Michael was not too far behind with his angry stare. He was particularly staring at Emily, firing hate missiles at her face. Emily became suddenly uncomfortable.
“What?” Rina spat. There was no mistaking they weren’t welcome.
Nevertheless, Joanna spoke with an infectious cheeriness. “Do you guys know Emily is hosting a party at her house tonight?”
“So?” Rina spat again. This time her glare shifted to Emily, who almost dodged behind Joanna.
“So, you’re both invited!” Joanna held out her hands and wiggled them as she said it; all that was left was for her to say ‘Ta-da!’
Rina stared at Joanna like she was crazy.
“No?” Joanna puffed out her bottom lip.
“Yes,” Michael said. He had a vengeful look on his face, and that look was directed at Joanna. There was even the hint of a smile on the side of his lips.
Emily swallowed hard. “I mean, if you would rather do something else, you don’t have to—”
“Nonsense!” Joanna cut her off. “Michael, we will see you by nine at Emily’s place. You know where it is, right?”
Michael gave Emily a knowing smile. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
“This makes you very uncomfortable, doesn’t it?” This was from Rina, and it was directed at Emily.
Emily didn’t reply. But then again, she didn’t need to. Her silence was answer enough for Rina.
“Then I’m in,” Rina said with an evil-looking smirk. “Whatever makes you uncomfortable.”
Joanna looked confused. “Then see you by nine? You know where her house is?”
“No. Michael will pick me up.” Rina walked away without another word, leaving Michael standing there looking rather surprised.
“Fantastic,” Emily grumbled. Just shoot me, already.
15
Emily’s life was . . . complicated. Yes, that was an apt description. First, she was having discussions with The Owl in her mind. Second, she found out The Owl was not just a thing within her, but a separate personality with feelings—and Emily was touchy about other people’s feelings.
Next, she received a message from someone she didn’t know who appeared to know she’s a shifter. Her life was in jeopardy, and she couldn’t seem to get it under control. Every day, from the moment she woke up in the morning, she felt like her life consisted of one revelation after another. Unbelievable revelations.
Especially today . . .
First, Mr. Winter somehow hijacked the school’s curriculum to check her out—once more showing just how powerful the chief of the vigilante task force was. Next, she learned that Mr. Winter had her friends spy on her, and that included Jamie. But perhaps, the bone-chilling part was the fact that Joanna was the one responsible for the operation to spy on her in the first place. Emily understood it had to be done. However, it didn’t negate the betrayal Emily felt.
Next, she learned that Michael believed a partial truth: that there was an Owl living in her home. Emily suspected the only reason he believed there was just an Owl living in her house, and not that Emily was The Owl, was because she had been cleared.
I guess I have Joanna to thank for that one.
In one day, she had come close to dying. Multiple times. She’d almost transformed when Mr. Winter had informed her of Michael’s beliefs. Then Rina had come within a hair’s breadth of uncovering her secret.
Emily was a shifter. She was The Owl. It was going to make a great headline. It was the sort of story to get recognized nationwide. Even though Rina was someone who advocated against the vigilante task force, Emily doubted she would exercise discretion if she somehow discovered Emily’s secret.
All in all, Emily had a stressful day, and it was about to get even more so. The two people who had an inkling there was something wrong with her—the two particular people she wanted to stay as far away from as possible—were the exact same people Joanna had just personally invited into Emily’s home.
Open season—that was what it was. Michael would definitely snoop around her house. Maybe he would find something. Maybe she would finally be ousted.
As Emily drove to the mall, her heart pounded away in her chest. Joanna was obliviously going on about a list of things to buy, but Emily paid her little attention. She was absorbed in how she was going to get herself out of the mess she was in.
All she wanted to do was make it through the night. There was still the unsolved problem of the mystery message from the previous night as well. The Owl was of the opinion that by hosting the party, she was going to force the exposure of whoever had sent the message.
Was The Owl correct? Would the culprit somehow reveal him- or herself?
What bugged her most was that she knew nothing of this person’s intentions. Would they go to the vigilantes? What was the purpose of getting her all worked up?
They arrived at the mall and looked for a space in the busy parking lot. Joanna had finished her list and was now going on and on about school gossip. She said something about some senior students coming for the party, which should have excited Emily, but she couldn’t give a damn about senior students attending her party. Not with everything else going on.
“Emily.”
Joanna’s voice startled her. She turned to look at her friend. Joanna’s brow was pinched in concern. She pointed at the open parking space that had just been vacated by a green pickup truck.
Emily was idling right in front of the parking space, lost in thought.
“Go in, or we’ll lose that one,” Joanna said calmly.
Emily nodded and guided the car into the space. They had gotten a prime spot very close to the door of the large mall.
“Rockstar parking!” Joanna exclaimed with a smile.
New Haven was unlike any other town in Texas. It had a population that numbered in the tens of thousands. So, naturally, it had a large-scale mall and some of the social amenities one doesn’t traditionally find in most towns. It also had a community college where Emily sometimes went to draw inspiration for her future educational pursuit for Stanford.
