Julie didn’t talk about it. She never said her mother’s name. One day we were walking down the street past a yard sale and Julie stopped without saying a word. She walked over to the box of toys and pulled out a big stuffed owl toy, just a ball of brown velvet with two dorky white eyes, a yellow triangle of a beak, and two flappy wings. She hugged it and I saw a heartbreaking desperation in her eyes. I bought the owl on the spot and she took it home. Later she told me she used to have one like it when she was a toddler. That owl was a secret treasured memory of being happy and being loved, sheltered and protected by two people who adored her, never suspecting that the world would one day smash it all to pieces. It had been a year since we found it and she still hugged it when she went to sleep.

“I gave her the rest of the apple pie,” Julie said. “I hope you don’t mind. She’s a bear and they like sweets. It made her feel better.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“You’re going to find him, right?”

“I’m going to try.”

“I’ll help you,” Julie said. “Tell me if you need anything.”

“I will.”

She gathered up her owl and her blanket and stood up. “I like Eduardo and George. They’re always nice to me.” She hesitated. “I don’t want her to feel what it’s like.”

My heart tried to flip over in my chest. It hurt. “I know.”

Julie nodded and went to the third floor.

I would find Eduardo. I would find him because he was my friend, because George had suffered enough and deserved a chance to be happy, and because I knew what it was like to have someone you love ripped away from you.

CHAPTER

3

IT WAS MORNING, the tech was up, and I was in our sunlit kitchen, making a small tower of pancakes. Julie’s school didn’t start until nine, because traveling through the dark in post-Shift Atlanta was too dangerous for kids, and we made our own hours. In our line of work, we weren’t guaranteed a lunch and we weren’t always home in time for dinner, so breakfast was our family meal. Shapeshifters had faster metabolisms than normal humans and they consumed a shocking amount of food. Curran was no exception. I had a pound of bacon baking in the oven—cooking it on the stove resulted in burned bacon, a cloud of smoke, and everything around me covered in bacon grease. Two pounds of sausage simmered in another pan, and I was on my tenth pancake.