WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!! Please do not read unless you have read "Delta: A Spy Novel" before reading this!! It's for your own good. Just go to my profile and click that book and you're good. Thanks :D

Well, this is it, guys. First chapter of the second book. I'm super, super, super excited so thank you so much for sticking with it and reading it! Thank you for waiting a month and a half for it! (I feel terrible) Thank you for taking the time to see if I posted! (if you did) Thank you all for being awesome, too. So...no boring author's note this time, my life is boring right now anyway. I'll just jump right in.

Gracias! <3 vb123321 (bet you missed this good-bye, didn’t you?)

Chapter One



♥ Astrid ♥



The world seemed to have ended, and yet life proceeded at such a quick rate that I hardly knew where to turn. Perhaps it was the fever from Cloying’s purgatorium mali that was still battling inside of me ferociously. It made me slip in and out of consciousness so often that I lost my grip on reality in the days that immediately followed my escape from Cloying’s manor. Was Pierre still alive? Why did his name conjure no feeling within me when I thought of him?



The ride in the helicopter to the headquarters of the DGSE – French intelligence agency – was, undoubtedly from the drug, a blur of pain and heat that was mixed with memories that sprang out of nowhere. By the time we reached headquarters, I was a complete mess, seeing people from my past everywhere in such ways that I ended up screaming at the French agents until they were forced to sedate me. I woke hours later in a white hospital bed – and discovered in the weeks to come that I would be doing that more than once.



Any attempt by the French to get anything out of me was in vain. I was so far gone by that point that I merely lay in the hospital bed and stared at the white ceiling while my imagination painted colorful scenes on it. Isaac Reagan, the agent assigned to stay with me, was by my side constantly as wordless support. Any attempts at interrogation by the French were shot down by him. Although I was barely aware of him at the time, I realized later that he may have been the only one who kept me from fading away entirely.



I spent a week at the DGSE before Alan Young managed to convince the French agency to allow me to be flown back to the States. The director of Delta informed me that I had “messed things up rather nicely” and then firmly closed the door of the hospital wing behind him after ordering the doctors to figure out what was wrong with me. They tried, but I didn’t expect them to understand that not only was an unusual fever-inducing drug working its way through my system, but I was also suffering from something else. Something that couldn’t be cured as easily as a fever.



Charlie’s death never stopped haunting me.



After another week in a hospital bed, this time at the Delta headquarters, I was discharged and thrown back into the routine of a spy agency. Hardly able to cope with that, I took to wandering the unrestricted corridors and rooms of the building, watching other training sessions with uninterested eyes. Those who walked past me cast me looks that varied from curious to sympathetic to pitying. I barely noticed them; though the fever from the drug was dispelled, I was still in a mental haze that couldn’t seem to be broken, no matter how many doctors looked at me.



“A case of the heart,” said Doctor O’Malley to Alan Young, polishing his glasses on his coat as he looked at me. “Time is all that is needed.”



But I knew more than time was needed to heal me. Not when I saw those piercing grey eyes looking at me every time I closed my own.



Sleeping no longer was a necessity. Whenever I lay down, I ended up staring at the ceiling as I had in the hospital. I began surviving on barely two to three hours a night and my health started to show it. The dark circles under my eyes became almost permanent and my appetite was in the dirt. Every day was spent waiting for news from Josh, some news that would raise me out of the stupor I was in. He and Pierre were the only ones I thought about as I hoped against hope that they were all right.



Then, on the eighth of October, something happened that drove the hazy uncertainty away from my mind. I was in my dormitory when the knock came on my door, doing one of my stare-at-the-ceiling sessions as Alan Young himself stepped into the room – a rare occasion to be sure. Without expression on his face, he told me that Charlie’s mother and sister would be coming that afternoon; they had just been told about his death.



This sparked many feelings within me. Guilt that I had forgotten about them entirely in my grief, with no concern as to how they might have been feeling. Anger that Delta hadn’t told them sooner though they were his family. Apprehension that I would be facing them shortly…and yet a sort of dulled anticipation that I would have someone that would understand exactly how I was feeling.



