Killer Spirit
Page 2
To Brooke’s left, the twins were adamantly voting for their body glitter of choice—gold. Brittany and Tiffany were absolutely identical and shared matching aptitudes for fashion and the manipulation of the so-called stronger sex. All things male melted into a pile of XY chromosomal goo in the twins’ presence. When they weren’t playing the seduction card, the twins designed our outfits for missions. They’d also appointed themselves the masters of my personal wardrobe, which was why I now owned more pairs of shoes than most of Young Hollywood combined.
Tara Leery—the most down-to-earth and therefore least Hollywoodesque of the girls—was a British exchange student whose parents were operatives overseas. She’d moved to Bayport to become part of the Squad, and as far as I’d been able to tell, she lived with an “aunt” who may or may not have been CIA. Tara spoke somewhere in the neighborhood of eight zillion languages, and could read and write more than that. She was my Squad partner, and from the beginning, she was the one I counted on to have my back.
Since I’d joined the Squad, my back had needed a lot of covering, due in part to the great deal of enmity that Brooke’s second in command, Chloe Larson, seemed to have for computer geeks in general and me in specific. A former child inventor, Chloe was now one hundred percent high school power player, and despite the amount of brain cells she reserved for playing the popularity game, Chloe’s grasp of microtechnology put mine to shame. Needless to say, she could also without question outsnob, outsnark, and outcheer me any day of the week.
That just left our peppy-to-a-fault weapons expert, Lucy Wheeler; our contortionist and resident space cadet (figuratively speaking), Bubbles (yes, Bubbles) Lane; and April Manning—the only other new recruit this season besides yours truly.
Looking at the girls, split 5–4 on the body glitter issue, I thought about everything that I knew they were capable of doing. They were smart. They were athletic. They were beautiful, and they were continually and severely underestimated.
They were, in other words, perfect spies.
“Toby? Earth to Toby?”
I registered Brooke’s tone and sent her a look that some people might have described as surly. “What?”
“Blue or gold?”
Apparently, they were still waiting for my vote. Let’s see, I thought, what color body glitter do I want to wear?
“Neither.”
Brooke smiled. “Blue it is.”
Damn.
CHAPTER 2
Code Word: Interesting
By the time we hit the locker room, there was exactly half an hour until first period, and my only goal was to delay being glittered for as long as was humanly possible. It was bad enough that I’d actually agreed (under duress) to wear a cheerleading uniform to school. The last thing I wanted was to draw any more attention to my uncomfortably short skirt, the bright blue ribbon tied around my superhigh ponytail, and the fact that my current look was about as far from my trademarked antifashion combat boots as you could possibly imagine.
Somehow, I didn’t think blue body glitter would do anything to de-emphasize my predicament.
“You don’t stand a chance,” Zee whispered, patting me consolingly on the shoulder. The good thing about having a profiler on the Squad was that she was a little more sympathetic to my obvious torment than most of the others. The bad part was that she was so perceptive that she may as well have been psychic, and the very idea of psychic cheerleaders scared the crap out of me.
“I could make a run for it,” I said under my breath.
Zee shrugged. “You could try,” she said, “but the twins might take it personally, and then you’d wake up tomorrow with rhinestones glued to your eyelashes.”
I stared at Zee in complete horror, knowing that there was at least a ninety-nine percent chance that she’d accurately predicted the twins’ most likely course of action. While I considered the inhumanity of having my eyelashes defiled in my sleep, one of the twins snuck up on me, and before I could dive-roll out of the way, she had a hold on my arm.
“Hold still and close your eyes!” Brittany ordered.
I wondered briefly if keeping my eyes open would delay the inevitable glittering, but soon found out that nothing could stand between one of the twins and adorning my face, breastbone, and arms with a substance more or less defined as powdered girliness.
“So,” Brittany said, the edges of her lips pulling up into a devilish smile as she finished the job. “How’s your brother doing these days?”
First glitter and now this. She was really pushing her luck. “You do realize that I could kill you, right?” I asked. “With my bare hands and very little effort.”
“No killing members of the Squad.” Brooke issued a drive-by order in a tone so serious that it might have been amusing were it not for the fact that one of the “hottest” girls in school was asking me about my impossible, obnoxious, and supposedly endearing younger brother. Noah considered himself a ladies’ man, which basically meant that he was forever trying to charm older, unavailable girls who almost invariably had large, angry boyfriends who didn’t find Noah’s overtures adorkable in the least.
I’d spent years trying to convince Noah that he wasn’t irresistible, and for some reason, the twins—heck, the entire Squad—seemed to enjoy undoing all of my hard work. As far as I’d been able to tell, none of them (with the possible exception of Lucy, and I so wasn’t ready to mentally go there) were actually interested in Noah, but they got a kick out of flirting with him, just because they knew it irritated me. As for Noah, he’d spent more time moonwalking and victory dancing in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life, which was really saying something.
