The Replaced(55)

“Here she’d been taken and experimented on and then returned, and she just . . . what?” He shrugged more to himself than to me. “She just accepted it, the way you would that the sky is blue and a bear shits in the woods.” He looked me right in the eye and nodded. “Yeah, that was it. It was that no-nonsense thing about her. Willow’s biggest fault, at least in Griffin’s eyes, was that Thom and I admired her. That and the fact that Thom and I thought maybe she could work with us, the same way Griff did.”

My stomach lurched at the casual way he said Griff. I wasn’t born yesterday—girls like “Griff,” with their push-up bras and badass attitudes, had a way of wiggling their way inside guys’ heads, and I couldn’t stop from wondering if she was there now—in Simon’s head.

But Simon was oblivious to what was going on inside my head. “No matter what we said,” he continued, “Griffin hated Willow from the get-go. And she went out of her way to undermine her every chance she got.

“At first I thought she’d get over it. I mean, just because we were taking an interest in Willow, that didn’t mean we’d replaced Griffin. But Griffin was never like that. She had to be the best at everything. The center of the universe. She didn’t like Thom and me having our interests divided by the new girl.” He was quiet for several long seconds, and then he said, “I just never realized how far Griffin would go to get Willow out of the way.” Simon spat in the sand, as if the memory were too sour to swallow.

“What did she do?”

“At the time, Blackwater was having serious problems with the Daylighters. That Agent Truman guy wasn’t around back then, at least not that I know of, but there was this other guy, and he was just as relentless. He always seemed to know about our recruiting missions even before we got there. Franco warned us all to be careful every time we left the camp. But no matter how many precautions we took, that agent was always one step ahead of us, and he would snag the new Returned before we could get to them.” He shook his head. “We started to suspect someone inside the camp was feeding him information.”

“And Griffin thought it was Willow?” I asked, piecing the puzzle together myself.

He shook his head. “That’s the thing. I don’t think she ever really believed it was Willow, but that’s what she told Franco. She convinced him that all our trouble started about the time Willow showed up, which was pretty much the truth. She said Willow shouldn’t be trusted.”

“And he believed Griffin?”

Simon shrugged. “Whether he did or not, I never got the chance to find out. I told Thom we needed to convince Franco that Griffin was wrong, that there was no way Willow was passing information to the No-Suchers’ Daylight Division.”

“How could you be so sure? What if it really was Willow who was working on the inside?”

“It wasn’t. Thom and I already suspected this recruiter named Eddie Ray, who’d been coming up through the ranks. He was power-hungry like Griffin, only he had Franco’s ear.” He grimaced. “I went to Thom about Willow, but he refused to back me up. He didn’t want to go against Griffin. I think that’s when I realized she’d gotten to him. That she was willing to do whatever it took to convince Thom, and anyone else who could help her cause, that she was right: that Willow was the traitor.”

I wasn’t quite sure I understood. “Are you saying they had a thing, Griffin and Thom?”

“I’m saying Thom had a thing for Griff . . . enough so that he’d stopped thinking with his head. I mean, I guess I knew she could do that to a guy; it was what made her such a good recruiter in the first place. I just didn’t think Thom would be so . . . susceptible.”

“And what about you?” I asked, hating the note of jealousy I heard in my own voice. “Were you susceptible too?”

“Me? Nah. I mean, I didn’t blame the guys who fell for her. She had this way of looking at you with those brown eyes of hers like she’d known you forever, even though she’d barely just met you. It was like the two of you had these private secrets that no one else in the world were in on. And, holy shit, when she smiled”—Simon squeezed his eyes closed—“kinda sideways, like it accidentally slipped out, you couldn’t help but smile back at her.”

I had to wonder if he had been a little susceptible, even if he wasn’t willing to admit it.

“My grandma had a word for girls like her. She called them wanton.” He grinned then. “It was pretty much the worst insult she could give, and that’s what she would’ve said about Griff. She was one of those fast girls you were supposed to watch out for. The kind we were warned about in church on Sundays. Also, why I kinda hated church. I liked girls who weren’t buttoned-up and afraid to speak their minds.” He looked down at our hands, and his fingers pushed their way between mine, until our fingers wove together. He smiled.

“But I thought Thom and I were . . .” I expected him to say “brothers,” just like Griffin had, but instead he finished with “partners,” which carried way less punch. “I thought he’d have my back when push came to shove. But he didn’t. He backed Griffin, even though we both knew she was lying.”

“So what happened?”

“I figured Griffin didn’t tell you everything.” He shrugged. “Back then I was the council’s favorite to take over as leader if anything happened to Franco. So when Franco called a meeting to deliberate over Willow’s fate, I was there. When the decision was handed down that Willow was set to be excommunicated, mine was the sole vote against it.” In the dark, Simon’s eyes met mine and he let out a slow breath. “It doesn’t sound so bad, except it was practically a death sentence for Willow. We still had a very real information leak in our camp and the Daylighters were sure to find out where Willow was being sent. I couldn’t let Willow be captured by those bastards just because Griffin didn’t like her.” His fingers tightened around mine and my stomach flipped. “So that night, we left. Willow and I snuck out of camp. I didn’t tell anyone what I planned to do, not even Thom.”