Everyone was looking at me with a certain kind of aggravated respect now, and I would have thoroughly enjoyed that...if I’d intentionally done the thing they respected.

“She can take it back, right? She can just...turn our Skills back on?” Kori looked to me for an answer and when I didn’t have one, she turned back to Gran, who could only shrug.

So we tested it out. Kori tried to travel out of the front closet for at least the fifth time in the past quarter hour, to no avail.

“I’m sorry,” I said when she emerged angrier than ever. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t even know how I’m doing it. I just...don’t want you guys to go without me.”

“That’s it.” When we all turned to look at him, Ian wore a quiet smile, but it appeared to be all for me. “It’s just like Kenley and binding. She has to truly want to break a binding, in order to remove her will from it, and you have to truly want us to go, for us to be able to leave.”

“But I don’t want you to go without me.” Kris and Kori started to object, but I cut them off. “Arguing isn’t going to help. And I’m not going to feel guilty for insisting that you treat me like an equal. I may not be able to shoot the wings off a fly at forty paces, or whatever, but I can do things none of you can do. Useful things. So...either let me join in your reindeer games, or it looks like no one’s going to play.”

Vanessa chuckled. “You’re going to have to take her with you.” She shrugged. “At least until she learns how to control the blocking. That’s how it works for all Skills, right? They take practice to control?”

Kori nodded reluctantly, and Kris looked almost amused. “I have to admit, that’s impressive.” He grinned as if he’d forgotten about the night before. About how kissing me was a mistake. “Your psychic temper tantrum put the lockdown on this entire house.” He turned to Kori and Ian before I could object to the characterization of something I couldn’t yet control as a child’s fit. “Maybe we need her with us after all.”

Kori didn’t look pleased and Ian seemed reluctant to put me in any more danger—they all did, since they’d found out about the smiling man’s knife and the weeks I’d spent in the hospital. But when neither of them could think of a logical reason to object, I knew I’d won.

A minute and a half later, Kris and I stepped out of the hall closet and into a small, dark bathroom in the warehouse on Sycamore Grove—the only patch of darkness in the whole building. Kori and Ian stepped out of the deep shadows behind us a few seconds later, and we tiptoed toward the line of light we could see beneath the door.

Kris opened the door carefully, and when no one burst in aiming guns at us, he pushed it the rest of the way open. Then nearly choked on shock.

The rest of us peered around him, and my entire body went cold when I saw what was waiting for us in the hall, facing the door we’d just opened in the only dark spot in the building.

A spot that had been left dark for us on purpose, I realized, as I stared at what Julia Tower had left behind.

Ned-the-guard. Dead, with a neat-ish hole in the center of his forehead. Nude and propped up in a sitting position, with a paper note safety-pinned to the flesh above his heart. His dead eyes stared up at us, and I knew what he was meant to be even before I read the note, which appeared to have been written in blood. Probably his.

Ned was a message from Julia Tower. To me.

I should have known she’d kill him if he was no longer useful to her. And if she knew I had set him free, then she knew I’d figured out exactly who I was and what I could take from her.

Pretense was over. The battle had just begun.

Only one of us could survive.

Fifteen

Kris

“Oh, shit...” I tried to block the dead man from Sera’s line of sight, but I could tell by her suddenly rapid breathing that she’d already seen. She tried to push past me, but I refused to move. I’d already lost Kenley by letting her rush into an unknown situation, and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. “Wait!” I whispered when she wouldn’t stop shoving. “It’s probably an ambush.”

“Bullshit.” Sera didn’t even bother to whisper. “They obviously knew we were coming—this was left here for us. If this were an ambush, they wouldn’t want us to know they knew we were coming.”

I had to think about that for a second; however, once I’d untangled her sentence, I couldn’t argue with it. But caution never hurts.

Kori and I fanned out for a quick search of the four other rooms emptying into the hallway, while Ian and his gun—fortunately, he’d been shot in his left shoulder—stood guard over Sera.

When we were sure the immediate area was deserted, I motioned for Ian to let her out of the men’s room. Sera shot an angry glance at me, but I was starting to get used to those. And I refused to feel guilty for trying to keep her safe. Angry-Sera was better than dead-Sera any day of the week.

Although agreeable-Sera would have been a nice change.

She knelt by Ned’s body, and when Kori and Ian took up posts on either side, I knelt with her to read the note pinned to the dead man’s bare chest.

His blood is on your hands.

“That’s Julia’s handwriting,” Kori said, and I looked up to see her staring at the note as if she’d seen a ghost. “She doesn’t usually get her hands dirty, but this time I’d bet my last drop of vodka that the bitch pinned it to him herself.”