We settled back to wait when Todd’s expression changed and darkened. He frowned, lips firming as he spied something going on in another corner of the room.
Several of us followed his eyes. Two boys around our age were hovering over a table, blocking the occupant from view. From the way they stood and their body movements, I didn’t think they were having a friendly conversation with whoever they were talking to. As we watched, one of them shifted and a young girl came into view. She was blond and pretty and from what we could see uncomfortable with the attention she was receiving. She kept shaking her head no, but neither boy seemed to take the hint.
Todd growled, his eyes lighting up. That wasn’t a good sign as we watched him get up. Niel, Nick and Thomas joined him. I watched as they traipsed across the room in her direction. I tensed. I didn’t want our first night in town to end in a brawl. But Todd was smarter than that. He moved in like she was his best friend, tapped her on the shoulder and bent down and whispered something in her ear. She nodded vigorously and stood up with him, gathering her things. He stood and said something to one of the boys we couldn’t hear. The taller of the two, freckles standing out in stark relief against his pale complexion, looked like he wanted to argue, and then he saw the rest of us and changed his mind. Both boys were human and finally left for easier pickings.
Back at our table, Todd held an empty chair out for her next to his. She sent tentative smiles our way, her long blond hair swinging to hide her face as she sat down. “Okay, this here is Jayne Martin. Seems a couple of the dudes over there weren’t getting the picture and so I asked if she’d like to join us, right?” He made introductions all round and sat down beside her.
Not long after, the pizzas arrived and we all dug in. After, one lane opened up and we bowled for the next couple of hours. Todd seemed to hit it off with Jayne. It had been a while since I’d heard him laugh and enjoy himself. After being in captivity and at the mercy of a madman for two months, he didn’t find much that was amusing. I watched Niel and Nick try to outdo each other on the bowling alley. It surprised me that Nick was actually fairly good. At one point, after his third strike in a row, I couldn’t resist.
A light elbow into his side made him gasp and he sent me an evil glare. I bent close to his ear. “You aren’t using any of that mumbo jumbo sorcery of yours to win, are you, because that would be like, cheating?”
He sent me a dirty look. “Is it so hard to believe I just happen to be good at it?” He seemed genuinely hurt by the accusation.
I blinked in confusion. “I’m just kidding. Don’t get your nose out of joint Seul.” I added. His eyes flashed in irritation and something else I couldn’t place that made me uncomfortable. I looked away.
The next ball he bowled he got a wide split and Niel took the lead with a shout of triumph. He held out his hand for a fist bump and I didn’t let him down. But I felt like a traitor just the same.
A shout of laughter pulled my attention and I looked up in time to see Jayne laugh out loud at something Todd had said as she snatched his arm and buried her face against it. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time, even Fern. The crystal had worked like a charm, and while she didn’t say much, she was smiling.
We were on our last of three games in the eighth frame when I caught part of the conversation next to us. A group of four other teenagers about our age were just finishing up and putting their shoes on as they talked.
“No one has found him yet. I’m telling you, no way did he get the hell lost in the woods. He was raised here, same as us. I think something happened to him.”
The pretty redhead next to him spoke up. “There have been rumors of strange going ons in that forest for years, maybe...” He gave a slashing movement with his hand. I could smell the shifter in him from where we sat. She was human.
“Only actual monsters in those hills are the ones that walk on two legs. No, I’m telling you, something happened. His parents are frantic. Together with volunteers and the local police, they’ve been all over the area looking for him, for signs of foul play. So far, nothing.” He jerked his jacket from the back of the chair and stood up, snatching his girlfriend’s hand and pulling her along behind him. The other couple followed as they left, still arguing.
I turned to look at Nick and Niel. We’d all heard them. With our preternatural hearing, how could we not?
My eyes narrowed on Jayne, who was looking pale. Todd had noticed too.
“Hey, Jayne, what’s up? You don’t look so hot all of a sudden.” She took his hand as he helped her up. She looked rather green.
