A Billion Echoes: A Thousand Faces Volume 3
Author: Janci Patterson
Date: 2018-01-18 00:00:00+00:00
Description: It's said that no one escapes from the Carmines, but Jory is determined to find a way to take down the monsters who killed her father and destroyed her life. With her friend Damon and her boyfriend Kalif by her side, Jory's painstaking plot unfolds piece by piece beneath the Carmines'ever watchful cameras and tracking devices. This task stretches Jory's skills to the limit, and every aspect of her life begins to buckle under the strain. Jory thinks she's found the key to taking down the Carmines and escaping from their influence once and for all- But following through may cost Jory everything
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Free book offer

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Free book offer

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Long Dark Night Teaser

One

Keep Reading

Thank you

A Billion Echoes

Kindle Edition

© 2017 Janci Patterson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, printing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except for use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Cover by Melody Fender

Cover image from istock.com/Aleramo

Author Photo by Michelle D. Argyle

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One

I walked up to the Systems Development building wearing a gray pencil skirt and a matching blazer, my hair a slightly duller version of my usual brown and pulled back in a tight bun. As I always did when I went into work, I'd aged my face slightly, just enough that no one would question my resume, which referenced my age as twenty-two instead of sixteen. My face muscles looked relaxed and happy—not so much that I'd appear ready for a day at the beach, but enough that my face didn't settle into a nervous scowl. In my outstretched hand, I carried a cardboard tray filled with three hot cups of coffee and a breakfast bagel.

Over the last month, I'd stopped feeling naked when I walked into work with a version of my home face. I'd stopped feeling like I needed to catalog the exits—mostly because I had them all memorized. But the tense feeling I got when I neared the building hadn't gone away, and I was confident it never would.

So I shifted my eyes softer and made sure my posture was open. I made myself into a new Jory—a Jory who was grateful for her job as Oliver Carmine's personal assistant, who was eager to climb the corporate ladder and get ahead. The Jory who worked for Oliver Carmine did not hate him. She didn't see her father's killer every time she looked in his eyes. She didn't collapse or freeze as she walked over the patch of concrete where her father had bled out on the ground.

The Jory who worked for the Carmines was calm, determined, and dedicated to her employers.

And today, like every day, my job was to appear exactly like that Jory.

As I swiped my key card outside the glass doors, I allowed myself one glance down at the concrete. It was embedded with small, shiny stones that grew slick when it rained.

It had also been impeccably cleaned.

Love you, Dad, I thought. And, as always, I hoped that if Dad was a ghost, he wasn't bound to this place. I didn't want him to watch his daughter walk into work every day, cooperating with the people who kidnapped and killed him.

On the other hand, if I succeeded, this would be the best con of my life, and I had to believe he'd be proud of me for that.

I moved down the hall past the information security office where Kalif worked tending the Carmines' firewalls and keeping people from doing what he'd once done—hacking into their system and stealing their data. From there he was working to gain access to all kinds of things the Carmines didn't want us to see.

But not footage of the torture basement—or at least, not yet. Kalif said that after our escapade with my parents, the Carmines had changed the cameras so they didn't record, presumably to prevent us from continuing to spy on them. We didn't know who might be down there, even now, chained up and cut on for refusing to cooperate with the Carmines.

I used my keycard to take the elevator up to the top-floor office of the man who held the knife. I passed by the desk of Jeanette, the thirty-three-year-old receptionist with permed red hair. She leaned one elbow on the desk, twirling a long, kinked strand of hair around one finger. I'd followed her home one night and watched her sleep. She wasn't a shifter. Also, like my own, her apartment was fully bugged. Even the Carmines' non-shifter employees were being carefully watched in their off hours.

She might have been faking it, of course, but after a month of observing her, I was almost positive she had no idea who she worked for.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning," Jeanette said back.

I walked to my office and dumped my purse on my smaller version of Oliver's rectangular desk. For a moment, I looked out the floor-to-ceiling tinted-glass windows, letting myself take in the view of the willow treetops that shielded Systems Development from the rest of the business complex. Then I turned on my computer monitor, opened my email, and took a bite of my bagel. Oliver and Wendy seemed to operate on coffee alone, but if I didn't get some carbs in the morning, I'd be a walking disaster by lunch.

Disasters didn't keep secrets.

Twelve new messages popped up: Oliver was terrible at answering his email, partly because he liked to make people wait. So as his personal assistant, a large part of my job was either answering the emails in his place, or physically knocking on his door and telling him who urgently wanted his attention, even though he could have plainly seen it for himself.

At first I'd combed through the email, searching for communication from other shifters, evidence that they had field teams working for them, possibly all over the world, policing rogue shifters and generally maintaining the balance of power, with the Carmines seated comfortably on top.

But of course none of it was sensitive—he had other email addresses for the lawyers and executive engineers about corporate secrets, and no doubt yet others to correspond with his stable of whipped shifters.

It had taken Kalif and me about a week to figure out that we weren't going to undermine the Carmines' operation by sabotaging their tech, either. Systems Development was one of those companies that charged exorbitant sums to do contract work without a byline. Tech companies would get themselves in a deadline bind and farm out their work—relying on Wendy and Oliver's reputation for quality, speed, and secrecy. The Carmines were dedicated to their front business. They were high payers doing cutting edge work, and that allowed them to attract some of the best minds in the hardware field. All of their work was checked and double checked. All the contracts were gone over by multiple lawyers. Their tech business was strictly on the up and up.

And this was the most dangerous thing about the Carmines: they were good at their jobs, and they covered their tracks. Whatever brand of electronics you used, some of the work on it had probably been done by Systems Development. Which meant that they had back doors into nearly every computer, server, and mobile device in the world.

Good work didn't come without a price.

I combed my way through the email, jotting down a list of all the things I needed to confer with Oliver about, transferring things to his calendar that I knew without question needed to be scheduled. I answered inquiries from firms who wanted to contract with Systems Development, sending the more promising ones on to the appropriate departments. I finalized hotel stays and air travel and dug through stock emails to send answers to tech firms and media outlets alike.

I did my job, and I did it well. But I couldn't believe that Oliver intended to keep me here as his personal assistant and travel planner. I was too valuable for that. He was waiting to see if he could trust me, and that meant I had to wait as well, much as I hated it. The impatient part of me wanted to finish things now, but that was foolish. One slip, and the whole plan would shatter around me. I had to be perfect, this time and every time. I could feel my father watching me, reminding me to be exact. If there was one thing I learned from him, it was that a proper job took time.

I was going to get this right.

The clock on my desk ticked to eight. Time to see Oliver. Usually I'd head into his office for our morning conference, but today I was scheduled for my very first performance review. Whatever came of it, I was going to need my acting skills in sharp form.

I was particularly careful to keep my posture relaxed as I breezed into Oliver's office, carrying the three cups of coffee in their cardboard tray.

They were all for Oliver. In my first weeks here, I'd learned where Oliver and Wendy lived, but from what I could tell, they spent as little time there as possible. Either they slept in the underground dungeon beneath the complex or they tried not to sleep more than absolutely necessary. Given the amount of caffeine Oliver ingested, I was willing to bet it was the latter. I might have done the same, if my public face faded every time I lost consciousness.

This morning, Oliver sat at his desk, his spine rod-straight in his ergonomic chair, his cell phone on the desk in front of him. "Well, why not?" he said into his headset. "It's your job to make it happen."

I set the coffee down on the edge of his desk, sat down in a chair, and waited for him to look up. He never acknowledged me until he was ready to pay attention to me directly. That's the kind of man Oliver was—he focused on only one thing at a time, but his mind could jump from subject to subject with alarming speed.

"See that you do," Oliver said. And then he hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Sometimes I wondered if he'd based his persona on a CEO from a movie, but if he had, it was surprisingly effective.

His gaze turned to me, and I focused on my face muscles, making my mouth turn up in a professional smile—but not so eager as to look like I was trying too hard. Nothing screamed scam like an overeager front man.

Then Oliver extended his hand to me over the desk. I took it and he gave me a firm handshake, like he did every time we met. And concealed beneath our fingers, we shifted our palms, passing back and forth the series of codes that identified us to each other, so we could be sure that neither of us were impostors. No one else was supposed to know our codes—that was the most private of all data, more sensitive than a normal person's social security number. But if I had to guess, I would have said that Oliver and Wendy shared codes and wore each other's personas, as if they were one person in two bodies. In that way, I could never be sure exactly which one I was talking to.

Oliver rested his arms on the desk in front of him. "Let's start with your performance review." He stared at me with a steady gaze, and I locked down my muscles, refusing to wilt. His eyes were green, with tiny flecks of brown in them. They say people don't notice eye color, but I was trained to notice tiny details. What I noticed about his eyes was that they'd be difficult to fake—hazel was the hardest, because it was easy to get the particular mix of colors wrong.

"Bring it on," I said.

Oliver smiled. He liked to work with people who put up a confident front. "How long have you been with us now?"

"A month," I said. "Give or take."

Three weeks, five days, sixteen hours. But counting was a nervous vice, and I needed Oliver to believe I was settling comfortably into my new life, eager to please, when what I was actually eager to do was to knock Oliver Carmine right off his ergonomic throne.

"And the job? How are you liking it?"

I fiddled with the edge of my sleeve. "It's fine for now," I said. "But I'm sure that there must be a better way to make use of my talents."

Oliver smiled. "You think you can do more."

"I know I can."

He gave a sharp nod. "Glad to hear it."

I maintained focus on him, keeping my pulse slow even though it wanted to race. A lesser foe might have responded better if I acted cowed, submissive. Even terrified. I certainly had the material to pull from. But I'd quickly learned that Oliver responded best to people who were sure of themselves.

I'd give him whatever it was that he wanted, if it bought me more time to bring him down. Kalif was working his own angle. Damon was ready and waiting to help.

But everything hinged on me.

Oliver nodded. "Perhaps it's time to increase your workload."

I was worried this job would take skills far better than the ones I had. This was the trouble with conning a con man. There was no amount of evidence of my loyalty that he couldn't dismiss as a setup. I knew. My thoughts raced that same track. Plus, there was the minor drawback that I actually was trying to play him.

Oliver reached into his desk and pulled out a single sheet of paper. He laid it on the desk between us, and on it, I could see a handwritten address for a place in Fresno, several hours to the south.

"There's a woman living at this address," he said. "Or perhaps a man. But regardless, I want you to deliver a message to this person for me."

I nodded. "What's the message?"

Oliver opened his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a hard plastic case with an external lock and a carrying handle. My lungs constricted, and I let myself exhale sharply. Even though I'd never owned one, I knew exactly what people kept in boxes like that.

I knew he was going to ask these things of me eventually. But I'd expected him to work me up gradually, giving me tasks that would test my abilities before he sent me after people who defied him.

At the bottom of the sheet of paper, Oliver wrote down a string of numbers.

The combination to the box.

My palms began to sweat, and though I could have pinched the pores closed, I let them.

Oliver Carmine was handing me a gun.

My fingers inched toward it, and then I let myself reach, running my hands along the smooth plastic, then entering the combination and opening the box.

Inside was a pistol with a black hand grip. I barely knew how to shoot a gun—I'd only done it once, when I'd shot Kalif's father in the knee through a wall. But looking at it now, I imagined lifting it, pretending to examine it, turning off the safety.

And then gripping it with both hands and shooting Oliver Carmine in the face.

I held perfectly still. I could do it. I could do it right now.

Except that getting a gun wasn't the barrier preventing me from taking the Carmines down. I was a damn shifter. I could get a gun if I wanted one—hell, it wasn't even that hard.

But if I shot Oliver without Wendy present, I'd have blown my cover. And even without Oliver, Wendy still had field teams of shifters—a threat still opaque to me. If I shot him impetuously, I didn't stand a chance.

Besides, I had something better in mind. The Carmines were the killers. I didn't want to take their lives as much as I wanted to destroy everything they stood for. I needed to win so thoroughly that neither they nor anyone who worked for them ever considered coming after me again.

And that called for a more sophisticated plan.

A plan that would be ruined if I didn't play along with Oliver right now.

"You want me to kill a shifter?" I said. "For my first real job? Are you sure you don't want to test me first?"

"You broke into my own fortified basement," Oliver said. "You evaded us for months, and brought us a man we couldn't find ourselves. I think that's test enough to know that you can handle this."

I was certain I could handle killing someone if I wanted to. Convincing him that I'd done it when I hadn't was another matter entirely.

I looked up at Oliver. That was why he was asking me to do this, of course. Smaller jobs I might be willing to do just to keep my cover. He wanted to do more than just determine my loyalty.

He wanted to turn me into him.

"That's some message," I said.

"Death," he said, "is the final message. Get a picture of the evidence, and clean up the mess. Bring me the body so I know the job's been done."

My heart wormed into my throat. No doubt this shifter was in the same position I had been in, but hadn't done as I had and turned themselves in to join the fold.

"And what if the person has moved?" I asked. "How will I know if I'm giving my message to the right person?"

Oliver's gaze sharpened. "I suppose you'll have to take some time," he said, "and be sure that you get it right."

"How long do I have?" I asked.

Oliver raised an eyebrow. "The sooner the job is done," he said. "The sooner I can give you another."

I allowed goosebumps to form on my arms. I wasn't going to kill for Oliver—or for anyone. This was the first and only rule my dad had taught me: shifters don't kill people. But Oliver operated under a different code, and I needed his trust. And that meant I had to at least appear to go along with him.

And figure out how to keep making it appear that way, even when he asked me to do things that were impossible.

"Consider it done," I said.

"Good," Oliver said. And then he gave me this look, deep and grandfatherly, like he was ready, finally, to take me under his wing. Oliver Carmine wanted to be my father, but it was because of him my father was dead. What I'd said to Oliver was the truth; I could do better than I had been doing. I had to.

Because no way in hell was I going to let this man get away with what he'd done.

Two

The apartment I shared with Kalif ought to have been a dream come true, but instead it was a nightmare.

When we'd first moved in, the place was already furnished. Not that I needed a sign that the place would be bugged, but the Carmines had done a beautiful job arranging the furniture so that I could tell exactly where they'd been planted. From the ornate glass clock in the living room to the ceiling fan directly above our bed, I'd only had to walk through the apartment once before I could tell exactly where the cameras were situated.

The message was clear: they were always watching. Nothing that happened here was just for us.

We couldn't search the place properly, of course. That was the problem with our cover—searching for bugs would indicate to the Carmines that we didn't trust them, that we were plotting things that we didn't want them to hear. We were, but we couldn't give them evidence that it was true unless we wanted to end up in their torture basement. So both Kalif and I carefully avoided staring at the clock, even though, outside the apartment, wearing clothes and shoes that had never been near any Carmine-controlled space, in our quietest whispers in loud bowling alleys and movie theaters, we'd both acknowledged the camera that was hidden inside it.

Even after a month, stepping into the apartment still felt like slipping under a microscope. Like going to work at Systems Development, the apartment was something that I knew I would never get used to. Not completely. And it was only half a blessing that I didn't have to do it alone.

When I unlocked the door and walked in, I found Kalif sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop. The fact that he was using the computer the Carmines gave him—the only one he owned that ever entered the buildings where we lived or worked—meant that he was doing officially-approved work, not the side project he was running for me.

Kalif's day job was a joke. He was supposedly working network security, but the Carmines didn't trust him with the deeper, more secure parts of their network, even though he could have broken into them any time, through doors he'd already made for himself before we came to work for them. I was pretty sure it took all his self-control minute to minute not to use them, but we were supposed to be setting up a facade and betraying them strategically, not randomly poking at their systems just because we could. He was watching and waiting for opportunities to dig deeper, gradually collecting evidence about the Carmines' real crimes that I could then use against them when I finished my part of the job.

But the magnet with the smiling photo of the real estate agent was still situated near the bottom of the fridge, only inches higher than it had been when Kalif had first plucked it from our junk mail and slapped it on the fridge.

This meant his part of the job had barely begun. Still, breaking into things for the hell of it was Kalif's favorite thing. I hated that they'd taken even that away from him.

Kalif was so focused on what he was doing that he didn't look up until I set the gun case on the table in front of him and held out my hand. As we exchanged codes, his eyes fixed on the case so intently that I knew he also knew immediately what it was.

I let a little of my trepidation into my voice. The Carmines would surely expect to see some nervousness. "Oliver finally decided to give me some real work to do."

Kalif smiled, and to his credit, it looked real. "It's about time," he said. "You'd proved yourself before we even arrived."

His acting skills had improved, and while I was proud of him, it also made me want to scream. Nothing that happened in this apartment was real. So little of my experience was anymore that sometimes I wondered if I was running a con or just getting swallowed by a life I didn't want.

I sat down at the table, letting myself stare nervously at the gun case. "It's a big one, though," I said. "He wants me to kill a shifter."

Kalif leaned back in his chair and exhaled slowly. He stared at the box in front of him with apprehension, and I was grateful for that small window of something he must actually be feeling, even if he could only show it because it paired with our cover.

The Carmines hunted down shifters who murdered regular people. It was the reason they'd captured my parents to begin with—they'd believed that my parents had performed a series of hits. By putting down shifters who took unnecessary risks, they were protecting us all, preventing the government from figuring out that we existed, from wanting to find us, and most of all, from wanting to believe in us.

If they were providing actual freedom, they might have had a point. But every day I lived this watched existence made me more sure of what I already knew: I'd rather live with the incalculable risk than spend one more day under Carmine "protection."

"That's big," he said. "Are you sure you're ready?"

"No," I said. "I'm not ready to kill anyone."

Kalif's eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. He knew this was part of the act, and he was trying to follow me. This part was the truth, though: I wasn't ready to kill someone, and I wasn't ready to fake it while we were both still under the microscope. But if I had to pick one or the other, it was going to be the latter. Too many people had already died. I wasn't going to take out some innocent shifter just to convince the Carmines to let me play their games.

"Are you going to do it?" he asked finally.

"Yes," I said. "I have to, don't I? I mean, this was what we decided. It's safer, working here. And if this shifter is doing things that could expose us. . ."

Kalif nodded. "Then it's for the greater good, right?"

No, I wanted to say. Instead, I wavered for a moment, and then nodded. "It's for our good, anyway. And that's the most important thing."

Kalif smiled, and I tried to return it, letting my struggle show. The Carmines knew I'd fought to save my parents, that I'd worked to keep my mother free from them. They might not believe I'd drank their Kool-aid, but they could believe this: I protected the people I cared about. It wasn't a leap to assume I'd kill a stranger to protect Kalif, and myself.

I liked to believe that I wasn't that person, but when it came down to it, I couldn't be sure. "I just hope I don't screw it up," I said. "If I do, they might not give me a second chance."

Kalif nodded. "I believe in you."

And cheesy though it was, if almost nothing else he'd said to me in the last month was real or true, at least I had that single thing to believe in.

I pulled my hair out of its bun and looked up at the ceiling. I didn't stare in the direction of the camera, which was hard, since I could practically feel Carmine eyes on me. It would be pointless anyway—I couldn't tell from looking at a recording device how Wendy and Oliver were taking my performance.

I'd see it on the day that I took them down. That day, they were sure as hell going to see something real.

"The job is in Fresno," I said. "Hard to get started tonight, so I think I'll go down this weekend. I'm going to go change. After that, want to catch a movie?"

Kalif looked sideways at his laptop. "I have a lot of work to do," he said. "Rain check?"

This was all code, of course. If I'd desperately needed to talk to Kalif, I would have asked as a statement. See a movie with me meant I had to talk to him. Do you want to? told him he needed to refuse.

I took one last glance back at Kalif before heading down the hall to our bedroom. His laptop computer made me nervous, though I knew that was nonsense. They couldn't watch every computer everywhere all the time. The key to evading them was to be where they didn't expect us to be. They might be powerful people, but they were still just people. More than that, they were believers—people with a cause that was so important to them, all other morals were second to forwarding it. Oliver and Wendy would steal, cheat, and kill anyone who they thought might expose shifters to the public.

Damon said they believed in their cause, and I hoped he was right, because believers—even ruthless ones—were ripe to be conned.

I walked into the bedroom and shed my business clothes. I tossed a pair of jeans on the bed—the scene of my nightly torment. The camera in the ceiling fan was the one I despised the most—and the only one in the apartment I let myself look at directly. At night when I was trying to fall asleep, I would stare blankly at the shining metal above our bed. I ran it more often than we needed to, just because I knew it must make their picture shake.

The existence of the camera was a catch-22. The Carmines were surely expecting us to have sex, but neither of us was about to lose our virginity in front of cameras manned by psychotic tyrants who happened to also be Kalif's grandparents. I couldn't think of any bigger buzz kill, and given my history with Kalif, that was impressive. But there wasn't a buzz kill big enough to take away the torture of lying in bed every night, ostensibly together, but at the same time completely not.

We probably should have faked it, but instead we lay still, holding hands, or with our arms around each other. Let the Carmines think there was stress on our relationship. Or else that we liked to look like we were together, but that it was all an act—one we weren't willing to take all the way. The less sure they were of our relationship, the less they'd be able to use us against each other.

I opened the closet. The Carmines had gotten us an apartment with a gigantic walk-in, a true must for a shifter wardrobe. I was fairly certain there was also a camera in the closet—in the air freshener mounted on the ceiling. There, they would track the outfits that we changed into or packed to take with us, so they could follow us outside the apartment. They'd also provided us with most of the clothes—no doubt a lot of those had trackers in them, especially the shoes. I resisted the urge to dissect them. I'd take care of them after I left the apartment.

Like bed bugs, it took a lot of effort to avoid contamination.

Today I picked an innocuous t-shirt—the kind of thing I might change into after a job to relax. I had to narrow my hips two inches to slip into the jeans—my ego wasn't big enough to think that I might actually be that skinny.

Then I walked back to the front of the apartment. "I'm taking off," I said. "Want me to pick you up anything while I'm out?"

"Hamburgers?" Kalif asked.

"Done," I said. "I'll try to make sure they don't get cold."

He didn't look up from his screen, but I saw him smile. "It's okay," he said. "I like them that way."

The Carmines might be able to take everything else away from us, but we still had a history together.

I only hoped it would turn out to be enough.

Three

I drove one of the cars the Carmines had given us to the movie theater and bought a ticket to the longest show playing, even though I could have sneaked in. The more of a paper trail I left, the better. The movie was about a cop chasing a serial killer, which felt appropriate.

Over the last few weeks, I had watched a lot of movies. I'd sat through more films beginning to end than I'd seen in the last full year of my life. This served a double purpose—to allow the Carmines to track me, to check up on me, to see me actually being where they thought I should be. Second, it had given me lots of time to scout out the theater employees, their habits, and, most importantly, their locker room.

I'd also bought a few tickets to shows I hadn't seen, and had instead snuck out to work on various pieces of the plan. I couldn't bring Kalif with me very often; we were careful to keep at least one of us on Carmine camera to lessen suspicion. If we were going rogue, we wouldn't leave one of us behind.

Tonight, it was time to start putting all that preparation to good use. I handed my ticket to the checker, who directed me toward theater five. But instead of going into the theater, I ducked into the bathroom and put on the face of Anna, concession stand clerk. Anna wasn't on tonight, but even if she was covering for someone, she and her boyfriend often ducked into corners to make out on the clock, so seeing her sneaking around wouldn't trigger the spider sense of any of the other employees. I checked to make sure the break room was empty before I opened the locker in the upper right hand corner.

The lockers weren't specifically assigned, and the employees provided their own locks. With all the turnover in the movie theater staff, it might be years before anyone noticed that the blue combination lock didn't belong to anyone who actually worked at the theater.

I pulled my change of clothes out of the locker. I'd bought them last week on my way to a movie. They'd never been in the apartment, so the only kind of tags they had on them were the department store sort that I hadn't yet removed. In the employee bathroom attached to the break room, I changed out of my t-shirt, jeans, and shoes, and put on a business-casual persona who could fit in almost anywhere. My dad used to refer to this kind of persona as a chameleon.

I left the Carmines' car in the parking lot. I had to be back in two and a half hours, in case they were paying active attention to the tracking bugs, or worse, following me in person.

The apartment Damon lived in was in a rundown neighborhood in San Jose, not terribly far from our apartment, for convenience sake. We would have liked to have moved him farther away, but he and I needed to be able to meet up in the brief time I was able to get out from under the Carmines' microscope. Calling his place an apartment was a bit of a stretch—it was more like a closet with a decrepit appendage that masqueraded as a bathroom. The previous tenants had been evicted for sleeping eleven people in its one tiny room—and the place still smelled of mildew and the black fungus that had been growing under the kitchen sink.

Damon could have afforded better. He said this was perfect because proud people like Wendy and Oliver couldn't imagine that any shifter would choose to live in squalor. I was pretty sure Wendy and Oliver had decent imaginations, but Damon was the one making the choice to live there, and I had to admit, it was better than my apartment. Whatever made him feel safe enough to work with me was worth the discomfort.

I knocked once on Damon's door, then tried the knob. It was locked, of course. Damon had also found an apartment that had a back door, and an end unit so that it had windows on the third side. Plenty of exits, plenty of ways to escape. I hoped it wouldn't come to that.

Damon answered the door as a girl who couldn't be more than twelve years old. She had tanned skin, messy brown hair, and hollow eyes that made her seem instantly sympathetic.

I offered him my hand, and we exchanged signals.

Damon held the door open and let me in, then locked it behind me with three separate locks—two of which he'd installed himself.

"What's with the child?" I asked, gesturing toward him. He was wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt that bared his midriff. The shirt clung to his ribs, making him look undernourished. He hadn't even bothered to hide the scar on his knee, which after his hospital stay and home treatments looked less and less like a bullet wound as time went on.

He shrugged. "If I yelled for help as a grown man, people would steer clear. I never know when you're coming, so I figure it's better to be safe."

It was a smart plan, but didn't exactly jibe with my cover. If the Carmines did somehow manage to follow me, I wanted them to believe that I was hiding my actual boyfriend from them, while pretending to be with Kalif.

"And your neighbors?" I asked. "They think a little girl just moved in?"

Damon smiled. "They think his daughter came to live with him."

A brazen cockroach crawled by Damon's shoe, and I tried not to shudder. He looked down and squished it under his flip flop.

"Or," I said, "they think that the guy who lives here bought himself a sex slave. Did you have to look so . . ."

Damon looked down at his scrawny self. "I thought it would add sympathy. Too much?"

"Yes," I said. "You might want to add a few pounds over the next week or so. At least make it look like he's treating you right. If child services comes to the door, you won't be able to come up with her father, and that could turn into a mess." Heaven forbid one of them tried to lift him, or drag him someplace. He might look like a twelve year old, but we couldn't shift our own mass. The social worker would be in for quite a shock when she discovered that the twelve-year-old waif weighed as much as a thirty-year-old body builder.

Damon shrugged. "I can handle child services."

"Yeah, yeah. If you want, next time I come I can pretend to be your mother. We can sit outside on the steps and let the neighbors get a good look at your parental supervision. No problem."

Damon snorted. "Like an underage prostitute can't have a mother."

They could. Of course they could. But the key to flying under the radar was giving people a healthy explanation they could understand. That's how abusers slid through the system, sure, but we weren't social workers out to set things right.

We were just shifters, ready to use people's assumptions against them.

"So, Chickadee," Damon said. "I know you didn't just come here to critique my ensemble. What's up?"

I followed him into the kitchen. Damon had taken to calling me Chickadee shortly after I'd told him my real name was Jory—a name I'd never heard him use, probably as a statement that he didn't believe I was telling him the truth. Which, to be fair, I wouldn't have either. "Have you had any luck locating the embezzler?"

Damon led me over to the table—the only piece of furniture in the apartment besides the mattress on the floor. Damon had added a sleeping bag near the bathroom—presumably for his daughter to sleep in.

Ugh. This situation totally screamed child services. And I didn't even want to think about how Damon would try to explain the suitcase overflowing with various sizes of clothing—a lot of which would have fit a grown woman, not a twelve-year-old.

I took a deep breath. If I wanted to work with Damon I had to trust him. Even if blending in wasn't his strong point.

Damon sank into a kitchen chair and perched his delicate toes on the edge of the table.

"No luck," Damon said. "But I found us a nice place in Barbados."

I rolled my eyes. Every time I snuck out to meet Damon, he had a new tropical paradise he wanted to whisk me away to. Which would have been lovely and all, until the psycho tyrants I worked for tracked us down and tortured us both for rebellion.

Also, there was the small matter of my fiancé.

"Come on," Damon said. "We could work as busboys. They wouldn't find us then, would they?"

I raised an eyebrow. "Busboys?"

"You could be a waitress, if you want. You've got the body for it."

I raised a finger in the air. "First of all, I have whatever body I want to have. Second, waitresses do not have to be hot."

Damon cocked a smile. "But hot ones get better tips."

"Thirdly," I gave him an incredulous look, "Busboys?"

"Fine," he said. "We'll go with the fallback plan. Move to Haiti and open a falafel stand."

I sank into the other chair. "Falafel?"

He held both palms out in front of him. "It's probably not a saturated market!"

I groaned. "If you don't tell me you've been doing something helpful with your time, I'm going to bury you under a falafel stand. You are warned."

Damon smiled. "I'm working on it. Good thing, too. I'm too beautiful to die." He tossed his matted hair over his shoulder for effect.

I closed my eyes. "Please change. I feel like I'm conspiring with an underage criminal. It's disturbing."

Damon shrugged. "Okay."

And then he shifted into his home body—right there in the chair, still wearing the tiny short shorts and top. Fabric stretched beyond recognition. His shirt painted itself over his defined pecs, the hem rising up to his nipples. The waistband of the shorts stretched thin as a string, and dug deep into his abs, girdling him.

And below that.

Oh, man.

I reached up to cover my face with my hands. "My eyes! It burns!"

Damon laughed with his own voice. "Don't look now, but I think my waistband's about to give."

I groaned. "I'm never looking at you again. I will never recover from what I just saw."

Damon laughed again, but the feet of his chair pushed back on the floor, and I heard his footsteps as he walked over to the suitcase and dug around in it.

A minute later, he spoke right behind me. "It's safe to look," he said. "I'm decent."

"No," I said. "You're disgusting." But I did uncover my eyes. Damon was now wearing a pair of tight jeans and a t-shirt that fit him snugly—but appropriately so. Damon's home body was very attractive—evidence of how much he thought of himself—but clothes that are ten sizes too small don't look good on anyone.

Damon sat down in his chair again, then kicked his now man-sized bare foot up onto the table and flexed his leg. Even under the jeans, his ridiculously large calf muscles bulged.

"Dude," I said. "No human being has legs like that. How do you even make them that big?"

"Obviously," Damon said, "you are incorrect."

I rolled my eyes, but he was right. Our bodies couldn't do things that were outside of human genetic possibility, so if Damon could make his Hulk legs, that did mean that they were possible. Improbable and ridiculous, especially for a subconscious self-image. But possible.

"Besides," he said. "I don't do it on purpose. I can't help it if my ego is a badass."

"Egotist is more like it."

"Call it what you want," Damon said, looking through his eyelashes at me. "But you think I'm hot."

I leaned back in my chair so hard that it creaked, pissed that I couldn't call him a liar with any sincerity. Damon knew he was hot. His eyes smoldered. His muscles bulged. His chest—which he had the habit of bearing unclothed around the house, strutting like a freaking rooster—would have been envied by Adonis himself.

But he wasn't my type. My type was Kalif.

"Whatever," I said.

Damon laughed. "You've forgotten what we were talking about, haven't you? Such are the powers of my manliness."

If it weren't for my no-touching rule, I would have hit him. He was an awesome manly man, sure. Who I knew for a fact prided himself in swinging every which way. I cleared my throat. "So about the embezzler."

"Ha!" Damon said. "She does remember!"

Of course I remembered. Without him, we didn't have a plan. And even with him, it was only the beginnings of one. "You haven't found him," I said.

Damon shook his head. "I don't know what good it would do if I did. But no. If he's alive, he's made a clean break. Skipped the country, most likely. Or else the douche bag who framed him also killed him. I haven't been able to find a trace of him or his lover, dead or alive."

I nodded. "That's good news."

Damon raised an eyebrow at me. "How do you figure?"

I smiled. Damon and I had first heard about the unfortunately named Dennis Finkman when we were looking for Kalif's father a month ago. We were fairly certain that Kalif's dad had stolen money from Finkman's company and framed Finkman for it. That by itself wasn't surprising—our parents used to run jobs like that together all the time, and Kalif and I used to help them, before Kalif's parents sold mine out to the Carmines.

Going after the embezzlement records had been the first job Damon and I ran together. We'd used the stolen ID of a government agent to get access to the police records.

And that's where we'd found it. Evidence that the job had been done by a shifter, and that the police who were investigating the case had begun to figure out what they were dealing with.

"If Finkman is out of our way," I said, "he'll be much easier to impersonate."

Damon planted both feet on the floor and leaned his elbows on his knees. "Okay, Chickadee," he said. "Time to let me in on the plan."

I nodded. It was time—I couldn't treat Damon as a partner and leave him entirely in the dark. But just like with Kalif, I didn't want to tell him everything. If Damon got captured and tortured, I'd still have some cards to play that were hidden from the Carmines' view.

But I had to tell him more than Kalif, because Damon was supposed to be working with me, while Kalif was working independently, building profiles of the Carmines' real crimes—their espionage, their privacy violations, hell, even tax and mail fraud, if he could find it. For my plan to work, I was going to need actual dirt on them, things they could do jail time for. Kalif wasn't telling me any of the details—not even where to find the information he'd compiled.

Damon and I, on the other hand, were working another angle. "We're going to profile the officer who investigated the case."

Damon's eyes narrowed. "The one who potentially suspects we exist."

I nodded. "That's him."

"The officer whose jurisdiction is up in Rocklin. Hours away from the people you're trying to con."

I smiled. "The officer who was offered a promotion to an office in Sunnyvale two weeks ago, and whose wife simultaneously had a teaching position come up in the same town, within walking distance of the fabulous rental house that practically fell in their lap."

Damon stared at me for a long moment, all trace of teasing gone from his demeanor. "You did all that."

"Of course I did," I say. "I was dealing with all normal people. It wasn't even that hard."

"Chickadee," Damo said. "Last time we were in a place that guy might have tracked us, we ran like hell."

I nodded. We always did—if agents of the government knew about shifters, it would put all of us at risk. Trouble was, we were already at risk. Because we worked unchecked by any kind of government power, people like the Carmines could control us, harass us, even kill us, without fear of repercussions.

I didn't want every officer on the street to know that we existed. I was as terrified as the next shifter of what would happen if every building was equipped with weight detection cameras that would sense a discrepancy between our appearance and our mass, or other anti-shifter technology.

But in our age of skepticism, where even the hardest of evidence could be disbelieved, it would take quite a feat to make everyone believe in shifters. "It's a risk," I said. "But if we're going to pin the Carmines in a corner the way we need to, we're going to need at least a few agents of the law on our side."

Damon studied me. "This is what I love about you. When you talk crazy, you really talk crazy."

I sighed. He said he loved it, but his folded arms and tense shoulders said otherwise. Damon was worried about what I was planning, and I couldn't blame him. It was one of the reasons I'd put off telling him, besides the security risk.

He was worried I wouldn't be able to pull this off. And to be honest, so was I.

"We need to start moving on a plan," I said. "The Carmines already have me working jobs for them. I'll handle this one, but Kalif and I can't keep up the facade forever. Eventually we'll blow our cover, or be forced to do something that will warp us, or break us and turn us into them."

Damon shook his head, and this time, he sounded totally serious. "Chickadee, you're never turning into them. But quit stalling and tell me how you want this to go."

I took a deep breath. "I want to find a way to corner them," I said. "To strip them of their power. To trap them using their own fears. Because whatever they want us to think, anyone who kills and tortures for power and control is operating behind a curtain of fear. And I know what their biggest fear is. They're terrified of being exposed."

Damon nodded thoughtfully. "Okay. I'm following you so far."

I smiled, trying to be as confident as I could shift myself to look. "We found the pieces of the puzzle on our first mission together, when we broke into that police station. We're going to convince some police officers that the Carmines are criminals. And that they committed all their crimes by shifting."

Damon paused, waiting for me to go on.

When I didn't, he shook his head. "That's crazy."

"I know," I said. "But you said you love it when I talk crazy."

Damon didn't crack a smile. "Where did you even get this idea?"

I smiled. "From Oliver, actually."

Damon just stared at me like I might have lost my mind. And I supposed I might have reacted the same way, in his shoes.

"Did you know Oliver was captured once?" I asked.

Damon shook his head. "He told you this?"

I nodded. "My first week at work." He'd been proud to tell me—it was evidence of his dedication to his cause. "He was held in a lab in Romania, in his home face. Their government kept him there for three years because they suspected what he was. But he never shifted while they were watching."

"If they still had the bastard, we wouldn't be in this mess."

"And yet," I said, "to hear him tell it, he did me a personal favor by not letting the Romanians catch him in a shift. He might have made the whole thing up, but my gut says no. He was too impressed with himself for it to be a lie."

"So you think we can do the same thing to him here. Get him held by the police."

I nodded. "Both him and Wendy, held by people who suspect what they are, and won't let them go until they find proof."

Damon shrugged. "This isn't Romania. What about due process?"

I smiled. That was where Kalif came in, but I wasn't about to share that with Damon. "Leave that part to me. What I need you to do is help me sniff out some cops."

"There's a problem, though," Damon said. "Let's say the police do arrest the Carmines for all these crimes. This could take years to sort out. The trial might go on forever. But the first time they fall asleep, they'll turn into their home selves. They'll stop being Wendy and Oliver Carmine. And anyone who witnesses it could testify of what they saw—hell, they could show the jury a video tape of it. But the Carmines aren't going to shift in front of the jury. And no jury is ever going to believe that crazy story, no matter how many witnesses there are."

I smiled. "Trust me," I said. "It won't matter."

"Besides which," Damon continued, "They'll probably escape. Three years in Romania may be a fluke. Normal people break out of jail sometimes. For someone with Carmine resources, it doesn't necessarily have to be shifting."

"I know," I said. "I have contingency plans."

Damon stared at me. "I don't suppose you're going to share."

I smiled at him again.

Damon shook his head. "Contingency plans or not, this could be dangerous. For us."

"Could be," I said. "And the rest of our lives are so safe by comparison."

Damon rolled his eyes. "You are crazy." Then he cracked a smile. "You're right. It's a good thing I like crazy."

"Besides," I said. "If what we know about Wendy and Oliver is true, they would never let this fall back on us, on our kind, I mean. That's why they wanted to kill my parents—because they think rogue shifters take too many risks."

Damon crossed his arms tightly across his chest. "That will be brilliant if it works," he said. "If it doesn't, and we're very lucky, it could get us killed." He looked right at me. "If we're not, it'll be worse. Much worse."

I held my breath. When I'd imagined this conversation, I'd been much more persuasive. I needed Damon on board. I couldn't do this on my own. What I was planning would require at least two shifters, besides Kalif. And at least one who wasn't under the constant watch of the Carmines.

This partnership was the reason I'd brought him in to this. Every person we added to the team was a liability, but also an asset. Damon was one asset I couldn't perform this job without.

But he was right. What I was after was dangerous—more dangerous than sneaking around to meet under the Carmines' noses. If I succeeded, we'd be free. If I didn't, the best case scenario was we were dead. At worst I might threaten the life and livelihood of every shifter, everywhere. And somewhere in between, our lives could be filled with torture and torment, so much that we begged for the end. I rubbed my palms against my slacks. Right now the job existed in potential—the thing that might save us. Once I started to enact it, it could rapidly turn into our doom.

But I'd spent the last several months looking over my shoulder, watching everyone Kalif and I loved rip each other apart. I knew there was no other choice. Not anymore. Not for me. I sat up straighter, shoulders back, trying to radiate confidence I didn't feel. "You go if you want, but I have to do this." I returned his steady gaze. "And I have a lot better chance of succeeding if you're with me."

Damon nodded slowly. "I'm in, Chickadee," he said. "Not backing out now. But we're going to have to be very careful, every step of the way."

"Agreed," I said. "And I have to be back at a movie theater in ninety minutes, so if you're with me, it's time for the first step of the job."

Four

Damon slouched behind the wheel of the car like it was a recliner. His wrist lolled lazily over the wheel. "You can leave me partly in the dark," he said. "But you do have to tell me where to drive."

I nodded. The trick wasn't figuring out what to tell Damon. It was figuring out where to begin.

"The officer's name is Brian Lee. He suspects that we're using face altering technology."

"And we're going to put the rest of the pieces together for him."

I nodded. "And the puzzle is going to look like a picture of Wendy and Oliver. Can you imagine the shock when he discovers that the person who stole the money is also the CEO of an established tech firm?"

Damon frowned. "But it wasn't. It was your boyfriend's dad, right?"

