full labs in each one in case he needed to work. He said it ensured he'd always have a lab he could go to, and we'd never have to lug his equipment around when we had to suddenly bolt in the middle of the night.

When Parker's mom agreed to let me use the storage room between Parker's bedroom and the door to the garage, I'm sure she didn't expect me to set up a laboratory. But she hadn't said anything.

Maybe she did expect it … after all, she
had
been married to our dad.

But despite all of my hard work, the equipment and chemicals were going mostly unused. Nothing, including visiting Benton Air Force Base yesterday hoping for some kind of inspiration, had provided the answers I still needed.

“Jack?” Chloe stared at me as she leaned against a table on the other side of my lab, waiting. She'd asked the same question every day for the last month: when will the new drug for the Takers be ready? I still couldn't give her the answer she wanted.

The formula Dad had given me was fairly basic, noth
ing overly complicated. The only problem was that in
place of three of the ingredients, he'd scribbled in the numbers 1, 2, and 3. Dad had always loved puzzles, and he was beyond paranoid at the end of his life, but so far I'd had no luck filling in those blanks. I'd hoped maybe to find a clue at one of his labs, but there was nothing.

And I was going to have to tell Chloe the truth sometime.

I wasn't sure I even wanted to make this formula in the first place. Takers had been responsible for my mother's death as well as my father's. Why would I want to work so hard just to save the people I'd spent my life hating?

But I knew why—it was because Dad had asked me to. He wanted this war between the different types of Night Walkers to end, and he was sure the incomplete formula in my pocket was the way to do it.

So I would figure this out … even if it killed me.

There was one extra word scribbled in at the very bottom of the formula. It was the main reason I'd gone out to the base to begin with, and even though I'd had no luck there, I had to believe he'd written it for a reason. The word was “buried.”

Not my idea of hopeful, but hey, that was Dad …

“The new drug isn't ready, and it won't be for a while.”

I stood with my back straight, hoping that once I told Chloe everything, she would stop asking, at least for a couple of days. She'd been around a lot since Parker had separated her from Finn's body. Some days it wasn't half bad … I mean, she was obviously hot when she wasn't pissed at me.

“I'm working on it,” I added. “It's just not going to be as simple as I hoped.”

“The deal was, I help baby-bro Parker save his buddy Finn and you help me survive. Right?” Chloe shifted her weight and stepped closer. Her stance was casual, but her eyes were gray storm clouds. As always, they begged for a fight.

A fight I could handle, but the darkening circles of sleep deprivation beneath her eyes made me look away. They were a reminder that this latest challenge from Dad was taking longer than either of us wanted.

Chloe was the only Taker I'd ever spent more than five minutes with and not tried to throw any of my knives at. Actually, that wasn't true. I did throw a knife at her once, but it was when she'd taken over Finn's body, so I'd missed on purpose. I rubbed my fist against the rivets on the right leg of my jeans, trying to decide if that counted or not.

Grabbing the neat stack of clean clothes from the corner, I threw them into my duffel bag, on top of everything else I'd never quite unpacked. I kept my voice perfectly calm. “Yes, that was the deal, but—”

“But what?” she demanded. “It sounds pretty damn simple to me!”

Zipping the bag closed, I double-checked that I'd put my cell phone in the pocket of my jeans. Taking a breath, I mentally braced myself for the fight that was bound to come after I told her the whole truth. “Look, I'm trying, but what Dad left me about the formula … it isn't complete.”

She stepped away from the wall, all pretense of this being a casual chat shattered. Her voice turned to a whispered hiss. “What?”

I stood my ground and met her hard gaze, despite the fact that she was a Taker and I had made it a goal to
never
meet the eyes of someone like her. “He gave me most of it, and a clue to find the rest, but I need time.”

“Time isn't always something we can get more of.” Chloe took another step closer. She masked it well, but the roiling emotion behind her stiff expression was hard to hide. “I don't understand. If he really created this formula to help the Takers, then why wouldn't he give you the whole thing?”

“Because he's learned through years of experience not to trust people like you.”

She looked away, but I wasn't done.

“Because even when he was trying to help Takers, he felt he had to build in safeguards. He had to make sure you needed his sons alive in order to make it.” I stepped a bit closer, and her eyes came up to meet mine again. “He didn't want your kind to be able to grab the formula, kill Parker and me, and make it yourselves.”

“Fine,” she muttered. “I get it.”

“Good.”

“Even so.” She rubbed her eye with her right hand and the shadow beneath it stood out in even stronger contrast. “It sure would've been nice for me to know this little detail
before
we made that deal, don't you think?”

“I'm working on the problem.” I pulled the duffle bag's strap over my shoulder.

“That's not good enough, Jack.” Her hands curled into small fists at her sides. After our last conversation, I already knew she wasn't afraid to use them to work out a little frustration. My quick reflexes were the only thing that had kept her punch from landing.

Not that I blamed her for being frustrated; what she was facing was terrifying. To be dying slowly, your mind eroding away from lack of sleep, with no way to stop it—any Watcher could understand how that felt. That was why this formula was so important.

I walked around her toward the door. “Well, it has to be enough. This is my responsibility, and—”

“Screw responsibility! This is my
life
, Jack!” Chloe grabbed my shoulder and jerked me back until I was staring into her eyes. She took down her mask completely, wanting me to see the desperation and fear she was feeling. I drew it all in, meeting her gaze, willing her to believe I really
was
on her side.

I couldn't guarantee I would always be on her side … but for right now, I was.

