by E. M. Moore
Before long, we pulled up to a great big house that matched the other historical structures around the area. It was a clapboard gray with deep blue accents framing the two story house. Travis put the Jeep in Park and jumped out. With my hand still firmly in Liam’s, I let him lead me out of the car as we followed Travis to the front porch. My stomach tightened the closer we got. There was one thing we didn’t think to ask Travis yesterday, and that was if he really thought Kaitlyn was having a problem, or if he thought this was just a ploy to see him again. Now that we were here and a few seconds away from seeing her, the thought kept flashing through my mind. Damn. I didn’t remember being so distrusting before.
“Feel anything?” Liam whispered in my ear.
Aw, hell. I closed my eyes as we waited for someone to let us in and took stock of my feelings. Despite the jealousy raging through my veins, there wasn’t anything else. No tightening of my stomach like in the cafe, or pull like when magic wanted me to come to the coven. I didn’t feel a thing.
I shook my head. His lips pursed. “Me either.”
The door swung open and Travis said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” a voice said. Travis completely blocked the girl out so at least I was spared her appearance for a few seconds longer. Hands wrapped around his neck and shoulders, and they stepped together to hug.
My jaw clenched. A hand came up to rub my back again, but I still stared daggers at the arms around Travis. After a moment, he stepped back. “I brought my friends with me. They’re, you know, like me. Or, most of them are anyway,” he clarified after spotting me. I seriously wanted to kick him. His eyes roamed over me, but then returned to Kaitlyn.
She stepped back, opening the door wide. “Come in. Thanks, guys, for coming. I wish I knew what was going on.”
Her gaze trailed up Randy, and I pulled Liam up after me as I stepped in front of him. I wished I could sequester Liam, Gabe, and Randy away or somehow mark my territory. Hell, that just sounded bad, but it was how I felt.
“Hi,” I said to her since she was staring at me after I’d put myself right between her and Randy.
“Hey, I’m Kaitlyn.”
She held her hand out, and I shook it. “Norah.”
“Norah. That’s a name you don’t hear every day.” My eyes narrowed, and she quickly tacked on. “I like it.”
The only feelings I was getting around here were ones of harm and they were coming directly from myself. I felt like I could snap and just start punching people.
Hands came up on my shoulders and a sexy British accent whispered, “Calm down, Love.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I whispered after Kaitlyn turned away and led Travis further into the house.
He chuckled. “No?”
Yeah, yeah. Okay. I knew, but I still didn’t quite understand it. It wasn’t a natural reaction for me.
Liam pried his fingers away from mine and moved me closer to Gabe. He looked at him as if to say “handle that, would you?”, and then walked up to Travis and Kaitlyn. The whole thing just made me snicker and brought me out of my own head. “C’mon,” I said to Gabe, pulling him forward. “We better hear what Little-Miss-Kaitlyn thinks is going on here.”
Travis glared at Gabe and I as we approached, then turned to his ex. “So, let’s hear what you told me on the phone yesterday. You said everyone’s just acting weird?”
She nodded, and bit her lip after looking around the big, empty house. “There’s something very strange going on here. All the girls are skipping class, staying in their rooms during the day. When they do come out, it’s only for parties.” She stepped forward and lowered her voice. “Nightly parties, as in every night. We’re not that type of sorority. Sure, we’re known to have some keggers, but nightly? No. We have GPA’s to keep up, standards to uphold. Travis, you know how hard it is to get in here. None of it makes any sense, but when I try to bring it up to the other girls, they just act like zombies. No, worse, like stoned cheerleaders who are only here to drink and dance the night away.”
Her voice caught, and Travis put a hand on her shoulder. I was going to have no teeth left by the time we left this place.
Despite what Kaitlyn told us, and that it did seem odd, I couldn’t feel a thing. I closed my eyes as she prattled on and searched for my magic. I sent it out, not in a fighting way, but in an exploratory way. It left me in purple smoke-like wisps and wandered through the house. It could only go so far before it hit a wall. Most likely my own limitations so I drew it back. I gave Gabe a quick shake of my head to let him know I still didn’t feel anything.
