The Thief (14 page)

Camille’s chin lifted. “You think I chose
poorly.”

“
I don’t think you’ve chosen
yet,” Tailor said, folding his arms and sitting back again. “Right
now all the choices have been made for you. You do what Gabriel
says without question, yes?”

“
Yes.”

“
Don’t sound so proud of
that,” he said, grimacing. “Don’t you know how to think for
yourself? Do you know the reasons behind anything he tells you to
do? That hunk of metal,” he gestured at the bracer, “do you know
what it is?”

Camille took her arm off the table
self-consciously. “Do you?” she challenged, even as part of her was
dying to know.

“
I don’t,” he said. “But if
I had something that was probably unnatural permanently attached to
me, I’d want to know what it was.”

“
It keeps me safe,” she said
defensively.

“
How convenient,” he said.
“That might even be true. Gabriel does like to mix his lies to make
them go down easier.”

Ire bubbled up. “He warned me,” she said.
“About you.”

Tailor laughed at that.
“Gabriel? Warned you about
me
? God, the world has gotten
strange. I guess I’m back to where I started. Why the hell am I the
only one who can see him for what he is? You
live
with him, it should be so
obvious that he’s using you.”

“
He saved me,” Camille
insisted.

“
Yes, but for what
purpose?”

Camille stood up, shouldering her bag. “Are
we done?”

Tailor caught her wrist, and she looked down
at him, defiant.

“
Monsters are made by their
choices, not their abilities,” Tailor said. “Whatever you can do -
whatever you think you’re capable of - you can help people, or you
can help yourself. The choice is yours. Do you know what they call
a monster who helps people?”

“
Confused monster?” Camille
said bitterly.

“
A hero,” Tailor said. He
handed her a dog-eared copy of A Tale of Two Cities. “Your reading
assignment.”

She regarded it with a frown, then stuffed
it into her bag. “Now we’re done?”

He sighed, sitting back. “Now we’re
done.”

She started to walk away, then stopped, and
turned.

“
Why can’t Gabriel come in
the library?” She couldn’t explain it, but somehow this was what
was burning a hole in her perfect resolve.

Tailor regarded her silently for several
moments. The hushed sounds of people browsing the aisles of books
and typing away on laptops suddenly seemed quite loud.

“
There’s a spell on the
building,” he said at last. “You can’t get in if you’re
immortal.”

Immortal. Camille nodded slowly.

“
You don’t look very
surprised,” Tailor noted.

She wasn’t. Not really. But hearing someone
say it out loud, confirm what she’d always guessed at...

“
There’s nothing more
dangerous than someone who can’t die,” Tailor said. “They have
nothing to lose.” He returned to scribbling in his
notebook.

Camille stood silently, still absorbing the
information. Nothing to lose, was that it?

“
You’re wrong,” she
murmured.

“
What was that?” Tailor
looked up.

“
You’re wrong,” she
repeated. “He has me.”

Chapter 8

Mac

Ten o’clock on Saturday, and my mind is
split. Half of my brain is focused on finding that ninja-thing,
glad we’ll finally have the time and daylight to trek into the
woods and check out the abandoned lumber mill. The other half of my
brain is still at school.

“
Did you see him? Did you?
He was practically groping her! Isn’t Kei supposed to be dating
Hayley?”

“
They’re not dating,” Destin
says, sullenly. We’re in my kitchen, swiping food for our trek into
the woods.

“
As far as she’s concerned
they are! He’s creepy, and he should just stick to Hayley and leave
Jul alone.”

“
He’s creepy,” is all Destin
admits.

I glance sideways at him. “You’re acting
weird.”

“
I’m worried we’ll end up
doing all the work on the project,” he says evasively.

“
Not a chance. Hayley never
does her own work when she can con someone else into doing it for
her - but that’s probably why Miller put her with us. She knew we’d
hold her to a line.” I nod to myself.

