Feeding Frenzy (The Summoner Sisters Book 1) (11 page)

“Oh, yeah.  Loads.  Thanks for letting us reschedule.”

I let Lia handle most of the responses, which allows me to monitor the tone of the questions, making sure we don’t give too much away.  It starts off casually—he flatters us, which is point one against him in my book.  He was so cold to me yesterday.  The change in behavior makes me suspicious.  My suspicion only mounts as the topic turns to the events leading up to us finding the captives.

“So, what brought you to that part of town?”  The detective’s voice is neutral, but I see a hardness in his eyes that makes me think that this is a little more official than he wants us to think.

“We’re new here,” I jump into the conversation to announce to Lia that I am uneasy about his motives so far.  “Taking a little tour of some of the country’s oldest towns.  Lia is an artist—she likes capturing abandoned houses and stuff.”

Lia shoots me a brief look to acknowledge my suspicions and confirms what I’m saying.

“And how did you find them, again?”

“As I said before,” Lia says, “we were taking pictures and the basement door was unlocked.  I know we shouldn’t have, but we went in.”  She looks sheepish.

“When we got inside,” I add, “we heard what sounded like an upset girl.  So, we went to see what was up.”

“Without calling the police?”

Lia shrugs.  “We weren’t sure if it was just some homeless people camping out or something.  We didn’t want to bog down a car if nothing was wrong.”

“How about when the grenade went off?”

Shit.  We both freeze for a second.  “Grenade?” I ask, trying to convey confusion.

“Where were you when it went off?”

“Sorry, detective…we don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Lia, too, schools her face to ignorance.

“You didn’t hear any loud explosions?  Those cuts on you aren’t from breaking glass?” he asks us both, eyes stopping at each visible scratch.

“No explosion…”  I tell him.  “But yeah, there was glass.  Had a couple accidents getting everyone down to the car.”

“Right, when you both decided to carry five people yourselves and transport them.  Why not call an ambulance then?  Why split up?”

My heart begins pounding again.  He clearly doesn’t believe a word we’re saying.

“We’ve got some EMT training,” Lia offers apologetically.  “I guess that just took over.  Couldn’t fit all of us in the car, and Summer wanted to stay and watch over the guy that was too big for us to move.”

“In the room with the corpse.”  We both shudder a little.  At least this part we’ve prepared for.

“We had no idea.”  Lia’s voice falters with emotion.

“I can’t stop thinking about how I was sitting like, six feet away from a dead person and didn’t even know it,” I add in haunted tones.  “Poor kid.”

“Said you have EMT training?  The smell didn’t give it away?”  I neatly avoid the trick question.

“The whole place reeked.  I mean, how long had those kids been there?  My nose wasn’t really picking out specific terrible odors.  It was sort of generally assaulted.”

The detective’s smile is entirely gone, his manner distrustful, if not turning downright hostile.  Well, the feeling is mutual, buddy.

“Plus, we were really just hoping to get the kids safe,” I add innocently.

Lia knows this is a warning sign for my unhelpful-bad-girl act and looks over anxiously, imploring me silently not to bait the detective.  I take a deep breath.  Easy does, Summer.

The detective leans back in his chair, the sudden movement making us both wary.

“I can’t put my finger on it, ladies,” he confesses with a slight twang.  “Something’s bugging me about this.  The media calls you heroes.  The doctors say if those kids hadn’t been found right then, there surely would have been more casualties.  The bank that owns the house doesn’t even want to press charges against you for any damage to the property, which is maybe the first time in the history of Roanoke that the banks haven’t demanded blood or money any time something happens.  I can’t quite help but think maybe there’s a little more to the story than the one everyone’s pushing.”  He smiles sarcastically.  “But, that might just be my suspicious nature.  Too many years in the field, my wife tells me.”

He looks at us too closely, a predatory gleam in his eye.  “You know where we might find the other girl, or the people that were behind the abductions?”

“Real sorry,” I say.  “We were lucky, not clairvoyant.”

“I see.”  He smiles darkly at us again.  “Anything else you want to relay to me?”

“No, I’m sure you’ve been very thorough,” I say too sweetly.  Lia discreetly kicks me under the table.

“Uh-huh.  Well, thanks again for all your cooperation.”

“Oh…sure.”

He stands up and gestures for us to leave.  As I walk by, he grabs my left bicep.  I almost scream, but manage to keep from making more than a small “huff” that could be written off as surprise.

