LONG LOST

by Brent, Cora

  LONG LOST

  Cora Brent

  Contents

  LONG LOST

  Also By Cora Brent:

  Contact Me

  LONG LOST (Blurb)

  Prologue

  1. Jay

  2. Jay

  3. Caris

  4. Caris

  5. Jonathan, Age 13

  6. Jay

  7. Caris

  8. Caris, Age 13

  9. Jay

  10. Caris

  11. Johnny, Age 13

  12. Caris

  13. Jay

  14. Caris

  15. Jay

  16. Caris, Age 13

  17. Caris

  18. Jay

  19. Johnny, Age 13

  20. Caris, Age 13

  21. Caris

  22. Caris

  23. Jay

  24. Jay

  25. Caris

  Epilogue

  THANK YOU for reading LONG LOST!

  Also By Cora Brent:

  LONG LOST

  “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”

  -Henry David Thoreau

  Also By Cora Brent:

  GENTRY BOYS (Books 1-4)

  Gentry Boys Series

  DRAW (Saylor and Cord)

  RISK (Creed and Truly)

  GAME (Chase and Stephanie)

  FALL (Deck and Jenny)

  HOLD

  CROSS (A Novella)

  WALK (Stone and Evie)

  EDGE (Conway and Roslyn)

  SNOW (A Christmas Story)

  Gentry Generations

  (A Gentry family spinoff series)

  STRIKE (Cami and Dalton)

  TURN (Cassie and Curtis)

  KEEP (A Novella)

  TEST (Derek and Paige)

  The Ruins of Emblem

  TRISTAN (Cadence and Tristan)

  JEDSON (Ryan and Leah)

  LANDON (TBR 2020)

  Worked Up

  FIRED

  NAILED

  Stand Alones

  UNRULY

  IN THIS LIFE

  HICKEY

  THE HERMIT

  SYLER MCKNIGHT

  Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarity to events or situations is also coincidental.

  The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.

  © 2020 by Cora Brent

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover: Wicked by Design

  Photo: Shutterstock/Predrag Popovski

  Created with Vellum

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  LONG LOST (Blurb)

  We should have been enemies from the beginning.

  But we were children when we met and children tend to ignore such rules.

  Even if the rules exist for a reason.

  Because Jonathan came from a family of savage killers.

  While I was born into the broken aftermath of their victims.

  For one short season we were inseparable.

  All it took was one terrible day to turn us into strangers.

  I’ve spent a long time chasing him from my mind.

  And I assumed he was gone forever.

  Until he shows up here.

  So far from where we started and so changed from the friend I once knew.

  The gentle boy I loved has grown into a volatile man with dangerous secrets and a different name.

  He won’t admit to who he is.

  Or where he comes form.

  Or who we are to each other.

  And I knew I shouldn’t have provoked him.

  I knew I shouldn’t have touched him.

  Most of all I knew I shouldn’t have offered him my heart.

  Yes, Jonathan and I were born to be enemies.

  And maybe that’s how our story will end after all…

  Prologue

  Caris, Age 13

  The last day of summer

  I know I won’t be here tomorrow.

  In fact there’s a good chance I’ll never be here again. My dad is already on the road from Dallas. My mom won’t be with him. Any day now she’s supposed to be released from the facility where she’s been healing for the last two months. But she’d be too fragile for a return to Arcana, especially after everything that’s happened. It’s possible she doesn’t even know, that this will just be something else I’ll be instructed to add to the ‘Don’t upset your mother’ list.

  I’m supposed to stay in the waiting room, which smells like rubber and sadness. The blood spots on my yellow shirt have dried in the pattern of a flower and I remember the bunch of wildflowers I plucked from the rim of a roadside ditch last week.

  Asters, they were called. I hadn’t known that. Johnny told me.

  The dried blood makes me want to throw up. Earlier I asked a nurse if she had an extra shirt so I could change but she looked at me like I had soup for brains and said the hospital doesn’t keep shirts for little girls just lying around for god’s sake. She didn’t need to be so rude. She probably felt bad about her attitude and that’s why she handed me two limp dollar bills with instructions to go down the hall and get something to eat from the vending machine whenever I get hungry.

  There’s a cop standing by the reception desk with a clipboard and a frown but he only glanced at me once before losing interest. He won’t care if I walk out. I have been left here to await the life or death verdict because there is no one else and because they don’t know what to do with me. I am not even a witness. I am a minor nuisance. I am ‘Suzanne’s daughter’. I am ‘the poor Chapel girl’, even though Chapel was never my last name but my mother’s. I am to be pitied and whispered about and otherwise avoided.

