Oath Bound
Page 108

“Anne still has a home phone,” she explained, pressing buttons on her cell.
I listened on Kris’s phone, and over the line, as Hadley’s screams quieted to a whimper, I heard the home phone ring. Something clattered against wood, and Anne said, “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Kori said from my room. “Turn off the grid. I’m coming over.”
“Just a second.” Anne’s voice was distant now, over Kris’s line. Kori hung up and shoved her phone into her pocket, then headed into the hall. A second later, her footsteps clomped down the stairs so fast I was surprised she didn’t trip over her own feet and plummet to her death. An instant after that, the closet door slammed, and I knew she was gone.
“Anne, can you hear me?” I said into Kris’s phone, and finally she picked it up.
“Who is this?” she said, and I could hear Hadley crying softly in the background, still mumbling about a spider.
“It’s Sera.”
“Where’s Kris?” she said. “Why are you on his phone?”
“He—” I said, but before I could admit to anything—which I wasn’t eager to do—I heard Kori’s voice over the line as she stepped into some shadow in Anne’s house. Almost at the same time, more footsteps raced up the stairs, and Vanessa stepped into my room again.
“Kris is gone.”
“What?” I said, but she could only shrug. That was the extent of her information. “Anne, I gotta go,” I said into the phone, then ended the call and slid Kris’s cell into the shallow pocket of my pj shorts. Ian, Van and I all headed for the stairs, and Gran was just trudging into the living room when we got there, her hair standing up in odd places, rubbing one tired, swollen eye.
“What’s all the ruckus?” She tried to smooth her hair, but it wouldn’t cooperate.
“Hadley’s hysterical and Kris is gone,” Vanessa said.
“Have you seen him?” I added, and Gran shook her head.
“He’ll be back.” She looked confused. “It must have been an emergency, or he wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night. He’s a good boy.”
“I know. Would you like some hot tea?” The offer was as much for me as for her. I couldn’t get Hadley’s screaming out of my head. It wasn’t a coincidence that she’d called Kris’s phone with what was obviously a prediction I couldn’t understand, and now he was missing. Kris and Hadley’s spiderweb trap were connected. And that could not be good.
“Screw hot tea. I’ll make coffee.” Gran brushed past me and I followed her into the kitchen, where Vanessa stood at the table, scrolling through something on her laptop.
“Ian, were you going through the police files I downloaded?” There was something ominous in her voice, as if she already knew the answer before she’d asked the question.
“No. Why?”
“This was on the screen when I opened my laptop. It’s one of the men from the police’s suspect list. In Sera’s case.”
I edged between them, trying to see the screen.
“Sera, wait,” Ian tried to hold me back, but he let go with one angry look from me.
“I was going to show them to you this morning,” Van said softly as I closed my eyes and exhaled, trying to prepare myself for what I might see. “But it looks like Kris did some research of his own.”
I opened my eyes, and the face on the screen came into focus. My throat closed and the air trapped in my lungs seemed to solidify. I sank into the chair to my left and pulled the laptop closer. My hands shook as I zoomed in, then scrolled to recenter the picture.
It was him. The smiling man. The man who’d killed my entire family and ended any chance I had of having children.
“His name is Chase Curtis,” Vanessa said, but I didn’t give a shit what his name was. I didn’t even have a chance to properly process the fact that we’d identified him, because my gaze was stuck not on his face, but on the back of his bare right shoulder, where the tattoo of a crawling tarantula stared back at me.
The spider.
“Oh, shit. Kris found the spider.” I could hardly hear myself because I hadn’t taken in enough air to give my words much volume, but they both heard.
“What spider?” Ian said, and Van tapped the tattoo on her screen.
“That’s what Hadley was trying to tell us.” I scrubbed my face with both hands, but couldn’t erase what I’d just seen. Nor could I make any sense of it. “She said, ‘The spider is dead. The web is a trap.’ And she said it on Kris’s phone.”
Vanessa exhaled heavily. “He went after Curtis.”
“And the web is a trap.” I wasn’t sure what that meant yet, but I was sure it was true. “Who would set a trap for Kris?”
“It’s not a trap for him, it’s a trap for you,” a familiar voice said, and I looked up to find Anne and Hadley standing in the middle of the living room, the child’s face still red and damp from tears. Kori was behind them closing the hall closet door. “And it was set by someone who wants you dead, and knows you’re going after the spider.”
“Julia,” I said, and everyone around me seemed to be nodding. “She set a trap for me, and got Kris instead.”
“This is my fault.” Ian met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “I told him to give you what you want most.”