I kissed her shoulder, taking in the sweet, almost smoky scent at the nape of her neck. It made me happy to imagine Bellanger faced with the cool wall of Cate’s disinterest.
“Yeah, well, he told me that I would be his protégée. His successor.” I turned to Isabelle. “What did he offer you, Isabelle? Money? Power?”
“Nothing,” she said. “He just asked me about my body.”
This managed to shut me up for a moment. Cate took over. “What about your body?”
“He asked me if I had regular periods. How many days there were between periods. He listened to my heart and felt here.” She gripped her neck. The spot where her thyroid was tucked.
Cate and I exchanged uneasy glances. The plain physicality of this was more disturbing than Bellanger trying to appeal to my pride or Cate’s kindness.
Rising, I tried the door again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is all my fault.” I kept thinking of everything we’d left in the Volvo, now out there in the desert, vulnerable. The guns—Cate didn’t even have that option to defend herself this time.
“We knew it’d be dangerous. We’re here for your mother,” Cate said.
“It’s not just my mother anymore,” I said. “There’s Fiona to consider. Now that we’re here, we can’t leave without her.” It was the first time I’d put it into words, and the truth of it sank in. “But I don’t think she’ll come easily.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Cate asked. “Who would want to be here with this creep?”
“I didn’t see him as a creep,” I said softly. “Not for years and years.”
“Hey,” Cate said, catching the pain in my voice, and she got up, wrapped her arms around me, kissed the top of my head. “Listen. We’ll play this safe if it means getting Fiona out of here with us. If you have a plan, I’m all ears.”
“Bellanger doesn’t know that we have powers. He thinks we’re just eight duds who came before Fiona. You heard him. Not fashioned from the same cloth.”
“I noticed that too,” Cate said. “If he’d known about our powers, he would’ve been yammering on and on about them. That’s good, though. That could work to our advantage.”
I looked to Isabelle; she shrugged. “He never even asked me.”
“Mathias never got close enough,” I said. “He didn’t expect to see our powers and so he didn’t even look for them. Just like Junior.”
“Then we can overpower them,” Isabelle said. “I grab the guard, and Josie, you tell Bellanger to stand down. Simple. We find your mother, we find Fiona, and we leave with them.”
“She has a point,” Cate said.
“It’s not as easy as Freshwater,” I said. “There are a lot more people here. There are weapons…” I quickly explained what I’d seen. “They’re all under Bellanger’s spell. Not to mention Fiona. If she’s against us, it could be ugly. We didn’t have to worry about her in Texas.” That bird spiraling toward the ground, eaten by flame; the way her unseen power suffused everything here. “This is my mother, not yours,” I said. “I’ve asked so much of you two. If you want to leave … then … I understand. If anything happened to you because of me? I couldn’t—”
“We aren’t leaving,” Isabelle said, before Cate could speak. Her voice was assured and steady. “I’ve been thinking about why I couldn’t find my powers. I was trying everything. I put myself through enough trauma, didn’t I? And I wanted to be powerful. I wasn’t like the rest of you. I knew what I could be. I knew.” The first time I’d seen her: lying in that creek, the water braiding through her hair, lips gone blue from the cold. “That should have been more than enough. So why did my powers only come when I met you and Cate?”
Cate and I watched her, not speaking. My throat hurt with unshed tears.
“You fought those men for me,” Isabelle said. “I knew when I called them there that you’d be on my side. I was never afraid because I knew I’d have you two with me. So Cate and I are doing the same for you now. Because you’re my power. You and Cate.” She reached for my hand. “We can do this. Easy.”
* * *
There was a knock at the door. It had to be afternoon now, time passing restlessly and sluggishly. All three of us straightened, instantly alert. Mathias stood at the doorway. He beckoned to me. “Girl One.” His voice was low, like he had to conserve it carefully. “She wants to see you.”