It was with shaking hands that I stood in a private room that afternoon, waiting for the Gallaghers to arrive. Thinking about my appearance for the first time in weeks, I had managed to locate a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt that wasn’t rumpled. I was determined to appear as sane as possible for them, because I felt I owed it to them for my silence about Charlie’s death.



When they were ushered in by an agent who then left the room, I couldn’t find words. We spent a good minute just staring at each other – and then, I was never quite sure how it happened, Mrs. Gallagher had thrown her arms around me and I was sobbing into her shoulder. Sadie, his fourteen-year-old sister, had tears coursing down her own face as she stood to the side, looking lost. After another minute for me to get under control, I embraced her as well, feeling her grief wracked up inside of her as she buried her face on my shoulder.



“Were you there?” Mrs. Gallagher asked quietly, running a hand across her eyes in a weary gesture.



Sadie released me, stepping away to look at me with wide grey eyes. They were so painfully like his that I had to look away, my eyes moving around the room as they were unable to meet his mother’s. I nodded, keeping my gaze on the floor as I heard Mrs. Gallagher let loose a great, shuddering sigh that went right through my heart.



“What…” Sadie’s voice was hesitant. “What did he – say?’



I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the questions that were to come. I knew that I should have been prepared for this, but it was painful nonetheless. “He wanted his mother,” I said in a low voice, my mind swirling with the memory of Cloying’s face as he said those words: All men cry for their mothers before death. I raised my eyes to look at Mrs. Gallagher’s damp ones. “He was thinking of you.”



A single tear splashed down her face, but she nodded slowly. “Thank you, Astrid. For being there with him.”



Something about the way she said it, the gratitude shining through her words of grief, or maybe the trusting way she was looking at me – something made my heart throb as again Cloying’s face came to mind, this time mouthing different words. Speak now, or I shoot. A sob rose within me, so quickly that it sounded like a dreadful cough ripping out of my throat. My knees crumpled as Mrs. Gallagher gathered me into her arms again with a concerned look on her face.



“Astrid, dear, are you all right?”



My guilt was weighing me down, so intensely that it hurt as I tried to pull away from her. “I killed him,” I choked out between the heaving sobs that were coming out of my chest. “It’s my fault.”



She embraced me, pressing my head against her shoulder and stroking my hair as the tears came again. “It’s not your fault, Astrid. It couldn’t be. Did you shoot him?”



I could barely speak for sobbing, but I knew I had to tell her the truth; I had to break through the oblivion she was living in. Maybe then she wouldn’t be so quick to comfort me. “I killed him,” I repeated with intensity. “Cloying – he said to me – that if I didn’t talk, he would shoot Charlie…and I didn’t say anything.”



Mrs. Gallagher was silent for a long moment, her hand still moving through my hair. I couldn’t bear to look at Sadie, closing my eyes instead and burying my face in her mother’s warm shoulder. My heart was squeezing painfully tight in my chest, drawing more tears from my eyes. Finally, when the silence became unbearable, I tugged myself away from her, forcing myself to look her in the eye.



“I don’t blame you at all, Astrid,” she said finally in such a motherly voice that I almost broke down again. She caressed my face gently. “It’s not your fault.”



No! I wanted to scream at her. Yell at me! Hate me for what I did to your son! It is my fault! But no words came out as I stood in front of her, my heart breaking in two as I saw the raw anguish in her eyes even as she smiled at me in a forgiving gesture. How could she forgive me after I had done so much? Sadie, too, offered me a tremulous smile from her mother’s side, her eyes reflecting the same blank shock I had felt when the bullet slammed into his chest…and the red flowers that blossomed thereafter…



“He loved you, you know,” Mrs. Gallagher was saying in a soft voice, her hand moving over my face with a mother’s touch. My head dipped down, my hair falling into my face as her words burned into my heart, leaving there a fire that I hadn’t felt since the last effects of the drug.



“I know,” I whispered, the words almost causing pain. “He was like my brother.”



She looked at me with a sad, piercing look that I couldn’t understand, shaking her head as her eyes burned with a fire of her own, so like Charlie’s that I couldn’t draw mine away. Her mouth moved, as if she wanted to say more, but no sound came out as her grief took over and tears began to fall down her face at last.