Damon always called Kalif my boyfriend. I wasn't sure if it was a reminder to himself or another assertion that he didn't think he knew our real names.

"Yes," I said. "But by the time I'm done, it won't look like he did. Trust me."

"I do, Chickadee. You know I do."

But his tone said maybe he was starting to think better of it, and I could hardly blame him for that.

Officer Lee had just settled into his new office at the Sunnyvale police department. It was probably too late for him to be at work unless he had something big going on, but I knew where his rental house was. After all, I'd offered the rental to him—over email, though I hadn't yet had an opportunity to meet him.

In my efforts to get him the job, I'd seen Brian Lee's resume. He had a background in computer science and experience tracing financial crime for a large webstore corporation before he joined the police force in Rocklin. That explained why he'd been assigned to the embezzlement case. If such cases were of typical interest to him, he'd be the perfect target.

I gave Damon Lee's new address, and on the way, we passed through a parking garage and shifted into new faces. I wore the face of a blond girl in her early thirties with stringy hair and a hooked nose. Damon kept some of his muscle, but gave himself a short, clean haircut and forgettable features.

Then we cruised through Lee's neighborhood. Even though it was dark out, the street was well lit—practically every house had their porch light on. The houses were small and boxlike, but they all had houseplants on their front stoops and well-watered lawns. In the land of inflated home prices, this was what passed for a middle-class neighborhood.

Lee's house was blue on blue—turquoise trim with pale blue stucco walls. As we passed, I noted the cars in the driveway—a beater Ford sedan with a rusted trunk lid, and a newer, nicer car with a shiny blue paint job.

"Did you have the place repainted to appeal to him?" Damon asked.

I shrugged. "No, but I definitely should have thought of that."

The house did have a pretty wreath on the door and a stained glass flower hanging in the front window. "Looks like they've already had time to decorate. Or his wife has, anyway."

That was a little sexist, but I was pretty sure he was right. "His wife's name is Vera," I said. "She's thrilled to be out of their neighborhood in Rocklin."

Damon nodded as he turned to drive around the block. "So what else did you find on him?"

I shook my head. "That's most of it. He's got a sixteen-year-old son, no other kids. Two years of military experience. And he's really into RC planes, and more recently, drones."

"If you need to get in the house, let me know where the kid hangs out."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "You want to befriend him?"

Damon shrugged. "I was thinking I'd date him. But a friend would work too."

"I'll remember that," I said, "but I don't think that getting into the house is my first priority. I want to approach him professionally."

It was Damon's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Then what are we doing here?"

"Profiling him," I said. "There are some things I need to know that I couldn't find out over email. Find someplace to park and we can walk by."

Damon parked on the fenced side of a corner house, where no one would look out the window at us. These personas were disposable, but we still didn't need to attract attention, particularly to Damon's car. If anyone called it in, it would be listed in the system. The Carmines couldn't investigate every car that was reported parking somewhere it shouldn't, but we couldn't be too careful.

Damon strode along like he didn't have a care in the world. I wrapped my arms around myself—I really needed to keep a jacket in my movie-theater locker. If I had time on the way home, I would buy one.

"If we're serious about this guy," Damon said, "I can do some research. Find out what other vehicles are registered to him. What time he leaves for work. Stuff like that."

I nodded. That was what I needed Damon for. I couldn't properly profile the guy if I could only get away for a few hours at a time. We needed someone who could follow him twenty-four seven if necessary, to figure out his habits.

We turned the corner, and I could see Lee's car at the end of the street.

"So what are we going to do?" Damon asked. "Walk up and change faces?"

"Not tonight," I said. "We don't want to scare him until we have personas that he trusts. That would just make it harder for us to approach him separately. We're going to con him."

Damon frowned. "Conning cops isn't easy. They're trained in ways other people aren't, to look for holes in stories, to trust evidence more than emotion."

"That's true. But they're also more likely to believe information that they hear from several unconnected sources. Which is right up our alley."

Damon didn't look convinced, but he stopped arguing.

I knew the plan was risky, but if we could pull it off, it would also be effective. Even if Lee began to suspect that someone was swapping faces to con him, that would be more evidence of what I wanted him to realize—that shifters were real, and that the Carmines were two of them.

"What's the matter? You don't think I've got it in me?" I asked.

Damon held up his hands. "I'm still here, aren't I?"

I smiled. "I just meant," Damon went on, "that I'm not sure you have the experience to plan something like this on your own. Maybe you should share the details, so we can hash it out."

I pursed my lips. It was a reasonable request, if we were partners. But I couldn't tell anyone everything—not with the Carmines on our heels. Better to let Damon think that I didn't have a specific plan than to give away everything and tie my own noose.

"I'm still working out the details," I said.

"Still worried they're going to torture me, huh?"

"Always," I said.

"That's just as well," Damon said. "I'm susceptible to torture. Tickle me with a feather and I'll tell you anything you need to know. Tell me nothing."

I smiled. "Noted."

His voice grew serious. "But don't tell your boyfriend either."

"If it makes you feel better," I said, "I haven't."

"Actually," Damon said, "that does make me feel better. And I'd feel even better if you'd tell me you won't."

"I make no promises," I said, "except that I will share as little as is possible while still getting the job done." A car passed by, pulled up to the curb, and parked right in front of Officer Lee's house.

A forty-something Chinese man dressed in a suit and tie climbed out of the car. Damon and I slowed our steps, and the man didn't even look up at us as he reached into his back seat and pulled out a dozen roses wrapped in crinkly paper. He whistled as he walked up to the house.

I stared, taking in the cut of his hair, the make of his suit, the shine of his shoes. Here was a guy who still looked put together after what had no doubt been a long day at work, and still walked with a bounce in his step and a literal whistle. When he reached the door, he fumbled in his pocket for his keys. The door swung open before he got them out, and the middle-aged Asian woman inside put her hands on her hips. Her hair was pulled back in a messy bun.

Even at our slow pace, we were passing the house now. I had to turn my head to see them, which was more conspicuous than I would have liked, but neither of them looked up at us. The woman just tapped her foot on the floor.

"I was going to give you a piece of my mind for being late," she said. "And then you show up with flowers."

He smiled. "Happy birthday."

Vera shook her head at him like he was a troublesome stray, and then stepped aside and held the door open for him. Lee kissed her on the cheek as he walked in past a tall stack of moving boxes, and then her eyes caught on us for a split second before the door closed.

We kept walking until we'd gone all the way by.

"Was that enough?" Damon asked.

"To copy his face? Probably. But I need more than that."

"You have to get back," Damon said, "but I could sneak in after everyone's asleep and see what I can get. Or I could raid his office while we know he's not there."

"The office raid we'll do another night," I said. "Before we do any more legwork, I need to know if he's the right guy."

Damon raised an eyebrow. "And I can't find this information for you?

"No," I said. "There's no record of what I need to know about him. Trust me."

"Okay, Chickadee," Damon said. "I didn't mean don't tell me anything. I need at least the next five minutes of the plan."

"Play along," I said.

And then I walked back to the house and knocked on the door. It opened a few seconds later, and Lee stood there, still shrugging off his jacket. "Can I help you?" he asked.

I scrunched up my face and pitched my voice to sound distressed. "Could you? Our car broke down around the corner and we don't have any jumper cables. We've knocked on like six doors and most people don't answer and this one guy yelled at us and—"

"Okay," Lee said. "Yes. I have some in my trunk. Just a moment." Behind him I could see Lee's wife putting one hand back on her hip, but then she carried her roses around the corner, presumably to put them in some water.

She was used to him helping out strangers. That was a good sign. From what I'd seen so far, Lee seemed like a good guy, and I'd need one of those if my plan was going to work—the kind of guy who felt like if he didn't do his full duty, that the world might not be safe for his wife and kids. A guy who already believed, and already cared, would be infinitely easier to con.

If he wasn't such a person, I needed to keep looking until I found someone who was.

Lee walked to his car and opened the trunk, pulling out the cables.

"The car's over here," I said. Damon gave me an alarmed look. If Lee saw the car, we'd have to swap it out immediately.

But instead, I led him around the opposite corner, to a spot on the street with a long fence blocking off the backyard of the corner lot.

I was taking a risk, here. I had no way to know if Lee was carrying a weapon or if he'd left it in his car. I'd hoped to catch him after he'd changed out of his work clothes for the day to minimize that possibility, but on Carmine time my options were limited. I probably should have done this over the phone, but I was afraid I wouldn't get a good enough read on him if I didn't do it in person, and I sure as hell didn't want to do it at any official location where he might have backup.

Damon positioned himself over to the side, not behind Lee where he would raise suspicions, but at the edge of his eye-line where he could provide emergency backup if needed.

"Mr. Lee?" I said.

Lee stiffened immediately and rested his hand on his hip. I couldn't tell if he was preparing to reach for his gun or wishing that he had it. "Did I tell you my name?" he asked. Then he turned, putting his back to the fence so he could keep both Damon and me in front of him. Behind him, spindly blue flowers cascaded over the fence like tangled spiders.

Damon held up his hands, rightly indicating we weren't here to start a fight.

"No," I said. "And my car isn't broken down. I'm a friend of Charlise Turn. Do you remember her?"

Lee appeared to recognize the name, which meant he remembered the embezzlement case. Charlise was the head of HR Finkman had supposedly run off with—and if he wasn't dead, he probably had. "I never met her," Lee said. "Is she interested in cutting a deal to testify?"

I shook my head, hugging my arms around myself to appear less of a threat. Damon took his cue from me and leaned against the fence in a pose that was calculatingly casual. "She didn't do it," I said. "And neither did Dennis. They were set up. They want to clear their names, and a friend of mine at the police department told me you were the one to talk to."

Lee's attention fixed on us, but he'd stopped reaching for his hip. "Okay. Tell me how to get in contact with them."

I smiled inwardly. With Lee's promotion, he wouldn't be on this case anymore, but he still cared. That meant he had a personal interest, which was one of the things I needed from him.

"I can't," I said. "I don't know how. But they get in contact with me every once in a while, so if you're willing to really listen to what they have to say, I can tell them they can trust you." I paused. "But it's some really weird stuff. I'm not even sure if I believe it."

He considered me. "What weird stuff?"

I shivered. "It's about these people." I cringed, like I knew I sounded like a crazy person. "People who can change their faces."

If Damon was worried about my tactics, he didn't show it. His persona looked completely relaxed, even though I was sure that was for show.

Lee stared at me for a moment, and I half expected him to laugh at us, or pull out his gun and bring us in for questioning. He could hold us for twenty-four hours, and while staying awake that long would be doable, explaining my absence to the Carmines would not.

Then Lee looked from side to side down the street, and sighed. "Did they say how they do it?"

Bingo. He did believe. Of course, he was probably looking for a non-supernatural explanation.

I wasn't going to give it to him now. I'd leave him one breadcrumb at a time, directing him exactly where I wanted him to go without putting him on the defensive. "I don't know," I said. "But Charlise said they have evidence. They're worried it'll just be ignored. If you're willing to listen, I'll tell them you're the one to give it to."

Lee paused. He had to know he had nothing to gain by hauling me in. I wasn't technically involved in the case, and while I'd lied to him about the car, I hadn't committed any crime. He could try to keep me against my will, but he couldn't hold me long, and he'd risk putting me off cooperation in the future.

Not that he'd ever see this face again.

"All right," Lee said. He reached into his pocket, and I saw Damon tense.

But all Lee pulled out was a business card. He held it out to me. "Give them this number. Any of you can call it any time."

I took the card, noting the way Damon positioned himself to intervene if Lee used the hand off as a feint to restrain me.

"I'll be in touch," I said.

Lee stepped off the curb, walking in the gutter to avoid Damon, and he turned back to his house, unused jumper cables still in hand.

The last thing I noticed was the way his hair—though meticulously combed—feathered upward at the nape of his neck, like in that one place it had developed a will of its own. It was details like that that I'd need to remember when I needed to be Lee.

Once Lee was gone, Damon shook his head at me. "You could have told me what you were going to do."

"I didn't want to hear it was a bad idea," I said. "Come on."

We circled around the block and worked our way back to our car, watching all the time to see if Lee was following. He seemed to have wisely returned to his wife to celebrate her birthday.

I checked my phone. I had barely enough time to make it back to the theater before the movie ended. "I need to get back to where I left my car. Can I leave you with a list of errands to run?"

Damon nodded. "It'll beat hanging around my apartment, impersonating members of my pretend family."

I smiled. "You make your life sound sad."

Damon shook his head. "If that cop is as nice a guy as he seems and we get him killed? Then I'm going to be sad."

I nodded solemnly. "That's not the plan."

And if I'd had a history of success with my plans, that might have been a comfort.

Five

I put off Oliver's job until Friday evening by doing research on my work computer, where I knew they'd be watching. In public records I found the ownership history of the address Oliver had given me—an apartment in a basement unit of a building on the outskirts of Fresno. Google street view gave me an image of the place—it had small windows that at the time of the photo were obscured from outside view behind window well coverings. That was exactly the sort of place Mom and I had tried to pick when we were on the run and trying to lie low, switching apartments every few weeks. Not that it had prevented people from finding us.

Whoever lived here obviously wasn't avoiding detection either, and I needed to find out more about them before I drove down there and walked into whatever mess might be waiting for me. In the street view photo I found what I was looking for—a parking enforcement sign posted at the end of the row of parking spots.

Kendall Parking and Tow. I could work with that. On a rental website, I found the phone number for the apartment manager, and dialed.

"Sandpiper Apartments," a woman's voice answered.

Perfect. I pitched mine to a deep, commanding male voice, projecting big and no-nonsense. "Hello," I said. "This is Phil with Kendall Parking and Tow. I'm looking for the manager of the apartments there on East Sycamore. That you?"

"Yes," she said, in a tone both even and polite. "This is Cindy."

"Cindy," I said. "I don't think we've spoken before, but I've got a man down here claiming he lives in unit B. Can you verify his name for me from the rental contract?"

Cindy hesitated. "There isn't a man in unit B. It's a woman."

"Huh," I said. "No chance this is a former tenant? The contract didn't just turn over, did it?"

"It did," Cindy said, "but she's been in there a month and a half."

"Really," I said. "That's verrrry interesting. She lives there alone?"

"Yes," Cindy said. "As far as I know, but I'm not involved in her personal business."

Excellent. Cindy really should have done that tenant the favor of not outing a woman who lived alone, but I wasn't going to point that out to her.

"Maybe this guy is her boyfriend?" Cindy asked. "What's he doing down in your office anyway?"

"He claims his car was towed, but it's his parking space. But if he doesn't live there he's probably just telling me stories to get out of the fine. I've got his ID here. The name on that woman's contract doesn't happen to be Jurgen Meijer, does it?"

Cindy laughed. "No. Girl's name is Macy. I forget her last name—something that starts with an S."

I laughed back. "And I don't suppose she happens to be six foot tall with broad shoulders and big feet, does she?"

"No, she's a tiny thing," Cindy said. "Can't be over ninety pounds. Pretty and blond."

Thank you, Cindy, I thought. "Sorry to bother you. I'll scare this guy good and see if I can get him to tell me if he's dating this Macy. Either way I'll put in a call to—" I eyed my notes on the building's owner "—Larry just to warn him to keep an eye out for the guy."

"No need to bother Larry," Cindy said. "If he parks there again, my husband will take care of it."

Even better. "Thanks, Cin," I said. "I appreciate the help."

I hung up the phone with everything I'd hoped to get except for a last name. Macy something that starts with an S wouldn't be easy to find in a web search, but if this person was a shifter, that wouldn't turn up anything usable anyway.

I went down to the Systems Development security department that afternoon, and stopped by Kalif's desk. He was squinting at his screen so intently he didn't react as I approached. "Hey," I said. "I'm going on that errand soon. I'll be back by tomorrow night."

Across the office, Kalif's co-worker Jazz kicked her legs in the air and rested her black combat boots on her desk. She surveyed me through her usual thick application of kohl eyeliner. "Must be some errand," she said. "Oliver have you traveling for business already?"

I forced a smile. Kalif said Jazz was cool, even in our brief moments alone when he could be honest. But I'd always found her annoyingly inquisitive. Kalif said he was near certain that she, like the receptionist upstairs, wasn't a shifter, which meant her thick glossy hair must be natural, and not her own invention. Too bad. If she'd had anything to do with its creation, I might have complimented her on it.

"Not going far," I said.

"Well," Jazz said to Kalif, "we should get some munchies and pull that all-nighter on the servers tonight. You owe me the help, and you know Wendy's never going to give you a second to breathe if we don't stay late."

When I thought about him spending all day, every day, down here with Jazz, talking about all that technical stuff I didn't get, I started to understand why Kalif had always had issues with Damon. And I really didn't love the idea of them spending the night together, even if it was for work.

"Sounds good," Kalif said, though he did glance up at me for a reaction.

I kept my smile on, but I knew he'd be able to tell it was fake. I sat on the edge of Kalif's desk and put my hand on his arm. He didn't look uncomfortable about that, at least, and took my hand in his and gently brushed my ring finger, where he'd once drawn on an invisible ring.

I took a deep breath. I got the message. We were okay. It was opportunities like this that would give Kalif time to do his part of the mission. I couldn't begrudge him that. I just hoped it was his only motivation.

Which, now that I thought about it, was exactly what Kalif had always said about Damon.

At least I was going on this weekend's mission alone, even if it was just because things were going to be hairy enough without risking the Carmines noticing that I'd brought Damon along.

Kalif must have sensed my concern, because he slid his chair back from his desk and stood up, planting a hand on either side of me and kissing me. I heard Jazz kick her feet back onto the floor and swivel in her chair, turning away from us.

And while I really didn't want to turn into a possessive jerk, I still hoped she got the message.

I finished Oliver duty for the day—shooting off a few quick emails about his upcoming trip to Milan and flagging others to talk to him about on Monday—and then drove south, arriving in Fresno well after dark. I got myself a room at a hotel, leaving Oliver's gun in the trunk of the car. Afterward I cruised by the building once, checking the basement apartment for lights. Even through the blinds and the window well, I could see the faint glow of light. Someone was home tonight.

I couldn't just knock on the door. For all I knew, the Carmines had bugged this place, or at least positioned cameras around it to make sure I got in and did the job. Even if I found the cameras, I couldn't disable them. Instead, I hoped they were watching. It would make what I planned to do much more convincing.

Then I put on a pair of scrubs I'd brought from home—glad for once to be able to use the Carmines' provided wardrobe, trackers and all. They would know where I was, but there was zero chance that any audio bugs would work without a heavy battery pack and survive in the wash. I slipped past security at the local hospital to gather a few supplies, then grabbed a couple hours sleep at the hotel and set my phone to wake me at four in the morning. On only the barest amount of rest and a tide of adrenaline, I parked in the alley between the two apartment complexes across the street, turned off my headlights, drank an enormous but vaguely watery vanilla mint coffee from the local gas station, and watched.

The lights were all off in Macy's apartment. It took an hour to drain the bottom of the coffee, and another hour for the sun to begin to rise. I was crossing my legs and wishing simultaneously that I had Kalif here to complain about the coffee with me and that I hadn't chosen quite so large a beverage for an extended solo stake out. I was debating the wisdom of giving myself full male anatomy and peeing into my empty coffee cup when a girl appeared up the steps from unit B.

She was a tiny thing. Pretty. Blond. She might have been over ninety pounds, but not by much. If she was a shifter I questioned her choice of persona—being that thin would draw attention. Though in her defense, the persona didn't look to be older than twenty or twenty-one, and she was more on the scrawny side than airbrushed attractive.

I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the cylinder and mask I'd acquired at the hospital.

Shifter or not, there was only one way to find out.

I waited for Macy to get into a car, intending to tail her, but instead she walked down the street in the direction I'd pulled in last night. I backed my car out of the alley and drove it three blocks around the neighborhood and into the parking lot of an empty church building. This early in the morning on a Saturday the parking lot was completely empty.

One glance down the street confirmed that Macy was still headed in this direction. I parked around the back of the church and kept to the bushes on my way to the curb. I walked through the easement between the trimmed bushes and the property wall. From behind a tangled mess of branches, I could see her approaching the front of the church, looking behind her, clearly staying aware of her surroundings, even though she didn't seem to have spotted me. She'd be at the bushes in a matter of seconds.

I steeled myself. This was going to be the worst part, but if I saved her life, it would be worth it.

I watched Macy's light blue sweater ripple toward me through the branches and leaves. As she passed the end of the hedge, I reached out and caught her by the arm right above her elbow. She jerked her arm away half a second too late, and I held on tight and used her momentum to spin her toward me, hauling her behind the bushes and flattening her against the wall.

She let out a guttural cry, and I twisted her arm sharply which made her suck in a breath, preventing her from screaming for a few seconds. Then I reached into my purse with one hand, keeping her pressed against the wall with the rest of my body, and clamped the mask over her mouth and nose. She fought against me, and if she'd had Damon's muscle mass, this might all have gone wrong. Macy was stronger than she looked, but with my superior leverage, I was able to hold her still.

With my thumb, I pushed open the cylinder so that the mask would begin to administer the Sevoflurane. She screamed into the mask, but the sound was muffled by the rubber. I held the mask over her face and spoke into her ear as softly as I could. "I'm not going to hurt you. I know the Carmines want you dead, but I'm here to help, I promise."

She screamed into the mask again, which I couldn't blame her for. On the drive down, I'd thought through every possible scenario about how I might find out for certain if she was a shifter without entering her apartment and allowing the Carmines to possibly observe my every move, but no matter what I did, I couldn't be certain that she'd cooperate with me.

I needed to see her unconscious body. I had to be sure of what I was dealing with. And while I was a master of manipulation, there's just no sure way to convince a person that they should allow a total stranger to sedate them, especially if they happen to be a shifter.

Macy continued to struggle, and I could tell she was trained in at least basic self defense from the way she twisted, pushed, relaxed, and then tensed again, trying to take me by surprise. But while her strength and training probably matched mine, I had the upper hand this time.

Still, it took what felt like an eternity for the Sevoflurane to finally work. I craned my neck, trying to get a good look at the dial and make sure that the inhalant was actually flowing, when her body became weak, slumping against the wall. I maintained pressure in case it was another trick, and her face fell forward, supported entirely by my hand.

The moment her body relaxed, it began to shrink under my hands. Every ounce of her minimal body fat contracted into her bones until I found myself holding a skeleton with skin barely stretched over bones.

My pulse raced.

Had I killed her?

I had to check her face beneath the mask to ensure that her features, too, hadn't contracted back into her head.

No. Her face was there, but it was just as gaunt as the rest of her, as if she'd been slowly starved over time. Her hair was stringy and balding, and her body was heavy—she weighed at least as much as I did. And yet her home body looked as if it had been starved until she nearly disappeared.

I shivered. I'd wondered before what a shifter with an eating disorder would look like. I'd always imagined that their home body would be drastically overweight to go with a warped self-perception. But I couldn't think of any other explanation for this. For a person's subconscious to reduce their physical self down to nothing . . .

I was beginning to think it was going to take a lot more than my helping her escape from the Carmines to save her.

Still, I was in this, now. There was no going back. She was still breathing; her face proved that she was still alive. I switched off the gauge on the cylinder and pulled the mask away from her mouth, and then fitted her with a gag from my purse and used another handkerchief to tie her hands and feet. I pulled her down the wall to the far corner of the lot, and propped her up against the wall while I hoisted myself up on it to make sure that no one on the other side of the wall was near enough to hear us.

In the other three lots at the corner of the wall, I found only empty backyards. I saw the back of a woman's head through a closed kitchen window at the back of one of the houses, but she was too far away to overhear.

I dropped back down to the dirt, sat against the wall out of kicking range, and waited an excruciatingly long time for Macy to awaken. When her head finally jerked up, she looked around, disoriented. Her skeletal hands clawed at the leaves.

"Don't scream," I said. Not that she'd be heard, with the gag. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She blinked at me, like she wasn't quite back to consciousness, and then let out a low pitched whine through the cloth. Her head lolled back against the wall, and she blinked at me again.

I took a deep breath. I'd sedated Damon, once, the first time we'd met. He'd come out of it lucid enough, but you could never predict how someone might react to a medication.

At least I hadn't killed her, even if that would have simplified my situation with Oliver. I didn't want her dead at my hands.

Or at his, for that matter.

"Macy," I said. "Can you understand me?"

She breathed in deep through her nose, and then she nodded. Her body filled out, returning to the persona of the waif-like girl I'd seen come out of the apartment.

It was time to deliver the bad news. "Oliver Carmine sent me to kill you," I said. "But I don't want to do it. If you cooperate, we can fake your death, and then he won't be able to find you."

I could tell Macy understood me by the panicked look on her face.

"You know who Oliver Carmine is?" I asked.

Macy nodded.

"Did he want you to work for him?"

She hesitated, then shook her head.

As much as I didn't want her screaming, I also wanted to hear her story. Plus, I hadn't tied her to anything, but she hadn't even tried to move away. "I'm going to take the gag out," I said. "If you scream it'll go right back in, but I don't want to do that. I'd like to leave it out, so we can talk."

Macy hesitated again, and then she nodded. I half expected her to try to bite me after I removed it, but instead she just stretched her lips, like the gag had been tight enough to cause her pain.

"Why is he after you?" I asked.

Macy shook her head. "You didn't have to knock me out."

"Yes, I did," I said. "I had to be sure."

Macy rolled her eyes, but she didn't contradict me. "I had some friends," she said. "At least, I thought they were my friends. But when the Carmines caught them they sold me out just to save their own skin."

My heart thudded. "Your friends work for the Carmines. Can you tell me how to get a hold of them?"

Macy shook her head. "That bridge is burned."

I nodded. If Macy did know how to contact them, she wouldn't tell me. That was fine. It would have been nice to be able to keep tabs on other shifter teams who worked for the Carmines, but I needed Macy to trust me, at least enough to work with me for one day.

Though clearly she needed more than that. "I saw your home body," I said. "You need help."

Macy shook her head. "I'm fine. At least, I was until my so-called friends decided to get me killed."

I took a deep breath. There was no way a person's self-image could distort that much over one incident. A warped self-perception like that would have developed over a lifetime. Macy needed help, whether she knew it or not.

But I couldn't be the one to give it to her, not today. Not with things being what they were.

"You really want to fake my death?" she asked.

I froze. I'd known coming in here I was taking a risk. Macy might be a plant—someone Oliver trusted, who would come tell him if I went against instructions and did pretty much exactly what I was doing now.

But he'd told me to kill her. It was a good bet Oliver didn't have so many agents working for him that he could afford to throw one away to test the loyalty of another. And if he had and Macy was in the know, surely she wouldn't take kindly to that.

"Yes," I said. "He sent me to kill you. I was supposed to walk into your room and do it while you slept. I haven't been working for Oliver long. I figure he's watching your apartment, to see if I'll get the job done. And I mean to make it look like I did exactly as I was told. If we do it right, you walk away, and Oliver can't prove you're alive."

"He'll still find me," she said. "He found me this time. And if you don't take back a body, he'll never believe that I'm gone."

"I know," I said. "He doesn't have to believe me, not completely. But as long as he can't prove I didn't do it, that'll be enough."

Macy didn't look convinced, and I had to admit, neither was I. But it was this or kill her. And no matter what, I wouldn't let them turn me into a murderer.

"I could run right now," she said. "You can't stop me."

"That's true," I said. "I can't make you help. But you want to do this for me, because you need me alive."

"Why's that?" Macy asked.

"Because I'm the one who's going to take Oliver Carmine down."

Macy stared at me for a long moment, though I couldn't tell if she was sizing me up, or considering my offer.

"No offense," she said, "but that's crazy."

"I work well with crazy," I said. "Trust me."

Macy squinted at me uncertainly, and I felt her weigh her options. "Okay," she said finally. "Tell me what you have in mind."

Six

That night, Macy went home at the same time she normally did, alone. She took a shower, put on a night shirt, and got into bed.

When her light went out, I was waiting, dressed entirely in black, even my face concealed. I'd taken the shape of a large, intimidating man, every feature carefully chosen beneath the black clothing in case some part of my disguise came off during the assault. By my side, I held a second gun, one I'd stolen out of the bedside table of a man who liked to post pictures of his literal guns on internet dating sites.

It had been a stretch to buy or steal everything we needed by nightfall, but I was prepared, and so, I dearly hoped, was Macy. We'd already had a rendezvous at a nearby hotel where I'd spent an hour watching phlebotomy tutorials on the internet before attempting my very first blood draw. It had taken me four stabs to get the vein. I was vaguely concerned that Macy might be planning to shoot me mid-plan as payback. It wouldn't have been the first time someone I worked with had tried to kill me.

I waited twenty, thirty, forty minutes after Macy's light went out. Then, as agreed, I walked down the stairs to her apartment and kicked in her door. The lock didn't break, but the door frame did, a long piece of wood jutting out from the wall. I paced through the apartment as fast as I could without running, found Macy lying under a heap of blankets in her bed, leveled my gun at her, and fired.

The silencer kept some of the noise down, but the blank was plenty loud anyway. Any camera of a caliber to be hidden in the room wouldn't be able to catch the actual bullet in the air, but it would catch the tremendous spray of blood that spurted all over the sheets. I stepped up to the bed, still moving with purposeful speed, and pulled the blanket back from her face just an inch, just enough that I could see beneath, but no camera not positioned on the blanket itself would be able to capture it.

In a deep voice, I swore loudly and pulled out a burner phone. I was banking on the neighbors being the self-preserving kind rather than the nosy kind, but if they decided to investigate or call the cops, I had ways to get rid of them.

This part was important.

I pretended to dial and pressed the phone to my ear. "Johnny, man," I said. "What the hell is this? Yes, I shot her, but the girl has no face? What do you mean it's fine? It's not fine, man. What the hell?"

I listened for a moment and then swore again. "Yeah, okay. Okay. I'm on it. I'm doing it. You better have one hell of an explanation for this, man." I wrapped the blanket around the girl's head so I wouldn't have to look at it, hauled her out of the apartment, and dumped her into the back of my van.

I drove my stolen, unmarked van five blocks before pulling over and letting Macy out of the back. "Nice job with the blood," I said. When she'd broken the pouch and used the spray bottle to mist it up over the headboard, her own blood had soaked all over her shirt and sprayed up her face and hair in a fine mist. "You look like hell."

"I need another shower," she said. "Are you sure that worked?"

"That half did," I said. "Now I have to go back for the other half."

Macy hesitated. "But not me. I'm done."

"You're done," I said. "You could steal a flight to Barbados." I'd clearly been working with Damon too much, but at that moment, it sounded like a more functional plan than what I had ahead of me. "But if you're willing, I have a job I'd like you to do."

Macy hesitated. "Because I owe you."

I shook my head. "Because you want to see Oliver Carmine pay."

Macy paused for another second. "What do you want me to do?"

I extended my hand. "First we need a signal."

For a second, I wondered if Macy didn't know what I meant. But then she took my hand, and enlarged her palm to have a pad of fat built up in the middle. I enlarged mine to match, and then shrunk my fingertips slightly for the second half.

When we finished, Macy drew her hand back. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a card. "That has an email address on it," I said. "And the password to the account. I'll be in touch."

She looked somewhat wary, like I was going to ask her for something terrible, because I wasn't spilling everything right now.

"I can't force you," I said. "But if you check the email and follow my instructions, you'll be helping make the world a little safer for all of us. And then afterward you'd have a new group of people to work with."

Macy looked surprised. "Why would you want to do that?" she asked.

I shoved the card into her hand. "Because I am so damn tired of being alone." I handed Macy the keys to the stolen van, and started my walk back to the apartment. Macy might respond to my email, or she might not. But I'd done what I could for her, and I could only hope that she was willing to return the favor.

When I got back to the apartment, I waited outside for a full hour to see if the cops would show. The neighbors must have either been used to gunshots, or the sound of a blank-plus-silencer was enough like something large falling over that they'd rolled over and gone back to sleep.

Which left me plenty of time for the next stage of the job. In my car, I changed my clothes to the set I'd brought from my apartment, put on a persona that looked like she could be Macy's friend come to hang out late at night, shoved Oliver's gun in my pocket, safety on, and headed down the stairs to the apartment again. I paused in the doorway, surveying the damage with wide eyes, and then searched through the apartment for the bedroom. When I found the bed, sheets, wall, and headboard still stained with blood, I swore again, and pulled out my own cell phone.

I dialed Kalif.

"Hello?" he said.

"Kalif," I said, pitching my voice into panic. "I screwed up the job."

"Jory," Kalif said. "Is that you?"

"Yes," I said. "Cold hamburgers. It's me. I went to shoot that rogue shifter, but when I got here . . . the place is empty, and there's blood on the sheets and a bullet in the mattress."

"Someone got there first?" he asked. He sounded stressed, which I hoped was from trying to figure out the right thing to say, not because I was actually panicking him.

"Yes," I said. "Thing is, I tailed the girl in here a couple hours ago. I should have come in right then, but I was so stressed out about killing her—him—whoever this was, that I just kept watching, thinking it would be easier if she was asleep."

"That makes sense," Kalif said. "Did you watch the whole time?"

"No," I said. "I should have right? But I went to get coffee, and now I'm too late. And Oliver is never going to believe me. What am I going to do?"

Kalif paused. "Look, this isn't your fault, okay?"

"It is," I said. "What if he decides we aren't working out, and he kills me, or you, or locks us up in the basement and—"

"No," Kalif said. "That isn't going to happen. It's going to be okay. Just—gather whatever proof you can find and bring it back and tell Oliver the truth."

I forced myself not to smile into the phone. We made a good team, even when we hadn't planned in advance. "If there's no body, there's no way he'll believe me."

"Think about it, Jory," Kalif said. "If they wanted this person dead, it's probably because they were doing shady stuff, right? Stuff that could put us all at risk. There was probably a long line of people who wanted to shoot them. It's not your fault someone else got there first."

"I should have done the job right away," I said.

"But you went in there to do it. You were going to do it, right?"

"Right," I said. "Of course I was. I know what's at stake."

Kalif took a deep breath. "Just get what you can and come home. Do you need me to drive out there to help you?"

I took a few steadying breaths. "No," I said. "No, I can do it. I'll get the bullet, and the sheets, and drive back up there tonight. I can take it all to Oliver on Monday, if he doesn't contact me first."

"Exactly," Kalif said. "You're doing great. Oliver knows it. It's going to be okay."

"All right," I said. "Thanks."

"No problem. I'll wait up for you, okay?"

"You don't have to do that."

"But I will anyway. I love you."

"I love you," I said. "Goodnight."

I hung up the phone and looked around the apartment with a shaky gaze—still part of the show in case there were cameras. Inside, I couldn't be happier with the way the phone call had gone. I remembered the way my parents used to work together. They could coordinate in persona without ever breaking character or arousing suspicion. Back then, it had seemed like a super power to me.

Now I wondered if it wasn't just being with a person through enough that you could read them, that you knew them, that you could predict the way they were going to react and align your own reactions accordingly.

Even if he had no clue what was really going on, Kalif played my backup without missing a beat.

I hastily gathered up the sheets, and pretended to dig a bullet out of the mattress, while instead using a pocket knife to gouge a plausible bullet-sized hole beneath the cover of blankets in an area particularly soaked with blood. I looked around, as if trying to decide if there was anything else I should take, but decided against it and headed for the door and out to my car.

On the drive home, I had only two things left to do. I drove to where I'd hidden a mattress from Freecycle, far enough down the highway that no one would hear when I used my stolen gun to put a bullet through the springs. I fished out that bullet—one that would now match a gun that wasn't Oliver's—and doused it in blood from the sheets, then left the stolen gun and the mattress by the side of the road with the rest of the supplies I didn't want to take back with me—the needles, the Sevoflurane, the black clothes.

Then I got back on the road and drove hours through the dark, back to San Jose, toward Kalif, toward Wendy and Oliver, knowing that tonight I had either pulled my greatest con yet, or made my final, fatal mistake.

Seven

There was something about waiting to find out if I was going to be locked in a basement and tortured that prevented me from sleeping even when I returned from Fresno at seven AM on Sunday morning.

Oliver never came into work on Sundays anymore. He made a big deal about everyone taking the day off regardless of how much work they had to do, which I took to mean that he needed one day a week to shift into whoever he needed to be without having to account for his whereabouts to his employees. It also gave him a fantastic window to ferret people into the basement without anyone knowing.

But it also gave me a full twenty-four hours to sweat before I strode into work on Monday morning with Macy's bed sheets and the bullet tucked into a messenger bag with the gun case. I'd shifted my eyes to be less puffy to cover for my lack of sleep. I balanced the day's coffee tray in one hand as I swiped my key card on the side door and walked in.

Sorry, Dad, I thought. And then I marched up the stairs to Oliver's office. He hadn't come after me over the weekend, and I chose to take that as a good sign.

Still, I had to shift my face to keep it from flushing as I arrived in front of Oliver's open door.

He sat behind his desk, hands folded in front of him, and I couldn't kid myself that he was waiting for anything but me.

I didn't hesitate for a second. If Oliver had already decided to torture me, he was going to do it no matter how I presented myself, so I couldn't afford to show fear. Instead I strode right into his office, shut the door behind me, exchanged signals with him, and then set the messenger bag on his desk, right on top of his gold plated name placard.

"I guess you already know I didn't kill her," I said.

Oliver raised his eyebrows at me. "Is that so?"

So that's how we were playing it. "I was too slow," I said. "When I was working with—" I feigned being shaken at mentioning my parents, and then charged on—"I was taught to always be meticulous. It's usually a good quality, but in this case, someone else got there first."

I opened the messenger bag and showed him the sheets. "The bed was bloody, and the body was gone. I found this bullet in the mattress. Either she got wind I was coming and faked her death, or someone else got her first."

Oliver didn't even look at the evidence. He kept his eyes on my face. "And did you find out who did it?"

"No," I said. "You asked me to kill her, not investigate her death. I'll look into it if you want me to, but I thought it would be wise to return for further instructions."

Oliver continued to look at me, and I held his gaze. "And are you satisfied with your completion of your assignment?"

This was one of those trick questions asked by interviewers, which I supposed Oliver actually was. "Not at all," I said. "I was sent there to kill her. Or him. I can't say I'm sad I didn't have to shoot her myself, but I sure as hell meant to bring her body back to you. But this is what happened, and I can't change it."

The trace of a smile crossed Oliver's face. Holy crap. He looked impressed.

Did that mean he bought it?

"Since you failed I won't tell you you've done a good job," Oliver said. "But I appreciate your honesty." He cocked an eyebrow. "If you are, in fact, being honest?"

I projected confidence into my voice—but not too much. A falsehood backed by too much confidence always sounds like a lie. "Yes, sir," I said. "That's the truth. I brought you evidence to prove it. And I'm returning your gun, which I carried but didn't fire."

He finally looked down at the evidence.

"Can you test the blood to see if it's hers?" I asked.

Oliver looked back up at me. "If you're telling the truth, why would it matter?"

I shrugged. "I'd like to know if I had the right person. And also . . . I was wondering if you can tell someone is a shifter by looking at their blood. Are there markers? If we leave blood behind and the cops knew what they were looking for, could they identify us?"

Oliver leaned back in his seat. "Yes," he said. "Which is why we need to be very careful they don't learn what they're looking for."

I nodded. "Makes sense. If they do, there'll be testing. Witch hunts. The works." It was true, in addition to being what I knew Oliver wanted me to think.

But instead of looking pleased with my response, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly. "Jory," he said. "Tell me why you're here."

"Um," I said. "Because I needed to report. I could have called you over the weekend, but all I have is your office—"

"No," he said. "Tell me why you work for me."

I swallowed. This must be what kids in school felt like when they had to take a test they hadn't studied for. "Because you do important work," I said. "And I hope I haven't ruined my chance to be a part of it with my past mistakes."

Oliver's face softened slightly. He liked that answer, or he wanted me to think that he liked it. I'd never be stupid enough to take one of his reactions at face value. That was the trouble with conning a con man. It was impossible to tell if he was buying it, or merely thought acting that way would play to his advantage.

"You mean because you couldn't complete your mission."

"I mean because I once broke my parents out of your basement." My heart thudded. That might have been pushing the brutal honesty a bit far. I didn't need to remind him of all my failures in the same conversation, did I?

Oliver laughed, and I couldn't tell if it was the laugh of a man who was amused by the conversation, or merely by the trap that was about to snap its jaws closed around me.

"I like you, Jory," Oliver said. "The person who did your job before you was with us for eight years. Do you know why I promoted her to be my personal assistant?"

"No," I said.

He smiled. "Because one day she told me that my tie didn't match. I'd talked to eight people that day before I met with her. The clash was bad, she told me. They all must have noticed, but not one of them said a word."

"It's good you like that about me," I said. "Kalif calls me the teller of uncomfortable truths. I may be a skilled actress, but I don't think I can change that about myself. Not for any appreciable amount of time."

