Hidden (Hidden Series Book One) (19 page)

I pulled the phone from my ear in the
morning. It was off, but I didn’t remember hanging up.

I sighed when I smelled lemons. There was
absolutely no chance that Sophia needed to clean anything after the
job she’d done last night. I rolled out of bed and met her in the
bathroom. She was seriously cleaning the door.

“Really?” I said. “Didn’t we talk about
this?”

She chuckled. “I didn’t touch those socks by
the toilet. Can I get a little credit?” Her hand closed tightly
around something I couldn’t see. She slipped it in her pocket as
she laughed. “And I didn’t make you breakfast.”

“I guess that’s a start,” I said, glancing
at the door. It looked like she’d written something in oil at the
top of it, shining against the cherry wood.

“I’m off to work. My boss is rude all day if
I’m late.” She kissed me on my cheek and left, in a flash of light
this time, not a snap. Maybe she needed more magic for some places.
Or distances.

I stood on my toes and traced the oil on the
door. I wasn’t sure until I did it again, but she’d written:
May
the spirits protect this child.

“From what?”

Sophia had promised I was safe here. I swung
the door open, looking up at the top of the other side. Oily words
dripped from it too.

May the spirits lift her heart and bring
her joy
.

That one obviously referenced my condition,
as she’d put it. I sniffed the oil on my finger. Lemons. I’d
thought that scent meant she was cleaning.

I reached on my toes in front of my closet
door.

“How have I not seen this?” I said, finding
oil there too. On both sides of my closet door she’d written,
May the spirits give her peace
. I went to my last door, the
front one. I traced the oily words, and my heart stopped.

No enemy shall pass
.

Someone knocked on the door as I stood
there. I jumped and clutched my heart. “Either you’re really close
to the door, or you’re actually baking a cake in there,” Nate
said.

I opened the door for my boyfriend. He
leaned in for a kiss, but I covered my mouth and ran to brush my
teeth first.

He was faster. He caught me and lifted me up
from behind, trying to embarrass me by sniffing my morning breath.
He came in with no problem, but I already knew he wasn’t my
enemy.

“You’re so weird,” I said, into my hand.

He carried me to the sink with one arm.
“Fine. Go ahead,” he said. I watched him suspiciously as I brushed
while trying to be neat. “Are you afraid to spit?” I shook my head,
lying. I’d been brushing way longer than I would have if he weren’t
standing there. “Don’t make me tickle it out of you.”

I turned away from him to empty my mouth in
private. “I’m not ticklish,” I said.

He grabbed me, wiggling his fingers under my
arms, down my back, and around to my stomach. I screamed and
laughed and squealed. I
was
ticklish. I’d just never been
tickled before.

He trapped me against the cabinets. I had
nowhere to go, nowhere to move. I just had to stand there and like
it.

“Can I get my kiss now?” he asked.

“No! I didn’t see you brush. I’m not sure if
I want to,” I said. I laughed and pinched my nose.

“Oh really?” he asked, pressing closer,
halting the laughter. His arms made a cage around my head as he
braced them against the cabinet.

My stomach flipped, and a crazy buzzing
radiated from there until it covered me completely. The thrill of
him actually being mine overtook me, made me bold in a way I didn’t
think I could be. I moved my hand to the back of his neck and
pulled him closer. Our sweet rhythm was the same until our kiss
sang way more than good morning.

Our lips separated an inch, intensity still
present and accounted for, and he smiled.

“Tell me your favorite color. Emma just gave
me a pop quiz on you on the stairs, and I missed that question. She
said I couldn’t call myself a good boyfriend until I knew it.”

I didn’t really have a favorite color. Until
now. “Green,” I said because of his eyes. “Yours?”

“Mustard.” He grinned and brought one of his
hands to my side. “You looked great in that shirt. That’s typically
what you wear in my head.” He cleared his throat and groaned. “Oh,
God. That was weird.
I’m
the one without social skills.” He
looked away like he was embarrassed, guilty almost. I noticed
another side to him then. There was the sweet, goofy guy I always
thought of him as, and then there was the one who’d notice a bra
through a shirt like Paul, bite my lip during a kiss.

