“Uh-huh,” said Jax. “So—you have the voice of command, but the girl with the pistol in her boot is in charge.”
“Shut up.” Riley stopped fussing with his collar, his eyes wandering to the window facing Mrs. Unger’s house. “If you—” He scowled and hesitated, and Jax braced himself.
“If you talk to her again,” Riley continued, “tell her you’re not part of my clan.”
That wasn’t what Jax had expected. “Why would she care?”
“Just tell her.”
Jax nodded, and Riley threw open the front door without saying anything else. Jax waited inside the house, listening for the sound of the motorcycle. Then he jumped up and scuttled outside to fetch the cooler of food he’d hidden in the cellar.
19
EVANGELINE AWOKE TO A FLUTTER in her stomach. It took her a moment to pin down the reason for it, and when she did, she sat straight up in bed.
Yesterday she’d had her first conversation with another person in years. She’d “hung out” with New Boy and “had a soda.”
What had she done? I cracked the dam, that’s what.
Evangeline’s life was not a happy one, but it was tolerable as long as her loneliness remained walled up behind a concrete dam.
Why hadn’t she run away when she’d had the chance? She knew Jax had been trying to win her trust when he told her about the lock on the pepper spray, but it had worked anyway. His honesty was so plain on his face.
Talking to Jax had cracked her dam, and she could almost feel water trickling through the leak, making it bigger and more dangerous.
She felt restless.
In the early afternoon, Jax rode off on his bicycle somewhere, and Red worked on his motorcycle in the yard. Evangeline crept to the kitchen door and put her hand on the knob. Running away from him yesterday had probably been an overreaction. After all, he’d invited her to speak with him the first day he arrived here. It had been her choice to refuse him and keep her distance thereafter. She was the one who had chosen silence, not him.
What if she walked outside now and introduced herself?
But he already knew who she was: the daughter of a traitor who’d sought to break the Eighth-Day Spell. Evangeline’s father had consorted and plotted with terrible Kin clans. Worse, he’d worked on a plan to retrieve the most evil Kin of all from the fortress in Wales where they were confined. He’d violated everything their famous ancestor Merlin had believed in and sacrificed for.
Evangeline had been hidden in this house so her father’s accomplices couldn’t find her and take up his cause. Nobody cared what her own opinion on the matter was.
Outside, she heard the clatter of something metal being thrown into a toolbox. Her hand tightened on the doorknob. There was no need for introductions, but she could ask him what she most wanted to know. How much longer must I stay here?
But she already knew the answer to that, too. She would be required to stay here until his side needed her for something. Or until the Taliesins thought she was old enough to be married to someone they picked for her, like she was the daughter of a nobleman in medieval times. A lot of the Kin behaved like they were still in the Dark Ages instead of the twenty-first century. It didn’t make Evangeline eager to rejoin them.
She let go of the door. There was no point talking to the Pendragon boy. He was her prison guard. There was nothing good he could tell her and no common ground they shared.
She stayed away from the windows and kept herself busy in the house, dusting and then alphabetizing the jars in the spice cabinet—because there was no fun in being a ghost if she didn’t do inexplicable things. She tried to read the most recent batch of library books, but living through the lives of Normal girls in books didn’t satisfy her. Another crack in the dam, she thought. Instead she pored over newspapers and magazines and fantasized, not for the first time, about slipping out of this house and losing herself in the world.
In the early evening, she heard the motorcycle leave, and it wasn’t long afterward that she smelled smoke.
She jumped up and ran for the kitchen. Fire was one of her greatest fears—as it was for all her people. The Kin were too easily eliminated by fires set on days they weren’t present. Nothing was wrong in her kitchen, but Evangeline’s eyes were immediately drawn to the window.
Smoke poured out of the house next door.
She barely had time to gasp before she saw Jax pitch some flaming object out his kitchen window with tongs. He didn’t look scared, just annoyed, and he waved the smoke out the open window with a towel. The house wasn’t on fire; Jax had just burned his dinner.
That was when Evangeline spotted everything set up on the lawn between their houses. A folding table. Two lawn chairs. Two place settings with plates, napkins, forks, and knives. Candles. Jax was planning a lawn party, and Evangeline felt pretty sure she knew who his guest was supposed to be.
She threw both hands over her face. That silly boy. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
But Jax doesn’t despise me. Maybe he doesn’t know what my father did.
When she peeked through her fingers, she spotted the other object on the lawn, and something overcame her. Curiosity. Or maybe the leaking of water through the crack of a dam. She was out the kitchen door and walking across the property before she could help herself.
Jax came out the front door carrying a plate with another plate covering it like a lid. He grinned when he saw her. “There you are. I was just going to ring your doorbell.”
Of course he was. As if she were a Normal neighbor.
“I hope you like hamburgers.” Jax put the covered plate on the table, muttering under his breath, “I hope you really like hamburgers, considering how they turned out.”
“I can’t stay,” she said apologetically. She really shouldn’t. “I just wanted to see your telescope.”
“Do you like it?” Jax glanced toward the telescope, set up on a tripod and aimed at the purpling sky. “Got it for my birthday last year. But you have to stay for dinner. I bought all this stuff.” He opened up a plastic cooler and lifted items out. “I got buns. Ketchup and mustard. A ready-made salad. And look, there’s cheesecake for dessert.” He showed her a cream-colored confection in a transparent plastic container. “Girls like cheesecake, right?”
Did they? Evangeline had no idea what other girls liked, but she had never tasted cheesecake. It looked very tempting.
Jax must have seen her resolve wavering, because he grinned with more confidence. “And I made hamburgers from scratch. I know you’d never guess, but it was my first time.” He whisked the cover off the plate with a flourish, revealing shriveled meat slabs. They resembled the round plastic disks Mrs. Unger put under the feet of her furniture. One of them was still smoking. Evangeline burst out with a laugh and then looked at Jax guiltily.
But he was laughing too. “I didn’t think they’d catch fire so easily. I almost burned the kitchen down.”
“I saw,” she said.
Jax stabbed a fork into one of the burgers and held it up for her to see. “C’mon, Evangeline. You know you want one.”
Suddenly she dissolved into giggles. She hadn’t realized how much she missed hearing her name said aloud by someone else. Encouraged by her reaction, Jax hammed it up, poking the burgers and assuring her that even if they were charred, the salad was unharmed. “Unless you want the salad burned,” he offered. “I can run it back inside and stir-fry it for you.”
It wasn’t that funny, but she had a sudden memory of her brother, Elliot, clowning around to make her laugh, and when Jax pulled a chair out from the table, she sat down without further objection. He asked what she wanted on her burger, and she had to admit she’d never eaten one.