"Good to know," Oliver said, and I felt that awful sinking sensation I had any time I gave away information I didn't absolutely have to. Oliver wouldn't know if that was true, or merely part of my persona. But I knew I'd given away a tiny piece of myself, and I hated it.

I didn't want Oliver to know the real me, and I definitely didn't want him to like me.

"Do you find it difficult?" he asked, "working for me, after what happened with your parents?"

"No, sir." I paused. "And also, yes. But I know it's the right thing to do."

He leaned forward in his chair again, as if what I said was fascinating to him. "The right thing. What makes you say that?"

Because I want to destroy you. I forced a smile onto my face. "Because you're trying to keep shifters from killing people. You thought my parents were murderers, and that's why you locked them up. If we were normal people, the government might have done the same."

Oliver studied me. "But at the time, you didn't think so."

I stared down at the desk. This was the first time he'd broached this topic—my feelings about my parents. "That was before I had time to think things through."

"And now?"

I paused. "And now I think you were working on the best information you had. I should have brought you the proof that Mel killed those people, not my parents. Things might have turned out differently."

Oliver gave me a kind smile. "Don't blame yourself," he said. "You were young."

I blinked at him. I was only a few months older, now, though it felt like years. He knew it hadn't been very much time, so what was he trying to say? That age was relative for a shifter?

Damon believed the same thing, but it didn't feel relative to me. I might look like an adult and have an adult job, but in his presence I barely felt sixteen.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

Oliver smiled at me. "You're welcome."

I smiled at him like he'd done me a favor, though it took every ounce of training I had.

He cleared his throat. "I have two more tasks for you," he said, "in addition to your duties as my assistant."

I let myself look nervous. "Okay."

Oliver pulled an envelope out of his desk. "There are two people I want you to find for me."

"Shifters," I said.

He nodded. "I don't have a name for the first. Or, rather, I suppose I have several names. And addresses. And former employers. But I have no idea where, or who, he is." He slid the envelope toward me, and I took it. "If you can follow those leads to any more, or to the shifter himself, bring the information straight to me."

I opened the envelope and looked at the addresses. There were dates written next to them—approximately when the tenant had lived at that location, I guessed.

The dates were all before I'd parted ways with my mother and Aida, so I wouldn't be turning them in. "Done," I said. "And the second?"

"Is your mother," Oliver said.

I froze. "What?"

"I want you to bring in your mother," he said. "Now that you're a believer in our cause, surely you wish for her to see the light?"

He looked at me, and I knew that while every part of our conversation, my mission, my employment here had been a test, this one was the one that would set the curve. I had to answer exactly right, or everything I'd done, everything I'd put at risk, would be for nothing.

"No," I said.

He leaned back in his chair, and pretended to be taken aback. "No?"

"No, I won't look for my mother. I don't know where she is. I don't want to contact her. I won't cover for her while you search for her, but I absolutely won't try to find her."

Oliver looked at me with a level gaze. "Really."

I nodded. "Yes, sir."

"And why is that?"

Because no matter how screwed up my mother was, I wasn't going to turn her in to die. Also, conveniently, because I knew that if I said yes to everything Oliver asked, I would seem like I was just telling him what he wanted to hear and then sneaking around behind his back—which was, incidentally, exactly what I was doing.

But also, in a tiny way, for the exact reason I gave him.

"Because I don't want to see her," I said. "She blissed out on pain pills while I was scrounging for rent. She hates Kalif, and doesn't want me to be with him. And then she had the nerve to try to kill herself, without a second thought to how I would handle being left alone in the world." I shook my head vehemently. "I won't find my mother, not because of what I'm afraid will happen to her, but because I never want to see my mother again."

I stared at him, letting my body tremble. The last part was a lie, but every bit of the rest of it pulled on something deep, something true.

Something I didn't know how to stop feeling.

"All right," Oliver said. "I'll put someone else on it."

I hoped that was also a test, to call my bluff and see if I would get nervous, tell him I'd do it after all, if only so I could cover for her.

I also hoped wherever my mother and Aida were, they'd damn well covered their tracks. I took a deep breath and rolled my shoulders, pretending to try to shrug off my anger. "Is that all, sir?" I asked.

He nodded, and I left his office, taking the envelope with me. From the hall, I turned back to him. "I'll be back in an hour with today's messages."

Oliver nodded again. "Thank you, Jory."

And while I knew I wasn't going to get to see my test grades, I prayed that I'd passed.

Eight

That night I started looking through the surveillance information on this shifter I was supposed to track. He had several addresses, some of them in the Bay Area, two in France, one in Oklahoma, and four on the east coast. The most recent was in Boston, though looking at the public records, I found that the house he'd used had been owned by the same couple for the last forty years. The wife had active social media accounts full of pictures of her grandchildren.

Which meant that address had probably been a dummy used for routing money, not a place the shifter actually lived. The last one before that was an apartment in Burlingame. I'd have to ask Kalif if there would be any way to track someone from that apartment electronically. It wasn't as if a shifter would leave a forwarding address.

Kalif came home when I was still at my laptop, verifying the information the Carmines had given me. He set his messenger bag down on the couch, exchanged hand signals with me, and took the chair next to me at the kitchen table.

"So you're still here," he said. "Things went okay with Oliver?"

"Yeah," I said. "I tried to come by to tell you at the office, but you were out with Jazz."

Kalif nodded. "We had to go to one of the satellite offices to deal with a networking issue. Took all day."

I wanted to ask if he'd managed to find anything new in the process, but he couldn't tell me here, and he shouldn't tell me at all. I eyed the refrigerator. The real estate magnet might have moved microscopically higher, or it might just have been wishful thinking.

He could give me a general update, if we were careful enough. "How's the job going?" I asked. "Do you feel like you're settling in?"

Kalif didn't miss a beat. "I'm learning a lot," he said. "Still have a lot more to learn, though. You?"

"Same," I said. "But it gets easier every day."

Kalif rubbed my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek, and I turned toward him and gave him a real kiss on the mouth. "I love you," I said.

Kalif knocked his forehead against mine. "Right back at you." And then into his palm I pressed a slip of paper, one I knew he would read away from the cameras and then destroy. Just a little request, something I needed him to do to support the job I was giving to Macy.

Kalif smiled at me, though he hadn't yet read the note. And I hoped the smile meant that he trusted me that the pieces were coming together. He sighed and reached for his bag. "I've got a lot of work to do. You?"

"Same," I said. "But I had a hard time sleeping after I failed that job. I can't focus."

He nodded. "Going to bed?"

I shrugged. "I think I'll go to a movie. Try to stay up late so I'm exhausted enough to sleep."

"Makes sense," Kalif said.

As I shut down my laptop, I caught him staring at a painting next to the elaborate clock that almost certainly held a camera. It was a water color of half of a woman's face, with abstract geometric shapes spiraling out of her hair into the background.

"What do you think of that painting?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I prefer landscapes. Looking at paintings of faces just makes me nitpick all the things the artist got wrong." I squinted at it. "The bridge of her nose is too wide. And the space between her eyebrows. I'm not even sure I can shift them like that, but even if I could, everyone would be unsettled by it."

Kalif nodded. "Unsettled is a good word," he said. "For some reason, I always feel like she's watching me. Like she knows something I don't."

The hair on the back of my neck prickled. That was as close as we'd ever come to acknowledging the bugs from within the apartment. Was he saying that he thought the camera was in the picture? That didn't make sense. Why try to hide it in a flat paper object when the clock with the glass background was right next to it, taking in nearly the same angle?

"You can take it down if you want," I said.

He shook his head. "Nah," he said. "Now that I know the anatomy bothers you, we should leave it."

I punched him in the shoulder, and he laughed and ran his hand down my arm to lace his fingers into mine, his thumb lingering on my ring finger.

And even if I didn't know exactly what he was doing, I felt comfortable with him, knowing that we were working together.

Even if progress felt slow.

I left my car at the movie theater again after buying tickets to two shows in a row. When I banged on Damon's door, he answered it in his father persona. Fully naked, with only a bed sheet wrapped around his waist, slipping low enough to leave little to the imagination. His persona's abs were clearly inspired by his own.

"What is wrong with you?" I asked.

He rubbed a bleary eye, letting go of one side of the sheet so it fell back, revealing his bare hip.

I pulled the door closed between us and yelled through it. "Put on some clothes!"

On the other side, I was pretty sure I heard Damon chuckle.

There were a lot of things I wished I could talk to Kalif about, but this wasn't one of them. When Damon opened the door again, he was still in persona, but this time he wore a pair of cargo pants. And nothing else.

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. As Damon reached to lock it, I could smell him.

"Dude," I said. "Shower."

"Eh," he said. "Overrated."

I sighed. Every other shifter I knew had impeccable hygiene. Smelling bad could always be arranged if it was part of a persona, but if it wasn't, it was a liability.

"Did you find anything on Lee?" I asked.

Damon tromped into the kitchen, where he had a pile of papers on the table. "Some," he said. "For the rest I figure we need to get into his office."

I nodded. There it was. Our assignment for the evening.

"Any idea how we might do that?"

Damon plucked a key card from under one of the papers. "He uses the west door to get in. There's no reception desk there."

No reception desk meant we'd only have to pretend to be Lee for the cameras, not for a person. Grainy images and overhead angles were our friends. "This is why I work with you," I said.

Damon snorted. "Chickadee," he said, "I'm all you've got. Don't pretend otherwise."

I shrugged. He wasn't all I had, technically. My mother and Aida would love it if I'd involve them. But they were each a mess in their own special way. I much preferred to work with Damon over them. Even if he did need to learn to wear clothes. And bathe.

"We'll go to the office tonight," I said. "We can bug the room and give ourselves remote access to his computer." I was pretty sure I could do that—I'd done it enough times for Kalif that I remembered how. "If we have time, we can get his files on the embezzlement case." We'd seen what was on file at the Rocklin police station, but I wanted Lee's personal notes, his opinions that didn't go in the official report.

"Sounds like a plan," Damon said. "Let me find something suitable to wear."

Lee's office was in the Sunnyvale police department, down the street from a park full of palm trees and large statues of sea turtles.

As we walked up, I wore Officer Lee's body. When Kalif and I worked, we usually stuck to our own genders, and I'd offered Officer Lee to Damon since he'd been profiling the guy.

Damon, however, said he preferred the persona of Lee's wife, Vera. "You have to admit," he'd said, "I look stunning in heels."

And when he'd emerged from his bathroom, a four-eight Chinese woman in a dark blue evening dress and matching pumps, I had to agree.

That gave Damon the easy job. He just needed to scowl and look impatient, maintaining the facade that his husband had dragged him into work when they were supposed to be on a date—a date that the Lees were currently on, elsewhere in the city.

Even now, he hung on my arm, his fingers carefully placed to avoid putting pressure on his press-on fingernails. They worked beautifully with the outfit, and were a decent impression of real manicured nails from Vera's favorite salon, but Damon hadn't attached them too securely. He had to be able to snap them all off if we needed to make a quick change. Polish wouldn't be so easily removed.

We walked across the front of the building—we'd intentionally parked on the far side for two reasons, first so no one would recognize the car, and second so that we could get a good look at the building on the way by.

The lobby in front was walled in clear glass—probably trying to persuade us of the transparency of our law enforcement. I wasn't fooled, but this worked in our favor; we could look right in and see a security guard and a receptionist laughing over something on a computer screen. He put a hand on her arm, and she didn't twitch as if that were out of place.

Security was distracted. This also worked in our favor.

We scanned Lee's keycard on the outside of the door, and when the lock popped, I pushed it open. Damon hung on my sleeve, his face hardening in annoyance. Entering from the back, we didn't have to pass by reception, but we did pass a few open office doors as we went.

"This will only take a minute," I said as we passed them. "I swear."

"Hmph," Damon said. "I've heard that before."

I smothered a smile. Either Damon was naturally talented at annoyed wife, or he had a lot of practice. I wasn't sure which I found more amusing.

Normally I would have taken the stairs to avoid being trapped in an elevator, but Damon hadn't been able to discover exactly where Lee's office was located from the listings on the internet, so I took the opportunity to scan the directory while we waited for the elevator to arrive.

Lee's office was listed for the third floor. I gripped the keycard in my fingers as the elevator arrived and we entered, Damon still clinging to my arm.

In the elevator I punched the button for the third floor, and when we stepped out, I took a quick look up and down the hall, making an effort to move my head as little as possible, so I wouldn't appear like I was trying to figure out which way to go.

The office numbers went up to our left and down to our right, so I led Damon down the hall until I found the office with Lee's name on the placard. I scanned the key card and went in.

Lee's new office was sparse and orderly, with none of the moving boxes that were piled up in his home. All the frames on his wall hung perfectly straight and even, as if whoever nailed them there had used a level.

Damon shut the door behind us. I heard a clicking sound, and when I looked up at him, he had one hand on his hip, and was flipping me off with the other. A press-on nail dangled precariously from his finger by a thread of adhesive.

"Now look what you made me do," he said. "Dinner is ruined."

I smiled and shook my head. "Don't be dramatic."

"Hmph," Damon said again. "I'll stop being dramatic when you stop being a workaholic."

His performance didn't falter, even now that we were alone. I didn't imagine that anyone had this office bugged, but I supposed I couldn't be sure. I looked down at the framed photo on Lee's desk—a picture of him seated in front of a blooming tree with his wife and his son. They were a beautiful family. I really hoped that whatever I found on his computer didn't make me think otherwise.

I pressed a few keys on the computer, and it woke to a password screen. Of course Lee would have his computer locked.

Good thing Kalif had walked me through this a time or twelve. I reached for the cord under the desk and unplugged the computer. As I rebooted the thing and entered in the command codes, Damon opened a desk drawer at my side.

He sniffed. "You don't keep much on paper, do you?" he asked.

I nodded, breathing in deep. "What can I say? I'm a digital guy."

If that was true, it was doubly important for us to get into the computer. When I got access, the first thing I did was set up the remote access that would let us break back in. If we couldn't accomplish anything else, at least we could do that.

Damon stood behind my chair and ran his remaining nails across the back side of it, searching for a place to slide a bug underneath the upholstery. It was a good location—Lee would probably sit in this chair while talking, so the sound would be loud, but he wouldn't feel it there like he would in the front.

I found where Lee kept his case files. He was as meticulous with his data storage as he was with his physical space; all the files were named and numbered, and every document within them used the same labeling system. It only took me a few minutes to find the CareWare case.

"Almost done," I said to Damon, and then I sent the entire thing to Damon's computer. He could sort through it tomorrow while I was at work.

Damon made a tsk sound with his tongue. "At least I can tell that you're keeping your office clean. Unless you planned to drag me here? Is this for my benefit?"

I sat back in the chair. Part of the purpose of being here was to make sure that Lee wasn't corrupt. But I didn't know where to start looking for something like that—it wasn't like Lee had a labeling system for kickbacks or other types of corruption.

But he did have a personal bank account and a system for storing passwords in his browser. I smiled, and sent that data to Damon's computer as well, double checking the remote access so that later I could get anything that I wanted.

"Everything I do is for you," I told Damon. "Now let's get out of here before we miss our reservation."

We walked out of the building, arm in arm. As we rounded the corner in view of our car, I could feel Damon's arm relax against mine.

Despite his attitude, he was as nervous as I was about messing with the police. And with good reason—if we did this wrong, we could all end up dead, or worse.

I hoped that Lee turned out to be the sort of person I needed him to be. If not, I'd have to start over.

And I wasn't sure that I had that kind of time.

Back at Damon's apartment I went over Lee's reports on the CareWare embezzlement again. I still suspected that the job had actually been done by Mel. Finkman hadn't been seen since the day after the money disappeared, right before it came out that the transfer had been done from his computer, and that witnesses reported seeing him in two places at once.

Damon looked at the reports over my shoulder and snorted. "CareWare," he said. "Did you know they were making computer software to assist the blind?"

"Ugh," I said. "I guess Mel didn't care who he screwed over as long as he got his cash. The important part is, Finkman's nowhere to be found."

"Nope," Damon said. "Not him or the human resource manager he was having an affair with. From what I can tell, that part was real."

"Excellent," I said. "We're going to prove their innocence."

"Okay," Damon said. "So if the Carmines supposedly embezzled that money—"

"—then why did these guys run?" That was the easiest part to explain. "For the same reason everyone runs from the Carmines. Because they're scared."

Damon nodded. "So we pretend to be them, and we give your cop friend evidence that we've been screwed over by shifters."

"Right," I said. "So step one is to generate that evidence. We need Officer Lee to already be a believer before we change faces in front of him. If he's not ready, he'll behave irrationally."

Damon nodded slowly. "Sounds dangerous."

It was. I gave an exaggerated sigh. "Listen. I need you to find us some recording equipment we can use to generate security footage. We'll need to be able to post date it, but other than that, any security equipment will do. We need a shooting location, the inside of which will look exactly like the old CareWare building. We'll have to furnish it the same."

Damon considered that. "Why don't we use the old CareWare building? That would save us some trouble."

"We would," I said. "But there's a dental office there now. From the look of the pictures online, they've totally redone the inside."

Damon nodded. "So we need to build this thing from scratch."

"Just the parts that will be visible on camera," I said. "Close enough that Lee doesn't notice anything wrong. He didn't work there himself, but it has to match the security footage that he already has." I pulled it up from Lee's files. "The footage from the time of the embezzlement is missing, as is the footage from the next night when Finkman disappeared. That's the one we'll want to fake, because as far as I can tell, no one else was in the office that night."

Damon whistled. "Won't be easy."

I nodded. "It doesn't have to be perfect." I didn't want to share the later stages of my plan with Damon yet, but the truth was, my plan would still work if somewhere along the line, Lee realized shifters were scamming him.

In fact, I was counting on it.

"What's Finkman doing in the office that night?" Damon asked. "After he embezzled that money. Is he back for more?"

"Proving he didn't do it," I said. "He has no idea the money is missing, so being at work that night is unconnected." I clear my throat. This is the part of the plan I'm most nervous about, and I almost don't want to tell Damon. I've gone over it a million times in my head, trying to convince myself I can not tell him, and just do the last step with Kalif.

But if I had Kalif make the security tape with me, all three of us would know it existed. Kalif was a prime candidate for capture by the Carmines, and he already knew so much because of his own side of the job—I didn't want to tell him any more. Besides which, he needed to be back home, my insurance with the Carmines that I hadn't gone completely rogue.

So like it or not, I was going to need Damon's cooperation. "So Finkman's making out with his lover in his office," I said. "They get interrupted by people wearing their faces, and different clothes."

Damon thought about that. "We'd need four of us to pull that off, wouldn't we?"

"No," I said. "We just can't have more than two in any one shot. That'll make it seem less staged anyway, don't you think? Finkman will want to hide his lover, so she can cower in the office. He can come out in the hall while one of them is there. The other one can barge in on her."

"So we don't need Finkman's office. Just the cameras in the hall."

"We do," I said. "We'll also have the regular security camera in the hall. The angles are well established in the footage the cops took into evidence. And then a separate video in Finkman's office."

Damon blinked at me.

"Because," I said. "They were making a sex tape."

Damon looked uncharacteristically surprised. "You want to make a sex tape. For real?"

"They'll get interrupted," I said. "So don't get too excited." And if I was going to do this with Damon, it'd be pretty damn early. Much earlier than it would be with Kalif. "Do you think it'll work?" I asked. "It's stupid to make a sex tape when you're having an affair—stupider from a work computer."

Damon laughed. "Chickadee, the world is full of truly stupid people. Especially when it comes to sex."

He was right. How many idiot politicians got caught sexting, when it was super obvious to anyone with a brain that there would be records of that?

"Though," Damon said, "you're thinking about this wrong. If they were making the sex tape with a phone, we can position it so we see as little of the room as possible. Like, just the corner and the chair. We wouldn't need a desk at all."

The chair. I cringed. Sure, making out in the office had been my idea, and I knew I'd have to pose with Damon to get that on film. But the image of us making a sex tape in a chair was a little much.

"Yeah," I said. "Good point." My voice cracked, and I knew I sounded like a terrified virgin. Which, you know. I was.

"So they're making a sex tape," Damon says. "And then what?"

"They get interrupted by people wearing their faces, and different clothes."

Damon nodded, and I found myself horrified that he was agreeing with me.

This was my damn idea. Why was I the one who didn't want to do it?

Damon seemed to share none of my nervousness. He kicked back in his chair. "All right. Give me everything you've got on what this office used to look like. It's about time you gave me a job to do that isn't boring as hell."

And I had to give him that one. This job would be anything but that.

Nine

It took us a week to put together the office. From library computers, I stalked the blogs and online profiles of every employee and contractor who ever worked for CareWare, searching out every snapshot and selfie that had been taken in the halls and offices of the building. From that I was able to give Damon some approximate dimensions, wall colors, and carpet colors. It was too much to ask that he'd find a place with the right desks and computers already in it, but if we didn't have to entirely refurbish the place, that would be a plus.

The next time I came to visit, he had a venue. "The carpet matches," he said, putting his feet up on the folding table in his kitchen. "And there's a room that's damn close to the right dimensions. We'll have to repaint, though."

I leaned back in my cheap plastic lawn chair and felt the legs begin to give beneath me. "Are we renting it?"

Damon shook his head. "The place is abandoned. I found the public record for the owner. He's living in Oregon. If we want to have guests over, we'll need to rent, but if we just want to set up for one film shoot, we can sneak in and out."

Sneak in with a truckload of computers and junk, plus repaint. That did sound like our style. "You're sure?" I asked.

"Chickadee," Damon said, "for as little as you're telling me, you sure ask a lot of questions."

"Fine," I said. "That place it is. Can you get the painting done?"

"Yep," he said. "I bought a can of paint already. It's close enough that the bad fluorescents should disguise it. It's got the hallway you wanted, and the exec's office. Tomorrow I'll wrestle up the camera equipment. What next?"

I pulled up the photos I'd been gathering. "Furniture," I said. "And tech. The corner of Finkman's office had a printer in it, and a filing cabinet. The printer was old, though. We won't be able to buy one in a store."

Damon nodded. "If there's one thing I can find in Silicon Valley, it's yesterday's computer parts. The thing doesn't have to work, right?"

"I think most people keep their sexual encounters separate from their printing needs."

Damon laughed. "Good. Let's get on it."

The next night when I left work, I didn't go by the apartment. I didn't text Kalif to ask if he wanted to catch a show with me. I didn't stop by the security office to tell him I was going to be late. We couldn't afford for us both to be off the grid overnight. Too much chance the Carmines might get aggressive about searching for us—or about interrogating us later. It might be safer for us individually, but if we drew their suspicion before we finished, they'd hunt us all down and kill us.

But a sickness in the back of my brain whispered that this wasn't information that I wanted to share, even if I could.

I couldn't use the movies as a cover—I needed to be out for longer than that. So I told three people in the office that it was my late father's birthday, and since I couldn't be home with him to drop flowers by his grave, I was going to spend the night at the beach, since he'd always loved the ocean.

I slipped into the bathroom of the office building next door to change, and then stashed my clothes in the trunk of a car of a man who worked three offices over, who lived up in Santa Cruz, not two blocks from the beach. A lot of people who lived in Santa Cruz commuted, and it had been easy to identify him by his UCSC bumper sticker and the salt-worn paint job on his old mustang. The flip-flops and loose shirts I'd seen him wear into the office on Casual Fridays were also a dead giveaway—people who live in Santa Cruz have a look, even when they're also engineers who work in the valley.

I wouldn't be spending the night near the ocean, but the devices the Carmines used to track me would.

I'd watched for the arrival of his car over the previous days. He always appeared for work around eight in the morning. If he discovered my clothes and ditched them, the Carmines would think that I changed for the beach. If he brought them back, I could extract them from his car in the morning when I arrived for work, and they'd just think I had them in my car.

I was pretty sure the cover would work, and it would give me the entire night.

I arrived at the office Damon had arranged to find him setting up the security cameras in the halls. "Check my work," he said. "Does it look right?"

I used his laptop to compare the video files we'd found in Lee's records to the images Damon recorded from the cameras in our fake office. If the angles were even slightly off, a trained eye might notice. It wasn't as if offices regularly remounted their cameras mere inches away from where they'd previously been, and I could fully expect that Lee would be comparing these videos side by side with the originals, and scrutinizing every detail.

Unfortunately, the company wasn't quite paranoid enough to have put security cams inside the offices themselves. To get footage inside Finkman's office, we needed the sex cam.

I checked the office next, against the photos from the police records. Damon had done a good job preparing the rooms. There were a few things missing from the office that were in the original video, but they were the sorts of things you'd expect to move: a stack of papers, a cup of coffee.

"Looks good," I said. "Where should we start?"

Damon shrugged. "Your call. Do you want to start with the action, or lead up to it?"

My stomach dropped. There were two types of action we were going to record, but I knew exactly which one he meant. "Let's start there," I said. "Get it over with."

Damon raised an eyebrow. "Ouch," he said. "I showered. I swear."

I kind of wished he hadn't. The camera couldn't smell him, and if he had BO, I would be much less likely to enjoy this. If I enjoyed this, I was a terrible person. Also, possibly a cheater.

"Nothing personal," I said.

Damon rolled his eyes, and his face shifted, turning into Kalif. "Would it help if I looked like this first?"

My face caught fire and I cooled it. "Stop it," I said. "We're here to work."

Damon's face snapped back to himself. "Fine," he said. "Just trying to make you comfortable."

In fact, he'd done the opposite. I felt bad enough about what had to be done. I didn't need to look at Kalif's face before we did this.

It was good if I hated this, I told myself. That meant it was purely business. Not cheating.

But then, Kalif's dad liked to mess around and call it business, too.

Damon was starting to look worried. "Chickadee," he said. "You sure you want to do this? If it bothers you, you don't have to."

I looked around. I had not made him go to all this work for nothing. "Yes," I said. "Let's do it."

Damon's eyebrows went up.

Okay. Bad choice of words.

I walked past Damon and into the staging room at the back of the office, where all the things we didn't want caught on film were stashed. I found the outfit we'd chosen for Charlise—a bright red blazer and skirt that showed off a little more leg than was strictly professional.

Of course, if Charlise ever appeared again, she'd be able to attest that she'd never worn such a thing. But the trail on her and her boss-turned-lover was stone cold. I didn't think they'd be back to serve jail time, and if they did, even that could work in our favor if we spun it right. I just needed to gently persuade the police to believe that there were competent shifters defrauding members of the Silicon Valley elite, and then point them in the Carmines' direction.

If I could get the jaws of the trap to close correctly, the Carmines' operation would be done with. No more high-powered tech firm. No more back door resources. No more torture basement.

That's why I was doing this.

Not for personal reasons.

I used Damon's laptop to check my persona against all the video and photos we had. Charlise had been quite the selfie-taker in college, so we had a lot of material. I checked those to make sure I got the underlying bone structure correct, and then looked at the photos from immediately before her disappearance to match skin tones, hair color, and hair length, since those things changed over time.

I spent a few minutes fiddling with the bridge of her nose, trying to get the arch just right. By that time, even I had to admit I was stalling. I picked up Charlise's purse—the matching bag Damon had found on Ebay—and checked to make sure the tiny metal spray bottle was tucked inside. I took a deep breath.

Showtime.

Damon filled the doorway, his normally large frame expanded to include the bulk of the CEO's extra padding. He wasn't a guy I would call fat—he wore his extra weight all over his body, making him appear merely large. It was odd to think of him making out in his office with the petite Charlise.

Then again, I didn't need to imagine. I was about to experience it.

Damon inclined his graying head toward the office room. "Shall we?" He stepped backward and I moved past him. Up close, he smelled like strawberry shampoo. He wasn't kidding. He had showered. Had he actively been trying to smell good for me?

Don't read into it, I told myself. I ought to believe he was just being considerate. Which was hard, because Damon wasn't exactly the considerate type.

I stashed Charlise's purse on Finkman's desk, and then Damon went into the office, sat down in the chair, propped up a phone, and turned on the camera. He swiveled in the chair as I closed the door and stepped up to the desk. He was establishing himself, and also giving his counterpart a moment to admire his mistress.

Me.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Use what you've got, I told myself. I allowed the goosebumps to prickle down my arms, and added a half smile for the benefit of the camera.

See me knowing he's there. See me liking it.

I smiled with both halves of my mouth and swiveled my hips as I approached in a manner I hoped was subtly seductive.

Please, I thought. Please let it not be obvious that I don't know how to do this.

I stopped in front of Damon with my weight on my right foot, my left high heel balanced on the tip of my toe.

"Hey," I said. My voice sounded sultry, seductive.

If only we could do this as a radio play. Then I'd really be in my element.

I took a step toward Damon, letting my hips sway confidently. Damon's face broke into a smile, revealing too-perfect teeth. I wondered if he'd actually looked up Dennis's dental records, or if he'd guessed, based on income, that he'd had work done. Damon sat back in the chair, his knees apart, watching me. I realized he was waiting for me—letting me make the first move. Which, despite how horrible this whole thing was, felt almost sweet.

We stood there in what might have appeared to be an awkward silence, were it not for the warm way that Damon was watching me, and the confident, smooth way I forced my body to move. We both knew what was coming. And while I was dreading it, my persona savored it. Drawing out the moment. Making it last.

I almost forgot to be disgusted that these two people cheated on their spouses and ran away from their legal trouble, leaving their families behind.

Damon cleared his throat.

I cocked my hip against the desk. This was it. The point of no return.

Except if I got it wrong. Then we'd have to return to it. Again. And again.

I formed Charlise's lips into a coy smile. And then I moved forward slowly, until my knees brushed Damon's.

I had to squeeze my pores to keep from sweating. I had been many things in my short life as a shifter. But here was a terrifying truth: I'd never kissed anyone except Kalif. I'd never kissed anyone at all when I didn't mean it, even if we were also scamming someone on the side.

And of all the acting advice my father had given me, kissing lessons were never on the list.

I stepped into him. Damon's hands graced my hips.

Goodbye, no touching rule.

I grabbed Damon by his lapels, pulling him toward me. That was probably a cliché move, but the only way these two could have been more cliché was if she was his secretary, instead of his head of HR. Suddenly I recognized the look on Dennis's face—hard, hungry, and a little too much like Damon.

I closed my eyes. I held my breath. I planted my knees on either side of him in the chair.

And I lowered my mouth onto his.

Damon's body rose under me, and his mouth engulfed mine. And that's when I learned that I didn't need kissing lessons. My body reacted naturally to his, kissing him back intensely.

Damon's stubble scraped against my chin, rubbing it raw. His home face always looked a bit unshaven—had he consciously chosen to add it to this guy, or was this part of his home self slipping out? How much of the way his hungry mouth closed over mine was an act, and how much was real?

Damon grabbed my ass and pulled me closer, his hips pressing into mine. My body reacted instinctively with a full body rush.

Holy. Crap.

I couldn't do this. Not with Damon. Not with anyone but Kalif. My every muscle wanted to stiffen, but I forced my limbs to stay loose.

You can do this, I told myself. It wasn't real. It wasn't me. I slid my hands around Damon's thick, pocked neck. My stomach twisted, but I made my body relax and press into him. My body wanted it—it knew what to do.

It was only my consciousness holding it back.

Let go, I told myself. This was a persona, not Damon. And I was a persona, too. We were actors, costars in a movie. And we weren't going to have sex in this chair. We weren't. We just needed to look like we wanted to.

Damon pushed his groin against mine, and I felt like I was two different people—one desperate to continue, the other blindly terrified.

Idiot, I thought. This was your stupid idea. Get it done. I tried to remember what it felt to be with Kalif—the way his mouth felt against mine when I'd pushed him up against the wall of our hotel room those months ago. I could do this scene with Kalif. I could make it convincing. And so what if Damon wasn't Kalif? He was wearing a persona. He could be.

I pushed my mouth against Damon's. I pictured Kalif. I had to pretend anyway—that's what a persona was for. Like a method actress, I could channel what I loved to get the performance I needed.

But my body wouldn't relax. Persona or not, Damon wasn't Kalif. There was no way to convince my instinctual self to be comfortable in his arms.

It wasn't about how he looked, or even how he touched me. Even though Damon looked like a forty-year-old executive with ample chest hair and a squishy gut, he smelled like himself, even beneath the strawberries—a scent I hadn't realized I knew until this moment—musky and smooth and like a man.

But not my man.

Damon's hands wandered up my back and his tongue scraped against my lower teeth.

I actually shuddered.

Damon pulled back, looking up at me. Not in a sexy, in-persona way, but in a concerned, breaking character way. He didn't actually shift, but he took me by the shoulders and pushed me back.

Like Kalif used to do, but for very, very different reasons.

Ugh. What was wrong with me? I couldn't do the make-out thing right under any context.

"Um," Damon said. "Maybe we should try that again?"

I tried to laugh, to play it off. But my laughter came out as a series of high pitched barks.

I was apparently the worst porn actress ever.

"Okay," Damon said. "I'll take that as a yes." He touched the phone, stopping the recording.

I took deep breaths. We could do the tape over. More than most missions, this one was like a movie. We could do as many takes as we needed to before we got it right.

If I wanted to spend all night making out with Damon. I was half tempted to call it off and bring Kalif in on this plan after all, Carmine suspicions be damned.

Damon put his hands on my shoulders. "I take it you've never done this before," he said.

I squirmed. "I've kissed people," I said. "Duh."

Damon rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but your boyfriend, right? Not like this."

I stood and slumped against the edge of the desk.

Damon pointed toward the camera. "Chickadee, I know it's not easy, but you're going to have to act better than that to fool them."

I sighed. He was right, of course. And I couldn't even play this off as harassment, and make it make sense for it to be uncomfortable, because I wanted the cops to believe these two had willingly run off together.

Damon gave me a hard look. "I hate to say this, but maybe we should have rehearsed."

Oh. My.

That was going to be the consequence of failure, wasn't it? We'd gotten this all set up. We could come back tomorrow night and try again. But if we did, I'd have to spend the rest of the day "rehearsing" with Damon. And then explain that to my boyfriend after this was over.

"No!" I said. "No, it's fine. Fine!" I knew I was babbling but I couldn't stop. "I'm just warming up. Don't you ever get like that, where you need some time to get used to a role?"

Damon hesitated. That didn't even make any sense. I mean, what shifter got to warm up for a job? We had to be able to turn on and off like freaking switches if we didn't want to get caught. "So, you want to do more warm ups first?"

No.

I looked down at the floor. "Just turn the camera back on," I said. "I'll do better, I swear."

Damon cracked a smile. "Not that I'm complaining about the way you kiss."

My guts squirmed. Not helping. I felt like I was going to be sick.

His smile faded. "Ready, then?"

No. Not a chance. I steeled myself and resumed my position by the desk as he sat down in the chair. I gave him what I hoped was an easy smile.

Damon started the camera and looked up at me, and I let my eyes cut away shyly. The situation we were in here was a desperate one, just as desperate for our personas as it was for us. They might not be afraid for their lives, but they were dying to be together without getting caught—so much so that they were willing to have their liaison in this cramped office.

Desperation.

I could use that.

So I closed the distance between us and grabbed him by the collar again. I kissed him openly, aggressively. And when I felt his body react, I shut down all the parts of my brain that were Jory and forced myself to be only Charlise. Desperate for some time alone, even in this horrible office.

I climbed into his lap and unbuttoned his shirt. Damon let out a gasp as I ran my mouth along his collar bone from shoulder to throat. Pain erupted from deep in my gut. Agony that this wasn't Kalif.

I buried my face in Damon's neck, and pulled his shirt off at the shoulders. It was just an act. I was playing a part. It wasn't real.

Damon's hand reached up under my shirt, brushing the small of my back. His lips brushed up the side of my ear, and I let myself gasp.

And I guess that must have been enough for him, because he breathed softly into my ear, my face blocking the view from the camera to his.

"On three," he whispered. "One . . . Two . . ."

As he whispered three, we both leapt apart. He moved toward the door. I stepped against the wall, clinging to it like I was terrified.

My part from here on out would be easier. I just had to look nervous. I fidgeted against the back of my chair. I leaned, trying to get a look out the door without actually taking a step toward it.

I counted silently in my head. We'd timed everything out and this was the pinch point. Damon had a quick costume change, and if he took too long, the timing on the tapes from the office and the hallway security cams wouldn't match.

Damon came back down the hall and charged into the room, this time wearing all black—and Charlise's body and face. I backed up, running into the printer and shoving it against the wall, to be sure that the camera caught us both, wearing the same face, mine contorted in shock and Damon's gritted in fierce determination.

Then I grabbed the purse and in one smooth motion pulled out the spray bottle and maced Damon in the face.

The bottle was filled with water, but Damon did an admirable job bending over, clutching his face like his eyes were on fire. As if his concentration had been broken, he shifted his face into Wendy Carmine's home face.

I screamed, and hit him over the head with the purse, and he—still wearing Wendy's face—stumbled back into the hall.

The real Wendy was too good to be stunned into dropping persona like that, but I didn't need to go for stark realism. All we needed to do was to plant the seeds.

I reached over and turned off the camera. My heart pounded as I collapsed against the wall, Damon watching from the hall.

"Better?" I asked.

He smiled. "Much." Damon was panting as well, fighting to catch his breath, and I hoped it was just from the quick change.

I shook myself. Of course it was. This was just a job. It didn't mean anything.

Meanwhile my boyfriend was back in our silent apartment, alone, with no idea.

I was officially the worst person ever.

"Okay," Damon said when he'd caught his breath. "Let's make sure we've got it, and then we can do the rest."

I made myself watch, even though what I really wanted to do was hide under the table in a tight ball. I told myself that the girl on the screen wasn't me, and given how happy and sexy and confident she looked, I mostly believed me. The couple on the screen looked like more than just an office tryst. The way they played off each other, teased each other—they looked happy.

Until something off screen startled them, and sent them into a panic.

When the tape was over, Damon shut the laptop. I waited for the jab, for the lewd comment, for the notes about my form and technique. Instead, he let out a long slow breath.

"Are we good?" he asked.

I was pretty sure he was only half talking about the tape. "I think it's done," I said.

Damon nodded, and then grabbed a duffel from the staging room and tossed it on the floor. "I'll let you change." He stood and left the office, shutting the door behind him.

I stared at it. It wasn't like Damon at all to be . . . polite. I would have expected him to stand there and wait for me to tell him to leave, or else change in front of me like it was no big deal, just to bother me.

What the hell was this? Had this . . . changed something between us? I wanted to believe that there was no part of me that ever wanted to do that with Damon again, but that would be a lie. Because the part of me that had been stuffed down for too long beneath the cold glare of the Carmines' cameras wanted desperately to escape, and she didn't care how, or with who.

I leaned against the wall and took deep breaths.

The rest of me was holding on, waiting for the day when things would be better, when Kalif and I would be able to be together without anyone else calling the shots. The rest of me knew that taking the easy way now would make that future impossible.

I traced the line around my finger, the invisible, imaginary ring that Kalif had drawn there before we went to work for the Carmines.

And even though I couldn't feel it, I had to believe it was real. I had to hang on to that, whatever other inclinations I had.

I steeled myself, and reached into a duffel Damon had left unzipped on the floor. In it I found black clothes—pants, shirt, boots, ski mask. They were close to identical to the clothing the Carmines had worn when they kidnapped my parents.

I put them on.

Now, it was time to be an intruder.

Shooting the rest of the footage was easier. Damon and I both put on Dennis and Charlise's faces, and the intruders' clothes. We wanted it to look like the intruders had pretended to be Dennis and Charlise, thinking they were gone, and come upon them making the sex tape in the office. We caught ourselves on the security cams outside approaching the building, and then split up in the hallway inside. Damon changed back into the original Dennis, his shirt half off, and I came down the hall from the other direction, wearing his face.

Damon came flying out of the office, looking as breathless, as if he'd just been interrupted with Charlise, as he had in the footage from inside the room. He saw me and his eyes grew wide.

I charged at him. We fought, and as we did, he slammed me up against the wall, his eyes bulging.

Damon held back when he twisted my head. The muscles down my spine spasmed. I could feel the tweak all the way down in my thighs. When he dropped me, I did my best to fall limply and naturally, and in the process took most of the fall with my shoulder.

That was going to hurt tomorrow.

When I hit the floor, I put on Oliver Carmine's home face, as if he, too, had been shaken from his persona. I made sure I fell with my face angled toward the camera, so it would get a clear picture of exactly what Oliver looked like.

Taking the form of Oliver's face made me feel ill. I rolled on the floor, beaten but not unconscious. I'm not you, I thought. I was going to fight like hell to get out of this with my mind and my relationship to Kalif both intact.

Even if I had to do some questionable things to get there.

Ten

When we got back to Damon's apartment, I could barely look at him. I couldn't go home—not when my clothes and therefore my trackers were spending the night in Santa Cruz. I didn't particularly want to hitch a ride there myself.