“But next time you just so happen to be on scene for something like that?  Call it in.  Heroes without the proper training sometimes end up in tragedies.  I wouldn’t want anything like that happening to two nice girls like you.”

He stares directly into my eyes as he says it.  I nod tightly, unable to speak appropriately.  He lets my arm go.

“Bye, now,” he says with another twisted smile and a careless wave.  I collapse against Lia.

“I need you to get it together just until we get to the car,” she whispers to me.  I nod again, trying to control my breathing.  I stand up as straight as I can and power walk away from the conference room.

We drive straight back to the motel.

“Son of a
whore
that hurts,” I curse when we’re safely in the car.

“Bleeding again?”

I look at it inside the sweatshirt.  “Maybe a little.  Stitches are intact though.”  We drive in silence for a couple blocks.

“I don’t think he liked us very much,” Lia comments.

“No, I think it’s pretty clear we’re not going to be invited over for dinner.  What makes me less happy is that I can’t tell if he actually knows more than he’s letting on—he may be working with Gregor, in which case he knows we’re full of crap and are out to kill his boss.  Either way, he definitely threatened us.”

Lia doesn’t respond immediately.  The distance I can imagine between us is more painful than my throbbing shoulder.

“I guess we should expedite this damn rescue then,” she finally says.  “I think our luck is running out.”

Back at the room, I lie back down and take more painkiller—just enough to take the edge off.

“You gonna be okay while I’m out?” Lia asks while she dresses for work again.  “This is a shorter shift, I’ll be back around ten.”

“Yeah, sure,” I assure her.  “Just don’t make any other stops.  I got a feeling we’re not alone.  Maybe even check for trackers on the car if you can do it casually.”

“There are just so many ways to legally invade people’s privacy now,” she sighs.

“Ain’t that the truth,” I mutter.

My sister leaves and I return to my research.  I hate feeling useless, like I do when I’m in my pajamas and Lia’s winning the bread, so I dive into the case.  I hack over to more and more classified information and peruse less and less reputable sources on how to find this incubus, and what to do if it turns out that we can’t banish it the normal way.  I don’t even hear Lia approaching the room again later that night until she opens the door.

“You’re conscious,” she says with a tone of surprise as she surveys my note-strewn bed.

“That’s me.  Never one for sleeping on the job.  How was work?”

She drops a wad of twenties down on the table.  “Good enough to probably get you a real doctor.”

“Save it.  I’ll live.”

“Yeah but if you don’t take care, you’re gonna be unable to move the left side of your body by the time you’re thirty-five.”

It’s nice to be talking to her again, and my spirits rise for the first time since I decided to involve a faerie in my work.  “That’s forever away!  Anything can happen between now and then,” I reply flippantly, reveling in the return of our banter.

My sister glares at me in warning.  “I need you mobile.”

“I’ll work on that.”

“And what did
you
do tonight,” Lia asks, nodding to the research materials scattered around me.

“I’ve learned that incubi like to hunt stealthily, but they sort of prefer to nest after that.  He should have just had the one home base.  So Brittany can’t be far, if she’s still alive.  Also, that they’re pretty hard to remove from this reality, outside of banishment.”

“But it can be done?”

“There are…rumors that it can be,” I hedge.

“Might be worth preparing for.”

“We can try.  Just gotta find it, now.”

Lia sits on her bed and thinks.  “Gonna be up to visit a few of our Greek sisters tomorrow?”

“You betcha.”

The next day, I take my first careful bath and add a sling to my normal accessories.  Being clean boosts my morale even higher, and Lia seems to be glad that I’m improving as well.  We make our way to the local hospital, where the five people we rescued are still being monitored.  It’s been three days since we retrieved them from the ‘cubus’ house.  I’m amazed at how different they look in even that time.  The color has returned to their faces, the skeletal look they’d had beginning to flesh back out with proper hydration and nutritional broth.  It’s imperative that starving people return to healthy levels of nutrients very slowly—it’s part of why Lia and I ease back into real food after protein bar diets for weeks on end.  Having had brief forays with hunger my own self, I know how traumatic it can be to your system to just jump back in like nothing bad happened.  And also, how awful broth tastes after the first meal or so.

We go up to see Chelsea first.  She’s awake, her hair in a knot on her head, listlessly scrolling through something on her phone.  Lia knocks on the door, and the girl looks up, a grateful smile on her face when she sees who it is.

