Callista still didn’t look satisfied.
“I just wish they’d packed more bullets and guns on board,” she said dryly. “You know, all that stuff they were gonna use to kill us. I really wanted to see some fireworks, Thad.”
“I’ll make a note of that for next time you need to take down a plane,” he replied dutifully. Behind her back, he gave me a feigned look of terror, before hiding it when she turned to look at me.
It was the first time our eyes had met, in real life at least. They shouldn’t have surprised me, but they did—seeing them so close, so vibrant that I blinked, thoughts scattering like fish before a shark. Their blue didn’t even seem to fit in any normal spectrum.
I was never a person to be intimidated, so I kept her gaze strongly.
“Fine, I’m a pyromaniac,” she burst, opening her hands defensively. “What can I do?”
Still, she refused to break my gaze. I didn’t know what that meant.
“You could…not crash planes?” I suggested.
To my surprise, she didn’t frown, but instead exploded into a fit of laughter. She laughed so hard that she fell backwards, hair going around her head like a dark halo, face staring up at the sky that was now entirely clear of clouds and rain, sunshine lighting her face as the happy music fell from her mouth.
“Yeah, that’d be a good start,” she agreed, closing her eyes, leaving me even more confused than before. I looked up at Thad, now unblocked by Callista. He glanced from me to her, then back to me again, but refused to comment. Callista breathed deep of the air, unimpeded even by the burnt smell that drifted our way, and the sound was filled with a strange relief.
“Um…” I started. I cleared my throat. “Can I ask why there’s a plane crashed on the beach?” I said, trying to force as much command into my voice as I could, but failing.
“Because if it’d landed, the eleven men on board would have killed you,” Callista said, without even opening her eyes.
“And Thad, and me too,” she added. “They were armed like the military. Tell him our plan, Thad.”
She poked him with her knee and he straightened up to attention.
“Right, the plan,” he said to me. “You already know Callista and I were caught before they found you. When they got the lead that you were out here, they sent this guy named Mr. Sharpe. But he must not have killed you, because he never came back. And because she and I never died. See…” He opened his hands. “That’s what I heard from them. If you die, then for some reason Callista and I are supposed to die immediately as well.”
“Right on the spot,” Callista said, with some disdain. “Because you’re a Guardian, and we’re just Chosens—that’s what they called us. We’re connected to you. Whatever that means.”
“Yeah,” Thad said. “So when we didn’t die, and Mr. Sharpe didn’t come back…well, Callista and I knew you were fighting. So it was our turn to put in some effort.”
He nodded excitedly. “Since you’d gotten the first guy, his boss went out to do things right: Wyck is what they called him. But when he left, all that was guarding us was his team of cheap expendable gunmen.”
He waved at himself. “Easily outwitted by me. The plan was for me to escape, which I eventually did, to go save your sorry life. Callista would stay behind and keep the henchmen at bay.”
“Basically, throw things into chaos,” Callista broke in, still laying down, eyelids shut.
“Because with Thad out,” she continued, “it wasn’t going to be so easy to kill you. There was someone lurking around who could challenge Wyck. So he got scared and had his henchmen get on that jet to move me out here, where he could make certain I didn’t get away either. But it’s like one of those two-ended rabbit holes.”
She held one hand up. “On this end, you have Thad running to save you. And on this end,” she held her other hand up, far from the other, “you have little old me, suddenly breaking locks and blocking bullets and cutting my way through the walls of a plane and slicing its wing off midair.”
To accent her words, claws flew out from the hand she’d marked as herself. They slid forth like hidden blades, making me blink, which by the look in her face was exactly the reaction she’d wanted.
“The little fox just gets trapped running from one end to the other,” she said. “And down go the henchmen, away goes the Callista, and safe goes the Michael.”
She hit my arm with the back of her hand, claws gone. I didn’t know what to say in response to their plan. It was either the stupidest thing I’d ever heard, or the most brilliant.
“So now they’re really going to panic,” I said with a hint of dread.
Callista nodded. “Like a bunch of bees when you hit the nest,” she said. She turned to look at me.
“Please don’t say I shouldn’t have,” she warned. “I don’t want to think about what I just did for you. Even if it was eleven trained killers without a single moral fiber in their bodies.”
“I think that we can agree on the fact that they started it,” I said with a long release of nervous breath. It was worrisome though, how that statement seemed to be the extent of emotion she had after killing eleven people. I remembered the newspaper article about her family’s fiery death…maybe her emotional fuses had been burned out with them?
Callista leaned away from me to look at Thad.
“I remembered,” she told him, pulling something out of her short pocket and placing it in his hand. It was a flawless bronze pocket watch, the type that gentlemen might wear on chains in old England. Except this one was unusual in its design: formed with two disks that met as a lid, but the top bearing two small, metal skeleton hands that reached for the lock. Thad took it without smiling, though he looked relieved.
I didn’t understand what’d just happened. I also didn’t like the way that Callista was simply laying there, as if we weren’t in any danger at all.
“So what now?” I asked nervously, as the fire truck hoses burst with solution that crackled over the flames.
“The moment Wyck hears about this, he’ll be coming this way,” Callista said. “So we’ve got to be out of here by then.”
“But as soon as he finds out…” My voice fell to a whisper simply from the weakness that suddenly overtook me. All at once, I realized what this meant. Somewhere, perhaps lurking in the sky or just now arriving at the church to find that I wasn’t a prisoner there, was a person who hunted me. Someone even more terrifying than Mr. Sharpe had been.
All at once, I realized the first place he would think to look for me next. My house.
“I—I’ve got to go now,” I told the others, scrambling to my feet, slipping but catching my balance as I stood. The others looked up at me in surprise.
“What? Where?” Callista asked, bending her head up. “We’re gonna leave in two minutes.”
“No, I’ve to go now,” I burst. “My mom and sister can’t stay in that house. He’ll come for them next!”
I spun around and tripped off the rock, not even pausing as I heard the others scratching up from the stone, making sounds in protest. I was already rising into the air. I didn’t care what they were going to do, all I could think about was my mom and Alli sitting in the house waiting to be attacked. Would the Guardians go so far as retaliation? I didn’t put it past them. I needed to get—
Hands grabbed me around my middle, tackling me midair and throwing me down onto the sand. I would have shouted if the hard beach hadn’t pushed the air out of me.