I chuckled, and he finally brought his eyes
back to mine. He unpinned me from the cabinets, but we didn’t pull
away from each other. That felt very impossible.

“You fell asleep while I was in the middle
of a story,” he said. I tried to remember. He’d been talking about
the games he played alone in his room as a child after I told him
about the Sienna and Whitney saga, even how it ended and what I
almost did. He didn’t care.

“Oh, the sock game! I’m sorry.” I kissed him
to add to my apology.

“It’s okay. In your drunken state, you
agreed to learn the game.” He pulled a long white sock from his
pocket and led me to the sitting room. “Don’t make fun of this. It
was my favorite thing to do … until last night.” He pecked my lips
and pulled away.

I wondered if we were close to hitting a
world record for the most kissing during the first hours of a
relationship. I felt a familiar tingle, like the answer to that was
complicated, a lot to sort through like the buzzing at school.

“Hello?” he said, snapping his fingers in my
face. “Yours or mine?” I hadn’t heard the rest of that question, so
I just picked one.

“Yours,” I said, still raptured in the
sudden energy pulsing through my body.

“Okay. So once the hand is in, you must name
the sock person,” he said.

He smiled, and I forced my attention to him.
I stared into his eyes, still buzzing. “Thomas,” I said. It was the
first name that came to mind.

He cocked his head to the side and squinted
his eyes. “My middle name? Did I mention that last night?”

I jerked out of my trance, seeing my
mistake. He didn’t tell me is middle name last night. He didn’t
need to tell me anything. I was psychic and … he didn’t know it.
God, the hunters, Kelly and Oliver, couldn’t figure out his name,
and I could. I was stronger than them, without training a day in my
life.

“Yeah, I must’ve told you. Did I tell you
that’s John’s middle name too?” He rolled his eyes. “Like … like
I’m really a part of their family, right?” He plastered a fake
smile on his face, and I hugged him, glad for the distraction. I
wasn’t ready to tell him, I was petrified to.

“Forget them. They’re stupid,” I
whispered.

He chuckled. “Are you stalling because you
think
my
game
is stupid?” I shook my head against is
chest. “Good. So, his name is Thomas. Let’s call him Tom.” I bit my
lip to stop the smile that would inevitably lead to the laugh. He
seemed very serious about this, and he’d asked me not to. “So Tom
must travel around the room, finding things that start with the
same letter as his name.”

In that moment, Nathan sounded five years
old. His eyes were bright and happy too. I could see him pretending
he had a friend, and nothing was funny anymore. This had to be the
loneliest game I’d ever seen.

I gave Tom a peck on the mouth, Nate’s
fingers, and I pulled the sock and my boyfriend to the TV, the
table, and to the tissue in the bathroom. It was obvious he’d had
more practice. He went to the clock and said, “Ticks and tocks.” He
took Tom to my blanket and said, “Thread.”

I found the obvious ones, and he, the champ,
sniffed out the abstract Ts all over the room. He made Tom lift my
lip to find my teeth and laughed. While he was there, he found my
tongue and ended the sock game.

How was I ever going to tell him he might
prefer turning me in to kissing me if he knew what I really
was?

Nate patted my stomach, hearing a rumble I’d
only felt, and stuffed Tom in his pocket. He threw me over his
shoulder, grunting like a caveman, and carried me downstairs.

“Hold on,” I said on the second floor, their
floor. “Sophia wrote something over my door. I want to see if she
does it to you guys.”

He walked me to his door and pointed to the
top. “Yep. Every morning she whispers, ‘May the spirits bless this
boy’. Isn’t that nice?” I sighed. It
was
nice. And a relief.
She wasn’t just doing it for me.

He took me to Paul’s door. He held me close
to the top, and I traced the lemony oil there. It was harder to see
on their cream doors.

“May the spirits be his guide,” I said. With
my hand on the door, I wondered why she would write this for him. I
felt a jolt and dropped my hand, avoiding another psychic
moment.

I felt different today. Happy, maybe the
most energized I’d ever been in my life. I was one hundred percent
sure that I was stronger because of it. Hopefully not more
dangerous.

“This is Emma’s room,” he said, at the next
door.

“May the spirits free her from dangerous
ties,” I said. We both knew why Sophia would write that. Remi.

