The Institute called them their Angelic Legion. They expected a few hundred children, gifted with talents beyond nature, properly trained, would be able to turn back the forces of hell when the End Times came. Ky Monroe saw them for what they were years ago–a cult masquerading as something good, something holy, something that would help and not harm. Matthew Thatcher recognized them for what they were, too–a dangerous organization not above murder and violence to achieve their aims, and together with Ky worked tirelessly to make sure the organization died–and when an explosion ripped through the Institute’s main facility in the midwest years ago, Ky dared believe they might have succeeded. But when an old friend reappears with a story to tell, Ky realizes exactly how wrong she’s been–and that time is running out to save the people she loves…
When All’s Said and Done is narrated by Kyle Anne Monroe (alias Kyrie Thatcher), a college student who escaped from the Institute as a teenager. It is the major work planned for the Lost Angels Chronicles, which shares a universe (and many characters) with the UNSETIC Files (and Court of Twelve works like The Man Who Made Monsters, a project I’m working on with L.P. Loudon).
Three
Ridley was still sleeping when we got to Damon’s apartment and they sent me upstairs to one of Damon’s spare bedrooms to rouse him. I leaned in the doorway for a moment, staring at my old friend as he lay on his back, still fast asleep. As soon as I stepped deeper into the room, though, he snapped awake with a start, blinking blearily as he pushed himself up on an elbow. He stared at me for a long moment, then forced himself up into a sitting position. He was bare-chested and looked better than I’d expected from someone that had so recently escaped the Institute’s hold. Then again, he hadn’t been subjected to quite the same things as some of our friends.
He rubbed his eyes and yawned before he opened his mouth to speak, expression deadpan as he stared at me. “I’m not hallucinating or anything, right? Blood loss isn’t fucking with my brain?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m as real as I was last night, and seems like you’re as real as you were last night.” I straightened from my lean. “Come down. There’s bagels and stuff. Breakfast.” It was almost ten in the morning. Damon had gone down to open up the clinic hours ago, before we’d arrived. Just because he had guests didn’t mean he could put his job on hold. I turned to head back downstairs.
“Ky, wait.” Ridley scrambled out of bed and started pulling on a pair of jeans that lay tossed over a chair. I half turned back toward him, arching a brow.
“I’m just going downstairs, Ridley.”
“I know, I know.” He grimaced. “But there’s…I have to…Julia doesn’t know what they did to us, Ky. I never…I never really told her all the details. All she knows is that it was bad. I think she suspects some things, but I never…never really told her. Not details or anything.”
“I guess she and my roommate are going to get an education, then.” Two at once. This is going to be fun.
“Your roommate?” He looked suddenly wary, like a cornered animal. “Is she…?”
“She’s clean, Rid. No connection to anything or anyone except for me. An innocent.” I understood his paranoia. I’d been the same way after I’d escaped, after I’d gotten away from them. He was afraid of going back. I still was, too, but I kept that fear buried, secreted away under lock and key at the very back of my mind. “At least, she’ll be innocent for another twenty minutes or so.” I exhaled through my teeth. “Get dressed. We’ll be downstairs.”
He stared at me for a moment longer, brow creasing slightly. “Are you okay?”
I paused again, nodding. “I’m okay.” For the moment, anyway. I looked back over my shoulder at him. “He’s alive.”
Ridley exhaled, seeming to deflate, and nodded. “Good.”
I nodded, too, then headed back downstairs. Matthew and Julia were sitting at the kitchen table and Reece was making coffee. I dropped into one of the empty chairs and rubbed my eyes.
“He’s up?” Matthew asked.
“He’s up.” I leaned forward against my elbows, looking at Julia for a moment. She looked a little grim, a little scared, but mostly determined. I wonder if she realizes how much is at stake here, how deep she’s going to end up. Hell, I wonder if she realizes how deep she’s already in, if she’s here with him. I wonder how much Ridley did tell her. I took a deep breath. “Julia, what did he tell you about the Institute?”
Reece brought cups over to the table, along with cream and sugar. The coffeemaker burbled quietly on the countertop as she pulled up a stool to sit on, leaving the last seat at the table for Ridley when he came down. She kept half an eye on the coffeemaker, half an eye on me.
Julia frowned and shook her head. “Not a lot. Just that they were bad people and that helping him could get me killed or worse. He seemed to think that if they caught us, my fate would be worse than just getting killed. That…that concerns me a little.”
