The Healing Power of Sugar: The Ghost Bird Series: #9 (The Academy Ghost Bird Series) (40 page)

They left, leaving Silas and I alone in the bedroom.

I sighed, feeling useless at the moment. Could I sit here, knowing something like this was going on? I didn’t want to sleep anymore. I wanted to get to work on something. Anything.

Silas breathed in deeply through his nose and then sat up. “
Aggele mou
,” he said, his voice deep, throaty. “You’re not going to sleep, are you?”

“I’m awake now,” I said. “Is there anything we can do?”

“Stay put,” he said. “Behave. What they’re doing now is dangerous enough.”

“Following Mr. Morris is going to be dangerous?” There were sounds deeper in the house now. People were walking around. The front door opened, closed. Things quieted. Kota and Victor had left in a hurry.

“Not just following,” Silas said as he got up and stretched, letting out a satisfied noise. He had on boxer briefs and a blue T-shirt. He was all muscle, and as he stretched, his shoulders and arms flexed, and even his legs showed defined lines, showing his obvious strength.

His black eyes studied me as I looked at him and I glanced away from his body, feeling embarrassed that I’d gotten caught staring. “So we do nothing?”

“We stay here and act like we don’t know anything,” he said.

“I always do that.”

He pulled on his jeans and then zipped them up. “Do you want coffee?”

♥♥♥

Saturday was a buzz of activity as the boys flew in and out of Nathan’s home. At first, I suspected I would go with them, but no, they left me behind every time.

I did spend a lot of time preparing food—simple eggs, toast, and coffee for breakfast—and cleaning up and holding messages. I fixed what I could of a lunch, and then thought of what to make for dinner. When someone showed up, there was always food prepared so they could eat while they wrote down notes and conversed with each other with whatever updates they had.

No phones this time. If we didn’t say something in person, it couldn’t be said. I was the one to relay coded messages whenever anyone came in. I told them where to go next when required.

I was also to watch cameras. Kota set up the laptop for me. He had me watching the house, the street. “You’re keeping house,” he said when he showed me how to toggle between the feeds.

I wasn’t so sure this wasn’t more than a way to keep me out of the way, but I didn’t mind. One other person was always with me, whether it was Silas, North, Kota, or any of the others. If they slept, it was at Nathan’s house, which seemed to have been turned into their base camp.

Still, while we were there, everyone was on edge, locked onto a laptop or busy studying material, papers. Kota wrote in files when he got in.

When Sunday rolled around, they were all still back and forth. No rest. The meeting they had planned didn’t happen. Too much activity from Mr. Hendricks and the possible leak in our phones made them overly cautious.

On Sunday afternoon, I sat with Kota on Nathan’s sofa. The sky was overcast, promising chilly weather instead of rain. I’d made breakfast and had cleaned up after the others, but hadn’t readied anything for lunch.

Kota was looking at his laptop. I occasionally glanced at the laptop he’d set up for me, sitting on the coffee table. It showed our own street and our homes, but nothing was moving on the screen—nothing was happening. I sighed, loudly.

“I know you’re frustrated,” Kota said, although he kept his eyes on the screen.

“I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “Why am I just sitting here?”

“Do you feel like you’re just sitting?” he asked. He looked up, turning his head toward me. “You’ve got one of the most important jobs here.”

“Shouldn’t I go out and help?”

“You are helping,” he said. “You told us about the phones. You made us aware they’d switched our phones out. You were the one who thought you spotted Volto. Don’t you see? If you hadn’t thought to go out and check, Mr. Morris and Mr. Hendricks could have followed you three for hours. You might not have noticed your phone being gone at all for a good, long time. And now that we are hyper-aware of Mr. Morris, we found out he was breaking into the Academy school. Now we’re trying to lay the groundwork to see what happens if he does find something interesting. We’ll be able to steer their plans to fail, whatever they are.”

“But I’m just sitting here now,” I said. I was still in pajama pants and the T-shirt I’d worn since yesterday. Since no one was asking me to go anywhere, I hadn’t bothered to change. I was feeling like a frumpy mess, but what did it matter? “I’m the one at home making sandwiches while everyone else is out there getting involved.”

