and both of them were crying. Summer had glowing purple eyes, and Louis’s hair was the color of my skin.
“We’re here to send a message to the traitors,” Summer said in a voice choked with tears. Louis finished with, “We’re here to die.”
Several chairs squeaked. People murmured. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to somehow reach through the screen and save those two kids. But this wasn’t live. Whatever happened to them had happened already. Beneath the table, Thatcher’s hand found mine and squeezed hard.
“Tell them,” the filtered voice said.
Summer looked right at the camera, anger mixing with her grief. “You betrayed Uncle and everything we’ve worked for. We’ll all be punished now, because of you. It’s all your fault.”
Bethany made a soft, choked sound. Thatcher leaned closer and put his arm around her shoulders, without ever letting go of my hand. My chest ached and my eyes stung. We were watching a nightmare unfold, and my only small consolation was that Landon didn’t have to see this.
In the foreground of the screen, a hand came into view. A hand holding a familiar black box—the collar trigger.
I closed my eyes. Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I covered my eyes with my free hand. I couldn’t watch it. But I heard it. The buzz of electricity, the short screams that turned into gurgles. The clank of chains. Then silence from the screen, while gasps and soft sounds of disbelief and anger erupted around the conference table. Bethany dissolved into hysterical sobs. Thatcher let go of my hand as she threw herself at him, and he held her while she cried. I glanced up at the screen, at the pair of swinging bodies, and I swallowed hard against the sudden urge to vomit.
“They were just fucking kids,” Ethan said.
“I’ll make this easy for you,” the filtered voice on-screen said. “The bodies are closer than you think. You may even hear the lion’s roar.”
The screen went blank, but the images of those two dead kids were burned into my brain. I glanced around the table, catching the same horror and rage on everyone’s face. The need to find these other kids before Uncle executed them, too.
“ ‘You may even hear the lion’s roar,’ ” Aaron said. “What does that mean? A zoo? A place with a lion statue?”
“Perhaps,” Marco replied. “I am already searching for potential matches within a two-hundred-mile radius.”
“He wants us to find the bodies,” Teresa said, as furious as I’d seen her in a long time. Her eyes flashed bright with tears, but her jaw was tight, her shoulders back. “Which means we could very well walk into a trap.”
“He’d have to know we’re expecting that, though,” Aaron said. “No one’s going to walk in blindly.”
“No. We’ll be ready for anything.”
“That floor looked like wood,” Ethan said. “Marco, can you zoom in on just the floor?”
“Of course,” Marco replied.
He did, and Ethan was right. The floor was old, unpolished, and badly in need of repair, but it was definitely wood of some kind. It kind of reminded me of a gymnasium floor.
Ethan slapped his palm against the table, which made most of us jump. “Lions,” he said. “I know where they are.”
The mascot for Lincoln High School in Jersey City was the Lions. Granted, the school hadn’t functioned as anything except a place for transients to roost for the last ten years or so, but Ethan’s prediction turned out to be correct. We found the bodies of Summer Jones and Louis Becker hanging from the rafters of the old gymnasium, near the three-point line. Gage and Panther-Marco sniffed the room for clues while Ethan, Sebastian, and I cut the bodies down. Teresa watched everything with a frozen horror that worried me.
The bodies weren’t stiff, so they hadn’t been dead long. Calling the police felt wrong, somehow, and yet taking them back to HQ with us seemed even worse. We were waiting for Teresa to make the decision. Involving the police now meant explaining the video, which could be a problem for Bethany and Landon’s current anonymity.
“Huh,” Ethan said after a few minutes.
“Huh, what?” I asked.
“Nothing has exploded, shifted, or otherwise attacked us since we’ve been here.”
“Doesn’t mean it still isn’t a trap.”
“If it’s a trap, it’s taking its sweet time to spring.”
Fifty feet across the gym, Gage and Marco were sniffing around in a shadowed area, probably trying to pick up any clues left behind by the Overseer—or whoever the executioner had been. Panther-Marco lifted his head and growled, a low sound that carried across the distance. Teresa’s head snapped toward them. Gage froze, listening.
“Get down!” Gage shouted.
The gymnasium roof exploded, raining noise, glass, and wood debris on top of us. We scattered. The gym had no actual cover besides a single section of open bleachers on the opposite side. Sunlight streamed down from the bus-sized hole in the roof, creating a giant dust moat illuminating the debris-covered bodies. A quick glance around told me everyone was on their feet.
Teresa’s hands glowed purple as she brought her power to the forefront. I reached for my holstered Coltson, glad I’d thought to grab it before we left. Sebastian’s cheeks hollowed as he pursed his lips and did whatever he did while preparing to spit acid at a target.
Two things happened simultaneously. The gym doors closest to Gage and Marco swung open, spilling in more exterior light and illuminating the shapes of four people. Two more shapes appeared in the roof’s giant hole, one of them flapping a pair of big, feathery wings and holding the second person in his arms.
“Hold,” Teresa said, before any of us could make a move. They’d attacked the roof, not us.
The flying pair (both boys) descended in a great gust of wind, stirring up enough dust to make me want to cough. The quartet (two boys and two girls) walked carefully around Marco and Gage, making a wide circle away from us to join their pals near the wreckage they’d created. No one spoke. Even in the dimness, I could tell the six newcomers were young, period. Teens or early twenties, and they all looked equal parts terrified and angry. The boy with the yellow-feathered wings was the only one who outwardly appeared Meta, but I knew better than to assume any of them were powerless.
A girl stepped away from the sextet. She wore black jeans and a black T-shirt—a uniform shared by the other five teens. Her black hair was shorn short, accentuating her stunning cheekbones and coffee-colored skin. As she moved into the light cast from the hole in the ceiling, her eyes sparkled like they were coated in white glitter. She crouched next to Louis’s body and touched his cheek with her knuckles.
One of the boys behind her made a grief-stricken sound. They all seemed caught somewhere between wanting to burst into tears and needing to punch something. I could definitely sympathize, having been there myself way too many times.
Our own group had reassembled on the other side of the bodies, gathered in a U-shape behind Teresa. We were evenly matched, six to six, but with no idea of their powers . . . well, this little standoff could go down a lot of ways, and I knew Teresa was hoping for peacefully.
“I’m so sorry,” Teresa said.
Sparkle Eyes stood up. She was taller than Teresa, and she had a lot more anger behind her right now. “You didn’t do this, Trance,” she replied. “Our fight isn’t with you.” Her voice had a Southern lilt to it.
“Your fight is with the man who ordered these children executed.”
“Our fight is with the traitors who made this happen. We’ve all been abandoned by Uncle now, thanks to them.”
“We can protect you.”
She laughed, a sound that turned into a sneer as she pointed at former Bane Sebastian. “You made your own choices by taking in our enemies, so no, thank you.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Sebastian said. He came a few steps closer, hands by his side in a
