Page 86 of Evil Queen

“You knew?” Alistair barked at Kyle.

Kyle pointed at me, and I held up a hand. “Deon and I both swore Kyle to secrecy, and he only knew because of unavoidable circumstances. He said very clearly that he thought it was a bad idea and wanted to tell Cherri right away.”

Cherri looked over at Kyle. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why don’t you call him?” Cherri asked.

“I don’t have a number for him,” I replied. “He calls me on an unknown number every single time, and it just rings and rings until I pick up. It never goes to voicemail.”

Cherri’s eyes widened. “What?”

“What?” I asked.

Cherri jumped up and bolted for the stairs. “Sicily!”

The rest of us exchanged looks and then stood up and ran after her. We rushed down the hallway, past the room with some suggestive sounds coming out of it, and down to Sicily’s room. Cherri opened the door, bursting through it. Sicily was sitting in front of his wall of monitors, clicking away at the keys, playing some game where he was a little green astronaut running around. A lot of other multi-colored astronauts were running around too. Right as we walked in, he appeared to get killed by one of the other astronauts.

“No! Lime!” he screeched. “Dammit.”

“Sicily,” Cherri barked. “Quit playing that dumbass game.”

“I knew he was sus,” Sicily replied and then turned and saw that we were all standing in the room. “Oh. Hey, guys.”

“Sis, remember that time that I got a phone call. It just rang and rang and rang, and for like fifteen minutes, it rang, but we never answered it. Finally, you just made me turn my phone off.”

“Yeah,” Sicily replied.

“You said that you kind of wished we’d answered it because then you could have tracked it?” Cherri said. “Nathan has gotten calls like that too. They were from Deon.”

“What!” Sicily snapped, then jumped up and ran over to me, slamming his hands on my arms. “Do you still have the phone?”

“Yeah.” I shoved my hand into my pocket, pulled out the phone, and handed it over. Sicily took it and sat back down at his computer. He exited out of the game and started aggressively clicking through websites and programs that I didn’t understand. “Are you going to be able to find him?”

“If nothing else, I’ll get a lead,” Sicily said.

“Good. Work as fast as you can. Time is of the essence,” I replied. “We need to find Deon so that we can track him down. Then we can find my dad together and end this mess for good.”

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