Chapter One
The last thing that I, Ridley Heart, wanted to be doing at seven o’ clock on a drizzly Sunday night was take my little brother to his friend’s house. “I swear to God, Ducky,” I threatened, glancing back at him through the rearview mirror. “If you don’t quit it right now, I’m going to pull over and let you walk to Steve’s house.”
“Why do you still call me Ducky?” he asked me. “It’s been a year and a half since we went to England. You know I hate that nickname!”
“And that is part of the reason why I still call you Ducky,” I said, flicking on the windshield wipers. “Besides, it’s no fun to call you Andrew. That’s a name for losers. Be original. Thank god Mom and Dad…” I waited for a second, to bait Ducky’s reaction before I continued, “were original when they named me.”
“Well, how do you feel when I call you Rogue?” he asked me, sneering at the mirror.
I flipped my blond bangs out of my eyes, the ones that I had dyed to be a bright contrast to my normal mud brown color. “Rogue?” I asked him, pretending to be clueless about whom he was talking about. “Who’s Rogue?”
He made a duck face, pouting out his lips and glaring at me. “You know who.”
“See?” I asked him, pointing backwards in what I hoped was his general direction. “That’s why I call you Ducky. Because you’re always making that face!” I flicked the windshield wiper power up a notch because the rain had begun to come down harder.
Ducky stuck out his tongue at me. “Rogue, Rogue, Rogue, that’s who you are. Just a loner girl with no friends.”
Slowly and deliberately, I pulled off onto the side of the road, coming to a stop. Ducky frowned. “Hey. Why are we stopping?”
“Listen,” I said, making the wipers go even faster, because the drizzle had turned into a steady downpour. “I’m not a loner. I have friends. But if you insist on making me Rogue, remember, she’s pretty badass. So, if you can’t admit to any of that, then you should get out of my car.” Ducky sat there silently, as still as a statue. “Okay then,” I said, angling the car back onto the road. “Now that we’ve got that cleared…”
Suddenly, something ran out in front of my car. I freaked as Ducky screamed, “Ridley!” I yanked on the wheel and the car spun in a circle, splashing up an arc of rainwater that crashed against Ducky’s window. I shrieked as I tried to get the car under control, hoping we didn’t die. There was a loud scraping noise, metal on flesh and then someone cursed loudly as the car pitched forward momentarily and then came crashing back down on its wheels. I winced, thinking of the damage that had been done and the bills that would soon arrive.
“What was that?” Ducky asked, his blue eyes growing wider with every passing moment.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Was it another car? Or a dog? Or, oh my god, did we hit a person? Nobody can know about this, Ridley! They’ll make us pay for it, or worse, make us work it off! That’s insanity! Do you know what we hit, Ridley? Was it a tree? Or maybe a…”
“Ducky!” I screamed, keeping my hands firmly attached to the wheel, at ten and two, as if I was going to be using my driving skills as a reason why it was impossible for me to hit whatever it was. “I told you, I don’t know! Now just…shut up and let me think!” For a rare moment, Ducky was quiet. “Okay,” I said finally, taking a deep breath. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to walk out there and panic like we found whatever I hit like that. Deal?”
“Okay,” he squeaked. Leaving the car lights blinking haphazardly-time I got them replaced- so that I could see without a flashlight, I grabbed a black umbrella from the passenger’s side glove compartment and rushed out, Ducky only steps behind me.
“Hello?” I asked the darkness as rain pelted my brother. Not me, I thought to myself. For the smart one of the family, Ducky has no common sense. He really should have brought un umbrella. “Is anyone out there?” A corner of the darkness rippled and I heard a low moan.
“Unnnnnhhhhhhhhh,” said the figure. From this distance, I could see that it was human and male, but nothing else.
“Ridley, he’s hurt,” Ducky said. He raced forward to the man and knelt by his side. His blue eyes were even wider than in the car and I wondered if he’d blinked since we hit the man. “Ridley!” Ducky called, jarring me out of my thoughts. I ran over to kneel beside the two of them.
“What are his injuries?” I asked breathlessly.
