The mist continued through the night, beading up on the windshield. Donovan stopped for fuel, but not at a gas station. He siphoned gas out of cars at a bus depot. Then he stopped for “the other kind of fuel,” by which he meant ransacking a convenience store. The twins stuffed the pockets of their sweatshirts with candy and bags of chips. Donovan took a shopping basket and filled it with sodas, whistling happily. There didn’t seem to be any method to their looting, as if they weren’t thinking more than a few hours ahead. As far as Jax could tell, they treated the eighth-day world like it was their personal shopping mall—here solely for their own gain—just as Riley had warned him most Transitioners did. In spite of his disapproval, Jax was so parched from his ordeal that he beat down his conscience and helped himself to a single bottle of water. As he was walking out, he passed a display of pet food and paused.
I’ve heard that cats purr, Evangeline had said.
“Hey, Thomas,” Jax called. “Is there such a thing as a Grunsday cat?”
“What’s Grunsday?” Thomas asked.
“That’s what I call the eighth day.”
“You want a cat for the eighth day?”
“I want to know if there is such a thing,” Jax said.
“An eighth-day cat or dog is a rare commodity.” Michael Donovan eyed him with interest over the shelves. “Expensive to acquire, but I’ll bet I could find one.”
“Bound to be the pet of some Kin.” Tegan added her two cents around a mouthful of cheese doodles. “They get nasty when you steal from ’em.”
“I didn’t ask you to steal one. I only asked—” Jax grunted in exasperation. “I’ll wait in the car.”
The best way to avoid talking to the Donovans was to pretend to fall asleep, and to Jax’s surprise, he really did doze off. Thomas had to shake him awake when they neared their destination.
“Which way, Jax?” Michael Donovan asked.
“Straight ahead.” Jax kept an eye out for likely-looking housing communities. In the seat next to him, Tegan was sound asleep, her head lolling on her shoulder and her hair fallen across her face. “Left at the next light,” he said.
In the rearview mirror, he saw Donovan frown. “You sure?”
“Yes.”
Thomas and his father exchanged glances, but Donovan made the turn. Jax continued to direct them, solely by the quality of the houses, and finally said, “Stop here.”
“Which house?” Donovan brought the van to a gentle stop and looked over his shoulder with a smile that was way too innocent for Jax’s liking.
“I’d rather you stop here.” Jax made a show of looking ashamed. “I live with someone who’d kill me if he knew I was dumb enough to get myself kidnapped by a bank robber.”
“I can understand that.” Donovan’s smile widened into a grin.
Jax opened the door. “I’m grateful, sir. You saved my life. Uh, see you at school, Thomas.”
Thomas eyed him over the back of his seat with a smile that eerily echoed his father’s. “Bye, Jax.”
Jax glanced across the van at Tegan. She was still asleep. He hopped out of the vehicle and walked down the street. When he realized Donovan wasn’t going to pull away, he looked back and waved, then sauntered between two of the houses. As soon as he was out of sight, he crouched and waited. After a few seconds, he heard the van reverse and turn around, and when the sound of its engine could no longer be heard, he sank to the ground in relief.
First thing he did was find a bike to steal.
He tried not to compare himself to Terrance or the Donovans. Instead, he remembered what Riley had told him: I’m not a thief, but I have stolen when I needed to. When he finally found a house with an unlocked garage door and a bike inside, Jax wondered when Riley Pendare had suddenly become a model of acceptable morality.
He was only eight or nine miles from home, and with any luck he could make it back before his scheduled lesson with Melinda. No one would ever know he’d been gone.
Except Evangeline.
Mounting the stolen bike, Jax tried to figure out what he was going to tell her.
25
EVANGELINE LOOKED AROUND IN HORROR.
She was standing under the nighttime sky in a wet mist, alone and vulnerable. How could she have been so careless? The first thing her parents had taught her, even before she’d been able to speak in complete sentences, was the dire importance of being in a secure location at midnight.
Evangeline bolted for the house, only to find the back door locked. For a second she panicked and looked for a rock to break the glass. Before she found one, however, reason caught up with her. Breaking the window would frighten Mrs. Unger. There was another way in. Years ago, she had stolen and hidden a key to the front door for just such an emergency.
It took her a couple of minutes to remember the right window and even longer to tease the key out of the crack between the stucco wall of the house and the underside of the windowsill. Her fingers had been smaller then. While she worked at it, she cast angry glances next door, where Jax’s bike was locked up in its usual spot. Jax had left her outside and hadn’t come back for her.
Once she’d retrieved the key and let herself in, she slammed the door and locked it. I should be angry at myself, she thought. Jax has no idea what it’s like. I let another person distract me from the time—and that was stupid.
My life is ruled by time.
She didn’t sleep well that night, too irritated at herself, disappointed in Jax, and engulfed in overwhelming longing for her own family.
If I had given the Taliesins a different answer five years ago, would they have let the three of us stay together?
After whisking Evangeline and her siblings through the woods and to a safe location, the Taliesin brothers had separated the children and questioned Evangeline—she being the eldest and most likely to understand the situation. “Do you know why we rescued you?” the one with the hawk-shaped nose had asked.
At that point, she still thought they must be allies of her father’s. They were Kin, after all, and she’d been told that all Kin wanted the same thing. “To end the exile of the Kin and dissolve the Eighth-Day Spell,” she promptly said.
When he hit her, she felt surprise before she felt pain. The blow was hard enough to send her sprawling across the floor.
“I told you she was too old,” he said to his brother. “We should have left this one behind. The younger two children might be re-educated.”
“I’m not certain about that,” the other mumbled, rubbing his leg. Addie had kicked him in the shins.
Evangeline, meanwhile, thrashed on the floor, trying to make her limbs obey her. Too old? She was eleven. She didn’t understand why they were angry. She didn’t know what they wanted from her. I didn’t mean it, she wanted to say. Tell me what answer you want me to give, and I will. But her jaws and her teeth throbbed.
“Every misguided attempt to interfere with the Eighth-Day Spell has ended in catastrophe,” the hawk-nosed man said, scowling down at her. “We have records—disaster after disaster, throughout the centuries, caused by fools like your father.”
The second man started to help her up, but the cruel one swooped in and grabbed her by the throat, hauling her to her feet. “You are nothing but a vessel, girl. A vessel for the bloodline that maintains the eighth day.”
She clawed at his fingers, but he tightened his grip, and spots floated in her eyes.
“We’ll put you somewhere safe,” he said. “But if I think, even for a second, that you’ve taken up your father’s cause, I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand?”