So instead I waited for Damon to strip his clothes off and offer to let me share his bed with him and his boxers. But he just sat down on the edge of his bed and rested his elbows on his knees.

"Good work tonight," he told me.

I nodded. "You too." It was late—almost four AM, and I'd need to be at work in four hours. "Mind if I crash on your floor?"

Damon shrugged. "You can take the cot."

He lowered himself onto the floor and made a show of stretching out his legs.

I hugged my arms around myself. I couldn't sleep in the same room as him. "No," I said. "That's okay." And I dragged his sleeping bag into the bathroom, locked the door, and curled up on the floor. The linoleum was cold as hell, but at least the door locked.

Damon didn't try to talk to me through the door.

When my phone alarm beeped at seven thirty—about the time the chauffeur of my clothing would have been cresting over the highway fifteen hill heading toward work, I stood up, stiff and sore, and prepared a short, unassuming persona to steal my clothes back from him.

When I stepped out of the bathroom, I intended to apologize to Damon for locking him out of his own toilet for hours. But Damon lay asleep on the bed, predictably wearing nothing but his boxers and a sheet wrapped haphazardly over his chest. His arms stretched wide to the sides, like he was greeting sleep with enthusiasm.

I, on the other hand, had slept crumpled into a tight ball, like a threatened armadillo.

I tiptoed out, locking the door behind me from the inside.

When I got into work—dressed in yesterday's clothes, freshly retrieved from the spare compartment in the trunk of my unwitting beach bum friend, my office door was already cracked open. I drew a deep breath, sure I was about to find Oliver inside, waiting to ambush me, to drag me down into the basement.

But when I tipped the door open, I found Kalif sitting at my desk. My heart pumped double time, as if, somehow, running into him was scarier.

Before he said anything, he extended his hand. After we exchanged signals, he let my hand go. "Hey," he said. "I missed you last night."

My palms began to sweat, and I was glad my hand was no longer in his. If we'd been alone, I might have told him everything. Here in my office, we were certainly bugged. I had to keep up the story I'd told yesterday.

"I was just missing my dad," I said. "It was his birthday."

Kalif's eyes bore into mine, and I felt like he could see everything—the lie, the betrayal. I hoped that he knew it wasn't actually my dad's birthday, but I didn't think that we'd celebrated that with his family last year.

I hoped he knew enough to assume that whatever I said under surveillance was a lie, but the best lies were mingled with truth. It must be so hard for him to tease it out.

Kalif reached for my hand again, but I brushed by him and sat in the extra chair in the corner. He rested his hand on his knee, as if that was where he'd wanted it to go all along.

"You could have taken me with you," he said.

I looked into his eyes, trying to decide if he was saying that for the benefit of the Carmines, or if he really believed I'd been leaving him out of too much. Doubts roared like blood in my ears. Maybe I should be doing these things with him. Maybe taking that risk would have been worth it. Maybe I'd let Damon too much into our lives.

Maybe I was the one screwing everything up.

Kalif looked back at me, and while I couldn't tell what I wanted, I could see one thing there.

Pain.

He hated the way things were, and he wanted things to be better.

That made two of us.

I stood and walked over to his chair. And in front of whatever cameras were watching, I brushed his hair off his forehead and kissed him gently there.

"I'm okay," I said. "Are you okay?"

He took my hand and squeezed it. "I'm sorry about your father," he said.

And in his voice I heard the truth: he was sorry about a lot of things.

I closed my eyes. "Me, too," I said.

Kalif stood, putting a hand on each of my shoulders and drawing me into a hug. To the cameras, it probably looked like comfort.

And while I couldn't know exactly how he meant it, I hoped it was a kind of a promise.

We were going to get through this.

I just hoped that when I could finally tell him about everything I'd done, the truth wouldn't tear us apart.

On my lunch hour, I went to pick up coffee and sandwiches for Wendy and Oliver, who liked to have lunch conferences in Wendy's office. The sandwich place was right next to a bank and a dry cleaner. I wasn't going to get a better opportunity than this for the next stage of the plan, so I used a burner phone to text Damon to meet me there.

He showed up dressed like his tenant persona's daughter.

After we exchanged signals, I sighed. "Worried I might try to attack you?"

He shrugged his slight shoulders. "Better safe than sorry."

I was glad he'd brought the child. It made it easier to forget making out with him in the desk chair.

"Did you bring the tapes?" I asked. Damon nodded and handed me a Disney princess backpack. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty beamed up at me.

I smiled. "Nice touch."

Damon gave me a childlike wave. "See ya," he said. And then he skipped away down the street like a kid without a care.

More than anything in the world, I wanted to actually be that girl. Except that girl had divorced parents, and a dad who lived in a one-room dump.

We couldn't even make imaginary people who didn't have problems.

The sandwich shop was a low-tech locally-owned joint that Wendy liked because they offered gluten-free bread. They didn't even make a show of having security cameras—at least not in the table area. So no one would record me going into the bathroom and coming out as a handsome business man in the sharp suit I'd borrowed from the dry cleaner across the street.

I left Wendy and Oliver's sandwiches in the car and headed into the bank. I used fake identification to get a safety deposit box—which wasn't hard, because banks aren't nearly as particular about who leaves things with them as they are about who takes them out—and listed Lee among the names of the people who were allowed to open the box. If I wanted a key for everyone who had access, I had to pay extra and wait ten days.

But that didn't matter. I was going to give Lee mine.

Before I hit the Starbucks, I put on the face of the Indian woman who worked at the dry cleaner's and returned the suit to its rack with barely a glance from the sixteen-year-old cashier.

On the way to the Starbucks drive thru I stopped by the post office and mailed the key to Lee by Express mail. He'd have it before two PM tomorrow, but probably sooner, because it only had to travel one post office over. The mail clerk gave me a little bit of a strange look when I paid thirty bucks to have the envelope delivered to an office ten minutes away.

"I need a postmark on it," I said. "It's a legal thing."

And she stamped the postage and dropped it into the Express bin.

Done and done.

I was just leaving the Starbucks when I got a text from Oliver. Coffee coming?

I smiled. If all my other plans failed, maybe I could just cut the man off from his caffeine. Five minutes out, I answered.

And I didn't even get pulled over for texting and driving.

I was just walking into the building when the power surged, and the lights went out. People came out of their offices, staring up at the lights. Maintenance people ran for the utility room next to the torture basement entrance, flipping breakers.

It didn't work. Anything not plugged into a surge protector had been fried.

I took the stairs up to my office, passing the frantic receptionist who was talking to Wendy outside the conference room.

"What happened?" I asked.

Wendy gave me a suspicious look. "We don't know yet," she said, with an emphasis clearly meant to communicate that if I had anything to do with it, I'd soon find myself detained in the basement.

"Yikes," I said, and I handed her the sandwiches and went to check my own computer.

My computer worked; it was plugged into a power strip. Even in the privacy of my office, I refrained from smiling. The power surge was part of Kalif's job—the task I'd asked him to do in that note—and I was happy to see that he'd been able to follow through. I just hoped Macy had followed up with my emailed instructions. If she did, we were well on our way to cornering the Carmines.

When I returned to the conference room, Wendy and Oliver were discussing the damage. One of the janitorial staff stood on the table, replacing the light bulbs in the fixture above the desk. Pale light streamed in through the tinted conference room windows.

"Sorry I'm late," I said. "I made the mistake of dropping by the post office. That's never a place to go in a hurry."

I waited for them to ask me what I was mailing—that was the only place I'd gone that would look strange on a tracker, so I had to bring it up. I was going to tell them I needed to complain that our mail carrier was leaving packages by the mail box instead of bringing them to the door.

But they didn't ask. Oliver nodded absently, and Wendy opened the sandwich bags. That's when I realized that I hadn't bothered to get lunch for myself. I'd been too wrapped up in rushing through my jobs to notice.

Oliver didn't seem to notice either. He pulled out the chair next to him at the conference table.

The janitor replaced the cover on the light fixture, and hit the switch. The lights turned on.

Most of the electronics without processors or power supplies would be fine. Anything more complicated without a surge protector would need to be replaced.

Oliver smiled at him. "Thank you, Les."

Les nodded and then stepped out, closing the door behind him. I sat.

Oliver stood and closed the blinds to the internal conference room windows as Les dragged a ladder over to the hallway fixtures and began replacing bulbs out there as well.

"What a mess," Oliver said. "Apparently a couple of engineers on the second floor plugged their computers right into the wall."

I cringed. "That sounds expensive."

Oliver nodded. "We can replace the power supplies and save the rest of the computer. But it's certainly costing us time. If it's not one thing, it's another."

He collapsed into his chair, and I tried not to look pleased that I was inconveniencing them. It was a nice side effect.

Oliver unwrapped his sandwich and turned his attention to me. "On a happier note, I hear you love movies," he said. "Have you seen the new James Bond?" Wendy looked up at me, as if she, too, was interested in my answer. As if they could have heard that from anywhere besides their persistent spy cams and tracking devices.

My skin felt suddenly damp. I'd bought a ticket to that movie, but of course I hadn't watched it. Did Oliver know I was supposed to have seen it? I had to assume that he did.

"Sure," I said. "It was okay. Not my favorite."

Oliver nodded. "Why's that?"

I froze. Yes, Jory. Why? "Too much action, not enough character." I forced myself to laugh naturally. "Though I did go to see a James Bond film, so I suppose it's my own fault."

Oliver smiled and leaned forward. "I suppose it's important to maintain realistic expectations."

My brain wanted to find a threat in that. I focused on keeping my cover. "Yeah, well. I go to movies to turn my brain off at the end of the day, not to give it a work out. And if you go as much as I do, you're going to see some bad movies. They all start to blend together, after a while."

Wendy grimaced. "I prefer to watch things at home. So much time wasted at the theater. I can't sit still that long. I need something to do with my hands."

Like torture my mother. I gave her a polite smile. "It's the only way I can stop myself from doing things," I said. "And if I don't unwind, I might snap."

Wendy and Oliver exchanged a look, and I swallowed, waiting for the blade of the guillotine to fall.

But instead, Oliver smiled. "I was just telling Wendy about our conversation the other day. We wanted to tell you how impressed I am with you. It's a fine person who can set aside personal grievances and make decisions based on what's right."

My mind reeled. If that was true, what kind of a person was I? I'd only set aside my grievances out of a desire to survive, or maybe because I'd decided that slow revenge was the best revenge.

"Thank you," I said. "My father always said that sometimes the hardest things are the most worth doing."

"Agreed," Wendy said. She beamed at Oliver. "You're right. She's fitting in nicely."

I wanted to choke her, but instead I made myself look pleased. I was doing what was right. This wasn't just about revenge. It was about protecting people—Kalif, Mom, Damon, Aida—even Macy, and other shifters I'd never met. The Carmines thought they were doing good by policing shifters, by keeping them in line.

But they were wrong. They were the problem.

Oliver cleared his throat. "Tell me, Jory. Which is more important. The good of the individual, or the good of the group?"

I blinked at him. Most of the hypothetical situations I was used to considering had to do with security weaknesses and human emotional responses. But I did have an inkling of what Oliver wanted to hear.

"If the good of the individual puts other individuals at risk, that can't be best," I said.

Oliver nodded, and finished chewing a bite of his sandwich. Neither of them seemed the least bit concerned that I wasn't eating, and I assumed this was yet another method to put me on edge. "Exactly," he said when his mouth was clear. "If the good of the individual is the priority, how do you balance the needs of one individual against another? The system falls apart. It contradicts itself."

"So it must be the group, then," I said.

Oliver nodded. "Exactly. The needs of the one can't be allowed to jeopardize the needs of the many."

"And that's why our jobs are important," I said.

Wendy and Oliver exchanged another glance, one I couldn't read. I'd included myself in the statement on purpose. They needed to believe I was on board, ready to work.

"I'm still working on those residential histories," I said. "I'm making progress, but it's slow."

Oliver waved a hand. "Take your time," he said. "Better to do the job right."

That was exactly what my father would have said, and I hated Oliver for that.

"Don't we need to get that shifter off the streets?" I asked.

"Of course," he said. "But tell me, why?"

I let myself look nervous. My persona knew she had to get this right. "Because this person poses a threat to us all," I said. "Because the good of the many outweighs the good of the one."

Wendy nodded. "True. But there's more."

I looked at Oliver expectantly, the perfect picture of a dutiful protégé ready to accept wisdom from the mouth of the master.

"It's because they need community," Oliver said. "Normal people are taught order, reason, right and wrong. They learn it in schools, at churches, in their families. But us, we're isolated because of what we are. We live with secrets. We turn against each other. Why?"

"Because we're alone," I said. I didn't have to pretend to believe that. I'd said as much to Kalif more than once.

"That's all we're building here, Jory," Wendy said. "Not a prison. Not a police force. A community of people who work together." She gave me a wry smile. "And you don't have to look very deep into the ruinous mess of humanity to know that the healthiest communities are the ones with boundaries and rules."

"Yeah," I said. "I've been on the internet."

Oliver laughed. "I know you don't have to be here. But thank you for trusting us."

It was all I could do not to spit at them.

I trusted him. I trusted him to torture me and my people as soon as he knew that we'd stepped out of line. Healthy communities were ones that people chose to be a part of, and not under threat of torture and death. Safety could be offered, but it couldn't be forced. Maybe we would be exposed. Maybe life for the group would get harder. But at least we'd be free from the vigilante murders that the Carmines called justice.

I held back the anger. "I don't know," I said. "You make me sound like too good a person. I'm not sure I have a lot of choices, you know?"

Oliver shook his head. "Everyone has choices. You could fight against us. But you're here, cooperating. That means a lot to us. I know it can't be easy for you."

I forced my face to soften, when I really wanted to scrutinize him. Was he trying to provoke me? Was he saying these things to see if he could get a rise out of me? To see if I was secretly harboring hatred toward him?

I wasn't going to fall for it. I wasn't going to let him see.

"Thank you," I said.

"Have you given any more thought to looking for your mother?" Oliver asked.

I shook my head. "I couldn't even if I wanted to. She never wants to see me again."

Wendy gave me a patronizing smile. "This is one thing you'll learn when you're a parent," she said. "You're never done with your children, no matter what they do."

The sentiment was sweet, but given the way I'd seen them treat Aida, I didn't miss the implicit threat. They'd always follow her, even more than the rest of us.

She'd left because she trusted me to take them down.

"I don't understand that," I said. "But I guess I won't unless I have a child."

Wendy nodded. "How are things between you and Kalif?"

I let myself look taken aback, because the implication that Kalif and I might have a child was enough to be startling even without the complications of knowing they were watching us do our awkward dance around each other every night, when we were supposed to be living together.

I had to tell them a story that alluded to what they'd seen.

"Tense," I said.

Wendy's eyebrows rose. "Anything we should know about?"

I shook my head. "It's not any one thing. We both miss our families—at least, the way our families used to be. Plus it's been stressful, learning our new jobs, adjusting to this whole new life. I mean, we're both still kids, right? But we're figuring it out."

Oliver gave an understanding nod, but I didn't for a moment assume that he bought my lie. He wouldn't be able to imagine that an immature kid could have defied and evaded him as much as I had before I'd come to work here. His ego wouldn't allow it.

"Do you need separate living arrangements?" Oliver asked.

"No," I said. "I love him. I think things will get better with time. Like you said, it takes a fine person to work through hard things, but Kalif is as fine as they come."

Oliver's face softened. I wondered if he liked hearing good things about Kalif because Kalif was his grandson, or if he was happy to hear a plausible story to explain the tension he'd seen.

"Give it time," Oliver said.

I nodded again. "That's what I'm doing."

I only hoped that I'd be able to wipe that understanding smile off Oliver's face before time ran out.

Eleven

When I left Wendy and Oliver in her office with the remains of their sandwiches, all I wanted to do was run and run and never come back. I wanted to really go to a movie and dwell on some drama that couldn't get anyone killed in my real life. I wanted to take Kalif to a hotel and crawl into bed with him and just stay there until the Carmines came to drag us away to our deaths.

But I didn't have the luxury. It was time to call Officer Lee and prepare him for what I'd left in that box.

I didn't have time to leave the area before I made my phone call, and I also didn't have an excuse to explain my absence, other than the fact that I still hadn't had lunch. So I bought a pastry from the vending machine—the kind covered in thick, sticky frosting—and headed out the west door and through the thick, low hanging trees. The ground sloped toward a canal that led into the marshlands, and at the edge of the incline was the bench Kalif and I had sat on when we'd first cased this place, back when we suspected my parents were being held in the basement.

Today I wasn't searching for anything. I just needed to make a phone call outdoors, where no bug would hear me.

I pulled out a brand new burner phone and used the internet to pull up a clip of Dennis Finkman giving a speech at a business owner's association. I listened to his voice, quietly shifting my vocal chords to match the pitch. Officer Lee might never have met the man, but I needed all the evidence he could find to match what I was about to say to him.

I dialed Lee's number. I expected to leave a message, so I nearly jumped when I heard his voice on the other end, low and gruff.

"Lee," he said.

I wandered toward the swampy area of reeds south of the business complex. If Lee traced this call, I wanted him to think that Finkman had stopped by a deserted area to talk, not associate the call with Systems Development or any of the other companies in the area. "Hello," I said in the CEO's voice. "This is Dennis Finkman. Do you know who I am?"

Lee paused for a moment. "You ran CareWare. I've been trying to reach you." Lee must have been good at vocal control for a normal person—he didn't sound surprised, though he must have been. Finkman was supposed to have fled the country.

Finkman was back, if only in spirit. And while the real thief was dead, the villains were still at large.

"I mailed you something," I said. "It'll arrive by tomorrow afternoon. Take a look at it, and then we'll talk."

"Wait," Lee said.

"I'll be in touch," I said. And then I hung up.

I needed to bait the man, leave him hanging. Because I wanted him to trust me, but I knew he wouldn't be ready. Not yet. Damon and I were going to walk him there together.

Speaking of Damon, I also owed him an update, and I had no intention of sneaking out to his place tonight.

Tonight, I needed to work on my job for the Carmines.

I took 101 up to Burlingame as soon as I got off work. Traffic was awful, but I still got to the apartment complex before sundown. The complex consisted of three cream-colored stucco buildings, all of which were accessed by doors with automatic locks on them, so only clients could get in.

That was easy enough to bypass. I stayed in my work clothes—happy for the Carmines to track me here, doing what I was supposed to be doing—and put on a sleek persona of a woman with white teeth and shiny black hair.

Then I marched into the front office, catching the manager just before he left for the night. The manager was a skinny guy with a worn tag that announced his name as Wyatt. He told me as much when I walked in, shaking my hand vigorously with a wide smile and a Texan accent.

I batted my eyelashes at him. "I know it's late," I said, "and I don't have an appointment. But I've been looking at apartments all day and I can't find a single decent thing in my price range. I've got to go meet my fiancé for dinner in twenty minutes and if I tell him I've got nothing he's going to burst a blood vessel. Do you have any places you could show me? I don't need a contract or anything. Just a lead."

Wyatt beamed at me. "My pleasure, ma'am."

I smiled, and as Wyatt led me through the vestibule of the southern-most building, I kept smiling at him and making chit chat so he wouldn't notice that I was casing the place for cameras.

"So, Wyatt," I said, touching him on the arm. "Where you from?"

"Amarillo," Wyatt said. "Moved out for law school. Graduated last year, but this is still the only way I can afford rent."

I nodded. Bay Area rent was ridiculous. If I'd had to pay for it legally, I'd have left the state myself. Kalif, on the other hand, was fully capable of supporting us with his hacking skills. Legally, even.

"How is your security?" I asked. "Have you had many break-ins?"

"Naw," Wyatt said. "It's a safe place to live. We have a part time security guard. Name's Turner. You'd like him."

I ignored his assumption about what I would and wouldn't like, and laughed easily. "I saw one place this morning that looked like a prison. I don't want to get shot, but I don't want Big Brother spying on me, either. You know what I mean?"

Wyatt laughed back. "I know what you mean. We've got the happy medium here. Cameras on the doors, so we know who's coming and going, but none in the common areas."

"Or the apartments, I hope."

Wyatt's face grew serious. "No, ma'am. No creepy mirror cams here. Though I read about a case where someone did that, once. The owner was selling the footage online. Can you believe people will pay for that?"

Actually, I could. In fact, if I could have bought footage of the inside of my mark's apartment right there, I would have made a high offer and let the Carmines foot the bill.

"Some people," I said. "So, tell me about the utilities."

Half an hour later, Wyatt was waving goodbye to me as I climbed into my car and he into his. He was headed to his evening ice hockey league practice, which would give me a few hours before he'd be back home and keeping a general eye on things. Turner, the security guard, was working a complex a couple blocks over tonight, and wouldn't come by unless someone called with a problem.

I meant to ensure that no one noticed or reported a thing. To that end, I drove across town to the Target and bought myself a plaid button-up, a pair of canvas shoes, and some jeans that looked similar to what Wyatt had been wearing. Then I pulled through a back alley and changed both my clothes and my face.

I parked my car a block away and walked up in Wyatt's body, whistling to myself. When I reached the complex office, only the lobby lights were on, just the way Wyatt had left it.

I hadn't been able to steal Wyatt's keys during our tour—he might have noticed them missing when he went to start his car, even if I could have isolated the ones for the office. But getting into the building was no problem. I stood outside the office and fiddled with a piece of loose aluminum on the outside of the window frame until one of the tenants appeared—a man in skinny jeans with the sides of his head shaved and curls bursting from the center like a hipster mohawk.

I gave him Wyatt's wide smile and waved as he walked in, and he didn't so much as glance back when I caught the door behind him.

The proper office was locked of course—I'd watched Wyatt close up on our way out. But I'd also gotten a good look at the lock. It was a cheap Kwikset handle without a dead bolt.

And I didn't even need to get away from the door cameras. I stepped up to the office door and pressed my shoulder against it, blocking the camera's line of sight to the door handle with Wyatt's broad shoulders. Then I slipped the Carmines' credit card between the lock and the door frame and pushed the door open.

I turned on the light and whistled as I walked on in and plopped myself down at the main desk.

To their credit, whoever had set up the office security did require a password to log onto the computer. And, to the credit of everyone who used it, it wasn't written down on a Post-It under the keyboard, inside the top desk drawer, or, heaven forbid, stuck to the monitor itself.

So I unplugged the computer, got into the BIOS, and stopped the security program from running when it rebooted.

Kalif would have been proud.

Once I was in the system, I set about finding the security footage. I could tell from the cables running into the wall that the camera was actually built to transmit—ones without cables are almost never live cameras, because it costs a fortune to wirelessly stream a constant video feed.

When I found the right files, it was immediately clear that even with the cables, they weren't capturing video—only a snapshot of the door every four seconds at low resolution, saving images of everyone who walked through the door, but dramatically decreasing the amount of space required to store the footage.

This place clearly wasn't spending much on security.

Nevertheless, I found the files from the dates that the shifter had theoretically lived in the building, as well as the digital financial records which would tell me the names of everyone who was paying rent. A lot of these people would be identifiable through a simple internet search, matching them to their own photos in their social media accounts. A shifter could, of course, set up a fake media presence for their persona—my parents had done that all the time when their personas needed to get hired at the companies they were casing.

Still, there would be signs. And since there was no reason for me to keep this job secret, I was free to pass on what I'd gleaned, and let Oliver decide if he wanted to do the searching—since he knew who he was looking for—or if he wanted me to do it myself.

It took ten minutes for me to open a paid cloud account with the Carmines' credit card and start dumping the security photos and the financial records onto a remote server. I let the computer make the transfer and got on my phone, emailing Wendy and Oliver to tell them what I'd found and where it was located. They'd be able to transfer it to their own server and cover the tracks. I added in the email that if they didn't have time, Kalif would be happy to do it for them.

I only hoped the poor shifter we were chasing was better at hiding than Macy.

When I left the office, I received a text message from Damon. How'd it go? it said. He must mean the package for Lee, because he didn't know a thing about my job in Burlingame.

Just waiting for the mail, I wrote. You can contact him tomorrow to see if he wants to meet with us and talk.

Will do, Damon said. Someplace public.

Yes, please. With lots of exits.

He's a cop, through. Could arrest us.

It was true. I looked at the clock; it was about time for me to be getting out of there to ensure that I wouldn't run into Wyatt while wearing his face.

He's going to need to meet us in person, I said. A voice on the phone won't be as convincing.

It's true, Chickadee, Damon responded. Just pointing out the obvious.

I threw that phone in a Dumpster a couple blocks from Wyatt's complex, and changed my face and clothes in a parking garage before heading home. In theory I tossed the phone to be certain that the Carmines couldn't find the text messages. Tomorrow night, I'd call Damon from another one to find out if he'd set up the meeting with Lee.

But another, deeper part of me just wanted to sever the contact, to erase what we'd done, to start over with another, smarter con.

One that didn't make me remember how close lying to my boyfriend brought me to losing the last person in my life that I loved.

When I got home that night, I felt like I'd been gone for four weeks rather than forty hours. Kalif's car was in the driveway, but the apartment was dark. I left the lights off, dropped my purse on the kitchen table, and eased open the door to the bedroom.

Kalif looked up at me in the darkness. "Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said back.

Light from the window glinted off his eyes in the dark. "Hey," he said again.

I undressed in the dark and put on a t-shirt and a pair of running shorts. I climbed into bed beside him, not speaking.

There were a million things I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him everything. Not just everything about Damon but everything everything, about how scared I was of the Carmines, about how I wanted to be running jobs with him and not Damon, about how I was so, so scared that I was going to screw it all up and we'd be stuck here forever and never really get away.

Or worse, that something would happen to him.

What would I do then? Run away on my own? I didn't know how to be on my own, and I didn't want to know.

But instead, I listened to him breathe in the dark, and looked up at the tiny gleam of the camera behind the ceiling fan.

It was a perfectly reasonable place to look.

But this time, I swear I could see the Carmines staring back at me. I hated them for it.

Kalif's hand slid along the sheets, pausing before it could touch my arm.

And we lay there, not touching, everything we wished we could say slowly disappearing into the dark.

Twelve

Damon set up the meeting with Lee over the phone using Finkman's voice from his speech about finance ethics. I wondered if it was this exact video that had led Mel to select Finkman as his victim. The irony sounded like something that would have appealed to him.

When I arrived at Damon's apartment to get ready for our meeting, I was afraid Damon would answer the door completely naked, but he was already dressed in his off-brand label business suit, which was rumpled but still professional looking. It was the kind of suit you'd want your CEO wearing when your company was in crisis—it showed that he was in charge, but under great strain.

"Not going to talk me into playing the man?" I asked.

Damon shook his head. "I thought you were getting a grip on Charlise. Might as well keep things consistent."

I was afraid he'd bought me something low cut to wear as Charlise, but he'd picked out a pair of slacks and a conservative blouse in a light blue color. It had layers that wrapped softly over one another. The whole effect was fragile and innocent.

Good thing, because while I didn't think flashing my breasts at Lee was going to help our case any, I also wasn't looking to bare that much skin at Damon, even if he supposedly knew it was all for show.

I stood in the middle of Damon's clothing-strewn apartment, fingering the sleeve of the blouse as it hung in his bathroom doorway. "Well done," I said.

Damon kicked a shoe out of the way as he looked for the classy-but-scuffed ones Dennis would wear. "See? This is why you keep me around."

I looked down at Charlise's ballet flats, lying haphazardly on the floor next to the bathroom door. Damon was good for a lot of things, but I didn't exactly want to lavish him with praise at that moment. It would only encourage him.

I settled for gratitude. "I know you're working hard and risking a lot. Thank you."

Damon looked up at me. His star-like eyes stared into mine and my knees quivered. "You're welcome," he said.

He held my gaze for the first time since we'd made out in Dennis's chair. I could feel my body sway gently toward him, like he was a force, drawing me in.

I wished there was some scripted thing to say after "You're welcome." Some rote response to fill the silence. Because as much as I wanted the silence to be awkward, stretching like distance between us, it didn't feel awkward or distant. At that moment, I felt closer to Damon than to anybody else. All of my doubts fell aside; I knew that he had my back. Just like a person should feel about their partner.

Except that my partner was supposed to be Kalif.

I kept expecting Damon to be the first to look away. When he didn't, I took a step back, and knocked the hanger off the door frame behind me.

Charlise's shirt fell over my shoulder and I grabbed it, tearing my eyes away from Damon's to scoop up her shoes off the floor. "I'm going to change," I said.

I could hear Damon mumble a response as I closed the door on him, but I couldn't make it out.

Honestly, I wasn't sure that I wanted to.

Damon and I both wore dark sunglasses as we went to meet up with Officer Lee, even though the sky was entirely black. Our personas were fugitives and couldn't afford to be seen in public. It was my turn to hang on Damon's arm, and while that, too, should have been awkward, it felt familiar.

We arrived at the Thai restaurant early to scope the place out. We could have done so in other personas, but arriving early as a precaution seemed like the sort of thing Dennis and Charlise would do before meeting with a cop. They'd have as much reason to worry as we did, and if Lee didn't yet believe in shifters, probably more.

I'd never taken on the persona of a wanted woman before, and I had to admit it made me nervous. If he wanted to, Lee could surround the building and drag us out, SWAT team and all. We were relying on his curiosity about the tape that we'd sent him, on his desire to know if the conspiracy really went deeper than the two of us. After all, if we were on the run because we were guilty, there was no reason for us to want to meet with him. Taking this risk said we really had something to bargain with.

And even though the details were fabricated, we did.

Damon and I requested a booth in the corner, where we could see the entire room. It was also near the kitchen, and we'd scoped out the back exits in our pass around the building, in case we needed to make a quick escape. I didn't love being in a booth, where one of us would have to climb out after the other, instead of bolting simultaneously. But it was preferable to a table, where Lee's backup could easily get behind us.

Lee showed up right on time; I spotted him talking to the hostess, still in his suit from work. He looked just like himself—which I obviously should have expected, but I'd grown used to playing these games with people who could change their faces.

Lee showed the hostess his badge as he spoke to her—probably as a precaution so that the staff would cooperate with him if he had to drag us out.

I elbowed Damon and nodded toward the front of the restaurant, but Damon was already eying him.

A thought passed through my mind: I was glad to be here with Damon instead of Kalif, because Damon could probably punch Lee out in two seconds flat, while Kalif wasn't any better a fighter than I was. And as Lee spotted us and approached our table, a sense of dread came over me that had nothing to do with Lee. I used the horror I felt, drawing back in my seat like it was Lee I was afraid of.

Lee reached our booth. He must have recognized us from the photos in Dennis and Charlise's files, because he offered us each his hand in turn, and the paranoid part of me expected him to pass me a shifter signal—that this was Oliver or Wendy, who had already discovered us and were here to end both this game and our lives. But Lee's soft hand didn't shift in mine. It just shook it firmly. He didn't whip out his gun, or his badge. He just lowered himself into the booth across from us and planted his elbows on the table.

"Bold of you to meet me here," he said.

Damon gave a sharp nod. "Bold of you to come."

I watched Lee's reaction carefully. Even though we'd profiled him, I still didn't feel like I knew enough about him to execute the rest of our plan. Would he be threatened by Damon? Treat him with scorn?

Instead, he looked impressed. "I watched the video you sent."

I blinked at him. "You think we fabricated it?"

Lee looked slightly taken aback, like he was expecting us to defend it, not suggest it might have been fake. Which was, of course, exactly why I'd led with that. We needed to disarm him, to subvert his expectations until he was ready to entertain the idea that we might be telling the truth.

And in a way, we were.

Lee studied me for a moment before he answered. My heart picked up pace, not because I was afraid of his scrutiny, but because it was exactly what I needed to see. The guy I needed to con had to be thoughtful and careful—an officer that other officers wanted to trust—or we'd never be able to see this thing through to the end.

"Forget about what I think," he said. "Tell me your story. Exactly what happened, in your own words, from the beginning."

Damon and I looked at each other, feigning that we needed to get each other's permission before continuing. In reality, this was what we both wanted.

It was time to put on our show.

"We—" I said, swallowing, like these words were hard to taste. "We were having an affair."

Lee nodded and looked sharply at Damon. "And you still are, because your divorce isn't final."

I sensed condemnation in Lee's voice. Either he was faithful to his wife, or he was a hypocrite. Damon's search through Lee's computer suggested the former, and I hoped he was right.

Damon rubbed his forehead and nodded regretfully. "Right. It's taking a while for my wife to divorce me, because I wasn't around to be served."

I raised my shoulders, hunching back into myself in what I hoped came off as guilty posture. "We were together at the office. We both stayed late a lot—that's how . . . that's how things got started, I guess. We used to take coffee breaks together and laugh. . ." I gave Damon a mournful look that I hoped drove my point home.

We weren't laughing anymore.

Damon gave a heavy sigh, but he didn't pick up the story for me. This was my con. He was going to let me tell it.

"Anyway, by the time things went wrong, we were there late together a couple nights a week. After everyone else left the office, we'd, well—"

Lee raised an eyebrow. "I get the idea."

My face flushed for real on Charlise's behalf, and I let the color show. "We were interrupted one night. Some people—" I shivered. "—if they are people—broke in. I don't know if they knew we were going to be there—"

Damon shook his head. "I don't think they did, or they would have been better armed."

I nodded. "I think they were trying to get into Dennis's office, but when they saw us—they were—" I grimaced, as if I knew how crazy this sounded. "They were wearing our faces."

Damon crossed his arms, not agreeing, but not disagreeing either. "One attacked me, but I got him first. When he hit the ground, his face changed. He turned into someone else. He came to pretty fast, though, and got up and escaped."

"When you say it changed," Lee said, "describe what you mean."

Damon and I looked at each other.

"It was like," Damon said. "It was like first he was one person—me, I suppose—and then he was another. Like a special effect in a movie."

This was another calculated move. We wouldn't bring up special effects if we'd used them.

"You're sure it wasn't a mask. Or a trick of the light."

Damon took a deep breath and shook his head. "No. It wasn't a mask. His actual flesh changed." He grimaced and looked up at Lee. "What kind of a person can do that?"

I took Damon's hand in mine on top of the table, and he squeezed. Lee looked at us stone faced.

I had no idea if he was buying this, but there was nothing for us to do but continue.

"What was it like," Lee asked, "staring into your own faces?"

"Disturbing," I said, and Damon nodded. "I still have nightmares about it."

Lee looked back and forth between us, and I still couldn't tell if he bought it. "What happened next?"

"After that, we thought it was over," I said.

Damon nodded. "I drove her home, told her to lock the doors and keep the phone by her side. And then I went home to . . . I went home."

I turned my posture away from Damon slightly, and he went back to guiltily wearing a hole above his brow with his fingertips.

Feel it, I thought at Lee. Feel that we're sorry. Feel that we never meant for things to turn out like this, even though we made terrible mistakes.

"And after that?" Lee asked.

Damon sighed. "The . . . things that broke in, either they got what they wanted, or they came back later after we'd gone. The next thing I knew, the money was gone and the police were coming for me. I got wind of the whole thing from an employee, and—" Damon let his face crack, just for a minute, emotion seeping through that looked real, even to me.

Yes, Damon was good at his job, even if thinking that made the guilty pit before me open wider.

"We ran," I said, lifting my arms helplessly. "I guess we just panicked."

"You didn't call security before you went home that night. Even though you'd been attacked in the building. Even though you didn't know who attacked you, or why."

Damon cleared his throat. "At the time, we were still worried about people finding out about our relationship." He shrugged. "Seems now like that should have been the least of our concerns."

Lee gave Damon another look of consternation.

I nodded my agreement. "So we took the tapes when we left. That's why there was no video of that night."

Damon dropped my hand. "If only we hadn't been there."

I put an arm around his wide shoulders. "Stop," I murmured. "You can say 'what if' forever but it won't change a thing."

Damon cringed, his shoulders bending in a perfect imitation of distress.

Lee cleared his throat and a sympathetic look crossed his face. I hoped he wasn't as good an actor as we were. "What I want to know is, why bring this to me now? It's been months since this happened."

I put my hands on the table tentatively. "It was my idea," I said. "I just hate the idea of these people—these things—getting away with what they did. I hate that we can't ever go home. And if they did it to us . . . I'm sure they'll do it again."

Damon nodded and took my hand on top of the table. "It took her a long time to convince me, but she's right. If we stayed quiet, we were just deepening the wrongs we'd already done." He stole a side glance at me, and I nodded my agreement. "I want you to catch the bastards who did this, and I want you to stop them."

I let my eyes flick toward Damon, like I wasn't sure we should be revealing this. Then I sighed. "I know it's hard to believe, but they can change their faces, their bodies, everything. I'd never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

Lee nodded. "I saw the tapes, but as you said, tapes can be doctored."

"I know," I said, making my shoulders shiver. I looked at Damon. "You were right. It wasn't enough evidence."

I waited for Lee to tell me that it certainly wasn't, but he hesitated. "I had a friend in forensics look at the footage," he said. "He told me that he couldn't find any evidence that special effects were involved."

I gave another sigh, preparing myself for what my dad always referred to as the negative sell. "But there's no way you can tell for sure, right? I mean, if I were you, I wouldn't believe us based on just a video image."

Lee looked us over. I could tell he was trying to decide if we were setting him up. I wanted him to think that, for his mind to wander over the possibilities and feel the weight of conspiracy hanging over him.

But I didn't want him to pin it on us.

"Most people would probably say that they want to believe you," Lee said. "But in my case it's the opposite. I don't want to believe there are people who can do this. I don't want to believe that such a thing is possible."

Damon straightened up and cleared his throat. He barely glanced at me. "I told you this was a mistake."

Damon's hand hovered at the edge of the booth, his other arm shielding me protectively from Lee. Every muscle in his body tensed, like he was readying himself to get up and run.

He was right to project that fear. Lee needed to see us scared, desperate even, if he was going to believe our story. But running from cops puts them on the offensive, so I showed the opposite, wilting on the bench like a flower too long after picking.

"Are you going to arrest us?" I asked. Let him think he had the power to hold us. Let him think that we were at his mercy. Let him feel in control.

People who felt they were in control were a lot more likely to believe what they saw, and to trust their own senses. I didn't need him to trust me completely. Not yet.

I just needed enough faith that he would keep looking.

Lee hesitated. I could see him waffling. Bringing us in would be a boon for him, whether we were guilty or not. But at the same time, if we were telling the truth . . .

"No," Lee said. "I'm not going to arrest you as long as you continue to cooperate."

Damon took his hand off the table and sat back in his seat, though his muscles stayed tense. "What do you want us to do?" he asked. "We already gave you everything we have."

Lee looked at me. "I want you both to describe the faces of these people to a sketch artist."

"You saw them in the video," I said.

"The image isn't clear," Lee said. "Not enough to do a facial recognition search."

Damon took my hand, like he was ready to haul me out of the booth if he had to. "We're not going into a police station."

Lee shook his head. "No. I'll set up a meeting like this. Informal. And . . ." He looked uncomfortable. "If you didn't tell the artist the rest of your story."

I gave Lee a sympathetic smile. "You don't think anyone will believe us."

Damon grunted. "Why would they? I don't even believe it half the time, and I saw it with my own eyes."

I could feel Lee appraising me, and I forced my body to project vulnerability. I wanted Lee to see me as afraid, cornered, weak even. Crazy people didn't doubt themselves. Crazy people were absolutely convinced of their own stories.

And as Lee looked at me, his face softened, like he was coming to all the right conclusions.

Thirteen

When I got back to the apartment, I knew I couldn't take another night of silence. So when I walked in the door, I dropped my purse on the floor and slumped onto a kitchen chair next to Kalif.

He looked at me wearily. "You know that picture you hate?"

I look up at the drawing of the girl with the too-wide forehead. "I see it's still here."

"Yeah, I stumbled and knocked it off the wall earlier. But don't worry. I glued the frame back together just for you."

I smiled, though I felt like I was the thing that was coming unglued, and I wasn't sure how to put what I'd wrecked back the way it was. Still, whatever the risks, I had to try, before there was nothing left of either of us to put back together.

"See a late movie with me," I said. "If you're not too busy."

Kalif smiled and shut his laptop. "Never too busy for you."

He reached for my hand. I didn't realize how much less often he'd been doing that until I felt his fingers in mine.

"Okay," I said. "I saw this historical thing last week that you'll love."

Kalif didn't ask for details about the movie as we drove to the theater, which was good, because everything I knew about it was from the wiki summary that I'd read on a burner. When we got to the theater, I almost dragged Kalif through my regular routine, but then thought better of it. He already knew I was using the theater as a front to sneak around without the Carmines following. Letting him in on any more of my process would put us both in danger, if the Carmines ever saw fit to interrogate him about it.

Instead, we slipped out the back and into the alley behind the theater. Our clothes were no doubt tagged, but if the Carmines checked in on us, they'd see us at the theater and think we were inside. Our backs were to the wall of one of the theaters, after all.