“... The pizza. I think it didn’t agree with me. Maybe too much grease. I’ll be okay. No honest Todd, I’ll be fine.” She held up her hand and waved him off.
It was past 10:00 and time for us to get home. We’d be walking with everyone else up the mountain in the dark, but a mile was nothing compared to what we were used to.
“What about you Jayne, should we walk you home? Do you live in town?”
“NO! I mean, it’s okay. I’ll be fine. You guys get on back. I’ll see you guys around I’m sure. I don’t live too far from here.”
Todd frowned, unsure. “If you’re sure. Can we exchange numbers? I’d like a text to at least know you made it. Sides, that way I can get hold of you. Maybe we can get together again?”
Jayne gave him a smile and snatched his hand and opened his palm. She snagged a pen off the table and wrote a number down in the center. Todd said something that made her laugh and then made a big show of putting his hand over his heart.
We left shortly thereafter, leaving Jayne standing at the door of Haggett’s and watching as we all headed back the way we’d come up Greylock Mountain.
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCY CAME IN AND SAT her purse on the counter of the old office. In the corner, she’d set up a cot to sleep on. The electricity hadn’t been shut off for security purposes, and this deep inside the warehouse she could use the lights and tiny microwave in the kitchen to cook small meals for herself. Her father and brother’s had set up similarly in the other offices. It was better than some of the places they’d been forced to call home in the last few years as they moved town to town.
She heard the murmur of voices down the hall, rising and falling as they argued and discussed their next move. Lucy would have been okay with giving it all up. They’d done enough damage, hadn’t they? She was tiring of the pain and brutality and the excuses for why they did what they did. They were growing old and so was her patience.
The last one, Jake, had just about done her in. There had been so many over the years that had what they got coming to them. Real creeps that misused what they were and preyed on the weak humans they lived in secret amongst. But there’d been others, like Jake, where it was harder to justify their supposed evil. Maybe Magicals were responsible for her mother’s death. It didn’t mean all of them were. Lately though, her father and her brother’s too seemed to be escalating the hunt and enjoying it too much. It wasn’t enough anymore for them to take the occasional asshole and remove him from the streets where he couldn’t prey on the unwary. In the last few months, they’d been upping their game and been less discriminating in who they deemed a plausible candidate for their experimentation. Whenever she brought it up, the immediate reaction was venomous and terrifying. They were her family. The only ones she had left, but lately they scared her enough that she avoided their company.
She’d acted as the scout in the past, infiltrating the towns and Magical cells as they found them and acting as the informant to feed them the information they needed to get victims alone and use their cocktail of drugs to incapacitate them. But lately, she’d been less than truthful about what she let them know. With a sigh, she left her office and wandered down the hall to where they sat in the break room, gathered at the table and dining on chips and beer. As soon as she hit the doorway, the conversation cut off sharply and three sets of eyes landed on her in speculation. They were doing that more of late. Seemed she
wasn’t the only one keeping secrets.
“Hey, Lucy, come on in. We were just talking about you.”
I Bet. “Oh, what about?”
Terrence Sawyer stared at his only daughter, eyes crafty with speculation. “The other night. Wolf boy. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought maybe you were trying to lead him away from us, instead of to us. That’s what Jazz tells me. I told him that my baby girl wouldn’t do that because she knows how important the work we do is. We’re saving human lives from the monsters living among us. You understand that, right?”
Lucy’s heart was racing and she had to keep her breathing even so she didn’t hyperventilate. “I do.” She croaked; eyes steady. She refused to look at her brother Jazz, but she could feel his eyes suspicious and cold as they rolled over her. Wyatt, her middle brother, was most likely on his ninth beer of the day, and it was barely noon. He could put them away. Lucy wondered if it was to help him live with what they did.
“What did you do to him? To Jake Winters, daddy.”
Jazz interrupted, taking a long pull on his cigarette before crushing it in the tray that was overflowing on the table. “Just never you mind sis. You just keep doing what you’re doing. You find em for us...”
