Carter muttered a cursed and scrubbed a hand down his face. “It doesn’t. I just can’t believe I was almost too late.”
“Almost too late for what?”
“To save your ass, that’s what.”
“Hey, I was doing just fine saving our asses before you came along.” I moved toward Mel, ready to grab her arm and get going, but Carter stopped me.
“You weren’t going to make it. Your plan was flawed.”
“You don’t know shit about our plan.”
“You didn’t even make it off campus. When I found you, that Collab—”
“Yeah, well, I had a plan for dealing with him, too.”
Carter cocked an eyebrow. “What were you going to do, stab him with your gardening shears and then steal his tranq gun?”
I gritted my teeth. “How did you—”
“Know about the gardening shears? When I found you with that Collab, your shirt had pulled up in back. I saw them tucked into the waistband of your jeans. So I deduced that your plan might have involved using them against that guy.” Carter stepped closer to me and, beside me, I felt Mel tense. “But even if you had dealt with that Collab, you still wouldn’t have made it off the Farm.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. I know that you’d planned to cross through the football stadium to the north side of campus. That you’d figured out that the electrical fence is down on that side because of its proximity to the river.”
Dread knotted my stomach. The only person I’d told the plan to was Joe. I’d told him all the details before he went to get McKenna. If Carter knew it now, he must have heard it from Joe. If Carter had been just another Green and he’d heard about the plan, then he and Joe would have both been here and we’d all be escaping together. Since that wasn’t how it was going down, I could think of only one other explanation. Joe had been taken to the Dean’s office. Worst-case scenario, he had already been taken off the Farm and fed to the Ticks. My friend could be dead already. Because he’d tried to help me and because he’d had faith that my plan could get him off the Farm.
Nausea rolled through my belly and I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.
“I don’t—” I said weakly.
“There are fail-safe measures in the security system you couldn’t possibly know about. And if you—”
His words snapped me out of my momentary stupor, and the more practical part of my brain kicked in. If I was right about Joe being caught and interrogated, that meant Carter really was a Collab.
“Oh, but you do know about them. Because you’re a Collab. Not just a Collab, but someone with enough seniority to have all this secret information about the security system. Someone the other Collabs know and respect.”
“I’m not a Collab,” he said in a low hiss. “If you don’t believe me about the security system, ask Mel. I bet she knows there was a problem with your plan.”
I glanced over at Mel. “Red rover?” I asked, suddenly uncertain.
She gave a quick shake of her head and then started humming Rachmaninoff again.
Damn it. If there was a problem with the plan, then why hadn’t she said so? Why couldn’t she have—just this once—broken free of those crazy knots that kept her tied up inside of herself and just spoken to me? She could tell Carter she liked potato soup, but she couldn’t freakin’ tell me we were about to walk into a death trap?
My mind spun as I tried to come up with an alternative plan. “Look,” I began, talking more to Mel than to Carter, “if Joe has been caught, that’s all the more reason to move quickly. Even if we tried to make it back to the science lab and regroup, we’re never going to have a better shot to get out. If we’re going to go at all, we need to go tonight.”
But it was Carter who answered. “If you try to make it out tonight—”
“I know, I know,” I snapped. “We’ll get caught.” I waved a hand dismissively. “If you’re so worried about these fail-safe measures, then tell us what they are.”
“I can’t do that.” Carter reached for me and even though his touch on my arm was light, it felt like a shackle. “Sebastian knows I’m out here looking for you. If someone else catches you, you’ll be completely screwed. But if you come back to the Dean’s office with me and—”
“No way!” I jerked my arm free. “Are you crazy?”
I couldn’t believe I’d tried to help him. That I’d actually worried about him. And what did he mean back to the Dean’s office? Was that where he’d been since we’d lost him before fourth meal? And if he’d been in the Dean’s office, was he the guy who’d beat up Joe?
“Lily, you have to trust me. I can protect you, but first I have to take you to the Dean’s office.”
I stumbled back a step, pulling Mel up with me. “Screw you, Carter.” I pointed an accusing finger at him, my voice rising louder than it should. “I’m not letting you take Mel to the Dean’s office.”