Out here, we could talk without distractions, and without fear of audio bugs, which were impossible to hide in clothes. We slipped between two dumpsters and sat down on the cold asphalt. Pebbles dug into my thighs, and the dumpsters smelled like wet popcorn and flat soda, but when Kalif pulled me into him, I found I couldn't care about anything else.

His lips brushed mine.

And then I thought of Damon.

Panic rose in my chest. I knew I should be cool. We should start by just talking. I should let the secrets spill out as part of a general sharing of plans. But much as I hated it, I shouldn't be sharing the whole plan with him. Not when the Carmines might torture it out of him.

So when I opened my mouth, I said the absolute worst thing possible. "I made out with Damon. I mean, not like I did. Like my persona did. With his persona that he was wearing at the time."

Kalif blinked at me. "You made out with Damon."

My heart pounded in my chest and I couldn't breathe, which made it a total mystery how I managed to get out these words:

"Pleasedon'thatemeInevermeanttohurtyouIcan'ttellyouhowsorryIam."

Kalif's eyes widened. "You're sorry that you made out with Damon."

My chest throbbed. "Stop repeating it like that! You make it sound so awful."

Kalif put a hand on my shoulder. "This was part of a job?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course it was part of a job. Didn't I say that?"

He ignored the question. "A necessary part, I'm assuming?"

My pulse pounded in my ears. Kalif had to be able to feel it. I didn't want to squelch it because even that felt like dishonesty. "Yes," I said. "I mean, I guess. Is any part of a job really unavoidable?" I winced. Sure. Make it sound like I wanted this to happen. That would make everything all better.

Kalif studied me like I was a freaking mark.

"Stop looking at me like that," I said. "Yell at me. Or dump me. Or something."

His eyes crinkled. "Are you into Damon?"

The word exploded out of me. "NO!"

Kalif had the nerve to actually laugh. "Okay," he said. "Okay. I get that these things are part of the job. It's fine."

I felt light-headed. Instead of clinging to Kalif, I sank back against the concrete wall. "It's fine? You don't care?"

Kalif's grip tightened on my shoulder. "I care! Of course I care. I'm not crazy about the idea of you kissing him. Hell, I'm not crazy about the idea of you working with him, okay? But this is what we decided to do. And sometimes in persona you have to do things you wouldn't do as yourself, you know? I get that."

Now he was chattering on. From the way he stared into space when he finally stopped, I knew it bothered him more than he was willing to admit.

"Tell me the whole story," he said finally. "Then we'll both feel better, right?"

My voice was small. "I can't," I said. "We agreed no one should know everything."

We sat there in miserable silence.

Kalif took a deep breath. His hand fell off of my shoulder.

"I hate this," I said. "I just want to be with you."

Kalif closed his eyes, and a slow smile spread over his face. "You have no idea how good that is to hear."

I smacked him in the arm. "How can you be happy at a time like this?"

He laughed and pulled me into his arms. His breath was warm on my ear. "Don't fight," he said. "In an hour we have to go back to living in the fish bowl."

I wrinkled my nose. "That's what you call it?"

"In my head."

It was an apt description, and I didn't want to go back any more than he did. I melted into him, and we held each other like we were afraid to let go.

"This is the stupidest date we've ever been on."

He smiled. "I have to admit, the lobster was better."

I planted my hands behind me on the concrete. "This is like fish sticks, by comparison."

He knocked his head back against the wall. "Beats starving."

I took his hand in mine and squeezed it. "You're right," I said. "I'll take what I can get."

Kalif looked at the brick wall above us. "Though, sounds like Damon can get a lot more than I can these days."

Blood drained from my face. I gripped his arm.

Kalif cringed. "That was supposed to come out as a joke, but it didn't, did it?"

I sighed.

It might have, if it hadn't been so painfully close to the truth.

I took off an hour early from work Friday afternoon, and went down to the Laundromat with three bags of clothes. Twenty minutes later, Damon and I sat in a car parked in the lot across the street from the Sunnyvale police station, him in a gray t-shirt and gym shorts, me in a sharp Armani business suit and the face of Lee's direct supervisor, both of us eating a bag of Chex Mix and listening to a metal station.

"This isn't music," I said. "It's noise."

"I knew it," Damon said. "You're secretly sixty-five. No one born in the last forty years calls this noise."

I smiled. "It is noise, though. The singer totally knows it. No one does that unintelligible screechy thing on accident. Isn't that the appeal?"

Damon grunted.

I crossed my arms. After my talk with Kalif, I'd been all prepped to have to tell Damon that obviously we were just friends, and that's how it was going to stay. But from the moment I'd arrived at his apartment, Damon had been oddly chill and strangely respectful. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but I also didn't know how to lay out the parameters of our relationship for him without making things awkward again.

I leaned back in my seat and put my feet on the dash, blocking my view to the clock. It was four-thirty, about the time Lee usually left to head home so he could beat the traffic. Damon had run the profile on his boss, who had a dental appointment today, which he'd gone to straight from a briefing meeting with the Chief of Police.

I picked some of the rye chips out of the Chex Mix, and Damon swatted my hand. "No picking," he said. "It's cheating. Eat it by the handful and take what you get."

I popped my ill-gotten rye chips into my mouth and brushed off my hands. Bits of dusty flavoring settled down over my black men's slacks. "I hope Lee's boss likes snack foods," I said. "Because I smell like them now."

Damon reached under the seat and handed me a bottle of air freshener. I gave it a tiny spritz, to see what it smelled like.

Damon snatched it out of my hand. "Not in the car! We'll suffocate." He cracked the window slightly.

The spray sifted down over my clothing, reeking of lavender. "Great," I said. "Now I smell like a grandmother's bathroom."

"Hey," Damon said. "It fits with your taste in music."

"If only I were pretending to be me."

The doors to the building finally opened, and Officer Lee came striding out, looking down at his phone in his hand. He was probably texting his wife, telling her he was on his way home. I climbed out of the car and strode toward him without being observed.

Time to put a little extra pressure on Lee, make him feel like the case was bigger than just two people with a video tape and a crazy story.

Lee saw me coming across the parking lot. I rubbed my hands on my slacks—partly to brush off the last of the Chex crumbs, and partly to project nervousness. I ran a hand through my carefully-combed silver hair, and scrunched my wrinkled brow.

"Brian," I called. "Can I have a word?"

Officer Lee tucked his phone into his pocket.

I gave an obvious look around, as if making sure we wouldn't be overheard. Lee's face scrunched in confusion.

I forced myself not to smile. Smiling now would completely ruin the effect.

I stepped into Officer Lee's personal space and lowered my voice. "I wanted to talk to you about a case you're working on. You know the one."

Lee studied me. "To be honest, sir, I'm working on a lot of cases."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "But only one involves people who can change their own faces."

Officer Lee looked surprised, and took a step back. "That's—" he said, "that's true sir. But I don't really think—"

I held up a hand. "No. Of course you don't. No one believes that case is what it looks like. I just wanted to warn you—" I shot a worried look back up at the office building—"that your particular case has garnered some attention from above."

Lee's eyes widened in surprise. "I'm sorry, sir," he said. "I'll back off."

"No, not at all. Keep going. Find out all you can." I gave him a hard look. "Don't speak of this at the office, and don't bring it up to me again. But if you can nail these two, the people who can wear other people's faces . . ." I cleared my throat. "I know you just got here, and there are a lot of people with more seniority. But if you can find answers, there's a promotion in it for you. I can guarantee it."

Officer Lee looked taken aback, and a bit suspicious. That was good. I was acting suspicious as hell. Lee might allude to the meeting later and discover his boss didn't remember it, but if he did, that would be another data point to convince him of the existence of shifters.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll do my best."

I gave him a satisfied smile, and let my shoulders relax. Then I took a step back. "Thanks, Brian," I said. "Knew I could count on you."

Lee gave me a sharp nod and turned back to his car. I walked the long way around to the executive lot, where Lee's boss would park, but paused behind some bushes and waited until I saw the back of Lee's car driving away. Then I took a walk back to Damon's car, and climbed in.

"Done," I said. "That went well."

Damon nodded, crunching the snack bag up in his fist. "Good thing," he said. "I just ran out of food."

I rolled my eyes. "You can get dinner after you drop me off at the Laundromat," I said.

Damon eyed me. "Sure I can't take you to dinner?"

My mouth went dry. There it was. The awkwardness. All the things I'd rehearsed fell right out of my head.

"This is just business," I said.

Damon stared ahead at the road, like he wanted to say something else, but thought better of it.

I was glad that he did.

Fourteen

The following Monday at work, the main hallway was full of boxes. New circuitry for the boiler, new smoke alarms, and new electric locks for the outside doors—since the power surge, security had been locking them manually.

As I walked past the top-floor reception desk, I found another box—smaller than the others, and addressed personally to Wendy. The return address label had a logo from Spectronics, the company from which the Carmines ordered their personal security cameras.

I kept walking, as if this meant nothing to me, and prayed again that Macy had done the job I'd emailed her about. If she hadn't, the whole power surge would be a waste. Wendy would be suspicious if I so much as looked twice at those boxes, so there was nothing I could do now but wait for the rest of the pieces to fall into place.

Before I could get through my email, Oliver called me into the conference room—to discuss my good work, he said. I shifted my hands to keep them steady and hoped it wasn't a euphemism. The conference room had thick oak doors—the kind it was difficult to hear through. Ostensibly this was to keep passersby from overhearing corporate secrets. The entire staff knew to knock or text if the Carmines were needed while they were in there—no one was allowed to walk in and interrupt.

So if they decided to interrogate, threaten, or incapacitate me in there, no one was coming to my aid.

Wendy and Oliver were already sitting at the wide oak table when I arrived. We exchanged signals, and then Oliver held out a chair for me across the table from Wendy, and I sat in it as he walked back around the long hardwood table to take a seat next to her.

If they were putting a table between us, perhaps that meant they weren't going to do anything horrible to me. Still, I kept my chair pulled partially back from the table, to make it easier to bolt.

Wendy leaned toward me. Her eyes had that glint of gold in them today, just barely brighter. I was becoming more and more sure that they traded roles—that tiny difference was the only tell I'd been able to see.

"Jory," she said. "We've been very impressed with your work."

"Really?" I asked.

Wendy nodded, and she and Oliver shared a look I couldn't read. I didn't know which prospect was more terrifying, that they didn't believe me, or that they did. I wanted them to be impressed enough to keep working with me, but not so impressed that they decided to ask me to prove my loyalty by torturing someone, or killing Kalif.

I needed more time.

Oliver beamed at me like a proud father, and it was all I could do not to squirm. "That surveillance footage you found for us, it was just what we needed." Oliver picked up a manila folder and rifled through it. "We had a stalker last year. A mercenary we were trying to persuade to work for us. He declined, took some pictures that could have been dangerous for us, and then he disappeared."

He slid a piece of paper across the table to me. I didn't have to look down at the photo to know who they were talking about. The picture was a man standing in a hallway with the same carpet as that apartment complex where I'd given the Carmines access to the security files.

Damon. In his home face.

My pulse raced. I turned my face to stone. If I gave even a flicker of recognition, I'd be putting Damon in even more danger than I already had.

I looked up at Oliver.

"Is it a persona?" I asked.

Oliver shook his head. "We're certain that's his home face."

I looked at the photo again. Damon was too clothed to reveal all of his muscles, but his buff frame and Adonis features were clear even with the grainy photo quality. "Jeez," I said. "Who thinks they look like that?"

"Someone with a high estimation of their own capabilities," Oliver said. "And he's not wrong. He's a very dangerous man."

I looked up at them, trying to simultaneously read their expressions and give nothing away, but they were even more practiced at that game than I was. Did they already know that I knew Damon? Did they know I was working with him? They could have gotten that security footage, same as I did. Had they sent me as a preamble, as a dramatic presentation of how far ahead of me they were?

Their faces revealed nothing. Seconds ticked by, and I waited for the noose to tighten.

But, of course, they waited for me to speak first.

"If he's so dangerous," I said, "why did you send me? I'm new at this, and I'm not much of a fighter."

"Who said we meant physically dangerous?" Oliver asked.

I cringed inwardly, but succeeded in maintaining my mask of calm. "I assumed," I said, "from his size. He's either buff or unreasonably self-deluded."

"Possibly both," Wendy said. "He put a picture of our home faces on the internet, with information about who we really are. He's actively trying to expose us to the public. And the longer he's out there, the more of a threat he is."

I nodded. The good of the group before the rights of the individual. They were consistent, at least.

"You want me to find him," I said.

"What we want you to do," Wendy said, her tone perfectly even, "is bring him in."

They knew. They had to know.

I was a stone. I was a tree. I was a soft breeze on a summer day. I was a Zen yoga master at a mountain retreat. "I understand," I said. "Are you sure I'm the right person to handle this?"

"You've done everything we've asked," Oliver said. His voice was warm and sincere, though I had no idea if he believed this to be true, or if it was part of the act, part of the bait on the trap that was still, it seemed, not yet ready to close. I almost wished it would, just so the waiting would be over.

No. Not yet.

"Okay," I said. "If you think I can handle it."

"We'd like to see if you can. Bring him to us." He paused, probably for dramatic effect. "Alive."

I wanted to swear, but I channeled my own terror into a look of concern as I surveyed the photo again. Alive meant I couldn't fake another death. The only way to do this job was to turn in Damon, and who knew what they'd do to him if I did. I'd brought him in on this job. I couldn't ask this of him. "If you already knew what he looked like, then this photo isn't a big find," I said. "Unless it gives us some other clue we can use to track him."

"What we have now," Wendy said, "is a photo to give you. So that you know when you've got him. And you have the addresses from before. You're a clever girl, you'll think of something." This time her smile did look smug, but I didn't know if it was meant to mean gotcha or impress me.

"Do you have anything else? An IP address from when he posted the photos, maybe? Or a user name?"

"Unfortunately," Oliver said, "we don't."

That was a lie—even I knew his username was Hunter—but the lie made sense. The Carmines wouldn't give me any information that might lead me back to those pictures of their home faces.

I squinted at the photo of Damon. In the picture he was standing against the wall outside his old apartment, checking his phone. The screen was facing the camera, but I knew from my visit to the complex that the footage wasn't high quality. The image wasn't good enough to zoom in and see what it said.

I looked Oliver in the eyes, wishing I could trust anything I might see there. Oliver returned my steady gaze. His own face was expressionless.

This was almost certainly a test, but what kind? It could be a test of my loyalty, to see if I would turn Damon in. Or a test of my skill, if they didn't already know that I knew where he was.

And without reading their minds, I had no way to know which it was.

I pressed my fingers against the bottom corner of the photo. If I wasn't sure what to do, the best move would be to stall.

"I'll do it," I said. "But it might take a while."

Oliver and Wendy smiled at each other, like they'd just learned something, and I fought to keep my own expression even. It was probably my imagination, but I thought they looked smug.

I took the photo of Damon and slid it back into its folder, and then stood. "I'll keep you posted."

And then I turned and walked out of the room, trying not to feel like a fly perching at the edge of a sticky trap.

One wrong step, and the three of us would never escape.

Fifteen

That night when I left work, I didn't pretend to go to a movie. Instead, I met up with Kalif at the house. I couldn't talk about all the details, of course, and I couldn't afford to drag Kalif off for another private pow wow so soon, but I also needed his input.

And damn it, we were con artists. We could navigate a conversation without blowing our cover.

Kalif looked up from his computer as I walked through the door, and I cut right to the chase. "Oliver asked me to do another job for him." I tried to sound hopeful, like I was excited for the opportunity.

Kalif looked up from his computer. "Oh?"

I added a touch of nervousness to my voice. "Yeah, there's this shifter who's been evading them for a while. I guess he once took a picture of them in their home faces and posted it on the internet, and they're worried he'll come back for them. They want me to track him down." I paused. "Or I guess I already was tracking him. They found his home face in some security footage I got for them on my last mission."

I paused, waiting while all that sank in. Kalif knew full well that Damon had posted pictures of the Carmines' home faces on the internet. We'd seen those photos before we'd met Damon.

To Kalif's credit, he kept excellent control over himself. He didn't give a single tell of alarm or recognition at my news. "Can I help?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I have a photo and some addresses—though they're the same ones I had before. If you have any ideas on leads, I'm all ears. Otherwise I think you'll have to wait until I find something to go on." I twisted my foot against the carpet. "This one's rough, you know? Do you think I can do it?"

Obviously he knew I could find Damon. He knew I'd made out with the guy, for goodness's sake. Kalif leaned back in his chair, and he seemed to have caught my meaning.

The walls were closing in around us. Did he think I had what it took to get us all out alive?

"Do you think it's a test?" he asked.

I nodded. "It's got to be, right? Like I've proven I'm willing to kill for them, and I've proven I can get information when they ask for it. Now I've got to prove I can tail a shifter—a dangerous one, Oliver said. I won't be able to finish this one in a weekend."

Kalif looked me in the eye, and I saw what the camera wouldn't be able to catch. He understood. I was clearly being tested and I didn't know which kind of test, so there was nothing for me to do but move forward, and play for time.

He nodded once. "That does sound like a much harder job than the last one."

"I can't turn them down," I said. "This is my chance to really prove myself."

I didn't know when this subtext had crept into the conversation, but now that it was here, I was sure that it was what I really wanted to talk to Kalif about. When we came to work with the Carmines we'd jumped right into the deep end of the pool, and now here I was, thrashing in the water, maybe drowning. And I didn't want a life raft. I didn't want someone to pull me out to save me.

I just needed to know if Kalif still believed I could swim.

He looked at me, and I could see him hesitating. Then he closed the computer, came over, and wrapped his arms around me.

"You're Jory," he said. "You're a freaking superhero. Of course you can do it."

I burrowed into his shoulder, burying my face in his sleeve. I was as aware as ever of our audience, but I was going to have this moment. I needed it, and from the way Kalif's arms tightened around me, almost desperately, I knew he needed it, too.

"You really think so?" I said.

He pulled back, and looked me in the eye. "Yes," he said.

And I believed him. He'd followed me into this pit of despair. He'd shackled himself beside me. He wouldn't have done it if he didn't have total belief in our ability to slip the chains off together.

"You're kind of a superhero, yourself," I said.

He kissed me on the forehead, and then pulled me into him, breathing his words into my hair. "Let's hope so," he said. "We're going to have to be, if we're going to prove ourselves."

I smiled into his neck.

I got what he was saying. It wasn't the Carmines we needed to prove ourselves to.

It was each other.

When I left the house saying I was looking for leads, Kalif let me go without argument, though I did see the slightest hint of disappointment on his face.

He wanted to come with me, and I wanted that too. But for the job I was running tonight, it was too dangerous. This is what I'd learned over the last few months: you'd think there would be a limit to the amount of danger a person can be in, but there isn't.

No matter what happens to you, things can always get worse.

I gave myself an hour between when I left the house and when I needed to meet up with Damon—enough time to both look like I was searching for Damon and to give the Carmines the slip.

The trick was looking like I was really trying was to treat this like I would any other job, but not do so well at it that I would actually lead the Carmines to Damon. For tonight, looking for Damon was just my cover. I headed to the San Jose public library. The biggest and best branch was located at San Jose State University. The city had opened up the University library to anyone with a city library card—or anyone with an address, didn't matter where.

I had addresses. I had fake IDs. I could have gotten dozens of library cards, if I so chose. But today, I didn't need one.

I just needed to talk to a librarian who would sign me on to one of the computers with a scanner attached.

I dressed as a student, complete with a torn backpack hung over my shoulder, courtesy of the top shelf in our Carmine-furnished wardrobe closet. There were quite a number of bags in there—ranging from the messenger bag covered in Buffy the Vampire Slayer patches to what I was pretty sure was an authentic Louis Vuitton. I almost took the one with the patches, but decided against it. Too memorable, too easy to spot on the library security cameras.

More than any of the other items of the wardrobe, I was certain the bags were bugged. There were too many possible places to hide a tracker—inside handles or between the thick seams, or even underneath the metal fasteners.

Good thing I wanted the Carmines to follow me tonight.

At the library, I got a guest login password from a librarian and checked on to one of the computers with a scanner attached, and scanned in Damon's photo at the highest possible quality. The scanner was nice—donated, according to the sticker on the side, by a local tech company. No doubt at least some of its parts had been designed at Systems Development.

Still, I didn't dare use the equipment in the Systems Development office. I didn't want to arouse the suspicion of the office staff, most of whom seemed to believe that their bosses were just regular people.

When the photo finished processing I opened the web browser and ran a reverse image search on the internet. Dad used to do that whenever a picture appeared online he was worried about—him or mom in persona with a supposed friend, or a security image that might get passed around. He'd find out where exactly it was being posted online, so he could monitor for damage and limit the fallout. Facial recognition technology was getting good enough that it could sometimes pull up other images of the same person, even if they weren't the exact same photo.

I knew this might put the Carmines on Damon's actual tail. It might yield other past addresses, old employers, even friends and family, if Damon had any.

I also knew that, undoubtedly, the Carmines had already done it. So I could look like I was making progress without giving them anything they didn't already know.

There weren't any exact matches, which made sense. This was a frame from a private security tape—it shouldn't be floating around the web. Most of the photos I scrolled through were clearly not Damon, though there were some body-builder websites that yielded gym pics of similar looking men.

I found two that were definitely Damon—one looked to be a bouncer at a night club, wearing a similar jacket to the over-sized windbreaker Damon had on in the security shot, though clearly not the exact same one. He was looking to the side, with a stoic expression on his face, his hair pulled back in its characteristic cornrows. I followed that image back to its source—it came from the social media account of a girl who liked to go clubbing and post pictures of random hot guys to accumulate likes. The photo was a year and a half old, and had been taken at a bar and nightclub called The Heat somewhere in the Tallahassee area.

The second was Damon holding hands with a little girl, walking down the street. He was looking at the camera, glaring a bit as if he had just caught someone taking a picture. The little girl had dark hair like his, hanging in twin French braids down her back. She couldn't have been older than four or five.

Damn. Was she a job? His sister? His kid? I was positive Damon was older than me, but by how much?

I almost didn't want to click on the source of the image, but I had to. The photo was two years old, posted by a woman named Vixie. The caption was short: D and Z, it said.

D and Z. I couldn't technically be sure that Damon was the D, and not the Z—I'd always assumed Damon was a fake name.

The social media account itself could have been faked, of course. I scanned through it, and it looked real: the ages of the people in the pictures changed over time. Still, that also could be faked. It could have been all part of a persona Damon had used for any number of reasons. It was possible he was Vixie, that he'd staged that picture.

But something about the image was striking, and I realized I'd been staring far longer than I'd intended to. I copied the link and the image and emailed them to myself at a new address, and then logged off the computer, picked up my backpack, and slouched up to the second floor.

I found a cubicle study station against a back wall next to the reference section on medieval architecture. I propped up my bag behind the cubicle divider, and then headed off to the campus gym, where I walked right past the card slider where students checked in and nobody said a thing. In front of the locker room I found the lost and found bin, and I pulled out a sweatshirt, gym shorts, and a pair of matching tennis shoes, and walked right back to the library with my haul.

The sweatshirt and gym shorts I had acquired were unfortunately different sizes, so I could either look like a large person squeezing into tiny shorts, or a small person wearing a sweatshirt as a tent. I chose a female persona with narrow hips and wide shoulders, and gave her a big chest to match, so that the sweatshirt wouldn't cover the shorts entirely and give the impression that I was wearing it as a dress.

The sneakers were well worn—I couldn't help but wonder if someone had left them behind on purpose, too lazy to carry them to Goodwill or even the nearest garbage can. But they covered my feet just fine as I walked back to my bag and stashed my clothes in it, keeping my trackers all in one place until I could come back for them.

It was time to accomplish the real work of the day.

Sixteen

I walked to the nearest parking lot and called Damon to come pick me up, giving him instructions to the Dean's parking spot in the particular lot where I was standing, so we'd be able to find each other even in our mismatched personas.

Good thing I did. Damon showed up, not dressed as the guy who was renting his apartment, but as a woman in a sharp red business suit with a severe skirt and bright red talon nails to match. I was almost afraid to take his hand as he extended it out of the window of the car.

"Um," I said. "I feel under dressed."

He looked me up and down. "You should," he said, rapping his nails on the steering wheel. "You look like you went dumpster diving behind the gym."

I climbed into the passenger side. "Close," I said. "It was the lost and found."

He gave me a look of condescension so practiced that I actually laughed. "Give me a break," I said. "I've seen you in nothing but a sheet."

My face immediately flushed. That sounded worse than it had been, but I still shouldn't be joking about it. We had real work to do. Work I couldn't afford to make awkward.

Especially now that we had serious things to discuss. "Besides," I said. "Haven't you learned your lesson about the acrylic nails?"

He waggled a no-nonsense finger at me, perfectly in character. "I learned that I should use super glue to attach them instead of those crappy little adhesive pads they package them with."

"Watch out," I said. "That'll leave residue behind."

Damon gave a sharp nod. "Sure will. But interested parties will have a hard time examining my nails when my fist is flying at their face."

Point taken. I looked in the backseat and found it empty. "I hope you brought me clothes."

"I'm your lawyer," Damon said. "You pay me the big bucks to think of everything. I'll find a gas station where you can change."

On the way to the gas station the silence felt thick, and I wasn't sure if it was because we still hadn't talked about making the sex tape and what it did—or didn't—mean, or because of what I'd done to him with the Carmines.

On one of these issues, I was ready to clear the air.

"The Carmines have been giving me assignments," I said. "I don't want to tell you too much, but the last one was to search for a shifter who lived at an apartment complex in Burlingame."

Damon looked sideways at me. "And?"

"And I accidentally delivered them photos of your home face." I shrunk against the car door, but Damon didn't look as concerned as I would have expected.

"They've already seen my home face," he said. "They caught me and knocked me out when I first said I wouldn't work with them anymore. That's why I followed them and got pictures of their home faces. Payback's a bitch."

"The question," I said, "is whether they know you're working with me."

Damon was quiet. "Do you think we need to cut ties?"

"It might be safer for you," I said. "I did an image search with the photo, and it mostly pulled up a bunch of nothing, but also a couple pictures of you." I paused. "One of them, you were with a little girl."

Damon's grip tightened on the steering wheel. "Damn it," he said. "I told her to take that down."

"Who is she?" I asked.

Damon's voice dropped quiet and low, falling out of his lawyer persona entirely. "Chickadee," he said, "you keep your secrets, and I keep mine."

I tensed. I'd clearly hit a nerve, which meant this was probably someone from his real life, and not a job he'd done. "I can't protect you if I don't know what I'm dealing with."

Damon shrugged. "I could say the same to you."

I had to concede that point.

When we reached the gas station, Damon pulled into the lot at an alarming speed and slammed on the brakes next to the external bathroom. Between the two of us, we had the locations of just about every one of those in the greater Bay Area memorized.

I thought about chiding Damon for attracting attention with his reckless driving, but he was glaring straight ahead. I was starting to worry that by finding that picture, I might have put someone in danger—though I hadn't officially sent it to the Carmines. But my instincts said Damon wasn't going to talk any more about it, and besides, it was time to get into persona.

I grabbed the clothes and headed into the bathroom. Today I was going to be Mick Gruger, spacey security guard and cousin of Dennis Finkman, who'd hired him as a favor to his favorite aunt. It turned out Mick had also disappeared. Damon had tried to trace the guy, but either he had gone out into the California desert to smoke weed and live off of lizards, like he told his aunt in a hastily-written and entirely misspelled email, or that email had been written by Mel, and Mick was under a speed bump somewhere. After all the time I'd spent as Charlise, I liked to envision her living on the coast in Ecuador, drinking cocktails and sunbathing on her patio, but the more we didn't turn up about where she'd gone, the more I suspected that she, Dennis, and Mick had all been disposed of so that Mel could make off with their cash without leaving a trail big enough for the Carmines to follow.

Of course, there was no reason for the Carmines to follow it now. Mel was dead, and they had the DNA tests on his cold body to prove it. That meant that Mel had done me exactly one favor in his miserable life; he'd left a hole at CareWare big enough for Damon and me to fill.

Today, we were filling it with Mick, who Lee had wanted to interview if and when he ever resurfaced. Resurface Mick had, just in time to offer a second voice to Charlise and Dennis's claims.

We'd agreed to come into his office to meet him—Mick hadn't been charged or arrested, and wasn't even listed as a person of interest in the case, given that the record showed that Dennis had fired Mick a full week before the embezzlement incident for failing to show up to work.

I didn't believe the record. Yes, the other employees said that Finkman had been grumbling about firing Mick forever, but the coincidence of the disappearance combined with the involvement of Mel were too much for me. I was pretty sure Mick had seen something, or else his was the persona that Mel had used to get in, and he hadn't been able to properly frame Mick for the theft.

When I got back to the car, Damon had restored his composure. As we drove to the police station, he was in full form, rattling off everything I needed to remember in order to talk to Lee, like he really was my lawyer.

"You're flaky," he said. "Don't remember too much and don't be too exact."

I glared at Damon. "You're going to start coaching me now, after all we've been through?"

Damon waggled a nail at me again. This time he'd made them much longer than he had when he posed as Lee's wife. "Hey, at least I'm practicing the character. You're the one who didn't put it on with the clothes."

I held up my hands. "Hey, man," I said. "Don't be picking on me. I didn't see nothing; I don't know nothing. There was just these creepy guys hanging around, man, that's all. I never thought nothing of it."

Damon smiled, and with his stark red lipstick, he looked almost wicked. "Exactly," he said. "That's what I'm talking about."

And if there were many things I wasn't sure of when it came to Damon, I was grateful at least that he knew how to get down to business when it counted.

Lee and his sketch artist, Carmel, were waiting for us in the lobby of the building. Lee nodded at us and reached out to shake our hands. He recognized us immediately again—he must have pictures of Mick from the files on the case, and had probably Googled his lawyer. I maybe should have been worried about that, but instead I was encouraged. At least I was doing a decent impression.

When we got up to the office, Lee sat behind his desk, while motioning for Damon and me to sit in the chairs in front of it. Carmel took the last chair—behind us, in the corner by the window. It made me nervous to have them sitting on opposite sides of us, where I couldn't see them both at once, but Mick wasn't the nervous kind, so I slouched down in my seat, with my knees wobbling far apart under Lee's desk, and settled for keeping an eye on her in the reflections from the certificates on the wall behind Lee.

"Got lots of fancy papers," I said to Lee. "That make you a genius or something?"

Lee looked unfazed. "You're the first to ask."

I smacked my lips. "Yeah well, my momma always said I was observant." I reached over and turned the picture of Lee's family to face me. "My, aren't they pretty."

Lee folded his arms on top of the desk and cleared his throat.

"Mr. Gruger," he said to me. "Where exactly have you been for the last two months?"

Damon gave me a severe look. "You may answer the question."

I scratched behind my ear. "It's hard for me to tell exactly," I said. "I ain't got a GPS or nothing."

Damon frowned at me. "He means generally."

"Oh," I said. "Well, I've been out in the desert. Round about south of Victorville. You been there?"

Lee frowned. "I'm afraid I haven't."

I nodded sagely. "Well, there's not a lot of hunting or fishing out there or nothing, but there's these lizards that are mighty tasty if you grill 'em up just right."

I could tell Lee was covering a cringe. "And you were alone with these . . . lizards?"

I shook my head. "Aw, naw, man. There's a bunch of us. We're camping out there and sticking it to the man, you know? Ever since Fink-Man fired me."

Lee nodded. "And what was the cause of your termination?"

I squinted. "My what?"

Lee took a deep breath. "Why did he fire you?"

"Oh," I said. "Because he's a fink." I looked at Damon. "Thought I made that clear."

Damon raised an eyebrow in a perfect arch. He crossed his legs, his skirt sliding up to his knee. "Did you have any questions for my client about the actual crime? He's already said that he wasn't there. He'd already been fired. You didn't feel the need to list him as a person of interest at the time so—"

"Yes," Lee said. "I have another question." He flipped open a file on his desk. "According to these notes, you mentioned to your employer that you'd seen people skulking around the property, is that right?"

"Sure," I said. "All the time, man."

Lee frowned again. Mick was supposed to have been a security guard, but he wasn't putting forward even a tiny air of professionalism. That was the opposite of everything Lee stood for, the opposite of how he lived his life, and it clearly ruffled him.

I hated to admit it, but playing Mick at him was fun.

"Can you describe any of them?"

"Sure," I said. I glanced back at Carmel, who had a sketchpad leaning against the wall near her. "You going to draw this or something?"

Lee looked down at the paper. "In a minute," he said. "It says here you thought the people hanging around were drug dealers."

"Those guys," I said. "They were selling something all right, but they wouldn't let me have a taste of it."

"That's enough, Mick," Damon said.

I shrugged. "What can I say, man? I am what I am."

Lee drew a deep breath. He didn't seem to be particularly fond of what I was, and I couldn't blame him. But he wasn't going to arrest me on the admission that I once bought weed. Anyone who spoke to Mick in his life probably surmised as much—and more so anyone who'd listened to his screeds on Youtube about fair trade and legalization. For a guy who usually used such tiny words, he sure had some grand ideas about turning the United States into a half-baked stoner paradise.

It worked in my favor, though. There was plenty of reference material so I could get the dialect right.

Lee closed his file. I was pretty sure he was giving up on getting actual information out of Mick. He waved to Carmel, and she brought her chair over to the edge of the desk and put her sketch pad on it.

It was a good thing I hadn't used a movie as cover for this one; it took her two hours to get all the information she needed out of Mick.

Lee leaned in the corner, watching us the entire time. When we finished, Carmel held up the pictures for me to see.

I gave her a sharp salute. "Yes, ma'am," I said. "That'd be them." I gave her a smile I didn't have to fake. The pictures she had looked similar to Wendy and Oliver's home faces.

Lee looked them over, considering, and I could see the wheels turning.

We hadn't finished framing the Carmines yet, but we were building the snare.

When we got into the car and closed our doors, Damon hesitated before starting the car. "She's my daughter," he said.

It took me a moment to catch up to him. "The girl in the picture," I said. "She's—you have a daughter?"

Damon nodded. "And I haven't seen her in a year, because if I go near her, Wendy and Oliver will use her against me."

I stared at the juniper bush directly in front of the car. "They don't know where she is?"

"They do," Damon said. "But they're too careful. They won't go after normal people. Too much chance that the police will investigate. They couldn't risk having the kidnapping of a five-year-old turn into front-page national news."

"And her mother," I said. "Is she—"

"She's not a shifter," Damon said. "And we're also not together anymore."

I nodded. "But if the Carmines won't use her against you, why is she a secret?"

"They won't go out of their way to use her," Damon said. "They don't want to get nailed for putting her at risk. But if you think they're not watching her . . ."

"No," I said. "Obviously they are."

"And just because they won't leverage people against us doesn't mean that other people wouldn't."

I tried to imagine what that might feel like, to have normal, defenseless people you cared about under constant watch, and not to be able to do anything about it. At least I knew Kalif and my mother could fight back.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

Damon shrugged and rubbed his face with his hands. He was hanging on to the physiology of his lawyer persona, but his posture was slipping. "Because," Damon said. "Because I want you to know why I'm here." He turned toward me and looked me in the eye. "When you showed up at my window and asked me to help you go after the Carmines, that was the first hope I'd had of seeing Zoe again. I'll do anything if it means there's still hope for that." He closed his eyes. "Even stick around while the Carmines have you on my tail."

"Now that I know that they have me hunting you," I said, "I can intentionally keep them from finding you."

"Thanks, Chickadee," he said. "Let's both pray they don't already know."

Seventeen

To our next meeting with Lee and the sketch artist, I wore a poncho-style shirt with a jangly necklace and matching clip-on earrings. Charlise had her ears pierced, so Damon made sure to get ones that looked like they could be real.

Lee brought in a different sketch artist, though whether that was to avoid bias in the drawing or to avoid suspicion on their part as to what he was investigating, I didn't know. He made good on the neutral location. We met in a meeting room at a local hotel. The hotel staff would no doubt back up Lee, but at least he didn't have the entire police force sitting in their offices outside the meeting room door.

The new sketch artist's name was Reece, and he had thick curly hair that fell to his shoulders, and acne in a frame where his hair habitually hung in his face. Between the zits and the scars, he was safe from impersonation. If people knew acne made them hard to impersonate, maybe they wouldn't be so eager to cover it up.

Lee sent Damon into one conference room with Reece, and kept me in another. I swiveled nervously in my chair, glad my persona ought to be jittery about sitting here with a police officer. Lee was going to take this opportunity to interrogate Damon and me separately. We'd planned this together, but we hadn't formally sat down and correlated our stories.

Which was, no doubt, exactly what Lee was counting on.

"So," he said, sitting down across from me. "I'm going to ask you some questions. Mind if I get this on tape?"

I squirmed. I did mind, in fact. The more he could pour over our exact wording later, the more likely he was to find discrepancies in our stories. But on the other hand, we'd be giving him a record of our existence that he could use later as proof if he did discover that we weren't who we said we were. For the first time in my life, I wanted to get caught. I just had to make sure it happened on my terms.

"Okay," I said. "That's fine."

Lee set out a recording device and turned it on. "All right," Lee said. "State your name, please."

"Charlise Turn," I said.

"Tell me where you were the night of August seventeenth."

"I was at my office at CareWare," I said.

"You stayed late at work."

"Yes."

"Why did you do that?"

I squirmed again, even though this time only Charlise was nervous about the question. "To spend time with Dennis."

"And did you often meet him at the office?" He kept his voice dispassionate and free of judgment, but Charlise still felt judged.

"Yes," I said. "We worked together."

"And was work the purpose of your meeting that night?" Now an edge crept into his voice.

"No," I said, jutting my chin out. "We were having an affair."

Lee nodded, the judgment fading. Charlise, I decided at that moment, was brave. She was, after all, the reason that they were there, taking this risk in the first place.

"Shall I tell you all the details of our sexual habits?" I asked.

Lee shook his head. "That won't be necessary. Let me ask you some more questions about what transpired that night at the CareWare building."

By the time Damon was done giving his description of Wendy and Oliver's faces to Reece, I'd given Lee a full workup of exactly what happened. I grew more confident as I spoke, relaying the whole night in full detail. I remembered something my father had told me; real stories always had discrepancies. Human brains made up details and filled in gaps. It was memorized lies that were always consistent from telling to telling.

I could afford a few different details than Damon, and, in fact, that might make our story more credible. Just as long as we weren't telling different stories about big things.

While Damon's time had seemed to fly by as I answered question after question, my turn at describing Wendy Carmine's public face was painfully slow. I couldn't help but wonder if Lee was being further convinced by our statements, or beginning to suspect that we'd been playing him.

When Reece was done, he took his sketch out to Lee, and Lee beckoned me over to him one more time. Damon was sitting in the swivel chair, a neutral look on his face. I pulled over another chair and flashed a smile at Lee that I hoped looked like it was trying to cover up for nerves. It wasn't a far stretch.

"So," I said. "What's next?"

"I have a few more questions," he said, looking down at his recorder to check that it was still on. "Tell me why I now can't reach Mick Gruber for a follow up statement."

I froze. We'd set Mick up as unreliable on purpose, but maybe we should have done the opposite. I at least could have given him a phone number and assigned him a burner.

Damon answered first. "Maybe because Mick is an unreliable idiot," he said.

"Interesting choice of words. So you don't think he's trustworthy."

I froze, wondering if we'd walked right into a trap. I had no way to know what Damon had told Lee. Had there been something in the discrepancies that tipped him off?

"He meant that he disappears a lot," I said. "And he knows what went down at CareWare. If you've been in contact, you probably scared him back to the desert again."

Lee narrowed his eyes at me. "Mick didn't strike me as scared."

I rolled my eyes. "He isn't self-aware enough to know what he's feeling. Terrified probably looks stoned and flaky on him."

"Like everything else," Damon said.

"Yes," Lee said. "That's convenient."

Damon gave me an alarmed look, which worked both in persona and out.

"Convenient?" I said. "We both lost everything—our identities, our jobs, our friends. We can never go back. But if that seems convenient to you—"

"No one in this case has a phone number," Lee said. "No one has an address. You've all resurfaced at the same time, yet there's no one I can reach for a statement. And I don't suppose either of you would be willing to stand before a judge."

Damon and I exchanged uneasy glances. Truth was, I'd be willing to stand before a judge, if that was necessary. But courtrooms could be tricky to plan for. There was no knowing how long the proceedings would take, and worst of all, a lot of times they were public and reported on.

Things being what they were, I really couldn't afford to make the news. Not yet.

"Would you give us an agreement of full immunity?"

Lee rolled his eyes. "If I even had the power to do that, which I don't, I'd need a lot more convincing that we had something prosecutable."

