Solstice Survivors_Book 1_Superhero Syndrome

by Caryn Larrinaga

  “Wait here,” Reed told me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Inside.” He inclined his head to one side, and the tall fox ears that sat atop his mask pointed to the house. “I need to grab a few things.”

  “And you don’t want me to come with you?”

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  Twisting around, I eyed the building. The knowledge that Bethany wasn’t inside—cutting fashion ideas or recipes out of lifestyle magazines—made the place seem cold and uninviting. And who knew if the police or that same thoughtful neighbor had cleaned up the chaos in the living room and the kitchen. Or if anyone had cleaned up the red smear on the countertop.

  I turned my back on the empty house. “I’ll wait here.”

  Reed nodded and disappeared behind me. I stood in the chilly yard, letting the scents of salt and fish from the harbor wash over me, and watched Bear bound around the dormant lawn chasing errant leaves that had escaped Bethany’s rake. Smiling, I pictured her working industriously in the yard, planting annuals and turning her flower bed into a note-perfect recreation of something out of Better Homes and Gardens. She was always happiest when she was making something.

  I’m going to talk her into that photography class when I get her back, I decided. She had an artistic eye; she could make a living with it.

  A few minutes later, Reed appeared back at my side.

  “Did you get what you needed?” I asked.

  In answer, he held up a crumpled black and green bowling shirt. He held it up to my face, and I leaned away from it. I didn’t want Bruce’s dirty laundry anywhere near my nose.

  Reed cracked a smile. “Good instincts. This thing is pungent, which is just what we need.”

  He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply. Bear stopped trying to dig up a power line and darted over, sitting at Reed’s feet in a perfect stance of attention. Reed took up the dog’s leash and let him sniff the shirt.

  “Get the scent, Bear,” he muttered. “Find your master.”

  Bear’s ears stood up straight, and he jerked his head toward the woods.

  “Smell him?” Reed whispered.

  The dog barked a single shrill yip that seemed incongruous with his size and coloring.

  “Then take me to him.”

  With another bark, Bear took off running. If Reed was anything less than inhumanly fast, he wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the dog. As it was, the two of them kept an equal pace, leaving me to huff and puff behind them.

  Bear led us down the slope, into the dense stand of trees lining the back of the housing development. Before long, the two of them pulled out of my line of sight, and I had to track them by the noise they made as they crashed through the trees.

  A grim thought formed at the back of my mind as I ran. What could Bruce be doing in the woods after dark, two days after he and Bethany disappeared? I’d never heard of them going camping, and the woods weren’t big enough to get lost in. If he was back here, would Bethany be with him?

  The worst question of all was one I didn’t want to think—I hated to think—but despite my efforts to fight it off, it came anyway.

  If they’re back here, will they even be alive?

  The thought set off a cascade of others. Maybe Bruce hadn’t snatched Bethany. Maybe the destruction in their house wasn’t the result of them fighting. Maybe someone or something had come into their house and dragged them out. I’d never heard of bears or cougars coming into people’s homes around here before, but when the weather got strange, anything could happen.

  The sounds of Bear and Reed running through the woods came to an abrupt stop.

  “Reed?” I called.

  Silence.

  “Bear?”

  From my left, Reed appeared from between the trees and held a single finger up to his lips. “Shhhh,” he whispered. “We found something.”

  My heart stopped. “What is it?”

  He beckoned for me to follow him and led me a little ways farther down the hill to a tiny clearing in the pines. I looked around in earnest, but didn’t see anything except dead leaves and patchy weeds on the ground.

  “What am I supposed to be looking at?” I hissed.

  “Here.”

  Reed crept forward and knelt down in the middle of the clearing. He swept the ground with one hand, revealing a dark sheet of metal. A few sweeps later, I could see a handle and a pair of rusty hinges.

