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“All right. Thank you for doing this.”
“No problem.” She paused. “Is Nick being nice to you?”
“As nice as he can be.”
Dani laughed. “That’s all you can ask for.”
“So…” I turned to the window, away from Nick, as if that would afford any privacy. “How’s Sam? Is he… okay?”
“Sam is fine,” Dani said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“And Cas?”
“Cas is Cas.”
She paused, then, “I should go. Be careful, bird.”
After promising her I would, we hung up.
“So?” Nick said.
“My uncle should be at a bar tonight.”
“So what do we do before then?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t mind taking a nap in a proper bed.”
Nick veered to the right, to the next freeway exit. “How about breakfast, and then we find somewhere to crash?”
I nodded. “Yes, please. I could go for a gigantic pile of pancakes right about now.”
“With brown sugar,” Nick said in a voice so low I barely heard him.
“What?”
His jaw tensed. “Just… try it with brown sugar. And syrup. And butter.”
“All right,” I said, slightly suspicious.
It was the best combination of sweet and buttery I’d ever tasted. I covered the stack of pancakes with butter, drizzled it with pure maple syrup, and then sprinkled brown sugar on top.
It was like heaven.
“Have you had it this way?” I asked Nick once I’d sopped up the last of the syrup. He shook his head. “Then how did you know I’d like it?”
He emptied his cup of coffee. “I just did.”
I tilted my head to the side. “Come on.”
Our waitress, an older woman with a long braid of gray-brown hair, swooped in, clearing our plates. “Room for dessert?” she asked.
I was stuffed. Maybe more stuffed than I needed to be. Sam had told me overeating was one of the biggest mistakes we could make. We could never know when Riley or the Branch would swoop in, and having a full stomach made you lethargic and slow. “Only eat for fuel,” he’d said. And I’d definitely just eaten for pleasure.
“No, thank you,” I answered. Nick shook his head.
“I’ll have your bill ready for you in just a minute.” She hurried off.
I turned back to Nick. “So?”
He shrugged again. “I just knew, all right?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You remembered, didn’t you? I used to like brown sugar on my pancakes when I was a kid?” Nick just stared at me, which was answer enough. “How do you know all these things about me?”
Another shrug. He avoided looking at me.
I smiled. “Maybe you didn’t hate me so much back then.”
He snorted. “Doubtful.”
I ticked off the things I knew about our past. In a flashback, he was with me while Dani and Sam fought. He’d shown me how to make a paper crane. He knew how I liked my pancakes. And in my drawing, the one where he was pushing me inside the closet, I had to wonder if he wasn’t pushing me inside to be mean, but instead to hide me from something.
And if so, what?
Or who?
After we ate, we drove around for another hour. We didn’t have much money left, not enough to rent a room somewhere, and it was far too cold to nap in the vehicle. Besides, the heat had started malfunctioning, so it hovered between blowing out cold air and blowing out air that smelled like a basement.
Nick drove to a nicer part of town, where quaint cottages were stuck between mammoth houses, and all of them surrounded a lake. The road narrowed the farther north we went.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re looking for a place to crash, remember?”
I sat forward, the seat belt tightening across me. “In someone else’s house? What if they come home while we’re there?”
“Shh. Just wait a damn second.”
I grumbled but sat back.
Finally he slowed and pointed at a one-story gray brick cottage. “Look, the driveway hasn’t been shoveled. There aren’t any tracks in the snow, in the driveway, or on the front path up to the door.” He nodded at the houses farther up the street. “See the icicles hanging off the roof?”
“Yeah.”
“It means the heat’s running. Now look at this place. See any icicles?”
I scanned the roof’s edge. “No, not really.”
“Means the heat is turned down so they can conserve it to keep the utilities low. It’s probably a summer place.”
“So no one will find us.”
Nick nodded. “Exactly.”
