Unchosen - Katharyn Blair Page 0,1

hiss. My fingers grip the edges of the roof, the ceramic tiles burning the edges of my fingertips. I chance a look down, blinking against the reflection of the sunlight in the mirrors I keep tied on my wrists and the tops of my boots. Dean’s dark hair is brushed back into a low bun, his brow furrowed with worry. He has a grip on my left foot, holding me up.

“You’re forgetting that time we tried to give ourselves hickeys with the vacuum hose,” I counter as my right foot finds the window ledge. I hoist myself up, onto the edge of the museum’s veranda. I tighten the straps of my backpack as I look back down at the amphitheater, pausing for a moment to sweep the area. Overturned tables and chairs lie still on the black tile, but other than the slight flutter of napkins and old brochures covered with Ramses II’s face on them, there’s no movement. We’d raided this place several times in the past two years and never had any problems. Turns out that people don’t really have a lot of uses for history museums in the face of the actual apocalypse. Normally, we’d just walk right into the open front doors and go from there. But what we’re looking for is in a locked room. So the window it is. A cool breeze gusts over from the ocean to my right, which toils just past the western edge of PCH—Pacific Coast Highway.

Dean eyes me. “Right. You’re so right. This closely follows the vacuum hickey experiment. Which should tell you something, Charlotte, since that happened when I was fourteen.”

I twist a rope around the railing that circles the veranda, testing once to make sure it’s secure before I throw it over the edge to Dean. Within seconds, he has hoisted himself up next to me.

“Harlow will absolutely kill us both if she finds out I helped you with this,” he says as we walk over to the sealed double doors. I slide my fingers over the edge, finding nothing.

“Nah. I’m blood. You’re just her boyfriend. She’ll just maim me. But yeah. You’ll for sure be dead.” I wipe the grime off the glass of the window and peer inside. I can’t see much, but there are no obvious threats, and that’s as much reassurance as I’m going to get. Dean adjusts the mirrored bands on his forearms.

“Sounds about right,” he says, pulling the glass necklace from under his shirt and wiping it on his sleeve.

I wind a scarf around my elbow and then take a deep breath as I turn around. With one quick movement, I shove my elbow back and the glass pane shatters.

We both pause as the sound echoes off the hills around us. I grip the iron blade that rests in a sheath tied to my belt. I’ve only ever used it for cutting rope and the limbs of stubborn trees on food raids, but I know that any time we step out past the perimeter of the fortress, I might have to use it for something much darker.

Dean pulls a mirror from his back pocket. “Mirror” is kind of a loose term—it’s a shard of reflective glass, but he’s wrapped the edges in black electrical tape. He holds it inside, tilting it to get a full sweep of the room.

“We’re good,” he says, stepping inside. I follow.

Wings flutter above us, and Dean and I duck. Birds leave their hiding place in the rafters, swooping over us before they take to the skies.

“Shit,” he mutters, looking around at the chaos.

I turn, surveying the marble room and swallowing the weird burn of emotion building at the back of my throat.

Leaves and dirt line the floor, and vines that cover the far side of the building have since slunk in through a crack in a high window.

The Getty Villa used to be a sanctuary for me. Vanessa always had gymnastics practice and Harlow was usually getting ready for one gig or another, so I’d go alone. It was like a seaside palace—perched above the waves on a cliffside in Malibu, full of gardens and fountains and marble staircases. I would spend hours getting lost here, sipping my coffee and looking at the statues of men long since dead.

I felt at home here then.

Now I look around, at the cracked plaster of the walls, the nostalgia souring in my gut.

“You okay?” Dean asks. I feel his eyes on me. I used to love the sound of