  A door was set into the ground. Reed raised his eyebrows at me, and I realized he was silently asking if I was ready to see what was inside. I clenched my fists into tight balls at my sides and took a deep breath. If Bear found this place, Bruce must be inside. And if he was able to get into an underground shelter, he hadn’t been mauled to death by some animal.

  That meant my initial instincts about this whole thing had been right. Bruce had taken Bethany, and she was under my feet right now, being held in that shelter against her will.

  I nodded, and Reed pulled open the door.

  At the bottom of the wooden stairs that led down from the clearing, a heavy metal door blocked our way. Reed rested his ear on it for a few minutes as Bear panted quietly beside him. Then he took two steps back and kicked the door right above the handle, making it burst open.

  Through the open doorway, I could see a cramped, low-ceilinged room. Against one wall, stacks of gray plastic tubs lined the concrete slab. Against the other, a long narrow cot covered with tattered green canvas barely hovered above the floor. The place stunk of human waste, and even in the dim light of the camping lantern that hung from the ceiling, it didn’t take long to see why. A five-gallon bucket that had been fitted with a toilet seat sat in one corner of the room. It had been used. A lot.

  In the opposite corner, Bruce stood with his back against the wall and his hands above his head, squinting into the darkness that still shrouded Reed and me.

  He was alone. The low, wide plastic tubs in the bomb shelter weren’t large enough to hide Bethany. Wherever she was, it wasn’t here.

  “Look, Ian, I was about to come see you.” Bruce lowered one hand to cover a cough then raised it again. “I swear.”

  He doesn’t know it’s me, I realized.

  I wondered briefly how I could use that to my advantage. But before I could come up with anything, Bear spoiled the moment by bursting through door and running toward Bruce.

  “Bear!” Bruce gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  At first, I thought Bear meant to jump onto Bruce’s chest and lick him, the way he had when he’d first met Reed in the hallway outside my apartment. But as the dog leapt through the air, he led out a low growl that grew into a shrill bark. Bear knocked Bruce backward, slamming the man’s head into the cinderblock wall, and began biting and tearing at his face.

  I stood, awestruck, in the doorway. Part of me was terrified, and the old injury in my thigh wanted to throb and complain and make me cower in fear of the big, bad dog.

  But the louder part of me was envious. Bear was doing exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to tear into Bruce. I wanted to beat some answers out of him. That louder part took me over, and a fraction of a second later I was crossing the small concrete room, brushing a finger against the camping lantern on the low ceiling and preparing to turn everything from my fingertips to my elbows into metal.

  A deafening whistle split the air, stopping me before I could even pull back my arm for that first delicious punch. Ahead of me, Bear pushed off Bruce’s chest and padded back to my side, where he struck up a defensive stance and snarled at the heap of a man he’d left in the corner.

  “Ugh!” Bruce squinted up into the light again as blood poured down his face. “Bear, what the hell?”

  “He’s not your dog anymore,” Reed said from the doorway. “He answers to us now. An animal like you doesn’t deserve Bear’s loyalty.”

  “Who is that? Who’s there?” Bruce lifted a hand to block out the lantern’s light. When his eyes met mine, they widen
ed. “Tess?”

  For the first time since the day Bethany had brought him home, he said my name with no trace of saccharine coating, no flirtatious undertone, no cackling laugh. I knew it was likely fear of his former dog that made his voice shake, but it brought a smile to my face nonetheless.

  Reed took a position on my other side then, stooping so he could fit inside the low room. Bruce’s eyes bugged out of his face.

  “What the hell is this?” He shrank away from us, deeper into his corner. “You know The Fox?”

  I didn’t answer. Reed was tense beside me, poised like a fox about to leap after its prey, and I could tell he was about to take control of the situation. In that instant, a surge of envy shot through me, and I realized how much I hated the thought of standing here and watching Reed beat some answers out of Bruce.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have the stomach for it.

  I just wanted to be more than a spectator.

  I wanted to be the hammer that made Bruce talk. I owed him that much, for the bruise on Bethany’s cheek on my first day back in town. For the black eye on my sixteenth birthday. For all the other things he’d done that Bethany had successfully hidden from me.