“Hey, Chelsea,” my sister says lightly.  “This is my big, Summer.  She was there, too.  Can we come in?” 

“Of course!  I really can’t thank you enough,” she begins.  We wave away her appreciation.

“Hey, we’re just glad we could help,” I say.

“Did you get that at…at the house?” she asks me, eyeing my sling.

“Eh.  Small price.”  I try to shrug it off.  Then I wince—shrugging is still right out.

“Where are your folks?” Lia asks her as we sit down.

Chelsea groans.  “They were driving me crazy, telling me this is why I shouldn’t have gone away to college or joined a sorority and what was I thinking, talking to strange men?  So I said I was stable enough that they should just let me heal up.  And you know what?  I’m feeling better already.”

“Jeez.  I’m sorry to hear that.  I guess it’s nice that they were worried,” Lia replies.

“Yeah…thanks.  So, did you come see me for a particular reason?”

“Well, we wanted to see how you’re doing, of course,” I start with a glance at Lia.  “But we also had a few questions for you about what happened?  If you could talk about it at all?”

Chelsea’s lips disappear into a thin line of discomfort.

“Chels, we can’t find Brittany,” Lia says in low tones.  “Summer and I have a…a knack for helping people in weird situations like this, but it’s hard to do if we’re missing information.”

Just then, a doctor walks in.  “Ah, Miss Eliopoulos, you’re awake!  And have visitors,” the doctor looks at us carefully, noting my sling and the bruises on my face.

“You girls picked a good moment to visit,” she continues in normal tones.  “You’re Lia, right?  The one who found them?” 

My sister nods and extends her hand.  It can be dangerous when we get any sort of celebrity status, and we try to avoid it, but it also has its perks.  Last night Ophelia got us free hamburgers, for example.

“Dr. Morris,” the doctor introduces herself as she shakes Lia’s hand.  “You did a great thing, helping these kids.  They’re just now getting to the point that they’re on the mend.”  She smiles at Chelsea.  “Soon, I’ll be here to say ‘goodbye’ as they wheel you out.”  She checks charts and fluids and performs a quick exam of Chelsea as she speaks.  Eyeing me again like she’d like to say something, she gives us all a quick half smile and leaves as suddenly as she’d appeared.  Doctors really don’t have much time to hang around anymore.

Chelsea seems lost in painful thoughts for a moment before turning her attention back to us.  “Okay.  I’ll try to help.  It just sounds so...”

“Weird?” I finish for her.

“Yeah.  They all think we were knocked out with something.  They don’t understand that it was more like a spell or.…”  Chelsea flails her arms, looking for the word.

“Tell us what happened after it took you.”

“We went back to the house.  Um…fooled around, a bit,” she looks at us shyly, like she’s expecting us to judge.  When we don’t react, she continues.  “Then he brought me to the room you found us in.  Brittany was there, at least at first.”  Her voice breaks a little as she says her friend’s name.

“Do you remember when the others arrived?”

“Sort of…it was like being in a haze.  I didn’t really care about anything else but him.  I remember other people being in the room, sometimes coming and going, but I couldn’t tell you when or anything.”

“Did you eat or drink or anything?”

She thinks for a second.  “Not at first.  It wasn’t until I’d been there maybe three or four days that he started telling us to eat and stuff.”

Lia and I exchange looks.  Why would it suddenly care?

“Do you remember when Brittany went missing again?” I ask.

“Yeah, it was only a day or two after I got there.”  We can see she’s on the verge of tears.  I reach out with my good hand and touch the back of hers.

“This is really helpful, Chelsea,” I tell her.  “We’re gonna find your friend.”

“How?” she asks with a defeated little laugh.  “The cops raided every house in the area.  Aside from poor Cody and that big guy, there was no one else around.”

“We’re not the cops,” Lia reminds her.  “They do their job, we do ours.  They don’t understand the abductor like we do.”

A nurse enters the room with food and medication, so we take our leave.

The rest of the victims have similar stories.  Mike, however, has slightly more to tell us.

“Was there a couple days, and suddenly a chick a—a different chick—blonde, curvier, and a big guy, came in.  Had some beef jerky and saltines and jugs of water, maybe a day or two after I got there.”

