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“Do with that information what you will, girl.” Ruse purred as he leapt off my shoulder and slowly prowled away, tail held high in the air. “I will keep my expectations quite low.”
Chapter15
Logan
The house felt awkward.
Over the following days, I kept myself busy visiting with Thorn while he told me stories of his kind and his experience traveling with his herd. He also enjoyed taking me into the back garden in the evenings and talking me through what plants were, and if they had any medicinal properties. In an odd way, it reminded me of my grandmother once more, and I felt a strange sense of home around the giant beast. Nox often surprised me in the quiet times of the day, while I was making coffee or reading a book. There was a sort of tension between the two of them, like they didn’t want to overstep one another, but both enjoyed being around me.
Neither of them was entirely responsible for the tension that I could feel in the air. It was like I was on constant display as I closed in on my second full week in the West Virginia mansion. My stay was just about halfway over, and I still had not developed a firm and organized plan for how I was going to make good on my word to end the monsters’ captivity. Mr. Silver had called me twice more since I’d first gotten the impression that he was checking my pulse through the phone.
It was Ruse, surprisingly enough, that kickstarted my brain one morning when he appeared as a mouse from behind my laptop while I was trying to follow along with a yoga video. Ted was in the backyard organizing the shed and could be seen clumsily carrying out old bags of soil through the living room window.
“Bit odd that you’ve received so many calls from Mr. Silver to see if you’re still alive when he’s got a perfectly good spy bumbling about all day five days a week,” Ruse said as he climbed his tiny body up the thin side of my laptop.
“Excuse me?” I asked, immediately snapping out of a warrior pose. “Are you implying that Ted for sure knows more than he’s told me?”
“Not implying,telling,” Ruse answered. “Pretty obvious, wouldn’t you say? I suppose you’ve got a thicker head than I thought.”
I turned to look back at Ted as he worked. The portly man had no idea I was watching him as I stood and chewed the cuticle around my nail.
I turned back to Ruse’s mousey form, perched comfortably on the screen of my laptop. “How much does he know?”
“Plenty. He’s the clean-up crew,” Ruse explained. “All that bullshit about how ‘Mr. Silver had a housekeeper get everything spic-and-span before your stay’ is utter nonsense. Pure lies. It’s him doing everything.”
I couldn’t help but throw my head back and laugh. There was so much that I had missed, and I couldn’t believe it. All this time I had assumed Ted knewsomething, but to learn that this old man who didn’t look like he’d be able to wiggle himself out of a paper bag had me truly believing he was entirely innocent was hilarious to me. At the same time, though, it was immensely heartbreaking. Of all the people I’d met in my life, I truly did not expect the chubby, balding groundskeeper to be in on Jonas Silver’s disgusting plot. He seemed like a genuinely good person who just wanted a simple life with his wife and children. I was angry and honestly a little hurt that the man who had offered me nothing but kindness turned out to be in on the plot for my life, but it appeared Jonas Silver used more than just dark curses to trap people.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I said, glancing out the window. “How long has he been doing this?”
“For a long time.” Ruse said with his head down. “Ted’s been living a double life for more years than I even bothered to keep track.”
“So his family doesn’t know what he does here?” I asked.
“Of course not, Logan.” Ruse scoffed. “What could he possibly say? ‘See you later, hon, I’m off to scrape girl-guts off the mantle!?’”
“That’s true.” I said as I pulled my ankles up behind me one at a time to stretch my quads.
An idea struck my mind like lightning, and I dropped my ankle to stand squarely in front of Ruse. “Wait, go back to what you said originally. About the ‘him being a spy’ thing.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ruse confirmed. “How it usually goes is me and the boys do our… dirty work. Boss-man will call the girls constantly until they stop answering, and then he has Old Ted come in and confirm before the Boss makes his grand return to check out the damage. I guess my question was why he would go through the extra effort to keep calling and calling when he could just have that dumpy moron check in every day?”
“It’s perfect, though,” I said with a grin and planting my hands firmly on my hips. “If we can get that dumpy moron to call Jonas and tell him he found me dead, we can lure that rich asshole here where he’ll find meverymuch alive and ready to blow his brains out.”
“Oh, we’ve been a bad influence on you,” Ruse squeaked, as smug as ever, talking in his standard tongue-in-cheek tone he preferred. “You could just stop answering the phone. Would we even have to involve the groundskeeper?”
“Unfortunately, we do,” I said as I turned to stare back at Ted milling about in the backyard. “He’s a liability. If we’re going to convince Jonas that I’m dead, we can’t have that guy spilling the beans that I’m notactuallydead. So unless I’m going to hide out of sight completely for however long it takes Jonas to come and check for himself, Ted’s gotta be considered a moving part in all of this.”
“True,” Ruse added. “Also, if you’re going to play dead and all, it would be helpful to have some sort of inside information about whenexactlyMr. Jonas is going to be showing up. You know, for theatrical purposes on your part.”
“Exactly.” I sighed as I sat cross-legged on the carpet and began to stretch out my arms over my head. “Now, we just have to figure out how to get him on our side.”
“Good news is we don’t have to gethimto do anything,” Ruse said with a devilish snicker. He hopped off my laptop and darted to the dining room, out of view of the living room window. His skin began to boil, and he slowly grew upward into the same size and shape as the groundskeeper. When Ruse turned back around, he was a perfect carbon copy.
“I think two Teds is one too many, don’t you?” Ruse asked in Ted’s voice.
“What are you saying?” I asked, giving him a sideways look of suspicion.
“I’m saying I’ll wager Nox would understand why I had to rid us of an obstacle stuck between us and our freedom,” he snickered as he drummed Ted’s fingers together.
