Chapter 34

Welcome home, was written in Ben’s familiar scrawl. He didn’t sign it Love, Ben or Always, Ben or anything else that I could have spent hours evaluating. There was no secret message hidden inside the two simple words.

I had enough craziness in my life without blowing a simple sticky note out of proportion.

Especially since I’d barged into his bedroom before dawn—uninvited—and immediately dissolved into a puddle of tears.

I shoved my hair away from my gritty, red-rimmed eyes. I never should’ve crawled into Ben’s bed like a five-year-old afraid of finding monsters in her closet. I should have made the mature, responsible choice and gone straight home to my mom.

Ben’s parents had to be at work by now, their sons were at school, making me an interloper in an empty apartment. I was still scared witless. Last night my total lack of direction had come as a relief. Force had taken the wheel, and I’d only needed to keep it together long enough to knock on Ben’s bedroom door. Technically, I began my meltdown in the apartment hallway, but whatever. I had shoved away all thoughts of the future. Except the tomorrow I’d envisioned was today and the rest of the world wasn’t going to slow down just because I felt like a white-bellied fish about to be gutted.

A nuanced survival strategy, with bullet points and checklists and a multi-pronged approach aimed at keeping me safe.

Instead, I slid out of the bed and fumbled inside my suitcase for my photo album. Maybe it was self-indulgent to hide in the pages of the past, but I didn’t care. Future Emmy would just have to deal with it. I sat cross-legged on the warm bed, cocooned in blankets, flipping through pictures that I’d examined thousands of times.

My mom grinned back at me from each page, flaunting over-dramatic poses in front of dozens of Los Angeles landmarks. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to visit California as a family. I could almost feel the oppressive heat of the sun, taste the gritty layer of dust that would coat my teeth near the Hollywood sign, feel my cheek muscles tighten into a stilted smile for the camera, hear my dad insist on taking a few more shots of his girls.

I flipped to the close-up photo of my dad’s left eye, searching it once more for some trace of emotion—sadness, anxiety, impatience, amusement—I’d accept anything.

Except this time the tingly you-are-missing-something-right-under-your-nose feeling refused to ease. It prickled, growing in intensity, until I sat rooted with an overwhelming sense of certainty.

My hand automatically slid into my sweatshirt for the Slate that I’d spent the night ignoring. I hadn’t wanted to think about it. I’d been an emotional trainwreck before Force had slipped the Slate into my pocket, and having it back had only intensified my anxiety. I’d tried. I’d done my best to get my panic under control. To keep a cool head.

Given the way I had sobbed hysterically all over Ben, I couldn’t have failed any harder.

Welcome Emmy Danvers looped and curled across the screen in a swirling script, knocking out my breath faster than a sucker punch in the stomach.

It really had been intended for me. Not Sebastian. Not President Gilcrest or Force or anybody else. Me. It was my name plastered across the home screen. I didn’t doubt that Frederick St. James had found the wrong girl, but my fingers couldn’t stop trembling as I clicked the inbox.

You have 438 new text messages.

I skimmed over half a dozen of them, most of which included the word payment before listing five-digit sums. One client in particular appeared to be growing increasingly desperate for a response judging by the excessive use of exclamation points. The names of the senders were blocked, but half a dozen of them shared Rachel Pierce’s creepy mocking cadence. A chill shuddered through me.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

String up a girl by her toe.

When she hollers, let her go.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

Ms. Pierce had been skilled enough to hide her insanity from her Emptor Academy colleagues, but even she couldn’t cheat death. Not when Force had delivered the final push. There was also one person Ms. Pierce hadn’t been able to trick—not completely—and I clicked on the camera icon to see the world through the eyes of a dead man.

It wasn’t the most flattering of photos. My face was scrunched with annoyance, my eyebrows furrowed, as I glared at the screen of a bulky laptop, tuning out the mid-afternoon Starbucks crowd. It was strange seeing myself at the table where it all began. The girl in the photo deserved to have “BEFORE” plastered over her forehead in giant block letters. She looked blissfully ignorant of her own danger. Clueless that in a handful of minutes her world would shatter all around her.

Unprepared to be terrorized, hunted, and nearly shoved out of a third story window.

I zoomed in on my face, wanting to study the girl Frederick St. James had chosen to drag into this mess. My index finger traced the thin lines of frustration that bracketed my eyes, accidentally leaving a trail of bright green dots in my wake. Instead of fading or disappearing when I failed to give the Slate a direct command, a tiny book graphic appeared with moving black squiggles as it flashed: Loading. Loading. Loading.

The book enlarged until it consumed the whole screen before transforming into a detailed case file. In the top right corner sat my unflattering high school photo, and beneath it was a stalker’s treasure trove of information.

