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“I love the new look, Sterling.”
Mama Rosa gave me a dagger-stare that felt more like a hail of butcher knives. Sterling’s response came muffled through the bandages wrapped around his head, so much that I couldn’t decipher it. I did easily decipher the very rude gesture he made with one of his exposed fingers,
though.
I crossed over to my room, prepared to set down my backpack and possibly stretch out in bed, when I realized that the hallway was longer now. There was another room at the end, where once there had only been a blank stone wall.
Things like this made me question how much Carver really knew about the Lorica. Either there really were some striking similarities in both the Lorica headquarters’ and the hideout’s ability to provide for their own, or they both used the same arcane interior decorator.
I heard voices from the room, which I guessed were Asher and Gil mid-conversation. Maybe Gil’s door was just shut for the sake of privacy. I couldn’t quite make out what they were discussing, but I peeked in anyway, intending to make my presence known. This Asher kid must have been nervous about his new surroundings, and it wouldn’t have hurt to spend a little time helping him ease into it.
But he was totally alone, sitting in a swivel chair similar to mine, his feet propped up on the stone desk that was a mirror of the one in my bedroom. He didn’t stop talking when he saw me, even lifting a hand in greeting.
“Yeah, the guys here seem pretty nice. No, they fed me. Of course they aren’t gonna poison me, come on, mom. These people could have killed me any time they wanted, why bother with poison?”
I peered closer, trying to make out the earpiece he was talking into, but more importantly, getting more annoyed by the second by how no one had bothered to tell me that we could now get cellphone reception inside the hideout.
“Sorry, am I interrupting something?” I said. “I can come back.”
“No, it’s cool,” Asher said. “Come on in. I was just talking to my mom. We’re done now.”
I gestured at my ear, then his. “You don’t have a cellphone though. Plus I’m pretty sure we don’t get reception here.”
His brow furrowed, then his eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, sorry, of course. I should have explained. I wasn’t on the phone. She was right here.”
“I. Um.” I held my hands up and shrugged, wondering if this was some kind of game, finding myself at a very rare loss for words. “I don’t see her.”
“Of course not. She’s dead.”
Chapter 20
I looked around the room, just to clarify. Was it polite to question the kid’s sanity? Probably not. Maybe it was his coping mechanism for all that trauma we’d just put him through. The obvious way to find out was to ask him, which was what I did.
“Sorry. Did you just say that your mom was dead? And you were talking to her?”
He frowned. “Don’t look so surprised. You do that vanishing thing. You’ve got a werewolf here, and a vampire, so I guess you’re the invisible man?”
Huh. I always failed to consider how shadowstepping looked from someone else’s perspective. He had a point. To an onlooker, all my travels through the Dark Room would just seem as if I’d disappeared and reappeared at different intervals.
“Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. Long story short, I can travel between shadows. Think of it as short-distance teleportation.”
His mouth formed into a little O. “That’s pretty awesome.”
I won’t lie, that made me feel like the cool guy in the room. I didn’t mean to do it on purpose, but my chest puffed out a bit.
“Well, you know. And you. You talk to the dead?”
He tilted his head up at the ceiling. “Something like it. I don’t fully understand it, you know? I can talk to my mom, at least, and I can heal a little. I found out when I turned eighteen.”
“And you’re how old now?”
He smiled flatly. “Eighteen. That’s when all the weird stuff started happening. If something is living, or has ever been alive, I can – do things to it. Like, I can make plants grow super fast, or I can age something up. It takes a lot of work, though.”
I narrowed my eyes. I had to admit, I had no idea what he meant. “Kind of confusing, if I’m honest.”
Asher shrugged. “Deirdre – the woman who took me – she said that I was a battery, like, apparently I’m so stuffed full of life energy that I can give it to others. That’s why she called me the Genesis Codex. She never even referred to me by name, I guess to maintain secrecy or make sure everyone in the house thought she just had an object stashed somewhere, and not a person.” He said the last bit glumly.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
