Chosen Ones (25 page)

An owl hooted and I remembered the time. Dad would be home soon. This might work to my advantage. I knew bringing the guy home would royally piss him off. He’d have puppies if he found a stranger in the house. Hell, he might even have a llama.

But while the thought of pushing Dad closer to the edge gave me warm tingles, it wasn’t my only motivation. I kind of wanted a little more time with the guy. Those arms… Those
eyes
. We were all alone out in the middle of the woods. If he’d wanted to go serial killer on me, he would have made a move by now. I didn’t believe he was dangerous. “My house isn’t far from here—Dad went to the grocery store the other day. Lots of junk food if that’s your thing.”

The look in his eyes made me think he didn’t trust me—which I didn’t get. I’d given him my
shoes
for crap’s sake. “I don’t know who your friends were, but they might double back. You’ll be safe at my place for a while. Maybe they’ll give up.”

He looked downstream and shook his head. “They are not the type of men who give up.”

2

It was a straight path through the woods and across to Kinder Street. The small cul-de-sac bordered the Parkview Nature Preserve and was home to five houses, all painfully similar except for their color. As we walked, I tried to get the guy to talk a few times, but all I got were simple, one-word answers that told me jack-shit. Eventually, I gave up and settled on counting the heavy fall of my shoes—still on his feet—as they clomped against the earth.

By the time the house came into view, I was dying of curiosity.

“So, ready to fill me in yet? Who were those guys in the fruity leotards?” I fought with the front door lock. Damn thing always stuck. “Did you piss off a herd of male ballet dancers?”

Silence.

The door finally gave way and I stepped aside, waving him in. He didn’t move. “Well?”

“You first.”

Alrighty then. Someone had a serious case of paranoia. I stepped in and waited. It took a few moments, but finally, he crossed the threshold.

“Can you at least tell me your name?”

He wandered the room, running his fingertips along the edge of the couch and over some of Mom’s old knickknacks. “Sue calls me Kale,” he mumbled after a minute of hesitation. He picked up a small crystal horse, held it to his ear, then shook it several times before setting it back down and continuing on.

“Kale what?”

The question halted his inspection and earned me a funny look. In his hand was the tile ashtray Mom made at an arts and crafts fair the week before I was born. It was cheesy and cheap looking, but I was still afraid he might drop it.

“As in your last name?”

“I don’t need one,” he said, and returned to his surveillance. It was like he was searching for something. Picking apart each item in the room as if it might contain the clues to a mass murder—or maybe he was looking for a breath mint.

“How very Hollywood of you.” I hefted the laundry basket off the floor, set it on the couch, and rummaged through it till I found a pair of Dad’s sweatpants and an old T-shirt. “Here. The bathroom is upstairs—second door on the right. There should be clean towels in the closet on the first shelf if you want a shower. Take your time.”
Please
take your time.

This would be the perfect payback for the ass-chewing Dad gave me for sneaking out last week. That, and it didn’t hurt that Kale was a total hottie.

He made no move to take the clothes from me.

“Look, no worries, all right? Dad isn’t due home for awhile and you’re covered in mud and gunk.” I set the clothes down on the seat in front of him and took a step back to grab a pair of my jeans from the basket.

Without taking his eyes from me, he gathered the clothes in his arms and stared. His expression was so intense I had to remind myself to keep breathing. Something about the way he watched me caused my stomach to do little flips. The eyes. Had to be. Crystalline blue and unflinching. The kind of stare that could make a girl go gaga. The kind of stare that could make
this
girl go gaga—and that was saying a lot. I wasn’t easily impressed by a pretty face.

He seemed to accept this because he gave a quick nod and slowly backed out of the room and up the stairs. A few minutes later the shower hissed to life.

While I waited, I changed out of my muddy clothes and started a pot of coffee. Even if Dad didn’t find a strange guy in the house when he got home, he’d be pissed about the coffee. I couldn’t count the times he’d told me the El Injerto was strictly
hands off
. He even tried to hide it—as if
that
would have worked. If he wanted me to leave his coffee alone, he should go back to drinking the Kopi Luwak. No way—no matter how much I loved coffee—would I drink anything made from a bean some tree rat crapped out.

I’d almost finished folding the laundry when Kale came down the stairs.

“Much better. You look almost human.” The pants were a little baggy—Kale was a few inches shorter than Dad’s six three—and the shirt was a bit too big, but at least he was clean. He still had his feet crammed into my favorite red Vans. They were soaked. Had he worn them in the
shower
?

“Your name?” he asked once he’d reached the bottom, the sneakers sloshing and spitting with each step. He
had
worn them in the shower!

“Deznee, but everyone calls me Dez.” I pointed to the soggy Vans. “Um, you ever gonna take my sneakers off?”

“No,” he said. “I cut myself.”

Maybe something wasn’t screwed on right. There was a mental facility in the next town—it wasn’t unheard of for patients to get out once in a while. Leave it to me to find the hottest guy in existence and have him be a total whack job. “Oh. Well, that explains it all then, doesn’t it…?”

He nodded and began wandering the room again. Stopping in front of one of mom’s old vases—an ugly blue thing I kept only because it was one of the few things still in the house that belonged to her—he picked it up. “Where are the plants?”

“Plants?”

He looked underneath and inside, before turning it over and shaking it as though something might come tumbling out. “This should have plants in it, right?”

I stepped forward and rescued the vase. He jerked away. “Easy there.” I carefully placed the blue monstrosity back on the table and stepped back. He was staring again. “You didn’t think I was going to hit you or something, did you?”

In eighth grade I’d had a classmate who we later found out was being abused at home. I remembered him being skittish—always twitching and avoiding physical contact. His eyes were a lot like Kale’s, constantly darting and bobbing back and forth as though attack was imminent.