  Even before I came here to Arcana this summer I understood something about people. They might smile at you and offer their sympathies but in the end they’d prefer you to stay at arm’s length. They don’t like to be too close to disaster. Like it’s a virus. Something invisibly spread from one person to another just by getting too close. Johnny knows this too. He had the nerve to say it out loud once while it’s something that only ever ran through my head.

  Thoughts of Johnny no longer make me happy. They make my heart thud painfully and my eyes squeeze shut. My fingers curl and the short nails dig into my palms. The ache in my chest is real. I suspect this is what a broken heart feels like. I hope I never feel it again.

  The cop continues to scribble on his clipboard. The nurse’s name is Rachel and he asks her if she’s going to rodeo night at Cradle, which is this raunchy bar off the highway exit to town. Aunt Vay complains that it’s where paychecks and morals go to die.

  Thinking about Aunt Vay should make me feel even worse than thinking about Johnny but that’s not the case. I have my reasons.

  Rachel likes the Clipboard Cop. I can tell by the way she throws her shoulders back and points her boobs in his direct
ion as she says that she’ll be on shift tomorrow but she has no plans the following night. Clipboard Cop smirks and clicks his pen. With every second that passes as I sit here in a scratchy red chair with my knees pressed together I want to scream a little more.

  That would be something they would notice.

  That would be something they would need to pay attention to.

  Rachel glances over when I stand up but I wave the dollar bills she gave me to show that I’m just going to get a snack. I know it’ll be a while before she wonders why I haven’t come back.

  It’s easy to slip out of the side door. A man in mint green scrubs is gulping a large energy drink while his thumb scrolls through his phone. I’d be using my phone right now too if I knew where it was. In all the turmoil I must have left it behind at the house.

  The color of the sky surprises me. The pinkish orange of summer twilight still cups the horizon. It’s not even late enough to be dark. Waking up to the sight of bright pink walls in my mother’s childhood bedroom feels like something that last happened a week ago and yet it was only this morning.

  My destination is not far, perhaps a twenty minute walk if I cut through parking lots and the tumbleweed-choked field that Johnny told me used to be a piece of his family’s land. It’s a good thing it’s not far because the bus service here in Arcana is infrequent and unreliable and the only money I have is Rachel’s two vending machine dollars.

  I’m tired and I dislike walking alone in the near darkness but this is my only chance. I won’t get to talk to him later. Once my father gets here it will all become impossible to explain.

  The sun keeps creeping lower, like an eyelid slowly closing. It’s still hot and I should have brought some water but there’s no helping that now. I walk quickly, sensing that time is running out with the fading of the light. A car honks at me from the road and a man extends a tattooed arm out the window. This kind of attention is new to me and I hate it. I cross my arms over my chest and veer off through a drug store parking lot, slide through a gap in a property line rail fence and ignore the trespassing signs as I speed walk.

  The sandy dirt crunches with each sneaker step and I keep my head up to make sure no one weird is in sight. Back in Dallas there was a girl two grades ahead of me who was practicing her cheerleader jumps one morning on the high school football field when a man approached. He asked her if she knew the way to a gas station and then without warning he threw her on the ground and hurt her. She never returned to school and I heard that her parents moved the whole family to Georgia for a new start. As if a change of scenery fixes the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe that’s true for some people. It’s never worked for my mother. Her awful history lives in her mind and all the passing years and the pills and the doctors can’t get it out.

  I wonder what that girl is doing right now. I think her name is Angeline. I wonder if she’s a cheerleader in her Georgia high school or if cheerleading is just a reminder of something she can’t bear to remember.

  If I see a strange man coming too close I’ll run. I’m not the fastest runner but I’m not the slowest either.

  A peculiar sensation is crawling up my spine, sort of like a sense that once I’ve been here doing this exact thing, maybe in a half forgotten dream that exists in pieces inside my head. I can’t remember walking through this dim parking lot before but it’s possible I ran through here with Johnny at some point this summer.

  Or perhaps my brain has discovered an inherited memory, if such things are possible. It could come from my mother or my grandparents or my great grandparents. My Arcana connections are infinite. They press down on me more than ever.

  I’ve never been to Johnny’s house but I know exactly where the trailer park is. Once he told me that he’s glad the trailer he lives in is located close to the entrance so he doesn’t have to walk through the whole place to get home. I also remember him saying that his place is really old and has ugly turquoise trim.