“He’s not lying,” I murmured, looking at my hands and trying not to think of Hadrian. “They mostly look for the ones with gifts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them lay hands on someone who didn’t have a gift, but if I’m following his line of reasoning…” My voice trailed away and I exhaled.
Hadrian lay curled on his side in bed, shivering under the blankets we’d snitched from one of the storage closets. His face was gaunt, eyes tired as I slipped into the room after bed checks and crawled under the covers with him, wrapping my skinny teenage arms around him.
“If you don’t have a talent that requires you to be physically active, and you’re tied to someone else, they’ll use that someone to get to you.” I couldn’t meet Julia’s eyes. “They’ll hurt them, make them suffer, so you do what they want you to do. Because they know how to manipulate people using their emotional bonds.” I looked away, at Reece, because I couldn’t look at anyone else. I also needed something familiar and warm to soothe my nerves. I hated talking about that damn place. “Is the coffee ready?”
Horror etched across her expression, Reece jerked, then looked at the coffeemaker and swallowed. “Yeah. Hang on.” She got up and turned her back on me quickly, busying herself with the carafe.
She’s smart enough to figure that one out—that I’m speaking from experience, not hypotheticals. I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, finally bringing myself to look toward Julia. Her expression was shocked, fear starting to creep into her eyes. Matthew was stone-faced next to her. He knew this. He knew all of this. My hands curled into fists. “I’m sorry,” I said to Julia. “But you’re knee-deep and you deserved to know.”
“He told me about you and Hadrian. That’s how you know what they’d do.”
I swallowed again and nodded. Of course. That’s why she was afraid. “That’s how we all knew. They wanted a lot from Hadrian and I and we wouldn’t cooperate. He’s a clairvoyant, a seer. My talents were—are—physical. He didn’t need to be able to get out of bed. Hell, I’m not even sure he needed to be able to think, just see. But they could get to both of us by making him suffer.” My hands were shaking. “Maybe…maybe you should stop worrying about getting me out, too. I can barely sit up, Ky.” I squeezed my eyes shut against the memory. “They drugged him, mostly. Stuff I think they were hoping would punch up his abilities, ended up just making him a wreck of a human being. Beatings, sometime, but mostly just the experimental drugs. He didn’t have a lot of ability to resist after a while. I tried to resist for him, but that just made things worse for both of us.”
Reece pressed a cup of coffee into my hands, squeezed my arm. I looked at her and saw the pain and horror mixed in her eyes. I looked away, into the dark depths of my coffee mug. “Sorry,” I murmured. “I shouldn’t be scaring you.”
“No,” Julia whispered. “Scaring me is good. Now I know why he’s so afraid.”
Ridley cleared his throat behind me, his tread more silent now than it had been then. I looked over my shoulder at him. He pressed his lips together in a tight line.
“What did you tell her?”
Julia got up from the table and went to hug him, wrapping her arms around him and holding on tight. He wrapped his arms around her, brow furrowing. Her voice was muffled against his neck. “Doesn’t matter what she told me. All that matters is that I’m not going to let them hurt either of us.”
Ridley stared at me for a moment, then dropped his face to nuzzle Julia’s ear and sighed. His arms tightened for a moment, then loosened as he looked warily at Matthew. “Does he have a plan for how that’s going to happen?”
Matthew grimaced. “Well, I’m not sure she’s going to like it. Come have a seat and I’ll tell you what I have in mind.”
Ridley seemed pretty reluctant to let go of Julia, but they both came back to the table and sat down. Reece passed out cups of coffee before returning to her stool, looking at me. I glanced up at her for a moment, then concentrated on spooning some sugar into my coffee. Matthew waited until we were all settled, then spoke again, looking first at Julia.
“This plan is going to go hardest on you, because we’re going to have to make everyone think you’re both dead.”
Julia blinked at him, hand tightening on her coffee cup for a moment. Ridley reached over and tentatively wrapped his fingers around her free hand, squeezing gently. “How?” She finally asked.
“Car accident, I think,” Matthew said. I smothered a wince at the way his voice caught, at the sudden flicker of pain in Ridley’s eyes, too. We’d both lost parents to a car accident years before—they seemed to be an Institute specialty. “That should be easy enough for us to fake up. Both of you killed in a collision. We’ll get you both new identities and a place to stay here, near the city, until it’s safe for you to resurface. Until this is over.”
My heart leapt into my throat. “They gave you approval to pursue this?”