That doesn’t seem to comfort him. “I’m also
worried about wandering around in a rotted out building in the
middle of the woods. Why aren’t we telling anyone where we’re
going?”

I grab my backpack and sling it over my
shoulder. “Because adventure is its own reward.”

“
That...has nothing to do
with what I just said.”

“
Oh! Grab that last
sandwich, I forgot to put it with the rest.”

My sister's voice comes from the hall, right
outside. "I think there's some juice leftover from - " Hayley and
Amity walk into the kitchen and we freeze, holding an open backpack
full of sandwiches.

Hayley raises an eyebrow.

“
We’re hungry,” I
say.

“
The last time you made
eight sandwiches, I found a note on your bed saying you were going
to the Sahara, and would send me a postcard when you found King
Solomon’s treasure. You were also nine. Aren’t you a little old for
this?”

“
You’re never too old for
adventure,” I say dramatically. “And that state trooper totally
brought us back in one piece, for the record. Now if you'll excuse
us, we'll be - ”

“
Scouting for a tree fort?”
Hayley says, condescendingly.

"Playing cowboys and Indians?" Amity tacks
on.

"Maybe some cops and robbers?"  Hayley
laughs. "Oh no, wait, or is it mutants and...whatever it is mutants
fight? I wouldn't know, I'm not trapped in kindergarten."

"Survival training," I glare at her.

"For what, DragonCon?" Amity derides, naming
Atlanta's yearly comic convention.

Hayley gives her a look of mild horror. "How
do you even know what that is? I have an excuse, I live with that,"
she waves a hand at me.

Amity flounders slightly. "I...heard..."

"Never mind." Hayley gives a longsuffering
sigh, and turns back to me. "You know there's no way Mom and Dad
are letting you go into the woods. We've never been allowed out
there."

"Well then maybe they should
have picked a house that wasn't
surrounded
by woods," I return.
"Seems like faulty logic to me." I zip up the bag and back towards
the door. "Since we're such a huge blight to your eyes, we'll just
get going."

"Did you even ask Mom if it was okay?"
Hayley says loudly.

"Keep it down!" I hiss, but I already hear
the sound of the office door opening, and my mom comes in, paint
flecks in her dark blonde hair and a wide paintbrush still in hand.
She has this thing for repainting rooms, but she ends up getting
more on herself than the walls.

"What's dramatic now?" she says
suspiciously, eying the four of us, one hand on the waist of her
painting overalls.

"Hayley, as usual," I say.

"Mac and Destin are sneaking off to the
woods," Hayley snaps.

Mom's eyebrows raise, blue paint smudge and
all.

“
We're not going far, Mom.”
I reach for the handle. “We’ll be back by dinner,
promise...”

“
MacAlister Dupree,” my mom
says harshly, and I cringe. “You are not wandering around in those
woods. They’re full of snakes and poison ivy, and there’ve been
reports of coyotes lately.”

Coyotes? Did that have anything to do with
the ninja? “We won’t go out of eyeshot of the house, promise,” I
lie.

Mom gives me the narrow appraising look that
means she’s reading my mind. I hate that look. “No. The girls and I
are going shopping in town, you’ll be coming with us. Destin,
you’re free to stay or come with us, of course, but I’m not leaving
the two of you here to wander off the instant my car leaves the
driveway.” She didn’t have to ask him if his dad knew where he was.
It was Saturday. Destin spends more time in our house than his own
anyway. Also, his dad isn’t nearly so micro-managing as my mom.

“
Aw come on, Mom, we
wouldn’t do that!” I protest. We would. We absolutely would. But
we’d absolutely be back before she was, so she’d never
know.

She takes the backpack from me and starts
transferring the sandwiches to the fridge.

“
The woods are off limits,”
she says firmly. “Always have been, always will be.”

Hayley gives me a smirk and sashays out of
the kitchen. Amity glances back at us with an expression I don't
quite understand - something like hunger - but quickly follows her
out.

