Chimera

earshot.

Good grief, Andrew was going to freak out when he realized his big brother was missing. The kid was eight. He’d been through too much already, was too damned young to have seen the shit he’d seen. Sure, kids were resilient during and after a crisis, but we carried that baggage for the rest of our lives. Mine was still firmly strapped to my back with a big old Fucked over and sold out by her own parents written on it in permanent ink.

Thatcher was tracking Teresa with his eyes, and I couldn’t help wondering if he was thinking along the same lines, worrying about Andrew. And Caleb, too. Both boys were attached to Ethan, and both deserved a safer life than the one they had. I’d never disagreed with that part of Teresa’s vision for a united Meta community. Children deserved a chance to grow up happy and safe, no matter who their parents were. Hell, if we were judged by our parents’ actions, the Rangers would have drowned me in the creek like an unwanted puppy and been done with me.

Instead, they saved me and gave me that happy, safe childhood.

For a while.

“Simon has a security camera outside of his house,” Teresa said once her conversation was over. “But we’re too far away for it to have seen anything. Simon’s coming out to read the area, though, see if he can pick up any emotional backwash.”

“What about the kids?” I asked.

“His housekeeper is going over to sit with them for a little while.” Just in case hung off the end of her sentence.

I had nothing to contribute to their search, so I hung back while Teresa headed over to the other Sport, where Gage and Marco were still poking around. They were too far away to hear anything, but close enough at half a block to still see clearly. And Gage was very clearly frustrated. He even pulled away when Teresa tried to touch his arm, and that rarely happened. Those two always used to be like peas and carrots, and lately they were more like the same ends of a magnet, pushing each other away.

“If you don’t let me up right the fuck now, I will hit you!” Aaron’s snarled statement bounced out of the Sport’s interior.

“Fine,” Noah snapped back. “If you fall on your face, I’m not picking you up.”

“Fine.”

Thatcher’s lips twitched, and when our eyes met he mouthed, Brothers?

I nodded. I’d forgotten he didn’t know our twisted history with the Scotts and their Changeling halves.

Aaron stumbled out of the Sport and right into Thatcher, who grabbed his arm and kept Aaron from falling face-first to the pavement. “Take it easy, kid,” Thatcher said.

“I’m not a fucking kid.” Aaron pulled away and only managed to fall sideways against the side of the Sport. He was smart enough to stay put, though, and use the Sport for support while he got his bearings.

“Then stop acting like one. Calm down and think.”

Aaron glared. Thatcher had a point. Aaron had known Ethan a few months; Teresa, Gage, Marco, and I had known him for twenty years, and we were keeping our shit together in order to find him. He didn’t get to be more upset than the rest of us.

Deja vu, honey.

The same thing had happened back in June when Teresa was shot by . . . well, Aaron, technically (but that’s a long damn story), and Dahlia about had a fit. Dahlia, who’d been part of our group for all of six months, who didn’t have our shared history, who’d never trained to be a Ranger. I’d seriously resented her grief and fear, and I was resenting Aaron’s, too.

Unfair? Maybe so, but that’s the way it goes.

“What do you remember about the person in the street?” Thatcher asked.

Aaron’s face scrunched up. He looked ahead of us, toward the other Sport, like it held the answers he needed. “A woman or girl, from the body shape. She was angled away from us, down, so I never saw her face.”

“Tall or short?”

“Short to medium, I guess. Her legs were bent.”

“Hair?”

“Not sure. She was wearing a knit cap, I think.”

“Clothes?”

Aaron rubbed his forehead and left a smear of grime behind. “Jeans, sneakers. A baggy T-shirt, maybe blue. Nothing that stands out.”

“She could have been Bethany Crow,” I said.

“That makes sense,” Thatcher said. “It leaves Landon as lookout, and it’s fairly easy for a telekinetic to drug someone from a distance. He could send in a syringe and depress the plunger without ever being seen.”

“But why take Ethan?”

“It’s possible my son, or the people who took him, are trying to get my attention again. He and Aaron made themselves targets by being out in the city alone.”

“Hey!” Aaron said.

Thatcher gave him a hard look. “You stopped to help a stranger on the street without first reporting it to someone at your HQ. You went out in the open. Perhaps they took advantage of your desire to help others, but regardless, you both made very amateur moves tonight.”

Aaron flushed dark red, and I half expected him to take a swing at Thatcher. Instead, he strode off toward the group at the other end of the block.

Inside the Sport, Noah heaved a sigh. “Aaron already blames himself, you know,” he said from his spot on the floor. “He calls it the big brother prerogative. Makes him a little unreasonable sometimes, especially when someone he loves is in trouble.”

“Understandable,” Thatcher said, “but he needs to be focused, or he’ll only hinder our investigation.”

I gave Thatcher a shrewd look. He spoke with a self-assurance that hadn’t been there before, and he stood a little straighter, more confidently. At some point he’d stopped thinking of this as something he was forced to help with and started thinking of it as our investigation. He’d become part of it, rather than an outsider looking in.

The corner of my brain that had always rebelled against including the Manhattan prisoners in anything we did stayed curiously quiet. Didn’t protest Thatcher’s inclusion or the way he’d handled Aaron just now. He’d been direct and useful. And for the first time since we sprang him, I didn’t mind Thatcher’s presence.

Not that I’d ever tell him so.

Seven The Call

Three hours later, we had exactly zero leads on Ethan’s whereabouts and enough shared anxiety to keep Hackensack General’s psych ward busy for a month. No clues at the crime scene, no contact from the kidnappers, and no witnesses besides a couple of alley cats who weren’t talking. Teresa assigned Lacey’s squad to stay in New Jersey and continue searching (more to feel like we were doing something than because she expected actual results), while the rest of us headed back to HQ.

Minus Marco. He wasn’t in Lacey’s squad, and despite his valuable skill with computers, he chose to remain in raven form and search on his own. A tiny part of me hated him for that ability. Even if he didn’t find anything, he was doing something.

My stomach was doing something: rumbling, reminding me to feed it. I wanted to know what was going on with Double Trouble, but despite that and my hunger, I didn’t follow the others inside after we landed. I headed through the archway to the back field and sat down on the same bench Ethan and I had sat on—hell, was that really just this morning? A lifetime had passed since then, and we still felt miles away from solving this case.