His jaw clenched. “I haven’t seen her since.”
He never wept. Somehow, in all the time that he’d been a prisoner, Thad had managed to build such a mental fortress that not even recalling the girl he loved was enough to break through. It could have been his resolve to find her, the uneasy platform on which he stood to keep telling himself that she was alive, when both of us knew she probably wasn’t. The Guardians didn’t have any reason to keep her.
It left us in a heavy gloom. I breathed slowly, trying not to let the torment carry me away.
He finally lifted himself up so that his gaze could meet my eyes—his were bloodshot and filled with haunting memories. The city reflecting in them looked like a desolate wasteland.
“I lost Sophia for you,” he said bluntly. “No…not for you. Because of you. So did Callista with her family. You are important enough for all this, and I know that, but I don’t think you can see how many people have sacrificed to give you a chance at finishing what you started when you were Daniel. You’re that significant, Michael.”
He nodded at me. “Who you are now is always more important than who you were before. And if you can’t bring yourself to do it because it’s right, then do it for the ones who care about you.”
In so few words, Thad had summed up the invisible foe that I had been fighting: myself. Because now, I wasn’t just myself. I wasn’t just Michael Asher who could go taking clients and driving nice cars and sneaking out and back in at night. Father Lonnie had been speared on a church. Callista’s family had been murdered. Anon still risked himself just to help me. How many others did I not even know about who were, at that very moment, praying secretly that I would somehow survive? Everyone that Callista, Thad, and I loved had already placed his or her lives as collateral for my victory. The debt was now mine to bear.
All along, I’d known what I needed to do, and yet I’d tried to deny it. If I let the Guardians continue, I knew how this would end—I’d already predicted it in another life. I had to take the Guardians’ power. I had to cure their poison.
Thad held my gaze for a few seconds and then looked back to the street. The nameless people had vanished, music still pumping through the walls but the streets momentarily emptied. I replayed the dreams like movies in the back of my head, retracing every step from end to beginning. Thad and Callista had run to save me in the second life, even jumping in front of me to block the bullet. And in the first, they had hurried with me up the winding stairs, knowing full well that there was no escape, that the moment we dashed out into the night we would be caught and killed. They’d done it for me.
“Underground,” I gasped suddenly.
Thad looked up at me. “What?”
All at once, something from the dream that had been pushed to the back of my subconscious leapt into the forefront. It was so obvious that it was nearly blinding.
How could I have missed that? Such a tiny detail…
“What did you say?” Thad demanded, rising up as he looked at my stricken face.
“M-my dream,” I managed to force out. “The first one, from my first life when I hid the Blade. There were stairs. You and Callista and me were running up stairs from a basement.”
Thad comprehended what this meant at the same time I did.
“The Blade is under the restaurant!” he realized.
20
Déjà Vu
I whipped my phone out of my pocket immediately. Not even a genius would claim wide enough knowledge of random trivia to match the Internet. It only took a few searches to find the answer we were looking for.
“The restaurant is built on the church’s foundation,” Thad told Callista, after a whirlwind of a flight back to the cliff. She stood with arms crossed, dubiously looking from his face to mine.
“There’s a basement under it,” Thad insisted, like she hadn’t heard him. “Somewhere in that basement is a door that nobody knows about.”
She still didn’t look convinced. I held my phone out so she could see what was on the screen: a history of the restaurant on its website, detailing how the original owner Gustav Fabolli had bought the worthless spot from the Catholic Church and turned it into a family business.
“It’s from the dream,” I said. “In the first one, we were running up stairs behind a hidden door. So if nobody knew it was there, then nobody’s moved it, and the Blade is still inside.”
“So there’s some secret door under the Italian restaurant?” Callista repeated. I caught the incredulity in her voice instantly. I’d thought that Callista would feel the same rush that Thad and I had, and her disinterest was throwing a damper on our discovery.
She twisted her face up and looked to Thad. “I thought we decided to hide for a while.”
Thad was taken aback too. He blinked a few times, unable to gather his words.
“Yes…” he said slowly. “But things have changed.”
“You know what this means, right?” I insisted to her. “Wyck thinks the Blade is somewhere up north. But it’s not. So while he’s traveling all the way up there, we have a chance to get it. Then they won’t touch us. What’s the one thing they’re afraid of more than anything?”
Being human: I knew that for certain. I’d already seen that on their faces, their utter disgust for the creatures they deemed so inferior. Fear of death drove them to insane lengths.
She was right, though: the Blade was why I’d been killed in the first place. But what was I supposed to do? Run off and hide even though I was so certain the Blade was there? I might have done that a while ago. It was different now. It was time for me to make their sacrifices worth it.
Callista appeared to be thinking the same, debating it inside though still not looking convinced. She’d changed too. Maybe it was because of my recklessness. She didn’t want to fight now. She wanted to retreat and regroup in someplace safe.
“Let’s try,” I insisted. “Just one more time. And if it’s not there, we’ll go east and disappear. I just can’t leave without taking this one chance.”
That decided it for her. Maybe it was the fact that there weren’t tears in my eyes anymore and somehow the renewed determination showed in my gaze. Her set shoulders fell as she uncrossed her arms. Thad and I turned, and with running bounds, we flew off the cliff like a small formation of birds, heading in the direction of Los Angeles.
The moon was masked behind heavy clouds, throwing the city into an even darker gloom than usual. Scattered cars and people continued on their duties, unperturbed by the time. It was as if Los Angeles simply refused to bind its life to the day hours, lights in the tall skyscrapers still burning for late-night workers and the windows of cheap fast food restaurants still alit.
Luckily, though, the darkness managed to conceal us when we landed in a deserted alleyway as our camouflage wore off. And just in time too, as a group of rowdy pedestrians walked by the opening. We startled them and they scraped to a stop—a group of rough teenage boys in baggy clothes—but when Thad stood up to his full height, they continued on in a hurry.
“You’re good at scaring people,” I murmured to Thad, rubbing my hands together under the bluish color of the streetlamp. “I could use you, if…you know, I ever go back to taking clients.”