“Shut up Jazz.” Terrence rasped, mouth a tight line as he glared at his eldest. He finished. “We just taught him a lesson is all. Made sure he wasn’t a danger to anyone else. We let him go on the mountain. I don’t know why he hasn’t shown up.”
Jazz snickered, eyes light with malice. “Yeah, gave him the juice. The stuff that makes them forget what they saw and what they are. He should come wandering down that mountain any day now. Unless he falls or something. Mountains can be a dangerous place at night.”
Lucy shuddered. “It’s been a long time. Nobody’s seen him...” she persisted.
Jazz lumbered to his feet, towering above them all at well over six feet and close to 250 pounds.
He took a step in her direction, hands balling into fists and eyes mean. “You questioning us? I thought we all agreed that you would leave the heavy lifting to us.”
Terrence sent his oldest a warning glare. “It has been a while, Lucy. But I promise you, he was alive when we left him on that mountain.”
Lucy stared at his grizzled face that showed every bit of his fifty-seven years. At only eighteen, her memories of her mother were vague, but she’d heard the stories of a woman who was kind to a fault. Magicals had murdered her when Lucy was only four. Her brothers were older by several years and remembered their mother in ways she couldn’t possibly.
She gave her father a tremulous smile, ignoring Jazz. She wanted to believe that Jake was still alive. Needed to believe it.
Terrence continued to hold her eye as he grabbed his cup from the table and refilled it from the thermos sitting there. “We have another problem we need your help with. This should be a breeze for you. See, seems the sister to Jake Winters is refusing to let things alone. She’s been all over town, poking her nose in with the cops, school, Haggett’s. She’s even been to see Franz Hobert. I guess he’s someone that holds an important seat on the city council. He runs some summer camp up in the hills a way. Anyhow, I don’t need her getting too hung up on the fact you were the last one to see him alive.”
“Alive, daddy? I thought you...”
“Figure of speech girl. I mean in Purdy. You were the last one that seen him before he disappeared and is presumed dead.”
Lucy bit her lip, a shiver of dread snaking down her spine. What did you do, Daddy? What did you and Jazz really do to Jake?
“Anyway, I need you back in town and asking questions too. Nothing like cooperation to throw them all for a loop. Admit you were with him the night he disappeared. Tell them the last time you saw him he was heading up the mountain. Ask to join the search parties and be a general pain in the ass and ask questions like you care.”
She did care, but she was tiring of being used as a pawn in her family’s vendetta against the Magical community. And they were escalating. She wasn’t at all convinced that Jake was in any kind of shape to show up anywhere.
Her father and brothers were human. So was she. But Lucy could also pick out someone with Magical Abilities or spot a shifter a mile away. How long before they decided that what she did wasn’t just based on blind luck? Would they decide she was evil too?
But Lucy was more worried about her brother. Who would he have to take care of him if she wasn’t around?
She looked around the room. “Where’s Blaine?”
Jazz jerked his head towards the door. “Room next to ours, listening to those damned headphones again.”
Without a word, Lucy snagged a bottle of water and a couple bags of chips and wandered to the door. Terrence, her father, stopped her. “We can count on you to help us out with this, right?” For once, she wasn’t scrambling for fifteen ways to get out of doing what he asked. She wanted to help look for him. Maybe they were right and he was somewhere on that mountain, alive and hurting and waiting to be found. It was the least she could do. “Sure Daddy, I can do that.”
She turned away and moved down the hall. Blaine’s door was open and she didn’t bother to knock. He never looked up from the book he was following along on CD to. She looked at the book. Where the Red Fern Grows was one of his favorite’s. To look at him, Blaine Sawyer was drop dead handsome. Bright blue eyes fringed in impossibly long lashes framed a masculine face pretty enough to grace the cover of any magazine. Lucy often thought it was God’s way of trading off for the disconnect in Blaine’s mind that didn’t seem to make all the right connections. Autism was what they called it. Blaine didn’t operate the same as her brother’s or her father. His sweet innocence drove them mad with impatience, and they weren’t always as kind as they could have been to him. To Lucy, it was his finest trait.