I expected him to avoid the question, or deny it—something evasive. That’s what abused kids did, right? Instead, he laughed. A sharp, frigid sound that made my stomach tighten and the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

It also made my blood pump faster.

He crossed his arms and stood straighter. “You couldn’t hit me.”

“You’d be surprised,” I countered, slightly offended. Three summers in a row at the local community center’s self-defense classes. No one was hitting
this
chick.

A slow, devastating smile spread across his lips. That smile had probably ruined a lot of girls. Dark, shaggy hair, tucked behind each ear, still dripped from the shower, ice blue eyes following every move I made.

“You couldn’t hit me,” he repeated. “Trust me.”

He turned away and wandered to the other side of the room, picking up things as he went. Everything received a quizzical, and almost critical, once-over. The trio of
Popular Science
magazines sitting on the coffee table, the vacuum I’d left leaning against one wall, even the TV remote sticking between two cushions on the couch. He stopped at a wall shelf full of DVDs, pulling one out and examining it. “Is this your family?” He brought the box closer and narrowed his eyes, turning it over in his hands several times.

“You’re asking me if”—I stood on my tiptoes and looked at the box in his hands. Uma Thurman glared at me from the cover, wearing her iconic yellow motorcycle suit—“Uma Thurman is a
relative
?” Maybe he wasn’t loony. Maybe he had been at the party. I’d missed the Jell-O shots, but obviously he hadn’t.

“Why do you have their photograph if they’re not your family?”

“Seriously, what rock did you crawl out from under?” Pointing to a small collection of frames on the mantle, I said, “Those are pictures of my family.” Well, except my mom. Dad didn’t keep any pictures of her in the house. I nodded to the DVDs and said, “Those are actors. In movies.”

“This place is very strange,” he said, picking up the first picture. Me and my first bike—a powder-pink Huffy with glitter and white streamers. “Is this you?”

I nodded, cringing. Pink sneakers, Hello Kitty sweatshirt, and pink ribbons tied to the end of each braid. Dad used it on a daily basis to point out how far I’d fallen. I’d gone from fresh-faced blonde with perky pigtails—his sunshine smile girl—to pierced nose and eyebrow with wild blonde hair highlighted by several chunky black streaks. I liked to think if my mom were alive, she’d be proud of the woman I’d become. Strong and independent—I didn’t put up with anyone’s crap. Including Dad’s. That’s how I imagined her when she was alive. An older, more beautiful version of me.

I looked at the scene in Kale’s hands again. I hated that picture—the bike was the last gift Dad ever bought me. The day he gave it to me—the same day the picture was taken—had been a turning point in our lives. The very next day my relationship with Dad started to crumble. He started working longer hours at the law firm and everything changed.

Kale set the picture down and moved on to the next. His hand stopped mid-reach and his face paled. The muscles in his jaw twitched. “This was a setup,” he said quietly, hand falling slack against his side.

“Huh?” I followed his gaze to the picture in question. Dad and me at last year’s Community Day—neither of us smiling. As I recall, we weren’t happy about taking the picture. We were less happy about being forced to stand so close to each other.

“Why not let them take me at the water’s edge? Why lead me here?”

“Let who take you?”

“The men from the complex. The men from Denazen.”

I blinked, sure I’d heard him wrong. “Denazen? As in the law firm?”

He turned back to the picture on the mantle. “This is
his
home, isn’t it?”

“Do you know my dad?” This was priceless. Score another point for my megalomaniacal Dad. One of his cases, no doubt. Maybe some poor chump he’d sent to the happy house, because that’s clearly where he belonged.

“That man is the devil,” Kale replied, lips pulled back in a snarl. His voice changed from surprised to deadly in a single beat of my heart and, crazy or not, I found it kind of hot.

“My father’s a shit, but the Devil? A little harsh, don’t ya think?”

Kale scrutinized me for a moment, taking several additional steps back and inching his way closer to the door. “I won’t let them use me anymore.”

“Use you for what?” Something told me he wasn’t talking about coffee runs and collations. Acid churned in my stomach.

His eyes narrowed and radiating such hatred, I actually flinched. “If you try to stop me from leaving, I’ll kill you.”

“Okay, okay.” I held out my hands in what I hoped was a show of surrender. Something in his eyes made me believe he meant it. Instead of being freaked out—like the tiny voice of reason at the back of my brain screamed I should be—I was intrigued. That was Dad. Making friends and influencing people to threaten murder. Glad it wasn’t only me. “Why don’t you start by telling me who you think my dad is?”

“That man is the Devil of Denazen.”

“Yeah. Devil. Caught that before. But my dad’s just a lawyer. I know that in itself makes him kind of a dick, but—”

“No. That man is a killer.”

My jaw dropped. Forget balls, this guy had boulders. “A killer?”

Arms rigid, Kale began flicking his fingers like he had by the stream. Pointer, middle, ring, and pinky. Again and again. Voice low, he said, “I watched him give the order to
retire
a small child three days ago. That is not what a lawyer does, correct?”

Retire
? What the hell was that supposed to mean? I was about to fire off another set of questions, but there was a noise outside. A car. In the driveway.

Dad’s car.

Kale must have heard it too, because his eyes went wide. He vaulted over the couch and landed beside me as Dad’s keys jingled in the lock on the front door and the knob turned. Typical. The damn thing never stuck for
him
.

He stepped into the house and closed the door behind him. Eyes focused on mine, he said, “Deznee, step away from the boy.” No emotion, no surprise. Only the cold, flat tone he used when speaking to me about everything ranging from toast to suspension from school.

I used to be sad about it—the fact that his career seemed to have sucked away his soul—but I was over it. Nowadays, it was easier to be mad. Trying to get a reaction from him—any reaction—was my sole purpose in life.