by E. M. Moore
“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 feel 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.
Chapter Twenty-Three
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 wa
s 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 smile 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?
Chapter Twenty-Four
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.
Peeking behind him, he shifted until he was in front of me. “What the hell was that earlier at the sorority house?”
I glanced up at him, still embarrassed he’d caught me looking at him. “What the hell was what?”
“You staring daggers at Kaitlyn and I. Pissed that not all four of us want to jump into bed with you, is that it?”
“Whoa,” I said, anger bubbling up inside me. “Do whatever the hell you want. I don’t care.”
“Seemed like you did. You acted like a possessive girlfriend. If I haven’t been clear enough already, I don’t want any part of whatever you’ve got going on.”
His words knocked the wind right out of me. Not only was he right, I had been acting like a possessive girlfriend and had the smooth tops of my teeth to prove it, but he really hadn’t been giving me any vibes other than he didn’t want anything to do with me. That didn’t mean it didn’t suck to hear. “Gotcha,” I said, swallowing hard.
He glared at me longer, and the more he did, a scent reached my nose—cinnamon. Must’ve been him. It was the same aroma I smelled in his room back at the apartment that first night.
“Oh jeez,” a voice said from behind us. “Stand back before you both spontaneously combust. You two are so alike it baffles me why you hate each other.” Both Travis and I scoffed, but Randy just looked at us as if we’d just proved his point. “Can’t say that I mind.” Randy snaked his arm around me and squeezed my ass in the process. “Just one less I have to share with.”
Without a word, Travis threw the door open and left.
Unaffected Randy chuckled into my hair. “Don’t go toe-to-toe with him, babe.”
“I wasn’t trying to. He blindsided me.”
“C’mon,” he said, giving my ass a quick spank. “Let’s get to the car.”
He pinched me and I yelped, completely forgetting that I was supposed to make him pay for leaving me in the kitchen earlier. Apparently I wasn’t that upset about it anymore. Before getting on his bike and heading for the real Mandy’s house, he bent over and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. He was our communicator for the night. The one to spy the real Mandy while we tried to seek out the doppelgänger.
Liam and Gabe came out of the house shortly after. Good thing because the tension in the Jeep was palpable. With all of them there, though, it dispersed some of the pent-up feelings. Liam went over the plan for when we got there and we all nodded along. I could picture them doing this for years before I showed up. Sometimes I had to remember that I was the new member here, and that Travis had a connection with the one before me even though he didn’t end up being the greatest guy. I should cut him some slack, I supposed. Just the fact that I was thinking that after he’d given me the verbal lashing was saying something about the feelings that were growing inside me for him. Damnit.
The sorority house looked like a completely different house at night. College kids danced in the lawn with
red plastic cups. Empties and other various trash were strewn all over the yard. We sidestepped everything as best we could as we made it up the porch, past a couple who needed a bedroom and stat, and pulled up short next to a big guy in a dark suit. Interesting. Since when did sorority houses have security at parties?
Travis tried to step around him, but the guy held his hands out to stop him. He sighed. “We’re here to see Kaitlyn. She invited us.”
“Pick a door,” a gruff voice came. His lips moved under a thick, black mustache, but the sound echoed as if had come from an overhead speaker.
“Excuse me?”
“Pick a door.” The guy moved out of the way and instead of the one door we went through earlier, there were now two red doors.
The fuck?
We all took a cautious step back. “Anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?” Liam asked.
“It’s just some trick,” Gabe said.
“I think we should—”
“Fuck it.” Gabe lunged for a door.
I gasped in a breath as pictures flickered in and out of my mind. “Pick a door,” the voice rumbled. Gabe picked the one on the right, dropping through a pitch black hole and landing in a crouch inside a dungeon-like room. Dupre was there. He sat on a throne of black, the jewels encrusted inside bleeding oily black liquid. It oozed out all over the floor, creeping toward Gabe’s shoes. Gabe tried to move his feet, but they were cemented. Dupre’s ominous laughter echoed throughout the chamber. “You chose.”
I gasped, my eyes opening wider. “No!” I pushed forward, knocking Travis out of the way to grab Gabe. His foot teetered over the edge of the threshold. Nothing but blackness greeted us, and screams from the inside rose up. I pulled at Gabe with all my might and we fell to the floor in a heap. “The hell, Love?” he said, coughing. My elbow had slammed into his solar plexus on the way down.
