Coercion (Goddess of Fate Book 3)

by Tamara Hart Heiner

  I licked my lips and clarified. “I mean, he won’t be free. Lieutenant Bailey is going to get him out just so we can question him. It’s temporary.”

  “That’s no good!” Meredith cried, attracting the attention of neighboring students. “We need to take him with us! We need Trey to tell us everything he knows about the mystical realm, and we have to help him get his powers back so that he can help us free all of those people, none of which can be accomplished in a twenty-minute interrogation!”

  “I know,” I said. “So the real question is, how do we help him break out?”

  “Break out. Oh. Oh! We have to kidnap him!”

  We were across the street now and entering the main wing of the school. “Something like that. We have to free him, and then we have to run.” Whatever my relationship with Lieutenant Bailey was, I knew he wouldn’t let it go lightly if I helped one of his prisoners escape. He would hunt me down, if only for the sake of appearances.

  “So what are your suggestions?” Meredith lowered her voice, as if she expected the police force to have spies walking around and eavesdropping.

  I tapped my finger against my lips. “I have none.”

  We stood for a moment in the hallway, silent, while students rippled around us as if we were rocks in a river.

  “Well, we better come up with something. I don’t think this is a plan we want to wing.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  We waved goodbye and I headed toward my second-hour class, already scheming different ways of breaking someone out of police custody and wondering where I would get my hands on all of the imaginary gas bombs floating through my ideas.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When I walked into work that afternoon, Kent immediately pulled me into the break room.

  “Jayne, do you realize how pivotal you are to this situation?” His eyes danced with barely concealed excitement, and he practically breathed fire with anticipation. “You might be the key to all of this.”

  I looked around for my co-worker Kate, eager for someone to shield me. “I really don’t know anything. I don’t remember what happened.”

  “Kent!” Justin, another staff member, poked his head in the room, his hand slapping onto the door frame. “It might be happening again!”

  We both looked at him with bewildered expressions.

  “What’s happening again?” Kent asked, biting before I did.

  “Disappearances. Come, check out the hotline.”

  The hotline was a number the police had set up just for the press, with a stream of constant information, kind of like a verbal newsfeed, mostly with police reports and weather reports. It provided us immediate bulletins without needing to call the police department every ten minutes.

  Kent dropped his notepad and pen back into his pocket and they both took off, leaving me virtually forgotten. But I stood up and followed, one anxious finger making its way to my mouth so it could be chewed on.

  But the disappearances couldn’t be happening again. Samantha’s power was gone. Her poem had been nullified.

  If there were any more disappearances, they had to be simply coincidental.

  The hotline was on speakerphone, with five or six reporters and staff members gathered around it to collect its feed. A missing persons report spouted off, and I did a quick count in my head. Five. Six. Seven.

  And then the newsfeed flashed to something else, something happening in the larger world around us. But all I could think was that seven was a lot of people to have suddenly gone missing.

  I took a tentative step forward, not wanting to draw attention to myself in case I wasn’t supposed to be in here. Nobody noticed me as I stood on tiptoes and peered at the list of names Justin had jotted down. Surreptitiously, I pulled out my trusty flip phone and used the camera function to snap a picture of the list. Then I put the phone in my pocket and snuck back out.

  While my official title had been upgraded from intern to junior journalist in August, my duties hadn’t changed. My job was to work next to Kate, another junior journalist who was actually in college working on her degree. I would help her with her assignments and her research and any other quick jobs around the office.

  But I hadn’t seen Kate, and she hadn’t tracked me down either. She might not even realize I was back. Which meant, for the moment, I didn’t have an assignment.

  Except for the one I was giving myself.

  I sat down in one of the vacant chairs and did a web search on the first name on the list of missing persons. Tara Elliot. Nothing came up.

  I got the same result with persons two and three. But on the fourth name on the list, I found a social media account. The woman, Rebecca Scott, had left a public comment less than a week earlier.

  “If you see my husband, please, call me or the police. I already reported him missing, but I know he would never leave me willingly.”

  She’d also posted a picture of the man.

  There were a string of optimistic comments in response, as well as a few negative ones suggesting he had left her intentionally. I pulled up the archives, searching for the list of missing persons the police had put together. They had worked with the news media to put the comprehensive list on news outlets and social media. Public theories of what was happening ran rampant, everything from cults to kidnappings to trafficking.

  I hadn’t seen the list before now, and my heart squeezed when I realized there were more than six thousand people on it. The list was in alphabetical order, so I only needed to scan down to the S section to verify if this woman’s husband was on it.

  But first I had to get past the C section. Even knowing it would be there, my throat tightened when I saw Aaron’s name.

  Aaron Chambers.

  I touched the screen. “We’re going to get you back,” I whispered. “I promise.”

  Enough of that. The police were doing what they could to get Trey, and I couldn’t do anything else until then. I continued scanning for the last name “Scott.”

  There. Dustin Scott. Turning back to the internet browser, I did a search for Dustin and Rebecca Scott.

