The MORE Trilogy (4 page)

She took too many risks.

Caleb frowned as he watched the girl walk through the darkness, arm-in-arm with her blonde friend.

Ava Michaels. The girl was a complication that just kept getting more complicated.

He felt the eyes on him from every side—the Council waiting to see if he could deal with the situation. Other Protectors ready to take it out of his hands. The Guardians itching to jump in at a moment’s notice. But Caleb still didn’t believe all of that was necessary. He could handle it on his own, he was certain. He’d already managed to infiltrate her life, keeping an eye on her and planting the idea with Professor Andrews to recommend him as a tutor.

Caleb smiled a little. The girl was smarter than he thought. Although she had difficulty with the subject, it wasn’t due to a lack of intelligence on her part. He’d seen it before; a mental block when it came to a certain aspect of math or science, usually in an individual with a more creative personality. But once that block was chipped away, it almost always came tumbling down—and like a key in a lock, the understanding clicked into place and it suddenly all made sense. He felt confident that he could help Ava unlock the mysteries of physics.

Of course, that was not his primary goal.

Caleb stepped out of the shadows, keeping pace with the girls as they huddled together. He wished she’d stop venturing out after dark—for his own sanity, if nothing else. He didn’t believe the Protectors or the Council would act without telling him first, but, in his opinion, she was asking for trouble.

There were Rogues out there, after all, and they ignored the Council as well as Race Law.

A shiver of awareness ran down Caleb’s spine, alerting him to the presence of another nearby. He saw Ava react as well, looking hard into the shadows of the administration building.

It wasn’t good, her reaction. It lent credence to the Council’s suspicions.

Caleb’s eyes narrowed at the dark figure in the shadows. He spoke, so low most people wouldn’t be able to hear him, but he knew
she
would.

“Katherine,” he said.

He heard her irritated huff a moment before she appeared at his side, the two of them melting into the shadow of the trees.

“Caleb. Fancy meeting you here.”

“What are you doing, Katherine?” he asked gruffly, ignoring her playful tone.

She shrugged. “Just out enjoying the evening air. It’s so refreshing, you know.”

“Did the Council send you?”

Katherine ignored the question, as he knew she would. Instead, she lifted a hand and ran a long, red fingernail slowly down his chest.

“Why so cranky, Caleb?” she asked with a pout, looking up at him from under her lashes. “You used to be a lot more fun.”

He grabbed her wrist, pushing it gently but firmly down to her side. “Ancient history.”

She shrugged, twisting out of his grip. “Your assignment seemed a little nervous tonight. Almost like she knew I was there. In fact, I could swear she looked right at me. Strange, isn’t it?”

Caleb’s jaw clenched. “It doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps you were being sloppy. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Katherine narrowed her eyes, all teasing abandoned. “You better watch yourself, Caleb. The Council won’t put up with your antics for long.”

“I can handle this.”

“You better, because your little girl is raising a lot of questions, and it’s only a matter of time—”

“I said, I can handle it.” Caleb ground his teeth in irritation, his angry gaze locked on Katherine’s.

She raised a perfect eyebrow, her lips puckering slightly. Caleb felt almost nauseous when he remembered how he once craved those lips. They split into a wicked smile, and he knew she’d followed his train of thought.

“See that you do,” Katherine said with a wink, before she turned and disappeared into the night.

Two weeks later, Ava sat across from Caleb at what had become their table on the third floor of the library, pointedly avoiding his gaze. They’d been meeting three times a week and had been making a little progress, although Ava felt it should have been a lot more. Caleb, for his part, remained patient but determined—a determination that Ava sometimes found grating, mostly because she felt as if she were failing him.

“Okay.” He sat up straighter, peering over the top of his glasses. “Wave-particle duality.”

Ava groaned, laying her head down on her crossed arms.

“I hate this,” she muttered, turning away to focus on the pathetic orange and black streamers draped across the library reference desk. Halloween was still a couple of days away, but obviously, the librarians were a little eager for the holiday. The jack-o-lantern sitting next to the copy machine had been in position for more than a week and was looking a little worse for wear, the electric candle flickering lamely behind its withered mouth.

“Come on,” Caleb said firmly, poking her head with the eraser on his pencil. “You have to at least try.”

“I
am
trying,” she mumbled into the cool wood, turning her head to peer at him through the tangled strands of her hair. “You don’t understand what it’s like, what with you being a genius and all.”

Caleb just rolled his eyes. “Wave. Particle. Duality.”

She sighed, sitting up and pushing her hair back from her face with a determined look. “Okay, what about it?”

“Give me the properties of light.”

“Ummm . . .” Ava tapped her fingers on her lips, thinking. “Reflection and refraction . . . diffraction and interference . . . energy transport . . .”

“Yes,” Caleb said encouragingly. “One more . . .”

“Damn,” she murmured. “It’s on the tip of my tongue. Something to do with weather.”