  The trailer park isn’t as crowded as I thought it would be. I pictured trailers stacked in neat rows but they are placed more haphazardly with wide spaces between them. I have no problem finding Johnny’s. He’s standing right outside. He doesn’t seem shocked to see me show up here and there’s something different in his posture. A look of carelessness. And strangely, he’s smoking a cigarette.

  “I thought you’d be gone already,” he says and tosses the lit cigarette into the dust.

  “I will be.” I’m watching the burning tip of the cigarette, annoyed that he refuses to put it out. I step forward, intending to crush it under my shoe but he beats me to the job and stomps the light out before I can get there.

  “My dad’s on his way here,” I tell him.

  “Lucky you.” He stomps on the ground hard again. There’s fury in his every move. “My mom’s gonna get out of town. This thing with Rafe is the last straw. She wants to go to Arizona.”

  “You’re going with her?”

  “Not like I have a whole lot of options.”

  I swallow hard. “I was at the hospital.”

  He stuffs his hands in his pockets. His jaw moves, almost like he’s gritting his teeth. “So I guess she’ll live, huh?”

  “It’s touch and go tonight,” I say, echoing the words I heard Rachel tell Clipboard Cop.

  Johnny’s response is to light another cigarette. I wonder when he began smoking.

  “He’ll be charged with murder if she dies,” I blurt, my voice layered with the anger that I can’t hide.

  He inhales, blows out smoke, and gazes out beyond the park into pitch blackness. I get the feeling I’m boring him.

  “Why the hell are you here right now?” he asks with an irritated sigh.

  “Just wanted to tell you goodbye I guess.”

  “Oh.” He snorts, taps out ashes even though there are no ashes yet. “Bye.”

  I don’t move. There are thoughts swirling around in my head of the things I ought to say. This shouldn’t be the last time we speak.

  “We’re not them, Johnny. We’re us.”

  That was my promise to him one afternoon as we stood at the threshold of the meteor crater and I slipped my hand into his. I’d thought about kissing him before and I thought we might kiss then but we didn’t. Now we never will.

  Grief thickens inside my chest, a different kind of grief than I was familiar with. This isn’t the grief of a baby sister’s death or watching your mother look right through you because her mind is broken. This is losing someone in a different way.

  He laughs at me, like he’s guessing my thoughts and has decided to torture me with them. “What are you waiting for, a farewell kiss?”

  “No! I don’t want to kiss you.” And I don’t. Not anymore. But my cheeks are full of heat and I’m grateful for the twilight because I know I’m blushing.

  Johnny smirks with the knowledge that he’s successfully pissed me off. “Couldn’t pay to me to do that anyway.”

  How could he have changed so much in so short a period of time? It’s almost like the violent actions of his brother have crushed every bit of kindness in his heart.

  “You’re just like them,” I spit out because I’m hurt by his coldness and I want to hurt him back.

  But he’s not hurt. He simply shrugs. “So are you. Just like them.”

  My ‘them’ is different from his. His are cruel and terrifying. Mine are fragile and ruined.

  Johnny, determined to forever destroy the bonds of our friendship, comes closer. The gathering darkness doesn’t hide his contempt.

  “Go back to your fucking family,” he says. “So you can all play bitch ass victims together. It’s the only thing you’re good at.”

  The sudden sour taste in my mouth warns me of forthcoming tears. I bite down hard on my lower lip to chase them off. My eyes water anyway.

  “Why are you trying to make me hate you?” I ask and I can’t stand how my voice cracks. I sound pathetic.

  “Because you should,” he says and the corner of
his mouth quirks up in a wicked smirk that turns his face into Rafe’s. “Now why don’t you get lost before something bad happens to you?”

  He doesn’t shove me but I feel like he has. I feel like he’s pushed me, kicked me to the ground and left me flailing in the dust while he laughs and makes plans to do worse.

  I don’t believe that he’d physically hurt me. Not even this new and awful version of Johnny would do that. But what he’s doing is almost as bad.

  I tip my head up and stare him down. I’m an inch taller so the move feels effective.

  “I never ever want to fucking see you again, Jonathan Hempstead!”

  I drop the words and run. I’m already scrubbing him from my mind as my legs begin pumping. I don’t want to hear anything else he has to say but I’m not fast enough. I hear his bitter chuckle.

  I also hear the last thing he decides to tell me.

  “You never will, Caris!”

  And I’m sure he’s right.

  Jay