In the days following their visit, I lost some of the old dazed feeling that had been with me after Cloying’s manor. Maybe it was the way Mrs. Gallagher had talked to me, or the way Sadie’s eyes had pierced into me when she said she was sorry that I had had to be there when he died. She was his sister, suffering under her own sorrow, and she took the time to do something for me. Both of them had been so supportive that it made my guilt enlarge a tenfold, because I knew I deserved none of it.



Something was left behind after that. I began to find purpose in life again, visiting the firing range and the martial arts areas to practice with a vengeance. Anything to keep me occupied, to keep me from thinking those thoughts that led to the depression in which I had nearly sunk. Constantly I was at Young’s door, asking for updates from Josh, of which there were few. I began eating again, forcing the food down although it tasted of ash in my mouth. Sleep still evaded me, but I managed to get up to nearly five hours each night, which wasn’t much less than what I had been used to getting.



It was near the middle of October that a thought occurred to me. Charlie, as a permanent agent of Delta, had owned a dorm-style room of his own. I had never really been in it, because of the fact that we were never the sort to “hang out” in each other’s dorms; it was more likely that we would be seen sparring together or having a shooting contest or something more active. But now that he was gone, I figured he wouldn’t mind if I went in it, just to see one last touch of his.



I knew that Alan Young cleared out deceased agents’ rooms at some point or another, but when I found my way to the corridor in which it lay, Charlie’s door still bore his name on its front. A long moment passed, in which I stood in front of the door in uncertainty, wondering whether Charlie would have wanted me to do this. Deciding that I would never know either way, I carefully pushed open the door and entered the room.



It was small, the same size as the room I occupied, with a simple bed, desk, and chest of drawers. On the wall hung a few posters of hockey, soccer, and football teams, but for the most part they were bare. Closing the door, I merely stood in the center of the room for a few minutes, gazing around me and drinking in Charlie’s familiar atmosphere. The ghost of his presence was so overwhelming that I couldn’t move for several minutes, feeling the wetness tickling my eyelids again. Blinking away the tears that threatened to flow, I finally broke out of my trance and moved to his desk.



There wasn’t much on it: Charlie had never been one for deskwork. A small lamp, an iHome for his iPod, an older set of speakers, a tin of pencils and pens, and a forgotten pack of Skittles that lay unopened on a red notebook. Swallowing hard, I fingered the candy pack with a trembling finger. I had forgotten his obsession with Skittles – it was his best source of bribery, something I had taken into consideration more than once. His iPod was missing, lost somewhere in the baggage he had left at Cloying’s manor. The notebook, upon opening, was blank.



I felt almost as though I was searching through a tomb but pushed that dark thought out of my head. Instead, I moved on to the drawers in the desk, two on each side, long and deep. In the first on the left, I found a stack of magazines – gun catalogs, mainly – and began to rifle through them. A fine layer of dust coated several of them, which led to me to think that these had piled up over the years Charlie had spent in this room. I found an edition from when Charlie would have been about thirteen, the excited scrawls in margins around circled pictures of guns.



This is the one! he had written next to a picture of a gleaming black gun, held in the hand of a seductive-looking model. Smiling as I wondered vaguely if he had been talking about the girl, I looked a little closer at the name. Desert Eagle. The same gun he had gotten from Pierre’s arsenal, before we approached the manor. The smile faded from my face as I looked at the picture. This was the gun he had always dreamed of? At least he had had one chance to use it before…



I turned the page.



Even though I was a teenage spy, pouring over gun catalogs wasn’t really my thing, and so I gently placed the magazines back into the drawer, shutting it. I then slid open the drawer underneath. This one wasn’t as full, but it was a lot more cluttered than the previous. Moving the contents around with one hand, I spotted many things: several CDs, such as Eminem’s Recovery,and a few from Coldplay and The Script; a small black book labeled “Codes”; a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in German, maybe to practice; daringly, as we were technically not allowed to have weapons in our rooms, a disassembled gun with a thin veneer of dust on it; and several bits of wires and things that, put together, could probably be as dangerous as the gun.