The sound of heels on the stairs reached us. Kaitlyn looked up, rubbing under her eyes furiously and then looking at her fingers to make sure she didn’t smudge any of her makeup. When the figure came into view, I panicked a bit. It was Mandy, and for a split-second I worried she’d recognize us, but then I remembered Travis stripped her memories. Thankfully.
“Hey!” she said, looking all annoyingly happy, pretty much the exact opposite of how Kaitlyn described her ‘sisters’ to us. She looked at Kaitlyn, tossed her hair over her side, and then moved on to the rest of us. She definitely looked better, no longer the picture of someone who’d been kept in captivity for a couple weeks. The poor thing. I hoped she was getting through everything okay. “Are you coming to our party later?”
Umm. ‘Kay. People coped with things differently, but Travis didn’t strip her of her captivity memories, only the ones of us. I wouldn’t have been ready to throw myself back into the sorority scene so quickly.
Travis and I exchanged glances while Kaitlyn said, “No, they can’t. They’re only here for a little while.”
“Aww,” Mandy pouted. She legit pouted, cementing every thought I had about girls like her. “That’s too bad.”
She gave us a quick wave and then exited through a hall. A niggle of apprehension wormed its way up my spine. That was definitely strange.
Travis motioned to Mandy, and asked, “How’s she doing?”
“Mandy?” Kaitlyn asked, twisting her long ponytail in her fingers. “Fine. She seems to be the only one who actually has a personality left while everyone else is stuck in limbo, but it’s just…”
She trailed off and this time it was Gabe who stepped up. “I think Travis means to ask if she’s alright. We heard something happened to her?”
Kaitlyn’s brows furrowed. “Not that I know of. She’s stayed in the house with the rest of them. Her parents were calling here, worried sick, but she refused to talk to them. Maybe that’s what you heard because I think her parents actually put out a call to the police or something.” She rolled her eyes. “She’s fine. Just a bit of a drama queen.”
I rubbed my forehead, catching Liam’s gaze. Puzzle pieces were starting to push together. Mandy told us she saw someone who looked identical to her. Kaitlyn was positive this Mandy had never left the house. If that was the case, the Mandy we knew couldn’t have been locked in that cell for a few weeks.
Travis rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you mind giving us a moment, Kaitlyn?”
“Sure,” she said, her face draining. “I’ll just step into the game room. You remember where it is, right?”
He cleared his throat. “Um, yeah. I think I can find it again.”
The daggers I wanted to send his way didn’t even matter right now. As soon as Kaitlyn went through the hall, Gabe said, “So, the Mandy we know isn’t looking like she was that crazy now.” He pointed to the door the other Mandy left through. “What is that?”
Liam held up his hand. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Travis wiped Mandy’s memories, so she wouldn’t have recognized us, anyway. I will admit that there is a potential problem with Kaitlyn’s version of the story, but that doesn’t mean it happened exactly how she said it did.”
“We can trust her,” Travis said. “She wouldn’t lie.”
“I’m not saying she lied, Travis. I’m just saying she might not have all the facts. I don’t know about you guys, but I fe
el nothing in here. Everything seems normal, no weird feelings, or tugs. Our magic has never failed us before, so I don’t see why if something was going on here that it wouldn’t alert us.”
Travis rubbed his jaw. “I don’t like it.”
Randy, who’d stayed quiet through all this, put his hands on his hips, drawing my attention. “I can’t say I like it either. I went back to the place where we found Norah and it’s clean, completely empty and swept from top to bottom. There’s no leads to go on there. We need to find something to help us figure out who’s after Norah, and now—maybe—there are two Mandy’s just as the real Mandy said there was. The ‘fake’ Mandy seemed to be a puppet of this Jay, according to the real Mandy so we should find her if we can. She can give us answers.”
