The Replaced(49)

I nodded. “Fair enough. But I have some questions too.” When she gave an unenthusiastic shrug and turned to inspect her cuticles, I took that as my cue to continue. “Why aren’t you friends?” Her eyes slid up from her nails, so I elaborated. “You said you knew Thom and Simon, but you said you weren’t friends. Why is that?”

“Actually,” she corrected smugly, “I didn’t say that either. You need to pay better attention. I never said whether we were friends or not.” She put extra emphasis on the “or not,” and I got the sense she got off on playing mind games, twisting everything around until you weren’t sure what your original point even was.

I decided to play my own game—the waiting game—and I refused to give her the slightest hint that she was getting to me. Instead of checking my nails, I tapped my foot to a song only I could hear, settling on “Womanizer” by Britney Spears, not because I loved the song or anything but because it was the first beat that popped into my head.

I felt a huge sense of satisfaction, like I’d just won the lottery or something, when Griffin blinked first, saying: “We were once—the three of us. We were close. I thought I could trust them back then, that I could count on them.” She made a sour face. “Turns out you can never count on anyone but yourself. They were as undependable as everyone else I’ve ever trusted.”

I tried to attach that word to either of them, Simon or Thom—undependable—but I couldn’t make it fit. They were a lot of other things . . . things she’d said. Simon was secretive, plus he was annoying as hell, and Thom was soft-spoken and reserved.

But undependable? Not in my experience.

“What happened to change things between you?” I asked.

“Did you know they used to be the best of friends?” Griffin asked, her brown eyes glittering like she was telling me something off-limits.

I was stunned, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Maybe I should’ve guessed all along. Only people who really knew each other, and who cared what the other thought, could get under each other’s skin so thoroughly.

“They once considered themselves brothers. Better than brothers. They used to say their bond was stronger because it hadn’t been forged by the mere circumstance of birth, something as incidental as a shared womb.” It’s true, her nod confirmed. “No, they shared something even more important: experiences. They’d chosen to be family, to stand side by side and have each other’s backs, no matter what.” My curiosity was ripe. The idea of Simon and Thom once being brother-like was almost as impossible as the idea of sharing DNA with aliens.

Griffin kept going. “They believed those bonds were the hardest to break. Except that wasn’t exactly true. They might not break, but they could certainly be stressed—tested and weathered—and those stresses could cause chinks that ultimately led to fractures.” It was almost as if she were repeating a story, the way she spoke. One she’d repeated again and again, like some twisted fairy tale. She reminded me of an elementary school teacher reading during story time, dropping her voice for effect and using exaggerated facial expressions.

Griffin was like that: theatrical.

I asked again, “What happened?”

When she blinked, her composure faltered and her vision drifted back into focus, and she seemed surprised to find me sitting across from her, almost as if she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone. “A girl,” she answered haltingly. “It all came apart over a girl.”

It took her a moment to recover, but when she did, her eyes brightened. “You should’ve known them before all that. They were different people then. We all were.” She shook her head longingly. “We used to have so much fun together as recruiters.

“Our job was to go out and find the new Returned and bring them back here,” she explained. “We did that by making them feel safe, special. We were the best at what we did. It wasn’t hard. We each had our own techniques, and we were damn good at it. It wasn’t necessarily intentional, but the girls were always drawn to Thom and Simon. You wouldn’t know it now, but the two of them together were very . . . charming, and those poor girls were scared and vulnerable. They needed someone they could lean on. A shoulder . . . or two.”

No matter how uncomplicated Griffin tried to make Simon and Thom’s relationship sound, it was almost impossible to imagine. All I’d witnessed were the two of them avoiding, antagonizing, or barely tolerating each other.

Friends . . . the “best of friends” . . . crazy.

But Griffin just kept talking. “By the time Simon and Thom had explained what had happened to them—where they’d been taken and how they’d been . . . changed—those girls were willing to follow Simon and Thom anywhere, to become the newest member of the Blackwater Ranch. We had become her new family.” She grinned, her shrug less than coy. “Me, I had different assets. I was in charge of recruiting the boys.”

I thought of the almost-spell I’d fallen under when I’d first met her, the way I’d wanted her to like me, and I could only imagine how unsuspecting boys might feel around her, wanting to please her, to make her notice them. I felt a little queasy thinking of the three of them using their charms to persuade people to join their camp.

“And what if someone didn’t want to be part of your family?”