  Jackpot. It pulled up their engagement announcement from seven years earlier, the only news they had ever made together. Lucky.

  Something was coming together in the back of my mind like a tenuous spider web, though I couldn’t quite grasp the edges of the sticky strings just yet. I went back to the first name on the list on my phone. Tara Elliott. Just for kicks and giggles, I toggled the archived list. I wasn’t surprised when I found another Elliott.

  I tried the list on my phone again, comparing the seven newly missing people to the six thousand already missing.

  I got five matches on the last names. Five. Out of seven.

  What did it mean? How were the new missing people related to the ones who disappeared last week? Had they found copies of the poem lying around the house and only now been affected? The poem didn’t mean anything now. Samantha no longer had the power to summon these people.

  I sucked in a breath as the sticky web fell across my mind like a net, the tickling thought coalescing into a theory. The new missing people were the significant others of those already gone. More specifically, the women of those already gone.

  It was just a theory, but I had a reason behind it. The professor I met with in New York told me how the ancient Latvian people, the druids who still believed in the pagan gods, were originally a matriarchal society, giving higher powers to the goddesses than the gods. But then something changed. New stories had arisen of Saule, the sun-goddess, losing a challenge to Velns, god of the underworld. The price of losing was high: she became his servant, and all women thereafter became subservient to the men.

  Professor Kestovely didn’t have much more to add to it than that. It was an interesting story, he had said, and explained the more recent trend of venerating the gods before the goddesses.

  But to me it was more than a story. Aaron and I had joked about it, but he hadn’t forgotten. And when he learned that S
amantha wanted to control me through him, he broke up with me first, thus freeing me from being subject to him by mythological laws.

  These other women might not have been so lucky. Samantha had their husbands and boyfriends. And that was all she needed.

  For moment I felt dizzy, and I bowed my head, taking slow, deep breaths. Children. How many children would be parent-less because of this? Sitting at home wondering where their moms and dads had gone?

  “Oh, no. No,” I whispered.

  Work would have to wait. I needed to get to the police station and share this development. I doubted the police could stop the summoning. Even if the women were incapable of leaving, I didn’t know what their state of mind would be.

  *~*

  “Lieutenant Bailey is not here.”

  “He’s—what? He’s not?” I stared at the receptionist as if she had spoken in a different language.

  She raised her eyebrows and rolled the pen between her fingers. “Did you have an appointment with him?”

  “No, but—are you sure?” It was a legitimate question. She’d been mistaken before.

  She cleared her throat, a sure sign she was losing her patience with me. “He’s off for the next two days.”

  Somehow it had never occurred to me that Lieutenant Bailey wasn’t always at work. He was just a police officer. Right?

  Turned out he actually had another life, and today he was living it.

  “Would you like to talk to his partner?”

  I didn’t even know he had a partner. Was it possible the partner knew about me? I needed to talk to someone, and urgently. “Yes. If he’s available.”

  She sat me in a chair in her office, and I waited until she returned. A man I’d often seen speaking with Lieutenant Bailey stepped in. He was portlier, and the crinkle lines around his eyes were stronger, but he looked friendly enough.

  “Come with me, Ms. Lockwood,” he said.

  I followed him back to a cubicle beside Lieutenant Bailey’s. I folded my fingers together, my stomach doing similar calisthenics. Was this even a good idea?

  He gestured for me to take a seat, and I did. Then he sat in a chair across from me.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I’ve seen you here when I’ve stopped by.”

  “I was there that night. You know . . .” He moved his hand across his throat.

  “Oh!” I touched my neck, feeling the fabric of the scarf I had knotted there. I always wore one these days to hide my scar. “I’m sorry, I didn’t remember.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. But we’re partners. Where he goes, I go too.”

  I swallowed hard, remembering again how close I had come to dying that night when the serial killer slit my throat. “Thank you,” I said, somewhat sheepishly. Here I had been half prepared not to like the guy.

  He settled back in his seat, hooking a thumb through the suspenders over his shirt. “How can I help you?”

  I hesitated, still playing with the knot in my scarf. “How much has Lieutenant Bailey told you about me?”

  His eyes narrowed, his lips pressing together. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I just wasn’t sure how much he’s told you about my lingering trauma,” I said, going out on a limb. Lieutenant Bailey would have had to come up with some excuse for my constant reappearance.

  He tilted his head, a hint of curiosity in his eyes. “It’s normal to take months to recover after an ordeal like yours. And it’s not unheard of for the victim to feel an attachment to their rescuer.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes. So Lieutenant Bailey had made it out like I had some kind of hero-worship thing going on. Fine. I could work with that. “It’s just every time I start to feel scared, I remember he’s here, that I can trust the police.”

  “Of course. We’re here to serve.”

  I kept going. “And I really just needed to talk to him today, just to get that reassurance.” Oh, how pathetic I sounded. Did they all think this? Did the whole police force think I came in here for comfort? I ground my teeth together. “Could you just let him know I came by?”

  “Sure. But hopefully you feel a little bit better knowing he’s not the only one protecting New Jersey.”

