2

2

We left scrab cleanup to the new recruits, and Patrick drove the team home to central London. A few weeks after Grayson died, Maddie bought an old, deserted hostel and turned it into the official London home for the St. John teams.

It had been a tight squeeze in the hostel at first. Maddie got bunk beds and shoved as many as possible into the rooms, and she’d still had to pay for some recruits to stay in other hostels around the city.

It wasn’t such a tight squeeze these days. In fact, there were a lot of empty beds. Recruits started dropping out after Grayson’s death, and it had only gotten worse in the last few months. Even after Maddie brought in a new group of recruits last month, we still had plenty of space.

I shared a double room with Maddie now.

Neither of us was the decorating type, so our room looked mostly the same as when we’d first moved in—two twin beds, two dressers, a closet, and a desk with a chair. Priya and Laila’s room was bright and colorful, with posters on the walls and artsy lamps on the dressers.

I’d looked at some posters in a shop a few weeks ago, but I was sort of afraid to just pick something, because I would inevitably pick the stupid art. The art that was meant for a dentist’s office.

As for Maddie, she just didn’t care. I asked her once if we should decorate, and she’d shrugged and said I could do whatever I wanted. I don’t need to hang my personality on a wall, she’d said. I liked that about her. She didn’t just act like she didn’t care what most people thought of her, she genuinely couldn’t care less.

But even with the blank beige walls, the ugly wooden furniture, and the creaky floors, it was starting to feel a little like the first home I’d ever had.

I showered and changed, pulling a sweatshirt out of my basket of clean clothes. It was late November, technically still fall, but it already felt like winter to me. It was cold and rainy most of the time. At least I didn’t have to deal with the scorching hot temperatures of the Texas summer. I didn’t really mind it. I preferred the cold.

I glanced at the closet. I’d bought some new clothes over the summer, but my wardrobe was still limited. I was going to need to buy some more winter clothes soon. The jacket I’d been wearing through the fall was starting to feel a little too thin.

I could spare some cash for it. Maddie had increased the stipends when we started losing recruits after Grayson’s death. Then she increased them again and gave bonuses to all the original, experienced recruits who stayed. It hadn’t slowed the defections, but it certainly made those of us who stayed happy. I’d actually saved up a good amount of money.

Maddie walked into the room as I was slipping my feet into my shoes. She shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it on the bed.

“You’re sure you don’t want my help with dinner?” She grinned. “I may be a terrible cook, but I get dinner done faster than anyone else on the team.”

“I think we’re going for quality over speed,” I said, returning the smile. I stood and grabbed my sweatshirt off the bed.

“Did you buy a new sports bra?” Maddie asked.

“Yes.” I gave her a weird look. “Why?”

“Your boobs look great.”

I bit back a laugh. “Thanks. It was really expensive, so that’s actually nice to hear.”

“I know your struggles to find good sports bras. I didn’t want you to think I hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s very sweet of you.”

Maddie’s phone rang, and she pressed Accept on the video call. “Hey, Mom.”

“Hi, honey. Why is there blood on your neck?”

Maddie quickly covered the small spot of scrab blood with her hand. “Uh, it’s nothing. Say hi to Clara.” She turned the phone around to face me as she tried to wipe the blood off.

Nicole smiled at me. “Hi, Clara.” She was a pretty blond woman who looked very much like Maddie. “Why is there blood on Maddie’s neck?”

“Hey, Nicole. Don’t worry, it’s just scrab blood.”

“You know that never makes me feel better.” She gave me a look that I could only describe as a “mom look.” It caused a heavy feeling in my chest.

Maddie turned the phone back around to face her. “She’s just saying it’s not my blood. Because I’m always careful. Not a scratch.”

I rolled my eyes at the outrageous lie. Maddie, like all of us, got injured pretty frequently. She was still healing from a nasty scrab claw puncture in her side from last week.

“I’m headed out to make dinner,” I said, and Maddie turned the screen around again. Nicole waved to me.

“Bye, hon.”

I said goodbye and stepped into the hallway, nodding at Priya and Laila as I passed by their room. Priya and Laila had the room across from us, with Dorsey and Edan next door, and Patrick and Noah across from them.

I walked up one floor to the small kitchen. The hostel had two kitchens, a big one downstairs and this small one upstairs. Meals were provided for the recruits, but it was mostly just sandwiches and protein bars, so we occasionally cooked a real meal.

Edan was already in the kitchen, studying a bag of potatoes. He was also freshly showered, his dark hair still damp. He wore long sleeves pushed up to reveal the tree tattoo on his left forearm.

I brushed my hand to the tattoo on my left wrist. It was my first, and so far only, tattoo. All of team seven had gotten matching tattoos that Laila designed for us—an artistic version of the St. John logo that was on all our uniforms.