“He’s semi-conscious,” Ducky started to rattle off. He gently probed the man’s body with his hands, checking for the bruises and the bumps and the ever-so-common broken bones. “He’s lucid enough to say some things, but I can’t tell what. I guess he can feel pain, but he hasn’t complained yet. I can see that something is wrong with his ankle, maybe it’s twisted or something? His shoulder is bleeding, but from what I can feel, we didn’t do that. There’s too much blood for it to have come from only a car crash with no broken bones. He could have gotten a concussion and that may or may not be from us. He’s not bleeding internally, at least I don’t think so, and nothing’s broken except that maybe ankle.”
“Aren’t you happy I made you keep up with the Medical classes at school?” I asked him. “Let’s get him back home.”
“But Ridley, we have to take him to the hospital,” Ducky protested. “He’s hurt…and bleeding…and…he could die!”
“We can examine him in Mom and Dad’s lab.”
“Neither of us knows how to work it!”
“Not true,” I whispered. “Help me get him into the car, will you?” Ducky took the man’s head and I grunted as we struggled to pick him up. Ducky had left the backseat door wide open and I pushed the man in. Ducky scrambled in afterwards, putting the man’s head on his lap. “Okay,” I said, sliding into the driver’s side seat. “Let’s roll.”
“What did you mean, not true?” asked Ducky as we sped off towards our house. “You know something about the medical equipment?”
“I’m going to be a pre-med major next year, Ducky,” I snapped. “I think I know some stuff about the lab. Plus, Mom and Dad had let me start to practice with it right before they…”I didn’t speak the forbidden words that would make Ducky’s eyes fill up with tears.
“Right,” Ducky said, erasing the awkward silence between us. “So what are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m going to wrap up that ankle. They taught me how to do that in first aid. I can’t take a CAT scan for the concussion, but I’ll do the best I can. Then I’m going to examine his shoulder. We can let him rest after that. “I pulled up the paved black driveway and parked right outside the front door. “Ducky, slide him out.” I picked up the man and groaned under his weight. Rain battered against the man’s head, plastering his black as night hair to his forehead.
“I got the door,” said Ducky, running forward and holding open the front door. His blue eyes gazed at the man’s shoulder. “It’s shiny, Ridley,” he said, keeping up with my quick pace as I started into the lab. “His shoulder is shiny. I think there’s something in it.” I glanced down at the man as I placed him on one of the many metal tables.
"You're right, Ducky," I said as I brushed the hair out of his eyes. Now that he was in direct light, I saw he was less man and more...boy. He couldn't have been more than 18, at the most. "But let's do the ankle first. ACE bandage, please." I held out my hand and Ducky passed it to me. I wrapped it carefully, including all joints in the process. "Now for the shoulder," I said and I grabbed the magnifying glass. "Yeesh," I said, making a face as I poked into the tiny hole looking for something.
"Lemme see,” said Ducky, pushing his way forward to glance at the shoulder.
"No,” I said, moving to block his view. "You can't see. Hell, Ducky, I don't even know why you're getting to stay here. But I can tell you this. There's a bullet in his shoulder and I need to get it out." I held out my hand again, but before I could say anything, Ducky slapped tweezers into it.
I looked down at my hand and then stared at him. "How did you..."
He shrugged and tapped his temple. "Certified genius, remember?" Oh yeah. Ducky's so immature sometimes, it's easy to forget that he skipped three grades and has a 147 IQ. "Just get it out before I faint." It’s impossible to forget about his aversion to blood, guts, and anything involving a horror movie, though.
"Fine," I said. I gently touched the tweezer ends to the bullet. "Count of three. One..." I yanked the bullet out and stood there, holding the tweezers and the bullet like I was a doctor who had just extracted a tooth. Ducky gasped and his eyes went wide again. He stared at me, then the bullet, then back at me and fell face first onto the hard linoleum floor.
I glanced down at him casually for a second and then looked back at the boy. His eyes were open and he was breathing hard, like he had just run a very long way. "Hey," I said. "You're awake." I put the bullet and tweezers down and stepped towards him with a pair of scissors, but he jumped off the table, grunting when his ankle touched the floor and clutching his arm when his shoulder jostled. "Hey," I said. "It's okay. I'm just going to bandage up that shoulder."
"Who are you and who do you work for?" he demanded. "If you're with Starr, I want you to tell her that I won't..."
"I'm Ridley," I told him, walking over and extending my hand. "The one on the floor is Ducky. And for your information, I don’t work for anybody...except for the grocery store, and only on weekends. Who are you and who do you work for?"