I glare at Destin for having
the nerve to look relieved. Did he
want
to collate homework handouts? If
we were going to clear our names, we had to find that
little...whatever it was!

Alright so, to be fair, I should probably
come clean about why the whole possibly-mythological-creature thing
didn’t freak me out as much as it should. And, you know, Destin and
the feathers.

When I was eight and he was nine, Destin
fell off the jungle gym in my backyard. He was mostly fine – some
scrapes on his hands and bruises – but there was this pile of
feathers all around him. At first I thought maybe he fell on a bird
or something, but then he swore me to ultimate secrecy and told me
the truth.

He wasn’t human. Not him, or his dad, or his
mom, or his sister. Their whole family was some sort of other race.
Feral, he said. Apparently being feral sometimes meant you got
abilities. Usually it was useful things like strength or speed or
really good eyesight. Not Destin – he just molted when you scared
him. Bummer of a superpower.

So anyway, that was how I first learned that
there’s a lot more going on in the world than most people know.
Naturally I wanted to know as much about this stuff as possible –
but Destin’s knowledge about his heritage is pretty limited.
Apparently his parents’ families immigrated from somewhere far
away, to get out of a bad situation, and have wanted to lie low
ever since. His dad was pretty vague about it to him, he said, and
refused to explain any more. He also claims that if I ever let on
that I know anything, his dad will go berserk. I’ve never seen the
man so much as curse in traffic, so I don’t know about berserk, but
so far I’ve kept my mouth shut and done my part to help Destin hide
the feathers. The down jacket was my idea. Pretty clever,
right?

Meanwhile, foreign people built a weird
school in the middle of some old cotton fields and started
collecting kids that give me the heebie jeebies.

“
It’s the school,” I say.
“I’m serious, there’s something really fishy about the whole
situation.”

I’d managed to convince my mom to drop us
off by the library downtown while she, Hayley, and Amity go dress
shopping. Research is a much better fate than listening to them
fight about skirt lengths.

“
We’re not actually writing
that paper for history, are we,” Destin states, as we cross the
street to the large, three story stone edifice that is the
Havenwood Public Library. For a town as small as ours, we really
outdid ourselves on our library. I like to call it THE CASTLE OF
BOOKS. In all caps.

“
Who said anything about a
history paper?”

“
You did, five minutes ago,
when you asked your mom to take us to the library.”

I make a dismissive sound. “I wrote that
already.”

“
Well I haven’t.”

“
Oh come on, it’s Civil War
crap, it took like ten minutes.”

“
It’s a five page paper, how
do you do that?”

“
I’ll give you my notes.
Come
onnnn
, don’t
you want to know what’s going on here? We’re clearly in the middle
of some crazy mythological stuff, and we have got to figure out
some way to clear our names. It’s bad enough that guys like Hyde
and Chase want to beat us up, we don’t need the principal for an
enemy. You think writing a bad paper for Caldwell is a problem?
Umino is scary, dude.”

“
Oh alright,” he sighs. “But
if my dad finds out we’re doing any of this...”

“
Yes!” I exclaim. How he
could be so apathetic about his own origins is a mystery to me. If
it was me, I’d want to know. “Okay so I’m thinking we start with
property records. I mean there has to be a reason why they went to
all this effort to build on that particular piece of land –
”

“
Kid. Hey, kid.”

There’s a woman sitting on a bench in front
of the library, presumably enjoying the shade of the awning. She
can’t be comfortable in that much leather – it’s scuffed and
stained and her mid-length hair is tangled and unkept. My first
assumption is that she’s homeless.

“
V’you got a library card?”
she asks in a distinct British accent.

“
Uh...yeah?” I say, taken
off-guard by the question.

The woman holds up a twenty dollar bill. “Be
a mate and check something out for me. I’ll make it worth your
while.”

“
It’s a public library,” I
state slowly, not sure she’s all there. “You can check it out
yourself.”