Oath Bound
Page 39

“Six years.” I didn’t realize my sister was staring at me until I found the right entry and looked up. “Off and on,” I amended, with one glance at her stunned expression. “Mostly off, for the last two, when... Cavazos. Then Hadley.”
It hurt to think those thoughts, but it hurt even more to speak them.
“Oh, shit.” She covered her mouth with one hand. “So, you and Elle were still together when she met Ruben?”
“We were never really together. Not like that. Not exclusively.” I’d tried for exclusivity, but Noelle was the kind of bird that dies in captivity. She’d needed the freedom to soar wherever the wind took her, and it took her away from me as often as it brought her back.
But in the end, freedom killed her faster than captivity ever could have, surely. And maybe I would have seen it coming, if I could have interpreted that damn notebook.
When I found my way out of my own head, Kori was still staring at me, waiting for more information. For the glimpse into a side of Elle’s life she’d never seen.
“She left after high school, like everyone else.” Anne and Liv had gone to college. Kori had attended the school of life and nearly flunked that the way she’d nearly flunked high school, because she refused to play by the rules. I’d had no better college prospects than she’d had, so I’d stayed with Gran and Kenley, working for anyone who needed a shadow-walker. I hadn’t been picky about the jobs, then. I hadn’t understood that not all of the syndicates’ recruits were volunteers.
I hadn’t realized I’d become a subcontractor helping them fill quotas until something that went very wrong turned out to be very right. I’d spent most of the decade after high school trying to make up for what I’d done the year I was nineteen, but Noelle had...
Well, no one really knew where Noelle went after graduation. She just kind of disappeared about the same time I was turning my life around. But...
“Elle came back more often than the rest of you,” I told Kori as I turned the pages of my notebook. “And when she was in town, we’d just pick up where we’d left off.”
That was all my sister needed to know. She didn’t need to hear about ice cream in bed, and all-night Abbot and Costello marathons, and the conversations we’d had when Elle was awake.
She didn’t need to know that every time Elle left town again, she’d sneak out of my bed in the middle of the night, with no note. No goodbye. It might be months before I saw her again. Once, it was years. And she’d arrive just as suddenly as she’d left. With no warning.
Until she stopped arriving.
“You found it?” Kori’s voice brought me back to the present, as if time was a rubber band being snapped against my skin.
It stung.
“Yeah. Here.”
She followed my finger to a passage written in blue ink, nearly eight years earlier. Noelle had been twenty. I’d been twenty-two. “Take the girl in the yellow scarf.” Kori looked up at me again. “That’s it? Just, ‘Take the girl in the yellow scarf’?”
“Yeah. It meant nothing until today, when I saw Sera standing there in that yellow scarf.”
Fresh skepticism swam in my sister’s eyes. “How do you know she meant this girl? This yellow scarf? Is she seriously the only girl in a yellow scarf you’ve ever seen?”
I thought about that for a second. “Yeah, actually, I think she is.” The only one I remembered, anyway. And that had to mean something, right? If I’d seen another girl in a yellow scarf, I hadn’t noticed her, and that had to mean something, too, right? “Anyway, I know because the moment I saw her, I thought of this. And not just my handwriting, blue ink on white lines. I thought of the night Noelle said this. The night I wrote it down. It just felt...” Right. “It felt like this is the girl Noelle wanted me to take. So I took her. And as bad as I feel keeping her here when she wants to leave, I can’t let her go until she’s done whatever she’s supposed to do, or I’ve done whatever I’m supposed to do. Or until I know whatever Elle wanted me to know.”
But Kori clearly thought I’d lost my mind. “Kris...”
“Don’t. I’m not crazy. Do you have any idea how many people have died because I couldn’t figure this out?” I closed the notebook and laid one hand on its ratty cover. “Because I don’t. I have no idea how many people I’ve failed to save, like I failed to save that crossing guard.” Like I’d failed to save Noelle. “I don’t know, because I can’t figure most of these out. This is the first time I’ve even come close to seeing what she wanted me to see, and I’m not going to give up on that.” I wasn’t going to give up on her.
“Is this about that boy? Micah?”
An old, bitter pain rang through me at the mention of his name. I hadn’t consciously thought about him in years, but his face was never far from my memory. “No. This has nothing to do with him.”
“Because you know, you can’t punish yourself forever, and no matter how many kids you shield, you can’t bring Micah back.”
No. I couldn’t. But I could stop it from happening to the others. To the kids most in danger of being headhunted by the Skilled mafia. Kids like Kenley, who’d barely been in college when she was extorted into joining the Tower syndicate. Kids like Micah, who’d been delivered into their own personal hell by people like me, who didn’t ask enough questions—who didn’t care enough to ask the right questions—and became unwitting, unbound cogs in the very machine I wanted to destroy.