“Do you see I have another arm right here?” he growled threateningly. “I could pin you to a chair, and Michael here to another chair, until both of you shut up.”
She shut up.
“Don’t you dare yell at Callista again,” he told me. “We’ve given up a lot for you already, and we don’t owe you a single thing anymore.”
I pressed my lips together tightly, teeth together too. I knew they’d given up a lot for me, and just having them there with me at that moment was something I should have been extremely grateful for. There was just no room for feelings of appreciation amidst everything else in my head at that moment.
When I said nothing, Thad turned to Callista again.
“And you,” he said. “We’re all upset right now. But you need to keep in control. None of us want to be here, but we’re here now. And we have to move ahead from that.”
He took a large breath and let it out quickly in exasperation. “You two are gonna drive me crazy if you keep this up.”
Finally, his arm slid away from me, and I sank back to let some of the tension ease.
“Am I allowed to ask what the next step is?” Callista said. Thad cleared his throat.
“Michael,” he said. They were looking at me again.
“Um…” I started. “Well there’s the bank cash box at the bottom of the letter.”
I produced the paper. The number was typed a space below an address in downtown LA.
“We can go down there and take a look,” I said. “That’s the next obvious thing to do.”
“Are we actually going to go after this Blade?” Callista said. Thad didn’t move but I could sense that the same question was on his mind too. Because that was really what all of this had pointed to, wasn’t it? I’d been led down a winding path to find the truth, and now that I knew, it was time for me to pick up where I’d left off, decades before.
I knew I was a Guardian. And with all I’d found out, I couldn’t just stop here.
But I couldn’t expect myself to go deeper, a part of me cried in counter. I was just a teenager. My goal was to go home somehow, right?
“I don’t know,” I replied, just like I’d replied to so many other questions.
“And that’s going to settle it for now,” Thad said, standing up quickly, clicking his pocket watch open. “It’s two-forty-three PM. We’re not going to argue. We’re going to stay here tonight, eat something, and tomorrow we will go to the bank, and take this one step at a time.”
That sounded very anti-plan and I knew Callista wasn’t happy about that. She managed to keep her dissatisfaction to herself by promptly leaving the room, but the heat of her anger emanated down the hall.
“You really get on her nerves,” Thad told me, shaking his head. I sighed.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be alright.”
“I didn’t mean to yell at her,” I said.
“Look, this is a lot,” he told me. “We’re gonna deal with it in different ways.”
I turned to him. “How come you seem so calm about this?”
Out of all of us, he’d reacted the least, and actually seemed to have already adjusted to our new discoveries. I could sense his coolness under pressure, the calculated way in which he absorbed everything. I envied his ability to let go of inhibitions because I was so much the opposite.
With questions still in the air, we left the room and headed in search of something to eat. Why did things have to be tenser now, even when we weren’t running from people trying to kill us? I felt stupid. I’d had to go and fight with Callista when that was the last thing I wanted us to be doing.
I thought about apologizing, but I never ran into Callista as Thad and I got to the stairs. When we reached the bottom, we saw the paper grocery bags at our feet.
“This was thoughtful,” I said, reaching in to the first and pulling out a sack of almonds. All of the bags were full of food: green apples, more almonds, a handful of fresh avocados, cans of white tuna, boxes of cheap crackers shaped like animals, and jars with some type of dough and fruit. The bags were full of them, assorted throughout like someone had picked them up from the store in a hurry and dropped them there.
“Glad he gave us something to snack on,” Thad said, taking one of the apples and biting in to it. I was far hungrier than I had realized, so I grabbed one of the tuna cans and ventured off in search of a can opener.
Around the corner, the area opened up into a gigantic kitchen with the same gray tiled floors as the entryway. The counter was made of smooth blue granite and seemed to go on forever around half the parameter of the room, not a spot or smudge on it. In the center of the floor was an island, covered by another slab of granite at least twice the size of my bed. The walls were full of cherry-colored cabinetry and drawers, except across the room where tall windows were covered by blinds. A small table sat beneath the windows.
The kitchen was stocked with plates and cups and utensils hiding in the cabinets. But the pantry was entirely empty and the fridge’s shelves were so clean it appeared it’d never been used.
It was difficult to let my surroundings sink in. Any other time, I’d have leapt at the opportunity to stay in a house like this. Spud would want to hear all about this giant home, only to be bored by the things I’d actually used it for: hiding upstairs at night and watching out the windows with my camera, attempting to see the neighbors as they got home. Most times, wealth didn’t impress me. Being star struck was a waste of time. I wasn’t the person who stood outside the gates of the Beverly Hills taking pictures; I was the person who grew scales and flew over.
I grinned at the thought of Spud seeing me now. That was if I ever saw anyone I knew again. Slowly, the possibility of never being able to go back seeped into me. It was nearly unfathomable. Never? Of course I’d be going back. Maybe if I waited a week, or even two weeks, all of this would blow over? Maybe I could fix all this, then sneak home and take my family far away, where we could get new identities and hide so deep that the Guardians would never find me again.
A week or two weeks? another part of me thought. Are you serious, Michael?
The Guardians had tracked down a billionaire hiding in Japan. If they could find him in a crowd of millions and would set off an earthquake just to get him, surely they could find me anywhere I went.
I sighed. I didn’t want to think about this, so I dug the last bite of tuna out of the can and chewed it down slowly.
As darkness settled over the mansion, we found ourselves growing restless. As large as the house was, it still felt like being trapped in a trench. I tried to step outside, just for a few minutes onto the back porch, but Thad wouldn’t let me. We had to stay indoors for now. If we were going to follow Anon’s instructions, we couldn’t take any chances of the neighbors alerting the police about trespassers.
In the interest of not calling attention to ourselves, we knew that turning on lights would be a bad idea. Thad found flashlights in the kitchen though, unscrewing their caps so that the bulb was like a candle. We sat in a circle in the first bedroom we’d entered and had a light dinner of mashed avocados and more tuna fish together. I pulled out the bag of crackers.
“Animal crackers and tuna fish,” Thad observed, grabbing some. “What a true meal of etiquette in this fine mansion.”
“I don’t think I’m using the proper tuna fork right now,” I added.
“I can just feel the walls trembling with disdain,” Callista said, taking a handful herself and dropping them into one of the crystal cups I’d found in the cabinet. The room was still very cold because even though we’d searched, none of us could find the thermostat controls.