“I have two victims and a witness, now,” Matthew said quietly. “They told me to keep it quiet but keep all of you as safe as I can. I’ve got some leeway.”
“What about my parents?” Julia’s voice sounded strangled. “My dad just lost his aunt and uncle in the past year. You want me to let you tell them that I got killed? What’s that going to do to them?”
Matthew stared at her, his best this is your life not theirs that we’re talking about stare. “If everything that I have ever learned and ever known about these people is right, then if they don’t think you’re dead, then they’re in danger, too. More danger because they’re expendable. If they’re gone, you don’t have anyplace to run.”
“Julia,” Ridley said quietly, fingers tightening again. “They kill people who get in their way. I understand that, now. I’d forgotten. I’d…been willfully blind about it.” His lips thinned. “They probably killed my parents, just like they probably killed Ky’s.”
“And probably Matthew’s, too,” I said grimly. Matthew grimaced and took a long swallow of coffee, then topped off what was in his mug.
Julia stared at Ridley. “Is that why you and Addy…?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and nodded. “You weren’t acting they way they’d anticipated. Not the Reverend, anyway. And it was pushing me in directions they couldn’t predict. Was too dangerous.” He wet his lips and stared at the table, not looking at any of us. “I don’t think she was going to be able to twist their minds away from it without them realizing. I think she did it once, earlier this month, but they didn’t notice. A second time…they’d have noticed, and she’d have been back inside and trapped with no one to protect her.”
I blinked, confused. “Who?”
“The page of cups,” Ridley breathed. “Laren. Adeline Stonard, now. Another Angel, one they married off to some jackass Institute crony in Andover Commonwealth.”
I went cold. The last time I heard of Hadrian’s ‘page of cups,’ she was betraying us to the Institute. “Ridley—”
He held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say, Ky. But she helped us. She helped me. We asked her to come with us and she said no, because what happens when they send the next broken soul to the Reverend to break even more?”
“Someone has to take care of them,” Julia whispered, hand tightening around Ridley’s. “That’s what she said, when I told her to come with us, after she beaned her husband with a tire iron so he couldn’t hit me again. I hated to leave her. I’m afraid he’ll hurt her. Stonard’s made my skin crawl since I was a kid. Even before he told me God had a special purpose for me.”
A shiver went through me. Shit. She’s lucky her folks aren’t dead already. Color must have drained from my face because Matthew looked at me in concern.
“Ky?”
I shook my head quickly. She has a talent, or potential, or something. Something that hasn’t manifested yet. Maybe something that’ll never manifest, but something they managed to identify. I never could figure out how they knew, how they could figure it out. “I’m all right,” I said quietly, then looked at Julia. “You’re lucky that whatever you have never quite manifested. Otherwise, I’m not sure we’d be having this conversation.”
She went a few shades of pale and Ridley glared at me. “Kyle!”
Reece mouthed my name—my real name, the name she had never known—and then asked quietly, “What do you mean, Ky?”
I grimaced, stomach tightening. “It seems like, with some of us, they know that we’ve got something we can do before we even know we’ve got it. I couldn’t step outside of time until after my parents were killed. I figured that out a few weeks later. It wasn’t a coincidence, though. Timothy’s abilities manifested earlier, he always said, but Ridley’s didn’t. Neither did Ally’s.” I looked at Julia. “They might have seen something in you.”
Julia’s mouth worked, though no sound escaped. Ridley bore down on her hand, squeezing tightly. She looked at him, lips parting slightly. My heart ached.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, leaning in to press his forehead against hers. “It’s okay. I made you a promise.”
She swallowed hard and looked at the rest of us, finally nodding at Matthew. “If they think I’m dead, my parents are safe, right?”
He nodded. “They should be. They won’t be targets.”
She nodded slightly, lips thinning. “All right,” she said quietly. “Keep talking.”
Matthew shook his head slowly. “There’s not much more to the plan than that,” he admitted quietly. “I have an apartment for you lined up, preliminary identification documents should be at my desk at the bureau office in another few hours. I put a rush on it. Don’t try to get a job or anything with any of it for a couple of weeks until I give you the go-ahead. Lay low. I’ll be in touch.” He rubbed his eyes. “Damon’s the only one in your family that’s going to know you’re alive for a while, Julia. He won’t breathe a word to anyone.”
She nodded mutely, pressing her lips together in a line. She squeezed Ridley’s hand and he squeezed back. Julia took a breath. “Is there anything we can do to help your case?”