He pulled in the driveway and up on the side of the garage, partially hiding the car beneath a canopy of thick pines. We walked around to the back of the cottage. There was a small porch there, and a back door with an old aluminum screen on the outside. I held it open while Nick worked at the lock on the inner door.
I bounced on my feet, trying to ward off the numbness spreading through my toes. The temps were colder here, and the wind coming in off the lake was nearly icy. Hurry up, Nick, I thought.
The lock clicked open, and Nick pushed the door in. I barged past him into a mudroom. Water shoes and sandals were lined up on a black mat. Raincoats hung from hooks on the wall. Beach toys were stacked in crates in the corner. I relaxed. This was definitely a summer home.
I followed Nick through a small galley kitchen to the living room. There was a sectional couch covered in white sheets. Nick tugged them off with one pull. Dust swirled in the air.
“It’s nice being out of the wind,” I said, rubbing my arms, “but it’s still freezing in here.” I could see my breath.
“We’ll only be here a few hours. I’ll turn the heat up.”
He located the thermostat in the makeshift dining room tucked in the back of the living room. “Seventy okay?” he asked and I nodded. He turned the dial, and the furnace ticked on a few seconds later. “Give it ten minutes, and it should warm up.”
“Thank you. Really.”
He looked at me, his expression hovering between his default scowl and something softer, more sympathetic. He didn’t say anything in reply, so to combat the sudden, awkward silence, I started searching for a linen closet or a blanket hutch, for something to keep me warm while the house heated up.
I found an old fleece blanket in a bag under one of the beds. After giving it a good shake, I wrapped it around my shoulders and plopped onto the couch.
Better already.
It took all of one minute for my eyes to grow heavy and my head to droop.
“You can take a nap,” Nick said. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You don’t mind?”
He shook his head. “That’s what we’re here for anyway.”
“What about you?”
He pulled a chair up to the front window and parted the curtains just enough to see out. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? Because I could take the first—”
“Anna.” He silenced me with a look. “Go to sleep.”
“All right,” I said, because I was exhausted. I lay down, curling onto my side, the blanket tucked around me.
It didn’t take long for me to pass out.
21
WHEN I WOKE UP, AN OLD MEMORY HOVERED in the sleepy haze, like a word I’d forgotten, just out of my reach. I knew the feeling of it, the shape of it, but not any of the finer details, the details that mattered.
Whatever the memory was, I knew instantly that it’d been important, and I sat up cursing.
Nick looked at me with a frown. He was hunched in the chair, still positioned at the front window. There was a beer in his hand, the top popped open. His hair was even more disheveled since I last saw him. I wondered absently if he’d moved at all, or if he’d been in that spot the whole time I slept. He must have moved to at least find a beer ferreted away somewhere in this place.
He looked beyond exhausted.
I set my feet to the floor and rubbed my eyes. “I had another flashback, I think.”
“You know who was there?”
The way he asked the question made me wonder if he was asking because he wanted to know if he was there. Since he’d been in a lot of my memories, I thought it was a good chance the answer was yes.
“I’m not sure,” I said, because that was the easiest response. “But there was…”
Blood. I paused, and looked down at my hands. A phantom sensation, warmth spreading between my fingers. Here in the present, my hands were pale, dry, cracked along one knuckle from the cold. Not covered in blood, but the sensation was overwhelming. I could almost feel it beneath my fingernails, feel it running down my arms.
I shook the image away.
Maybe I was going crazy.
“What?” Nick prompted.
“Nothing.” I stood. “Any idea where the bathroom is?”
He nodded down the hall. “Second door on the right.”
“Does the water work?”
“Yep.”
Inside, I shut and locked the door and used the toilet. After washing my hands and face, I looked in the mirror.
My head was pounding. My eyes hurt deep into the sockets. When would I ever live a normal life? Like, go to bed not worrying about being ambushed in the middle of the night. And wake up looking refreshed, a whole day spread out before me. A day of possibilities.
