The Rising

SEVEN

AS WE NEARED THE aquarium, Corey stopped suddenly.

“It’s a trap,” he said.

“What?”

“I—” He took a deep breath. “I think it’s a trap. I mean, are we sure this chick is who she says she is? All we know is that someone emailed us.”

“Using an address you just set up and we only gave to Mitchell’s daughter,” I said.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel said.

Corey shook his head. “Nothing. I just . . . I think we should reconsider.” He glanced toward the aquarium. “I think we need to be really, really sure that the person showing up is a woman. We should scout first.”

Which made absolute sense. Except that Corey was never the guy advising caution; he was the one we had to caution.

“It’s not a woman waiting for us, is it?” Daniel said.

“I don’t know. I’m just saying—”

“No, you’re not.”

Daniel instinctively took on his persuasive tone, then seemed to catch himself. He cleared his throat. Earlier we’d talked about this, how he didn’t want to use his powers on us. Now, without thinking, he was doing it and he looked abashed, but I wasn’t sure he had a reason to. It was a skill as much as a talent. Something he’d always done, except with me. Maybe because he knew I was too damned stubborn to be persuaded of anything.

He cleared his throat again. “You’re not ‘just saying,’ Corey. You saw who’s waiting for us. You had a vision with the headache.”

“What?” Corey said. “Um, no. You’re confusing me with Maya. She gets the visions.”

“This is different,” Daniel said. “You see images of things that don’t make any sense. Like Maya with Rafe when we thought he was dead. You saw him with Maya in her backyard. Exactly the way they looked when we found them, right?”

Corey glanced at me.

“I didn’t tell him.” I said. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

“I overheard,” Daniel said. “You’re never as quiet as you think you are, Corey. It didn’t make sense at the time, but after, I started wondering. Then when we were in that van, you knew it was Maya rescuing us before she got the door open.”

He was right. Both about Rafe and the van. I just hadn’t made the connection.

“What did you see?” Daniel asked before Corey could deny it.

Corey stood there, cracking his knuckles.

“You see visions of the future,” I said. “That’s your power. What’s wrong with that?”

“Seriously?” He looked over at me. “Daniel is a demon-hunter. You’re a shape-shifter. Apparently, I’m a fortune-teller. On a cool scale, that ranks about a five. Add in the headaches and puking, and I’d knock it down to a two.”

“So, because you’ve decided your power isn’t cool enough, you’re going to let us walk into a trap?”

“No. I warned you, didn’t I?” He caught Daniel’s look and shuffled his feet. “Fine. But if anyone starts buying me crystal balls and Tarot cards . . .”

“Of course not,” I said. “We can’t afford it.”

He grumbled, then shoved his hands in his pockets. “There’s not much else to tell and I don’t know whether it’s real or not, so I don’t want you guys relying on what I say. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“There’s a guy waiting for us. A kid, I think. Maybe our age. Brown hair. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Tanned. I didn’t see much of his face. I’m not even sure about the—”

“We understand,” I said. “Don’t second-guess.”

“He’s in the woods. In a tree.”

“A tree?”

“Don’t ask me. I just get flashes. Images. I saw Maya in the woods right over there”—he pointed—“and there was a guy in a tree.” He jammed his hands into his pockets again. “Hell, now that I’m saying it, I don’t even know if he’s waiting for us. It could just be a kid goofing off.”

“Okay, well, let’s just keep that all in mind, then.” Daniel turned to me. “Are you ready?”

I nodded.

No one was waiting for us.

After ten minutes, I said, “Maybe this isn’t the right spot. We said just inside the forest, but . . .” I peered deeper into the woods. “I’d say we should split up, but considering what Corey saw—”

I stopped and looked at them. “That’s what Corey saw. We’d split up. I was in the forest alone.”

“Okay,” Daniel said. “So we don’t split . . .” He trailed off and scowled at me. “That’s not what you’re going to suggest, is it?”

“Corey didn’t see me getting attacked by some guy in a tree—”

“Hey, no,” Corey said. “I see still pictures. No action. A snapshot. You were under a tree with a guy in it. For all I know, he jumped you two seconds later.”

“But now I’m ready, so we’ll get the jump on him.”

We had to at least pretend that we’d split up to search for our contact. That meant I couldn’t exactly walk around gaping at the treetops. I kept glancing up, but with the dense trees and shadows, every nest looked like someone crouching on a branch. Then, as I passed under a tree, I heard a limb creak.

I looked up. Sure enough, there was someone at least ten meters up, almost hidden by the thick needle-laden branches.

“Guys?” I said.

I waved Daniel and Corey over, and I looked up again.

“I can see you,” I said. “Come on down.”

The figure didn’t move. I walked over and grabbed the trunk. That brought Daniel at a jog, but he didn’t try to stop me, just watched as I shimmied up.

I made it almost as far as the first thick branch when the guy jumped onto the limb below him, then onto a neighboring tree and shuffled down a limb, gripping the one above for balance.