“You know, he is kind of cute, Toby.” Tiffany appeared beside her twin and gave me an impish look.
This went beyond friendly teasing, and there was no way I could let it stand. Even if we were, by some stretch of the word, friends, I had a moral obligation to discourage their feigned interest in my brother, for the good of the world as well as my own sanity. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to go with the truth. “Yeah, well, he kind of wants you guys to have a naked pillow fight in our living room.”
For some reason, the twins thought this was an absolute riot, which just goes to show that their mother probably dropped both of them on their heads repeatedly as small children.
“Ha-ha,” I said dryly. “My brother likes naked girls. Yes, very funny.”
They continued laughing and I decided it was time for a change of subject. Luckily enough, I knew exactly which direction I wanted to push this conversation. A few weeks earlier, I’d discovered something about one of our contacts in Washington that had rocked me to the core, and since then, I’d been trying to figure out which, if any, of the others knew about it. The twins were among the last on my list, and now seemed as good a time to broach the subject as any.
“Speaking of things that don’t involve my little brother”—I gave them each a look that, had it been any more pointed, would have been capable of drawing blood—“we haven’t heard anything from the Big Guys in a while.”
“Brooke talks to them all the time,” Tiffany said. “They’re the ones who told us about the TCIs. Obvi.”
“Plus they sent us this really cool volumizing mascara last week,” Britt added. “It’s made by like NASA.”
I couldn’t begin to fathom why NASA would be designing mascara, but didn’t bother to ask Brittany if she was mixing up her acronyms. I had more important things on my mind. “Don’t you guys ever wonder who the Big Guys are?” I asked.
The twins stared at me, clearly not comprehending such curiosity.
I tried to put this in terms they would understand. “For all we know, they could be really hot or something.”
That got identical contemplative looks out of the two of them, until Brittany realized that our superiors in Washington were “probably like really old,” and then the two of them shrugged off the entire conversation and began to apply a second coat of glitter to my body, on the off chance that my sparkle had waned during the course of our conversation.
Each and every girl on the Squad was a master of deception, but the more time I spent with them, the better I got at reading the subtleties of their body language, their tones of voice, and their patterns of behavior. For the twins, worrying about my “sparkle quotient” was more or less the norm, and every instinct I had told me that all they knew about our superiors was that they had access to cosmetic prototypes that would have made other fashionistas drool.
Tara Leery—the most down-to-earth and therefore least Hollywoodesque of the girls—was a British exchange student whose parents were operatives overseas. She’d moved to Bayport to become part of the Squad, and as far as I’d been able to tell, she lived with an “aunt” who may or may not have been CIA. Tara spoke somewhere in the neighborhood of eight zillion languages, and could read and write more than that. She was my Squad partner, and from the beginning, she was the one I counted on to have my back.
Since I’d joined the Squad, my back had needed a lot of covering, due in part to the great deal of enmity that Brooke’s second in command, Chloe Larson, seemed to have for computer geeks in general and me in specific. A former child inventor, Chloe was now one hundred percent high school power player, and despite the amount of brain cells she reserved for playing the popularity game, Chloe’s grasp of microtechnology put mine to shame. Needless to say, she could also without question outsnob, outsnark, and outcheer me any day of the week.
That just left our peppy-to-a-fault weapons expert, Lucy Wheeler; our contortionist and resident space cadet (figuratively speaking), Bubbles (yes, Bubbles) Lane; and April Manning—the only other new recruit this season besides yours truly.
Looking at the girls, split 5–4 on the body glitter issue, I thought about everything that I knew they were capable of doing. They were smart. They were athletic. They were beautiful, and they were continually and severely underestimated.
They were, in other words, perfect spies.
“Toby? Earth to Toby?”
I registered Brooke’s tone and sent her a look that some people might have described as surly. “What?”
“Blue or gold?”
Apparently, they were still waiting for my vote. Let’s see, I thought, what color body glitter do I want to wear?
“Neither.”
Brooke smiled. “Blue it is.”
Damn.
CHAPTER 2
Code Word: Interesting
By the time we hit the locker room, there was exactly half an hour until first period, and my only goal was to delay being glittered for as long as was humanly possible. It was bad enough that I’d actually agreed (under duress) to wear a cheerleading uniform to school. The last thing I wanted was to draw any more attention to my uncomfortably short skirt, the bright blue ribbon tied around my superhigh ponytail, and the fact that my current look was about as far from my trademarked antifashion combat boots as you could possibly imagine.
