Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

“Alpha told you to kill your boyfriend’s grandfather?”

I nod.

“And you considered it?”

“No!” I hiss. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t ever—”

And then the waiter sidles up to our table. Finally . Yellow ducks her head back to the notebook.

“Good evening, ladies.” He sets a small basket of bread on the table. I have to restrain myself from jumping on it. “Have you had a chance to look over the menu?”

I haven’t even opened it. Yellow’s sits untouched, too.

“I’ll have the green turtle soup and the filet of beef,” Yellow says, her head still down. “Rare, please. Oh, and a side of the truffled duck in jelly.”

I blink. Most of that sounds absolutely disgusting. I quickly glance at the menu and want to gag. Larded sweetbreads, kidney, mutton, tongue. I could never live in 1894.

The waiter clears his throat.

“The filet of beef, too,” I tell him. It’s like the only edible thing on the whole menu. “But medium, please.” On the outside, I might seem like a rare-meat kind of girl, too; but really, meat that is too pink and bloody and, well, raw makes me want to hurl.

The waiter raises an eyebrow. “Medium? I don’t understand.”

My head whips over to Yellow, and she quickly shakes her own. People haven’t heard of medium in 1894? I look back to the waiter. “Um, just not rare. A little more cooked.”

This doesn’t seem to clear much up, but the waiter takes our menus and leaves. I pounce on the bread basket and rip open a half moon–shaped roll with my teeth. I don’t pause to bother with the butter, and I sure as hell forget my manners. The roll is warm and buttery, and I could eat seventy of them.

“Anyway,” I say. “It’s clear that Alpha’s up to something, so we need to figure out what it is and then come up with a way to stop him, which is going to be difficult, considering I’m apparently a wanted felon these days. Any ideas?”

Yellow doesn’t even acknowledge that I asked her a question. She still has her nose buried in that damned notebook.

I clear my throat and grab another roll. “Ahem, I asked if you had any ideas.”

Finally she looks up. She has a bewildered expression on her face. “You haven’t read this?”

“No,” I mumble with a mouth full of bread. I should have ordered an appetizer. “When would I have had a chance to do that? When I was running from you guys? When I woke up in a hospital room, and you showed up like a minute later? While I was breaking into a colonial house to get back your necklace? Huh? When in all of that free time was I supposed to sit down and do some pleasure reading?”

Yellow shakes her head. “You don’t have to be so snippy about it.” She tilts the notebook at me. “It’s our missions. Every single one of them. I think Alpha was selling them on the side.”

I reach over and snatch the notebook out of her hands. It’s open to an entry marked June 5 from last year. It reads:

JL

7.5

I scrunch up my nose. “And how exactly did you come to the conclusion that this is a mission?”

“Because of the date. June 5. I remember that mission. Green and I tampered with a Supreme Court decision on some transportation statute, then he tried to cop a feel before we projected back. I kneed him right where it hurts. I’ll never forget that day.”

“What’s seven point five?” I say. “This doesn’t strike me as having anything to do with money.”

Yellow grabs back the notebook and flips it to the beginning. “Look, here.” She holds it up and points to a page of entries. My eyes scan them.

RF

$5.75

BB

$2.8

KP

$3.0

“He stopped using the dollar sign almost right away, probably because it was too obvious,” Yellow says.

I take the notebook from her and flip forward a few pages. She’s right. The dollar sign is on that first page and then it disappears. I thumb through and find the JL entry. “So what’s seven point five? Seven and a half million?”

“No way,” Yellow says as she shakes her head. “There are hundreds, thousands of entries in there. Alpha isn’t making several million dollars off each of them. He’d be a billionaire or something. Alpha doesn’t have billions of dollars, I can tell you that much. Seven and a half thousand, maybe? Or seven hundred and fifty bucks?”

“Who’s JL?” I ask.

Yellow shrugs. “Code for one particular person, I’d imagine. And I’d really doubt that those are initials. Alpha’s smarter than that.”

She drops her napkin into her lap and reaches for the bread basket.

“You ate all the rolls?” she asks in horror.

I barely hear her. I’ve already flipped the notebook to the last few pages and am staring at the dates. The Boston Massacre mission is there. KA bought it for 50.0. Well, tried to buy it, at least. I failed that mission, as evidenced by the angry blue scratch mark through the number.

Fifty thousand dollars. Yellow’s right. It has to be thousands. Alpha would have made fifty grand off that.

The mission in DC with Senator McCarthy is there, too. OO bought it for only 3.0. Small potatoes. The Gardner mission’s there, too. That one went for a million dollars. Holy shit.

I flip to the very front of the notebook. Looks as if Alpha started selling the missions in the early 1990s. Which means . . .

I flip forward a few pages and feel the rolls I just pounded start to rise in my throat.

It’s there. It has an entry. Alpha knew about the JFK mission. It wasn’t unauthorized at all. Alpha might have set up my dad.

I stare at the entry. Alpha was set to make ten million off stopping the JFK assassination.

Instead there were two assassinations that day.

“We’re going to Dallas,” I say as the waiter sets down two plates, a low bowl of soup, and a rectangular serving platter on the table. My mind is racing.

Yellow picks up her spoon and swirls it around in her reddish-brown soup. “Excuse me?”

I toss the notebook across the table at her. “Someone code named CE bought the Kennedy assassination for ten million dollars .”

Yellow swallows and sets down her spoon. Her face turns sour. “Look, I don’t know if that’s the best idea.”

“And why not? It’s the only idea we have, and I don’t see you throwing out any suggestions.”

“You’re saying we should go back to the mission where your dad died.” She says it like a statement, not a question.

“Yeah. So?” I shove my knife through my steak and saw back and forth. It’s well-done.

“So what do you want to do, stop your dad’s death? We can’t do that.”

I set down my fork a little more forcefully than I mean to. The couple at the next table looks at us. The man is wearing a white dress shirt with a high collar and a gray-striped frock coat. His wife has on a long, corseted gown with ruffles. She raises her hand to her face as if she’s shocked by the way I’m acting.

“What are you looking at?” I snap at her. Her face grows red, and she drops her gaze.

“Iris, stop it,” Yellow says through gritted teeth.

“No!”

She kicks me. Hard. Right in the shin. “Stop making a scene,” she mutters under her breath. “You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met; you know that?”

My eyes fly open. “I . . . what?”

“It’s always you you you. What’s best for Iris? That’s the only thing you think about. And then you lash out at people who don’t immediately see things your way.”

“You don’t know me at all, Yellow.”

“Really? I think I do. You haven’t stopped talking about yourself since you joined Annum Guard. You were born in Vermont. You thought your dad was a Navy SEAL. Your mom is bipolar. You had to leave your boyfriend behind. No one likes you. Boo freaking hoo. Iris Iris Iris. All the time.”