Stolen Hearts: Book 1 (Grim's Labyrinth Series) (5 page)

“Reading a romance novel you just couldn’t put down?”

“Fighting a stepmother intent on killing me.”

“Ah. Yeah, hate when that happens. It messes up my whole schedule, my sleep cycle gets out of whack. You know how damn inconvenient it is.”

Jessica smiled. Conlan was easy to talk to, and their conversation was both serious and playful at the same time. It was a relief to have someone to connect with, someone who got her.

“Let’s see if this works again,” Conlan said, reaching into her backpack behind her seat. “The bag gave you that soda earlier, so maybe it’s got snacks now too?”

Even as she shook her head, knowing that she hadn’t had time to go to the kitchen and stock up on anything, he pulled his arm back over the seat and handed Jessica a bag of chips. She looked at it for a second before touching it.

“Where did you get this?” she asked quietly. Conlan laughed out loud.

“We’re riding in a magical car down an ethereal highway, and you’re questioning the gift of Doritos from your backpack?” He raised an eyebrow at her and laughed at her skeptical expression. She still didn’t open the bag, even though she was hungry enough to break into it with her teeth. “Go ahead. In fact, I’ll eat the first one, just to prove they’re not poisonous. Better yet, I’ll have my own bag.”

Conlan reached behind him again and grabbed his own bag, along with two more sodas and a couple of sandwiches.

“How are you doing that?” Jessica asked fearfully, as though the impromptu picnic was finally her breaking point.

“I’m not doing it. I told you. I just reach in the bag, and whatever we need is already in there. Try it. Grab us some dessert.” He leaned back in his seat and propped his left foot up on the space between the driver’s side window and the steering wheel, letting the air from the vent flutter the cuff of his worn jeans.

Jessica turned around and retrieved her backpack. She plopped it in her lap and didn’t touch it, but watched it intently instead.

“It’s not gonna bite you. Unless you tell it you need dentures,” Conlan joked, talking around a bite of his sandwich and chewing slowly, exaggerating the sheer ecstasy of its deliciousness for her benefit.

Jessica nodded, then closed her eyes.

“What are you doing? You don’t have to make a wish, you know. I don’t think it works that way,” he chided kindly.

“First of all, you don’t know how it works any better than I do. Second, I’m not making a wish, I’m concentrating. Now be quiet and let me focus.”

Conlan at least had the courtesy to do as she asked, but he still watched her face warily. When she reached in the backpack and pulled out a small rectangle of fabric, both of them looked confused.

“What did you wish for? A washcloth?”

“No, it was supposed to be a blanket. I’m cold,” she answered, ignoring the way he’d phrased the question. “But this isn’t what I meant.”

“Maybe you were thinking ‘blanket’ but the magic bag heard ‘hankie’.”

Jessica shook her head. This couldn’t be real. There had to be some explanation for this, for all of it. The fact that she didn’t even know where to begin sorting it out wasn’t helping anything.

“What if we thought about a book, you know, like an instruction manual for what’s going on?” she asked out loud, not really expecting Conlan to answer. He shook his head.

“I think that’d be like that rule in the storybooks where there’s no wishing for more wishes. Thinking about a book about how to think about things is kind of how wormholes get made, if you ask me.”

Jessica leaned back in the same pose Conlan reclined in and kept her mouth shut, stopping herself before she could explain exactly how many people in the car had asked him what he thought. She propped both her feet on the dashboard above the center console and waited for inspiration.

“Wait, this bag of yours,” he began, “it’s got to be like some kind of portal, right? The people running this show are sending us stuff through the bag, as stupid as those words just sounded coming out of my mouth. So it’s all got to be coming from somewhere, right. What if we tried to go in the other direction?”

“You want to climb inside my backpack and go exploring?” she asked, a smirk on her face telling him exactly what she thought of that idea.

“Well, not when you say it out loud and make it sound stupid like that, I don’t. And here I was going to offer to take you with me. But you have to admit it sounds like an interesting idea.” He pretended to be hurt, crossing his arms in front of him and turning slightly to look out the window. “Jessica… what do you think that could be?”

