The Culling (Book 2): The Hollow:

by Bell, A. C.

  "Are you even on a team? I made Varsity," I warned.

  He gave a low, impressed whistle. "As a freshman? And no, I’m not. I actually have a life.”

  I tried to hide my inflating ego and picked up my racket case.

  "Is that a 'no'?" He asked.

  I chuckled. "I wouldn't want to embarrass you in front of your friends."

  "Don't worry about them. Unless you're afraid to lose. I get it. " He turned to strut away and I glared at the back of his head.

  "Hey!" I called after him. He turned back around with his hands tucked comfortably in the pockets of his jeans. I pointed to the other end of the court with my racket. "Put your racket where your mouth is."

  He shrugged, nonchalant, and strutted to the court’s entrance. "I'm Peter, by the way."

  I handed my spare racket to him. "Adeline. You wanna serve?"

  "Nah, ladies first."

  The feminist in me who refused to let boys hold doors open for me simmered and as he sauntered across the court. I prepared to destroy him. As he got into position, I noticed he wasn’t even holding the racket correctly and his stance would make him clumsy. To test him I lobbed an easy pass near his racket hand and he awkwardly swung, missing the ball. I hid my smirk while he ran after it. His friends even chuckled over at the fence. He appeared nervous now and shook himself to regain his confidence. Over the next ten minutes or so, each pass ended one of two ways; He would serve to me and would miss when I sent it back or he would miss my serve. His friends howled in laughter and actually cheered for me. The next time I served to him, the racket actually flew out of his hand when he swung. He chased after it in a flurry of profanity.

  “Hey!” I complained. “These were expensive!”

  When he straightened from scooping it back up, he was smiling. Not an embarrassed “I can’t believe I just did that,” kind of smile. A wicked smile that turned my blood cold. He looked over at his friends and they hooted for him. He resumed his position and his posture completely changed. He now held a sturdy stance and gripped the racket in a firm, stiff hand. He’d been toying with me. He'd lured me into a false sense of security by pretending to be lousy. As my brain tried to recuperate, he served an ace past my shoulder. I gaped like an idiot before hunting down the fuzzy yellow traitor. Even to this day, I’m ashamed that I let him get to me. I’d been so rattled by his ploy that he was able to catch up to my score fairly quickly. He was fast.

  I was able to keep the score tied until the end. He held the ball up to serve and in the middle of his swing, he altered course and drove the ball toward my other side. I didn’t catch the trick fast enough and it zipped past the corrected swing of my racket. He’d won.

  “Woo!” Peter hooted, holding his hands in the air and taking a little victory lap around his side of the court. I tossed my racket to the ground and wiped the sweat from my brow with the cotton wristband on my forearm, growling through my teeth. He gripped the top of the net when he looped back around and pressed it down to lean on it. His face gleamed with sweat. “What’s the matter? I thought only the best of the best were picked for varsity.”

  I leveled his grin with a glare and pointed accusingly at him. “I want a rematch. Fair this time.”

  His grin broadened his teeth a bright white line in the sharply slanted afternoon sun. “You sure you can keep up?”

  ***

  In the photo, his arm was draped over my shoulders as I pretended to look miffed, my arms crossed and lips pouting. A laugh bubbled out of me at the memory, but it didn’t stop the tears. Where was he? I ambled to the futon mattress behind my bed and sank down to it. It took a while to fall asleep but eventually disjointed dreams took over.

  I was groggy the next morning. My eyelids were difficult to pull apart and even more difficult to keep open. Anxiety kept me from going back to sleep, however. My bedroom door was open a crack. Someone else was in my room, I could feel it.

  The floorboards groaned softly as I bolted upright but my breathing eased when I found Nikki asleep on my bed. Her blond hair concealed most of her face but I could see her cheek smashed against the side of my pillow, scrunching her mouth into an amusing, crooked pucker. Only then did it occur to me that, after my reverie about the picture, I had forgotten to lock the door. My tired brain encouraged me to lay back down and the floorboards complained again. Nikki was a much lighter sleeper than I was, so the creaking seemed to startle her awake. Her hazel eyes took a moment to focus as her sleep-addled brain worked to recall where she was.

