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Better to stay in the gray than get eaten by the dark.
“We all agreed—no strays.” The other boy shook his head. “That’s why we didn’t take the kittens!” “Oh, for the love of . . .” Liam slumped down in his seat, pressing his face into his hands. “What were we going to do with a box of abandoned kittens?” “Maybe if that black heart of yours hadn’t been willing to leave them to starve, we could have found them new, loving homes.” Liam gave the other boy a look of pure amazement. “You’re never going to get over those cats, are you?” “They were innocent, defenseless kittens and you left them outside someone’s mailbox! A mailbox!”
They probably think we took her, and if they put in the call that there are freaks roaming around in a beat-up black minivan . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to finish. “Hey,” Liam said, holding up a finger, “don’t talk about Black Betty that way.” “Oh, excuse me for hurting the feelings of a twenty-year-old minivan.”
“You all right, Zu?” he asked. The girl gave him two thumbs-up, her yellow gloves the only bright spot of color in the van. “Well, I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Chubs said. His little glasses were crooked on his face as he smoothed his blue button-down shirt. For good measure, he leaned forward and smacked the back of Liam’s head. “And by the way, are you out of your freaking mind?
“You did a good job,” he began. His voice was quieter than I expected. Unfortunately, it did nothing to calm the pissed-off snake that was coiled tight around my stomach. I reached over and punched him in the arm. Hard. “Ow!” he cried, pulling away from me with wide eyes. “What was that for?” “That was not like riding a bike, you asshole!” He stared at me a moment, his lips twitching. It was Suzume who burst out into a fit of silent laughter, an endless stream of gasping and shaking that turned her face bright pink and left her breathless. Seconds passed with her laughter as the only sound
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And unless they just so happen to have a resident bounty hunter in this neck of the woods, we’re going to be fine.” Those were famous last words if I had ever heard them. “The reward for turning in a kid is ten thousand dollars.” Chubs twisted around to look at me. “And the whole country is broke as a joke. We are not going to be fine.”
There was another car turning off the highway, a small silver Volkswagen; both Liam and I threw up a hand to block the intense glint of the sun against its windows. “Okay, Old Man River.” Liam gave the car an impatient wave. “Go ahead and turn before the next century. No, take your time, shave, contemplate the universe . . .”
I don’t suppose Black Betty has GPS?” I said. Liam blew out a sigh, patting the steering wheel. He had decided we were going right. “Black Betty may drive the straight and true path, but souped up, she is not.”
“So, naturally, the next choice was a minivan.” “Yep, she called to me from the parking lot of abandoned cars. The sun was shining through her windows like a beacon of hope.” Chubs groaned. “Why are you so weird?” “Because my weird has to be able to cancel out your weird, Lady Cross-stitch.” “At least what I do is considered an art form,” Chubs said. “Yes, in ye olde medieval Europe you would’ve been quite the catch—” “Anyway,” I cut in,
Before he stood, Liam knocked his shoulder into mine. “Where in the world did you get that dress?” I snorted, picking at the skirt. “Present from Zu.” “You look like you want to throw it into a fire.” “I can’t promise there won’t be an unfortunate accident later on,” I said, very seriously. When he laughed again it felt like a small victory.
There were, apparently, only two restaurant chains left in the state of Virginia, or at least the western half of it: Cracker Barrel and Waffle House—and one wasn’t open before nine o’clock in the morning. “Thank goodness,” Liam said in a solemn voice as he parked a short distance away from the Waffle House. “I don’t know how we would have chosen between these two fine culinary establishments.”
He cleared his throat. “Um . . . how about you pass out the food? I’ll just check—” “Liam Michael Stewart,” Chubs’s voice thundered from the backseat, “if you step one foot out of this minivan, I will order Green to run you down with it.” “Don’t think I won’t,” I warned, knowing exactly what Liam wanted to do: go out and risk his neck by walking down the alley to make sure the coast was clear. When I handed him a Styrofoam container, he slumped back in his seat, accepting defeat.
The only thing the ramshackle group had in common, outside of their pool of food and an alarming pile of firearms and knives, was their camp in New York, which they lovingly referred to only as “Satan’s Ass Crack.”
“If you can hear this, you’re one of us. If you’re one of us, you can find us. Lake Prince. Virginia.” That same message, three times, before it clicked again and switched back to the frequency we had heard before. For a long time, Chubs and I could only stare at one another, speechless. “Oh my God!” Chubs said, “Oh my God!” And then we were saying it together, jumping up and down, arms flung around one another like two damn fools—like we had never, ever wanted to reach over and slap each other multiple times on multiple days. I hugged him without any kind of fear or self-consciousness,
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“Ruby,” Chubs said. Then again, louder. “Ruby! Oh, for the love of . . . we were talking about Black Betty, not your Orange ass.”