Name: Emmy Violet Danvers

Mother: Vera Lynn Danvers, née Vera Lynn Smith

Father: Daniel Danvers

Spouse: NA

Eyes: Green

Height: 5'7"

I skimmed the rest, which included every crappy apartment building my mom and I had shared and every single report card I’d received in school. My soy allergy. A list of my favorite bands, books, and movies. There was some information that I hadn’t known about myself. Apparently my stern-faced elementary school teacher Mrs. Wolff thought that I displayed great maturity.

There was more—so much more—but the massive amount of text made the individual sections blur together in my mind. I scrolled down the page, pausing only to read a handful of other teacher evaluations, before I found the statement that Officer McHaffrey had taken from me right outside the Starbucks. Right beneath it was the file Detective Dumbass appeared to be compiling on me, although the Slate had helpfully added the words in-progress on the tab.

Numbly, I scrolled back up to my basic statistics and tried to click on my dad’s name. The Slate refused to link to a new page. My mom’s name required only a brief loading session before it spit out all of her financials, her tax statements, her job recommendations, even the scripts with her lines as Bored Waitress #2 highlighted in yellow. They weren’t even good lines.

Take table four, will ya? I gotta pee.

An unabridged account of her past was spread out before me, and yet the most I could find for Daniel Danvers was a copy of my birth certificate and a name-change form for my mother. She claimed to have taken his name simply because “Danvers” was better for her acting career, far more memorable than Smith. The one time I had pointed out that it made them sound married, she’d merely shrugged and said that the assumptions of strangers weren’t her concern.

Not that it had worked, as evidenced by the section inside her file devoted to all her loser boyfriends.

My dry eyes burned as I forced myself to stare at the sweatshirts hanging in Ben’s closet.

It was too much to take in. The names, dates, and figures merged into a tangled mess as I struggled to make sense of the information resting in my hands. To understand the full impact of everything laid out before me.

Things that only law enforcement should be able to see after going through all the proper channels to obtain a warrant. Otherwise it was a total invasion of privacy that couldn’t possibly be legal. It definitely wasn’t ethical for me to be prying into other people’s secrets this way.

“Not good. Not good. Not good,” I mumbled to myself as I paced from the closet back to the bed. “You can’t use this, Emmy. You need to make Ben’s bed, grab your stuff, and resume your life as a normal, sane member of society. That means no checking into your mom’s credit card history to satisfy your own curiosity.”

My fingers yanked on a corner of the bedspread, sending the photo album toppling onto the floor with a muffled thump. Every muscle in my body stiffened.

I’d turned over Sebastian’s comment so many times in my head that it felt as smooth as sea glass. It had sounded absurd when he’d first said it and nothing that had happened in the interval had changed my mind. If anything, the files on the tablet made it even more painfully obvious how little I knew about anything.

I curled into a ball on the floor, reliving those panic-fueled moments before Ms. Pierce had kicked down the door as an excruciatingly detailed set of flashbacks. The glow of the Slate’s screen as I’d keyed in my Hail Mary of a password. The blinding flash that had spots of color spinning before my eyes. The extreme disorientation I’d felt right before the door exploded.

I’d assumed the Slate had been programmed to incapacitate me as revenge for all my failed attempts, but the Slate hadn’t triggered any other emergency protocols. It hadn’t instantly shut down in the library like it had in the computer lab for Audrey. The screen never blackened.

The blinding flash must have been part of the design, specifically created to compensate for the darkness of the room. A feature that had completely backfired last night. Although there was no way any tech engineers could have foreseen that particular flaw in the design, since most people went their entire lives without being stalked by homicidal private school teachers.

I could relate to the frustration behind those cold words. There was a hell of a lot that I still couldn’t piece together. The Slate had identified me from the retinal scan. Okay, fine. Big deal. Welcome Emmy Danvers sprawled across the home screen had sort of spoken for itself.

Instead of thumbing through over four hundred text messages clogging up my inbox, I clicked on the Sent folder.

I stared at the simple message, time-stamped for 3:17 A.M. with a location listed at the bottom of the message: Emptor Academy, Library. 302L.

I dimly remembered screaming, pleading, begging, as I scrambled away from a killer with a pixie cut. Nobody had heard me. I’d been certain at the time that my fate rested in the hands of whichever security guard happened to be making the rounds that night.

My mind reeled. Why had it chosen Force? Surely he couldn’t be the only person Frederick St. James trusted to watch his back in a brawl. Was the bodyguard/driver simply the closest preapproved person within a certain radius? What if Force had decided to put on his favorite tuxedo and catch a concert at the Kennedy Center? Whose name would the Slate have pulled out of its database then?