Somehow, I didn’t think blue body glitter would do anything to de-emphasize my predicament.
“You don’t stand a chance,” Zee whispered, patting me consolingly on the shoulder. The good thing about having a profiler on the Squad was that she was a little more sympathetic to my obvious torment than most of the others. The bad part was that she was so perceptive that she may as well have been psychic, and the very idea of psychic cheerleaders scared the crap out of me.
“I could make a run for it,” I said under my breath.
Zee shrugged. “You could try,” she said, “but the twins might take it personally, and then you’d wake up tomorrow with rhinestones glued to your eyelashes.”
I stared at Zee in complete horror, knowing that there was at least a ninety-nine percent chance that she’d accurately predicted the twins’ most likely course of action. While I considered the inhumanity of having my eyelashes defiled in my sleep, one of the twins snuck up on me, and before I could dive-roll out of the way, she had a hold on my arm.
“Hold still and close your eyes!” Brittany ordered.
I wondered briefly if keeping my eyes open would delay the inevitable glittering, but soon found out that nothing could stand between one of the twins and adorning my face, breastbone, and arms with a substance more or less defined as powdered girliness.
“So,” Brittany said, the edges of her lips pulling up into a devilish smile as she finished the job. “How’s your brother doing these days?”
First glitter and now this. She was really pushing her luck. “You do realize that I could kill you, right?” I asked. “With my bare hands and very little effort.”
“No killing members of the Squad.” Brooke issued a drive-by order in a tone so serious that it might have been amusing were it not for the fact that one of the “hottest” girls in school was asking me about my impossible, obnoxious, and supposedly endearing younger brother. Noah considered himself a ladies’ man, which basically meant that he was forever trying to charm older, unavailable girls who almost invariably had large, angry boyfriends who didn’t find Noah’s overtures adorkable in the least.
I’d spent years trying to convince Noah that he wasn’t irresistible, and for some reason, the twins—heck, the entire Squad—seemed to enjoy undoing all of my hard work. As far as I’d been able to tell, none of them (with the possible exception of Lucy, and I so wasn’t ready to mentally go there) were actually interested in Noah, but they got a kick out of flirting with him, just because they knew it irritated me. As for Noah, he’d spent more time moonwalking and victory dancing in the past two weeks than he had in his entire life, which was really saying something.
“You know, he is kind of cute, Toby.” Tiffany appeared beside her twin and gave me an impish look.
This went beyond friendly teasing, and there was no way I could let it stand. Even if we were, by some stretch of the word, friends, I had a moral obligation to discourage their feigned interest in my brother, for the good of the world as well as my own sanity. After a moment’s consideration, I decided to go with the truth. “Yeah, well, he kind of wants you guys to have a naked pillow fight in our living room.”
For some reason, the twins thought this was an absolute riot, which just goes to show that their mother probably dropped both of them on their heads repeatedly as small children.
“Ha-ha,” I said dryly. “My brother likes naked girls. Yes, very funny.”
They continued laughing and I decided it was time for a change of subject. Luckily enough, I knew exactly which direction I wanted to push this conversation. A few weeks earlier, I’d discovered something about one of our contacts in Washington that had rocked me to the core, and since then, I’d been trying to figure out which, if any, of the others knew about it. The twins were among the last on my list, and now seemed as good a time to broach the subject as any.
“Speaking of things that don’t involve my little brother”—I gave them each a look that, had it been any more pointed, would have been capable of drawing blood—“we haven’t heard anything from the Big Guys in a while.”
“Brooke talks to them all the time,” Tiffany said. “They’re the ones who told us about the TCIs. Obvi.”
“Plus they sent us this really cool volumizing mascara last week,” Britt added. “It’s made by like NASA.”
I couldn’t begin to fathom why NASA would be designing mascara, but didn’t bother to ask Brittany if she was mixing up her acronyms. I had more important things on my mind. “Don’t you guys ever wonder who the Big Guys are?” I asked.
The twins stared at me, clearly not comprehending such curiosity.
I tried to put this in terms they would understand. “For all we know, they could be really hot or something.”
That got identical contemplative looks out of the two of them, until Brittany realized that our superiors in Washington were “probably like really old,” and then the two of them shrugged off the entire conversation and began to apply a second coat of glitter to my body, on the off chance that my sparkle had waned during the course of our conversation.
Each and every girl on the Squad was a master of deception, but the more time I spent with them, the better I got at reading the subtleties of their body language, their tones of voice, and their patterns of behavior. For the twins, worrying about my “sparkle quotient” was more or less the norm, and every instinct I had told me that all they knew about our superiors was that they had access to cosmetic prototypes that would have made other fashionistas drool.