That was smart, but it also left us at loose ends. I needed Lee to be engaged in the case, not giving up.

"What do you want from us?" I asked.

Lee was quiet for a long moment. "I want to know who these people are who came after you," Lee said.

I leaned back in my chair. He still believed that our assailants existed. That was something, at least.

"So do I," I said. "But that's your job. We just gave you faces for your image search." So had Mick, though Charlise didn't know about that, so I couldn't point it out.

"I'll follow up on the faces," Lee said. "But if I don't find something substantial soon, my hands will be tied."

I shot an alarmed glance at Damon, which also went double for Charlise.

"Does that mean you're not going to help us?" I asked.

Lee was quiet for a long moment. "No," he said. "But it does mean that with the evidence we've got, I'm not ready to bring this to my superiors." He hesitated. "Are you willing to submit to a polygraph?"

I froze. I was adept at lying, but could I pass a lie detector? I could control my pulse, my temperature. Would it work? I had no idea.

"Yeah," Lee said. "I thought not."

"Let me think about it," I said. Better to bring him more on my terms than to enter a situation I didn't know how to control. But the more evidence I falsified, the greater my chances of getting caught in the lie. But what I understood best was that I was losing his attention, right when I finally had the evidence he needed in his hands.

I couldn't lose him now. It was time to send him a message he couldn't ignore.

When I got home that night, my mind was still racing. Kalif sat at the table with his laptop, looking up at me as I hung my keys. I knew I had to act normal in front of the cameras. Ostensibly I hadn't done anything that should have shaken me up.

But the end was coming. I could feel it. Either the Carmines knew I was working with Damon and were baiting me into the jaws of their trap, or they were expecting me to deliver him, and I could only stall for so long. Lee was growing skeptical, and while I'd wanted someone rational who thought things through, the terrified part of my brain screamed that he was going to give up on the case, that all my work was for nothing, that the race was ending and all along I'd been backing the wrong horse.

Kalif turned toward me, though he didn't close his laptop. I couldn't see what he was doing because of his privacy screen, which was probably just as well. He couldn't do work at home that he didn't want the Carmines to notice, but part of his job involved combing through their systems, for which he had to be creating legitimate excuses or else waiting for the right opportunities.

I couldn't imagine that was quick work, even if it did play to Kalif's strengths. The magnet was higher on the fridge now, almost to the top of the lower door.

I wished he hadn't had to drop the business he was building before we'd come to work here, even if he did still have the money he'd saved stored in offshore accounts. He was saving it for our future, he'd said. When we got out of here. When we were on our own.

Even though I was running a con to accomplish just that, I wasn't sure I believed we'd make it.

I must have pulled off the aura of calm because Kalif turned back to his computer. I knew he didn't like to talk to me much in the apartment—the fake conversation felt stilted and wrong. We were used to being apart, to fitting our relationship into short bursts. But this glut of time together where our relationship slowly starved to death? This was worse. This was unbearable. This was killing us both, but it was also necessary. So he smiled, and went back to his work.

Mostly, I loved him for it, but today, it broke my heart.

Instinctively, I locked down my muscles. I couldn't walk in from research and start crying in the middle of the living room. Whoever was watching the tapes would notice. The Carmines would see. They'd know something was up, and pay particular attention to where I'd just been. Whatever else happened, I couldn't let them get to Lee. He was my only chance, even if that chance was waning. It was far too late to start over.

But somewhere, at the back of my mind, I could hear myself sobbing. Not me, exactly, but the girl I'd been months ago, when Kalif and my relationship was new and exciting, when it felt too good to be true and I couldn't be sure that it wasn't. It wasn't the newness I missed, as much as the freedom. My not-so-long-ago self would never have believed it, but she had so much more time to express what she was feeling, so much more space to explore it. Her heart was more trusting, more easily given.

I stood just inside the door of the apartment, staring at Kalif, wondering if, by trying to save what we had, I'd turned myself into someone who couldn't feel like that anymore. We might never recover. We might never love each other like that again. We might save ourselves only to lose each other.

Despite my locked grip, the muscles in my fingers shook slightly.

Kalif's fingers paused on his keyboard. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, like he wanted to assess me without the camera catching it. I was still standing next to the key rack, watching him. Did my face look stiff? I was looking away from the obvious camera, but there might be others.

He typed something else, clicked twice with the track pad, and then paused again.

I couldn't stand it. I couldn't lose him. I dropped my bag in the entryway and moved over to the table.

Kalif looked up at me, his own expression blank. He pushed back his chair, about to stand, when I put a hand on his shoulder.

I sat down in the chair across his lap, and lay my head on his shoulder. I couldn't tell him what I'd been doing, couldn't tell him about Damon or ask his opinion about the police—not even outside the apartment.

"Hey," he said in my ear. "I missed you today."

Everything I wished I could say threatened to crash over us, but I held back the tide. Instead I pulled back and let my mouth collide with his.

I wasn't prepared for the flame that lit between us—less like a candle and more like a blowtorch. Our bodies melted into each other, every inch of our skin searching to press closer.

We'd lost nothing, he and I. And though I knew I should just make out with him in the chair and leave it at that, I couldn't. I needed more than this. I needed things to be the way that they used to be.

I broke away, leaving only an inch between us. "Come to a movie with me," I said.

Kalif's dark eyes stared up into mine. "Now?" he said.

I knew what he was really asking. Was I making a wise and calculated decision, or panicking in a way that might get us both killed? It was fair of him to question me—one of the reasons I loved working with Kalif is that we weren't required to agree with each other in order to be loyal. He could call me on being wrong, and that was okay.

But this time, I wasn't wrong. "Yes," I said. "We've been working too hard." I gestured toward his computer. "This can wait until tomorrow, can't it?"

He nodded. We couldn't say anything more here, but when we got out of the apartment, we could change clothes, head to the theater, buy tickets, and then sneak out the back. As long as we weren't physically followed and were completely clean of things that had been in the apartment and therefore might be bugged, the Carmines wouldn't be able to watch us past that.

It was a risk, but just this once, just for tonight, Kalif and I were going to work together the way that we used to.

I needed to remember what it was I was trying to save.

Eighteen

When we snuck out the back of the movie theater, we were on our third personas already. Once we got clear of the theater and double and triple checked that we weren't being followed, Kalif pulled me into an alley behind a book store and pushed me up against the hard brick wall.

Kissing Kalif felt like stretching out after a long nap—every part of me waking, remembering. Flames climbed the wall, dancing all around us, threatening to devour us, but for that moment, I didn't care if we burned up right there and never saw the light of day again.

A voice nagged at the back of my mind. This was exactly the kind of thinking I couldn't afford. A moment of carelessness, a single ill-thought action, and the Carmines would destroy us. Still, pulling away from him was like trying to escape an event horizon. I couldn't even put an inch between us. "We should get to work," I said feebly. But I didn't believe me.

Kalif, however, must not have been caught in the same force I was. He pushed away from the wall and looked down at me. "Work?"

Oh. Right. I hadn't told him the plan. "Yeah," I said. "I have a job I need you to help me with. You don't mind, do you? I thought it could be like old times."

He closed his eyes, and his whole body drooped. "Okay," he said. "No problem."

I grabbed onto his shoulders. "Don't do that to me," I said. "You can say what you want right now. Talk to me."

The corner of his mouth ticked upward. "Sorry. Habit."

Not talking to each other was a bad habit. One we'd both have to break. "Well? Sorry I couldn't consult you first, but when I came home today all I wanted was to run this job with you and not Damon. Are you mad?"

Kalif's smile turned genuine. "That's the best thing you've said to me in weeks."

I rolled my eyes. "It's the only real thing I've said to you in weeks."

He laughed. "Yeah, well. I'll take it. Even if it isn't exactly what I thought you meant when you wanted to leave the apartment."

His body swayed into mine, perhaps involuntarily, and I shivered. I tried not to think about the evening he'd imagined, but the pang of frustration was familiar.

Oh yeah. This was exactly like old times.

"All right," I said. "I'm going to teach you your persona. Watch and learn."

Behind the alley, in the hollow behind the dumpster, I turned into Lee's boss, Lionel Khessler. Kalif studied me as I held my shoulders back, drawing myself up to his full height of six foot three. I walked back and forth along the stucco wall, acting like I was looking for something. And then I shot a questioning look back at Kalif. "You got it?"

Kalif nodded. I stepped back behind the dumpster, and in the shadows, Kalif changed.

Despite his different clothing, he looked like an exact replica of the person I had been—broad shoulders, confident posture, even the wrinkles of the face were correct.

I searched for a flaw, but I didn't find one. "You've gotten better," I said.

He reached for my hand. "I had a good teacher."

I smiled. It was nice of him to say so, but we both knew he'd done a lot of the work on his own.

The voice took more work. We stood in the shadow of the dumpster, murmuring to each other, my hands on Kalif's throat, coaching him about what to loosen, what to thicken, how to get the tone just right.

But in the end, he got it.

"Okay," I said. "Now we're going to scare the hell out of a police officer. I'll tell you the plan on the way."

We bought a spool of wire and clothes that suited Lee and Khessler at the local Wal-mart, and then grabbed a bus that stopped two blocks away from Lee's house, right in front of the high school.

We walked the two blocks to Lee's house. The windows in front were dark, but I could see light from the bedroom window reflecting off the back fence.

That was perfect. I didn't want an audience for what we were about to do. I pulled out the spool of wire and bent the end into a hook.

"Watch the house," I told Kalif. And then I fed the hooked wire into the weather stripping of the door to the back seat of Lee's car, jostled the hook until it caught the door mechanism, and unlocked it. I sat down in the back seat.

"Okay," I said. "Your turn."

Kalif looked up at the house. "Here goes."

I wanted to kiss him again, but if Lee's wife found him making out in the backseat of his car with his boss, that would add all sorts of unnecessary complications.

I leaned into the front seat and unlocked the driver's side door, and then checked the glove compartment for a gun. There was one there, and I lifted it gently, checking the safety, and stashed it under the driver's side seat. He'd find it there eventually, just not in the middle of our conversation.

"Okay," I said. "Go."

Kalif practiced his lines once more in Khessler's voice, then he stood and strode to the door. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, drew himself up tall, and knocked.

I cracked the window so I could hear, and moved so that I was situated behind the passenger seat, in the shadow. I reached up and turned off the interior light that went on when the door opened. I needed him in the car before I terrified him.

The lights in Lee's living room turned on and the door cracked and then opened. Lee stood there in a tight t-shirt and a pair of gray sweats. He looked up at Khessler—who was half a foot taller than he was—with an expression of confusion, and then worry. Kalif ducked his head low, speaking quietly to Lee, so that even with the window down, I couldn't hear. And then Lee nodded, stepped out, and closed the door behind him.

They walked across the lawn toward the driveway, but Lee never looked directly at me, so Kalif hadn't given away my position.

"Let's sit in your car," Kalif said, his voice echoing Khessler's in perfect imitation.

Lee's hands went to place where his pockets would have been if his sweatpants had them. "Let me grab the keys," he said.

Kalif walked around and opened the driver's side. "Looks like you don't need to."

The confusion was back on Lee's face as Kalif sat down in the driver's seat and lowered himself in. He gripped the steering wheel as he reached across and unlocked Lee's door. Lee bent down to sit in the seat, but his eyes shot toward the back, and he looked right at me.

I nearly froze. This was the moment everything hinged on—the moment when he either screamed and ran or sat and talked. I was glad we hadn't caught him dressed—there was nowhere for him to be hiding a gun in those clothes—but he'd be trained in how to disable an opponent without a weapon.

I hoped Kalif would handle that. More than that, I hoped he didn't have to. If Lee was ready, if I'd left him enough of a breadcrumb trail, he would be frightened, but he wouldn't panic like a man who was seeing the impossible.

"Hi, Brian," I said, in his voice.

"Uh," Lee said. He blinked at me, and for once he didn't seem to have anything professionally appropriate to say. His hands shook as he glanced toward Khessler, who reached out his hand, offering it to Lee.

Lee gripped the open door, like his brain was trying to process and running into a computation error.

Then, all at once, it came back to him. He leaned back, keeping his hands clear of Kalif's.

"My family is in the house," Lee said. "If I call out, my wife will lock it down and call the police. My neighbor down the street is an officer; he could be here in seconds."

Kalif did exactly the right thing. His posture relaxed, like he wasn't expecting Lee to do anything violent. "It's okay," he said. "Like I said before, we just want to talk."

Lee's hands were still shaking, betraying his bravado. His eyes flicked to me, and then away again, like he couldn't stomach looking at his own face for more than a second.

I made sure not to smile at him—nothing is more off-putting than a scary person smiling—but I dearly wanted to. This wasn't a video he was seeing. This wasn't some special effect.

Lee was staring into the very real, up close and personal evidence of what a shifter could do.

And even as he hesitated, I knew. He wasn't going to explain this away tomorrow as some kind of trick.

I'd turned Lee into a believer.

"We're not here to hurt you," I said. "But you see what we can do. If you won't talk to us, we'll have to come back. What would happen if we came here during the day, to talk to your wife? Do you want to explain to her that she can't trust anyone wearing your face? Do you want her always wondering if the you who came home was the real you, or a fake?"

Lee's shoulders dropped, only a few millimeters, but enough that I could see his resolve failing. He lowered himself into the car, sitting with his feet still on the driveway, and his body twisted to the side to keep both of us in front of him. "Who are you?" he asked.

I leaned forward, putting my face closer to the seat back between us. "I think you know who we are," I said. "We know what you've been doing, who you've been talking to."

Lee swallowed, and I saw his fingers twitch reflexively toward his side, where he would usually carry his gun. I spared a glance at Kalif. He was watching Lee intently, ready to subdue him if necessary. Lee was probably better trained, but he'd never fought a shifter before, which would give Kalif enough of an edge to be able to do it.

"What do you want from me?" Lee asked.

This was it; this was my gamble. I leaned forward, grabbing the metal bar under the headrest with my fingertips. "We want you to back off," I said. "You're only barely starting to understand the kind of trouble you'll make for yourself if you don't leave us alone."

Lee leaned back; half his body was out of the car. His whole frame was poised with fear. I was getting through to him, but I saw something else in his face.

Defensiveness. Belief that his job was to take down people like us. Belief that it was his duty to do the opposite of what I was asking.

I empathized with Lee at that moment. It was both a relief and a terror to see the thing I had been counting on in the flesh.

"You're threatening an officer of the law," he said.

I smirked at him. "I'm a shifter," I said. "I am above the law." And then I opened the car door on the opposite side as Lee. "Don't give me reason to see you again."

And then I slammed the door on him and strode down his driveway. I heard another door close, and footsteps behind me. From their steadiness I hoped they were Kalif's, but I didn't dare ruin the illusion of my exit by turning around before I was out of sight of Lee's vehicle.

When I did turn, partway down the block, I found Kalif hurrying after me, and just to be safe, we checked hands.

"Damn," Kalif said.

I let go of my grip on my own muscles, letting them tremble to get out my jitters. "I know," I said. "Believe me, I know."

He put a hand on my shoulder. I wished it was an arm around me, but for simplicity's sake we needed to avoid making Lee's neighbors think he was having a secret affair in the darkness of his own block.

Kalif was quiet as we walked back to the bus stop, but when he spoke, his voice was serious. "I hope you know what you're doing."

Jittery energy welled up inside me, and my body gave an involuntary laugh. "Don't get too hopeful. You have to know I have no freaking clue."

Kalif's grip on my shoulder tightened. "This may be crazy," he said. "But I have more faith in your blind cluelessness than I have in most people's most carefully laid plans."

I squeezed my eyes closed. I was not going to cry at that. I was not.

"Thank you," I said.

I could only hope, for both our sakes, that he would turn out to be right.

As we walked up to the theater, Kalif put a hand on my arm. "There's something I need to tell you," he said.

My stomach dropped, thinking of all the horrible things he might say. He was having second thoughts. He'd met someone else. He'd been having sex with Jazz on the desks in the security office.

"Okay," I said.

Kalif squeezed my hand. "Don't sound too excited."

I bit back my fear. "I'm bracing for bad news."

He looked surprised. "Oh," he said. "No. It's the opposite, actually. I just wanted you to know that I'm not wasting time. It's slow going, but I've found all sorts of stuff on the Carmines. I have records, and they're safe. I'm not done, but you're not, either, are you?"

"I'm not," I said.

He glanced at me. "I'm not supposed to tell you more than that, right?"

My hand buzzed where our skin touched. I shook my head. He shouldn't have told me that much. I wanted to know the details—did I ever—but I could be captured and tortured as easily as anyone else. If I did, Kalif would need to finish the con.

In that case, it was good he knew as much as he did. He could get in touch with Damon and together they could finish what I'd started.

"I love you," I said.

Kalif squeezed my hand, and as we reached the back of the movie theater, we checked again for cameras and watching eyes, and then shifted back into ourselves. At the sight of Kalif's face, I pushed him up against the wall and kissed him again, fully aware that these moments were the last for a long time when we'd be together outside of the fishbowl.

When we broke apart, Kalif ran his hands around my waist and pulled me against him. I lay with my ear to his chest, listening to his heartbeat. "You were right," he said. "This was exactly what we needed."

I rested my forehead against his chest, my fingers trembling over his heart. We needed a lot of things that we weren't getting.

But I had to believe that this mission with Kalif hadn't been our last.

Nineteen

When I arrived at Systems Development the next morning, I didn't have to fake the smile on my face. Things were still hard; we still couldn't afford mistakes. But the feeling I had when I worked side by side with Kalif electrified every aspect of my life.

We were going to make it. We were going to do this.

Together, we were unstoppable.

I was sifting through Oliver's email when I got a phone call from Damon on the burner phone I had reserved for him. I didn't dare answer while in the office, so I picked up an errand—a package that needed to go to the post office—and headed out.

Between me and the post office I stopped at a public park and got out of the car, then walked clear of any bugs that might be in it before calling him back.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," Damon said back. "Updates on Lee."

I smiled. "Shoot."

"He ran the sketches of the Carmines' faces through the database, and came up with nothing."

I'd known watching Lee's computer was going to come in handy. "Okay," I said.

"Then he ran an internet image search on their faces. And he came up with Oliver Carmine."

I did a fist pump. From Oliver, he'd easily be led to Wendy's face, which would match the other sketch. "That's good, right?"

"If you say so, Chickadee," Damon said. "Just thought you'd want to know that he's headed your way."

My heart skipped a beat. Damn. Of course he was. "Now?"

"Yeah, now," Damon said.

I sprinted back to the car. "Why didn't you text me? Why didn't you say that first?"

"I was explaining what was going on! I didn't want to risk someone else seeing the message, if you were at work. He left like ten minutes ago, so he should be there—"

I opened my mouth to say "any minute" along with Damon, but all that came out was an indistinct panic noise. I got back into the car, hung up the phone, and headed back to the Systems Development building without stopping at the post office.

What was I going to say? Why didn't I mail the package? Had I forgotten my wallet? Was there some way I could explain that I knew the police officer was coming? No. I didn't want them wondering what my ties to him were.

And since I'd clearly brought my wallet and the package I had damn well better go to the post office or they would absolutely notice that I had raced back to get there at the same time as an officer of the law who otherwise should have had no reason to be there.

While waiting at a traffic light I texted Damon: do you have a tracker on his car? Is he close?

Damon took his sweet time getting back to me, but when he did, he came through. Two miles, he said. You're closer.

Great. So Damon had a tracker on my car as well. It made sense, I supposed, because he could never know when I might disappear and finding my car might help him to discover what happened to me.

But I sincerely hoped he'd done it carefully so the Carmines couldn't trace it back to him.

Have to make a post office stop, I said, texting and driving like an idiot who wanted to add getting pulled over to her long list of reasons that she was going to miss Officer Lee entirely and have to spend the rest of the day wondering what the Carmines had told him.

Good luck, Damon answered.

I swore as I pulled into the post office parking lot. Even if I used a self-serve kiosk—which I would—Lee was still going to beat me there. And I knew better than to hope that he'd already found something he could arrest them for and come prepared with a warrant. He couldn't be ready to arrest the Carmines. But they were about to become aware of him, and I couldn't help but feel unprepared for that.

Sure enough, when I finally reached Systems Development, Lee's car was already in the parking lot. I forced myself to park slowly, to take a moment to check my cell phone and gather my purse, and then walked slowly but confidently into the Systems Development building. When I scanned my card to get into the upper lobby, I could already hear chatter. Jeanette was huddled behind reception with Paula from accounting, saying something in hushed tones.

"Afternoon, ladies," I said, walking up and putting my elbows on the reception counter. "If there's office gossip I want in."

Paula looked slightly alarmed—probably because I worked for the boss and she thought I might be a spy.

If only she knew.

"We don't know much," Jeanette said. "But someone from the police is in there talking to Oliver, and we were just wondering if it had anything to do with Wanda."

I raised an eyebrow. Wanda was the girl I'd replaced, and she'd left the company threatening to sue because Lester in security was supposedly stalking her. While that did sound like the sort of cover I would set up—and possibly should have—I was confident it wasn't what Lee was here about today.

I looked toward the conference room. The interior blinds were drawn, and the door was closed tight. If I'd been able to see this coming I would have installed a bug in there earlier, but I couldn't risk bugging the whole office. The Carmines were definitely thorough enough to notice.

I bumped Paula with my elbow. "Well, if I hear anything, I'll be sure to share," I said. "If Oliver's busy, I'll just take my lunch break now."

Jeanette smiled. "Down to see your boyfriend in IT?"

I gave her a cheerful smile over my shoulder, even though I felt like an overtightened violin string, about to snap with a dissonant twang. "Where else?" I asked.

I took the stairs down, working out some of my nerves by jogging down as quickly as I could without slipping in my no-traction flats, hitting my head on the stairs, and dying right there in a heap of irony.

I swept into the security office and found Kalif and Jazz both eating taco wraps from the food truck and sitting with their shoes up on their desks. Kalif never used to do that. He must have picked it up from her.

Or maybe he'd just decided it was a good way to appear relaxed even when he couldn't possibly be. I needed to work on that. Good thing my older-Jory persona was at least a little high strung. Otherwise I'd never have been able to stay in character under the pressure.

"Hey," I said, walking over to Kalif's desk. He smiled with his lips closed to avoid giving me a view of his chewed taco and pulled out a chair for me. Once he swallowed, he motioned to his wrap. "You want half?"

"Nah," I said. "I'm not a big fan of salmonella."

Jazz raised her taco wrap as if making a toast. "To strong immune systems," she said.

Kalif raised his in return. "To chills, fevers, and stomach cramps."

"Wuss," Jazz said, and she turned back to her computer.

I sat down on Kalif's desk and put my feet on the chair he had pulled out. "Get this," I said. "The Carmines are meeting with some police officer upstairs."

Kalif raised his eyebrows at me, giving me a more intense look than I would have liked for the information I'd just delivered. This was not the moment to break character. Which he obviously knew, because he immediately played it off as concern.

"Do you think they're in trouble?"

"I don't know," I said. "But what I wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall in that room right now."

Kalif nodded, like he was agreeing with me, and I hoped beneath the veneer of calm he was understanding what I needed him to do.

"Eh," Jazz said. "It's probably just Wanda trying to prosecute again."

"Maybe," I said. Though it had only just now occurred to me to wonder if Wanda was actually suing, or if she'd been another shifter in persona who'd needed to conveniently disappear, and they'd used the court case as a cover to explain away some other trouble to their non-shifter employees.

I had thought it sounded like something I would make up.

Kalif shrugged and pretended to dismiss it, though I was sure all alarms were firing the minute I'd mentioned the police officer. "If you're not going to eat truck tacos, are you going out for lunch?"

I shrugged. "I was thinking about it."

"You should take my car when you go," he said, handing me the keys. "Would you put some gas in it? I might be working late tonight and I'm worried the station down the street will be closed. I really don't want to have to drive all the way to the freeway to fill up at one AM."

I took his keys and made a fake pouting face. "You're going to work until one?"

He rolled his eyes. "One of our white hats found a weakness in our security. I have to stay until I get it patched up."

Jazz finished her wrap and tossed the paper toward the garbage. She missed. "And I can't stay past eight tonight, so your lover boy offered to cover for me."

"Technically, you said you wouldn't stay," Kalif said. "And technically it is my job to do it."

"I have a hot date," Jazz said. "Sue me."

"Yeah, well," Kalif said, "forgive me for hoping it flops. And if it does, you better—"

"Snivel, snivel," Jazz said. "I'll come back."

I shifted my stomach, tightening the muscles until it growled. "All right, I'm going to lunch. And I'll get your gas. Cause I love you or something."

Kalif stood and kissed me, and I let myself wrap my arms around him and hold him tight.

This was better. Things were getting better.

Now I had to get out of here and find out why exactly he wanted me to go to lunch and take his car.

I was in the middle of filling up at the gas station when a phone rang in the glove compartment. I pulled it out—a pristine, unmarked burner.

When I opened the phone, all I found was a text message with a link.

I clicked it and a video opened—a black and white, slightly grainy image of the Carmines sitting across the conference table from Officer Lee.

If Kalif had been there I would have kissed him. A lot. But since he wasn't I just finished filling up and sat in the car, watching the video.

It wasn't long, just a two minute clip of what must have been a longer meeting. But, by some technical miracle, Kalif had managed to send it to me, hopefully untracked, and with the sound.

"I'm not here to arrest anyone," Lee was saying. "One of the witnesses in the CareWare case mentioned that you might have been friends with the suspect. Dennis Finkman?"

Oliver and Wendy looked at each other. "The name is familiar," Oliver said, "but I'd say friends is a stretch. Do you remember him?"

"Mmm," Wendy said, "I think we met him at a benefit. Friends of the Wetlands, was it? Or Stamp out Hunger?"

Oliver shrugged one shoulder. "Could have been either."

Lee pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase and held it out to Oliver. "Take a good look at this picture, please," he said. "It might help your memory."

I couldn't see the picture in the video, but I could see when Oliver took it and looked it over. "Ah, yes," he said, handing it back to Lee. "Make a Wish. Last year, maybe the year before. I remember he wanted to look into having us consult for his company, but we had to turn it down. We're simply too busy."

Lee held the paper out to Wendy. "Is that right?"

Wendy nodded. "Yes, I remember now."

The clip went on, with Lee asking a few more questions. Even in the grainy image, I could tell by his expression that he wasn't here hoping for a confession. Instead, he was feeling them out, trying to decide if they were lying to him.

The tape skipped forward, and they were all standing at the door. "Funny thing," Lee said. "Dennis Finkman disappeared a couple months back."

Oliver's eyes widened. "I hope he's all right. He seemed like a nice enough man, didn't he?"

Wendy nodded.

"Yeah," Lee said. "We're worried he may be unstable. Before he disappeared, he was heard babbling something about people who can change their faces."

I recognized the look on Oliver's face, then. It was the locked-down stone face I used when I didn't want to betray my emotions.

Lee waited for a beat, and then he laughed. "Crazy, huh? I hope for his sake it was just a story and not a full mental breakdown." He shrugged, and walked out of the office, not looking back at Wendy and Oliver.

They looked at each other, but didn't say a word. They wouldn't—not here. Like Kalif and I, they would discuss sensitive things away from the prying eyes of security.

But I couldn't help but feel that for the game we were playing, time had just run out.

We were rapidly headed into sudden death overtime.

Twenty

When I returned to work, Oliver was back in his office with the door open.

"Jory," Oliver's voice boomed.

Before I got a hold of myself, I jumped.

Oliver stood in his doorway, filling the frame. He didn't lean—Oliver never leaned. He stood straight with his shoulders back, like a gorilla puffing out his chest. I'd never seen a more intimidating silhouette.

He knew. I was sure that he knew I had something to do with Lee's sudden appearance. He stepped back into his office, leaving the door open for me. Every instinct told me to run, but if I did, I'd be forfeiting my chance to talk my way out of this. There was every possibility that Oliver just wanted to give me a new job: tail the nosy cop; find out what he knows.

I walked into the office at a businesslike clip.

Oliver shut the door behind me and that click sounded like the slamming of a cell.

"Jory," he said, "how's that special project going?"

The room seemed to dim.

"It's slow going," I said. "Tracking an asset like that isn't easy. I've been working the address angle—trying to find out if he forwarded his mail, or paid his rent from a bank account, or used any kind of stolen numbers to set up utilities that he might have used again at the next place he lived."

Oliver looked unimpressed. "You're counting on him to be sloppy."

I shook my head. "No. But there's no sense in breaking out the big guns if the guy made mistakes for me to follow. I haven't traced a person yet who didn't make one mistake or another." Kalif and I had certainly made our share since we'd been working together. Not the least of all today.

Oliver nodded his approval. "Why work hard when you can work smart," he said. "I've always liked that philosophy."

"Yes," I said. "But I've found that hard and smart tends to get the job done."

Oliver gave me a pleased smile, and I resisted the urge to breathe a sigh of relief. He moved toward the door, and I expected him to open it to let me go.

But instead he stood in front of it.

"I'd be more impressed of course," he said, "if I didn't know you were only pretending to look for Hunter to buy you time."

The room began to spin around me. He'd never used Damon's forum handle with me, and he had to be letting that slip now to startle me, to get me to crack. But maybe Oliver didn't know. Maybe he only suspected.

I locked down every muscle, refusing to grip the edge of the desk, to allow my skin to blanch, heaven forbid to vomit over the top of Oliver's desk. I'd recognized it when Oliver locked down his face in front of Lee. No doubt if I could see it, he could, too.

Instead, I contorted my face into a look of genuine hurt. "Why would you think that?" Then I let myself look confused. "And who's Hunter? Did you find more information on him?"

Oliver glowered down at me. He was tall, like Lee's boss, but I couldn't help but think that at this moment, he'd added a few inches to his height and some extra bulk to his frame.

He didn't need to. I was already terrified of him.

"Have you ever had a puppy?" he asked.

I blinked at the non-sequitur. "I—" I said, "We—"

But Oliver charged ahead as if the question had been rhetorical. "The key to training a puppy is to be consistent with your discipline. When the dog steps out of line, the consequences must be swift, or the animal won't make the connection. The wretch will never learn."

I failed to hang onto my composure, then; a tremor shook my hands at the wrists. I tried to lock them down; I tried to stop all motion, but I couldn't. They shook, and I saw Oliver's gaze flick down. He noticed. He knew that his tactics were working.

"I'm not here to play games with you," Oliver said. "You're good, Jory. Very good. Bring Hunter in, and I'll forgive the indiscretion. Carry on this charade—"

He held up his hands, like he was helpless to change the course of my fate. "—and I'll have to be swift with the consequences."

Oliver gave me the sad smile of a disappointed parent who hopes for change, but doesn't expect it. And then he opened the door again and held it for me, letting me out.

He was letting me go. I should be bound for the torture basement, but instead he was giving me another chance to do the right thing. I couldn't imagine why he would do that—

—unless he was telling the truth. He wanted me working for him. He'd made allowances for me since I first arrived, forgiving me for breaking out my parents, for running from them, for sheltering my mother. There had to be a reason for it, and there was only one reason I knew Oliver Carmine to make allowances for people.

He respected me, and he still had hope he could bring me around. The latter gave me an opening I knew I couldn't waste.

And the former was a sign that I might be able to pull this con off, after all.

My heart beat in my throat as I walked out the door. The roof was falling in on me. I'd run out of time. I wasn't ready. We weren't ready. I could hand them Damon to buy myself time—he might even volunteer if I explained the situation—but I wasn't close enough to penning them in yet to make that kind of a dangerous move.

I needed Kalif's part, and he'd told me he was almost ready, but not quite.

Had that changed?

I returned to my office to collect myself and put my forehead on the desk, letting my breath cloud the polished surface.

Ready or not, it was time to set things in motion.

The first thing I did was head down to the IT office to see Kalif again. Jazz was out, though it wasn't time for her to leave for her date yet—not that it mattered. Everything I said would be caught on camera, and this time I could be perfectly certain that the Carmines were listening.

I could go on hoping that they didn't know I was in contact with Damon, but the chances were so slim. They hadn't called my bluff like that with Aida, or my mom, both of whom they might also suspect me of colluding with. I could take that gamble, but the odds were against me.

So instead I had to play my cards now, assuming they were on to me. Tell a lie they could believe—that was the only way to buy myself time.

Even then, I might only get a few hours, so I'd have to make it count.

"Hey," I said, sitting down on his desk next to the computer and offering him my hand. After we traded signals, he leaned back in his chair.

"Got any more gossip?" he asked.

"I wish," I said. I made a show of looking around to make sure no one else was listening. "I'm going to have to turn in Hunter."

Kalif's eyes widened. He knew exactly who I was talking about. "What?"

I nodded. Kalif was smart enough to know that what I said in front of the cameras was all for the Carmines. He might assume that I was going to do the opposite of what I said, but the truth was, I didn't know what I was going to do about Damon.

I only knew there were two important things I needed to communicate to Kalif first.

"Can you come with me?" I asked.

Kalif hesitated, as if considering whether this was an actual question, or part of the code. He shook his head, and made the right call. "I can't. Remember? Jazz is gone tonight—"

I nodded. "I get that you're busy. This is what I hate about your job. It takes so long."

He smiled at me. Anyone else might have thought it was an easy smile, but I could see the alarm in his eyes.

He got the message. I needed it done. Now.

"If it gets to be too much, you should ditch," I said. "If Jazz can spare time for her hot date, you can sure as hell get out of here, too."

Kalif nodded. "I'll remember that."

I smiled. "Your girlfriend needs you, too, occasionally," I said. "If you can't bounce tonight, can we at least do something fun tomorrow?"

And Kalif stood from his chair and kissed me on the mouth. "Yes," he said. "Of course."

And I knew he understood exactly what I was trying to say. Time was running out. He needed to get out of here, soon, if he could. At most, we had one more day to finish the con.

Kalif reached up and brushed my hair behind my ear. "You're so beautiful," he said. "Like a girl in a painting."

I kissed him far more aggressively than was appropriate for office affection. I knew he meant something else by that comment. He, too, was trying to tell me what to do next. And while I wasn't sure exactly what he meant, I couldn't ask him to clarify without drawing attention to it.

"Good luck," I said, reaching down and squeezing his hand.

And then I left the Systems Development building for what I thought might be the very last time.

When I walked up to the apartment where Damon was staying, I still wasn't sure what I was going to do. I wasn't sure what my parents would have done in my place. I wasn't sure what Kalif would have told me to do if he could have been forthright.

What I was sure of was that this was my decision, and that whatever I chose was going to change everything.

I found Damon sitting at the kitchen table, leaning back in the lone chair, his boots propped up next to a bowl of nuts. He had a pocketknife in his hand, and was using the various attachments to crack the nuts open.

He looked up at me, nodded, and went back to twirling his corkscrew into an almond.

"That doesn't look very efficient," I said.

Damon didn't take his eye off the nut. He kept turning the pocket knife round and round until the sides of the nut disintegrated, and he was able to squeeze the thing open with his fingers.

"Ha," he said. "Victory." He pulled the mangled almond meat out of the shell and popped it into his mouth. Then he flipped down the corkscrew and pulled out the can opener.

I leaned my hip against the doorway. "The knife blade got too easy?"

He tipped the kitchen chair onto its back legs and rocked precariously. "I'm willing to bet you're not here in the middle of the damn day to discuss my nut cracking habits."

Unfortunately true. I'd gone to a movie in the middle of the day, so Oliver couldn't tail me to where Damon was staying. I hoped he didn't already know where that was.

But I wasn't betting on it.

"I need you to do something for me," I said.

"Sure," Damon said.

"Sure?" I said. It came out sharper than I'd meant it to. "I haven't even told you what it is."

Damon cocked a smile. "Chickadee," he said, "you never tell me what you're up to. Hasn't stopped me before."

My voice rose, and even with all my vocal training, I couldn't bring it back under control. "What is wrong with you?" I asked. "You don't have to be here, you know."

Damon's face hardened. I thought he was going to yell back at me, but his voice came out quiet and low. "What happened?"

I knew why I couldn't keep from raising my voice. I didn't want to. I couldn't yell at Oliver. I couldn't yell at Wendy. I couldn't yell at my mother, or Aida. Thanks to our fishbowl, I couldn't even yell at Kalif.

My breathing grew shallow. "I work for psychopaths, that's what happened. And you! You just wander along in the dark like you trust me. You're part of it, aren't you? You're ratting me out. Why else would you just sit here waiting for me? They've probably asked you to turn me in, too. They're going to kill one of us and adopt the other. What is wrong with us that we're playing their game?"

The corners of Damon's eyes crinkled. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "But it doesn't sound good."

He watched me, waiting for me to explain.

But a deep ache rumbled in my gut. And that's when I knew that I wasn't going to ask him to turn himself in for me, not because I was afraid he wouldn't do it, but because I was afraid that he would.

"Go," I said.

Damon looked confused. "You haven't told me where you need me to go yet."

I closed my eyes. "You can't tell me where you're going," I said. "You just have to get out of here. Make sure I can't follow you."

Damon's eyes fixed on me. "They asked you to turn me in."

I nodded. I should have made him mad first, so he wouldn't feel any loyalty to me. That's what I should have thought of before I walked in here—some small betrayal that would piss him off. If he insisted on staying, I wouldn't have the will to make him go. I didn't want him to.

I couldn't talk to Kalif, not with things the way they were. And so once Damon left, I was alone.

Damon kicked his legs down from the table, knocking over his bowl full of nuts. A walnut rolled to the edge of the table and fell onto the warped linoleum. Damon didn't look down at it.

Instead he walked to the counter, where he'd left his phone. He plugged it into the speakers by the sink, cranking some of his noisy music all the way up. Then he walked evenly to the doorway and loomed over me. He ducked his face close to my ear, shielding his mouth from anyone who might be watching. His voice was so quiet, no bug could have picked him up over the music. "Cloud nine," he said.

I looked up at him, and his dark eyes stared down into mine. For once, his face was serious. "What?"

"It's a bar in Fiji," he said. "Look it up—you'll find it. I'll meet you there, six months from the day we met. No, the minute we met. You remember, right?"

I gave a nod so small it was almost imperceptible.

Damon's face darkened. "If you're not there, I'll hold you a funeral."

I could barely breathe. "I might not be dead," I said. "There could be other reasons why I might not come."

Damon shook his head sadly. "If you don't show, then I'll never see you again, right? So as far as I'm concerned, you will be."

Damon's hands dropped to my waist, and he gave me one last look, as if memorizing my face—even though he had to know it wasn't mine. And then he pushed me back, moving me out of his way. When he let go, he walked out the door, taking nothing with him but the clothes on his back. I was sure even those wouldn't last more than a couple of blocks.

The door banged shut behind him, and I leaned against the door frame, fighting for breath. And that's when I knew.

I loved Damon, in a different way than I loved Kalif. I loved him for the way that he stuck by me, even though he could never know for certain that I wouldn't betray him. I loved him for the way he charged through life like he wasn't afraid of anything, even though underneath it all, I knew that he was. I didn't know what he wanted from me. We'd never had that conversation. But I knew what I wanted from him.

I hoped I'd meet him in that bar in Fiji. I hoped Kalif would be there with me. I hoped that in our next life—with new personas and new covers and a whole lot more freedom—the three of us would be friends. We'd work together, or maybe just meet up a few times a year for vacation. My parents wouldn't be around to worry about the ostentation. Damon, Kalif, and me. I could see us there, in the bar in Fiji. Hell, I could almost taste it.

I shook my head, trying to clear the thought. Kalif would probably hate it. Damon might not be thrilled about it either. It all felt so far off that it might as well have been my next lifetime. But today, none of that mattered. If I screwed up what I had to do next, we wouldn't have that future.

We wouldn't have any future at all.

Twenty-one

The first thing I did after I left Damon's apartment was text Kalif.

Hey, I wrote. I know you're in the middle of a project, but your needy girlfriend can't wait anymore. See a movie with me tonight. I need you.

I shoved my phone in my pocket and walked the three blocks to the Laundromat. On the way, I checked my phone to make sure it was set to vibrate.

It was. But Kalif didn't answer.

From a different phone, I dialed the line for the security office. Jazz answered.

"Yo," she said.

"Yo?" I asked. "That's how you answer the office phone?"

"Huh," she said. "Thought this was Kalif. No one calls this number but people who work here."

I swallowed. "Kalif's not there?"

"No," she said. "And he's supposed to be back so I can leave. I'm guessing he's not with you?"

Hairs rose on my neck and arms. "Nope," I said. "I figured he was there."

Jazz snorted. "Well, when you find his lazy ass, tell him to drag it in here before I kick it to the curb."

"Done," I said. Then I hung up the phone, walked to the nearest dumpster, dropped it in, and started to walk briskly in the opposite direction.

I tried to think. Kalif could be at the apartment, but we didn't have a direct line there.