“Did the girl look like this?”  Lia flashes Mike a picture of Brittany.  She’s blonde and dimpled with a Jessica Rabbit body.

“Yeah, maybe?  Kind of hard to tell.  It wasn’t
her
, you know?”

“Did you ever see this girl again?”

“I…think so?  We always had food and water.  Every now and then we were told to shower and stuff, and someone gave us towels and soap.  I remember blonde hair.”

It’s afternoon before we make to leave the hospital.  At the elevator, we run into Dr. Morris again.

“Looks like a puncture wound, there,” she observes, looking at my left shoulder.

“Accident,” I say, trying to look embarrassed.

“Accident on the wrong side of a gun?”

I look at her sharply.

“Just an accident,” Lia says with a smile, trying to break the tension.

“I’m sure,” Dr. Morris says.  “Hemostatic compresses and hydrogel compounds are my go-to for accidents, too.  But those are just the initial things I’d start with.  Afterwards, I’d want a more sustainable treatment.”

Being so casually called out puts me back on full alert.  “Thanks, but, I’m good.  Already had my doctor look at it,” I say warily.

She smiles tiredly at me.  “If you’re good, I’m good.”  The elevator arrives, and we all get in.

After a second of uncomfortable elevator silence, Dr. Morris looks at me again more directly.  “It’s just, I’ve heard every word for ‘gun wound’ out there.  If you’re prepared to make a statement to me that it wasn’t a gun, I can still look at it, no calls made.”

“Appreciate it…but we had someone look at it, and besides, I don’t have insurance.”

“Ah.  I can see why that’s a problem.  Well, I’m on lunch today at four, anyways, so I don’t know what I could do.”  She looks at us significantly, winks and gets off at the next floor.

“Getting real tired of overly observant officials in this town.  Think she was being kind or creepy?” I ask Lia in soft tones.

“Do you wanna find out?”

“I think we probably should.  If we’ve got more pieces of the puzzle out there gunning for us, I’d like to know about them before they bite us.  And if she’s that eager to help, and
isn’t
looking to harvest our organs, maybe we should see what’s up.”

“Reasonable,” Lia grants.

We get back in the car.  “Should go let Clyde out soon.  Were you able to check for the GPS tracker on the car?”

“I could only look quick, didn’t see anything.”

“Okay.  Let’s go back to the motel, I’ll take a look there.”

The silence on the ride back is more comfortable than it has been the past two days.  My head is spinning with doctors and detectives and Greek monsters, but I’m happy that my sister seems like she won’t stay mad at me, and that my shoulder hasn’t been grabbed today.  I’m not difficult to please.

The warm fuzzy feelings I’m harboring disappear in a second when we get back to the motel parking lot.

“What the
fuck
?” Lia swears.

The door to our room is open, the manager of this fine establishment standing in the doorway with his arms crossed.  He sees us pull up and points, turning to say something to the people inside.

“Careful,” I warn, pointing to the three cop cars parked closer to the office.

We race upstairs to see our room being torn apart.  I mean, not that it was terribly well ordered beforehand, but now it is definitely in disarray.

“What’s going on?” I ask the manager.

“I don’t know what you two are up to, but your room is a sty.  The cops had a warrant to search it.  I go to open it for them, and it smells like a barn!  Now everyone will think I run a barn!”

“A barn would be an upgrade, pal,” Lia says furiously.

“Excuse me, who’s in charge,” I call into the room.

Detective Kline comes out of the bathroom.  Crap.  He comes toward me, stopping to receive a report from one of the men rifling through my personal effects.

“Ms. Watson.  Glad we caught you.  My, whatever happened to your arm?”

“Old tennis injury flare up.  Mind telling me what’s going on?”

“Being thorough,” Kline says with a slight sneer.  “Finding this girl is important.  We can’t leave any stone unturned.”

“What, you think she’s hiding in my underwear?”

“Well, not quite,” the detective replies.  “But this is certainly interesting.”  He brandishes a bag with one of Lia’s pistols in it.

Lia mutters darkly.

“I
assume
you have a permit for this?”

She looks nervously at me.  As if I can read her mind, I realize that this one is
not
registered to Ms. Ophelia Watson.

“Permits aren’t necessary in Virginia,” I remind him quickly.  “And how, exactly, is that relevant to this case?  So, we have a gun for protection.  We’re two girls who travel around a lot.  We weren’t carrying it.  We only transport it in an approved travel safe.”