The Vigilante's Handbook (Misfits #1)

Thirty Two: I Need a Friend with Me

My wristwatch read half past three in the morning, which was late enough for me to be certain that everyone in the apartment was asleep. The front door was locked, which meant that Lucia had finished doing her midnight round of  checking that the apartment was secure. I motioned for Mona to wait outside for me.

She hadn’t asked many questions when I took off toward the apartment after her revelation. But it didn’t take her long to recognize the desperate look on my face. She was right, she wasn’t an idiot--I didn’t make friends with idiots--but she was impatient. 

Eventually her patience ran out. “Anna, I have missed going along with your crazy schemes, but I would like some reassurance that you aren’t going to lock me out of your apartment for the rest of the night.” 

I hit her in the arm to shut her up. When she opened her mouth to complain more, I beat her to it. “I’ll be back in three minutes, and if I’m not you have my permission to yell loud enough to wake up the whole apartment. Just give me three minutes.”

She took a moment to weigh her options and raised one bushy eyebrow in a way that made me afraid she would start screaming right then, but her answer was a quiet, “Three minutes and counting.”

I drew the apartment key out of my pocket, twisted it in the lock, and let myself in. As I had expected, the boys had taken over the front room. Alek was snoring on the couch while Miguel and the sleeping lump that I determined to be Elliot were huddled on an air mattress. When I walked in, Miguel looked up without a hint of sleep in his eyes. I put a finger to my lips and immediately felt silly. 

His wide eyes searched the empty space behind me for Mona. I could see the questions and worry pull his eyebrows tight. The slightest shake of my head alleviated some of the tension, but not all of it. I nodded at Elliot, and Miguel gently shook him awake. 

A finger to my lips was enough to silence Elliot. They had been living with my antics long enough to follow without question, even as I carefully opened the coat closet and threw their warmest winter coats at them. 

Mona was still waiting outside, counting up from zero as she waited. I closed the door behind me as she hit 180. “Good timing. Now that the gang’s all here I would like to know what’s going on.”

“Isn’t this about the Misfits?” Stitch asked as he struggled to fit his second arm into the coat sleeve. 

“Obviously, that’s why we’re all here.” Clearly, Mona had not been following local news. 

“I mean the Misfits as in the vigilante group.” He turned back to me. “Did something happen?”

“Not exactly.” I couldn’t find the words to explain to him that his sister might be lurking in the shadows of this whole mess that we had fallen into over the summer. Not to mention that I had no desire to alert all present company to their relationship. “How do you feel about breaking and entering?”

Their instant dissent said they didn't feel good about it. Probably because of the blizzard. If it was a warm summer night, maybe there protests would have been minimal. But a hike through the snowy Canadian wilderness before dawn made for some annoyed friends. 

The path to the cabin wasn’t marked well, but I had walked it every day for years. I knew it better than I did the rest of the woods. If we had been dropped anywhere near it on that first day in the forest, I would have recognized the trees and their shadows. It was by fate that we were left on the other side of town. Fate or careful planning. 

It was usually a twenty minute tromp through the underbrush from city center to the little cabin. With the piling snow it was more like an hour.