“You’ve been distracted since we left the school,” Joanna observed with a guarded frown. “Why?”
Emily grunted, trying to shake away the question. The last thing she needed now was for Joanna to get a whiff of her troubles. If Joanna did, Emily was not sure she could escape telling her best friend everything.
“You’re not going to tell me?” whined Joanna. There was a little bit of hurt in her voice as she looked away.
“It’s nothing,” Emily brushed it off. “I’m just a bit concerned, that’s all. I’ve never really had a party in my house before. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve heard horror stories.” Emily shrugged. That wasn’t really a lie. She was scared about the party and about having so many people over, but it was rooted in the fact that she was someone’s target, and she didn’t know whose.
“It’ll be okay. Come on, let’s go shopping,” Joanna pushed.
Emily was about to protest, not knowing what Joanna had planned. Joanna was not having any of it. She ignored Emily and hopped out of the car with a spring in her step. She came over to Emily’s side of the car, opened the door, and stared at her.
Emily felt forced to get out. “Okaaaay, I’m coming.”
When the two were finally standing eye-level with each other, Joanna embraced her. They were locked in that position for a full minute, which Emily found suffocatingly awkward.
When Joanna was satisfied, she pulled back. “Look, I’ll be there with you, okay?” Joanna squeezed Emily’s shoulders. “You won’t be doing this alone. I’ll be there to make sure everyone stays in line.”
“What if they don’t?” Emily asked. She had seen Joanna’s harsh side. Joanna was a doer. She was a strong woman who could get things done. She could also be very intimidating, sometimes even to guys. And it didn’t hurt to be the daughter of a billionaire.
“We can always kick their asses out of the house,” Joanna replied.
“An
d if they resist?”
Joanna smiled. “That’s when it gets fun. We’ll call the cops. Or I could press my panic button and have a SWAT team descend on the house within ten minutes.”
Joanna let go of Emily’s shoulders and sighed. “Look, Emily, it’s no fun being all tensed up about this. You’ve got to enjoy this, Girl. You’re throwing a party. Live a little. Enjoy yourself. This party is going to be the most talked about party of the entire school year.”
Emily didn’t like the sound of that. She wondered what Joanna had planned. Joanna was not the kind of person to live vicariously through others. But in Emily’s case, she sometimes did. Just like now. It was forbidden for her to have a party in her father’s house. So what does she do? She throws a party in the guise of Emily throwing the party.
“Look, you can stay here while I go buy all the things we need,” Joanna suggested. “That is if you’re not feeling up to it.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
Emily smiled slightly. “I’ll take you up on that.”
Joanna looked a bit disappointed that Emily had opted to stay behind. She only nodded and walked away. Emily hopped back into the car and waited.
It took Joanna a good hour to finish shopping. It would have been a boring wait if Emily didn’t have a thousand and one things bugging her mind. The Owl was surprisingly quiet throughout the whole hour, and Emily was glad for it.
Regardless of how deeply she pondered, she just couldn’t figure out who this mystery-message-sender was. She felt like she was trapped in a mental cage.
Maybe this was the sender’s intention all along. Maybe it was meant to make her hysterical. Maybe it was meant to throw her off the scent.
Joanna returned to the vehicle with several carts and several mall workers aiding her. Joanna opened the trunk from the driver’s seat. It took another twenty minutes to arrange everything she’d bought. When they were done, she gave the workers a hundred dollars each before joining her in the car.
“That was a lot,” Emily said.
Joanna shrugged and pulled her seat belt over her. “Now, let’s go throw the party of the year!”
16
The ride to Emily’s house was mostly silent. Joanna didn’t say a word. Emily suspected it was probably because she had agreed to stay behind while Joanna did all the shopping. Although this was Emily’s cue to break the ice between them and get Joanna talking, she allowed the silence to linger. If anything, she appreciated the quietude. She decided to apologize to Joanna properly later in the evening. They were, after all, going to be spending all evening alone together before their guests arrived. The party was scheduled to start by nine and last until who knew when.
Emily pulled onto her street. The moment she got within a hundred yards of her house, she knew something was off. Even before The Owl or Joanna spoke.
Something’s wrong, The Owl proclaimed.
“Emily, is that your house?” Joanna was suddenly alert and leaning forward. She squinted against the glare of the setting sun against the windshield.
Emily didn’t need to squint. One of the perks of being a shifter was that some of The Owl’s abilities translated to her human form. So her eyesight was better than most, especially at night, since owls had great nocturnal vision.
Emily’s mouth fell agape as she saw what had been done to her house. The whole building had been toilet-papered. The windows appeared to be shattered. Several portions of the roof had been vandalized. The walls of the house were spray-painted.
Emily’s heart began to pump a hundred beats a second—or so it felt—as she approached her damaged home. There were a few people hovering about the house, but they all looked dazed. Their expressions held no alarm; their eyes just looked glazed over. (Yeah, Emily could see that far.)
The door was slightly ajar and appeared to have been yanked off its hinges. The damage seemed to proceed into the house itself.
