Inescapable (Talented Saga #7) (20 page)

“
I guess you’re back on
Eden?”
I sent.
“How’s Penny? Did you guys have at least a little fun on your
world travels? Have you seen Alex yet? Victoria says he’s doing
well, but I’d feel better hearing it from you.”

Steering the conversation towards cheerier
topics seemed like the best course of action. Talking about prison
was depressing, and I didn’t want our first conversation in a month
to be a downer.

“
Whoa,”
he sent, chuckling.
“Slow down. One question at a time.”

Erik’s laughter was music
to my ears.
My mind conjured an image of
his beautiful turquoise eyes, twinkling as a smirk lit up his
handsome face. I wanted so badly to touch his cheek, run my fingers
through his hair, and snuggle into his side.

Soon,
I told myself.
Soon we will be
together for real.

“
Yes, I’m back on
Eden,”
he sent.
“We just arrived a couple of hours ago. I would have been in
touch sooner, but I had to meet with Victoria about an incident at
the last rally.”

It was obvious that Erik didn’t want to tell
me about the attack. Apparently, Victoria didn’t tell him that I
already knew. That was fine, though. I didn’t need to hear the
details. Watching the events unfold on Yocum’s communicator had
been bad enough.

“
Penny is good, she’s
back, too,”
Erik continued.
“I haven’t seen Alex yet. I wanted to go by
before his bedtime, but didn’t get the chance. I promise, I’ll see
him before I see you tomorrow, then I’ll be able to give you a full
report. As for fun, well, we were on a diplomatic mission. There
wasn’t much sightseeing beyond the landmarks right by the rally
sites. But I’d love to go back to a bunch of the places with you,
so we can really check them out. If you’d want to?”

“
Do you even have to
ask?”
I asked, once again hit by a burst
of longing. Of course, a niggling sense of doubt crept in.
Traveling the word, seeing historic landmarks, trooping through
ancient ruins, sampling foreign cuisines—those luxuries were part
of a life that other people enjoyed, not us.

“
Someday, I
promise,”
Erik sent, picking up on my
skepticism. My heart swelled with the certainty that came with his
statement; someday, we’d be able to do the things other people took
for granted. Someday, we would find out how the norms
lived.

“
Sounds like a
plan,”
I sent, smiling.

“
Crap, I just realized
what time it is. Can you hang on real quick? I need to call
Victoria. I’m sort of supposed to be somewhere in a few minutes.
It’s this meeting about my security for the final rally. I’m just
going to let her know I need to reschedule. Give me a
minute?”

“
Oh, no, you should
go,”
I sent quickly. Erik’s safety was my
number one concern. Our conversation could wait. It wasn’t like I
had anywhere to go.
“I’ll be right here
all night. Just let me know when you’re back in your
quarters.”

“
Our
quarters,”
Erik corrected me.
“It’s our apartment. Our bed. And you’ll be back
here with me soon, I promise. The council can’t keep you locked up
much longer. I won’t let them. I shouldn’t have let them in the
first place.”

His guilt came through the bond loud and
clear. Which, of course, triggered my guilty conscience, in turn. I
hated that Erik felt that he was somehow to blame for my sentence
on Vault. All the decisions that landed me in a cell were my own,
so the consequences of those decisions were also on me. I knew the
risk I was taking when saving Anya. And I definitely knew the risk
I was taking when I let Kenly go free instead of hauling her back
to the islands. It was ludicrous for him to think that any of it
was his fault.

“
I should’ve refused to
play poster boy,”
he rushed on.
“I should’ve told them I’d only do it with you by
my side. I’m so sorry, Tals.”

“
Stop,”
I sent.
“You have
nothing to feel bad about, okay? Please. It’s not your fault. I’m
fine. Vault isn’t awful. Seriously, I’m just treating it like a
supervised break. And it will be worlds better with you in my head.
It already is. Go to your meeting, and then come back to me. Keep
me company. That’s all I want.”

