Timestorm
him and grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, tugging it hard and pulling him farther from my sister.
    “Excuse us,” I said to Courtney. “Mason and I have some Tempest business to discuss.”
    “Okay…?” she said.
    I gave Mason a shove in the direction of the lake. “Walk with me.”
    “Uh, doesn’t look like I have a choice,” he said, attempting sarcasm, but I could hear the tiniest indication of fear in his voice, which made my blood literally boil.
    Guilt. His intentions must not be very innocent.
    The lake looked more green than blue now, and I waited until we had nearly reached it before stopping and yanking Mason to a halt by grabbing his hood again.
    “What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
    He shrugged, looking anywhere but at me. “Nothing.”
    I snorted a laugh. “Yeah right. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on in your head. Just put a stop to it now. Whatever you did to send her digging through clothes and memorizing your waist measurements needs to end.”
    “I didn’t do anything,” he said, his voice going up an octave. “It’s not my fault we have things in common.”
    “Like what? What do you possibly have in common with my sister?”
    Mason folded his arms across his chest, staring hard at me.
    Oh right, the being-dead thing . I swallowed and took a step back from Mason. “If you touch her, I’ll seriously kick your ass, and if that doesn’t scare you enough, I’m sure Agent Meyer Senior will.”
    He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, fine!”
    After Mason stomped off, I moved closer to the lake, picked up a few rocks from the grass, and started tossing them in, trying to skip them across the water and blow off steam at the same time. Mason knew what was going to happen to Courtney. He knew everything about my family, so what was he thinking? And he’s seventeen, she’s fourteen. I could see it in his eyes, just then, he liked her. In that way that I remembered all too well from being Mason’s age. It led to kissing and removing bras and—
    I shuddered, forcing the mental picture from my brain.
    I wasn’t alone for long before I heard Holly’s and Emily’s voices coming from the grass behind me. They were all the way over by the tree stump with the T-shirt still pinned to it and didn’t appear to be coming closer anytime soon. At least I had smoothed things over with Emily. Holly and Courtney still hated me, but one out of three was better than zero out of three.
    It had just occurred to me that in my idiotic grief, I had left Holly and Blake alone in the reproduction room. Good thing Blake didn’t have access to wine.
    Being jealous of the two of them left me completely demoralized by my moral decision to let Holly choose her own path. What if that path was Blake? What if we were stuck here forever until we got really old and died of natural causes? Did I want to keep this secret from Holly for that long—to never attempt to make her love me again? I didn’t know if it would even be possible, but I did have a record of two out of three with getting the different versions of Holly to do exactly that. This one would be the most difficult, though.
    I put a lot more force behind the next rock I threw into the lake as disgust filled me completely. How could I look at being in love that way? Even in my head, using information from 009 Holly and 007 Holly to lure Agent Holly in felt like a total sleazeball thing to do. Plotting to make a move on her, to trick her into loving me—it diminished everything I thought our relationship stood for. It played out in my mind like just another mission. A task full of lies and deception, the polar opposite of true love.
    And Holly deserved true love.
    It was wrong to avoid her because of our past, and it was wrong to pursue her for that same reason. I needed to start looking at Holly as the girl right behind me, the one I first saw in the NYU bookstore in June of 2009.
    “How do you do that?” Emily said. “Show

Similar Books

Body Guard

Unknown

Letters From Hades

Jeffrey Thomas

Snow Raven

Patricia McAllister

Fervent Charity

Paulette Callen

Grave Doubts

John Moss

Haunted Fields

Dan Moore