Chapter Twelve

Keira and I sat on a damp wooden bench beside a pond littered with golden leaves. A royal blue plastic bag was tied to the metal railing beside us, full of birdseed, and my sister was feigning interest in a flock of black ducks with snowy white stripes down their foreheads. Despite the persistent rain, the ducks kept swimming in the icy water, quacking away.

I yanked the hood of my raincoat tightly around my face as I stared at the Peter Pan statue across the footpath. It was famous, marking the spot Pan stood in one of J.M. Barrie’s legendary stories. I knew this because there was a cell phone tour offering the explanation, which I listened to, because it was preferable to talking with my sister. We sat silently, neither of us wanting to start the argument.

In what felt like a bad omen, there was a bouquet of long-stemmed pink roses abandoned at the foot of the soaring bronze statue. Blush petals were scattered about Peter Pan’s mountainous base, the clear plastic flower wrapping haphazardly torn open, and its hot pink tissue soaked. I could almost envision a woman furiously slamming the gift to the ground and storming off—a peace offering gone wrong.

Keira finally slapped her hands on her thighs, wiping the remnants of birdseed on her wet jeans, and sighed heavily. “What are we gonna do?” she asked, kicking the heaps of mushy brownish leaves under our boots.

“We’re going to find some Dresden Kids,” I replied.

“That’s not what I meant.” She cut me a look.

“I don’t think I’m some spy or assassin.” I echoed her words as I pulled at my scarf, covering half my face.

“You think you’re invincible. You think you’re smarter than the rest of us. I’m not ungrateful. I know I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.” Her head leaned toward me as her gaudy teal polka dot hoop earrings clanked against her hood. “But I can’t sit silently forever, doing everything you say, without question, just because you rescued me.”

“I never said that you have to do everything I say or that I’m smarter than anyone else. But Keira, this plan makes sense, and if I had listened to anyone else before, you wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s just it!” She pointed a finger at me. “There’s nothing I can say to that. End of argument. You saved me, so I have to shut up and ignore every instinct in my head saying your plan is crazy.”

“It’s not my plan. Allen Cross, a professional spy, came up with it. And I am listening to what you think of it right now, which is a lot more than you did for me, when you ran a DNA test on Mom and Dad. You told Craig Bernard and not me. You trusted him.” The words spilled from my lips faster than my brain could warn me to hold them in.

Every day since Venice, I forced myself to swallow any feelings I had about my sister’s decision to chase our parents’ secret pasts. It was over. It couldn’t be undone. But the truth was, she lied to me. She never told me what she was doing, and instead she confided in a psychopath. That hurt.

“I know.” Her forearms collapsed onto her thighs, her body hunching, wet hair falling into her lap. “I started all of this. I brought Craig Bernard into our lives. I slept with him. I know. Trust me, I live with that every day.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” I rested a hand on her back.

“Don’t be. We need to say this stuff. We’re holding too much in. We’re lying to each other.” She swung her head my way. “Randolph Urban sent you a baby photo, and you didn’t tell me? You know what that means, and you acted like you suddenly wanted us to move to France, like that picture thing had nothing to do with it?”

“It didn’t.” Though I really wasn’t sure. I wrapped my arms around my chest. “I don’t know, maybe it did. But going into hiding was a good plan. I wish we had done it. I wish we were there now.”

“It wouldn’t change anything. Tyson would still be dead.”

“You don’t know that.”

“You are not the center of the universe,” Keira said, only she didn’t mean it as an insult. “Bad things happen, and they’re not your fault. You can’t control everyone.”

“I’m not trying to control you.” I shook my head, jaw tight as I clenched my arms more firmly around my body.

“Maybe you don’t realize you’re doing it. But look at you—you’re so different now. Every muscle in your body is tense, all the time. You’re always angry and scowling.”

“And you think you’re the same?” I tossed back.

Keira was kidnapped; that crime forever changed us both. Maybe I did have a hard time smiling, but she had a hard time sitting up straight. Was that so hard to understand? My best friend was murdered. His killer left me a message. Marcus’s parents might be involved, and a spy told me my dead parents were alive right after a funeral. I’m sorry if my shoulders are a little knotted up.

Keira dug her hand into the plastic bag of birdseed and threw a handful at the ducks, a little too aggressively this time. “I know this is my fault, I get that, but I don’t want to feel like your problem for the rest of my life. Somebody deal with Keira, stupid Keira, helpless Keira.”

“I do not act like that.”

“When you got that message from Regina, the first thing you thought was that I would be kidnapped.”

“Because you were recently kidnapped!”

“Yes, I was. I made a huge mistake, but that doesn’t mean you need to lock me in a tower and exclude me from every decision.”