My phone buzzed. Kalif, responding to my text. I opened it and froze mid-stride.

Jory, it said. We have Kalif in the basement. Come back immediately. Don't keep him waiting.

The world around me tunneled—I could see nothing but the screen in my hand. The words turned to gibberish, just symbols against the light. They couldn't mean what I thought they meant.

They had him in the basement. Had they already cut on Kalif like they did my mother?

I had to help him, but the basement was locked with retinal scanners, and I didn't have the current codes. Why didn't I have the codes? Why weren't we better prepared for this?

I leaned against the stucco wall next to the Dumpster. Damon was gone. Kalif was captured. I was the only one left.

It was up to me to finish the job. If I did it quickly enough, Kalif would still be alive.

If not, everything we'd worked for would be for nothing.

I might not be prepared, but I was sure as hell going to try.

My only hope for finishing the job lay with Officer Lee. I'd spent too long working this one angle to abandon it for a new one. He was my only hope at sequestering the Carmines and getting them off of my tail—for good.

The first thing I did was change my clothes again. I paid in cash at a local boutique for a draping dress and scarf that fit the style of Finkman's mistress. I put on her wavy hair, letting it hang like a curtain over my face, and placed a call to Lee's office.

If he wasn't ready to spring, I had to make him be.

"Lee," he said when he answered.

"This is Charlise," I said. "Can you meet?"

He paused. "Now?"

"Outside the Costco on Lawrence," I said. "Fifteen minutes." That would be public—very public. I wasn't far from Damon's place. I could take his car. He was probably in the process of procuring another right now.

I cursed myself for sending him away. But it had been the right thing, hadn't it?

If I didn't make it to Cloud Nine, I hoped he had a drink for me.

"All right," Lee said. "See you there."

I didn't tell him to come alone—hopefully that was implied, and insisting would only arouse more suspicion.

Besides, if he wanted to show up with a full SWAT team and a helicopter, I couldn't stop him.

I went back for Damon's car, and walked back into his empty apartment, where music was still blaring from his phone. My chest squeezed, knowing he'd never be back here, but I found his keys in a pair of pants and drove the car to Costco. When I arrived, I spotted Lee's car toward the back of the lot and found him sitting in the front seat, sipping a cup of Starbucks coffee. I pulled into the spot next to him, and he reached across and opened his passenger door, then beckoned me over. I didn't particularly want to get in the car with him, but it would be easier to escape from his car than it would be to evict him from mine.

This was my last chance to convince him to go after the Carmines, and I had very little evidence without the work Kalif had done. I was pushing this forward on a prayer, now.

I didn't have any other choice.

I got out of my car and took a cursory look around the parking lot. There were a few other people sitting in cars—a dad with a two-year-old girl on his lap in the driver's seat, an unlikely candidate for backup, and a woman across the parking lot reading GQ magazine.

She might be a cop, but even if she wasn't, I couldn't be sure Lee didn't have backup waiting somewhere out of sight.

I closed the door to Damon's car and climbed into Lee's, closing the door behind me. I should be safe to open it again, because I'd seen him do it from the inside.

"Charlise," he said. "How can I help you?"

I took a deep breath. "You can tell me you're ready to arrest the people who are terrorizing me."

Lee sighed. "I don't suppose you have any evidence that will hold up in front of a judge."

Tears threatened the corners of my eyes, and they didn't feel out of character, so I let some of them go. "Isn't that your job?"

"My job is to find out the truth. Are you ready to be straight with me?"

I looked sideways at him. "What do you mean?"

Lee sighed. "Tell me: what's your grudge against Wendy and Oliver Carmine?"

My throat closed. Of course that's what he would assume. He knew I was setting them up.

"No answer? The way I look at it, something very strange is going on here. And from where I sit, it looks a lot like you're trying to frame Wendy and Oliver Carmine for it. I did some digging; their company Systems Development contracted some code from Dennis while he worked at Raysoft years ago. That's the only connection I could find between the two of you." He looked me right in the eye. "So I ask you again, what's your grudge against Wendy and Oliver Carmine?"

My mind spun.

They tortured my mother.

They killed my father.

They sent their son-in-law after me hoping he'd kill me.

They had my boyfriend in their torture basement, and might be cutting on him as we spoke.

I let the tears well up enough that Lee could see them, but then narrowed my ducts and flushed the fluid from beneath my eyes before they could really start to flow.

And damn, did they ever want to.

"If these Carmine people are the creatures that are haunting me," I said, "then they ruined my life. You can't let them get away with it."

"How did you do it?" Lee asked. "Send people to my house with my face? I know you can do a lot with latex and makeup, but the faces looked so real."

The car seemed to crush in around me, like it was being rolled over by an enormous truck. This was why I didn't wing things. This was why I always carefully prepared.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "All I know is that these things that are after me are real, and they're dangerous. You don't think they'll do this to someone else? You don't think they already are?"

Lee put his head in his hands. "Look," he said. "Even if I believed you, I'm bound by the law, you understand? And to make an arrest I need a warrant. To get a warrant I need evidence that will convince a judge. And I don't have that."

I looked at him. It was true. He had no hard evidence, because I'd been playing at lies that echoed the truth. Sometimes, as people who didn't exist, it was the best we could do.

What I had to say to him didn't feel like a con. It didn't feel like a lie, or an act. This time—though I was using one of a billion fake voices—I could be completely, and totally honest.

"You can't give up," I said.

"All right," Lee said. "Then the next course of action is for you to come with me to my office and submit to a polygraph."

I put my hand on the door handle. A polygraph would be a drop in the bucket when I needed a tidal wave. Lee's own hand moved closer, resting on the gear shift, but he didn't reach to restrain me. Not yet.

He needed a warrant to arrest me, like he said. But he could hold me for twenty-four hours without booking me.

An entire day for the Carmines to do whatever they wanted to Kalif.

"I can't do that," I said. "If you saw these people wear your face, then you know they can impersonate anyone, anywhere. They'll be able to get at me, even under police protection. You won't be able to protect me."

Lee watched me warily. He wasn't believing anything I was saying, although, that, too, was the honest truth.

"Besides," I said, "what would it accomplish? You said yourself you can't get a warrant with just what I know."

"There's already a warrant for your arrest," Lee said. "For evading the law, and for the CareWare embezzlement."

I couldn't breathe. This would be the absolute worst time to get arrested. I'd escape, but it would take time. Maybe a lot of it.

I couldn't leave Kalif there to die.

"But do you even believe that I did it?" I asked.

Lee's face betrayed nothing. "Do you have any evidence to show that you didn't?" he asked. "That doesn't require a judge and jury to believe in magic?"

I drew a deep breath. I didn't know if Kalif had finished his part of the job. If he had, I wasn't sure I could figure out where to access the information he'd gained. But I had to leverage something.

All of it required him to believe in shifting, of course. Not because I was lying, but because that part was the truth.

Kalif had the information. He was almost done. If I could just find it—"Dennis has more evidence," I said. "I don't know what it is exactly—some information his private investigator found. But I can get it to you."

Lee stared at me for a long moment, and then he nodded. His face was resigned, that of a man who was hoping this last piece of evidence would give him what he needed to solve the puzzle—to arrest someone, at last.

Probably me.

"I'll look at anything you have," he said, "but I can't make any guarantees."

"I'll get it to you," I said. "Today."

Lee paused, and then reached for his pocket. I startled and opened the door, but he only pulled out a card, and then took the pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled something on the back. "This is my personal number," he said. "When you get your evidence, call me and we'll arrange something."

When I reached for the card, I had to shift my face muscles to keep them from crumbling. "Thank you," I said.

And then I climbed out of the car before I could completely lose my composure.

When I got back behind the wheel, my hands trembled.

I'd been working this con for weeks, but now I was out of time.

And the worst part was, I should have evidence. Enough to keep the police busy investigating the Carmines for years, plus enough to keep them locked away while they did it.

But I didn't know how to find it.

Not without Kalif.

Twenty-two

As I drove away from Costco in my long, flowing dress, it felt like the sort of thing I might wear to a funeral.

Possibly my own.

Think, I told myself. In theory, Kalif had spent the last several weeks combing through the Carmines' records, cataloging the Carmines' real crimes, but thanks to our plan of secrecy, I had no idea where he stored it.

Even if I knew, I doubted I could access it without him. Information like that would be protected by his very best encryption, and buried in some cloud storage, or even hidden on someone else's server without their knowledge. Maybe several someone else's, in several pieces.

Kalif was good. There was no way someone like me would be able to follow his tracks.

Unless he wanted me to.

I ground my nails into my palms. I had to believe that he'd left me a clue. I had to believe I could follow it. I'd gone around acting like I was some super spy, instead of the terrified child that I was.

Now I had to be that spy.

And then I remembered what he'd said last time I'd seen him. You're beautiful. Like a girl in a painting.

That painting in our apartment, the one that he'd mentioned a few times in passing. The one of the girl with the distorted features.

Could that have been what he was talking about?

Would he have left information there, when he knew it could be tortured out of me? If there was one thing Kalif could be counted on to do, it was to back up his work.

I just had to find it before it was too late.

The first problem, of course, was that I couldn't go back to the apartment. I was certain the Carmines would be watching it, if not lying in wait there themselves. It was illogical to think that they spent all day staring at those cameras—usually they'd probably been reviewing the tapes. But today they'd threatened me. And no persona in the world was going to convince them that the person walking through those doors and tearing through the house for clues wasn't me.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I parked around the corner from the apartment. I moved through the alleys of the neighboring complex, approaching from the back side. And when I got to the transformer box at the back of the parking lot, I busted the lock open and cut the power.

I didn't really know what I was doing, so I might have been a little overzealous with my throwing of switches. Around me, lights went out in all of the apartment complexes on this section of the block.

A lot of people were about to call their power companies about the outage, but without power, the Carmines' cameras couldn't record. Their transmission feeds couldn't relay data. Without light, they couldn't see me enter.

But in case they had back-up batteries and infrared I had to get in and out.

Fast.

I climbed through the bedroom window in my home face. No point in hiding—anyone the Carmines saw ransacking the place they would assume to be me. I ran through the apartment, tossing pieces of clothing from the wardrobe onto every surface I suspected might contain a camera. I wrapped a pair of leggings over the base of the ceiling fan and draped a Hawaiian shirt over the clock. I'd blinded them, then, even if the power came back on.

They were probably already on their way, of course. But with that done, I pulled the picture off the wall. There, tucked into the bottom of the broken frame, was a mini-SD card—a tiny, tiny piece of hardware no larger than my thumbnail. Kalif had said he'd broken the frame; he must have knocked it from the wall on purpose to give himself a chance to hide the chip there without arousing suspicion. I picked it out of the frame and was back out the window before the lights came back to life.

But when I hopped down onto the concrete, I saw someone standing on the far side of the apartment, leaning against the driver's side door of my car. Someone wearing Damon's face.

Someone waiting for me. Staring at me, as I climbed out the window.

I tucked the SD card against my palm, careful to neither drop it or smash it.

And I turned and ran in the opposite direction.

The first day we'd moved here, I'd scoped out the area for effective escape routes. The Carmines had carefully selected an apartment that was surrounded by other complexes and boxed in by major streets—no parks or drainage ditches through which to escape. But I had found one thing—a pedestrian tunnel under one of the major streets that led into an adjoining neighborhood. It was small and tucked back behind a tool shed, so it had taken some looking to find.

The Carmines might know about it, but with any luck, they didn't know I did.

I moved through the buildings, all the while hearing Damon's voice behind me.

"Chickadee," he called. "Damn it, it's me!"

Oliver had to think I was stupid. He'd told me that he knew about Damon. Did he think I would fall for that now?

The boots behind me—which, in a nice touch, did sound like Damon's favorite heavy ones—pounded closer.

I raced down a back alley toward the tool shed, climbing over a riding lawn mower and sprinting through the open fence gate and into the tunnel beyond. I expanded my lungs for increased oxygen, enlarged my muscles to push myself to run faster.

But the person after me could do all those things, and probably had more practice. He caught me with the full force of Damon's form and shoved me up against the tunnel wall.

"Damn it, Chickadee," Damon said in my ear. "It's me." He grabbed my hand and forced it into his.

And then passed me the first part of our signal.

I groaned, my shoulder aching where it had hit the wall. But I responded with my half, and we passed the rest of the signs.

That couldn't be right. He'd left; he shouldn't be here. "Damon," I said. "What the hell are you—"

"I came back," Damon said. "And I didn't know how to find you besides to watch your apartment."

"You waited here in your home face?" I asked.

"I wanted you to recognize me. So yes, I did, after I knocked out the two idiots watching your apartment and handcuffed them in their trunk."

I blinked at him. Damon had just saved my ass, big time. "Were they shifters?"

"Yes," he said. "Both of them."

I closed my eyes. I had no way to know how many of them there were. Hell, there could be fifty Oliver and Wendy Carmines for all I knew. I could have talked to a different one every day.

Focus, I thought. Kalif was in danger. And just like he'd told me about my parents long ago, I had to move forward as if there was still hope.

"Come on," I said, pulling Damon through the pedestrian tunnel. "We need to get moving. The Carmines might be torturing Kalif as we speak."

We ran three blocks until we came to a local park with a shady set of bathrooms behind some trees. I pulled Damon into the women's room without having him bother to change persona to fit in. I locked us in the handicap stall and sat down on the toilet tank with my feet on the seat.

Damon watched as I popped the back off of one of my phones and slipped in the mini SD card.

"What's on that?" Damon asked.

"I don't know," I said. "But we'd better hope it's something useful."

I shouldn't have doubted Kalif. The data capacity was enormous, and I recognized folders from our old server—the ones listing all the jobs our parents had done together, complete with three-sixties of the personas they'd used and all the data they'd stolen.

Other files were marked with dates and the term SD. Those would contain the data Kalif had stolen from Systems Development—all the information about their real crimes, hopefully including their corporate espionage and privacy violations.

There weren't as many of those as I would have liked, and the dates only went back two months. It was probably everything Kalif had when he left the card for me, but he must have kept looking.

At least it was a start.

What interested me most were two folders at the top, one labeled 001eyescans and the other labeled 001forJory.

I opened the eyescan folder first. Inside was a note from Kalif explaining that the Carmines had their basement retina scanners rotating images daily.

Kalif had broken the code, though, deconstructing the algorithm their program was using to determine which would be used on each day. He'd left me a schedule that went out three months, and, of course, the retina images.

I smiled.

"Anything good?" Damon asked.

"Yes," I said. "It's everything Kalif could do to help us."

He'd done his job, even if only partially, and that would be enough for me to turn over to Lee to give him ammunition for his investigation.

Except that now Lee suspected I was setting the Carmines up. Which I was. All of the data here would be circumstantial. I couldn't prove we hadn't made it up. I couldn't prove Wendy or Oliver were involved, even in the things they'd actually done. What I'd get from this data was not an arrest, but a prolonged investigation. If I was lucky, Lee might be ready to make his move within a month.

I couldn't leave Kalif for that long.

Holding my breath, I opened the folder addressed to me. Inside was a text file. A message. From Kalif.

Jory, it said. if you read this, you'll know what I know. If you're ready for that, scroll down.

Kalif had left a number of blank returns in the document, enough that the rest of the text was off the page. He'd honored my wishes not to know everything, but I still couldn't help but feel breathless as I scrolled down, looking for the rest of the message.

We didn't have time to mess around.

The letter continued.

First, I want to say that I love you. I know you. I know that if I'm still alive you won't give up on me.

But you should, Jory. If they've got me, don't come for me. The mission is too important. If you don't finish this, they'll destroy us all.

You have to go forward with the plan. Don't even think about abandoning it.

The other files are all zipped, so you can send them easily. They've all been made as clear as I can make them without arousing suspicion.

I know you can do this, with or without me. You've always been stronger than you think.

Love you. Love you love you.

Kalif

I stared at the screen, tears creeping into my eyes. This time, I let them, not because they fit with some persona, but because for this one moment, I wanted to let myself feel what I felt, and not what I thought it was useful to feel.

Damon stared at me, but I kept my focus on the words—maybe the last words I'd ever see from the guy I loved.

He could already be dead. More likely, he was still alive, but being cut on, tortured, made to give up our secrets. That was the risk I'd taken, wasn't it? That was why we'd kept the pieces of the plan so discrete. Because any one of us could be caught. Any one of us could be tortured. Any one of us could be held, made to give up what we knew, and then used against the others.

I couldn't imagine now how I'd ever thought that was an acceptable risk.

It hadn't been real to me. Even after what happened to my mother—it hadn't ever felt like something that was imminently going to happen. Maybe to me, but not to Kalif.

Never Kalif.

My throat closed up and the tears in my eyes welled over.

Here I was, working with Damon, when all I wanted to do was to be with Kalif—always and forever.

Damon came over and put a hand on my shoulder. He took the phone and read the text file, and I didn't stop him. I wanted him to see—wanted him to know what I had with Kalif, what I'd put in danger these last weeks playing stupid games.

What, for all I knew, I'd already lost to the Carmines' brutality.

I couldn't send Damon away. I knew that I needed him. But being with him, working with him—it felt wrong. It felt like a betrayal.

"Why?" I asked. "Why did you come back?"

Damon squeezed my shoulder, his fingers massaging the knots in my back. "Because, Chickadee. Your boyfriend's not the only one who loves you."

My body wracked with sobs, and I put my hands over my face.

But for once, I let myself cry.

Twenty-three

Damon knelt beside me. "Whoa, hey," he said. "It's okay."

I looked at him like he was a complete idiot. "It's not," I said. "They have Kalif. They're probably cutting on him right now, and Lee's still not ready to make an arrest." I flailed an arm in the air. "Why am I so bad at this?"

Damon sat down beside me and stretched an arm around me, leaning me against his chest. "Maybe because you're trying to do it alone."

I sniffled. He was probably right. "I had to," I said. "It wasn't safe otherwise."

Damon shook his head. "Chickadee, it wasn't safe anyway."

I dissolved against Damon's shoulder, which was yet another betrayal.

He was right, of course. I worked so hard to keep us safe, but in the end, nothing worked. "You shouldn't have come back," I said.

Damon shook his head. "I had to come back."

"What about Fiji?"

"Fiji made me feel like a bastard," he said. "Like I left you here just as things were getting hard."

He should have stayed gone. I couldn't lose Kalif and just fall into Damon's arms. I didn't want to. "I told you to go."

"Yeah. But if a kid tells you to do something, that doesn't make it the right thing to do."

"You have no idea what my real age is."

Damon gave me half a smile. "Chickadee," he said, "I think I've got a pretty good idea."

I stared at him. He'd called me a kid—but he couldn't think of me that way, could he? "I thought you said you loved me."

Damon looked more confused than ever. "Yeah," he said. "I don't know what it is about you. I haven't known you all that long, but I swear you feel like my kid sister."

My mouth filled with taffy and I struggled to talk against it. "You love me . . . like a sister."

Now Damon was looking at me like I was an idiot. And I had to admit, I felt like one.

"If you thought of me like a sister," I said, "why did you keep hitting on me?"

"Um," Damon said, "because your reaction was hilarious." He shifted defensively. "And we're not actually siblings."

"You hit on me like a thousand times! And I told you to stop, and you didn't! That's creepy."

"Yeah, okay," Damon said. "Maybe not my finest decision."

Obviously. "Okay," I said, my brain slowly computing. "So then why did you get all weird after we made out on the job?"

Damon rolled his eyes and stabbed a finger at me. "Because you got all weird. All of a sudden it was like the jokes weren't funny anymore. Plus, kissing you was messed up. Like, I'm not one to turn down something non-committal, but again. Little sister."

I closed my eyes. "And exactly how much older than me do you think you are?"

"Chickadee," Damon said. "Siblings is stretching it. I don't like to talk specifics. Don't want my subconscious to start realizing how old it should be. But I'm pretty sure I'm old enough to be your dad."

"Ew," I said. "So you're a dirty old man."

He shrugged, adopting Mick Gruger's voice and haphazard shrug. "I am what I am."

I leaned back on the tank and knocked my head against the wall. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to feel about this. Insulted? Almost certainly embarrassed.

But instead, I only felt relieved.

I cared about Damon. I liked him—I had since the first time we met. Like I'd once told Kalif, I didn't want to be with Damon, but I did want to have him in my life. I didn't think about kissing him; I didn't care if he never touched me again. But if something bad happened to him, I cared. If I never saw him again, I'd be sad about it. Really sad. As if—

"I think I love you like that, too," I said. "Like family."

Damon nodded like he wasn't sure why we were having this conversation. "That's good," he said. "Because you made it pretty clear you're in love with Kalif. And you are, right?"

"Yes," I said. "I am."

And that's when it occurred to me. This was what I wanted. Other people to lean on. Other people to care about. But no one ever so important to me as Kalif.

No one could ever eclipse him.

"I think," I said, "that I knew so little about making friends that I didn't even realize when it happened."

Damon laughed and slung his arm around me, squeezing my shoulders. "Yes, well. Welcome to friendship, Chickadee. The kind that's thicker than blood. I'm not going anywhere by choice."

"Me, either," I said. "And you'll help me get Kalif back."

"Yes," Damon said. "But you're going to have to give me a better idea of what we've got."

The tears welled up again. "Not much," I said. "Just what I told you. It's not enough to nail the Carmines. I thought things would go faster. I thought I'd have more time. I messed everything up, and now I don't know what to do."

Damon clicked his tongue. "I guess you should just leave him there, then."

I sat up straight. "What?"

Damon waved a dismissive hand at me. "Since you're so useless, I guess you should just leave him there."

I glared at him. "I understand that you're manipulating me. I'm not stupid."

That didn't faze Damon. "Well? Is it working?"

"Maybe," I said. "It's making me angry."

Damon shrugged. "Angry is an improvement over sulking."

I punched him in the shoulder—much harder than I ever hit Kalif.

"Ouch," Damon said. "Never mind. Sulk then."

I hit him again. "Maybe I should. What I have is a suspicious police officer, and a bunch of info that was supposed to convince him that the Carmines are criminals. But the only evidence he has to tie it to the Carmines' specifically is a couple of suspect sketches. And even if I had time to build on that, he'd probably only get more suspicious that I'm setting him up. Oh. And my boyfriend who's locked in a torture basement."

Oh. I climbed off the toilet.

There was more evidence, footage I'd been carefully collecting. I just hadn't expected to access it without Kalif's help.

I felt in my pocket for Lee's card. It was still there.

"What?" Damon asked. "I'll give you, that sounds bad."

"It is," I said. "But having a torture basement is definitely against the law. And it's physically there. In their building. Just waiting to incriminate them."

I'd intended it to be the last piece, the nail in the coffin, after the Carmines had been arrested.

But if I could get to it first, it would be more than enough to get Lee to act.

"You can tell Lee it's there," Damon said. "He can go find it and break out Kalif."

"No," I said. "He'll probably just think I'm setting him up. Even if he didn't, I'm not sure he could get a warrant on my word, and even if he could, the Carmines might divert him, and then hurt Kalif." More. If that was possible.

"All right," Damon said. "What do you propose then?"

"I have evidence," I said. "But I need to get in there to get it. I can send him pictures. He won't be able to ignore that."

Damon nodded. "That sounds solid, except for the part where we're walking into the Carmines' stronghold."

He didn't say the last part but I thought it: Again.

I'd expected to collect that evidence after the Carmines were arrested, to strengthen the case. Once I walked in there, weren't we all dead? Did I really have a chance to get to Kalif and keep us safe until I could send pictures to Lee?

My breath caught. I didn't even know the tears were back until I was choking on them. Damon gripped my shoulder again, anchoring me.

But the tide washed me out anyway.

"I couldn't even get my dad out of there alive when I had Kalif on my side," I said. "How the hell am I supposed to do this now?"

If Damon noticed that I'd basically said I'd prefer Kalif to him, he didn't mention it. "Jory," he said. "We can do this because we've still got you."

Then, from deep in the back of my mind, I heard her. The confident version of me, the one I had the hardest time impersonating. She grabbed me by the throat, and into my ear, she yelled, it isn't over yet.

I took deep breaths. I blinked through the tears.

It wasn't over until the Carmines executed us, every last one.

I still had Damon. I still had me. And he was right. I still had Officer Lee.

Together. Tonight.

We were going to take the Carmines down.

Twenty-four

We stopped at a discount clothing store to buy Damon a suit and me a nondescript women's pantsuit. There was no way I was going to go into that basement unnoticed, so it would be Damon's job to distract the Carmines and keep them occupied until I got to Kalif.

It wouldn't help with other shifters, but I didn't have time to procure a weapon. If they had other people in the building who could pass the eye scans, we'd just have to deal with that as we came to it.

We rented two separate cars, and Damon headed to Systems Development first, while I gave him a twenty minute lead parked behind a gas station two miles away. Damon was wearing the face of a high-profile client who had a habit of stopping by unannounced to check progress. The Carmines always attended to him personally, and I hoped this time would be no exception.

If it was, Damon was prepared to make demands. He was to get the Carmines in a conference room and keep them there for as long as possible, while I got into the basement, sent the pictures I needed, and hopefully got myself and Kalif out of there before the Carmines realized what was happening and descended on us.

This would all go a lot better if the Carmines had already installed the security cameras that arrived just a few days before. I didn't expect things to go that well, of course. But we couldn't afford any more planning time. I waited in my car, tapping my fingernails on the steering wheel as the minutes passed, each feeling like an hour.

And then, when time was up, I drove to Systems Development, forcing myself to obey the speed limit.

I wore the persona of a woman who worked in R&D on the third floor. Her name was Veronica, and I'd made a copy of her key card when I first came to work here. In some ways, I'd been prepared to break into the basement if necessary.

In other ways, there was no prepared.

Veronica walked with purpose, and so did I. I strode up to the side door nearest the maintenance door that led to the basement and scanned my key card. The door lock glowed green, and I pulled the door open.

So far, so good. My own door access would no doubt set off alarms, as would my face on the cameras. Veronica was probably in her office, so within a few minutes two of us would appear on the security cameras. But without a system alert, hopefully the Carmines, and the security team, would be too occupied with other things to notice. It would have been nice if I'd had Kalif to run Jazz and her people on a goose chase while I was at it, but I'd work with what I had.

I moved into the back hall, past the security office, which was empty. I wondered if Jazz had gone on her date even without Kalif's return.

If she had, then his disappearance was working in my favor for once.

I entered the door code, trying not to remember the last time I'd done this—with both my parents, just minutes before the death of my father, and consequentially my family.

Kalif is your family, I told myself. I wasn't just walking into a death trap. I was walking into a death trap containing him.

And he, above all, was worth it.

I snapped a magnet onto the door sensor as I stepped in, so the opening of the door wouldn't set off a flag in the system. Without Kalif to watch my back, I had no way to know if that worked and no one to cover my tracks if it didn't.

All the more reason I needed to get to Kalif. We worked so much better as a team.

I paused inside the door, using my phone screen for light, and reached up to the security camera mounted on the wall. The Carmines no longer retained the footage of what was happening in the basement, probably so I couldn't use it against them again. But their cameras were connected to their personal devices so they could view what was happening down here at a moment's notice—behind a massive firewall, of course. I pulled the camera down, breaking the mount, and tore open the plastic case.

There, wired inside to the circuit board, was a tiny device containing another mini SD card.

I smiled.

Macy had done exactly what I'd asked her to do.

I pulled out the SD card and popped the back off my phone. I loaded the card in, pocketing Kalif's card, the contents already uploaded to a cloud account.

I set this data to copy as well, and moved down the stairs, through the darkness, pulling up the retina scan diagram, all prepped and ready, and shifted my retinae to match. One by one, I entered the eye codes. One by one, the machine accepted them.

I got each of them right on the first try.

The lock clicked, and I pushed the door open, affixing a magnet to the sensor so the downstairs wouldn't fill with fog.

On the other side of the door was another camera, also containing a hidden SD card. These would have been installed when Macy infiltrated the factory, so the Carmines would have no reason to suspect that they'd been tampered with. I made it through the next doors without setting off any fog, or alarms that I could sense.

I smiled. I'd gotten better at this over these last months.

Take that, Carmines.

In the narrow basement halls I moved past the first few doors, collecting cards as I went, most particularly in the Carmines' wardrobe area, which was filled with rows of business suits and a rack that looked like an unsorted bin from the back room of a Good Will.

I set the footage to upload, one card at a time.

Now it was time to find Kalif.

I remembered the rooms my parents had been kept in, so I knew those were equipped for prisoners. I'd try them, first. I reached the door where my dad had been kept—searching through the files Kalif had sent me for something about the door codes, but not finding it. Instead, I knocked on the door. "Kalif?" I called.

"Jory?" he responded. I heard movement inside, like scuffling against the floor. "Jory! Can you get me out of here?"

"I don't have the door code," I said. "Is it in the information you gave me?"

"Yes," Kalif said, without missing a beat. "You'll have to search for it, though."

"Okay," I said. I selected the search function on my phone, opened the cloud account, and looked for anything containing the word door. There was a whole folder worth of door codes—conveniently marked by Kalif—and subfolders, helpfully labeled with which part of the building they went to.

I opened the one labeled basement and began entering codes. On the fifth one, the little light on the door turned green. I turned the handle and pushed open the door, clapping a magnet to this one as well to avoid the ensuing alarm.

Kalif sat on a metal cot, bound to bolts in the wall with thick cables and a formidable looking combination lock. He looked tired and weary, but not bloody or maimed.

I'd take it.

I moved cautiously up to Kalif, hand extended. This could be a trap—anyone could have been waiting in here wearing his face. He stood as far as he could, drawing the cables out taut, and took my hand.

We passed each other our signal completely.

I breathed a sigh of relief and closed the door behind me, cursing myself for not bringing wire cutters. Kalif collapsed back against the wall, and I noted bruises on his face, but no obvious cuts. I held up my phone. "I don't suppose the combination to that lock is in here?"

"No," Kalif said. "But I watched when they locked me in and I memorized it. I just didn't want to unlock it in case it wasn't really you." He spun the wheels on the combination lock, and it popped open.

I smiled. The team was back together—all three of us.

We were going to take these suckers down.

"Okay," I said. "But don't move yet. I need to take a few pictures, first."

Kalif raised an eyebrow. "I don't think this is really a photo opportunity."

"Here," I said, pulling up photos of Dennis and turning the camera to Kalif. "Turn into this guy. And trust me. This is going to work."

Kalif strained to see the pictures on my phone. "Let me see that?" he asked, holding out his hand.

I took a step closer, and Kalif reached for the phone with one hand.

And with the other, he pulled out a Taser from behind his back, and pressed it to my skin. A strong vibration ran up my arm, pain shooting through my joints as if the bones were physically knocking together. I tried to stay upright, tried to reach for the Taser, but the pain shot through my body until even my toes ached. I lost control of my limbs and fell to the floor.

Kalif stood over me, smiling.

"Nice try, Jory," he said.

Then he pressed the Taser to my collar bone, just below my neck.

And I was blinded to everything but the pain.

Twenty-five

When I regained feeling in my body, I was chained to the metal cot, and my skin stung where it had been pricked with the metal barbs. My arm ached, probably from the fall, and my hands were shaking.

Kalif stood across the room from me, typing something into a smart phone.

"You tortured him," I said. "You tricked him into giving up his signal."

Kalif smiled, and I recognized the expression, even with my thoughts fuzzy from the Taser.

"Jazz," I said. "You're a shifter."

Jazz's smile widened, and she shifted into her home face—or the face of the persona she used upstairs, whichever it was.

"Very good," Jazz said. "Too bad you're too late."

And while I knew I couldn't trust the answer, I had to ask. "Did you kill Kalif?"

"I didn't," Jazz said.

I bit my lip. "Did Wendy or Oliver?"

Jazz shrugged. "Couldn't tell you."

She was probably lying, of course. That would have been true no matter what she said.

I looked down at the lock. I'd watched her put in the combination, but she'd used that reasoning for Kalif. She'd be watching for it. There was no reason to hide it. I reached down and carefully manipulated the numbers.

Jazz looked up from her phone and held up her Taser. "Don't make me hurt you again," she said. "You can feel free to enter those numbers just as soon as I close the door."

There wasn't a scanner on the inside of the door, here. Once it was locked from the outside, I would be stuck.

I waited for her to look back at her phone. No doubt she was texting Wendy and Oliver to let them know that she had me in chains, which meant Damon was in serious trouble. If I got stuck in here and he was caught upstairs, there would be no one left to bail the rest of us out. If I had involved my mom, or Aida, things might have been different.

Like my team would have been imploding from within, instead of crumbing from pressure from without.

I went back to turning the dials.

Jazz shoved the phone in her pocket and took a step toward me. "Final warning," she said.

I moved my hand away from the dial, and she stared at me. I glanced down. One more number to enter.

I slipped my hand over and entered it.

Jazz leapt toward me with the Taser, but I pulled the lock free and jerked upward, hitting her in the wrist with it. The Taser fell to the ground, and I dropped to the floor and swung out with my legs, sweeping her feet out from under her. She cried out and fell to the floor beside me.

Before she could fully recover I grabbed the Taser, pressed it to the back of her neck, and fired. Jazz's body jolted, and while she'd lost control of her body I took the opportunity to loop the cables around her wrists, shut the lock, reclaim my phone, and snap several quick pictures of her, including the burns I'd just given her to the back of her neck.

Then I Tased her again, shifted into Charlise, wrapped the foot cables around my own legs, and did the same, making sure to include pictures of the burns she'd given me to my arm and my collar bone.

I hoped those wouldn't leave scars, but it wouldn't matter if I didn't get out of this alive.

With one more blast from the Taser, I backed away toward the door as she cried out and scrambled toward me, restrained by the cables. She'd be out of them in a moment, but she wouldn't be able to escape from the room—for a while at least.

"See ya," I said. And I stepped out the door and closed it behind me. I stood in the hallway, limbs still aching from the Taser, and sent those pictures straight to Lee's cell phone.

Help, I texted. This is Charlise. Went to get you that proof and things went wrong. Locked in the basement of Systems Development. Some kind of dungeon down here. Other prisoners, too. I hid my phone so far, but might lose it soon. Help, please. I have your evidence in a cloud account, but I think they're going to torture it out of me.

I made sure my phone was silent, but on vibrate, and shoved it in my pocket.

And I dearly hoped that Lee had his ringer on.

I opened the folder with the door code files, which Jazz must have anticipated would be in the information Kalif had sent to me. First I tried the door to the room where my mother had been cut on and tortured. There I found another person who looked like Kalif, stretched out on a similar metal cot, his hands chained beneath it so that his shoulders twisted at an odd angle. He wore a simple set of cotton scrubs, and his head was turned away from the door. My chest constricted as I walked in. He could be another decoy.

I didn't want to look at his face. What if it was already sunken and blank?

But I could see his chest rising and falling. He was breathing. He would still have a face, whatever shape he was in.

I stepped up to the cot, Taser at the ready. Besides his breath, he didn't move. He had dark circles around his eyes, and his face was streaked, whether from tears or from sweat, I couldn't tell. But they hadn't cut on him. They hadn't destroyed his ability to shift out of here.

Not yet.

Thinking he must be unconscious, I put a hand gently on his arm, bending over him.

Then his head shot up and bashed me in the skull.

I reeled, stepping back.

Kalif's body jerked, and he cried out, kicking with what mobility he had in his legs, fighting against his arms. His eyes looked at me, filled with fear and anger, and he fought against his bonds.

"No," he screamed. "No!"

I ducked down low, reaching under the cot for his hands. "Shh," I said, grabbing his hand in mine. His fingers fought against me, and my muscles ached trying to hold onto him. "It's me," I said. "It's me." I passed him the first part of our signal, but he just screamed at the ceiling.

Good thing the basement was soundproof.

I straightened, trying to look at him without getting my head bashed in again. "Kalif," I said. "I love you. It's me." I passed him the first part of the signal again.

His face crumpled, and he looked at the ceiling, refusing to meet my eyes. "You think that will fool me?" he asked. "You tricked it out of me. You bastards. Let me go and I will kill you."

I let go of his hand and straightened up. He stopped fighting me. I ran a hand gently down the side of his face. "It's me," I said. "Gear shifts and hamburgers. That night at the hotel after we found your dad's other family. Kissing behind the Metroplex. It's me."

Kalif's face contorted and his eyes welled. "She told you everything," he said. "Just like me. I tried not to, but . . ."

I put a hand on both his shoulders, steadying him. "It's okay," I said. "It's okay. That's why we didn't share information, right? Because we expected this." My hands shook. "I'm sorry it took me so long. I'm sorry I left you down here. I should have come right away, but—"

He turned to me, his face filled with malice. "You're. Not. HER."

That's when I broke down crying. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm so sorry. Jeez, Kalif, I'll get you out of here. You can knock me out. You can watch me sleep. I'll do anything, I swear. It's me. It's really me. Here." I thrust the Taser into his hands, waiting for him to grip it beneath the cot before pulling away. "You can shock me. You can smell me. You can ask me anything. It's me."

He sniffled, and his body lay still. His face hardened, and I expected him to refuse, to clam up and lie still and wait like I was going to torture it out of him. But instead, he looked at me, his eyes searching. "Tell me about that time we went to dinner."

I closed my eyes, staying close to him. I hoped he saw that I wasn't being careful. The Carmines would have stood back. They wouldn't have given him the chance. He could beat the hell out of me if he wanted to—hell, if he knocked me out, at least he'd have his proof.

"We had lobster," I said. "We went because you wanted to, because you just wanted to do something normal. But it wasn't normal. It wasn't us at all." I squeezed my eyes, trying to see it, trying to remember, even though the people in the memory didn't seem like us. Maybe us from a lifetime ago. Us from before.

I told him about the restaurant, about the way the napkins were folded. I told him about the old Victorian house, and how we'd been tucked up in a room on the second floor, overlooking the garden, that was beautiful even at night. I told him about what the server was wearing, and the way she kept interrupting us while we tried to talk about what we were going to do about our parents. I told him things he couldn't possibly know, like how I'd felt so inferior compared to him, how I'd worried that he was growing up faster than me, that he was going to leave me behind. When I couldn't think of anything else to tell him, I opened my eyes, worried that he'd be staring at me angrily, still not believing, furious that they'd tortured all that out of me.

But his face had softened. He still looked at me warily. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, but soft. "Jory?" he said.

I nodded, and a tear streamed down my cheek. I leaned our faces close together and kissed him gently on the lips. And despite his weakness, he kissed me back. When we broke apart, I could tell he was breathing in deep, smelling me.

I put my hand in his again, and this time he passed me a new signal—a different one. Half his palm shrunk while the other half grew, changing the feel of his hand in mine.

"We need a change," he said.

And while he was absolutely right, while I knew it was what we had to do, I still felt flames of rage that our original signal—the one we'd passed hundreds of times as an identification, as a comfort, as a sign that passed only between us—was one more thing the Carmines had taken from us.

His body relaxed. "It's really you," he said. "They were . . . they were wearing your face." He shuddered.

I felt sick. I should have expected that they would use my face against him while they tortured him. Now when Kalif looked at me, he'd have to remember them.

"Did they cut on you?" I asked.

He shook his head. "They did . . . other things." Kalif's body jolted, and he pulled against his restraints. "Do you have the keys?" he asked. "Where are they? They'll know you're here. They'll be coming."

I held him by the shoulders, easing him back down onto the cot. "Damon is distracting them," I said. With his fists if necessary, and by now it had probably come to that. "Hold still while I pick the lock."

I lay down under the cot and pulled out a lock pick, carefully listening for the soft clinks of the tumblers, the only other sound in the room the soft rise and fall of Kalif's breath.

He was alive. I was alive. We were back together and I was going to damn well make sure the Carmines never took that away from me again.

The lock clicked open, and Kalif sat up. I climbed out from beneath the cot. "I'm glad you can still shift," I said.

Kalif nodded. "I think they were planning to use me against you."

I looked him over. His limbs were shaking, like he'd been exposed to the cold, but the room was warm. They'd done something to him, something that didn't leave obvious marks.

"They did do this," he said, leaning forward. There, just below the base of his neck, were two red, angry marks—burned into his skin. They were larger than the ones on my arm—probably a result of being used over and over again.

I touched the area around them, keeping my fingers feather-light.

Kalif's voice was anxious. "Will it scar?"

The burns were worse than mine. "Probably," I said. "But they'll be easy to hide." Kalif was right. The Carmines had been careful not to mark him in places that would make him unable to work.

They'd intended to turn him into their frightened lap dog, like his mother.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out. It was a message from Lee, one line long.

On my way, it said.

I smiled. It would take Lee at least fifteen minutes to get here, maybe longer, if he was farther than his office. But now I didn't have to escape the basement. I didn't have to get away.

I checked the SD card that had just finished uploading, and inserted another. I just needed to stall them long enough for Lee to get here and witness what kinds of means the Carmines used to maintain their business.