Matthew shook his head a little. “I’ll need the address of your place in Andover Commonwealth and the address for the Institute building there, if you’ve got it. If you don’t, that’s all right. Can’t be that hard to spot, right?
Julia shook her head slightly. “No. Big, blond stone complex outside of the village. Half the village works there. I thought it was a think tank, innocuous. Nothing really to worry about. I hate how wrong I was about that.” She frowned and looked at her hands, then looked up at Matthew. “I could call someone. See if there’s any movement at the place.”
I inclined my head. “They might try to move people, if they don’t know where Ridley’s disappeared to. Might, but might not.” I hope they don’t. We’re so close. If I could find a way to sneak in and sneak him back out again… I wet my lips and took a long swallow of coffee. “I have to get there,” I murmured, not quite realizing I was saying it aloud. “I have to get him out of there.”
Ridley looked at me. “You dreamed of him.”
“I dreamed at him,” I corrected. “And he dreamed back.”
“Dreamed at him?” Reece sounded confused and gave me a long, measuring look. “What’s that mean, Ky?”
I grimaced a little and struggled to find a way to explain it. How do you tell someone that your brain is connected to someone like that without using fluffy terminology like ‘soul mate’ or rot like that? “We…Hadrian and I…we started being able to share each other’s dreams a long time ago. Real dreams, like when we’re sleeping kind of dreams. It started as an unconscious thing and then we started to be able to consciously…I guess you could say ‘tug’ on each other. I used to think it had something to do with his abilities and something that the Institute did to us, but I don’t think that’s the case.”
“It’s not,” Ridley murmured. “If they wanted us to be able to see our partner’s dreams, we all would have been able to do it. Most of us can’t.” He smiled weakly at me. “You guys were special. I’m relieved that they never quite figured out how special.”
Maybe they did. Maybe that’s why they make him suffer so much. Righteous anger, righteous indignation. Frustration that we wouldn’t help them fulfill their so-called holy duty. I shook my head a little. “In any case, dreams were how we communicated sometimes, at night when I couldn’t risk sneaking out of my room to be with him. When they stopped…after the explosion,” I glanced at Matthew, “that’s why I thought it was over. Why I thought he was dead. I never thought he’d leave me alone like that.” Did he really think I was gone? That he’d just dreamed me up for years after I escaped, after they first started telling them that I was dead, when they started to try to kill what little hope they had left?
Matthew shook his head slightly. “I always wondered why you did such a 180 after that.”
I shrugged. “Well, that was why.” I thought losing him was going to kill me, then. But it didn’t. And I’ll get through this, too, as long as I don’t have to go through that again.
Reece was still staring at me, as if she was seeing me for the first time. I took a long, bitter swallow of coffee. If she was looking at me like that now, how would she look at me the first time I showed her what I could actually do? I looked at Matthew.
“What can we do?”
“Well, I can’t storm the gates yet, if that’s what you’re implying,” Matthew said, frowning. “It’ll have to be cloak and dagger and I don’t have any ideas yet.”
I guess I shouldn’t have expected to be able to go in guns and badges just because he’s got clearance to pursue the case. I had to suppress a sigh anyway, a ball of dread settling in the pit of my stomach. But how am I going to get him out of there if Ridley’s right about the defenses, and we can’t go in there with badges and guns blazing?
Julia frowned and got up from the table. Ridley threw her a questioning glance and she shook her head. “We don’t know enough, seems like. I’m going to call Patrick and see if he’s near Addy. See if we can find out anything.”
Matthew grimaced. “That’s dangerous.”
Julia shrugged a little. “I’m not legally dead yet, right? Nothing untoward about me calling Patrick. Not like I’d be doing it from beyond the grave.”
I looked at him. “She has a point, Matthew. And if she can find out if they’re moving anyone out of the facility…maybe we can find a way to intercept.” Maybe Hadrian would be one of the ones they’d move. Maybe. Not sure if that would be lucky or unlucky. Maybe both, depending on the circumstances. “It’d be more witnesses.”
Matthew frowned, but nodded. “Just a question of not tipping our hands. We don’t need a repeat of what happened last time we moved on them.”
A ball of ice settled in the pit of my stomach. I guess I deserved that. I nodded a little. “Well…I’m not going to do anything stupid this time.” I shouldn’t have waited. Waiting is what cost us. “Can’t afford to. The cost would be too high.”
