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“It wasn’t a set-up it was a warning, a statement,” Luce replied to Cam, giving me a quick once over.
I nodded my head in agreement with him.
“He’s right if they wanted to kill us all they would have known to use more than that small amount of Stags. And their marker was fresh,” I pointed out.
“And, they let Makayla go knowing she would report back where Lilith, Sam, and Bella were,” Nyx added.
Whom they still had, I thought to myself. I wanted to plan for the worst and foolishly hope for the best, something I never did but this was our family, my baby sister, my little cousin and their best friend.
They had to be okay. I still didn’t understand why they would take them in the first place. It wasn’t just toying with the idea of a war between the two factions; it was flat out deciding there would be one.
“They thought we’d take each other out,” Zane said from beside his truck.
I turned to look at him, promptly diverting my gaze when I saw he’d taken his mask off and was now shirtless. I didn’t want to know what he looked like.
I realized that was ridiculous, but for the first time in my life, I was unsure about someone of the opposite sex. I was unsure what to think of him, what to say to him—how to look at him. All I knew was what I’d been told, and that was a rumor mill I wasn’t prepared to wade through.
“My little brother is missing too,” he continued, surprising the hell out of me with that nugget of information. No one ever mentioned him having a younger sibling.
“So they knew we would both show up and start killing one another? Naw. What was the point of the Stags inside the school then?” Luce asked.
“In case we didn’t kill one another? Look that was as far as I got, man. They sure made sure we would be stranded,” the girl with colorful pixie hair answered.
“They dragged Makayla to a vehicle, and then went right,” Nyx said, following tracks I hadn’t noticed until just then.
“While we handled their sacrificial friends, they did this,” Maliki tacked on, lightly smacking the side of their truck.
“If they knew all of that, then they would have known our moves before we made them. And we all know what that means,” a woman with a strong accent pointed out.
No one had anything to say to that. No one wanted to confirm what it meant. It was acknowledging someone close betrayed you.
It was never an easy thing to accept but seemed to always be the case. It was why Jesse would be missing too.
Rubbing my brow, I broke away from the group and walked back to the turnoff point.
“What is that way?” I pointed to the right. “If I wanted to hide my faction somewhere remote, but large enough to accommodate where would I go?”
Annie came and stood beside me, looking in the direction I’d just pointed, speaking under her breath for a minute. “Hocking Hills,” she said, adding, “An abandoned campground completely off-grid.”
The moment she said the name my mind latched onto it. I had no solid proof, and acolytes had been supposedly searching for this faction’s base for months with no leads.
Yet, there I was in spite of all that, believing my intuition was correct in assuming that’s where they were going.
“You know how to get there?” I asked her.
She turned her head and looked at me, a rare, knowing smile on her face. “I know exactly how to get there.”
“What are you thinking?” Nyx asked, coming to
stand on my other side.
“I’m thinking that we should go after them. If it’s off the grid, the kids can’t be there yet.”
“I agree with you. We—.”
“No,” Butcher’s voice cut across the clearing. “Nyx are you really that insane? Why would you do—?”
“Did you just tell me no? And why would we…? Because they have my brother, my cousin, and your sister.”