She moved into the room and sat down next to him. He finally looked up, a wide smile lighting his face.
“Lucy!” He took his headphones off, laid them carefully beside him on the mattress that was his bed, and hit the stop button on the CD player to pause.
“Where the Red Fern Grows! It’s my favorite. But he cries when the dog dies. Why does he cry, Lucy?”
Lucy didn’t bother to correct him. They were all his favorite, every single one of the over fifty audio books he owned, most of them classics. He was a sucker for them.
“He cries because he’s sad, Blaine. He doesn’t want his dog to die.”
Blaine waved his hand awkwardly. “That’s silly. All I have to do is play it over again and he’s alive.” Lucy smiled.
“I brought you some chips and water. I’ll see if I can bring you something sweet tomorrow. Would you like that, Blaine?”
“Twizzler’s? The red ones. They’re my favorite.”
“Check, Blaine. Strawberry Twizzlers.”
He set the chips aside and took a drink from the water bottle. Then, as if she were no longer even there, he put the headphones back in place and started the player. Slowly he smiled and started to rock.
Lucy stood and bent over and kissed him on the forehead. She walked to the door and turned back, watching him sway. The doctors had explained once that the rocking was Blaine’s way of self-soothing, a form of comfort he allowed himself. Most days living with her brother’s and father she felt like rocking herself. She knew that if not for Blaine, she would have been long gone already. But with no money and nowhere to go, Blaine would just end up in some institution and she’d most likely be in prison. As Jazz liked to remind her often, whether she wielded the cocktail of drugs or swung the ‘cooperation bat’ as he liked to call it, she was still an accessory after the fact. If they went down, she went right along with them and she’d never see her brother again.
She checked her watch as she wandered back down the hall to grab her purse. Maybe she could lay the foundation of cooperation by asking around town to see if anyone had seen Jake. Later, she’d drop by Haggett’s and see if she could make friends with the sis
ter. Lucy knew he wasn’t in town though. Where she wanted to be was with the search parties on the mountain. It had been three days. If he’d been fully human she knew, his chances by now would have been nil. But shifters were harder to kill. Depending on how bad they’d hurt him, there was still time to find him.
If he was alive when they left him there like they said.
“FRANZ LIFTED THE BAN for tonight. The ‘no fly’ ban.” Sirris chirped, grinning as she plopped down at our table and snuck a sliver of apple from Thomas’ plate before he could stop her.
“I thought it worried them that the search parties out looking for Jake Winters would see them?” Thomas asked, moving his tray sideways with a look of warning which she ignored.
Sirris nodded. “They were, they are. They are taking precautions. But the ban is only being lifted for tonight. I guess they are laying off the search party until tomorrow and Franz has plans to put guards in place just in case. Niel says that the Dragon shifters are getting antsy under the restrictions and are threatening to revolt, whatever that means.”
Sirris had wandered into lunch on the tail end of the lunch hour and was looking for leftovers. She looked at my tray and my leftover lasagna. The portions were huge and I was full. I rolled my eyes and shoved it her way. She was going to have to skip the fish today.
Niel chose that moment to pull up a chair and sit. He looked straight at me, almost shaking with excitement. “Did you hear? We have a temporary reprieve tonight. You don’t want to miss it, Sadie.” He looked around at the rest of the table. “Or any of you. It’s quite a sight whether you shift or not.” We didn’t mention it had already been the topic of conversation before he sat down.
The news should have given me a thrill. Instead, an odd lump settled low in my stomach. “I don’t shift Niel. You know that, so why would I want to come?”
“To see what you have to look forward to when you do.” He answered without stopping to think about it.
Valley of the Dragons (Rule 9 Academy, #3) Page 5