I sighed and turned on the faucet to splash some warm water on my face when my vision cut out. Sight came back to me in flashes, like a dozen blinks in rapid succession.
I slammed my eyes shut, pressed the heels of my hands to my temples.
A scream. In my head.
What the hell was happening?
I was running. Through a hallway. People were shouting behind me. I slid into the bathroom, tore off the toilet tank lid, and plunged my hand into the freezing-cold water. I came up with a plastic zipper bag. There was a gun inside.
My knees buckled. I pitched to the side, scrambled for something to hold on to, but took a basket of toiletries down with me. Aluminum and glass containers clanged and shattered on the floor.
Blood on my hands. Running down my arm. Blood beneath my fingernails.
Something splintered and slammed against the wall. Hands shook me.
“Get Anna out of here,” Dani said.
“Anna!” Nick shouted. “Can you hear me?”
Opening my eyes hurt and the light from the ceiling blinded me. The leftover haze of the flashback mixed with the present, and I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.
Nick crouched beside me, his fingers digging into my skull as he examined me. “What the hell happened?”
“Another flashback.”
He looked over his shoulder at the shredded bathroom door. “New rule: Leave the door unlocked next time.”
With his help, I climbed to my feet. My head swam a second but dissipated enough that I could pretend I was fine.
But was I?
When we’d first left the lab at the farmhouse, Sam had gone through several debilitating flashbacks once his system withdrew from the memory suppressants. My dad had told me once that Sam had gone through too many memory wipes and that’s why his came back so violently.
As far as I knew, I’d had my memory wiped only once, right before I’d been placed at the farmhouse.
So why was I experiencing the same thing Sam had?
We hung around the summer cottage for several more hours while Nick tried to repair the bathroom door. He managed to get it back on its hinges, but there was no way to hide the caved middle where Nick had rammed a shoulder into it.
Just after seven PM, Nick turned down the heat and locked up the house. He walked with me to the passenger side of the car, as if he was afraid I might have another sudden flashback.
“No problem.” She paused. “Is Nick being nice to you?”
“As nice as he can be.”
Dani laughed. “That’s all you can ask for.”
“So…” I turned to the window, away from Nick, as if that would afford any privacy. “How’s Sam? Is he… okay?”
“Sam is fine,” Dani said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“And Cas?”
“Cas is Cas.”
She paused, then, “I should go. Be careful, bird.”
After promising her I would, we hung up.
“So?” Nick said.
“My uncle should be at a bar tonight.”
“So what do we do before then?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t mind taking a nap in a proper bed.”
Nick veered to the right, to the next freeway exit. “How about breakfast, and then we find somewhere to crash?”
I nodded. “Yes, please. I could go for a gigantic pile of pancakes right about now.”
“With brown sugar,” Nick said in a voice so low I barely heard him.
“What?”
His jaw tensed. “Just… try it with brown sugar. And syrup. And butter.”
“All right,” I said, slightly suspicious.
It was the best combination of sweet and buttery I’d ever tasted. I covered the stack of pancakes with butter, drizzled it with pure maple syrup, and then sprinkled brown sugar on top.
It was like heaven.
“Have you had it this way?” I asked Nick once I’d sopped up the last of the syrup. He shook his head. “Then how did you know I’d like it?”
He emptied his cup of coffee. “I just did.”
I tilted my head to the side. “Come on.”
Our waitress, an older woman with a long braid of gray-brown hair, swooped in, clearing our plates. “Room for dessert?” she asked.
I was stuffed. Maybe more stuffed than I needed to be. Sam had told me overeating was one of the biggest mistakes we could make. We could never know when Riley or the Branch would swoop in, and having a full stomach made you lethargic and slow. “Only eat for fuel,” he’d said. And I’d definitely just eaten for pleasure.
“No, thank you,” I answered. Nick shook his head.
“I’ll have your bill ready for you in just a minute.” She hurried off.
I turned back to Nick. “So?”