  Before Reed could step forward, I flung my arm out in front of his chest and pushed him backward. He looked down at me, eyebrows raised, and I mouthed a question at him.

  “Can I?” I silently asked.

  He nodded, relaxing his posture and taking a step back. I took a deep breath and tried to calm my features, then stepped directly in front of my brother-in-law. Bruce was bleeding from a large gash on his cheek, and one sleeve of his shirt had been torn to shreds.

  “Hello, Bruce,” I said in a quiet voice.

  “Tess?” Bruce struggled to his feet and took a step toward me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Stay where you are,” I barked. I didn’t want him getting anywhere near me. He stunk of sweat and feces, and I didn’t trust myself not to tear his jaw clean off his face if he got within an arm’s reach of me. As it was, I ached to pull on the memory of touching the metal lantern and let my fists do the talking. “Where is she?”

  “Where is… who?” He seemed genuinely confused.

  I was dumbstruck for an entire second. Could he really not know the only reason I would ever come looking for him? I sputtered for a second to get my mouth going again. “My si—, your w—, Where is Bethany?”

  Bruce’s eyes widened. “You mean she’s not with you?”

  “With me? Why would she be with me?”

  All color drained out of Bruce’s normally ruddy face, and the busted veins on his nose contrasted sharply with his sudden pallor. He stumbled forward, pushing past me and sinking down onto the low cot to cover his bleeding face with his hands.

  “No,” he murmured against his palms. And then it seemed that was all he was capable of saying. “No, no, no, no!”

  Reed and I exchanged glances. This wasn’t how I’d thought this would go.

  I tried again. “Bruce, where is Bethany?”

  His voice was barely audible and cracked heavily. “She’s supposed to be staying with you. I knew they were coming. I told her to go. She didn’t want to leave me, but I knew…” He trailed off, raking his hands through his wavy hair.

  “Who was coming?” I demanded. “Bruce, what happened?”

  “I couldn’t tell her why she needed to leave, I just told her she had to go. She was crying, begging me to stay. And then we were fighting. I… I was throwing things, you know, just little stuff, trying to make my point.” He fingered a cut on his forehead. “Got myself pretty good with a piece of glass. I bled all over the countertop.”

  The breath I was holding let out a fraction of a percent. So it hadn’t been Bethany’s blood. It was a small relief, but I still felt miles away from finding her. I needed Bruce to get to the point.

  “And she left?” I prodded.

  He gulped. “Eventually. She took my car—said she was driving to your place—and I was cleaning up the living room when I saw the van pull up. A black van.”

  He stared at me like I was supposed to know what that meant.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My employers. My real ones. I lied to you, okay? I didn’t get a promotion. I haven’t worked for Belladonna in years.”

  I knew that already but didn’t bother to interrupt him. He was finally talking, but still not fast enough, and I was already struggling not to reach down his throat and yank the words out myself. So I simply stared at him, unblinking, and willed him to go on.

  He complied. “Ian and Jared Nyx.”

  The muscles in my neck throbbed involuntarily where they’d been squeezed in the alley. What were the chances it was the same Ian? Weyland wasn’t a big enough town for coincidences. It had to be the same one.

  “Where did you meet them? At Belladonna?”

  Bruce nodded. “Yeah. They own it.”

  “And what do you do for them?”

  “I run security. For their… side business.”

  “Cut the crap, Bruce,” I said. “Tell me exactly what you do for them.”

  “I make sure the right cops get their payments. So they don’t sniff around too much, you know? And I look after some of their call girls. The ones they keep in town, anyway. They’ve got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, none of them legal. Gambling. Drugs. People call them the Nightshades.”

  A low growl came from my left. Reed was standing beside me, arms crossed over his chest, digging his fingers into his biceps. I’d been so intent on Bruce’s story that I’d forgotten he was there.