“What we can do right now,” Liam said, as relief flooded Travis, “is cleanse the place, and do further investigation. Mainly, I think we should come back tonight. We’ll have one of us go to the real Mandy’s place, confirm she’s there, while the rest of us come here. If there are two Mandy’s, we know the one here is mixed up in what happened with Norah.”
“It still doesn’t make sense why we’re not getting the pull though,” Gabe offered. “If there was something going on here, we should’ve felt this other Mandy, even just a little bit.”
The rest of us shrugged. Unfortunately, none of us had any answers.
After we performed a quick cleansing spell, Travis pulled Kaitlyn back into the room and told her we’d be back tonight. He didn’t offer up that we’d done anything and she didn’t ask. But, I noticed she had more color in her face than when we first got here. She’d better hope that was the cleansing spell we did and nothing Travis related.
23
It had been a stressful couple of hours. Instead of Liam and I stopping at the apartment to grab things after our intended date, we stopped there on the way back from the sorority house. There was a weird vibe in there, as if the place had been infiltrated without evidence to back it up. After we returned to Liam’s parents’ place, everyone scattered. With things in tow, the guys went to the different rooms they’d claimed to do God knows what. Later on, I found Liam in the living room, his laptop on his lap and scrolling through a website.
“Hey,” I said, coming up behind him.
Startled, he looked up with glazed-over eyes. He sighed, took his glasses off, and rubbed his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve been reading this for hours, and I’m just trying to piece things together.”
I glanced at the screen, looking at a depraved picture of shadowed people screaming. “That doesn’t look like fun research at all.”
He placed his glasses back on while I came around the couch to sit next to him. “It isn’t. It’s just something Kaitlyn said that struck a chord with me. I don’t know how it would even fit into our situation, just a shot in the dark, really.”
I squeezed his thigh. “I think you’re trying to do what the rest of us are, make sense out of everything. You just take the research approach. I noticed Randy takes the workout approach.” I nodded toward the full glass window where Randy was doing sprints from one side of the lawn to the other.
He shifted closer to me. “What do you do?”
“Can’t you tell? I bug the people who are actually trying to do something.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You’re not bugging me.”
Locking eyes, we both moved forward to press a lingering kiss to one another’s lips. “I’m sorry we won’t be going out on our date tonight.”
“Duty calls,” he sighed. “I’ll be glad to have this over with. It’s weird, but I’m kind of hoping we can correlate what happened to us at the cafe, to Dupre taking you, to Mandy, to the sorority house. If we can, then we can just put this to bed.”
“So sure, are we?” I teased.
“It’s what we do. I don’t like all these mysterious claims and threats. Just come at us so we can deal with it.”
I blinked at him, surprised. It was stupid to be though. Liam was a black and white person, even when it came to this. It didn’t matter that he looked like the total opposite of the guy who would fight for you, appearances were deceiving. “I know what you mean. I got excited when we talked about bringing my shop up here and everything.”
“We’re still going to do that,” Liam assured. “We’ll just have to do it as a team, and of course, as long as you don’t listen to any more of your Granny’s terrible advice, we should be okay.”
I chuckled into his shoulder. “She’d hate you for saying that.”
He looked up at the ceiling. “She can’t hear me, can she?”
“I’ve no idea. She seemed to always hear things I didn’t want her to, but in this case, no, I don’t think so. Apparently she only comes to mine and Travis’s dreams.”
Liam shook his head. “Yeah, I didn’t get that.”
“You and me both. Maybe he was the only one asleep at the time?” I shrugged and put my head on Liam’s shoulder. The screen of his laptop caught my eye again. “What is this anyway?” I asked, trailing my hand down the frame.
“I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
“Tell me,” I urged. If he thought it was important, it most certainly wasn’t stupid.
“This is Dante’s Inferno. Well, a representation of one of his nine circles of hell, anyway. Have you heard of it?”