I grabbed the nearest branch and swung onto it. I caught a glimpse of the guy—just enough to see that he was young with brown hair, as Corey had seen. He didn’t look back, just leaped down a branch, then along it, moving faster now. He swung to the next tree and almost missed. He righted himself, crouched, and jumped to the ground.

Daniel caught him in a running tackle and took him down. Corey raced over behind and bounced there, fists up, like he was standing outside the boxing ring, waiting his turn. As the guy struggled, Corey tensed, ready to leap in, but Daniel got him pinned facedown on the ground.

“What the hell is this?” the guy snarled. “A mugging? I knew I shouldn’t have cut through the park.”

“You always cut through using the sky route?” I said as I bent down and patted his pockets. “Huh. Nothing to rob, I guess, because you aren’t carrying a wallet. That’s a little odd, don’t you think?”

He snarled profanities now. Daniel tensed, like he was waiting for the guy to aim those profanities at me. He didn’t, though. Just general cursing. I double-checked inside his pockets.

“No ID. That is weird. So where do you have it?”

I tugged up his pant leg. He tried to kick, but Corey dropped and held his feet still while I pulled a thin billfold from his sock. It was held on with an elastic for safekeeping.

Inside the wallet were a few hundred dollars and three credit cards. I fanned the cards.

“So are you Jason or Drake or Todd?”

The guy didn’t answer. He just kept staring at the ground.

“You don’t look eighteen,” I said. “So they’re fake. Or stolen.”

No answer.

Corey pulled up the guy’s other pant leg. “There’s something here, too.”

It was a blue passport, attached with another elastic.

“An American passport,” I said. “I’m pretty sure these are hard to fake. So let’s see who you really are.”

I opened it. My gaze headed for the name, but the photo snagged it instead. I stared at the picture for a moment. Then I looked down at the guy on the ground. At his bare arm. Corey said he’d seemed tanned in the vision. He wasn’t. He was Native.

I lifted the passport to get a better look at the photo. His eyes were hazel and his hair was light brown, but he still looked Native. As I stared at the picture, I could swear I recognized the face. I didn’t, though. Not his name, either.

“Ashton Gray,” I said.

He didn’t respond. I looked at the birth date. It was a couple of months before mine. What was a sixteen-year-old kid doing climbing trees in Stanley Park with fake credit cards and an American passport?

He seemed like a street kid. The soles of his running shoes were almost worn through, his jeans were frayed, and his black T-shirt had been washed so often it was a dirty gray. But his nails were trimmed and his hair was poorly cut but clean.

I looked around. “Where are the others?”

“What others?” His first actual response. He didn’t try to look at me, though.

“Someone contacted us and set up this meeting through an email address, which we only gave to one person. That person wasn’t you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Daniel backed off the guy, staying poised to pounce if he bolted. “Get up.”

“Well, since you’re asking so nicely . . .”

The guy—Ashton—rolled over and pulled himself to a sitting position. He moved slowly, getting to his feet as if taking his time meant he really wasn’t doing as he’d been told. His hair reached his collar at the sides as well as in back, and hung in his face. Only after he was standing did he bother to push it back. He fixed Daniel with a hard stare. Challenging. Pissed off that he’d been taken down so easily.

“Better?” he said.

Daniel looked at him. Stared, actually. He looked at me. Looked back at the guy. Then he swore under his breath.

I stared at Ashton Gray, too, and again I had this vague sense of I know you. Something about his face. Something familiar.

“Maya?” Daniel said.

Ashton flinched when Daniel said my name.

“Hmm?” I said.

“Rafe has a birthmark like yours, right? Where is it?”

“On his . . .” I trailed off. Daniel thought this guy was a skin-walker? Why? Because he was looking for us and happened to be Native? No, Daniel didn’t jump to conclusions like that.

“On the back of his shoulder,” I said. “A paw print like the one on my hip.”

“Turn around,” Daniel said to Ashton.

The kid’s lip curled in a sneer and he seemed ready to snarl at us all, but when Daniel snapped, “Turn around” again, he obeyed. He was only a couple of inches taller than my five-five, which made him shorter than both of the other guys. Smaller, too—slight and wiry.

He yanked up his shirt to his shoulders.

The paw-print birthmark was there.

“What’s the birth date on his passport, Maya?”

“Birth date? Um . . .” I double-checked. “August fifth.”

“Fake, then. It’s more like October, isn’t it?” Daniel said, walking around to meet Ashton’s gaze. “Early October. I don’t know the exact date, because Maya’s isn’t exactly right, either, but the doctors had a pretty good idea how old she was when she was found, and they wouldn’t have been two months off.”

I tried to follow what he was saying. How would that have anything to do with . . . ?

I stared at Ashton Gray. No. It couldn’t be.

“Is your real birthday in early October?” Daniel asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you just turned sixteen?”

“Yeah.”

“And you know why I’m asking?”

A pause. But only a brief one. His gaze started my way, then stopped, and he stared at the forest instead.

“Yeah.”

“Holy hell,” Corey murmured. “You’re Maya’s brother.”