Page 148 of Renegades

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

ITWASN’TALONG RUNback to the house, and yet she was breathless as she barged through the back door into the kitchen, her pulse pounding in her ears.

The mason jar of honey had been left out on the counter, the sticky spoon balanced across the top, but Queen Bee was nowhere to be seen. Nova darted across to the staircase and was halfway up the steps when she heard a knock at the front door. She squeaked and barged into Leroy’s room. His lab equipment took up half the space, some concoction left bubbling in a copper pot on an electric burner. But Leroy himself had disappeared.

Spinning around, Nova ran across the space into the second bedroom she now shared with Honey, but it, too, was empty but for their sleeping bags and Honey’s air mattress and a few pieces of lingerie tossed haphazardly across the floor.

Nova’s gaze swept up to the attic access door in the ceiling. It was meant to be Phobia’s space up there, though she wasn’t sure how much he’d actually been using it.

Another knock sounded at the door.

Gulping, Nova headed back down the stairs, stopping to peer behind every door and into every closet she passed, but there was no sign of Honey or Leroy.

She was still shaking when she finally opened the front door.

Her first impression of seeing Adrian standing on the stoop of the row house was that he was trying very, very hard not to appear awkward, and it wasn’t working.

He smiled. Uncomfortable and uncertain. Nova was still far too frazzled to return it.

“Hi,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” she blurted in response.

Adrian started, tucking his hands into his pockets. “I was worried about you.”

Those simple words shattered Nova’s mounting frustration with him, but did nothing to dissuade the panic of him being there. Her shoulders drooped slightly, but try as she might, she couldn’t rearrange her features into something calm, confident, even welcoming. So instead, she just kept staring at him, her hand unable to release the doorknob.

“I sent you about a million messages…,” Adrian added, even as his gaze slipped down to her wrist. “Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that you might have just taken the band off.” Taking one hand from his pocket, he scratched behind his ear. “I was having visions of you passed out in a gutter somewhere.”

“Oh. Right,” Nova stammered, remembering the concerned messages she’d gotten from him while she was still at headquarters. “I, um…” She searched for an explanation. “I take it off to… shower.”

The moment she said it she became painfully aware of her very dry, unwashed hair and the fact that she was still wearing the sameclothes she’d been in last night when he found her inside the quarantine. She cleared her throat and gestured vaguely back toward the house. “I was going to… but then I got distracted with some stuff…” She inhaled sharply and finally managed something close to a smile. “But I’m fine. As you can see. Not passed out. Not in a gutter.”

Adrian’s gaze slipped past her, darting around the front room. The tattered furniture, the stained carpet, the peeling wallpaper. Though he said nothing and his expression remained perfectly neutral, Nova had the distinct sense that her real home wasn’t adding up to be much better than the gutter he’d imagined.

Or maybe she was just being sensitive.

“Uh… you don’t want to come in, do you?”

“Okay.”

She gawked at him, horrified. “Really?”

Though he’d sounded eager before, Adrian now seemed to hesitate. “If that’s all right?”

It was certainly, absolutelynotall right, and Nova struggled to think of a reason, but it occurred to her that it might be just as suspicious to send him away as it was to let him inside. Pressing her lips, she stepped back out of the doorway, her mind scouring through every object and possession in the house and trying to determine how any of it could be traced back to Nightmare or the other Anarchists. They had done little to the place since claiming it for themselves, other than a bit of surface cleaning to make it somewhat habitable.

Adrian stepped inside. Nova gulped and shut the door.

His focus went to the arrangement of photographs on the wall. He reached out and straightened one of the frames.

“Are you hungry?” Nova asked, before he could ask who any ofthe strangers in the photographs were. She trotted past him without waiting for an answer. Swooped one of Honey’s rhinestone hairpins off the coffee table as she passed, tucking it into her pocket. Gathered up Leroy’s old copies ofApothecarymagazine and shoved them into a drawer.

“We have…” Reaching the kitchen, she opened a cupboard and found herself staring at half a dozen mason jars. “Honey.”

Adrian followed her into the kitchen and she could sense him behind her, staring into the mostly bare cupboard. She shut it and tried the next cupboard, discovering a box of unopened crackers and two cans of tuna fish. She dared not even pretend to look in the refrigerator—she’d opened it once when she first moved in and found the shelves mostly covered in mold. She hadn’t bothered to open it since.

She grabbed the box of crackers and held them up for Adrian to see.

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