If at first you don’t succeed, wear them down with random comparisons to grumpy animals!
“No,” Knox said flatly. “I wasn’t.”
“It would be a shame…” Rohan’s oh-so-British voice emanated from the shadows. “If someone less scrupulous than the four of us got to Mr. Daniels first.”
Gigi took it upon herself to step delicately between Rohan and Knox. “Captain Shoulders-to-Waist-Ratio over there isn’t wrong,” Gigi told Knox. “We need to find Brady before Zella or Calla or anyone else does.”
Knox shuttered his eyes, but Gigiknewhe cared—about Brady, about the possibly malevolent Calla. It had been hours since Knox had realized Calla Thorp was alive, that she wasback. He’d been trying super hard to pretend that didn’t matter, but Gigi knew better. Knox had loved Calla once, and Calla had left him scarred.
Literally.
“So,” Gigi persisted, as chipper as chipper could be.I can do this all day, buckaroo.“Where are we headed next?”
Chapter 5
LYRA
A hand-carved chess set and the table that held it were all that separated Lyra from Toby Hawthorne. The chess pieces were simple and smooth. The man who’d carved them, on the other hand, was a little rough around the edges.
“What do you meanAvery is missing?” Toby’s brown hair was overgrown and streaked with auburn. He clearly hadn’t shaved in a while. He also hadn’t bothered charging his phone, hence Grayson and Lyra needing to track him to his place in Texas.
“Technically,” Grayson told his uncle, “Avery left a note saying that she wasnotmissing, and she told us not to look for her.”
Toby’s green eyes settled with almost palpable force on the chess set, but Lyra got the feeling that he was seeing something else, that Tobywassomewhere else. After four or five seconds, he stood, moving with an efficient sort of grace as he grabbed a messenger bag off the counter and crossed to the opposite wall, removing two items from the lone shelf that hung there: a leatherbound book and a small, rectangular parcel. Then Toby turned again and strode toward the door. His home was small and stark. A single room doubled as bedroom and kitchen,the chess table the only furniture in the room other than a mattress on the floor.
“You know something.” Grayson blocked Toby’s exit.
“Don’t try to Hawthorne me, nephew.” Toby’s voice was gravelly enough to make Lyra wonder how many weeks or months oryearsin his lifetime he’d spent not talking.
“Eve did this,” Grayson replied, giving his uncle no quarter. “Your daughter tried to throw Lyra to the wolves, and the wolves came for Avery instead.”
They didn’t know that, not for a fact, but Lyra still couldn’t help thinking,It should have been me. She was the one who’d tipped Eve off about calla lilies, the omega symbol, and Alice Hawthorne. She was the reason that the time forwatchingwas over.
“Now would be a good time,” Grayson told Toby, his voice like tempered steel, “to tell us everything you know about your dead mother being very much alive.”
“Would it?” Toby replied.Hawthorne versus Hawthorne—it was a thing to behold.
“We know your mother faked her death.” Lyra was only capable of letting Grayson take the lead for so long. “We know she’s dangerous. We know she doesn’t work alone.”
They knew that Toby knewsomething.
The man stared at Lyra,hard, then made his way back to the table, taking a seat across the chessboard from her. “Tell me what elseyouknow.” Toby Hawthorne’s eyes were intense—intensely green and intensely focused on Lyra’s.
Lyra didn’t even blink. She and Grayson had already agreed that telling his uncle everything was their best bet at dragging information out of Toby.
“We know that there are always three of them, whoever and whatever they are.” Lyra looked down at the chess pieces in front of her and chose one, a rook. “The one in red is the Watcher.” She placed the rook down in the center of the board. “Also called the Lily.” Lyra went for a knight next. “The one in black is the Omega, also known as the Hand.”The tide of dark memories threatened to pull Lyra under, but she fought it, and her control held. “The Watcher watches. The Handacts.”
Grayson came to stand behind her, his hand making its way to the back of her neck, anchoring her in the here and now.
“And the third?” Toby asked.
“The Woman in White.” Holding tooth and nail to the present, Lyra picked up one last chess piece: a queen. “She’s called the Monoceros, and her role is Judge.”
“Who are they?” Toby asked the same question that Lyra and Grayson had asked Odette Morales not twelve hours earlier.
“Women, exclusively,” Grayson replied, co-opting Odette’s answer as his own. “We’ve been told they believe that some situations require a guiding hand and others a gilded blade.”
The wordbladehung in the air, and something else Odette had said came back to Lyra.If you know where to look, history tells the tale.