“Oh, my gosh,” Joanna said as Emily pulled into the driveway. The driveway and the small lawn surrounding the one-story building had been toilet-papered as well. Whoever had done this had taken his or her sweet time. They had left no portion of the building untouched.
“Who would do this?” Joanna’s voice was just above a whisper.
Emily parked in the driveway and shut down the engine. She watched as the few people hovering about started to walk away when they noticed her. She thought maybe they would assume it was some sort of high school prank. Maybe it was her rival at school or a cheerleader in the squad who wanted to take over as head cheerleader. Totally reasonable, right?
But this was neither of those things. Emily already had a dreadful idea of what or who might have caused this. She freed herself from her seat belt. That caught Joanna’s attention, who then grabbed Emily before she could reach for the door handle.
“You can’t go in there!” Joanna shrieked, terror in her eyes. “They might still be here.”
“Joanna, my father was in the house when I left,” Emily said a bit frantically. “I need to know he’s still alive.” Her voice caught in her throat.
“But who would do this?” Joanna asked again.
“I don’t know.”
You and I know that’s a lie, The Owl intervened.
Emily exited the car but hovered in the driveway still, looking around. The evening air was cold and chilly. The sun was already descending in the western horizon where its trail was hidden behind thick blankets of clouds. Emily’s first instinct was to listen carefully for any movement in the house.
She had no intention of going into the house and being captured by whatever psychopath had vandalized it. As she listened, she was horridly fascinated by the fact the cops were not there.
No one had called the cops. Seriously? What. The. Hell. Everyone really must have thought it was just a prank.
As Emily stood there listening for any sign of activity inside, Joanna came out of the car to join her, rubbing her palms together to ward off the cold; she was smart enough not to say anything.
After listening for one full minute, Emily heard only silence from within. “I don’t hear anything, do you?” she asked Joanna.
“What?” Joanna looked genuinely confused—she’d been distracted by keeping warm.
Emily gave her one look-over and shook her head mildly. “Never mind.” She proceeded to leave Joanna and go around the back of the house.
Portions of the lawn had been torched to ash. Burn marks decorated the side of the house. As Emily continued down the side of the building to the back, her dread increased. Not hearing anything from the house meant two things: It meant the attacker was not in the house. It also meant her dad was not in the house.
Emily bit back a sob; she remained steely. This was not the time to be girly or chicken out. They had taken her mother. They would not take her father.
She came to the back of the house and noticed the back door had been totally unhooked from its hinges and dropped on the back lawn. A portion of the picket fence had been destroyed.
Behind the fence was a stretch of thick woods. The forest scape was large and spanned several hundreds of yards in length. Aside from a couple houses within, the woods were generally sparse with human settlement.
Whoever vandalized her house could have come from the forest and vanished back into it without a trace.
“We should call the police,” Joanna said suddenly from behind Emily.
Emily jumped a little from the close proximity of Joanna’s voice. “Don’t!” she insisted with a sharp tone.
Joanna gave her a curious look which Emily ignored. She had no time to cater to Joanna’s needs.
Carefully, the girls passed through the open back door into the main corridor. Inside, the house smelled of gas. There was also the slight sound of pressurized air. Emily’s thoughts immediately went to the gas line into the house. It was left open. She fought the urge to turn and run out.
“You smell that?” asked Joanna.
“Yeah
, it’s gas.” Emily covered her face with her hand. “Try not to make any sudden moves or cause a spark. We may never live to speak of this harrowing tale.”
Joanna rolled her eyes. “You watch too many Hallmark Classics.”
Emily rolled her eyes right back. Although Joanna wasn’t wrong.
They didn’t bother checking the living room because they could see no sign of her dad from the corridor. She checked the kitchen instead. All the breakables had been shattered on the ground. The counter was cracked into two. That would have required great brute force.
Lots of the appliances had been ripped in half while the rest were nowhere to be found.
Emily found the gas main and saw that the tap had been destroyed. She grabbed a napkin from the top shelf and tied it around the exposed pipe. It took her quite some time to tie the napkin properly. When she finished, she proceeded to the rooms on the ground floor.
The beds were shredded and the sheets torn. She met the same situation upstairs. Dad’s room was the worst. In fact, there seemed to have been a fire there because the sheets were burned along with a few of Dad’s shoes.
The fire had to have been controlled not to have triggered the alarm system.
Emily, in some ways, was still in a state of shock, and that’s why she kept going. Observing everything she saw as though detached from her body. Just an external observer.
All the while Joanna remained by her side, silent. She took pictures here and there where necessary. When Emily asked why, Joanna told her it was for evidence. They might need to prove that this was actually the work of nefarious entities. In such case, the pictures would come in handy.
Emily nodded and swallowed hard. She had approached her own room.
“That’s weird . . . ,” Joanna said as she stepped inside Emily’s bedroom alongside her.
Hmmmm, The Owl muttered.
Emily’s room was perfectly arranged. Even more than when she had left it. She was certain she hadn’t made her bed. She never did on school days. But there it was, made with fresh, clean sheets.
Adopted by The Owl: The Owl Shifter Chronicles Book One Page 8