“
I will. As soon as I’m
done, I’m all yours
for the rest of the
night.”
Erik paused, his emotions pouring
forth. I felt it with every ounce of my being, even before he
thought the words.
“I love you, Tals. I
can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”

Tears pooled in my
eyes.
“I love you, too.”

For several long minutes, I simply laid
there and thought about Erik. Sure, I could have stayed in his
head; I could’ve followed him to the meeting and lived vicariously
through him. But it would undoubtedly only intensify my longing to
be with him.

Besides, I had other issues that needed my
attention. I needed to uncover something in the mess of articles,
reports, and files that shed light on the odd situation in France.
Otherwise, un-chaperoned visits with my boyfriend might not be in
my immediate future.

Wiping the tears away, I
sat up and reached for a folder from the stack on the floor beside
my bed. This one was marked
Abductions
. Determined to distract
myself from thoughts of Erik, I settled in with my back against the
wall and began to peruse the contents.

The first item was another police report. It
sparked my interest immediately, mostly because it wasn’t yet
another obligatory report of livestock theft. Given its apparent
irrelevance, I probably should have cast the report aside.
Nonetheless, it was by far the most intriguing thing I’d read all
day.

The complainant was a Canadian woman, Zinca
Lupo, who claimed her daughter had been abducted nearly a year ago
from their family home in Alberta. The authorities had seen it
differently. When it came to the disappearance of a
fourteen-year-old girl who was craving independence—she’d been some
sort of child actor, so the police assumed this was the
case—without any signs of foul play, the case was deemed just
another runaway by the Canadian police. Given their disinterest,
Mrs. Lupo hired a private investigator. The PI found a witness
claiming to have seen the girl leaving a private airfield ten miles
outside of Besançon, France. Supposedly this witness recognized the
young girl from the wallscreen, given her status as a minor
celebrity.

I studied the picture that Mrs. Lupo had
provided to the French police. The girl was tall for her age and
extremely pretty, though not familiar to me in the least. My lack
of recognition was no surprise, though, since I wasn’t exactly
up-to-date on pop culture.

Setting the image aside, I continued on with
the report, my chest aching for the mother with each word I
read.

The officers were initially wary of Mrs.
Lupo’s allegations, due to her “hysterical nature” and the fact she
was “not in-touch with reality.” Granted, she’d insisted that
Minotaur kidnappers invaded her home and stole her daughter from
bed. Before the Talented, her story would’ve sounded as fantastical
as unicorns or world peace. But given everything I’d seen,
including both morphing abilities and perception manipulation, it
was certainly possible she was telling the truth. Mrs. Lupo also
believed that Mr. Lupo was complacent in the abduction, claiming
that he’d told her the girl’s abduction was for the good of the
family.

“
Yikes,” I breathed aloud,
wondering where the truth of the situation lay. “What an
ass.”

Mr. Lupo urged his wife not to contact the
authorities in Canada, threatening to divorce her and take the
family’s sizable fortune should she defy him. This had then
prompted Mrs. Lupo to hire the aforementioned private investigator
instead.

When the PI found the witness in France
claiming to have seen the daughter, Mrs. Lupo hopped on a plane to
Besançon immediately. She’d gone straight to the French police,
expecting their help looking for her daughter. Instead, because of
the mother’s allegations of half-human, half-beast kidnappers—I had
a sneaking suspicion that it was also because Mr. Lupo was an
internationally known and respected vid director—the authorities
placed Mrs. Lupo on a seventy-two hour mental health hold at the
jail.

“
This is nuts,” I mused
aloud.

The thought of the poor, distraught mother
finding only grief and heartache while looking for her daughter
made me queasy. Curiosity got the better of me, though, and I
continued reading the tragic tale of the Lupo family matriarch.