  “I’m sorry, go back to sleep,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said with a groggy dismissive wave.

  She rolled onto her back and stretched across the mattress making a funny noise. The action mussed her hair and when she settled, my lavender comforter covered the bottom half of her face as she yawned. She let her limbs slump into positions that couldn’t possibly be comfortable.

  “Where’s my camera?” I teased.

  Her laugh was slightly muffled by the blanket. “Shut up, I’m adorable. Why do you have a twin-sized bed anyway? I’m four inches shorter than you and even I barely fit on this thing.”

  “I’m sorry, your Highness, but not all of us can fit a queen-sized bed into our childhood bedrooms.”

  “Whatever, peasant. I expect these sheets to be washed and made up before ten. If I find one wrinkle, floggings will be administered,” she said.

  “Can it, wench. Freeloaders wash their own linens in this inn.” Our laughter filled the room and Nikki uncovered her face. I braced my arms on my forehead and studied the ceiling. “So, I guess Mom called you.”

  Nikki made a confirmatory sound. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t get hurt. Mostly, I was just angry, but I slept it off.”

  “Good. You’re not allowed to get hurt anymore. I’m expecting at least a good seventy more years of perfect health out of you.” She was jesting, but the undertone of her voice shook with emotion.

  Seventy years. I’d never really given a lot of thought to where I might be in twenty years, let alone seventy. I frowned up at the ceiling, drawn back to my meeting with Wyatt Parker a few months ago. I now knew that my life would be very different in seventy years. I didn’t want to lose this...

  Nikki rolled over to peer down at me for going silent. Her brows scrunched into an empathetic knot. “What’s wrong?”

  I knew I should tell her. I needed to tell her. I tried to push the words through my lips, but they wouldn’t come.

  “Nothing,” I lied. I pushed myself off the floor and lifted my arms to stretch. “I’m gonna hop in the shower. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.”

  Her hazel eyes made the back of my head itch as she watched me collect a change of clothes from my dresser and I didn’t have the courage to look back as I fled the room.

  I took more time than necessary washing myself and massaged my tea tree oil shampoo deep into my scalp. It had started to dry out in the winter climate. I treated my cleaning process as more of a ritual so it would take longer, but after a while, my phone started chiming, beckoning me out of my sanctuary. After I wrapped myself in a dark blue towel, I checked my call history. It had been Slade. Anxiety chewed at my stomach. To procrastinate calling him back, I dressed slowly but Caro Emerald began singing at me again as I tugged a casual grey blouse on. I finally answered the call.

  “Hey Uncle,” I greeted awkwardly, holding the phone with my shoulder so I could pull my jeans up.

  His gravelly tone reverberated through the phone. “Guten morgen,” he greeted in German, reminding me that I was supposed to do the same. He’d agreed to help me learn a bit of German but I was not gifted with a talent for tongues, so it had been a challenging process so far. “What’s with the formality?”

  “You’re the only extended family I’ve ever known, so I’m milking it for all it’s got,” I insisted.

  Slade chuckled.

  Technically, he was my great-great-uncle through marriage. Back when he�
��d lived with the Viesci 500 years before, he’d briefly been married to Kendra Cahn, daughter of Xavier, the Viesci who had started my dhampir line by having a son with a human named Amelia Parker. Slade had been convinced Kendra was dead until a few months ago when Alexandra had given me an amulet that had belonged to Kendra. Though he hadn’t been able to track her down since.

  “I assume Raiden explained what we found at the cabin?” The air outside the bathroom felt too brisk on my still damp skin so I settled for leaning against the bathroom counter.

  “He explained what bit he saw, but he also passed out. What did you see?”

  “They looked weird. Really weird. Grey skin and black veins, all sharp teeth. And when the woman fell down, she left a really deep imprint, like she was really heavy.”

  Slade exhaled loudly, a deep rumble through the phone.