When a girl cries, few things are more worthless than a boy. Having two of them just meant that they stared at each other helplessly instead of at me. Chubs and Liam stood, up to their ears in awkward, until Chubs finally reached out and patted my head like he would have patted a dog.
“We have no idea, but it’s not like we’re going to win any awards for normalcy anytime soon. So you get into people’s heads? The two of us can throw people around like toys. Zu once blew up an AC unit, and all she did was walk by it.”
Liam leaned down so his face was level with mine, so close that our foreheads were nearly touching. “We want you,” he said, his hand slipping through my hair to cup the back of my neck. “We wanted you yesterday, we want you today, and we’ll want you tomorrow. There’s nothing you could do to change that. If you’re scared and you don’t understand your crazy abilities, then we’ll help you understand—but don’t think, not for one second, that we would ever just leave you.”
“Maybe nothing will ever change for us,” he said. “But don’t you want to be around just in case it does?”
“So now you see,” I said, finally, “what a mistake it was to let me stay.” Zu was shaking her head, looking distraught at the suggestion. Chubs rubbed at his eyes, hiding his expression. Only Liam was willing to look me straight in the eye. And there was no disgust, or fear, or any of the thousand other ugly emotions he was entitled to; only understanding. “Try to imagine where we’d be without you, darlin’,” he said, quietly, “and then maybe you’ll see just how lucky we got.”
My fingers brushed against his hair, trying to smooth it down. I realized what I was doing a full minute after Liam had closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. Embarrassment flared up in my chest, but he grabbed my hand before I could pull back and tucked it under his chin. “Nope,” he whispered, when I tried to tug it away. “Mine now.”
crackers . . .” a voice breathed out behind us, “yessss . . .” Both of us turned, watching as Chubs twisted around in his seat and settled back down, still fast asleep. I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Liam rolled his eyes, smiling. “He dreams about food,” he said. “A lot.”
“Wake up, team,” he said. His shoulder popped as he reached back to slap Chubs’s knee. “Time to carpe the hell out of this diem.”
“It feels like we should do something,” he said. “Like, send her off on a barge out to sea and set her on fire. Let her go out in a blaze of glory.” Chubs raised an eyebrow. “It’s a minivan, not a Viking.”
“Now, you couldn’t have been at Caledonia. I would remember a face like yours.” I think he thought he was being charming with those dark eyes and dimples. He looked over at Lee, who was fighting back a smile as he watched my reaction. “Where did she come from, and where can I find one?” “Picked this one up at a gas station in West Virginia, bargain price,” Lee said. “Last one on the shelf, sorry.”
“I’m a Green,” Hina said, pointing to her full head of hair. “Duh.” Zu gave us an apologetic shrug before tugging Hina away, back to the circle of younger kids who were engrossed in some kind of card game. Liam turned toward me with a look of pure amazement. “Did I just get sassed by a twelve-year-old?”
Liam, at one point, had the football an inch in front of him, but his hands were too slow and his footwork too bad to catch it when it was tossed to him. “Keep your eye on the ball, butterfingers!” I called.
Zu looked right at me when she nodded. The next note was for both of us. I want to be with my family. I just don’t want you to be mad at me. “Mad?” Liam shook his head. “Never. Ever. You’re my girl, Zu.
“Had to,” he managed to mumble out. “I’ll kill him,” I said, anger flaring up inside of me. “I’ll kill him.” Liam started to chuckle again. “Ah . . . there she is. There’s Ruby.”
“God.” He shook his head, mouth twisting into a shadow of a smile. “Did you know . . . you make me so happy that sometimes I actually forget to breathe? I’ll be looking at you, and my chest will get so tight . . . and it’s like, the only thought in my head is how much I want to reach over and kiss you.” He blew out a shaky breath. “So don’t talk about getting me out of here, because I’m not leaving, not unless you’re part of the package, too.”
“I’m a monster, you know. I’m one of the dangerous ones.” “No you aren’t,” he promised. “You’re one of us.”
“Do you have a better offer?” I asked. “What if I did?” “I’d find that hard to believe,” I said, inching closer, trying to distract him, “considering you care so little about me. If this situation had been reversed, you wouldn’t have come running, would you have?” He shrugged. “I would have come. I just would have walked.”
The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces.
“Lee!” The word exploded out of me. He dropped the charred wood from his hands and struggled over the tree, blindly fighting his way through its leaves and branches. Seeing me. Believing and not believing it all at once. “Oh my God!” I threw my arms around his neck and nearly took us both down. “Thank you,” he was whispering, “thank you, thank you. . . .” And then he was kissing my face, every inch of it he could find, wiping away the tears and soot, chanting my name.
Liam wasn’t the only one who escaped, but he was the only one who came back.
And then, because, let’s face it, I’m basically an Olympic god when it comes to sports, I manage to volley the ball right into your face.”
