“That was an emergency, Kori,” he said, in that way he had of making quiet words seem more important than shouted ones. “Most people don’t respond well to the shock-and-awe approach.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Kris demanded, and his arm slid around my waist. Maybe I should have pushed him away, to prove I could stand on my own, but instead I scooted closer, and his arm tightened around me, and I realized he wasn’t trying to protect me—he was standing with me.

“I was thinking that she had the balls to do what needs to be done, no matter what that requires.” Kori gestured angrily as she spoke. “She’s the one who wants to charge into enemy territory, and we can’t send her in unprepared. She has to be able to use her Skills.”

“Kori...” Kris started, but she cut him off, her anger clashing with his.

“Listen up, all of you.” She stepped away from Ian and addressed us as a group—as if she were in charge—and my blood boiled. “None of you know what Julia’s capable of. Not like I do.”

“She can’t hurt me,” I insisted, clinging to that very thought.

Kori turned to me, eyes narrowed, studying me. “She can’t physically hurt you, or order someone else to. But there are many kinds of pain, Sera. What that man did to your sister? What you saw? Julia can and will make that happen all over again. Maybe to someone you know—she’ll pluck your best friends right off the street, if she can find them. She’ll make you watch them tortured, for no reason other than to see you suffer. To make you remember what you would do anything to forget.”

My friends? College felt like a lifetime ago. My friends were a universe away—I hadn’t seen even one of them since the funeral. But they weren’t beyond the Towers’ reach. “Why would she...” My question had no end. I couldn’t say it.

“To make you give up your birthright. To illustrate what a heartless bitch she really is. Because she’s premenstrual. Because she’s bored. Because she can. She doesn’t need a reason to cause pain, but she has plenty of them to choose from.”

“We won’t let that happen,” Kris swore. Then he turned on his sister. “Get out.”

“You’re sending a lamb to the slaughter, Kris. You all need to listen to me.”

“And you need to back the fuck off and get out of here!”

Kori blinked, stunned. Then she glanced at me and backed slowly toward the door.

“If Sera goes in there and her plan falls apart—hell, even if it doesn’t fall apart—they’ll use every weapon at their disposal to break her. And her weak spot is pretty fucking obvious.” Her hand found the doorknob and one foot landed over the threshold in the hall. “She needs to deal with that shit before she goes in there, or they’re going to rip her heart out and serve it on crackers.”

With that, she stomped past Ian into the hall and out of sight.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when she was gone. “She really does mean well. And she speaks from experience you can’t even...” He stopped and studied me for a minute. “Well, maybe you can imagine. Her approach was wrong, but her heart’s in the right place. She really was trying to help.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept his apology, in part because it wasn’t his to give. But his point lingered. And I suspected he was right—they both were. Not that I was eager to go home again. That house was haunted, if not by ghosts, then by memories. By loss. And if I couldn’t face my own memories, how the hell was I supposed to face down Julia Tower?

Seventeen

Kris

“You sure you want to do this now?” I slid the full clip into place in the handle of the .40 Sera had confiscated from Mitch. “You’re entitled to a break, you know.”

The warm, early fall breeze blew a long dark strand of hair across Sera’s forehead. “Screw that.” She pulled a rubber band from her pocket and secured her hair in a casual ponytail at the base of her skull, then laid her palm over the gun I’d set in front of her, barrel aimed down our makeshift firing range—a card table in the backyard, fifty feet from a fresh paper target tacked to an old, dead oak tree. “Sitting around thinking about what can’t be changed won’t help. I need something to do. I need to do this.”

“No one expects you to get over everything you’ve been through just like that.” I pressed the last 9 mm round into the clip for the gun I’d borrowed from my sister.

“Kori does.”

“She doesn’t expect you to get over it. She expects you to deal with it. She’s not over all the shit she’s been through, either.”

“I know.” Sera watched as a brown rabbit hopped from a clump of overgrown bushes toward the woods at the edge of the property. I loved that we were far enough from downtown to have rabbits, at least until we scared them off with gunfire. “She has nightmares. Loud ones.”

“They’re getting better.”

Sera turned away from the tree line to frown at me, squinting into the sun. “That’s better?”

I nodded and picked up an extra clip next to the pistol on the table in front of me. “She hasn’t tried to gut anyone in her sleep in, like, a month.”

She thought I was kidding. I could tell from her exasperated expression. I decided to let her think that. And to warn her away from Kori and Ian’s room after dark.