All These Warriors Read online

  “Turn it on, it’s fine.”

  He hesitated. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been meaning to watch that one anyway.”

  I used to have news alerts turned on for Julian too—hoping for a sudden arrest or news of new evidence being uncovered—but I’d had to turn them off a few months ago. Julian had acquired a small but very dedicated group of fans after Grayson’s death, and they all hated me. I didn’t need to read every blog and Reddit thread calling me a crazy bitch.

  I’d stuck to the facts in the video we made the night Julian murdered Grayson. I told everyone exactly what he had told me—that MDG was training scrabs to build some kind of army and shipping them back to the United States. I explained that we’d stopped the shipment, but we didn’t know if there were others. I told them that the bruise on my cheek was from Julian, that he’d killed two police officers and Grayson in a fit of rage, and he was directly responsible for the deaths of our teammates Archer, Zoe, and Gage.

  Julian denied everything, and he and his high-powered lawyers took every opportunity to remind people that we’d dated. The fact that I’d been in a relationship with Julian for all of three weeks made everything I said suspect, apparently.

  And, as the police explained, they needed more witnesses, and no one else had seen Julian direct scrabs to kill the police officers. My word wasn’t good enough, it turned out. But all of team seven believed me, and that was what was important. None of them had been there to hear Julian confess, and for all they knew, I’d made it up to get back at him or to impress everyone (Are we sure she wasn’t just trying to get attention? one news anchor had suggested several times). But all seven members of my team had been unwavering in their support, publicly and privately.

  As for Grayson, the gun Julian had used to shoot him had actually been one of Webb’s, and Julian claimed he only grabbed it after Webb died, to kill a scrab. The fact that Grayson had used explosives to blow up part of a private residence had not helped matters. Julian told police that the scene was chaotic and he could understand why we’d gotten confused. In the end, prosecutors decided that a conviction was unlikely and they declined to bring charges. Julian walked free.

  The law enforcement officers (British and American) we were in contact with claimed that they were still investigating Julian, as well as MDG. They just had to build a solid case based on evidence, not the word of one teenage girl. A teenage girl who had been photographed kissing Julian just days before she claimed he was a dangerous murderer.

  It did not look great, admittedly.

  As for training scrabs, MDG had flat out denied it for a while, before finally conceding that perhaps some of their employees had been working on programs without their knowledge. They’d vowed to cooperate with the police to get to the bottom of it. I didn’t believe for a minute that the higher-ups at MDG didn’t know about everything, but at least it seemed like their training program was going to fail before it ever fully got off the ground.

  That’s what I’d thought, anyway. Then Julian started making the rounds on cable news a couple months ago.

  Edan pressed Play on the clip and propped his phone up on the counter. Julian was sitting with a blond woman, his favorite reporter, a woman who clearly found him charming and didn’t ask particularly hard questions.

  He always looked sharp and put together when he did these interviews—he was in a flawless pressed suit with a shiny red tie, and his brown hair was perfectly combed. He was undeniably good-looking. But I knew him well enough to see that he was fraying around the edges. He had dark circles that even makeup couldn’t cover, apparently. He looked like he might have lost some weight. His cheekbones were more prominent today.

  “Today we’re discussing the scrab defense movement, which has been gaining serious traction in recent months. I’m here with Julian Montgomery,” the anchor said. “Former second-in-command of the St. John teams, he’s been employed by the Monster Defense Group since shortly after the death of Grayson St. John. Julian, you’ve become an advocate for scrab training since seeing trained scrabs in action in London, correct?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m an advocate,” he said with a smile. “But I have seen the reality of what these trained scrabs can do. I work with Roman Mitchell in the security division—I believe you had him on yesterday—and our job is to protect clients from scrabs. Protecting humans from scrabs will always be the primary goal of the security division. And we have to train our people to fight back against trained scrabs, since they may encounter them while protecting a client.”

  “Roman said that MDG is only focused on protecting clients from scrabs at this time, but you’ve spoken out in favor of MDG, and possibly other groups, embracing trained scrabs.”

  “I have. Listen, we can’t ignore what’s happening in the world right now. The trained scrabs exist, whether we like it or not. We need to get serious about protecting ourselves and our country or suffer the consequences.”

  “And that’s what this group—the Scrab Defense League—is arguing, right? They say that trained scrabs are weapons and should be covered under Second Amendment rights.”

  “They do,” Julian said. “I’m not a member of the Scrab Defense League, but I have been in contact with them, and they’re just trying to adjust to a changing world. The right to own a gun has always been important in this country, but what do you do when you have an enemy who is nearly bulletproof? I can tell you from experience that most people aren’t equipped to fight these things, regardless of the weapons at their disposal. So basically, the league is saying, what counts as the right to bear arms? If we’re being attacked by scrabs, shouldn’t citizens be allowed to defend themselves? And if the most effective means of protecting yourself is with a trained scrab, why shouldn’t we be allowed to do that?”