He pointed out his window to a spot on the far-off horizon, a wide area of light where the night sky lightened a little, its glow bouncing off of the clouds overhead. Before she could answer, the car turned left sharply and bounced along a narrower, two-lane road, slightly less traveled than the wide highway they’d been on.

“Conlan, I don’t like this,” she whispered.

“I know. Me neither.” He took her hand in his and tried to smile reassuringly, but it came out more like a grimace. They sat back and waited for something to happen, their eyes fixed on the approaching glow.

Chapter 7

Faydra cowered on the floor before the masked figure, small drops of blood from her scalp dripping off the ends of her hair. The drops had finally begun to pool together on the floor beneath her, and she calmed herself by focusing on the reflection of the kitchen light fixture in the crimson puddle. Anything that would take her mind off the agony inflicted by her visitor.

“I will ask again. Where is the girl?” he demanded in an urgent but still steady voice. The years he’d spent surrounded by smoke and flame had left his voice husky, as if it could shatter with one more syllable. It added an edge to his voice that made it scary even when he was being kind.

And he wasn’t being kind.

“I told you, Rabeeg. I don’t know. She left. She ran away sometime after school,” Faydra said, panting for air as the new swell of pain began in the base of her skull. She shook her head involuntarily; weakness wasn’t something he tolerated well and she tried her best to fight it, but she couldn’t help the writhing that would soon start, followed by the humiliating sounds of her own screams.

“Your incompetence is outdone only by your pathetic lack of strength,” he said, already sounding bored as his victim arched her back and let her mouth open wide in a silent scream. This had stopped being fun for him over an hour ago, which was a shame since he’d dreamed of this day for years, ever since she’d left him to take this assignment.

Whose career is more important now? he thought with a sneer, watching with detached delight as his former consort twisted into a sad rendering of a fetal position.

“This is why you should have killed her after you finished with her father,” Rabeeg said softly, leaning over her and speaking in Faydra’s ear as though he was chastising an unruly child. He spoke slowly to emphasize how stupid he thought she was.

“But… but I had no choice. The council… said no,” she gasped, lifting her head a few inches off the blood-soaked floor to look at him as she answered, only to let it fall back in a sickening splash of dark droplets.

“Ah, but that was before I was on the council. And I say we don’t need her anymore. And, my ex-darling,” Rageeb got down close to Faydra to deliver his final words without hesitation, “we’re kind of done with you, too.”

Chapter 8

The classic Mustang finally rolled to a stop still miles from the end of the road. Jessica and Conlan looked at each other with a mixture of relief and fear before peering out the windows to see what might happen next.

“Oh. Mystery solved, we’re out of gas,” he declared, peering down at the gas gauge on the dashboard.

“How is that possible?” Jessica wondered, peering around the wheel to see for herself.

“Well, it’s this phenomenon that only happens in—wait, all cars—when they’ve been running for too long.”

“I mean, how is it possible these people can conjure up a bag of sandwiches but they can’t manage to keep gas in your tank? Some kidnappers they turned out to be. Do we just walk home from here? Call a cab?” she joked derisively, gesturing to the wide open middle of nowhere that surrounded the car.

“I don’t know. I guess we walk? And considering how long we’ve been driving, that city-looking thing over there is probably way closer than your house.” Conlan pointed again into the distance to an area of light that didn’t look any closer than it had the first time they saw it.

Jessica shrugged. Walking it was.

The only problem was the road seemed to grow with every step. The lights up ahead never got closer, just as they had failed to do when they were still driving. It took all of Jessica’s strength not to whine. If Conlan wasn’t complaining, neither would she.

“We’re never going to get there!” he finally moaned, dropping to the ground dramatically and striking the gravel with his fists in a truly award-winning performance. Apparently she’d spoken too soon. Jessica found herself dragging Conlan up by his underarms, promising him all manner of ice cream desserts awaited him at the city up ahead.

