Page 11 of The Lovely and the Lost

“Hello,” Cady repeated. “I’m—”

“You’re the daughter.” The boy bent to scratch Pad behind the ears, then rose again. “I’m supposed to be on my best behavior, so I suppose I should welcome you home.”

I felt, as much as saw, him cross the invisible threshold that put him within two arm’s lengths of my family. Saskia took a single, threatening step toward him.

“Easy, Sass,” I murmured. I followed my own advice, right up until the boy bared his teeth at Cady in a smile that didn’t strike me asfriendlyin the least.

“We heartily accept your dubious welcome!” Jude beamed at him. “I admire a man with pent-up anger and a casual disregard for even the most basic social norms! You do you, I always say.”

The boy came to a stop. There was nothing overtly aggressive in his posture. But that didn’t stop the part of my brain that had been on high alert since this interaction began from sizing up my opponent’s weaknesses.

Worse came to worst, I could go for his throat.

“We’re here for the search,” Cady said.

“You don’t want to be here at all.” The boy rocked back on his heels. “Believe me, Ms. Bennett, that’s perfectly, crystalline clear.”

“Crystalline,” Jude repeated. “An excellent vocabularical choice! I’m Jude. This is Kira. We will be your same-age peers today.”

The boy flicked his gaze away from Cady, just briefly. But he didn’t look at Jude. He looked at me.

“Gabriel.”

The boy didn’t introduce himself. An older woman, who’d just appeared on the cabin’s front porch, did it for him. She wiped her hands on a faded blue apron as she strode toward us. She was tiny and bird-boned, but moved like she was used to people getting out of her way.

When she reached us, she gently lifted a wrinkled, sun-worn hand to cup Cady’s face. “It’s good to see you, Cady-girl.”

For the first time since we’d entered Hunter’s Point, Cady smiled. “Ness.”

The older woman pulled Cady into a long, tight hug, then reverted to business mode. “Cadence Bennett,” she said, pulling back, “meet Gabriel Cortez.” She turned her eagle eyes to the boy next to her. “Gabriel,” she said, her tone warning him to play nice, “has been helping your father run this place for the past year.”

“An altruist if I’ve ever seen one!” Jude sidestepped Cady to get a better look at Ness. “I’m Jude, and the lovely lady glowering in your general direction is Kira. Glowering is Kira’s way of showing love.”

The older woman arched an eyebrow at Jude. “I take it you don’t get your temperament from the Bennett side of your family tree.”

“I am, in many ways, an enigma,” Jude intoned. “At the moment, I happen to be an enigma who is wondering whether or not there are any cookies to be had in the near vicinity?”

Ness snorted. “That’s quite a nose, young man. I just finished baking a fresh batch. If you’re lucky, your friend won’t have devoured them all.”

There was a moment of silence and then Jude tilted his head to the side, like NATO the moment someone so much as mentioned the wordt-r-e-a-t.

“What friend?” Cady asked.

I knew the answer to that questionbeforeFree sauntered out onto the porch, a cookie in each hand. I should have guessed, when she was helping me pack, that Free wouldn’t just roll belly-up and let us leave her behind.

“I brought the bloodhounds,” she informed Cady. “In case you need them. Or, you know, in case you need me.”

“Miscreants’ Creed, line nine,” Jude whispered in my ear. “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

“Do I want to know how you beat us here?” Cady gave Free what Jude liked to callThe Look. “Or how you knew where exactly we were going?”

“I could invoke my constitutional right not to incriminate myself,” Free mused. Being Free, she didn’t stop there. “But for argument’s sake, let’s just say that Jude can’t keep a secret, and once I knew where you guys were going, I might, hypothetically, have talked my way into a ride.”

Cady’sLookintensified. “Did you know the person who drove you here?”

Free shrugged. As protective as she was of us, she’d never had any particular talent for taking care of herself.

I could practicallyseeCady counting back from a hundred. “You and I are going to be having words, Free.” Cady let that single sentence hang ominously in the air for a moment before she turned to Ness. “Where’s my father?”