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“What’s she doing?”
The questioning voice was as high-pitched as a child’s. Luke’s reply was deeper and entirely calm.
“Protecting you from zombie giraffes, of course.”
Their laughter was sweet as I sidestepped the door and took in the kitchen’s inhabitants. Luke crouched in front of a blanket-wrapped figure who, for half a second, resembled Bastion. But, no, of course that wasn’t the case. My cousin lay unconscious in the back seat of our family car....
As if reacting to those scrambled thoughts, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Ignoring it, I took a step forward even as Luke slid past me out the door.
“Clarence, I’m Honor. It’s good to finally meet you.”
From the way his family treated him, I’d expected someone small and ineffectual. But Clarence got over his fright quickly, unfolding into a teenager who was nearly as well-built as my cousins. His voice—when not surprised by a dagger-wielding woman whirling into his kitchen—was a mid-range tenor. “The pleasure,” he told me, “is all mine.”
The seventeen-year-old took my hand and lifted it to peach-fuzz-topped lips as if he were a fifties movie-star. Dark eyes flashed above freckled cheeks. The gesture would have been more debonair if he hadn’t been dressed in space-ship pajamas.
Still, I resisted the impulse to pat him on the head and instead spoke to Luke as he returned from his mission far too quickly to have done much scouting. “Do you want to search outside or should I do it?”
Luke shook his head, pulling milk out of the fridge as if we were preparing for a tea party rather than tracking down an intruder. “Too late.”
Too late to find Clarence’s almost-kidnapper? Luke moved fast, but even he would barely have had time to circle the house and come in the back before I joined him in the kitchen a few minutes ago. In the thirty seconds he’d been gone just now, he could have done no more than lock the front door. How could he know the kidnapper was gone?
I frowned. But before I could puzzle out what Luke might be hiding, my phone buzzed three more times in quick succession.
Only Grace would be so impatient. I took a step sideways, unlocking my phone while half listening to Clarence and Luke argue over beverage selection.
“I don’t like cocoa,” Clarence whined. Never mind that he was the victim of a failed kidnapping attempt and needed something warm and sweet to derail shock before adrenaline started fading.
I would have been tempted to browbeat him into submission. Luke just shrugged, pulling sugar and powdered chocolate off the top shelf without having to stretch to reach the packages. “It’s not crap from a mix.”
“You can do that?” Clarence sounded so floored by the notion of homemade cocoa that I couldn’t help smiling as I opened my text messages.
Then my amusement faded. Because the last message told me exactly what I’d wanted to hear an hour earlier and now couldn’t handle.
“Where are you?” Grace demanded. “Bastion is wide awake.”
***
BEFORE I COULD PULL together an answer, the elder Smythewhites burst into the room as a unit. They must have heard me pounding down the stairs. Or perhaps parental intuition had drawn them to the kitchen. Whatever the reason, they were here, using up all of the air in the room.
“Honey, what happened?”
Clarence dropped his mug on the counter, visibly shrinking as his mother threw her arms around him. One moment, he was seventeen going on thirty. The next he was a little boy afraid of a bump in the night.
“I...I’m not sure. I think someone came in through my balcony...?”
“Wait,” I tapped into my phone, sidling toward the back door as Clarence fumbled through an explanation. I grabbed a handful of my curls and tugged them, hoping pain would dislodge a solution. Could I take advantage of the kidnapping aftermath to sneak Bastion into the residence? Maybe tell the Smythewhites that my family was an evidence-gathering crew? Or....
“Where are you going?” Luke stood in front of the exit, even though I was certain he’d been ten feet away a second earlier. He cocked his head, reading my text messages upside down. “Who’s Bastion?”
“How can you know the kidnapper is gone?” I countered. “We need to check the backyard. Or rather, you do. My sinuses....”
Luke’s lip quirked ever so slightly. “Nice sidestep.”
I had sidestepped, both literally and figuratively. And Luke had inched over to join me, his hand hovering six inches from my hip as if we were preparing to waltz.
The incipient contact burned. Like when Luke had run his hands across my pelt, pressing deep until the palms of his hands bit through the fur and hit the skin beneath it.
Only there was no pelt in the mix this time. Just me, my hormones, and Luke.
Tensing, I forced myself backwards, expecting Luke to demand more information about my cousin. Instead, he answered my initial question, speaking so quietly I could barely hear.
“I smelled this door when I came in and the front one a moment ago. They both reek of Lysol across their entire surface. The Smythewhite cleaning crew wiped down the door knobs when they left yesterday. No one but me has touched them from the inside since.”
He paused, his eyes full of lupine intensity. “No one left the house. You’re the only one who entered it.”
For a moment, I forgot my phone buzzing angrily as my twin resisted my request for patience. I ignored Clarence’s parents hovering around him, ignored the way Mrs. Smythewhite stepped aside to speak fast and urgent into her cell phone.
Instead, I focused on Luke while translating his intent stare into words to make sure I understood him. “You’re saying the kidnapper dropped Clarence in the kitchen then circled back around to the main stairs while you were outside and I was coming down the back way.”
“That’s my guess.”
“So either the kidnapper has been hiding in the house all night waiting for an opening...”
Luke picked up where I left off. “Or whoever took Clarence had a reason to be here from the start.”