  “Does it sound familiar?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve never heard of a creature like that. She was heavy?” Slade sounded completely perplexed by this random attribute.

  “Yeah. Crazy heavy. Didn’t stop them from zipping around like spiders, though.”

  Slade fell into silent contemplation and I chewed on the inside of my lip.

  “I’m sorry for disappearing the other night.” I busied myself with slipping my laundry into the hamper beside the bathroom counter.

  “Raiden got worried when you didn’t check in,” he said.

  Guilt saddened me and I finally ventured downstairs. The cold hardwood floors numbed my feet as I trotted down to the living room. “I know I shouldn’t have taken off like that, I just didn’t know what to think. I still don’t.” I pinched the phone with my shoulder again and sat down to tug my socks on. My feet welcomed even the slight warmth they provided.

  “He wasn’t lying about it to exclude you.”

  “It’s not that I feel left out. I don’t know either of you well enough to expect you to tell me everything about yourselves, but how is his being a dhampir not relevant to what happened to me?” I stood and tied the curtains up to busy myself. Warm light bounced off the snow outside and illuminated the room.

  Slade’s sigh drifted through the phone. “I can’t tell you. It’s not my place to explain for him. You should talk to him, though.”

  A black sedan pulled up in front of the house and a familiar scowling agent of the Supernatural Affairs Unit stepped out.

  “I’ll come by and talk to him, I promise. Sorry, but I have to go.”

  “Alright. Oh, can you tell your mom that I tried her chicken and waffle recipe? She wins. It works.”

  I chortled. “Changed your mind, did she?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now she has to try using lard in her tamales.”

  I laughed again. “I don’t know how well that will fly.”

  “I tried her recipe, now she has to try mine.”

  “Alright, I’ll tell her.” The doorbell rang. “Gotta go. Auf wiedersehen.”

  “Bis später,” he answered. I hung up and spotted Nikki clomping down the stairs to answer the door. I waved her back.

  She grinned. “Oh, is it Raiden?”

  “What? No, it’s someone from Supernatural Affairs.”

  Her smile dropped. “About last night?”

  “Probably. I don’t know how much you’re allowed to know about all of this. Please, go back upstairs.”

  The doorbell rang again and I flinched. Agent Stokes didn’t strike me as a terribly patient man. Nikki pursed her lips and surrendered, retreating back up the stairs.

  Agent Stokes rapped his knuckles loudly against the door. “Miss Parker?”

  “Coming,” I called.

  I pulled the door open and found the man adjusting his blue striped tie. A salt and pepper goatee framed a frown that seemed to have been carved into his face. He tried not to look irritated at having been kept waiting since he’d seen me through the window.

  “Sorry, I was on the phone.”

  “That’s alright. I have a few questions. May I come in?” he asked. Anxiety turned my stomach but I nodded and stepped aside to let him through. “Hello,” I heard him say as I shut the door. I turned to glower at Nikki where she leaned casually against the wall beside the stairs. “I need a few minutes to speak with Miss Parker privately.”

  “If you’re worried that you’ll be exposing ‘your world’ if I sit in, don’t worry. That horse was buried out back when Ian Brackett threw me into a glass door with a wave of his hand, remember? You know, the guy your agency refused to do anything about until after he abducted and experimented on my friend, here?”

  Stokes’s lips pinched and I frowned.

  “He came when no one else would,” I reminded her. He’d even taken time off to do it when the agency wouldn’t sanction the investigation.

  This didn’t quell the fire in her eyes, however. “If that was any indication as to how you people run your investigations, then I won’t let you bully Adeline into answering any questions she doesn’t want to. Either you talk to both of us or neither of us.”

  The man took a deep breath to keep from becoming ornery. “Have it your way.”

  Reconnecting

  Stokes moved over to the sofa chair. I sent Nikki a look of exasperation but she just patted my shoulder and moved to sit on the couch. I perched next to her, clenching my hands together anxiously in my lap. Stokes pulled a phone with a large screen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and began clicking and swiping his finger across it.

