The Becoming (3 page)

Cade grinned and got up from her chair to retrieve a covered plate from beside the grill. “Perfect timing, Josie. Your hot dog is ready,” she announced dramatically. She carried the plate over to set it in front of Ethan and Josie. “You’ll help her if she needs it?” she asked Ethan as she passed behind him.

“Is that even a legitimate question?” Ethan asked. He gave Cade a big grin and pulled Josie’s pigtails back, pretending to tie them together into a bow as Cade sat back down.

“I was thinking about having a movie night tonight,” Cade said thoughtfully. She swirled her straw through her tea. “Maybe digging out some of those DVDs I bought last week and haven’t watched yet. The four of us could kick back after Josie goes to bed. What do you think?”

“Are we
required
to be there?” Ethan teased as he looked over at Anna. She gave him a large smile, and as their eyes met, she winked.

“Well, of course. That’s why I’m telling you about it,” Cade replied. Her tone of voice hinted at just what she thought of Ethan’s intelligence level—and it wasn’t much.

Anna and Ethan looked at each other for a moment. Then Ethan said, “I don’t know, Cade. I think we’ll sit it out this time. I was thinking about spending some quality time with my wife this evening.” Anna reached over and grabbed Ethan’s hand as it rested on top of the table, and he returned the smile she gave him at his words.

Cade’s grin became mischievous as she raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I see what kind of evening you’re going to have,” she said knowingly.

“But, Uncle Ethan, there’s going to be popcorn,” Josie said. Her voice was muffled, her mouth full of hot dog and bread. “Aunt Cade always makes popcorn when she watches movies with me.”

“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full, Jos,” Ethan told her as he fluffed her bangs playfully. “Anna and I haven’t gotten to hang out with each other in about a week. We’ve both been working.”

Cade smiled at them both and said, “You two need to make me an aunt already. I don’t care how you do it. You can freaking adopt for all I care.”

“But you’re already an aunt, Aunt Cade,” Josie said, as if it should have been obvious.

Ethan laughed softly and gave Cade a shrug as he pressed his nose against the back of Josie’s hair. “We’ll see,” he said. “I’m not exactly in a hurry, and neither is Anna.” Ethan had yet to tell Cade about the last doctor’s appointment, when he and Anna had found out they couldn’t have children. It was too painful to think about, and the last thing Ethan wanted was to talk about it with someone other than Anna, even if it meant excluding his best friend from the news.

Anna reached over from her side of the table and took Ethan’s hand again. She gave it another affectionate squeeze before she released it. “You’ll be the first to know if something happens,” she told Cade. “Right, Eth?”

Ethan nodded. “Oh, definitely. If I ever decided to tell someone something before you, Cade, you’d probably kill me.” And Ethan had no doubt that she would be successful at it too.

Cade’s face brightened. “Speaking of killing, you need to check out my new toy.”

An ominous feeling settled into Ethan’s gut at her words, replacing the queasy hung-over feeling he’d had all morning. “Your new toy?” he repeated.

Anna held out her arms for Josie and grinned at him. “Oh, you’ll like it,” she assured him as she took the little girl. She shifted the four year old to her lap and slid her plate back in front of her. “She showed it to me a while ago. It’s something that’s right up your alley.”

“Doesn’t make me any less scared at the idea of Cade and her
toys,
” Ethan replied. Cade’s “toys” were infamous among their small group of friends. They usually tended toward the extremely sharp, mildly explosive, and always dangerous end of the spectrum. Given that she had so many assorted guns and knives hidden around the house, Ethan was amazed that Cade’s older sister Lindsey let her keep Josephine for extended periods of time.

Cade led Ethan into the house, through the kitchen and living room, and up the stairs to her bedroom. Ethan followed her into the room wordlessly and stopped near the bed. He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels as he looked around. A photograph of Cade in her IDF uniform sat on the table by the bed, a multicolored ribbon mounted at the bottom of the photograph. Ethan couldn’t remember what the award was for. “Hey, are those new curtains?” he asked conversationally as he looked in the direction of the windows. “I don’t remember them being that color.”