I understood too well the weighty responsibility that rested on my shoulders: the fate of not only her life, but the lives of many,
many
more. All of the Takers' lives—plus the lives of ordinary people, which the Takers could and would destroy if I didn't find a way to stop them.

Watchers my age had been raised to despise all Takers. We were polar opposites in many ways—Watchers learned how to blend in when we were in the mind of someone who was dreaming. As much as possible, we tried not to disrupt the Dreamers. Takers did the opposite. They took over the actual bodies of Dreamers while they slept, and often left nothing but rubble in their wake.

I shook the thoughts from my head. The Takers had been my enemies for a very long time, but for right now I had to focus on a different part of our relationship: the similarities. The Takers were still Night Walkers, just like me. And so no matter how much I disliked them—and yes, at times even Chloe—I would still find a way to save them. Dad sacrificed himself to save Parker and me, so I would finish the task he gave me.

As tough as Chloe always tried to act, her fingers trembled as they gripped my arm.

“I know
exactly
how important this is, Chloe.” I enunciated every syllable as I backed slowly toward the storage room door, and her hand fell back to her side. “So please, let me do what I need to do. I want to keep my promise.”

The door opened behind me and hit the back of my shoe, but I didn't turn when I heard my brother's voice.

“Uh, am I interrupting?”

“No.” I stepped forward and shifted my bag so Parker could open the door the rest of the way. When I turned around, his gaze was on my duffel. He raised his eyes to mine and I pulled out my phone, studying it like it held some fascinating secret.

“You're leaving right now?” His face fell into a deep frown.

I didn't look up as I answered. “I told you that last night on the way home from the base.”

“Yeah.” He rubbed his thumb along his chin and added, “You said the same thing the night before that, and the night before that.”

Finn, Parker's best friend, poked his head around the corner, shaggy pieces of auburn hair hung across his right eye. “You're really going?”

I groaned. “Yes, if you two will stop blocking the door.”

Finn shuddered when he saw Chloe standing behind us and jerked backward out of the room. He'd been avoiding her—more specifically, avoiding eye contact with her —as much as possible. It had been very awkward ever since she'd taken over his body … not hard to see why.

Of course, there was a lot more to the whole Dreamer-Taker connection than just making the mistake of looking at a Taker. The Dreamer, Finn, would have to go to sleep after the eye contact, and Chloe would need to lie down and enter the Taker version of sleep—which looked like sleep, but was actually more like a light coma state. And Chloe would need to do this before making eye contact with anyone else. Although Finn basically knew all of that, it didn't seem to make him feel any better about being around her. I guess once someone has trapped you in your own mind and tried to kill people using your body, forgive-and-forget isn't really an option.

Reaching out one long arm, Finn yanked on the back of Parker's shirt until he too moved out of my way. I got one quick glance at Finn's shirt—
If history really repeats itself, I'm SO getting a dinosaur
—before it was out of sight. Although I didn't know him that well yet, even I had to admit the guy was pretty entertaining.

“Anyway, I think I know where I'm going now.” I stuck my phone into my pocket and adjusted my bag. After Chloe stepped out, I locked the lab door behind me and stepped past Parker.

“Where?” Parker's expression was dark as he followed me down the short hallway. Even without looking him in the eye, I could see this argument coming from a mile away.

I looked around to make sure Chloe hadn't followed us. I'd been worried over the past month that she might be reporting back to the other Takers, even though she'd given me no hint of it. For the first few weeks I'd occasionally
followed her, or grabbed her phone when she wasn't looking to check for texts or calls to her brothers. If Parker hadn't agreed to try to help her after she separated herself from Finn, I would never have let her hang around. She was a risk … and a big one.

“Dad and I lived in a trailer outside Logandale a few years back,” I said. “I need to go there.” I muttered the part that concerned me under my breath: “I think.”

Parker said, “How will this help exactly?”

“In the formula, there are numbers standing in for three missing ingredients. And the word ‘buried.' Logandale is a place where Dad might have buried something he wanted me to find later.” I crossed to the kitchen counter and leaned against it, trying not to get bumped as Finn dug around in the fridge beside me.

Parker popped the knuckles on his right hand. “So you think he buried a list of the missing information out on a trailer lot somewhere?”

I shrugged. “Maybe he told people the information and buried his address book. Or maybe there's nothing there at all. It's just a place to start.”

“Could he have buried actual ingredients there?” Parker looked incredulous, and I couldn't deny that I had doubts of my own.

“I don't know, Parker.” This was starting to feel like an interrogation, so I did my best to shut down any further questions he might have. “I think Danny—Dad—didn't want anyone else to be able to make this formula without my help. It's an insurance policy for both of us, because if the Takers hurt either of us, then I'll burn every reference to it and they can all just die for all I care.”

When I turned around, I saw Chloe standing in the doorway. She caught my eye over Parker's shoulder, and I immediately regretted my words when I saw the hurt in her expression. It's not that I hadn't meant what I said … but I hadn't intended for her to hear me say it.

Finn sidled across the room in the awkward silence and took up a post in the opposite corner of the room from Chloe.

Parker didn't say anything, and his mouth pressed into a firm line. Then he sighed. “Fine, give me five minutes to pack some stuff.”

“No need. I shouldn't be gone too long if it goes well. Logandale's only an hour away, and I'll let you know what I find.” I walked around him and propped the door to the garage open with my bag while I lifted my motorcycle keys off the counter.

Parker shook his head, looking frustrated. “You want me to stay here?”

“Yes, for now.” I braced myself for the argument I could see coming. “Would you move my bike out back and throw the tarp over it? It's probably in your mom's way, and I need to get on the road.”