about all the things I still couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him.
“We were just being kids. Best friends standing around the kitchen, making promises we probably never would have kept, just to make Anne smile. But then Kori’s little sister, Kenley, came in and overheard us, and she wanted to help. She said it wouldn’t be official unless we wrote it down.”
Cam’s brows rose halfway up his forehead, and he looked away from the road long enough to make me nervous. “Kenley Daniels was your Binder? Sixteen years ago?”
I nodded. “If we’d known that ran in her family—turns out her mother’s a Binder, too—we probably would have realized what she was doing, even if she
didn’t.”
“Displaying the first instinctive manifestation of a very serious Skill?”
I couldn’t resist a smile. “Good guess.”
“How old was she?”
“Ten.”
“Damn. It doesn’t usually show up so early.”
“I know.” I’d met more than my share of Binders since that day fifteen years ago, and not one of them had displayed a stronger Skill or instinct than Kenley Daniels had at ten years old. Without even knowing what she was.
“So … she what? Scribbled a promise in crayon and told you to sign it?”
I laughed again, but more out of nerves than amusement. He wasn’t far off. “It was pink glitter pen, actually. And after we signed, she said it still didn’t feel right. She said it wouldn’t be ‘real’ unless we used blood.”
The four of us had been losing interest by then, but Kori had perked up when she realized that meant she’d get to use her knife. And I have to admit, I was curious—perhaps the beginnings of my own talent with blood.
“Oh, shit!” Cam glanced at me again, then back at the road. “Kenley’s a blood Binder? I thought she worked with signatures….”
“Actually, it turns out she’s a double threat.” Blood binding was a much rarer Skill than name binding—binding a written oath with a signature—and those who could do both were rarer still. And someone with the power to do both at such a young age was almost unheard of.
“So, I’m guessing that contract is ironclad …?” Cam said, flicking on his turn signal when I pointed toward a side street ahead.
“Yeah. And what’s worse is that she had plenty of Skill, but no training. It was really more an oath than a contract. Just a promise that we would help one another whenever asked. There was no expiration date, no stipulations and no exceptions. There weren’t even enough words to form a decent loophole.”
“Why didn’t you just burn it?”
Burning it to ashes was the only surefire way to destroy a blood-sealed contract, which is why certain notorious crime lords had started sealing their employee bindings in the flesh—literally—with tattoo marks as a fail-safe in case the corresponding written contract was destroyed. Fortunately, Kenley hadn’t foreseen that advancement. I wasn’t even sure she was capable of flesh binding, not that any of us knew what that was fifteen years ago. Her first sealed contract could easily be destroyed—if it could be found.
“By the time we realized what we’d done—the first time Kori’s grandmother had to pick her up from the police station—the oath was gone. We looked everywhere. Our parents got together and tore the Danielses’ house apart, and when it wasn’t there, they searched their own houses. But we never found so much as a scrap of powder-blue paper or pink glitter pen.”
“You think someone took it?” he asked, and I could only shrug.
“It didn’t walk off on its own. But I have no clue who could have taken it. Or why. Until Kori got arrested, only the four of us knew about it—Kori, Anne, Noelle and me. And Kenley, of course. And we all wanted it destroyed.” Badly, by the time we got to high school. “We explored different theories over the years. A parent trying to teach us a lesson. Kori’s brother, Kristopher, being a pain in the ass. Their dog burying a new prize. But no one ever admitted anything, and Anne didn’t know she was a Reader yet, so it never occurred to her to look for a lie. And every time we tested it, the binding was still intact, which meant that the oath was still whole, wherever it was. And obviously it still is now,” I said, gesturing to the entire car to indicate our current vigilante mission.
“That sounds like a total pain in the ass.”
“Worse. We started hating each other. Even the most offhand, ridiculous request became a geas—a compulsion that had to be obeyed, to the exclusion of everything else. We wound up cheating, and lying, and stealing, and starting fights for one another. We got hurt, and arrested, and kicked out of school. And the cycle was self-perpetuating. Anne would get pissed at Kori for making her help cheat on a test, so she’d ask Kori to go to the drugstore and shoplift only hemorrhoid cream and Vagisil, knowing that when she got caught, she’d be humiliated.”
Cam laughed. “When I met them, the four of you seemed to get along pretty well.”
“Part of that was the fact that we rarely saw one another after high school. The rest of it was the second oath.”
“There was a second oath?”
“Yeah. My senior year, Kenley got tired of all the bitching and backstabbing. And I think she felt guilty, because she was the reason for the trouble in the first place. So she conned us all into the same room long enough to show us a new oath she’d penned, which basically made us swear never to ask one another for anything.”
“So, did you sign?”
“Hell yes! We fought over who got to sign first. After that, everything was fine. We weren’t best friends anymore, but we didn’t hate each other, either. We just kind of … left each other alone. That New Year’s Eve party six years ago? That was the first time we’d spent more than an hour together since high-school graduation. It was also the last time I saw any of them. Until this morning.”
“Because Anne burned the second contract?” I scowled. “You were eavesdropping?” He shrugged. “I could only hear bits of it from the hallway.”
After a moment of hesitation and concentration, I motioned him through the next red light, but I could tell his thoughts were no longer on the drive. “So, why did you guys let Anne keep the second oath?”
“We didn’t,” I said. “It didn’t seem fair for any one of us to have it, so we let Kenley keep it. She was the only neutral party, and she was the one who sealed it.”
“Well, Anne must have gotten ahold of it somehow, if she burned it.”
My hand clenched around the bloody material. I hadn’t thought of that. “And she must have gotten to it quickly….” I mumbled, mentally counting the few hours between Shen’s murder and the moment Anne showed up in my office. And she’d found Cam even before that. “Maybe she’s still in contact with Kenley….” I began, then realized that we’d rolled to a halt three cars back from a four-way stop.
“Which way?” Cam asked, and I forced my mind back to the energy signature I was tracking.
I
