“You think someone took it?” he asked, and I could only shrug.

“It didn’t walk off on its own. But I have no clue who could have taken it. Or why. Until Kori got arrested, only the four of us knew about it—Kori, Anne, Noelle and me. And Kenley, of course. And we all wanted it destroyed.” Badly, by the time we got to high school. “We explored different theories over the years. A parent trying to teach us a lesson. Kori’s brother, Kristopher, being a pain in the ass. Their dog burying a new prize. But no one ever admitted anything, and Anne didn’t know she was a Reader yet, so it never occurred to her to look for a lie. And every time we tested it, the binding was still intact, which meant that the oath was still whole, wherever it was. And obviously it still is now,” I said, gesturing to the entire car to indicate our current vigilante mission.

“That sounds like a total pain in the ass.”

“Worse. We started hating each other. Even the most offhand, ridiculous request became a geas—a compulsion that had to be obeyed, to the exclusion of everything else. We wound up cheating, and lying, and stealing, and starting fights for one another. We got hurt, and arrested, and kicked out of school. And the cycle was self-perpetuating. Anne would get pissed at Kori for making her help cheat on a test, so she’d ask Kori to go to the drugstore and shoplift only hemorrhoid cream and Vagisil, knowing that when she got caught, she’d be humiliated.”

Cam laughed. “When I met them, the four of you seemed to get along pretty well.”

“Part of that was the fact that we rarely saw one another after high school. The rest of it was the second oath.”

“There was a second oath?”

“Yeah. My senior year, Kenley got tired of all the bitching and backstabbing. And I think she felt guilty, because she was the reason for the trouble in the first place. So she conned us all into the same room long enough to show us a new oath she’d penned, which basically made us swear never to ask one another for anything.”

“So, did you sign?”

“Hell yes! We fought over who got to sign first. After that, everything was fine. We weren’t best friends anymore, but we didn’t hate each other, either. We just kind of…left each other alone. That New Year’s Eve party siars ago? That was the first time we’d spent more than an hour together since high-school graduation. It was also the last time I saw any of them. Until this morning.”

“Because Anne burned the second contract?”

I scowled. “You were eavesdropping?”

He shrugged. “I could only hear bits of it from the hallway.”

After a moment of hesitation and concentration, I motioned him through the next red light, but I could tell his thoughts were no longer on the drive. “So, why did you guys let Anne keep the second oath?”

“We didn’t,” I said. “It didn’t seem fair for any one of us to have it, so we let Kenley keep it. She was the only neutral party, and she was the one who sealed it.”

“Well, Anne must have gotten ahold of it somehow, if she burned it.”

My hand clenched around the bloody material. I hadn’t thought of that. “And she must have gotten to it quickly….” I mumbled, mentally counting the few hours between Shen’s murder and the moment Anne showed up in my office. And she’d found Cam even before that. “Maybe she’s still in contact with Kenley….” I began, then realized that we’d rolled to a halt three cars back from a four-way stop.

“Which way?” Cam asked, and I forced my mind back to the energy signature I was tracking.

I closed my eyes and placed my hand flat over the tacky sock, inside the bag. The pull was still there, but fading as the blood dried. “Straight,” I murmured. “But slightly to the right…”

“There’s no slightly to it,” he said, and I opened my eyes as we rolled through the intersection to find the street sandwiched by tightly packed rows of buildings—mostly neighborhood businesses and apartments.

“Slow down.” I closed my eyes again and let the blood guide me. The pull was getting stronger, but not definitively so. “Stop,” I said at last, when the blood began to pull me from behind. “We passed it.”

He backed into the first available parking spot on the curb and turned off the engine. “Up there, maybe?” he said, twisting to peer through the rear windshield at the building on the right. “In one of the apartments?”

“That’s my guess.” I pulled a packet of wet wipes from my satchel and started cleaning blood from my hand. Again. The wipes wouldn’t work as well as lye, but they were portable and didn’t make me want to peel my own skin off to stop the burning.

Cam glanced at the slight gun bulge beneath my jacket as I stuffed the used wipe into a plastic sandwich bag in the side pocket of my satchel. “Are you really going to do this?”

“I don’t have any choice. Or did you forget what compelled means?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything, Liv,” he said, and I realized we were having two different conversations. “Do you have a silencer for that thing?”

“No, I don’t have a silencer. Because I̱m not an assassin.” I dug through my satchel for a thin box of surgical gloves and plucked two from the slit on top, then shoved them into my right jacket pocket.

“Well, that’s too bad, because this is an assassination.”

“No, this is an execution.”