Sabin, A Seven Novel Read Free

this kind of thinking.
    I turn the water off and shake off the excess as I step out. I really need to regroup here. I can’t face my team with this much turmoil going on in my head. That won’t set a good example at all.
    Juliette and Kade. They must be kept safe. Always. And Judgment Day must be located. Whoever grabbed it from the sea must’ve been there the same time Juliette threw it overboard. Verus thought he had a lead, but it didn’t pan out. We’ve traced it all over the damn place … from the Caribbean back to the U.S. And then back to the Caribbean. It ended up in North Carolina for a while. Verus believes he has a new lead. He thinks whoever has it is a deep sea diver. He also believes the reason we’re having difficulties is because that individual keeps passing the damn thing around like a fucking toy.
    Time to go to work, to pull my act together, and take the reins again. I need to stuff my sappy-assed self away and face the fact that we have a potential disaster facing us if we don’t get our hands on whoever has Judgment Day, and fast.
    I plunge my aching arms into my shirt, and then tug on my pants. Pushing away all other thoughts, my mind focuses on what it needs to—finding Judgment Day. Once I’m dressed, I hurry back to the sec center where Rafe and Edge wait and Verus is on the complink.
    “Let’s roll. Show me what you’ve got, Verus.”

Home. Or that’s what it’s supposed to be. The old, two-story structure, more unwelcoming now than ever, causes a sense of dread to rush through me as I pull my duffle bag out of the trunk. More than anything, I’d like to get back in the car and get the hell out of here. It’s like this every time I visit them. My parents complaining about everything from how awful I look to telling me I need to get a better job. Some things never change.
    When I was young, life with them sucked, for lack of a better word. I didn’t recognize it then because I assumed all parents were like that. Wrong. They were ancient compared to all the other moms and dads. And I was bullied, not specifically because of that, but because of the way they dressed me and forced me to wear my hair. I was their little accident, their mistake. My arrival threw a monkey wrench in their carefully planned out retirement. Suddenly, they were two fifty-year-olds with an infant. My sisters are twenty-five and twenty-three years older than I am. They clearly did not want me. So they pulled all their old baby items out of the attic, things they should have thrown away years before, and dressed me in them. As I grew older, I was given clothes that had been stored up there for decades. They were disgusting, and no matter how many times they were washed, that musty mothball odor clung to them like glue. But Mom refused to buy new ones, saying they couldn’t afford it. The kids in school didn’t whisper about me; they made fun of me to my face. I don’t think I had a day in school where I didn’t suffer some sort of nasty humiliation.
    Serena, you stink.
    Serena, where did you get that outfit?
    What hole did you crawl out of, Serena?
    Has anyone ever told you how ugly you are? Who’s your date to the prom, Frankenstein?
    “Remind me not to shop where you do—Clothes Aren’t Us!
    When’s the last time you took a bath, Serena? Do you live in a barn?
    No one wanted to sit next to me, claiming I made them sick to their stomachs. Sometimes, they would write ugly things on the back of my blouses during class with a Sharpie. I would be forced to walk around all day like that, and though the teachers would send the boys to the principal’s office, that didn’t stop them. It only made it worse. And it went on and on. In middle school, they started cutting off chunks of my hair. One day I was sitting on the bus and they were all laughing, which was nothing unusual. One of the girls poked me in the back and asked how I liked my new hairstyle. When I touched my hair, I realized what they had done.