“Yeah, Mom mailed them to me last year. Said the last set I had up when she visited didn’t match the room exactly. I couldn’t care less, but you know how she was,” Cade said. She threw open her closet door and hauled out a large black case. “I figured after she died, I’d drag them out and put them up, ‘cause I know it would have made her happy.” She slung the case onto the bed and went to the dresser, yanking a drawer open and digging through its contents. Ethan moved to the case and leaned over it. He smoothed his hand over the rough plastic surface as he studied the case curiously. It was a rifle storage case, and Ethan had a sinking feeling that whatever was inside was going to prove just as deadly as every other interesting item Cade owned.

Cade came back with a small silver key and slid it into the lock holding the case closed. “This is seriously the best thing I’ve ever bought for my personal use,” she informed Ethan as she twisted the key in the lock.

Ethan let out a low whistle as Cade slowly opened the case to reveal a deadly-looking rifle nestled in its padded innards. He recognized the weapon vaguely—he had seen its type before in a movie or a television show—but he couldn’t exactly place what it was. “What kind of rifle is this?”

“It’s an IMI Galil SAR,” Cade replied.

Ethan whistled again and raised an eyebrow.
That
was a name he had heard before. “Impressive. I’m assuming you’ve got permits for this?” he teased as he gave Cade a light jab in the side with his fist. Cade danced aside and lifted the rifle out of its case, holding it in both hands. Her grip on the weapon was as sure as if she had been using it for years.

Cade smirked and tore her gaze away from the rifle. “I don’t know, Eth. It’s a great idea to show my best friend, who just so happens to be a cop, the rifle I don’t have a permit for, don’t you think?”

Ethan laughed and shook his head as she offered him the rifle. “No, I’ll let you handle that thing. I’m pretty likely to shoot my foot off with something that high tech,” he joked.

“Ethan, it’s unloaded.”

Ethan smirked. “Yeah, my point stands.”

Cade laughed and put the rifle away as gently as a mother would tuck in her child. She locked the case once more and gave the lid a tug to make sure it was secure. “So how about those burgers and beer?” she offered. She motioned for Ethan to follow her out of the room after a quick stop at the dresser to return the key to its hiding place, and they retreated back downstairs.

As they passed through the kitchen, Ethan noticed a newspaper lying on the table. He scooped it up as the headline caught his attention. “Mysterious Illness Sweeps Atlanta,” he read out loud. “What’s up with this?” He waved the newspaper at Cade with a rustle.

“With what?” she asked. She leaned to glance at the headline and shrugged. “I don’t know. Just some flu or something that’s going around. The hospitals are having some problems dealing with it. You know, the usual bullshit.”

“Damn, are you sure?” Ethan asked. He scanned the article. The details were vague. His eyes caught the byline, and he frowned at the unusual name. Avi Geller. He’d heard or read the name before, but he couldn’t place where. It was obvious that the illness was becoming widespread, though, and that worried him.

Cade shrugged again. The expression on her face said that she really couldn’t have cared less. “It’s probably just the flu, like I said. Andrew said that he didn’t think it was as bad as everybody is making it out to be. He had a little trouble getting out of Hartsfield-Jackson, but that’s nothing new. The media is probably just blowing it all up for ratings or whatever. Besides, those kinds of things have a way of dying out eventually. I’m not too worried about it.”

Ethan set the newspaper back down on the table. His gut told him that something wasn’t quite right about the situation in Atlanta, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was that made him so nervous about it. He shook himself free of the feeling and began to gather plates and utensils. “Come on, let’s go eat,” he said as enthusiastically as he could, despite the nagging, ominous sense settling into his stomach. “I’m starving.”

Cade awoke with a start to the sound of soft, persistent knocking on the closed bathroom door. She blinked as she tried to gather her brains back together, and she realized that she had dozed off in the bathtub. She was submerged to her collarbones in water that had grown tepid; her fingers were wrinkled and soft and felt odd when she bent them. She reached up to make sure her thick dark hair was still gathered into its clip at the base of her skull before she climbed out of the bathtub. Quickly toweling off, Cade pulled on a heavy bathrobe before she opened the door.