"You have an extra phone?" Kalif said. "I can mess with the security system from here."

I handed it to him, and though his fingers shook, he went immediately to work. "Thanks for the information," I said. "I've already put it to use."

Kalif smiled. "I knew you'd figure it out. I told them where it was, but you must have gotten there first."

I pulled out my other cell, the new one with the number I'd given to Damon, and set a chip to upload in that one as well. Done, I texted to Damon. Bird is flying.

After a pause, Damon texted back. Stay where you are, he said. I'm on my way.

My skin went cold.

Damon shouldn't have been able to respond that fast—he should have been taking care of the Carmines. Even if he could text me sitting at the conference table with them, he shouldn't be on his way down here—not even if he'd already incapacitated them. And more than that, he shouldn't want me to stay where I was.

He shouldn't even know where I was.

I swore. "The Carmines have Damon," I said. "They're on their way down."

Kalif tried to stand but his knees buckled. I helped him back onto the cot. "You do what you can from here," I said. "I'll intercept them."

Kalif's hand tightened on my wrist. He didn't like it; he never liked me going into danger.

I kissed him on the cheek. "I love you," I said.

"I love you, too," he said. "Be safe." And then he went back to work on the phone.

I stepped to the door, adding another magnet over the door latch so that it wouldn't lock behind me. Kalif needed to be able to escape, in case I didn't make it.

And then I set out down the hall after Wendy and Oliver Carmine for what I hoped would be the very last time.

Twenty-six

I felt terrible, walking away from Kalif while he was in that state. I felt like I should never leave his side again, after what I'd allowed to happen to him. But I shook my head, correcting myself.

Kalif chose this. He knew what the risks were when he took this job with me, and he bore them.

Better than I did, most of the time.

As I moved down the corridor I put on Jazz's face. It might not buy me more than a few seconds, but at this point, every moment counted. I had her Taser out in my hand, which was plausible as well.

But it would only do me so much good when Wendy or Oliver brought a gun.

In my mind, I solidified the plan. I wouldn't set off the fog, because the Carmines might bring infrared goggles. I wouldn't trigger alarms in other parts of the basement, because while I might get them to chase me, I'd also be giving them a chance to get past me to Kalif, and to Jazz. I needed to buy us time—Lee was on his way, which meant I needed to stall for as long as possible. I moved quickly to the stairs, the one that would lead up to the landing with eye scanner. As far as we'd ever been able to tell, this was the only way in or out of the basement.

I waited behind the door, remembering the last time I'd done this, lying in wait in the Carmines' basement dungeon.

This time, I was in control.

The door lock clicked and the handle turned. As the door opened and Wendy stepped in, I held my phone out in front of me for light and charged at her, literally running into her and knocking her back against the door frame.

I forced my voice to sound like Jazz's, only breathless and desperate. "They're here," I said. "They're here and they're going to kill us all. They brought, they brought—"

Wendy grabbed me by the shoulders. "Slow down," she said.

But I didn't. "They brought a bomb," I said. "We have to get out of here before they blow the building."

Wendy looked stricken. She believed me. She believed that there might be a bomb, which should keep her away from Kalif, and possibly even evacuate the building in time for Lee's arrival and—

Wendy forced her hand into mine. She made the skin on her palm soft and wrinkly.

I'd done what I'd planned to do; I'd bought us seconds, but nothing more. All at once, the building went quiet around us. The floor lights went out, plunging us into darkness. No more fans, no more furnace, no more air filtration, no more humming fluorescents. Now the retinal scanners wouldn't work either. The only way in or out of the basement would be brute force.

No more power. Just quiet.

Thank you, Kalif.

I hit Wendy in the throat with the Taser. Her hand released mine as her body convulsed, and she gasped for breath. She fell back into the vestibule, and something hard and metallic clanged to the floor.

I felt for it and found a gun.

I Tased her again on the floor, retrieved the gun, then dragged her down the hall by the light of my phone and hit her with the Taser again each time she tried to struggle. The prongs burned her skin, leaving marks, but not as deep as the ones she—or Jazz or Oliver—had left on Kalif.

I didn't have time for that. Instead I dragged Wendy back to the room with Jazz. Jazz launched herself toward the door as it opened, but collided with Wendy as I shoved her in, and they both landed in a heap next to the cot.

I closed the door on them and left them to sort it out. It wouldn't hold them forever—Wendy probably knew a way out. But I didn't need forever. I just needed to buy us the precious minutes for Lee to arrive.

I looked at my phone. Ten, now. Maybe less.

I moved back toward the door to the stairs by the light of one phone, texting Kalif on my other one as I went.

You okay?

Safe for now, he responded. Got the lights.

Thanks, I said. Covering the entrance.

Be safe.

I couldn't make any promises about that, but I was going to try. And compared to what happened last time I descended into this basement, things were going beautifully. I moved back through the open door and waited at the closed lock to the first vestibule. There on the wall, I found a hasty patch on the wall where I'd once fired a gun and shot Kalif's father in the knee.

The Carmines hadn't brought any contractors down here to fix it; they'd done it themselves. I waited one breath, two.

And then I heard a noise on the other side of the wall, a grunting, and then the sound of fists on flesh.

A man swore.

I recognized the voice.

Damon.

A gun shot rang through the hall.

So much for going well.

I banged on the door, yelling Damon's name and jiggling the door handle. It was locked, of course—though the retinal scanner would be disabled because of the power. The door was steel core.

But I knew from experience that the wall beside it wasn't. After engaging the safety, I bashed the butt of the gun through the wall patch and tore at the sheet rock with both hands. The sound of fighting on the other side grew louder as I reduced the wall between us to bits, shrunk myself to a minimal size, and squeezed through the small opening.

I emerged on the other side to find myself facing two men, both of them wearing Damon's face. Not just his face, in fact, but his body, every taut and bulging muscle.

The light of my screen reflected in their eyes, and they both looked at me with perfect mirrors of Damon's concerned expression on their faces. One knelt on the ground, stripped down to a tank top and boxers. The sleeve of the shirt he'd been wearing had been forced into his mouth and knotted around his head as a gag, his hands tied behind his back with another strip of fabric that had likely come from Oliver's dress shirt.

My grip tightened on the gun. Standing over him was a carbon copy, wearing nothing but a different pair of boxers. Clothing littered the ground around them, pieces of the clothes Damon had been wearing when he left, and also one of Oliver's business suits.

The Damon who stood had a gun trained on the one on the ground, pointed right at his head.

I looked at the remaining things that they wore, but I didn't keep close tabs on Damon's underwear, and we'd changed separately. I had no idea which pair of boxers had been on him when he'd left for Systems Development in the rental car.

I raised my gun, and pointed it at both of them.

"Let Damon go," I said.

"Jory, it's me," the standing Damon said, adjusting his grip on the gun. "They got the best of me upstairs, and I didn't get a chance to make a move until we got down here."

The Damon on the ground's eyes widened and he shook his head. The side of his face was swelling like he'd taken a heavy blow, and he tried to stand, but the standing Damon stepped on his back, forcing him flat on the floor.

"Freeze, both of you," I said.

"Stop wasting time," standing Damon said. "You think this punk could beat me? Get Kalif. Let's get out of here." He lifted his foot to kick him again.

"Stop," I said. "Don't move. Don't touch him or I will shoot." I needed to check their hands, but I didn't want to get that close to Oliver—if it was Oliver—especially if he was the one with the drawn gun.

"Ungag him," I said. "Now."

"Jory," Damon said. "You have to trust me. Don't you remember?"

I nodded. The real Damon wouldn't expect me to think it was him based on trust, and never called me Jory, so I was reasonably certain he was Oliver. Though even his expressions were exactly like Damon's, more so than the one on the ground. I'd never seen Damon with a gun to his head before.

When it came down to it, it didn't matter which was which. I didn't need to figure this out. All I had to do was to stall for another five, maybe seven minutes.

And pray that before Lee arrived, no one got shot in the head.

Twenty-seven

I waved the gun at both the Damons, keeping my finger out of the action. "Ungag him now," I said. That would give standing Damon something to do that wasn't shooting the other Damon in the head.

Not that I'd mind if that one was Oliver.

When the standing Damon hesitated, I pointed the gun right at his face and put my finger on the trigger. I was almost certain he was the fake.

But not certain enough to shoot.

"Step away from him," I said. "Now."

Standing Damon raised his gun slightly, and bound Damon struggled to his feet.

"Chickadee," he said, shrinking his face to loosen the gag. "It's me."

The other Damon—the one I was now certain was Oliver—looked quickly from the other Damon to me, recognition flickering across his face. He didn't know that nickname.

At least that meant the Carmines hadn't been able to listen to everything I'd done over the past few weeks. But Damon had given it away. I knew for certain which one he was now, and worse still, Oliver knew that I knew.

I stepped forward, bracing my elbows and pointing the pistol at his chest—less threatening than the face, but more likely to hit.

My phone vibrated, and I nodded at Damon and leaned my head toward my pocket. "Can you check that?"

Oliver stared me down, keeping Damon's face, but not even bothering to keep up the act.

Damon shrunk his wrists and slipped out of the knotted fabric, tugged the gag down from his mouth, pulled my phone from my pocket, and looked at the screen. "I sent it all," Damon read. "Through links to offsite storage. The card was just backups. Sent link to your stuff, too."

I smiled. Of course he did. Even if Oliver got the best of me now, maybe we'd still get him, even if it was from the grave.

I heard noise behind us, through the hole in the wall. More likely Wendy and Jazz than Kalif. I'd taken both their weapons, but I couldn't guarantee they weren't storing more down there—bigger ones, even.

Please, I thought. Pull those out. Let Lee get you on illegal weapon possession as well.

Oliver smiled. "Tell her the truth, Hunter," he said.

Damon stared at Oliver, who looked terribly pleased for a man who had a gun trained on him.

"Drop it," I said. "Hand over your gun."

Oliver's smile persisted. "You want me to give it to him? He's on my side. He might have given you cute nicknames, but he's been working for me all along."

I froze, keeping my pistol trained on Oliver. We'd come too far, Kalif, Damon and I. Too far for me to start doubting either of them now.

"He's lying," Damon said. "He's just trying to get you to make a mistake."

My hands shook, and Damon put a hand on my shoulder. "I've never cooperated with them. I never would. Don't believe him."

My throat clogged with a lump the size of a walnut. I looked up at Oliver, who shook his head with pity. "Game's over, Jory," he said. "Face it. You can't trust anyone."

Damon's hand squeezed my shoulder, a brotherly gesture of solidarity.

And I smiled.

It could still be a trap—it could always be a trap. There was certainly a trap in here somewhere; I just couldn't see the location of the steel jaws.

But Oliver wanted to isolate me. That had always been their purpose. Alone, we were weak, and easier to control.

But I wasn't alone.

I took my phone back from Damon. "I have proof of what you are," I said. "Hunter gave me part of it; Kalif and I gathered the rest. It's all here, in this file. That's what Kalif sent, just now. I push this button, and I send it all to the NSA."

The screen lit up with a text message. The one I'd been waiting for, from Officer Lee.

I'm here, it said.

My heart pounded.

Oliver rolled his eyes, his posture slouching with disinterest. "You think we don't have contacts in the NSA? You think we can't impersonate an official at a moment's notice?"

Oliver raised his gun and pointed it at me, not for the first time in my life.

Last time, I'd felt blind panic. I'd nearly crawled out of my skin. But this time I felt an eerie calm come over me, like my mind was disconnecting from my body.

Please, I thought. However it ends, let this be over.

I heard footsteps upstairs, and voices shouting.

"Go ahead and shoot me," I said to Oliver. "But do you hear that? It's the end. And when they arrive, my dead body lying at your feet will only serve to further indict you."

Oliver hesitated, and lowered his gun. He turned toward the stairs, his face confused. I shifted myself into Charlise, and Damon followed, assuming his Dennis persona. I dropped my weapon.

And that's when a literal SWAT team broke down the vestibule door.

Oliver still wore Damon's face, which dropped into an expression of shock as the team invaded in force, guns of all sizes pointed at each of us. I put up my hands and squeezed tears from my eyes. "Help us," I said. "Help us, please. We were trying to escape; don't let them get us."

Lee came through from behind his men, holding a pistol. He kept it aimed at me, even though I'd dropped my own weapon. "The people who were holding you," he said. "Where are they?"

I could accuse Oliver, but it wouldn't stick. Besides, I had other plans. "I don't know," I said, pushing my tears toward hysterics. "I don't know. Help us. Please."

"It's okay," Lee said. "It's over."

Oliver stared at Lee, still wearing Damon's face. He'd dropped his gun, and his hands rose slowly into the air.

I fought a smile. Lee was right. A lot of things were over.

Just a few things left to finish up.

Twenty-eight

Even as we were loaded into the police cars, officers swarmed the building, rounding up employees for interviews, seizing computers, sweeping the whole place for evidence. I smiled. Even if Kalif had missed some, hopefully everything would turn up. The police might not believe the fantastical bits about people shifting faces, but they sure as hell would believe the corporate espionage bits, and be able to thoroughly investigate the torture basement. Given enough time, they'd be able to build a legal case that didn't hinge on shifting.

Wendy and Oliver were about to become America's Most Wanted.

The two of them, of course, were nowhere to be found. Lee and his team pulled copies of Kalif and me out of the basement, wearing Wendy and Jazz's clothes.

We all got hauled down to the police station and questioned for what felt like—and probably was—hours on end. Jazz, Oliver, Wendy, Kalif, Damon, and I, all separated into different rooms, where they took turns taking our statements. Lee collected all our phones, including all the SD cards with data and footage.

We were all photographed, including our burns and other wounds. Wendy ensured that my face was put on file, in addition to Damon's and Kalif's—thanks Oliver and Jazz—plus a full accounting of Kalif's injuries, which would probably come back to bite us in the future.

But at least we were all alive. And if the last piece of my plan worked, we were going to stay that way.

When we were finally ready to be released, Lee came to see Damon and me personally. "Stay in town," he said. "We're not charging you today, but that doesn't mean we won't be. We're still sorting through evidence."

Given the volume of what we'd given them, they were going to be sorting for a long time. "Yes, sir," I said. "You can reach me at the number I called you from before."

Lee seemed satisfied, but he shouldn't have been. As soon as we got clear of the building, I was going to destroy the cell phone, and he'd never see me wearing Charlise's face again.

"There were a few other prisoners," I said. "Ones we met in that horrible basement. A girl with brown hair, a man who looked Middle Eastern, and the man with the cornrows. Do you think we could see them before they go? They're the only reason we could escape."

Lee shrugged. "I'll see if they want to talk to you." And he left the room.

I dearly hoped I would never see him again.

Twenty minutes later, Damon and I were escorted down the hall to a conference room, where we found Kalif sitting uncomfortably across from Oliver and Wendy, who still wore the faces they were arrested in—Damon's, and mine.

I stepped in, and smiled, then turned back for a moment toward the guard.

"We aren't being recorded in here, are we?" I asked.

"No, ma'am," he said. And he let Damon enter and then closed the door behind us.

Wendy and Oliver Carmine sat at the table, neither of them bound. We were more suspects than they were—there was no reason for them to be restrained.

And they also couldn't attack us. Not here. Not without incriminating themselves.

I moved over and sat down next to Kalif, and Damon took the chair on the other side of me.

"Hello, Oliver," I said, nodding at him. "Wendy."

"Hello, Jory," Wendy said.

I folded my hands in front of me. Here I was, faced with my parents' kidnappers, my father's killers, and I didn't need to shift or run or hide. Here, in this room, I had the power. And finally, from this angle, I could see the truth.

These people were nothing.

"From now on," I said, "you're going to leave me and my people alone."

Oliver faked a laugh, but he sounded nervous. The man was a professional player; I couldn't imagine how scared he had to be for it to actually come through in his voice. "What makes you say that?" he asked.

"Because I killed you," I said. "Wendy and Oliver Carmine are effectively dead."

Puzzled looks crossed both their faces. I leaned closer, ducking my head conspiratorially. "You'll leave a trail, of course. Evidence that Wendy and Oliver left the country. And they'll take the fall for what you did. But your business is finished. Your assets will be seized. You'll never be Wendy and Oliver Carmine again."

"So you got our personas," Oliver said. "What of it? There's always more."

That wasn't strictly true. It would take decades for them to build the kind of clout they'd had as the Carmines. But it was also beside the point.

"The police have evidence now," I said. "Evidence that shifters exist. They won't arrest you for it, or me. But by engaging in this struggle with me, you've done the opposite of what you want to be doing. You've exposed yourselves. You've exposed us all."

Damon and Kalif kept straight faces, though they must have wondered where I was going with this.

Wendy and Oliver clearly did. "You did those things," Oliver said. "Not us."

I continued as if he hadn't spoken. "That's what you wanted to execute my parents for, wasn't it?" I asked. "For putting us all at risk? Too bad it was your own son-in-law who was the murderer. You two aren't that bright, are you? Otherwise you would have caught him. Good thing someone finally did. Who was that again?"

I should have stopped there, but I couldn't help myself. "Oh yeah," I said. "It was me. I thought you guys were the ones trying to get rogue shifters off the streets." I looked deliberately from Wendy to Oliver, and then back again. "Guess I beat you at your own game."

Oliver looked down at the table, and Wendy actually rolled her eyes.

"And that's where this ends," I said. "You won't come after me because I'm better at this than you. I took you down—your resources, your empire. You're still standing, but only because I'm not a killer like you. But if I ever, ever hear wind of you, see the slightest snatch of evidence that you're back, that you're following me, that you're coming after anyone that I care about, I will end you."

I looked directly into Oliver's eyes, then Wendy's. "But you won't do that. Because I'm not worth chasing. I can take care of my own trail. I can keep the law off my people. I've done it better than you, these past weeks. Or haven't you noticed? I conned the police, and they still haven't caught one of us in custody. I killed the two of you, but they still don't have any proof. They have suspicions, but no way to hunt us. They have names and dates and records, but not a soul to experiment on. You kill shifters you feel pose a risk—murder is a blunt instrument you use out of fear. But I've gone in with a scalpel and carved out just what I need. So tell me, which one of us is the greater threat to our kind?"

"You took unnecessary risks," Wendy said. "We're not going to congratulate you for it."

I smiled. "That may be. You don't have to listen to me. But I've planted the seeds, now. If I have to, I will destroy everything you've tried to protect. Mark my words. If you threaten my people again, we will all go down together. Do you understand?"

For a moment, everyone in the room stared at me, stunned.

I smiled. "Actually, I suggest you try to come after us. I'm only going to get better at this."

Wendy's jaw dropped a quarter inch before she caught it. She and Oliver glanced at each other.

"Fine," Oliver said. "We'll leave you alone."

I stared at them. They couldn't come after me here, so it made sense to tell me what I wanted to hear whether they meant it or not.

"See that you do. And one more thing. Remember the new cameras you installed in the basement? They've been storing everything they record. Now Officer Lee has recordings of all of your comings and goings. I sure hope you never used your home faces down there, especially in the dressing room."

Wendy and Oliver exchanged looks, and their attempts at stone face failed miserably.

I gave them an easy smile. "And if anything happens to Lee, don't think I won't track you down and murder you in your sleep."

From the hateful look the Carmines both gave me, I half expected them to swear at me, scream at me, swear a blood oath to murder my unborn children. But they didn't.

I'd bested them. I'd won. I was playing on a higher level—the one where violence was used only when necessary, and threats were made to be kept.

I was above them, now. I was the one making the demands.

And if they didn't make good on their word, I was sure as hell going to make good on mine.

No one escapes from the Carmines, Kalif's mom had said. No one gets away.

No one, perhaps.

Except us.

Twenty-nine

Kalif and I were married on the beach, in a little cove just out of Monterey. I'd chosen a cocktail dress—white, but without all the lace and trim of a typical wedding dress. I wore sandals with straps so thin that I looked almost barefoot, and left my hair down. Kalif insisted that I keep it my own color.

He also insisted that we take pictures, even bought a disposable camera for the occasion. "It's not safe," I said. "There shouldn't be any record of our home faces."

He gave me a pleading look. "I'll build a new server. I'll encrypt the data twenty times over. I'll bury them so deep in code that no one will ever be able to dig them out. Please? Just this once?"

So we did. We propped the camera in a tree, and took them holding each other and smiling.

Afterward, I looked at the pictures. Even on the tiny screen, I could tell that we looked older. Without trying, my home body had moved itself into its mid twenties. We matched, Kalif and me. We both looked healthy. Strong. Happy.

And though I knew that my own subconscious was no predictor of the future, I let myself pretend for the moment that it was. Though the years wouldn't wear on our bodies like they did on normal people, I hoped that they wore well on our minds, so that we would always look like this. Beautiful. In love. Together.

We weren't religious, but Kalif had found a minister of a local church who was willing to officiate. Neither of us felt thrilled about going to a justice of the peace, since government attention wasn't exactly our thing. If the paperwork didn't go through, if our marriage never became official in the legal sense, we both agreed it was just as well. We weren't doing this for tax purposes or legal protections. For us it was purely a symbol—a way of trying to start our lives out right. When our time together had been poisoned by so much wrong, this was one thing to do to try to be different than our parents.

After everything else that happened, I really expected to get married in the rain. But the sky was clear as we walked across the beach toward the minister and our friends. Mom was waiting for us, wearing a slimmed down version of her home face, her hair more slick down her back, her figure thinned so that she didn't look like herself except from close up. Her scars had faded, no longer angry and red. She pulled me into a hug.

"I want to tell you how proud of you I am," she said. "But I guess maybe it wouldn't mean much."

I squeezed her back. "It means everything, actually."

And even though we both still had a lot of healing to do, it did.

Kalif took my hand and led me down the beach, and I felt my mom follow behind.

I wasn't going back to live with her. I didn't know how often I'd come to visit. But I did know this: we were still family. We'd stay in touch.

We'd figure things out, somehow.

I'd suggested that Kalif invite Aida, but in the end, he'd decided against it. "She almost got you killed," he said. "Repeatedly." I'd sent my mom a message through her, which meant that she knew about the ceremony, but hadn't been invited to attend. That had to hurt, and while I was ready to let the past go, to keep ourselves safe, yes, but also to move on, I knew I couldn't force him to do the same.

When we passed by Damon on the way down to the beach, he stepped into my path. He shook Kalif's hand, no doubt passing him a signal, but when he took my hand, he sped through the signal and then pulled me into a hug. Kalif stood right behind me, but he didn't move to stop him. I let Damon squeeze me, and hugged him right back.

Damon turned his face into my ear, so no one else would be able to see his mouth move. "Fiji. Cloud Nine. Twelve weeks from today. I expect to see both of you, you hear?"

I smiled and nodded against him, and then pulled back. "You got it," I said. And then I took Kalif's hand, and walked down toward the water.

The minister met us on the path that led down the beach. He was a short, balding man in his early fifties, and though he was wearing a white suit, he'd also come barefoot.

I liked him immediately, so when he reached for my hand, I gave it to him. "You look beautiful," he said to me, and he held my hand tight.

I froze. That shouldn't have bothered me. I mean, shaking hands was a normal thing, wasn't it? It was a thing that people did who weren't shifters. It didn't mean anything. But something about the pastor's face made me think that it did—the slight smile that graced his lips. Like he had a secret.

Then he passed me the first half of Aida's signal.

"I couldn't be happier for you," she said.

I pulled my hand away and looked at Kalif. He stepped back, alarmed at my reaction.

Aida held out her hand to him, and Kalif looked to me.

I nodded. I wasn't about to be the bearer of the news. Let him figure this one out for himself.

When they shook hands, Kalif's face darkened. He dropped her hand and stepped between me and her. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

Aida's face still looked for all the world like the innocent preacher. Even her expression looked taken aback in the way that he might.

I had to give her credit. When she wasn't terrified out of her mind, Aida was good.

"Asking your forgiveness," she said. "Your minister had a little trouble with his car. And also happened to lose his phone this morning. And his power is out."

I smothered my smile. The Christian minister was a nice persona for this. Oh yes. Aida was very good.

Kalif started to back away, but I grabbed his hand. "Hey," I said. "You aren't backing out on me, are you?"

He looked at me. "You can't be serious. You want to let her marry us?"

I sighed. Aida had never turned on Kalif. Not ever. And she hadn't turned on me without her husband or her parents involved. I probably should have hated her for what she'd put us through, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I recognized this olive branch, and I didn't want to hate anymore. Aida had been through enough.

"I forgive her," I said.

Kalif frowned at his mother. "It won't be legal if you do it," he said.

Aida laughed, a chortling, old-man chuckle. "It won't be legal under assumed names, either."

I smiled. We couldn't use our names on the paperwork. I didn't even have a last name. So instead we'd kept only our initials, and made up the rest.

"It's a symbol," I said to both of them. "Are you ready, or not?"

Kalif looked resigned. "I'm ready."

Aida smiled, and I took a deep breath. I wasn't sure if this meant she approved of me, or just that she didn't think she could talk Kalif out of it. Either way, I was willing to take it.

Aida began speaking the words of the ceremony—words she must have memorized and prepared in advance. The water was rough, and the biggest waves thinned almost to our feet. Halfway through the ceremony, I kicked off my shoes and dug my toes into the sand. The wind blew at my hair, and I didn't even put up a hand to stop it. Kalif's eyes squinted against the setting sun, and I held both his hands and passed him our new signal again and again.

We couldn't know the entirety of what we were signing up for—people didn't come with a warning label, although now that I thought about it, they should.

But if people are what they give you, then I knew what I was getting from Kalif. I was signing up to be prioritized. I was signing up to be loved. I was signing up for the truth.

The wind blew cold, but his hands were warm.

This was us. For better, for worse. For safe or for terrified. For watching each others' backs. For always. Not everyone in the world is lucky enough to find that. Not everyone in the world is lucky enough to recognize it.

But I do.

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Acknowledgments

As this series comes to a close, I'm reflecting on what I learned (the hard way): writing a trilogy is a whole lot of work, and I wouldn't have made it without support.

Thank you to my writing group, Accidental Erotica, for their patience as I angsted my way through this book, and for the ever-fabulous feedback. Some of you began reading the series on this book, while others have been with Jory since the beginning. All of your perspectives were invaluable in helping me make this book the best it could be.

Kristina Kugler, my fantastic editor, did an excellent job on this book, as she does always. Thank you, Kristy. I love you fifty-million billion.

Thanks to my cover designer, Melody Fender, who makes my books look so good. I'm so grateful to have you as my designer and my friend.

Megan Grey, who listened to an intolerable amount of whining as I worked on (and frequently avoided) revisions of this book, and yet somehow managed to tolerate me anyway. I'm forever honored to be your friend.

And, of course, thank you to my husband, Drew, and my two kids. I'm frequently busy and distracted, but I love you all more than words can say.

You guys, my trilogy is finished! There were times I didn't think it would happen, and I'm so, so grateful to have finally reached the completion of Jory's story.

Thank you to all my readers. I hope you enjoyed the ride.

Janci Patterson is the author of contemporary and science fiction young adult novels. Visit her online at www.jancipatterson.com.

Turn the page to read the first chapter of Long Dark Night, a vampire thriller by the author of A Thousand Faces.

One

As I approached our apartment building, I could sense the corpse crouching behind it. He grew in my mind like a fungus, his undead flesh outlined as if covered in a thin coating of dewdrops. This one was thin, with bulky muscles. Perhaps in life he'd been an athlete.

Out of old habit, I popped a penny into my mouth. Even against my dry tongue, it tasted like blood.

I ducked inside a bus stop, peering up at our curtained windows. Zeke should have been home by now, but I couldn't sense any corpses inside the building, and the one behind the building wasn't him.

False dawn crept over the rooftop, making my skin twitch and crawl. The sun rose late in Salt Lake City—it had to make its way over the mountains, first. Zeke would be furious that I'd cut it this close getting home. If he had his way, I'd stay locked in the apartment twenty-four seven.

I flipped the penny over with my tongue. Where was Zeke now? The safest place I could wait for him would be inside the apartment with the door locked. Sunrise was twenty minutes away, at most. He'd be home by then.

A few buildings away, another corpse shifted. He was moving down the block toward me. That made four stiffs in all—the one behind the apartment, the one half a block down, and two crouching on the other side of the street behind some Dumpsters. I'd have thought I was imagining things, but I'd been feeling Zeke come home from work every night. At first I'd thought it was just the predictability of his schedule, but then I'd started sensing other stiffs, too. Now I could make out their body types, even their facial features, sketched out in crystalline dots. I checked over each of their faces. None of these corpses was Zeke.

A gust of wind blew into the bus stop shelter, flipping the pages of a magazine abandoned in the corner. I pressed my cheek against the metal frame of the shelter. I knew it was cold, but my skin was colder.

Waiting wasn't giving me an advantage. I walked up to the building as confidently as I could. I could feel the corpse behind the building stand, but he didn't come any closer. I hurried up the staircase toward our second-floor apartment, turning at the top to look toward the back parking lot. The corpse was still there, lurking just around the corner. Corpses passed from time to time, but they didn't stay, they didn't lurk.

Not unless they'd suddenly found a reason to. I moved to our doorway and shoved my key into the lock. I stepped in and shut the door behind me, breathing in the dark. My body hadn't needed oxygen in six months, but Zeke said it took some corpses as long as fifty years to break their breathing habit.

Ash and decay reeked from the kitchen. If I'd had a heartbeat, it would have been racing.

I flipped on the hall light, warding away the dark. I could still feel the corpse in the alley, just a few walls away. Its form was low to the ground, hunched over, waiting. The others across the street began to move toward me. I locked the door.

I forced my legs to carry me down the hall into the kitchen. Even before I saw him, a cold wave washed through me. It wasn't an actual chill, of course. I was numb to temperature fluctuations—one benefit of lacking homeostasis.

Seeing Zeke's body was enough to make me forget to breathe. The yellow hall light illuminated what was left of him, lying on the linoleum floor. His red t-shirt contrasted sharply with his now-gray skin; his body had turned entirely to ash. His head lay several feet from his body, lying on its cheek, with a trail of ash scattered over the floor between the parts of his severed neck.

The form of both head and body remained, like papier-mâché castings of his former self, ashes clinging together, monochromatic and crumbly. His chest had already sunk under the weight of his shirt, his legs deflated beneath the waistband of his jeans. As I walked toward him, eddies of air flaked away particles, wearing away at what used to be his arms.

My knees gave way and I knelt beside Zeke on the floor. I wanted to cry, but my body didn't produce tears anymore. I was left without expression, like a dry fountain, or a puppet left hanging on its strings.

There were easier ways to kill us. Anything that could damage the heart would do—a knife, a bullet— silver or otherwise. The best weapon was probably a shotgun—since the shells fragmented and caused massive damage, increasing the odds of piercing the heart muscle. But instead of being efficient, Vance had done this as dramatically as possible, to send me a message, and I knew what it meant.

Somehow, Vance had found out about Paris.

My skin crawled. Whatever weapon Vance had used had also torn the collar of Zeke's t-shirt. Bare threads ran through the ash at his neck in red lines, as if they might have been blood. But of course, there wasn't any. His body was powder, and the air would slowly wear him away until there was nothing left.

When Vance had sent me to live with Zeke, I'd cowered in my room, sure he was going to hurt me, just like Vance. But Zeke had never touched me. He'd only wanted to keep me safe.

My hands shook. Now he was gone. I'd gotten him killed.

The corpse in the back alley slunk toward the side of the building. I could sense his flesh under his clothing. All of the corpses surrounding me were male.

I looked to the window. Around the edges of the aluminum foil, I could see the pink glow of the false dawn.

The corpses around me had to be Vance's men. They'd come for Zeke, and now they were back for me.

I leaped to my feet, reaching for the envelope of cash on top of the fridge. "Just in case," Zeke had said. I ran for my room, for my already-packed duffel, stuffing the money into the pocket. I slung the bag over my shoulder. It already had a change of clothes in it, and a few of my father's old books. There wasn't much else in my room—not even a bed. We didn't own much besides the video games. Zeke said too many possessions made you feel like the living.

I'd need food. There wasn't time to eat now; I'd have to take it to go. How much blood did we have? Not more than a couple of pints. Vance never gave out more than that at a time, to keep us from running.

Back in the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator and grabbed two pint bags from the third shelf, dropping them into the top of the bag. I left the organs in the crisper drawer—an appendix or two that Zeke got from our supplier. He liked to have food he could chew—but I couldn't stomach human flesh, no matter how much the darker parts of me might crave it.

As I closed it, the refrigerator door pushed a wave of air over Zeke, shifting the ash enough to obscure the details of his hair, his fingernails. I cringed, but I knew it was pointless to try to preserve him. If I didn't destroy him, the police would.

As I left the kitchen, I turned on the ceiling fan, and I didn't look back.

Zeke had told me where to go, if anything ever happened to him. I had to find his friend Jack. Jack wasn't a corpse, so he wouldn't turn me over to Vance, but he would help me get out of town. Maybe even to Paris, if I was lucky. Zeke had driven me by Jack's house, so I knew where he lived. I couldn't run there, not with the sun rising. But if I waited here, Vance would get me for sure.

My best bet was to find someplace they couldn't get me without making a scene, and also where I could hide from the sun. The department store at the end of the block was a good bet. That is, if I outran the waiting corpses first.

As I ran for the front door, the corpse from the alley reached the corner of the building. The dots forming his skin rippled as he moved, a cold spot slinking at the edge of my mind. The ones across the street were moving closer, too, but slowly. They were taking their time. They thought they had me cornered, like they'd had Zeke.

I had an edge, though. Zeke couldn't sense corpses, not the way I could. He always got mad at me when I talked about it, like being different was against some corpse code of conduct.

I looked through the peep hole in the front door, making sure there weren't any surprises waiting for me out there. I couldn't see anyone. The nearest stiff was now creeping around the front of the building. That meant I had to head toward the back if I wanted to get away.

Time to run.

I opened the door and sprinted down the walkway along the front of the building. Don't look, I told myself. If I saw them coming for me, I'd freeze.

Pivoting at the corner of the building, I ran along the side walkway, passing door after door. One of the corpses moved toward the stairs, so I stopped in the middle of the barred railing.

Don't think. Jump.

I grabbed the metal drainpipe at the edge of the balcony, planted a shoe on the bar and hoisted myself over, plummeting feet-first into the alleyway below.

Landing on my feet didn't help much. My knees buckled, slamming into the asphalt with a sickening smack. I cringed instinctively, but felt the impact without pain. Already, I could feel the skin and bone of my knee beginning to knit itself back together, always returning to the way it was before. Tiny pieces of gravel fell from my flesh and plinked onto the pavement. I scrambled to my feet.

A car started on the street. I raced past the parked cars and the Dumpsters to struggle over the back fence, and landed in the parking lot of the drug store behind our building. I wished I'd worked harder at pull-ups and sprints in gym class when I was alive—I'd always been a weakling then, and my strength hadn't improved any in death. My feet pounded against the pavement as I ran along a back alley. My undead stamina would let me keep running forever, but I'd gotten a C+ in sprinting, and no matter how much I pushed to go faster, my muscles could only do what they did in life.

I reached the main street on the other side of the drugstore, running along the block. Dawn light gleamed off the few cars in the parking lot. Already my skin began to itch. It had been a long while since I'd felt any pain at all—the only things that caused my body pain now were the things that could kill me, like the sun, or presumably a beheading or stab to the heart. Later my skin would turn red and peel. Fire wouldn't hurt me, but something about sunlight damaged undead skin when nothing else would. It would be worth it if I could get away. I'd keep running until I got so far Vance could never touch me again.

I could still feel corpses around me, but I was too panicked to focus on the images. I concentrated on the area just ahead. No one was close enough to grab me. Not yet. That meant I still had a chance.

A car squealed around the corner, screeching to a stop right behind me. A deep chill sucked at me. More corpses. Vance's men worked in tandem, hunting me like a pack.

I ran, my tennis shoes banging on the pavement, duffel slamming into my back with each step. My legs flexed like rubber. The first golden rays of sunlight bounced off an office building, flashing onto me. My skin contracted like shrink wrap. I veered down a dark alleyway, hiding in the shadow of Zion's Bank. The burn wasn't bad—just a light sunburn. I could get some aloe for it later.

I saw the first of them up ahead, waiting for me. A tall man, with dark glasses and black hair licking out from beneath a wide brimmed hat. He wore gloves that ran under his sleeves. He'd stepped out of the sun, which meant that his suit and hat must be made to block the rays. Vance kept his sunsuits for his lackeys, of course. He didn't share them with the rest of us.

I felt a corpse round the corner behind me. Without turning, I could see the silvery outline of his face. He was waiting in the shadow of the alley, blocking my escape.

How did they know where I was? Could they feel me the way I could feel them?

Vance's voice rose from the pocket of the corpse with the hat. "She's right between you. Very close."

Maybe they couldn't, but Vance could. Was he nearby, waiting for me? If he was, I couldn't sense him.

The men both kept to the shadows, stepping closer. There were no exits between me and them, no side streets. I looked up for something to climb, but the walls rose on either side of the alley like two sheer cliffs. Sunlight spread along the sidewalk at either end of the alleyway. Even if I managed to get by them, my skin would fry in the light.

One of the corpses raised a radio to his mouth. "We have visual," he said. "She's got nowhere else to run."

I slumped against the wall. My breaths came fast, but not from the exertion. A limo rolled into the alleyway, and parked behind one of the corpses. Even the windshield was tinted against the sun. The back doors opened, and two more of Vance's clones stepped out—corpses he'd specially made to accompany him. One of them was a lousy look-alike, though. His face was too fat. Vance ought to have starved him a bit before he turned him. I hoped that the sunlight would peek over the buildings and scorch them all, but looking up I could see it would be hours before the sun rose high enough to reach us.

Then Vance stepped out of the car. I could tell him from a look-alike anytime. None of them quite had his hawkish nose, his flawless skin, or the sense of pride and power that rolled off him like crashing waves. He pulled off his sunglasses, watching me with cold eyes.

"I see you packed," he said. "Excellent. I've come to collect you. You're too young to be alone."

I stood absolutely still, every muscle tense. Vance took a step toward me, and my body jerked reflexively.

"What's this?" he asked. "I know it was a lifetime ago, but don't you remember? We're friends."

It was a lifetime ago. But he was wrong. No matter what I'd thought back then, we'd never been friends.

Vance shook his head at me, holding out his hand. "Come." His voice was soft, like he was here to rescue me.

He was the one I needed rescuing from.

My knees shook, and I braced myself against the wall for support. I'd been a fool to run down this alley. I should have stayed in the sun. Burning would have been better than going with Vance.

But my skin flinched at the thought. The pain of dying from a sixth-degree sunburn would be overwhelming. I didn't have the will to destroy myself that way. Just like I'd been too weak to run from Vance that last time. I should have screamed. I should have fought. If I had, I wouldn't be here now.

My limbs refused to move, even to shrink away. Vance could kill me right here, do anything to me, and just like before, my traitor body was going to let him.

"You'll come with me, won't you April?" Vance asked. He stepped aside, motioning to the limo doors.

I avoided looking him in the eyes. The other corpses stood stiff around us, waiting for Vance's command. They'd follow him anywhere, do anything he said. Even Zeke was like that sometimes.

Everything in me screamed to struggle. To make up for the way I just lay there when he changed me. I could still feel the force of his cold grip. It came to me in flashes sometimes, when I was alone in the dark.

But once again, I couldn't move. I remained there, braced against the wall.

Vance came toward me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and pulled me forward. My feet stumbled a bit, carrying me toward the limo. I felt like my mind had unplugged from my body, and no matter how loudly my brain told it to run, it wouldn't go.

Then again, if he thought I was compliant, he wouldn't watch me as closely. That might be my only chance.

"Yes," I said. "I'll come."

I climbed into the limo, edging as far away from Vance as I could. Not that it would stop him from touching me. Not if he wanted to.

Vance sat next to the door, across from me. The limo started, pulling down the alley and out into the street, leaving his men behind.

"I'm sorry about Zeke," Vance said. "But he wanted to take you away from me. I couldn't let him do that. You'd both starve, out on your own."

I hugged my knees. We should have left before Vance decided to take an interest in me again. It didn't matter if I fought. Vance would always be faster and stronger than I was. Our bodies didn't deteriorate, but they also didn't grow or change. I'd passed my sixteenth birthday a month ago, but I'd be in my fifteen-year-old body for the rest of my undeath. I couldn't even cut my hair shorter; it'd regenerate to its shoulder-length crop, like the rest of my body did when it was injured. Vance was larger and fitter than me when he died, so I'd never be able to best him.

I closed my eyes. It was like that line from Tennyson's poem, my favorite one from my dad's old books: Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die. A stronger person would have ended it, and believed that what came after was better, but I couldn't. I was too afraid.

Faced with Vance, all I could manage to do was quiver.

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