“Lil, I have to—”
He reached out a hand, but I danced out of his grasp.
“You want to take me to the Dean’s office, you’re going to have to tranq me first.”
Then, clenching Mel’s hand in mine, I turned and walked into the darkness. Carter might be a Collab, but one thing I knew about him for sure—he would never shoot someone in the back.
But then he did.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carter
“You tranqed her?” Sebastian asked.
Sebastian wasn’t one to let his emotions show but there was no hiding the surprise when he stared at Lily’s prone body draped over the sofa.
“I didn’t have much choice,” Carter muttered.
Carter backtracked to the office door. Mel hadn’t followed him in. She stood in the hallway of the admin building just down the hall from the office Sebastian had appropriated when they’d first arrived, where any Collab wandering by could see her. She stared at him warily, clutching her Slinky. After he’d tranqed Lily, he’d had to dig around in her bag to find it.
Great. Now she was freaking out. He’d friggin’ shot her sister in the back and she’d been okay with it. But now that she was thirty feet from safety, she freaked out. Brilliant. Perfect time for the Valium to start wearing off.
Sebastian, who had followed him out into the hall, studied Mel. “Let me see if I understand this properly. You didn’t shoot the autistic girl. You shot the normal one?”
“Yes, I shot Lily.”
“The one you claimed had a crush on you in the Before?”
“Yes.” He tried to lure Mel into the office. “I have gum.”
Her fingers stilled and she cocked her head to one side. “Dubble Bubble?”
He turned back to Sebastian. “Is it Dubble Bubble?”
Sebastian looked bored. “How should I know? It’s green.”
Carter and Mel exchanged a look. He gave her a hey-I-did-what-I-could shrug. “It’s probably spearmint or something.”
She considered for a moment and then—finally—walked down the hall to the office door. She gave Sebastian a wide berth, nearly flattening herself against the doorway to ooze past him.
Carter glanced at the vampire, trying to see him through Mel’s eyes. Clearly she sensed something off about him, though he easily passed as human. Yeah, the guy was ridiculously good-looking. Standing next to Sebastian, Carter always felt like a Neanderthal.
But Sebastian’s unnatural good looks were the only indication that he was something other than human. In the months that Carter had been traveling with Sebastian, no one they’d met had pegged him as a vampire. Certainly not at first glance.
On the other hand, Mel looked leery, but not afraid. So maybe this was just normal Mel stuff.
“So,” Sebastian continued in the same mocking tone, “you were able to lure one sister here with a Slinky and the promise of gum, but you couldn’t get the other sister to come with you at all? And the one you thought liked you, even. How embarrassing. Gum’s on the desk, by the way.”
Carter hated like hell that he’d tranqed her for her own good. Yes, it was true, but it didn’t sit well with him. It reminded him all too much of the times his father had meted out harsh punishments for his own good.
“I wouldn’t have had to tranq her if you hadn’t called me on the Bat phone right before fourth. Things were going great until then.”
“If I hadn’t called you back to the admin building, you would not have known they were planning an escape.”
“She would have told me eventually,” Carter insisted. If only he’d had a few days with her instead of a few hours.
“Or they would have tried to escape tonight on their own and they’d be dead now. We should be thankful Joe came to us with the information about their plans.”
“Right. Thankful that friggin’ Joe Mateo was willing to stab them in the back to save his own ass. Thank the Lord for that.”
“Yes, you made your feelings about Joe quite clear when you beat him senseless before sending him back for more information. But what I want to know is why you couldn’t convince your Lily to come with you using simple logic. Why did you have to complicate things by using the tranq gun?”
“Yes,” came a voice from the doorway. “I’m most interested in that as well.”
Sebastian and Carter both swung around toward the voice.
The Dean stood in the doorway. Though the man was neither tall nor physically powerful, only a fool would mistake him for weak. This wasn’t a world in which weak people held power.
He wasn’t an idiot, either. Which he proved by saying to Sebastian, “Of the nearly five thousand Greens on this Farm, why do you want this one so badly?”
Sebastian’s gaze became deadly cold. “What business is it of yours how I choose my Greens?”