“Do you have any idea what it was like to sit at Tyson’s funeral? To see his casket? We put Mom and Dad in the ground.” I gave her a knowing look, one only she could fully understand. “Now they’re coming back from the dead, and I’m supposed to be okay with that? Meanwhile, my best friend was stabbed on the street in front of his girlfriend. Because of them. Because of me.”

“I am so sorry.” Now it was her turn to rest her hand on my back. “I wish I could have been there for the service. I know what that must have been like for you. But I couldn’t go, because the world thinks I’m dead. Do you have any idea how that feels for me?”

“No,” I admitted, my voice defeated. It was starting to feel like we were living in the same house, the same reality, but not really seeing each other.

“I have no friends. I can’t contact anyone. People I care about are still mourning me. I lost my job. You guys are my whole world, my only world, and you all either think I’m a screwup or a child.”

“We do not!”

“Are you kidding me? You’re the worst—you don’t trust me, and you’re clearly pissed at me,” Keira said, her gaze steady. I could see that she meant it. How could she mean it? “You planned this whole Dresden Kid thing with Charlotte and then told me this was how it was going to be. You told me we were moving to France. You lied about the baby picture. You don’t care what I have to say about anything. And just now, you put all this effort into making Marcus feel better, about his parents, but when you told me Mom and Dad are alive, you just said it. Not when you first found out, not as soon as you got out of the car with Cross. No, you told Charlotte first. Why? So you could break it to me in person? Well, thanks for that. You didn’t even give me a hug.”

My mouth snapped shut.

Is she right? Am I mad at her? No, I’m not. I would know if I was.

I thought about Keira’s safety, her feelings, more than I thought about anything else in my life. I was going to tell her about the baby picture eventually. And I didn’t hug her, because she didn’t like to be touched. That was her choice. Wasn’t it?

“I mean, Keira, you know—”

“I don’t feel the same way you do,” she cut in, not letting up. “Not about Mom and Dad. Cross says they left because of us, so we could have normal lives, so we could be free of Department D. I believe him. I know it didn’t work out that way, but I believe they were trying to save us.”

Her voice was so soft, but for the first time, I really heard her. My twenty-four-year-old sister was asking for permission, from me, to have her own feelings about our parents. I blinked at the realization.

“You’re right.” My tone was sincere. “We don’t know why they did what they did, and you have a right to feel however you want about them. But so do I. People have been hurt and killed, because of them, including you. And I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive them for that. But that’s how I feel. I can’t force you to feel the same.”

“I am so sorry about Tyson.” She squeezed my leg. “It is wrong on so many levels, but this plan, I think we need to at least consider other options.”

“Like what?” I cocked my head in my hood. It had stopped raining, but we didn’t adjust our jackets, as if we needed the barrier surrounding us.

“Like we let the CIA handle it.”

“You know the CIA is not on our side. Cross said so himself. They want to track us back to Mom and Dad and send them to death row, if not worse. Is that really what you want?”

“No, but the CIA is a lot more equipped to destroy Department D than we are.”

“Yeah, but they haven’t done so yet, and there’s probably a reason for that. They could be in on it,” I pointed out. “These are Dresden Kids we’re talking about. They’ll trust us. They’ll talk to us. I believe that.”

I looked at the Peter Pan statue looming across the way and wondered briefly if Peter’s origin story included parents who’d abandoned him. Maybe Peter hated them; maybe he resented them so much that he never wanted to grow up to be like them. Maybe the Lost Boys weren’t all that different from the Dresden Kids—we had Randolph Urban, and they had Captain Hook. Now, if we could only find a crocodile.

“Okay, say these kids do want to help us, say they even have evidence—which is a big if—then what? Will you go to the CIA, or any form of law enforcement, and let them deal with the spies?”

I looked her square in the eyes; it was a compromise I could make. I nodded. “Yes. We’ll turn the information over. We’ll let the CIA, or whoever, bring down Department D. We won’t have any direct contact with them, I promise.”

Keira paused, assessing me, then smacked her lips, seemingly satisfied. “All right. But I don’t really think that’s a promise you can keep. You know, at some point, we will see Mom and Dad again, whether you want to or not, whether we choose to or not.” She pulled back her hood so she could really see me. “There are too many forces at work here, and you need to be ready for that. They’re not some evil strangers hiding in the shadows. They’re our parents. And I don’t think it’s going to be as easy for you to hate them when you see them face to face.”

“Trust me, it’s very easy to hate them.” I kept my hood up.

“Your feelings might change.”

I bit my lip to keep from listing my resentments in alphabetical order. (A is for Assholes, Abandonment, Assassins, Archenemies; B is for Bastards, Boat chase, Blood, Bruises…) I could go on and on, but I didn’t want to fight with Keira anymore. We were finally on the same team again. This plan would work.

We were going to end Department D one Dresden Kid at a time.

We just needed Allen Cross to send us the first name.