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“I knew it,” Lennox mutters. “Knew the caller was a she.”
Orion frowns. “You can be the worst, you know. But you’re my brother, and I can’t let you carry out stupid plans alone. Should we go?”
He means that in the old-fashioned sort of way, which actually means after you. He even points at the door. Kind of. With his shoulder rucked up.
“I hope she’s eighty,” Lennox huffs at us as we both scramble for the door.
The truth is, I don’t mind my brother’s shade one bit, and a few hours out of here would do us both good before we literally start inventing things that would help us climb the wall. I had an idea for glue and my boots, but I’m not sure it would work. Granny would likely have our balls for the damage to the new walls.
“Hope you get sprayed by a skunk!” Lennox shouts as I tug the door open. “Or run into a feral rat.”
“Aren’t all rats in the wild quite feral?” Orion asks me like he really wants to know.
I just shrug. “I’m not trying to be an asshole. Really.” I shut the shop’s glass door tight behind us. Orion is my brother, and he deserves the truth. “I guess I was intrigued by her voice. It was pretty. The most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. She could be earning a living doing voice-over stuff, commercials, or cartoons. But she’s not. She’s stuck somewhere in some dump of a house, and no one wants the work. It’s like a challenge. Helping someone in need. Isn’t that what we do?”
My brother studies me blankly. “Not really, but whatever you say. Should we buy tool belts? Please tell me I can get my own tool belt.”
This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever done, and okay, so we don’t do this kind of thing—helping individual people. We bring down bad guys, like really bad guys, to help the general population. We pour out liquid good into the world by eliminating some of the bad. It’s dangerous work, and as a result of that, we don’t live a normal life. We haven’t done a job in a long time, so maybe that’s why I’m really getting restless. That could be why I agreed to a bit of action, no matter what the action actually was.
Or maybe the siren song of that peachy-sweet voice called to me over the phone, and I was powerless the second I heard it.
“Yeah, we can get toolbelts.” I pat my brother on the back. He deserves some reward for sticking with me through this.
Or at least he will after we get back to the shop and face Granny’s wrath.
“Phones off,” I whisper delightedly to Orion. “Not letting Granny track us.”
“We can’t take the car then,” he points out.
“Right. Well, we can if we ditch it and get a rental before we go.”
“This is getting complicated. She’ll just wait and chew us a new asshole when we get back.”
I shudder. “Please don’t use the words chew and asshole and Granny in the same sentence.”
He rolls his eyes. “Technically, I didn’t use the word ‘Granny.’ I said ‘she.’ Anyway, she won’t actually come and chase us down. The car should be safe. The phones, though? I don’t need to get blasted before we even get there. I vote for turning them off.”
I take mine out of my pocket as he does, and we turn them off at the same time. I guess our twinness sometimes freaks people out. Like how we do things at the same time, quite often in tandem, physically and mentally. I don’t even bother trying to hide my devious grin as I hold up the list of directions I wrote down.
“Sometimes it pays to be without tech.”
“Can I get my toolbelt now?”
I nod at my brother and clap him on the back. “Sure. Let’s go pick out a matching set. Everyone will love it. And by love it, I actually mean they’ll hate it. What’s one more thing to get lectured about later?”
CHAPTER 3
Atlas
As we pull down the long gravel driveway after driving down an even longer dusty gravel road, I realize we should have gone with my original idea and rented a truck. What kind of fixer drives a sleek, black, armored sedan? Okay, not that kind of fixer. I know this is supposed to end with me admitting that I’m a computer guy, not a home fixer guy, but still.
We park in front of a ramshackle two-story farmhouse with a roofline that’s caving in because it’s in dire need of repair. The roof shingles, which were probably replaced sometime in the past three decades, were now peeling and lifting, reaching for the sky like the wings of butterflies. The door was probably red at one time, but now it’s not hanging properly, and only a few slivers of paint cling to the worn, gray wood. The siding is the same shade of matching, time-worn, wind-beaten, sun-shellacked gray. Some of the windows are boarded up while others proudly stand in their single-paned glass glory, shutters askew like gaping teeth.