The Slate buzzed softly in my lap as the inbox rose to 439 unread messages. Probably another frantic request from yet another mysterious texter. Another mystery to be unraveled. I was damn near drowning in them.

And none of it was pointing me in the direction of my dad. In fact, I was starting to think that the old man had given me the Slate as part of an exercise in futility. Judging by the lack of information in my dad’s file, Frederick St. James had made zero progress tracking him down.

I reached for the photo album. Maybe it wasn’t something that I knew. Maybe it was something that I had.

Carefully, I tugged the photo of my dad’s left eye out of the protective plastic cover, trying not to leave any smudges on the edges. If the Slate could perform a retinal scan in a near pitch-black room, then there was a fighting chance it could handle this.

Loading. Loading. Loading.

His hair was lighter than mine, a sandy reddish brown that looked carelessly rumpled even in his unsmiling snapshot. The basic information on the other side of his face made my stomach writhe like an angry snake struggling to get into striking position. My heart thudded too fast. My hands trembled unsteadily.

Name: David William Danverse

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Green

Height: 6'2"

Occupation: FBI agent, investigated in 2006, resigned in 2007 after being cleared of all charges.

That was preceded by a whole list of aliases that included Robert C. Redford and Lucas Rodriguez. He didn’t look much like a “Rodriguez” to me, but apparently he hadn’t gotten busted for it since there wasn’t a record for any prison time. Of course, it was still entirely possible he was locked up in some hellhole where they didn’t document their inmates. Or maybe he was sipping cappuccinos on the beach in some tiny Italian villa, reading a lengthy biography on Winston Churchill, and smiling as he watched his other legitimate kids frolicking in the waves.

My pulse increased into hyperspeed, like a caffeine junkie who’d just knocked back five shots of espresso.

It had only taken sixteen years, two untimely deaths, and my complete loss of faith in humanity, but I’d tracked down my father. The man who had walked out on my mom without a backward glance was only a phone call away. I sat on my hands in a desperate attempt to control the shaking. It didn’t help though. Not when my whole body twitched with nervous energy. I’d spent over a decade daydreaming about a father-daughter reunion. I should have felt happier at the prospect of actually making it happen. The one constant in all those fantasies was that I’d wanted to find him. See him. Meet him.

I’d never imagined the possibility that my emotional range would ever be stunted to the point that I vacillated between panic, fear, anxiety, and an overwhelming numbness that left no room for enthusiasm. All I could think was that this information should have been my birthright. His face should have lingered over my crib for countless games of peekaboo. Nobody should have needed to die for me to find one lone picture of him.

Anger rose inside of me, flushing my cheeks and filling all the empty spaces inside me. I craved the heat of outrage, embracing it like a long lost friend. It made me reckless. Impulsive. Honest. I didn’t claim to be an expert on law enforcement agencies, but I’d read enough romance novels to know that FBI agents weren’t obligated to lie about what they did for a living. They weren’t forbidden to get married or raise kids. They might not be able to discuss their cases at home, but they could say, “Sorry, honey, work calls. I might be out of reach for a week or two” if they had been handed a particularly big assignment.

If my dad thought his disappearing act would never come back to bite him, then he was in for one hell of a wakeup call.

I pressed the phone number before I could chicken out, holding my breath as the Slate sprang into action.

Riiiiiing.

Oh, holy shit. What was I doing?

Riiiiiing.

What was I supposed to say? “Hey asshole. Welcome to Fatherhood?”

Beeep!

“Um, hi,” I said lamely, my anger deflating like a cheap grocery store balloon. “I’m looking for Dan . . . uh, David,” I corrected myself. “This is . . .” your long-lost daughter, your best kept secret, your least favorite person, “Emmy Danvers.”

I swallowed hard, feeling hopelessly unprepared to string complete sentences together. I ordered myself not to panic. Not yet.

“I’ve got a message from Frederick St. James. If he wants to hear it, he’s going to have to call me back.”

I didn’t think a perky “Have a nice day!” would be the right note to end a cryptic message with my absentee father, so I simply disconnected and clutched at Ben’s blankets with trembling fingers.

I had chosen my path, made my bed, fallen further down the rabbit hole—insert cliché here—but with that decision made, the worst had to be over. No more stumbling blind. No more hesitation. From this point on, I could face whatever conflict came my way without flinching.

“Toughen up, Emmy!” I snarled into the silence of Ben’s bedroom. “You don’t want people to push you around? Then you need to fight back.”

Go for the jugular, girl.

Trust nobody.

The Slate clutched in my hand began to ring and my heart seized with a strangling panic.