The boy shifted away from my hand, but didn't move any farther away. "Drew Cotter. Where am I? It's not a hospital, is it? What happened?"
I sighed. "I kinda hit you with my car. There were a lot of questions that I didn't want to answer, and your injuries were minor, so we took you to our home office. Now, I'm going to cut off your shirt so I can clean the hole, okay?" I touched the blade of the scissors to his shoulder and he didn't flinch away, so I took it as a good sign and began to cut the neck of his shirt away. "There, see? Was that so hard to do?"
"Thanks," he said. "Now let me ask: why do you have a doctor's office in your basement?"
"It was my parents'," I said, staring intently at the black t-shirt. "Their clinic. If you needed something done, you went to Heart's. No questions asked."
"Heart?"
"Yeah, that's our last name. Why?" I finished cutting off his shirt and admired his chest for a second- damn, he had to work out to get those abs- then put down the scissors and began to pour out some antibacterial wash.
"Do you know Nancy and Dominic Heart?" The bottle I was pouring the wash from slipped from my fingers. For a second that felt like an hour, the world was quiet. Then the bottle smashed to the ground, shattering on impact. Drew grinned, an 'I-know-a-secret-that-you-don't' smile. "I thought so. Who are they? Your distant cousins or something?"
"They were our parents," I whispered. "And they're gone. They disappeared on a trip to Siberia. Sometimes they would take me and Ducky, like when we all went to England last year, but not this time...they never came home. It's just Ducky and me now. We try to stay out of trouble...at least until next year, when Ducky and I both graduate and I can be Ducky's legal guardian."
"No," said Drew, closing his eyes. "I hadn't realized...I didn't know...When?"
"Six months ago," I said as I picked up the bottle shards. Once that was cleaned up, I grabbed a new bottle and began to clean out his wound on automatic.
"I'm sorry for your loss," he said, shaking his head. "I'd been away so long that I didn't...Wow. I didn't know they had kids," he said abruptly. "How old are you two?"
"I'm 17, 18 in about four months, and Ducky's 14."
"At least one of you has a genius IQ," he said, deadly serious. "The gifted doctor or the fainter?"
"The fainter," I said. "He's skipped three grades. How old are you?" I asked.
"18."
"How did you know my parents?"
"We were coworkers of sorts. We...traded information sometimes. It’s classified."
"And who's Starr?" I asked softly as I wrapped gauze around his shoulder. He was quiet so long that I didn't know if he had heard me.
"I can't tell you that, either," he said, sitting up as I snipped off the end of the gauze. "It's classified information. But while I've got you, Heart, did you ever see your dad with this little black book? It had names and numbers in it. He would have left it here whenever he went out?"
"Yeah," I said, opening a drawer. "It's right here." I handed him the leather clad book, its cracked binding crinkling as it passed hands. "Why do you need it?"
"I'm giving you my number," he said, taking a pen out of his pocket and writing something in the book. "If anything happens that seems...slightly out of the ordinary? Call me. It's under C for Cotter. Wow." Drew stepped back and looked at his listing in the address book. "I can't believe he updated it for every time I moved." He nodded approvingly. "Dedicated." The book was handed back to me and Drew started for the stairs. "I gotta go now, Heart."
"Wait, where are you going?" I asked, running after him as he went upstairs to the second floor and into my parents’ room.
"I need this," he said, taking a ring from my mother's jewelry box. Drew held up another ring, one that looked identical, and dropped it into the box in return. He grunted as he yanked the big white window in the corner open. He glanced out and grabbed top of the window edging.
"Where the hell are you going?" I asked as he swung one leg over the edge of the window, then the other, balancing on the tiny ledge outside of the window and still holding onto the inside. "You're hurt! Who the hell do you think you are, Superman?"
Drew turned his head so I could see his profile, glancing out of the corners of his eyes at me. He grinned again as his dark hair blew into his dark green eyes. "Nice meeting you, Heart. Expect some of our guys in four months." Still smiling, he let go of the window and fell forward.
"No!" I screamed and ran to the window. I only saw a fleeting glance of Drew as he ran into the darkness. From what I could see, he was clutching his arm to his side and stumbling on the hurt ankle. I smirked. Idiot. He couldn’t have used the front door?
"Ridley?" called Ducky. I sighed and slammed the window closed, turning away and missing the red dot that started beeping in the distance.
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