The therapist brought in by the French
authorities diagnosed Mrs. Lupo with paranoia and something
ominously called Acute Delusional Coping Syndrome. Whatever that
was. These determinations had been made largely based on several of
Mrs. Lupo’s more colorful statements; she’d accused the doctor of
being “a spoke in the wheel of conspiracy” and “She-Satan’s
minion.” The latter, while not really funny in these particular
circumstances, made me laugh out loud. There was a note by the
doctor about an addendum to Mrs. Lupo’s file, so I skipped ahead to
see what it was referring to.

My heart sank the moment I flipped to the
last page of the report and saw what was attached—the daughter’s
death certificate. It had been issued by a Canadian medical
examiner, dated the same day as the girl’s alleged abduction.

Sadness for the mother filled me as I
quickly scanned over the document. I paused after reading the cause
of death, which was listed as “Natural Causes.” Nydia Lupo had been
fourteen-years-old when she died, what was possibly natural about
that? Unfortunately, no further information was given about it.

Flipping back to the doctor’s report, I saw
that Mrs. Lupo was finally released when her husband and her
therapist from Canada arrived in Besançon. They’d told the police
that the woman had escaped from a mental health facility in
Alberta, where she was being treated for depression and a myriad of
other illnesses brought on by the loss of her child.

The tale was so tragic, and tears welled up
in my eyes. I couldn’t fathom the plight of the poor mother, and my
heart broke for her. Warm, salty liquid was still pouring down my
cheeks when I flipped to the final page of the doctor’s notes and
saw the signature of Mrs. Lupo’s Canadian therapist on her release
form: Selby Masterson. The same woman whose name was familiar to me
in a way I couldn’t quite touch on. The same woman who’d spoken to
the reporter about the farmer, Duquesne, and dismissed his tales of
being probed by aliens as the ranting of an unstable man.

Okay, so the farmer never actually said he’d
been probed; I just figured it was par for the course when the
little green men took a human aboard the mothership.

“
Who are you?” I said
aloud, staring intently at the mystery woman’s loopy
signature.

In my mind, there was no
way that the woman’s involvement in two seemingly unrelated cases
was a coincidence. The odds of Selby Masterson being both Mrs.
Lupo’s therapist in Canada and a random townswoman familiar with
Franz Duquesne’s tinfoil hat were slimmer than an anorexic
ballerina.
Particularly when I recognized
her name, despite the fact I’d never visited Besançon.

“
You’re the thread that
connects the dots,” I told the piece of paper clutched in my
hands.

With my marker—I wasn’t allowed pointy
writing implements, for obvious reasons—I began scribbling a list
of questions for Victoria. I wanted full background checks run on
Zinca Lupo and her daughter, Nydia.

I was willing to bet my freedom that Nydia
wasn’t actually dead.

In a case like this one, comprised of some
of the weirdest elements I’d encountered—centaurs, alien
abductions, mysterious disappearances, cattle thefts, and random
power outages—a fake death certificate certainly wasn’t farfetched.
Any decent forger could’ve easily made one, especially since it
only had to pass muster in a foreign country, where the authorities
weren’t likely to know what it should’ve looked like anyway.

As far as I knew, the search of TOXIC’s
records hadn’t produced any results for Selby Masterson, since
Victoria hadn’t included anything of the sort in the second batch
of files she sent over. Still, confirming that fact firsthand the
following day wouldn’t hurt. I added the question to my short list,
along with a request for a full background scan on Masterson.

I was also eager to learn more about Mr.
Lupo. What was his story? If the daughter was actually alive—and I
was nearly positive that she was—and the mother was telling the
truth, why had her father basically given her away?

A thought occurred to
me:
Is the daughter Talented?

Were the Poachers currently operating in
Canada? Was Selby Masterson affiliated with the Poachers? If so,
where did she fit in? And what did that mean?

Thoughts of the Poachers brought the
terrible memories of the auction flooding back through my mind. My
heart had already sunk so far while reading about the plight of
Mrs. Lupo that it was resting among my toes. But my next thought
took it underground.

If Nydia’s father was complacent in her
abduction, that would mean he essentially sold his daughter to the
Poachers.