“Weather?” Caleb looked at her blankly.

“Yeah.” Ava began to doodle little clouds and lightning bolts on her notepad. “The weatherman on the news when I was a kid used to talk about some kind of radar. Oh!” She snapped her fingers. “Doppler! The Doppler Effect!”

“Excellent,” Caleb said with a grin. “And what exactly
is
the Doppler Effect?”

“A change in the observed frequency of a wave as a result of relative motion between the observer and the source,” she recited.

“Which means?”

Ava frowned. “You’re relentless.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

She sighed again. “I know.” Ava swirled her pen in absent circles on her notepad, adding a tornado descending from the clouds. “It’s like when you hear an ambulance go by and the pitch of the siren changes as it gets closer, then changes again as it drives away.”

“Good. And what does that have to do with wave-particle duality?”

Ava’s brow creased as she thought back over what she’d read. “Those four properties point to light being a wave, but Einstein suggested that light existed in a particle-like state as photons. The photoelectric effect demonstrates a dualism to the nature of light, a concept in modern physics that light has both a wave and particle state, although not at the same time.” She took a deep breath, daring to glance at Caleb. Who was staring at her as if she’d grown a third head. “Or something like that,” she grumbled after a while.

“That’s . . .” Caleb shook his head in wonder. “That’s absolutely right.”

“It is?”

“Well, don’t sound so surprised.” Caleb laughed. “You have an excellent tutor. Something was bound to rub off.”

Ava snorted and crumpled up a scrap of paper to throw at his head.

Caleb dodged it easily. “Now read the rest of chapter three and we’ll discuss the practice questions.” He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses, and pulled his phone from his pocket, tapping away to check his messages. After a moment, he slipped in his ear buds and leaned back, breathing deeply.

“Don’t you have any homework?” Ava asked grumpily, turning a page.

Caleb smirked, his eyes closed. “Nope. Part of being a
genius and all
.”

“You so suck.”

Caleb chuckled and they lapsed into a comfortable silence, the only sounds the occasional turning of a page and the slightly tinny tinkle of the music through Caleb’s ear buds.

“So,” he said after a while, still lounging back but tugging one of the ear buds out and tucking it into his collar, muffling the sound. “Big plans for Halloween?”

Ava glanced up absently. “Oh. No. I’ll probably be studying. Not as much fun since it’s on a Sunday night.”

Caleb laughed. “Don’t think that’ll stop many people around here from celebrating.”

“No, probably not.” She turned back to her book.

“Did you grow up around here?”

Ava glanced up absently. “No. Oregon.”

“Ah,” he said. “Family still there?”

“Mmm-hmmm . . .”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Nope. Only me.” Ava looked up at him, curious. “Why do you ask?”

He shrugged. “Just wondering.”

Ava went back to her text, contemplating red and blue shifts in the light spectrum. She could feel Caleb watching her, though, and after a few minutes she huffed in irritation.

“What?” she asked. “How am I supposed to concentrate on this stuff with you staring at me?”

“I’m not staring.”

“Did you
need
something, Caleb?”

He sighed, fishing his ear bud out of his shirt and tucking it back into his ear. “No. Nothing.”

Ava shook her head, mystified and more than a little annoyed. She liked Caleb. He was nice, funny, and definitely a good tutor, but sometimes he was just plain . . . strange.

Caleb forced his expression to a complacent mask as the
boom boom boom
rhythm from his mp3 player pounded through his body. He’d thought getting information from Ava would be simple, that he could ask a few questions, and she’d open up to him like a long lost friend, spilling all her secrets.

What an idiot.

Katherine’s warning echoed in his mind, mingling with the vibrating bass of the music, and he hazarded a glance Ava’s direction from under his lowered eyelids. Her brow creased as she focused on the physics text, a finger following along as she read, and jotted down notes with her other hand.

He sighed. He was running out of time and unsure how to proceed. He knew if he couldn’t get the answers the Council sought, within an increasingly dwindling amount of time, Ava’s fate would be out of his hands, no longer his concern. The thought bothered him more than he cared to admit.

He reached out to her mentally, probing and poking along the edges of her psyche and seeking for some clue how to proceed, how to lead her down the trail of thought that would give him something—anything—he could use for her defense.

Nothing.

He needed to get her talking about her background, her childhood. Something personal that he could latch on to, to prove she was . . .

Well, what she believed she was, and not what the Council feared she might be.

But Caleb was quickly learning that it wasn’t quite as easy as he’d thought it would be. Ava was irritatingly tight-lipped about herself, and he had a feeling she only opened up to those very close to her. Probably not completely, even to them.

The friend, he thought. The roommate. She could be the key. If he couldn’t get what he needed from Ava, perhaps Lucy Matthews might be more forthcoming. He’d observed the two of them together enough to see they were close, and Lucy was definitely the more talkative of the two.