Kota sighed, putting the laptop beside him on the couch. He turned toward me, holding out his arms. “Come here for a second.”

I was pouting, but I couldn’t help it. The boys had come and gone for over twenty-four hours now, and here we were, half way through Sunday, and I was all the more restless to take action. It felt like my fault my phone had been lifted. How could I not have noticed? Perhaps if I’d put it into my bra like I normally did, it wouldn’t have happened. Luke had told me that putting it in there actually prevented people from taking it.

With Kota signaling again for me to come closer, I leaned into him. He gathered me in his arms and kissed my cheek as he rubbed my back and held me. I curled my arms up into his chest, leaning into him in a cuddle. I was still frowning, but Kota was soothing my hurt feelings from getting left behind.

“Sang,” he said quietly. “You’ve taken my job.”

“Huh?”

“You do what I used to do,” he said. “I used to be the one that stayed in place and passed messages. It’s an important job, even if you do it in your pajamas”

I sighed and rubbed my cheek against the rough material of his polo shirt, feeling his chest underneath, the dense muscle. “I don’t mean to complain.”

“Are you thinking we are treating you like a girl? Or that you don’t belong?”

“I’m just anxious to do more than sit here and stare at cameras pointed at nothing.”

“I know,” he said. He smoothed a hand over my back. “I am, too.”

“Is this it?” I asked. It was what I’d been concerned about since Black Friday. “Did Mr. Hendricks find out we were going to smooth things over? Are we stopping him from pointing more fingers, so he’s trying to fish up more dirt on others? What’s going on?”

“He doesn’t have enough dirt to throw, like he thought he did,” Kota said. “I’m thinking he’s getting pretty desperate. So we gave him something that looks like it might be big, but really isn’t anything at all. He’ll have to wait until Monday to use it. In the meantime, we’re preparing.”

“For what?”

“Changes,” he said quietly. “Our only snag is you, though.”

Why wasn’t I surprised? I wiped at my face, but still Kota held me. “Because of my father? Or the school?”

“For a lot of reasons,” he said. He kissed the top of my head and kept his lips there, tucking my head under his chin. “It’s just a big risk. He could easily make a phone call or point a finger at you—and he doesn’t even know the whole of how you would be affected. He doesn’t know that he carries the possibility of taking you down, or at least how strongly we’d fight it if he tried. Don’t worry.”

Maybe that was why they had me playing dispatcher. Maybe it was an important job, like Kota said, but I was the person doing it because if I made a wrong move now, it could bring down everything around me. My father could get a phone call. The police could be notified that we were living alone in our house. The school board could look into my records, and dig deep, only to find my stepmother wasn’t my real mother. They could demand my sister and I go to foster homes.

There were footsteps in the hall, faint ones. I was surprised when they stopped and went still. Usually people just walked in, talking, or I could hear them picking up food from the small display of sandwiches and other things I’d left out for them in the kitchen.

I pulled myself from Kota’s arms and straightened up, looking over the edge of the couch. Kota turned his head to look, too.

It was Luke standing over us. He looked down at Kota and then at me.

The corner of his mouth dipped down for a second, but he wiped the frown away quickly. “Sorry,” he said.

Kota released me and waved his hand. “Don’t be,” he said. “We were just talking. How’d it go?”

Luke looked at me and then at Kota again. He walked around, pushing the laptop I was using aside before he sat heavily on the coffee table in front of us. His hair was tied back in a messy ponytail and his eyes had deep shadows. His jeans and the blue shirt were rumpled.

He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “No good,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere. I can’t find hers or any of our phones in anyone’s house, nowhere in their cars. Not on their person. Mr. Hendricks. Mr. Morris. Rocky. Jay. I even checked a few more Mr. Hendricks sometimes has on his team. Our phones aren’t there.”

Kota frowned. “You’ve gotten that close to all of them?”

“I’ve been in every house,” Luke said, his brown eyes serious. He smoothed a palm over the top of his blond hair. “Victor’s not able to pull any data at all, he can’t recover anything. He’s temporarily disconnected our numbers, but whatever we used to not allow our phone messages to get tapped, they are completely useless. They still got hacked somehow.”