Each was like a bit of him, and it was with a lump in my throat that I closed that drawer. The top drawer on the right held nothing but some old sets of well-tangled headphones, an older version of the iPod, a lanyard, two spare keys to unknown locks, and various trophies for sports. I picked up a few of these, turning them over in my hands with a smile on my face at the thought of the seven-year-old Charlie playing soccer, basketball, and track. Some of them dated back as much as ten years, and I felt a pang as I realized he had missed his childhood more than I had known. There were also a few other odds and ends that were meaningless but painful to look at nonetheless. I felt as though I was looking at bits of his past, in a way.



The next drawer was hardly more interesting, with a cracked coffee mug, a used Starbucks gift card, a pack of playing cards, and more paraphernalia that he seemed to have hoarded over the years. I hadn’t realized exactly how much the little things in life had meant to him. Underneath that pile of things, however, was a carved wooden box that just fit into the bottom of the drawer. Carefully removing the junk on top of it, I lifted the box out of the drawer and set it on the ground. It was plain enough, with a simple clasp that I lifted after a moment’s hesitation.



It appeared that this was his personal box. The first thing that I saw was a stack of envelopes that, upon investigation, proved to be several years’ worth of birthday, Christmas, and Easter cards from his family. Sadie’s messages were quirky and humorous, teasing him about being “James Bond” and telling him that she missed him loads. His mother’s were more sentimental, as only a mother’s can be, and the lump in my throat grew larger as I pictured her writing them to him in a lonely sort of way. My guilt rose in me again, threatening to inundate my senses.



Putting the cards to one side, I then picked up several sports photos that undoubtedly collaborated with the trophies in his other drawer. In one, six-year-old Charlie sat in the center of his team, soccer ball perched on his knee and a huge toothy grin on his face. Basketball uniform in another, with his team making silly faces at the camera – Charlie was in the middle of waggling his tongue, holding two fingers up in a bunny-ear gesture to one of his teammates. Smiling, I tucked these pictures back into the box.



Thinking that maybe I would send these objects back to his mother, I leafed through a pile of papers in the box and stopped when my hand touched something that looked like a small jewelry case. A sudden wrench of guilt tugged through me out of the blue, as if my mind was reminding me that I shouldn’t be digging through Charlie’s things. Moving aside the papers on top of the box, that guilt was immediately dispelled by curiosity. For, written in a yellow Post-it note that stuck to the top of the case, was my name in Charlie’s scrawl, along with an uncertain hand writing: birthday?



With a slight frown, I opened the lid of the case – and stopped dead. Nestled inside, glinting in the light above my head, was a small golden ring, with a simple blue stone in the center. I leant back on my heels, staring at the small box for a full thirty seconds, running possibilities through my mind. My birthday? Maybe it was some sort of joke…Charlie had usually done things like that. Gently, I probed the cold metal with a finger, wondering whether it would spontaneously combust or something as a prank. It did nothing, and so I was left to stare blankly at it for another minute while my confused mind tried to catch up.



Just a birthday present…



Lifting the ring from the box, I slid it onto the ring finger of my right hand – no need to get serious. Then, placing the ring’s case back into Charlie’s box, I closed the lid of it tightly, sliding it back into the drawer in which it belonged. My hand rested on the drawer handle for a moment as I gazed at the ring on my finger before turning away from the desk in a decisive movement.



A brief search of the chest of drawers found nothing but clothes, an extra bag, and a length of rope. He had turned the top of it into a sort of a bookcase, and I looked at the spines of the books curiously. I had never known Charlie to be that big of a reader, what with the intense training and everything. A cursory scan of the titles changed that thought for me: All of them were in foreign languages, ranging from German to Cantonese to Swahili. I hadn’t even known they printed books in some of the languages I spotted. They were popular novels translated into different languages – I spotted a book or two from the Harry Potter, Pendragon, and Alex Rider series.