Cade skimmed her eyes over the disheveled little girl who stood in the doorway, her khaki pants and pale pink sweater wrinkled and dirty from a day’s worth of play. Cade chuckled softly, not quite missing the wide-eyed look the girl gave her. “Hey, Josie.”

Josie tugged at one of her messy brown pigtails and bit her lip. “Aunt Cade, there’s a scary movie on the TV.”

Cade raised an eyebrow and released her hair from its clip. She went to the medicine cabinet to get a comb. “A scary movie?” she questioned. She worked the comb through her hair as she spoke, watching the girl carefully. “SpongeBob isn’t scary.”

“It’s not,” Josie agreed. She nodded and chewed her lip again as she twisted from side to side, never taking her wide eyes off of Cade. “It’s not SpongeBob.”

“Well, what is it then?” Cade sent up a prayer that Josie hadn’t seen anything that would traumatize her. Cade’s older sister would kill her if Josie came back from her latest visit with a new set of nightmares as a parting gift. Cade was sure that Lindsey still hadn’t forgiven her for the last batch of nightmares after Cade took Josie to the circus and the girl had a run-in with a clown.

“There’s a lady talking and people running and yelling.” The little girl looked worriedly down the hall toward the staircase. If Cade focused hard enough, she could just make out a woman talking, her tone urgent, though her words were indistinct.

“Did you tell Andrew?” Cade asked as she looked down the hall with Josie. She focused her gaze on the head of the staircase. Her eyes narrowed, as if she were trying to will Andrew to get off the couch in the den and fix the problem downstairs.

“He didn’t say anything,” Josie replied, much to Cade’s surprise. It wasn’t the answer she expected; she really wasn’t sure
what
she had expected. But it definitely wasn’t that. “I think he’s still sleeping.” She shifted her eyes back to Cade and scuffed her bare foot at the hallway carpet.

Cade made a face of annoyance; she would have to inform Andrew—
again
—that she wouldn’t tolerate him lounging around sleeping all day. She was already irritated that Andrew hadn’t come out to join the rest of them for the barbecue. Ignoring Josie when the girl had a problem was another thing altogether, a situation that might have gotten him kicked out and sent home if Cade had been in a worse mood.

Cade set the comb on the sink and knelt down in front of the little girl. She brushed Josie’s bangs back from her brown eyes and gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll tell you what,” she started. She leaned to look at the glowing red numbers on her alarm clock in the bedroom across the hall. The numbers told her that it was after nine at night. “You’re going back home tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s past your bedtime, and you need plenty of rest for the trip back home, don’t you?” Cade suggested. She hoped dearly that she sounded at least slightly persuasive. It would be much easier to talk to Andrew with Josie tucked away in bed and not practically in front of them when things degraded into an argument—as their discussions always seemed to do lately.

“I guess,” Josie mumbled with a small shrug. The little girl didn’t quite look at her, and Cade knew that Josie didn’t agree. But her droopy eyes told Cade everything she needed to know.

Cade offered Josie a hand as she stood again. “Come on, chick. Let’s get your teeth brushed and get you all tucked in.”

Josie went to sleep easily, for which Cade was thankful. She smiled indulgently as she looked in at her niece from the doorway, watching as she curled onto her side with her cherished stuffed elephant in her arms. Cade turned on the night light and slipped out, leaving the door cracked so she could hear if Josie called out for her in the middle of the night.

Cade went back downstairs after a quick stop in her bedroom to change into her own pajamas. She paused in the doorway of the den and looked in on Andrew. Surprisingly, he wasn’t on the couch where she had left him. She turned her head and spotted him in the kitchen. He stood in front of the opened refrigerator, staring inside listlessly.

“I think Josie’s been playing with the remote,” she told him. Andrew didn’t reply, but Cade saw his head bob as he nodded. Cade sighed out loud as she went to the couch and began to dig around the cushions and pillows, searching for the remote as she half-listened to the television.