  “But wouldn’t it make more sense to eradicate scrabs completely? Shouldn’t we be focusing our resources on killing them, not training them?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Julian said. “In an ideal world, we would just kill all these things. But we’re not in an ideal world. It’s been ten years, and the US may have mostly gotten our scrab problem under control, but these things are still around in many parts of the world. Look at the St. John teams. They’re out there in London every day, killing scrabs left and right, and there are more, not less.”

  Edan looked at me, brow furrowed. “Isn’t that a blatant lie?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Our data shows a thirty percent reduction in scrab activity in the greater London area over the past two months. The London police data shows a nearly forty percent reduction. And the government recently released a report that shows a twenty-three percent drop across all of England compared to this time last year.”

  His lips twitched up like he was amused.

  “What?”

  “You just know all that off the top of your head. It’s impressive.”

  “Oh.” My cheeks warmed. “It’s my job.”

  “You’re good at it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “. . . and you do have to consider the bigger picture,” Julian was saying. “The people who were working on scrab training were doing it with military defense in mind. We can evolve and embrace scrab training, or we can let another country do it first and suffer the consequences.”

  “Same shit, different day,” Edan said with a sigh, clicking his phone so the screen went black. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Same.”

  I’d heard way more than enough from Julian.

  3

  The next morning, there was an email from Julian in my inbox.

  I moaned, dropping my phone on the bed. Maddie, who was already up (she was always up), turned away from the mirror as she finished securing her ponytail.

  “What?” she asked.

  I held out my phone to her. “Julian.”

  “Again? He just emailed you two days ago.”

  I moaned again, pulling the covers up over my face. She took my phone an
d was quiet for a moment as she read.

  “Same shit,” she said. I pushed the sheets away from my face, and she dropped the phone on the bed beside me. “He misses you, he’s sorry, you’re the best girl in the world, blah blah blah.”

  I sighed, picking up my phone and glancing briefly at the email before putting it in the Julian folder. A folder that was getting quite large.

  He’d starting emailing me a few weeks after he left. The first time I saw his name in my inbox, I thought I’d find an angry, hateful message, but it had been an apology. A vague apology, one that didn’t include confessing to murdering several people, but still, an apology.

  And then there had been another. And another. Some were long, rambling emails just telling me about his life; others were short and sad. He was clearly lonely. He’d built me up to be some kind of savior. The only girl who had ever understood him.

  He kept emailing even though I never responded. He even tried contacting me through Instagram for a while, until I deleted my account. At least he didn’t have my new phone number. I could only imagine the number of texts I’d get from him.

  I’d thought about sending a one-line response to his emails—Stop contacting me, asshole—but it seemed best to just ignore him. I’d seen what happened when Julian flew into a rage. People had died. I was hoping he’d just give up one day.

  I hadn’t told anyone on the team except for Maddie. I was tired of talking about Julian, and everyone had still been so upset when the emails first started. I’d just wanted to stop talking about him. Maddie had agreed to keep it between us.

  “I’m making the right choice by never responding, right?” I asked.

  “I think so.” She grabbed her coat. “But you know who could really help with that?”

  “Maddie, don’t.”

  “A therapist. Super helpful with so many things.”

  “You’re relentless,” I said. Maddie had gotten a few psychiatrists for the team after Grayson’s death and had pushed me to go. I went once, talked awkwardly about my dad, and didn’t feel compelled to do it again. Maddie had been pestering me to go again for months.

  She smiled at me and pulled the door open. “I’ll see you down there.”

  I climbed out of bed with a sigh. Julian sure knew how to ruin a morning. I’d considered changing my email address, but part of me was hoping he’d slip up one day and say something I could send to the police. At least the emails weren’t mean. Half the time, they were just sad.

  I pulled on my workout clothes and met the team in the hostel lobby to walk to the gym. We had our routine down—we started every day at the gym, then went back to the hostel for a quick breakfast before heading out to whichever area of London Maddie had assigned to us that day.

  Noah fell into step beside me, typing something on his phone. The scar that ran down one side of his face, from forehead to chin, had healed but left a permanent mark. He said he didn’t mind, that it made him look like a badass. It did, actually.

  “Clara, I’m going to need current scrab data for London to refute a statement Julian made yesterday,” he said.

  “Yeah, I saw it. I’ll send it to you this afternoon.”

  Maddie, who’d been walking with Patrick ahead of us, looked at us over her shoulder. “Do I want to know what that asshole said this time?”

  “No,” Noah and I said together.

  “We’re just going to have to work harder,” Maddie said. “I want the scrab numbers so low that they can’t lie about them.”

  I glanced back at Priya and Laila. We’d just been talking yesterday about how a lot of recruits needed a break. We needed a break. We hunted scrabs seven days a week. Most of the teams did, and I wasn’t sure if it was an effective strategy.

  If I was being honest, I wasn’t sure that any of this was an effective strategy. Grayson had built these teams to help, to let people from all over the world join the scrab fight, but it was becoming clear that he’d never had a long-term plan. France had kicked us out of the country pretty quickly, and several other countries had declined our help. China had absorbed most of the recruits in Asia into their official scrab-fighting forces.