“Vaguely. I think we read it in high school? Maybe.” The dark-shadowed pencil drawings that portrayed these horrific souls bothered me. “Which circle is this?”
“Limbo.”
I gasped a little. I’d heard Kaitlyn say limbo too, but this seemed like a stretch. Limbo? In a sorority house? That was kind of poetic, right?
“I have nothing to tie anything together,” he said, sighing again. “The only thing that remotely comes into play is when Kaitlyn said all her ‘sisters’ were acting peculiar, different from their normal selves. It’s a longshot, but I thought I’d best do my research about it instead of pushing the thought away. Sometimes you never know when different pieces will come together on a case like this. Right now, I feel like we’re flying blind. If there is something going on with Mandy and Kaitlyn’s sorority house, it doesn’t make any sense that we wouldn’t feel it. Except, of course, that our magic has been acting haywire since…” He shifted.
“Since I showed up,” I continued for him. “I know.”
“It’s not your fault, Norah. You got the pull. Then we get Dupre taking you to some place in the country for this mysterious Jay person. He doesn’t do anything to you himself, and he had to have known we’d come looking for you.”
“But he didn’t think you’d be able to find me. He was sure you wouldn’t have gotten the pull.”
“Which we didn’t,” Liam said. “He seems to know an awful lot about this. We only knew where you were because Granny contacted Travis.”
Though we were trying to figure this all out, and it was important, I loved that Liam just referred to my grandmother as Granny. Cue girly smile.
“Then again,” Liam said, missing entirely that I was in relationship heaven, “I think Dupre waited until you were away from us to take you. He tried to take you when he came across us at the cafe, but that didn’t work out so well for him, so he waited until you were alone, and surprised you.”
Yeah, he certainly did, the asshole. Nothing like making me seem like the damsel in distress who needed saving. Thank God I was able to stop Mr. Touchy Feely with my own magic before the guys showed up. “Do you think he knows we’re stronger together?”
“It would make sense. Then again, it’s kind of common sense to get someone you want to take alone, so I’m not sure if that part is magically related or not.”
“My head hurts.”
Liam’s mouth dropped for a split second and then he burst out in a laugh, grabbing his stomach. “Hell, mine does too.”
“I expect you to figure all this out before we leave in a bit. You know that, right?”
His pure sm
ile immediately slipped from his face.
I grabbed his arm, my stomach bottoming out. “Liam, God, I was joking. This is too much for us to handle right now. We absolutely don’t have all the pieces so there’s no way to push it together to fit perfectly. We just need to take it piece by piece. First piece is seeing if Mandy has a doppelgänger.”
“Doppelgänger?”
“Yeah, I watched The Vampire Diaries, you know. Katherine and Elena. They were like the same person, but not.”
“I don’t get your reference, but I absolutely know what a doppelgänger is, thank you.”
I lifted myself up and kissed his cheek. “Good. It’s about time you caught up to me.”
Liam laughed, his perusal of the website returning after I snuggled back down into the crook of his arm. From everything we’d just worked out, at least I had a better sense of the problem we were up against. It seemed to me we needed to find out who this Jay character was. He was pulling all the strings. The real Mandy had helped us connect the doppelgänger Mandy and Jay together, and Dupre himself told me of his association with this Jay. If it was in fact doppelgänger Mandy at the sorority house, we needed to use her to get to Jay. Not that the doppelgänger or Dupre weren’t a threat. The guy wanted a voodoo doll to torture his ex. He was sadistic enough to do God knows what to us. I cringed to think that someone had obviously given him the means to do that with. Maybe after all this was said and done, I could find Dupre’s ex and make that right. The person who wanted the power to harm others was the exact type of person who shouldn’t have the power to harm others.
How was that for black and white?
24
Somehow, Travis and I ended up alone as we waited by the door for everyone else. He’d dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that fit him just right. His hair was gelled, dark and handsome, bringing a confident mysteriousness to his look. I didn’t get to look for that long because as soon as he saw me looking, I glanced away.