He shrugged again. “I just knew, all right?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You remembered, didn’t you? I used to like brown sugar on my pancakes when I was a kid?” Nick just stared at me, which was answer enough. “How do you know all these things about me?”
Another shrug. He avoided looking at me.
I smiled. “Maybe you didn’t hate me so much back then.”
He snorted. “Doubtful.”
I ticked off the things I knew about our past. In a flashback, he was with me while Dani and Sam fought. He’d shown me how to make a paper crane. He knew how I liked my pancakes. And in my drawing, the one where he was pushing me inside the closet, I had to wonder if he wasn’t pushing me inside to be mean, but instead to hide me from something.
And if so, what?
Or who?
After we ate, we drove around for another hour. We didn’t have much money left, not enough to rent a room somewhere, and it was far too cold to nap in the vehicle. Besides, the heat had started malfunctioning, so it hovered between blowing out cold air and blowing out air that smelled like a basement.
Nick drove to a nicer part of town, where quaint cottages were stuck between mammoth houses, and all of them surrounded a lake. The road narrowed the farther north we went.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re looking for a place to crash, remember?”
I sat forward, the seat belt tightening across me. “In someone else’s house? What if they come home while we’re there?”
“Shh. Just wait a damn second.”
I grumbled but sat back.
Finally he slowed and pointed at a one-story gray brick cottage. “Look, the driveway hasn’t been shoveled. There aren’t any tracks in the snow, in the driveway, or on the front path up to the door.” He nodded at the houses farther up the street. “See the icicles hanging off the roof?”
“Yeah.”
“It means the heat’s running. Now look at this place. See any icicles?”
I scanned the roof’s edge. “No, not really.”
“Means the heat is turned down so they can conserve it to keep the utilities low. It’s probably a summer place.”
“So no one will find us.”
Nick nodded. “Exactly.”
He pulled in the driveway and up on the side of the garage, partially hiding the car beneath a canopy of thick pines. We walked around to the back of the cottage. There was a small porch there, and a back door with an old aluminum screen on the outside. I held it open while Nick worked at the lock on the inner door.
I bounced on my feet, trying to ward off the numbness spreading through my toes. The temps were colder here, and the wind coming in off the lake was nearly icy. Hurry up, Nick, I thought.
The lock clicked open, and Nick pushed the door in. I barged past him into a mudroom. Water shoes and sandals were lined up on a black mat. Raincoats hung from hooks on the wall. Beach toys were stacked in crates in the corner. I relaxed. This was definitely a summer home.
I followed Nick through a small galley kitchen to the living room. There was a sectional couch covered in white sheets. Nick tugged them off with one pull. Dust swirled in the air.
“It’s nice being out of the wind,” I said, rubbing my arms, “but it’s still freezing in here.” I could see my breath.
“We’ll only be here a few hours. I’ll turn the heat up.”
He located the thermostat in the makeshift dining room tucked in the back of the living room. “Seventy okay?” he asked and I nodded. He turned the dial, and the furnace ticked on a few seconds later. “Give it ten minutes, and it should warm up.”
“Thank you. Really.”
He looked at me, his expression hovering between his default scowl and something softer, more sympathetic. He didn’t say anything in reply, so to combat the sudden, awkward silence, I started searching for a linen closet or a blanket hutch, for something to keep me warm while the house heated up.
I found an old fleece blanket in a bag under one of the beds. After giving it a good shake, I wrapped it around my shoulders and plopped onto the couch.
Better already.
It took all of one minute for my eyes to grow heavy and my head to droop.
“You can take a nap,” Nick said. “I’ll keep watch.”
“You don’t mind?”
He shook his head. “That’s what we’re here for anyway.”
“What about you?”
He pulled a chair up to the front window and parted the curtains just enough to see out. “I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? Because I could take the first—”
“Anna.” He silenced me with a look. “Go to sleep.”