  The teams had shrunk not just because of the mess with Julian, but because it became obvious that we were flailing. It wasn’t Maddie’s fault—she was just continuing what Grayson had planned—but she definitely got all the blame since he was gone. Which made me hesitant to even bring up any of this. She dealt with enough criticism. Everyone underestimated Maddie—many people seemed to think that an eighteen-year-old who was mostly famous for being a rich party girl wasn’t equipped to lead the teams. She pretended like it didn’t bother her, but I knew that it did.

  “We can take a look at our strategies,” I said carefully. “But the scrab numbers are down here, no matter what Julian says.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t think that it would matter how successful we were here. We could eliminate scrabs entirely, and Julian would say that the numbers were up.

  What we really needed to do was expose MDG and Julian and anyone else involved with scrab training. Once everyone knew the truth, it would be easier for us to recruit.

  Maddie muttered something I couldn’t understand. Patrick hooked his arm through hers and asked about the movie she’d seen last week, obviously trying to pull her mind away from Julian.

  It wouldn’t work. Maddie was determined to make Julian and MDG pay. She wasn’t going to rest until they were in prison.

  We walked into the gym, and a few recruits scattered as soon as they spotted us. Probably because of Maddie. She yelled at a lot of people in the weeks after Grayson’s death, and had garnered a reputation for being scary and mean as a result. This didn’t seem to bother her at all.

  Laila broke off from the group when she spotted Saira, the leader of UK team thirteen, nearby. She greeted her with a kiss.

  Noah looked from them to us in surprise. “When did that happen? Did we even know she was gay?”

  “She’s bi,” Dorsey said, which was news to me. Laila was almost as secretive as I was, though I got the impression that for her, it was more that she just liked to keep things to herself. She talked to her parents and her sisters all the time, and mentioned her friends in Chicago often.

  “Huh,” Noah said. “Who knew?”

  “Me,” Dorsey said with a laugh. “Also, I found two more bisexuals the other day. I’m going to start a club.”

  “What do you mean, you found them?” Noah asked. “Were you out looking for them?”

  “No, they were just drawn to me. Bisexuals, pansexuals, we can sense each other, you know. We send out a signal.”

  Patrick snorted.

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Noah said, squinting.

  “No, it’s totally not true,” Dorsey said with a laugh.

  We spread out to various parts of the gym, and I met Edan for sparring after a run on the treadmill. We changed up partners occasionally, but I was still the person he was most comfortable with. And I just liked having him around, always.

  There was one benefit to Maddie’s relentless pace—I was in great shape. While six solid months of training and scrab fighting had become a little tiresome, I couldn’t deny that it had made me pretty badass. And my constant sparring with Edan had made me incredibly fast.

  I thought about Dad sometimes, and how he’d take swings at me. He just used brute strength and took advantage of my fear. I had no intention of ever seeing him again, but if I did, it was nice to know that he wouldn’t be able to land a single blow.

  I wasn’t going to see Dad or Mom ever again, apparently. I hadn’t intended to cut off all contact with Mom, but she hadn’t reached out to me once since the day of tryouts in Atlanta. Neither had Dad, though I wasn’t terribly upset about that.

  But Mom? She could have at least checked on me once or twice. The address of our hostel in London was public and prominent on the St. John website. It was where all letters and packages for recruits were s
ent. And my email address was the same one I’d had since I was ten. I was easy to contact, as my many emails from Julian so clearly demonstrated.

  But I hadn’t heard a word from her.

  I stepped away from Edan, breathing heavily. We were in the boxing ring, surrounded by recruits working out. He wiped the back of his arm across his brow. I noticed some recruits nearby staring at us, clearly impressed.

  “Done for the day?” I asked.

  “Yes,” I heard someone groan from behind me. I turned to see Priya leaned dramatically over the ropes of the ring, arms hanging down toward the ground.

  “Yeah, I think we’re done,” Edan said, looking at Priya in amusement.

  Dorsey walked up beside Priya, using his shirt to wipe sweat from his face.

  “Did you do that?” I asked him, pointing to her.

  “I just suggested that we race around the building a few times,” he said.

  “I hate running,” Priya moaned.

  “I won,” Dorsey said. Priya punched him in the side.

  Behind them, I spotted two of the new recruits sparring in the corner. I winced as one took a hit directly to the face and then promptly fell on his butt. This new group needed some work.

  Patrick, who was at the punching bags with Maddie, pulled his earbuds out and said something to her. He frowned as he pointed at the new recruits. I edged closer to them as Maddie also pulled out her earbuds.

  “Jayden was needed on assignment today,” she said. “They’re fine.”

  Patrick made an exasperated noise. “They are not fine. They need good trainers, not whoever happens to be around today.”

  Maddie shrugged. “Noah’s in charge of training, take it up with him.”

  “Noah assigned Jayden to them!”

  “Oh, right.” Maddie glanced around the gym. “Naomi!”

  Naomi, one of the more experienced UK recruits, hopped off the rowing machine and walked over to them.

  “Work with the new recruits today, will ya?” Maddie asked. “They need some help.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Naomi said, a little wearily. I watched as she trudged over to the new recruits.