  “I suppose I’ll get right to it. We found this video on social media late last night.”

  When he found what he wanted, he held the phone out to me. Of course, I knew what I would find when I accepted the device from him.

  The video had been taken from the house across the street so I knew the “documentarian” was the Collins kid. The video was focused on a large bug on a windowsill and then shifted up and zoomed in to my driveway. Ben’s dark canine form crept out of the bushes while I pulled the trashcan up. Sure enough, Rigby Collins’s voice blared into the video.

  “Dude, come look!” the fifteen-year-old hollered to someone.

  “Whoa, what kind of dog is that? It’s huge!” Said another male voice as I tipped the trash can to catch Ben in his assault. The boys laughed and cheered as I made my stand against what they assumed was a wild animal.

  “Oh sure,” I grumbled. “Don’t try to help or call for help or anything.”

  Presuming I had seen enough, Stokes plucked the phone from my fingers as Mom came out of the house with her shotgun. In my peripheral, I saw Nikki gape.

  “Your mom has a shotgun?” she whispered.

  Agent Stokes cut in before I could answer. “I know you’re probably afraid that he’ll come back if you speak up, but this is a less complicated case than with Ian Brackett. We already have video evidence of this canisi attacking you and potentially exposing our world to countless viewers. We were able to take the video down quickly, but there’s no way of knowing how many people saw it before we did.”

  “So, as long as exposure is risked, you guys hop right on a case?” Nikki muttered snidely.

  The feminist in me balked at Stokes’ comment, but I quieted her down. He wasn’t insinuating that I was scared because I was a “helpless girl”, but because I was still new to the supernatural world. Of course, that wasn’t actually why I hadn’t called about the attack. If I told them who Ben was, he would be in a lot of trouble that he didn’t deserve. I was careful not to use any gender-specific pronouns in my answer.

  “I don’t know who it was,” I lied. “It’s not like they stopped for an introduction, as you saw.”

  “Regardless, you can still file an official report.”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary for now,” I said. Having Nikki beside me helped to keep my resolve strong under his intense scrutiny.

  Irritation darkened his eyes and his lips pursed into a line. “If you don’t come forward, he could do this to someone else. I know you don’t want that.�
�

  “I think this was a one-time thing.”

  “There’s no way to know that. These types of people don’t usually just strike once.”

  “She said she doesn’t want to file a report. You can’t force her,” Nikki snapped.

  Stokes rose in a huff and pulled a card from his inside pocket. “In case you lost my last card, here’s another. Please use it if you change your mind.” He plopped it frustratedly onto the coffee table and excused himself. I kept my glance down while he left.

  Once the door shut behind him, Nikki swiveled to face me. “That was Ben, wasn’t it?”

  I stared hard at the coffee table. “I won’t deny that what he did was wrong, but I won’t risk getting him arrested for this. He’s angry and sad just like us. For Peter’s sake, I need to let this go.”

  Nikki exhaled a sigh and gave my arm a reassuring squeeze before rising to her feet. “I’m gonna go have a talk with Rigby Collins.”

  “Wait.” I caught her hand. I pondered a way to go about what I needed to say but it was difficult to do with her hazel eyes boring curiously into mine. “I saw Marcus on my walk home last night.”

  “What?” Her tone suggested that she didn’t appreciate him lurking about to chat up her friends.

  “You should sit,” I offered. She parked her rump on the edge of the couch cushion, as tense as a pole. “He said your mom threatened to terminate her pregnancy if he didn’t leave. Claimed that’s when her early-onset schizophrenia started and it caused problems between them.”

  Nikki didn’t speak and I let her think it over. She put her elbows on her lap and hung her head, tapping her fingers as she processed. Eventually, she made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a growl. “Even if it’s true, that doesn’t excuse him altogether. He’s had twenty years to reach out.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. “I know, but on the other hand, you finally have a chance to get to know him. I won’t try to guilt you into it because of my dad; I know they’re two completely different people. But what if Marcus is serious about making amends?”