“All right,” I said, because I was exhausted. I lay down, curling onto my side, the blanket tucked around me.
It didn’t take long for me to pass out.
21
WHEN I WOKE UP, AN OLD MEMORY HOVERED in the sleepy haze, like a word I’d forgotten, just out of my reach. I knew the feeling of it, the shape of it, but not any of the finer details, the details that mattered.
Whatever the memory was, I knew instantly that it’d been important, and I sat up cursing.
Nick looked at me with a frown. He was hunched in the chair, still positioned at the front window. There was a beer in his hand, the top popped open. His hair was even more disheveled since I last saw him. I wondered absently if he’d moved at all, or if he’d been in that spot the whole time I slept. He must have moved to at least find a beer ferreted away somewhere in this place.
He looked beyond exhausted.
I set my feet to the floor and rubbed my eyes. “I had another flashback, I think.”
“You know who was there?”
The way he asked the question made me wonder if he was asking because he wanted to know if he was there. Since he’d been in a lot of my memories, I thought it was a good chance the answer was yes.
“I’m not sure,” I said, because that was the easiest response. “But there was…”
Blood. I paused, and looked down at my hands. A phantom sensation, warmth spreading between my fingers. Here in the present, my hands were pale, dry, cracked along one knuckle from the cold. Not covered in blood, but the sensation was overwhelming. I could almost feel it beneath my fingernails, feel it running down my arms.
I shook the image away.
Maybe I was going crazy.
“What?” Nick prompted.
“Nothing.” I stood. “Any idea where the bathroom is?”
He nodded down the hall. “Second door on the right.”
“Does the water work?”
“Yep.”
Inside, I shut and locked the door and used the toilet. After washing my hands and face, I looked in the mirror.
My head was pounding. My eyes hurt deep into the sockets. When would I ever live a normal life? Like, go to bed not worrying about being ambushed in the middle of the night. And wake up looking refreshed, a whole day spread out before me. A day of possibilities.
I sighed and turned on the faucet to splash some warm water on my face when my vision cut out. Sight came back to me in flashes, like a dozen blinks in rapid succession.
I slammed my eyes shut, pressed the heels of my hands to my temples.
A scream. In my head.
What the hell was happening?
I was running. Through a hallway. People were shouting behind me. I slid into the bathroom, tore off the toilet tank lid, and plunged my hand into the freezing-cold water. I came up with a plastic zipper bag. There was a gun inside.
My knees buckled. I pitched to the side, scrambled for something to hold on to, but took a basket of toiletries down with me. Aluminum and glass containers clanged and shattered on the floor.
Blood on my hands. Running down my arm. Blood beneath my fingernails.
Something splintered and slammed against the wall. Hands shook me.
“Get Anna out of here,” Dani said.
“Anna!” Nick shouted. “Can you hear me?”
Opening my eyes hurt and the light from the ceiling blinded me. The leftover haze of the flashback mixed with the present, and I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.
Nick crouched beside me, his fingers digging into my skull as he examined me. “What the hell happened?”
“Another flashback.”
He looked over his shoulder at the shredded bathroom door. “New rule: Leave the door unlocked next time.”
With his help, I climbed to my feet. My head swam a second but dissipated enough that I could pretend I was fine.
But was I?
When we’d first left the lab at the farmhouse, Sam had gone through several debilitating flashbacks once his system withdrew from the memory suppressants. My dad had told me once that Sam had gone through too many memory wipes and that’s why his came back so violently.
As far as I knew, I’d had my memory wiped only once, right before I’d been placed at the farmhouse.
So why was I experiencing the same thing Sam had?
We hung around the summer cottage for several more hours while Nick tried to repair the bathroom door. He managed to get it back on its hinges, but there was no way to hide the caved middle where Nick had rammed a shoulder into it.
Just after seven PM, Nick turned down the heat and locked up the house. He walked with me to the passenger side of the car, as if he was afraid I might have another sudden flashback.