So this was how he had perfected his language skills almost as quickly as I had. I could almost hear him saying in a sarcastic tone, “Not all of us have semi-photographic memories, Astrid.” And yet he had learned the same languages as I had nearly as quickly, and this explained it. Smiling to myself, I ran a hand along the spines of the novels, wishing that I had known sooner to rub it in. How was it that I had known him for nearly seven years and I had never entered his bedroom?



Turning away abruptly, I stopped in front of his bed, looking at the crumpled bed sheets, thrown carelessly on the bed, and the faded pillows. A teddy bear was seated at the head of the bed, just behind his pillow, and I touched its head gently as it seemed to gaze sadly at me with its glass eyes, as if it knew that its owner wasn’t returning. I pulled the blanket straight on the bed, plumping the pillows back up, and then I looked at the walls to the right and back of the bed.



They were covered with photographs, plastered on quickly so that they hung in a haphazard way that made it look homey. Sinking onto the bed, I scanned them hungrily with my eyes. I seemed to be in most of them – he was my best friend – and they ranged from our first year at Delta to my sixteenth birthday a year previously. There had to be at least a hundred of them, maybe more, and my eyes moved from one to the next as I was bombarded with a storm of memories from each of the photos.



There we were on our first day of fieldwork – hoisting guns in the air and pretending to shoot the cameraman. And there was Charlie, Josh, and I, cupcakes in hand as we stuck our tongues out at the camera. Mine had a birthday candle on it, and I vaguely remembered Josh baking them. There was Charlie and I at our first bar, raising our tequila shots and giggling at the camera. Josh with his army-style haircut he had been forced to wear for an assignment, looking forlorn. A particularly spectacular shot of the two of us parachuting out of a helicopter, me screaming my head off and Charlie laughing at me.



All were so achingly familiar that my eyes began to burn. He had all these memories on his wall where he could see them anytime. My fingers moved along the faces in the photos, chiefly Charlie, Josh and I, along with a few other agents that smiled at the rowdy kids that looked astonished to be a part of a spy agency. He had even – audaciously – managed to capture a picture of Alan Young, even though everyone knew there were laws against photographing the director of Delta.



In fact, if any other agency or group in the world wanted close-ups of Delta agents, Charlie’s room was the place to be. Of course, they would have to get through Delta Headquarters in the first place, so there was no fear of that. Charlie had captured each of our best moments together perfectly; so perfectly that they made my heart ache to even look at. And then my hand brushed a picture unlike the others that were coating the wall around it. Charlie and I were holding some sort of bomb, probably made by him, and standing next to me, his arms folded in an achingly familiar way, was Jay.



My fingers paused beneath him as my mind froze involuntarily. I hadn’t thought of him in days, somehow, my grief outweighing any feelings I had for him. The picture had caught him flawlessly – Charlie really had been an amazing person with photos – but the stark blueness of Jay’s eyes seemed to drag me in like no other. I realized that this was one of the only pictures including Jay that he had on the wall. Had he taken the others down when Jay had left? Or had he never had them up? They had never seemed to like each other…



He killed him.



I sagged back onto the bed, looking away from Jay’s face in the photo. The guilt in me was washing through my body with the strength of a tidal wave, and the many photos of Charlie – looking at me, laughing at me, so full of energy and life – were only making it so much worse. I touched his face in the photos with trembling fingers, as if somehow I could bring him back to life, bring back the explosives-loving, overprotective, loyal boy that I had loved as a brother for years.



But he was gone.



The energy seemed to leak out of my body like air from a balloon. I pressed my face into his pillow, imbibing his familiar scent as I lay flat on the bed, feeling my sorrow pouring over me like the rainstorm that had quenched the fire from the drug that had battled within in. How long had it been now – a month? More? I didn’t know anymore, hadn’t thought about time in a while. Now I could only hope that Josh was okay, that he was getting Pierre out, that both would come home safely…because I knew that if they didn’t, the part that died in me when Charlie did would become one of many.



My eyes burned with unshed tears, and I closed them tightly, only to see his grey eyes looking back at me, reproving me for thinking only of myself in my grief. Of course, he would want me thinking of Josh – and Pierre – and how I could help them. So why was it that I only wanted to lie there and cry until I had nothing left in me?



He was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.