Gypsy (The Cavy Files Book 1) (13 page)

It’s always struck me as sad, the way he’s trapped in his body. Outwardly, in the real world, the staff at Darley doubted he had any usable brain function. We told them that he seems to understand us in the Clubhouse, that he follows our conversations and that his eyes communicate. It gave the Philosopher hope, for a time, that they could rehabilitate him, but they never had.

“Hey, Geoff.”
His smile grows. He likes his new name, and I suppose calling him Vegetable had never been politically correct. Not that my name is, either.
“Where are the others?”

He doesn’t answer, so I reach out to Mole, then Haint, and then, out of desperation, Pollyanna. We can’t talk in each other’s minds or anything as cool as that, but if we’re in the shared space and kind of… knock, it’s kind of like a drum beating or a light flashing in the corner of your mind. We leave notes here often, which have the same effect.

None of them show up, and I try not to worry. It probably means they’re in a situation like I had been in earlier, with other people and unable to zone out mentally for a few minutes.

I curl up in Mole’s chair, breathing deep. The man’s face, the one who jabbed me, hovers behind my closed eyelids. The longer I stare, the more sure I am that I’ve never seen him before in my life. It’s not a long list, the people I know, but there were staff that came and went at Darley.

I wake to a tap on my shoulder and no memory of falling asleep.

Haint’s chocolate skin is transparent, making me blink. She closes her eyes and grimaces, then focuses on becoming more solid.
“I only have a second. My grandparents went downstairs to cook dinner, but she’s already checked on me twice.”

The words wake me all the way, and I sit, grasping the arms of Mole’s recliner.
“Tell me what happened.”

“A woman grabbed me outside my grandparents’ house a little before three-thirty. She knew my whole given name and when I stammered that was me, she stuck me in the neck with a needle.”

“Were you alone?”

“Yeah. Mole and Polly were together.”

“I was with a girl from school.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Her dad’s a doctor, and he took some blood. At least we’ll know if we should be worried.”

Her face paled, coffee-bean eyes sharp.
“We should be worried about what they’re going to find that has nothing to do with that injection. And what the police are going to make of the fact that he was looking for you specifically.”

“I know. I’m sure my father will insist on reporting it.”
I pause.
“Have you talked to the twins?”

“No.”
Haint stops, casting a glance at Geoff when he grunts.
“Were they here?”

He makes a gargantuan effort to nod.
“Too.”

“It happened to them, too?”

“Me,”
he pushes out.

“And you?”
My heart speeds into a gallop. Geoff and Prism are still in the hospital, as far as we know. If these attackers got to them, too, they’re ballsy. Or desperate.

The second scares me more.

“Okay, so we assume that these people targeted all of us, at the same time, for a reason,”
Haint recaps.

“
Obviously
, Becca.”

“Don’t call me that. Not in here.”

“Fine. Oh, and I saw Reaper. We’re going to the same school.”

“How is she?”

I shake my head.
“Not good. Depressed and scared.”
And pissed.

“Tell her welcome to the club.”

“You know it’s worse for her because of what she can do.”

She closes her eyes again.
“My grandmother’s hollering for me to come set the table. Let’s meet back here later and figure out a plan, okay? Midnight?”

“Yeah. I’ll leave a note. You go.”

Haint tugs the sleeve of her thin, red shirt over her hand and reaches for me. Her caution reminds me that there’s more about today that needs to be relayed, including that my gift malfunctioned when Dane Kim touched me. I’ve hardly thought about it since school ended, and there isn’t time to discuss it now.

We need an agenda for tonight. It’s going to take multiple meetings to discuss everything, and trying to figure out what in the hell happened this afternoon is most pressing, for sure.

She gives me a squeeze, letting me know that her frustration isn’t for me but for the potential hazards of this new world, and leaves. To go
set the table.

The thought of her in such a normal situation makes me both happy and sad. Happy because we
should
be able to do normal things like set the table at our grandparents’ house. Sad because it’s going to change the core of who she is, how she deals. How will she concentrate without her pattern of disappearing herself, one body part at a time?

Worse, if she forgets and
doesn’t
concentrate, those parts could go invisible before she realizes.

Worries, too many to count or name, settle heavy on my shoulders as I scrawl a quick note asking everyone else to meet back here at midnight. I pin it to Geoff’s shirt since he’ll be here and no one would sit on him.

I’m intent on finishing this task and getting back to the house before my father gets home when Geoff’s hand grasps the note, his fingers closing around it. Our eyes meet. His reflect the astonishment numbing my limbs—he moved. With purpose.

We share a thought:
the injections.

Time passes without my noticing it. Five minutes might have ticked by, or it could have been an hour before the sound of the front-door buzzer shakes me from my state of shock. My brain isn’t working properly, not even wrestling with the questions of what might have been in that injection or how someone could know what affect it would have on Cavy DNA. Know we
have
Cavy DNA.

My mind just drifts. Blank. Stunned.

The buzzer sounds again, insistent, and my legs respond on autopilot. It never would have occurred to me this morning to check out the front window to see who’s ringing, but after what happened, I do.

The sight of Jude stops my heart and snaps my brain to attention, flooding me with trepidation fast enough to make me shake. Maybe it’s best not to open the door.

I’ve almost decided on that course of action when the wrinkle between his eyebrows and the downturn of his lips catch my attention. The concern draping his entire body like a cloak tugs at my heart and I open the door without another thought, wondering how I can be happy to see him and wish he weren’t here at the same time.

Relief slumps his shoulders, relaxes the muscles in his face, but he doesn’t smile. “Maya called and told me what happened. Are you okay?”

