Cassidy Jones and Vulcan's Gift (Cassidy Jones Adventures #2)

Chapter One: Old Joe

And shouldn’t you be a tad more grateful about the personal sacrifices she has made for you? My guilt deepened as I reflected on all that Serena had given up to help me—what she and her son, Emery, had given up. I couldn’t decide which had gotten the rawer end of the deal: Serena, who had closed the doors to her Wallingford University laboratory so she could squirrel away in her basement day after day and secretly study my mutant virus with the next-to-nothing hope of developing a vaccine? Or Emery, the fifteen-year-old college-graduate genius, who had put Stanford on hold to enroll at Queen Anne High School, where he masqueraded as a ninth-grader of average intelligence in order to keep an eye on me?

It really was a toss-up.

“Pay attention,” Joe demanded.

Coming out of my head, I stared at him. Bending over, he brought his face to mine. “Mind you, Green Eyes,” he said, tapping his temple next to his right eye, “Ol’ Joe is watchin’.”

I nodded respectfully. I really liked Joe.

He studied me a moment more before straightening up and turning away, ambling nobly across the grass toward the garden sculpture called Moses, where he had set up sleeping quarters in the crevice underneath the black-painted steel sculpture. Walking, he called over his shoulder, “I got eyes on the back of my head.”

I nodded, but Joe couldn’t see me—unless he really did have eyes on the back of his head.

I watched him crawl into the dark crevice, and adjusted my vision so I could observe him tugging a pile of dingy blankets over himself. Playing with my hearing, I picked up his rhythmic breathing and listened to it discriminately for a moment. When he snorted a snore, I smiled. Old Joe was already catching z’s.

“Glad you’re on duty, Joe,” I said to myself, doing a quick scan. Only he and I were currently in the near vicinity. “Hope all your eyes are shut.”

Stepping up to the Needle’s beam, I pressed my palms to the cold steel flanges jutting out from its sides. The chill penetrated to the bone. I pushed my feet against the flanges, creating opposing forces, and used the friction my tennis shoes and hands created to defy gravity and move rapidly upwards. Within a minute, I heaved myself onto the saucer’s roof, 605 feet above the ground. Crawling past a lightning rod, I settled underneath the amber tree and gazed up at it triumphantly.

It did resemble a Christmas tree close up.

As I yanked off the ski mask, a strong wind gusted off Puget Sound. The icy blast whipped my cascading dark red hair into a frenzy and bit through my windbreaker and sweats like needle-sharp teeth.

“Oh, geez,” I chattered, curling into a ball and wrapping my arms around my knees. The Needle swayed at least four inches. When the squall died down, I stuffed the mask into my windbreaker pocket and raked long, tangled locks off my face, tucking them behind my ears. Then I twisted around so I faced Elliot Bay.

The bay reflecting city lights looked like a sheet of black glass. Looks can be deceiving, I mused. And none more than my own. Scooping up a lock of hair, I observed it contemplatively. It was the same color as my mom’s. Her name is Elizabeth. I also inherited her wide-set eyes, nose, and fair complexion. My twin, Nate, and six-year-old brother, Chazz, inherited these traits, too. My blond-haired, blue-eyed dad, Drake, would appear to be the odd one out in our family, when in actuality I am. My family doesn’t know this, though. They don’t have a clue what happened to me the day I fell off a stool in Serena’s former laboratory eight weeks ago, and I plan to keep them in the dark, along with the rest of the world. If my secret were to get out, my life would not be the only one in danger.