“And it doesn’t appear to be Mr. Hendricks and his team,” Kota said. He picked up his laptop from the couch, but put it on the table next to Luke. “They went to some trouble to replace Sang’s phone.”

“Victor thinks maybe that was the trick,” Luke said. “Her phone was the gateway to figuring out how to do all this. Once her phone was stolen—whenever that was—they had just enough time to hack the rest of our phones.”

I froze on the couch, my hands clenching around the leather of the seat cushion. “This was my fault.”

“No, Sang,” Kota said, waving his hand. “This could have happened to any of our phones.”

“When did you last use yours?” Luke asked Kota.

“Right after Sang left,” Kota said. “I sent out a message to Mr. Blackbourne about Sang going with you. I got an okay from him. That was all.”

“I’m thinking from the moment we weren’t able to call, that’s about when we were hacked,” Luke said. “It adds up to her phone getting stolen.”

“That was quick though,” I said. “I had my phone in my bra for a while. We called the moment we saw Mr. Hendricks. That was the moment I switched my phone from my bra to my pocket. It had to be between the time Gabriel and I went in looking for you…”

“It was crowded,” Luke said. “There were lots of shoppers in that mall.”

“But our phones weren’t calling out then,” I said. “And they’ve done that without switching my phone out. We’ve been having problems.”

“Our signals could be blocked,” Kota said. “Somehow they are blocking our calls.”

“They block our calls and then steal my phone?”

Kota sat up, touching the corner of his glasses. “Or the two things aren’t connected. It could be Mr. Hendricks somehow found a way to block our calls. Whoever stole the phone and hacked our data might be about something else entirely.”

I looked at Luke, the only person I knew who could pick a phone out of my pocket without me noticing. “Who else can do what you do?” I asked quietly.

Luke jerked his head back, and then frowned. “What do you mean, asking that?”

My eyes widened. Did it sound accusing? “No, I just mean, I know you can steal phones from pockets.”

“I didn’t do this,” he said defensively, his voice rising.

“Calm down,” Kota said, pausing in his work to look up at him. “She didn’t mean it like that.”

“I’m tired of everyone asking,” Luke said, pulling away to pace in front of the television. “You think I’d steal them and cause all this uproar? I’m the one trying to find them.”

I glanced at Kota, suddenly afraid to say anything further. What had I said? Had the others been bothering him with questions about how this might have happened?

Luke had disappeared when my phone might have been taken.

And if he didn’t
want
to find the phones, he could just say he couldn’t find them.

He had access to all of us.

I kept my lips shut, though my suspicions burned inside me. I didn’t want to say anything further, and I didn’t want to even think it, but the more I considered recent actions, he did seem like a likely culprit. Could it be the others had pondered the same thing?

“I’m sure they were just covering their bases,” Kota said.

“Well, I haven’t done anything wrong,” Luke said. Without another word, he stormed around the coffee table toward the kitchen.

Kota got up, looking over the couch at him. “Where are you going?”

“To look for her phone!” Luke cried out. The front door opened, but before Kota and I could stop him, he slammed it shut.

Kota jogged around the couch, heading toward the front door. I followed.

By the time we got outside, Luke was gone. I wasn’t sure how he could have gotten into a car and taken off so quickly. Either he had the motorcycle, which I couldn’t hear, or he’d run off.

Kota stopped on the walkway heading to the drive, scanning the neighborhood. He groaned. “Why would he say that?” he asked. He turned to me, a new pain in his eyes, disappointed. “Have people been accusing him?”

“I haven’t,” I said. “Although…I thought perhaps…”

Kota lifted an eyebrow. “Thought what?”

He didn’t know? Had I said some of my suspicions to Mr. Blackbourne? No. Maybe not directly. “I told Mr. Blackbourne about the masks. You know, right? How Luke admitted to it?”

He nodded.

I slid my bare foot against the cold sidewalk. I didn’t want to be the one to pose this question. “I may not have said so out loud, but…I’ve been thinking. What if Luke…is Volto? Like what if the eight masks meant he was saying there would be only eight on the team? What if
he
stole my phone? He was right there. And before that, he…there were times when…” I tried to present more evidence, but I wasn’t sure where to start.

Kota’s eyes widened. “He would never do that,” he said. “Why would you think such a thing?”