They didn’t have to wait that long.

Ahead of them, three figures approached in the darkness, their stature and stance too intimidating to possibly be friendly. Conlan straightened and became serious once again, pushing Jessica behind him gently as he stepped in front of her to face the newcomers. This wasn’t the time to talk to him about women’s equality and their ability to take care of themselves. Jessica gratefully accepted the shelter his tall frame could provide, however ineffective it might end up being once the approaching group finally intercepted them.

Three figures of different heights, all garbed in different styles of clothing as though they hunted through random closets to compile an outfit, walked towards them, their feet not quite reaching the pavement. They floated above the warm road in a way that made her hope it was just the heat of the unseasonably warm night playing tricks on her eyesight.

Instead, they came closer and stopped, appraising the younger people in front of them while they seemed to converse without speaking. They alternated between staring and whispering, their heads bowed towards each other from time to time.

“I don’t know about you,” Conlan whispered over his shoulder to Jessica, “but I’m in no hurry to find out what these guys want. If they want us so bad, they can do all the walking.” He folded his arms and waited, his feet planted wide, ready to either fight or run. Behind him, Jessica braced herself for whatever was to come.

But it was nothing. Literally nothing.

The figures approached, shimmering slightly under the faulty power of the projection that made them appear. When they finally stood before them, a recorded voice warned them that grave danger lay both ahead of them and behind them, leaving them practically no other choice than to assume that the lesser of the two evils lay in trusting the images, people whose eyes darted nervously and often looked into the distance beyond the road.

“You must come with us, but you must know the danger too,” the image in the middle said in a transmitted voice, seeming to look through Jessica as he spoke instead of at her, as if he couldn’t quite find her through a remote connection.

“Do we have a choice?” Jessica asked, instinctively leaning closer to Conlan while she waited for an answer, one that never came. There was a pause and more watching from the figures, then the figure on the right spoke, repeating some variation of the first message.

“I don’t think they can hear us,” she said. “Even if this is live and being transmitted, they must not have a microphone that lets them have a conversation. They’re just repeating their message.”

“So they have the power to bring us here in my car and feed us, but not to talk to us? Well, this sounds completely legit. I say we go with them and ignore even their own advice,” Conlan announced in a falsely cheerful, overly chipper tone. Jessica looked up at him and shrugged. “Of course, I don’t think we have a whole lot of choice. It’s not like we actually drove here. The car that brought us here didn’t actually do it like a regular car, you know.”

“Yeah,” she said, unsure of where he was going with this. “So you think we should do as they say?”

A streak of lightning ripped through the sky, making Jessica jump. She clung to Conlan’s sleeve before she knew what was happening. Looking up at his questioning glance was all the reassurance she needed.

“Let’s go.”

Chapter 9

The trip into the city—town? building? center?—took no time at all, even less than the time it took for their hosts to approach them in the first place. Without a sound, Jessica and Conlan were led into a gated area before passing through into the low entryway of a cavernous building. Around the room, empty chairs sat lined up against the deep red walls, waiting for bodies to fill them.

“Oh my god, they’ve brought us to the DMV! We’ve actually died and gone to hell!” Conlan whispered in a completely monotone attempt at dry humor. “Except their chairs are nicer. I think those are cup holders.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. Leave it to him to try to find the humor in the situation. A door beside them slid open and disappeared into the wall, leaving a rectangular gap of blackness that pierced the otherwise serene room. A pattern of overhead lights flicked on one at a time, casting the auditorium in a strange filter of illumination.

A line of people—actual people this time, not merely projections—emerged from the door and began to file around the room in order, taking their seats in the half circle in front of the spot where Jessica and Conlan stood.

“We should have thought to grab a chair before they hog them all,” Conlan whispered, leaning close to Jessica. She swatted him with the back of her hand, mentally willing him to stand up and behave himself. If these people had the senses of humor they looked like they had, they would zap Jessica and Conlan right there on the spot if the guy didn’t watch his mouth.