  I forced a smile, not wanting him to feel slighted by my obvious preference for Lieutenant Bailey. “I do feel better.” I stood up, shouldering my purse and choking back the bitter taste in my throat. “Thank you.”

  I managed to keep the scowl off my face until I was safely out the doors of the police department. Poor helpless victim indeed. I yanked out my phone and scrolled through my contacts until I found Lieutenant Bailey’s number. I wouldn’t be waiting for his partner to let him know I came by.

  He answered on the second ring. “Ms. Lockwood.” His voice held that same note of caution as his partner’s had. “How can I help you?”

  “I know why people are still disappearing,” I said, almost tripping over my words in my hurry to get them out. “I know who’s going to be next.”

  “You have a name?” He sounded decidedly more interested.

  “Not exactly. But I know who it’s going to be. Or at least, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Can you meet me at the station? I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  I growled under my breath. I had just left the station. But I wanted to be accommodating, and this was important. “I’ll be there.”

  I seated myself down on a bench in front of the police department. I didn’t want to go back in and feel the scrutiny of the receptionist and Lieutenant Bailey’s partner. They would wonder what I could possibly have to say to Lieutenant Bailey that I couldn’t say to them.

  So I waited.

  A patrol car rolled in nearly half an hour later, and Lieutenant Bailey climbed out. He joined me on the bench and pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket. He looked different dressed in jeans instead of his uniform. I noticed he still had a shirt with a pocket on it, though. Kind of like me, always looking for a place to stock notepads and pens.

  A pen was in his hands now also, and he looked at me, fingers visibly twitching. “What do you know?”

  He didn’t ask me how I knew, probably because he’d rather not find out.

  “The people who disappeared yesterday are all related to the people who vanished last week. And they’re all women.”

  His brow furrowed together, pen halting, and he even lifted his eyes from the paper. “What?”

  I exhaled and tried to spell it out for him. “The women that were left behind by their spouses, boyfriends, significant others, those are the ones vanishing now. They’re going to join the men. They don’t need a special poem.”

  He looked down again, scribbling frantically over his notepad. “Are you sure?”

  I shrugged. “Check for yourself.”

  He looked at me again, his gray eyes somber. “How can we stop this? Who’s next? Husbands? Children? Cousins, friends?”

  While I suspected the answer was no, I couldn’t say for sure. “I don’t know.” I leaned closer, pressing my fingertips against his knuckles. “I need Trey Clark. And not for just an hour.” I said it as clearly and emphatically as I could, hoping when Trey disappeared from the hospital, Lieutenant Bailey would forgive me.

  “The judge has granted me an interview with him next week on Tuesday. Three o’clock. But it will be in an interrogation room under surveillance. We’ll have to conduct the interview there.”

  “What good is that?” I said, my anger getting the best of me. “I need him free.”

  Lieutenant Bailey’s gaze remained steady on me. “They won’t let him go.”

  Simmer down, I told myself. I met his gaze coolly. “Tuesday at three o’clock?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll be there.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I went straight to Meredith’s house after I ended my conversation with Lieutenant Bailey. I told her everything he’d said.

  “So what are we going to do?” she ask
ed from where she sat at her computer desk chair, watching me pace the room like a caged lion.

  I lifted my arms. “We tried to do this the legal way. I did what I could to get him free. Now I’ll just have to break him out.”

  “The police will know it was you,” she said, her eyes trailing me.

  “No kidding!” I snapped, the rage boiling again. Criminy. “They didn’t leave me any choice. Aaron—”

  I didn’t say it. Aaron had saved me, and now it was my turn to save him.

  “Okay. How do we do this? We can’t exactly take him out from under Lieutenant Bailey’s nose.”

  “No. I think he might even expect me to try. He’ll have his guard up. We have to do it before he brings Trey to the station. He’s expecting me to be there Tuesday for the interview. He won’t expect me to take Trey before that.”

  Meredith nodded. “And how are we going to kidnap him?”

  I gave her a tight smile. “Why, my dear Ragana, I’m surprised you even have to ask. You, the one gifted with the powers of persuasion.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You want me to manipulate their minds?”

  I nodded, my heart giving a nervous little jump. I wasn’t asking too much, was I?

  She returned my smile. “Looks like I better write some poetry.”

  Meredith and I spent the next hour plotting what we would do after we got Trey out of the mental hospital. We had no place to hide him, and Lieutenant Bailey was very likely to come knocking on my bedroom door as soon as Trey disappeared. While I hadn’t been able to convince the lieutenant that he needed to do everything in his power to free Trey, I was certain I had convinced him of my desperation to get Trey free.

  And when he came to my house and discovered I was gone, he would have no doubt. But by then it would be too late.

  “Are we doing the right thing?” Meredith asked, looking uneasy.

  “I have no idea,” I said, some of my frustration leaking into my voice. “All I have to go on is Laima’s declaration that Beth and I could save Aaron and all of those people with you and Trey helping us. My only power is to look people in the eye and see how they’re going to die. Not very helpful.”