I barely know him. It occurs to me that this is strange, a guy I just met coming to check on me. He’s watching me close enough that I think he sees the reaction in my face, and his cheeks turn red.

“I know it’s weird, me showing up like this, but Maya was freaked out. She said you didn’t say much after it happened, you didn’t seem to want to talk to her about it, but she thought maybe we should check on you anyway, and…” He gives me a sheepish grin. “I’ll shut up. Maya’s worried and bossy. Bad combination.”

I hate that the gesture of friendship makes me suspicious. Maya had been quick to pick up on the fact that the attack hadn’t been random, and surely the thought had entered her mind that it has something to do with Darley. She probably sent Jude to dig deeper.

But he seems genuinely concerned, and I don’t want to be alone. My throat burns, and I stand aside, motioning Jude into the foyer. He follows me through the living room, past my dad’s office and a library, and into the kitchen. The stroll gives me time to get my emotions under control.

I grab a pitcher of grape juice and a block of cheese from the fridge, then snag a box of crackers out of a cabinet. Slicing the cheese into chunks turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth when I knick the side of my index finger and spend five minutes donating blood to a dish towel. Jude helps me rinse it clean and wrap it up with a Band-Aid, then we sit on the bar stools next to the island, and he reaches out to touch me.

It’s there the whole time, the instinct to pull away, to protect myself from the knowledge, but in this instance the damage has been done. And like a bolt of lightning so bright it wakes me from a lifetime of slumber, I realize I
want
him to touch me.

Maybe I just want
someone
to touch me.

His hand covers mine. It’s warm and soft, with a touch of roughness about his fingertips. The
18
flashes, but I focus on Jude’s warm eyes instead of the number, trying to breathe around my jumping stomach and racing heart. I’ve read about this, seen it on a screen, but once again it’s different when it’s happening to me.

“So, are you okay? And I don’t mean your finger, I mean what happened this afternoon.”

“I think so. It doesn’t hurt or anything but Maya’s dad won’t have the blood work back for a couple of days.” A chunk of Colby-Jack falls from its Triscuit perch, giving me an unwanted excuse to pull away from Jude’s touch as I retrieve it, then take a bite. He waits for me to chew, more patient than any of the Cavy boys when they want answers. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just a crazy person.”

“A crazy person looking for you specifically?” Jude arches an eyebrow, studying me over the rim of his juice glass. There’s a perception, a willingness to problem solve, in his gaze that reminds me of Maya. It’s endearing and attractive, more so in him than in her, but it’s also an issue.

They’re not interested because they care. They want the juicy gossip.

I shrug, taking another bite and searching for a believable answer. “You know we’ve been on the news, and crazy conspiracy-theorist blogs have been saying all kinds of things. There are a lot of whacked people out there. Who knows what they think? Maybe it’s some off-the-wall church out to save us or something.”

“You think he injected you with Kool-Aid?” His lips twitch, but a sheer curtain falls over his gaze, obscuring something. “Was it red?”

I shove him playfully, unable to stop a giggle. “Very funny. But seriously, I guess the reactions to us and our old lives run the gamut.”

“What was your life like until now?” He bites his lip, guilt darkening his expression. “You don’t have to tell me if it’s horrible and you don’t want to remember or something.”

“There was nothing horrible at Darley. It was… idyllic. We lived on a gorgeous plantation with spades of gardens, trees, a river, and a giant house with a million nooks and crannies waiting to be explored. I had friends that never had to go home.” The constant medical and neurological testing hadn’t been my favorite thing in the world, but it hadn’t constituted abuse. It hadn’t ruined my life. And anyway, I couldn’t talk about that aspect. “I assume the staff thought they were doing a good thing, taking in orphans. We never knew they didn’t have legal custody of us. They were nice. It wasn’t like
Annie
or anything.”

That makes him smile wider, even though his eyes remain fixed on me, probing for additional information that might be hidden under my answer. “But you’re
not
orphans. That must have been quite the revelation.”

It takes a moment for me to process my feelings, and it occurs to me that no one has asked about that, not even Sandra. How I feel about believing my whole life that no one wanted me, that no one could handle the strange mutation to my humanity, and finding out that isn’t true. That the Philosopher and the Professor and all the rest kept me from a family, a real one.

But my mother
did
give me up, even if she didn’t want to, and the Cavies are family, too. As excited as getting to know my father makes me, as hopeful as I am that we will build a great relationship, he’ll never replace them.

“I don’t know what the people at Darley knew. They got us from a place that said we were unwanted.”

The thought of sharing the details about my poor mother makes me sad. I’m not ready to face the fact that she’d wanted to keep me, or that my life could have been different.

It’s clear now that she and my father had no idea about my unique genetics, so that couldn’t have been a factor in giving me away. They lied. All of them. It’s not my abilities that landed me at Darley, and if that’s true of all of the Cavies, I’d be super interested to learn how the Philanthropist found us in the first place.

More mysteries. We need a whiteboard in the Clubhouse so we don’t forget anything.

“Well, that’s good to know.” He chomps on the last cracker, then brushes the crumbs off his fingers. “I’d hate to think you’re all mentally unstable or something. Since we go to the same school now.”

The wink he sends my way flutters into my heart, beating its wings and stirring up glittery dust that clings to my ventricles, refusing to let them return to business as usual. It makes me consider that Maya might be right, that Jude could have personal motives for wanting me mentally stable that have nothing to do with his curiosity about Darley. It takes me a few minutes to remember why letting myself enjoy, or even return, those desires would be a bad idea.