Edan looked up and smiled. His green eyes sparkled beneath the lights, even though I could see the exhaustion beneath the surface. Edan was nearly always tired. I hadn’t noticed it about him at first, because he’d dealt with insomnia for most of his life, and he was good at hiding it. He also drank obscene amounts of coffee.

“These haven’t gone bad yet,” he said, holding up the potatoes. “We could make mashed potatoes to go with the chicken.”

“Sure.”

He pulled out his phone. “I should probably look up how to make mashed potatoes.”

“Minor detail.”

I grabbed a head of garlic and a cutting board. Edan found a peeler and began peeling potatoes over a bowl next to me.

“Hey, if you have time tomorrow, you want to come shopping with me? I need advice on a winter coat.”

Edan looked up, amused. “You need fashion advice?”

I bumped my shoulder against his. “I need warmth advice. I don’t know what to get. Back in Dallas, I just threw an old jacket over a hoodie and ran inside as fast as possible.”

“Just admit that you think I have fabulous fashion sense and you’re jealous.” He stepped back, gesturing down to his black sweatpants—with a hole in one knee—and faded pink shirt. Or maybe it was a white shirt that had accidentally been washed with something red.

“You are truly the epitome of fashion,” I said dryly. He laughed.

Though he was actually pulling that look off. I returned my attention to the cutting board. “I just need something besides my team jacket.”

“Sure. I could use a new coat too.” He turned and grabbed a piece of chocolate from the bag on the counter behind us, offering one to me. I took one and popped it in my mouth.

“My tía, in Mexico, always said that most American chocolate was garbage,” I said. “I never really had much to compare it to, but after being here for six months, I have to admit that she’s kind of right.”

Edan glanced up at me. “Have you heard from her again? Your aunt?”

“Yeah, she emails pretty often. And I’ve talked to her a few times. She even invited me to come visit her.”

He smiled. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I told her I was probably going to be over here for the foreseeable future, but maybe one day.” That was true, but I’d also felt awkward at the prospect of going to see Tía Julia. I really didn’t know her that well.

But she did seem interested in having a relationship with me, which was more than I could say for my own mother. And if I stayed in touch with her, I could also stay in touch with Mom’s extended family. I had cousins and some other relatives in Mexico.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Mexico,” he said. “And South America. And not just because they’ve never had much of a scrab problem down there.”

“That is a bonus, though.”

“It is.” He grabbed another potato. “You’ve been to Mexico once, right?”

“Yeah, Guanajuato, a few years ago, when Mom took me to visit family there. Tía Julia tried to get us to stay permanently, actually.”

“Because she knew about your dad?”

“That’s what I always assumed. They fought about it, but they were both speaking Spanish—and talking really fast—so I couldn’t really understand. I would have agreed, if Mom had asked my opinion. I could have finally learned Spanish.” I smiled at him. “I think you’d like Guanajuato. A lot of the streets are so narrow that you can’t drive down them. You have to walk a lot.”

“That does sound like my kind of place.”

Edan’s phone buzzed, and his smile abruptly faded.

“What?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

“It’s nothing, just a news alert about Julian.” He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles and put his phone on the counter. “It’s the interview he did yesterday. I’ll watch it later.”

“Turn it on, it’s fine.”

He hesitated. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ve been meaning to watch that one anyway.”

I used to have news alerts turned on for Julian too—hoping for a sudden arrest or news of new evidence being uncovered—but I’d had to turn them off a few months ago. Julian had acquired a small but very dedicated group of fans after Grayson’s death, and they all hated me. I didn’t need to read every blog and Reddit thread calling me a crazy bitch.

I’d stuck to the facts in the video we made the night Julian murdered Grayson. I told everyone exactly what he had told me—that MDG was training scrabs to build some kind of army and shipping them back to the United States. I explained that we’d stopped the shipment, but we didn’t know if there were others. I told them that the bruise on my cheek was from Julian, that he’d killed two police officers and Grayson in a fit of rage, and he was directly responsible for the deaths of our teammates Archer, Zoe, and Gage.

Julian denied everything, and he and his high-powered lawyers took every opportunity to remind people that we’d dated. The fact that I’d been in a relationship with Julian for all of three weeks made everything I said suspect, apparently.

And, as the police explained, they needed more witnesses, and no one else had seen Julian direct scrabs to kill the police officers. My word wasn’t good enough, it turned out. But all of team seven believed me, and that was what was important. None of them had been there to hear Julian confess, and for all they knew, I’d made it up to get back at him or to impress everyone (Are we sure she wasn’t just trying to get attention? one news anchor had suggested several times). But all seven members of my team had been unwavering in their support, publicly and privately.