I wanted to skip the last door, sure
something startling was there before we stood in front of it. I
traced the oil and dropped my head.

“What?” he asked.

“Bound is this enemy until she is a friend,”
I said.

I think I knew who Sophia didn’t want in my
room.

He lowered me down on his chest so that our
lips could meet. “Don’t worry about her. Sophia obviously has hope
for her, or else she wouldn’t have her in your house.”

He pecked my lips and carried me to the
kitchen.

Emma and Paul smirked when we walked in.
Paul raised his hand to high-five Nathan. “Way to go, Sparky,” he
said.

Nathan shook his head and put me down. “My
name is not Sparky, and we did not spend the night together.”

Paul grunted like we were crazy. I guessed
we did live in an unsupervised house, my unsupervised house, and
could have talked all night in person, or could have not talked at
all.

Remi banged on the kitchen door, and Emma
let her in. She was paler than usual, and she didn’t stop to talk
to anyone. She blew past Emma, bumping her shoulder, and I froze.
My skin buzzed, electric and dangerous, as I stared at my prey. Oh,
the things I could do to her. The lessons I was created to teach
things like her.

Nate squeezed my shoulder, slid his hand to
the small of my back, and pecked my cheek. Three bullets to Leah’s
chest. Remi ran upstairs, unharmed.

“And not so much as a thank you for covering
for her,” Emma said when Remi’s door slammed. “Sophia’s right.
She’s a clone of my sister.”

“Ew! Edith made a copy!” Paul said. Their
faces soured, reminding me of how disgusting I was to them. To him.
“My dad said he saw one during the war. He said he almost wet his
pants.”

“How did he know what it was?” I asked,
nervous.

“How could he not? Bloody face. Evil glare,”
he said, baring his teeth then laughing. Bloody? Why would our
faces be bloody?

Nathan kissed me and pulled me away from my
problems again. “Paul, could you not scare my girlfriend this early
in the morning?” he said. “You okay, Chris?”

If I’d told him no in that moment, it would
have been a lie. I was fine … right now. And I wanted to stay that
way. I wanted more seconds with him. I wanted to hope for those
seconds to become minutes and days and years of a long and happy
life.

I gasped. “She’s … becoming just a panther,
isn’t she?”

“You win the random award of the day,
Chris,” Paul said.

“I was just thinking about a long life.
She's down to three hours as herself. She isn’t going to be Remi
for much longer, right?” Nate nodded. “That’s it. That’s why she
acts like that.” I shuddered. “And when will you stop being
you?”

He laughed. “I’m not a deranged panther who
hates himself. That loose screw in her head is doing this. It’s not
normal. I get to be whatever
me
I want to be until I die.”
He pulled me closer. “Hopefully all old and gray with my bestie if
she can put up with me that long.”

“Oh, God. You’re a genius,” Paul said as I
buried my head in Nate’s chest and accepted his vague proposal,
probably taking it much more seriously than he’d meant it. “The
best friend angle! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Shut up, Paul. Babe, you want cereal for
breakfast since you fired Sophia?” Nate asked.

“Yeah. Sit. I’ll get it.”

After breakfast, neither of us could fathom
separating. We stretched out on the feathery rug in my room, and he
helped me with my schoolwork. He was smart, in a take twenty
minutes to get one answer kind of way, but when he got there, it
was always right. He knew History well and French too. He was best
at Calculus, the worst at understanding Shakespeare.

Three of the four hours were spent wisely.
The last one was debatable. We flipped through my literature book
and reenacted the kissing scenes in awful accents, finding the
slightest reason to touch each other and adding kissing to scenes
that had none.

“I’m late for Remi’s lesson,” he said and
groaned. “Will you be my air freshener today?” I answered yes with
a kiss. He picked me up and tossed me around to his back. I held on
tight as he blurred down the stairs. He knocked on her door. No
answer. “Want to hunt her down with me?”

“Okay.”

He sniffed the air, and I giggled. He’d
meant that literally. “She’s not up here.” He dropped to his knees,
jerking me down with him, and sniffed the stairs. I laughed and
screamed when he jumped down them. “She’s this way.” He stood and
opened the front door. I adjusted on his back, snaking my arms
around to his abs. “Behave back there, Ms. Grant,” he said.