  “So.” The light from the lantern burned in Reed’s overlarge pupils. “Those are their real names. Jared and Ian Nyx.”

  “You’ve heard of them?” I asked. “The Nightshades?”

  He gave a single, terse nod. “It’s a name I keep running into, but that’s all I had—just the alias. I didn’t know who was behind it. I just knew that name was connected to all the recent kidnappings.”

  What little color that remained in Bruce’s face drained away. “You know about those?”

  In two short steps, Reed crossed the room and grabbed Bruce’s thinning hair, yanking the other man’s head back with one hand and grabbing him by the throat with the other. Bruce cried out—a short, sharp choking sound—as he was hoisted up off the cot.

  “Yes,” Reed hissed into Bruce’s face. “I know about it. I’ve known for weeks, and I’ve spent every moment trying to track down the monsters who are ripping those girls away from their families, the scum who are sentencing those girls to live in Hell for the rest of their now-shortened lives.”

  His gloved fingers tightened around Bruce’s neck. Bruce gasped for air, and his legs kicked uselessly beneath him.

  “How long have you known, Bruce? Three years? Is that how long you’ve been running security for the Nightshades?”

  Bruce clawed at Reed as his face slowly started to turn blue.

  “Stop!” I tugged down on Reed’s arm, trying and failing to loosen his grip. “You’ll kill him!”

  “It’s no less than he deserves,” Reed snarled.

  “My sister! If you kill him, we might never find her!”

  His lip curled backward, but he released Bruce back down onto the cot. “Fine. He’s all yours.”

  I waited for a few minutes while Bruce wheezed and coughed into a thin, filthy pillow. When he seemed to have gained most of his breath back, I finally spoke.

  “You thought she was with me. Well, she isn’t. So do you think they have her? Would they have taken her?”

  “Maybe.” He stared down at the floor. “They’d consider her collateral. Against my gambling debts.”

  I ground my teeth together. Collateral? How could he sit there and talk about his wife like that, like she was just a thing?

  As I tried to decide how long I might go to prison for murdering the sack of crap who sat in front of me, Reed roamed around the cramped space, checking in the plastic totes
and unscrewing the top of a large water bottle. After picking up a long metal bar and twirling it in one hand, he turned back to Bruce.

  “You’ve got plenty of food and water to last you at least a week,” he said. “I’m leaving you down here until I’ve taken care of the Nightshades.”

  “W-what?” Bruce spluttered. “You’re going after them?”

  “Do you expect me to leave those women in their hands? I’m not a coward.” Reed spat out the last word like it had a foul taste.

  “You can’t leave me down here!” Bruce jumped off the cot and clutched at my arm. “Tess, please!”

  “It’s better than you deserve.” I yanked my sleeve out of his grip, and Reed, Bear, and I walked out of the room.

  “They’ll kill you!” he screamed after us. “You’re leaving me to die!”

  Without responding, I closed the heavy door on Bruce behind us. We climbed the wooden stairs back up to the clearing, and Reed slid the metal bar through a pair of handles on the trapdoor set into the ground. Bruce was locked in his hideaway.

  “What if he’s right?” I asked. “If they kill us, what’ll happen to Bruce?”

  Reed shrugged. “He’ll share our fate, I guess. Does that bother you?”

  I saw Bethany’s bruised face in my mind’s eye and thought about the women Bruce had let the Nightshade Brothers steal from the alleys of the Trident and the other slums over the years.

  “Not one bit,” I said.

  Reed was quiet on the drive back to Bilgewater. He’d briefly sketched out his plan to me on the walk back through the woods, but now he sat in silence and concentrated on the road. The sun was rising over the harbor, turning the ocean a brilliant shade of orange. Bear sat in the back of the truck, his tongue lolling happily out of his mouth as he watched us.

  “Are you sure this is such a good idea?” I asked him. “Won’t there be like, I don’t know, guys with machine guns? Guard dogs? Dangerous stuff?”