As for Grayson, the gun Julian had used to shoot him had actually been one of Webb’s, and Julian claimed he only grabbed it after Webb died, to kill a scrab. The fact that Grayson had used explosives to blow up part of a private residence had not helped matters. Julian told police that the scene was chaotic and he could understand why we’d gotten confused. In the end, prosecutors decided that a conviction was unlikely and they declined to bring charges. Julian walked free.

The law enforcement officers (British and American) we were in contact with claimed that they were still investigating Julian, as well as MDG. They just had to build a solid case based on evidence, not the word of one teenage girl. A teenage girl who had been photographed kissing Julian just days before she claimed he was a dangerous murderer.

It did not look great, admittedly.

As for training scrabs, MDG had flat out denied it for a while, before finally conceding that perhaps some of their employees had been working on programs without their knowledge. They’d vowed to cooperate with the police to get to the bottom of it. I didn’t believe for a minute that the higher-ups at MDG didn’t know about everything, but at least it seemed like their training program was going to fail before it ever fully got off the ground.

That’s what I’d thought, anyway. Then Julian started making the rounds on cable news a couple months ago.

Edan pressed Play on the clip and propped his phone up on the counter. Julian was sitting with a blond woman, his favorite reporter, a woman who clearly found him charming and didn’t ask particularly hard questions.

He always looked sharp and put together when he did these interviews—he was in a flawless pressed suit with a shiny red tie, and his brown hair was perfectly combed. He was undeniably good-looking. But I knew him well enough to see that he was fraying around the edges. He had dark circles that even makeup couldn’t cover, apparently. He looked like he might have lost some weight. His cheekbones were more prominent today.

“Today we’re discussing the scrab defense movement, which has been gaining serious traction in recent months. I’m here with Julian Montgomery,” the anchor said. “Former second-in-command of the St. John teams, he’s been employed by the Monster Defense Group since shortly after the death of Grayson St. John. Julian, you’ve become an advocate for scrab training since seeing trained scrabs in action in London, correct?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m an advocate,” he said with a smile. “But I have seen the reality of what these trained scrabs can do. I work with Roman Mitchell in the security division—I believe you had him on yesterday—and our job is to protect clients from scrabs. Protecting humans from scrabs will always be the primary goal of the security division. And we have to train our people to fight back against trained scrabs, since they may encounter them while protecting a client.”

“Roman said that MDG is only focused on protecting clients from scrabs at this time, but you’ve spoken out in favor of MDG, and possibly other groups, embracing trained scrabs.”

“I have. Listen, we can’t ignore what’s happening in the world right now. The trained scrabs exist, whether we like it or not. We need to get serious about protecting ourselves and our country or suffer the consequences.”

“And that’s what this group—the Scrab Defense League—is arguing, right? They say that trained scrabs are weapons and should be covered under Second Amendment rights.”

“They do,” Julian said. “I’m not a member of the Scrab Defense League, but I have been in contact with them, and they’re just trying to adjust to a changing world. The right to own a gun has always been important in this country, but what do you do when you have an enemy who is nearly bulletproof? I can tell you from experience that most people aren’t equipped to fight these things, regardless of the weapons at their disposal. So basically, the league is saying, what counts as the right to bear arms? If we’re being attacked by scrabs, shouldn’t citizens be allowed to defend themselves? And if the most effective means of protecting yourself is with a trained scrab, why shouldn’t we be allowed to do that?”

“But wouldn’t it make more sense to eradicate scrabs completely? Shouldn’t we be focusing our resources on killing them, not training them?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Julian said. “In an ideal world, we would just kill all these things. But we’re not in an ideal world. It’s been ten years, and the US may have mostly gotten our scrab problem under control, but these things are still around in many parts of the world. Look at the St. John teams. They’re out there in London every day, killing scrabs left and right, and there are more, not less.”

Edan looked at me, brow furrowed. “Isn’t that a blatant lie?”

“Yes,” I said. “Our data shows a thirty percent reduction in scrab activity in the greater London area over the past two months. The London police data shows a nearly forty percent reduction. And the government recently released a report that shows a twenty-three percent drop across all of England compared to this time last year.”

His lips twitched up like he was amused.

“What?”

“You just know all that off the top of your head. It’s impressive.”

“Oh.” My cheeks warmed. “It’s my job.”

“You’re good at it.”

“Thank you.”

“. . . and you do have to consider the bigger picture,” Julian was saying. “The people who were working on scrab training were doing it with military defense in mind. We can evolve and embrace scrab training, or we can let another country do it first and suffer the consequences.”

“Same shit, different day,” Edan said with a sigh, clicking his phone so the screen went black. “I’ve heard enough.”

“Same.”

I’d heard way more than enough from Julian.