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I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, whether it had been a couple of hours or a couple of days, but it was nighttime. I seemed to be in some sort of motel room, lying on my back on a bed that had been dragged into the center of the floor. My hands and legs had been tied to the four posts of the bed so tightly that the only thing I could move was my head.
My kidnapper was standing in front of the desk where he had a laptop set up. Its bluish-white glow was harsh against my eyes in the dimly lit room. I pulled against my restraints again and sighed in frustration when they still didn’t budge. I had to think. What would Jeremy tell me to do? What would Conrad do?
“Ah, you’re awake,” my captor said without turning away from his computer. “I was worried I’d hit you too hard. I thought you would be a little bit more resilient. Apparently, you’re not as strong as everyone has made you out to be.” God, he was chatty. I decided to keep him talking. The longer he was talking the more time I had to figure out how to get out of this mess.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, and scrolled through as he spoke.
“You do have quite a bit of fight in you for someone so fragile.” He chuckled, “You kicked me pretty damn hard, I have to say, bravo .”
I scowled at him. “What do you want with me? Why am I here?” He cocked his head to one side and grabbed the chair from the desk and brought it to the side of the bed, sitting down next to my head.
“You must know. How could the daughter of the good old detective be so ignorant?” He mused out loud. He looked down at me and waited for my response. When I said nothing, he continued. “Your little magick friends didn’t tell you that you were being hunted? I find that hard to believe. Magick folk are always meddling in business that doesn’t concern them.”
I sensed a note of prejudice in his voice, and I wondered what had happened between him and the magick folk in the past to make him dislike them so much. Hopefully, Conrad would come soon and give him another reason to hate them.
“So Amon sent you? Is that it?” I asked. He looked surprised for a second, then he threw his head back and laughed.
“Prince Amon? You think that arrogant prick would ever hire someone to do his dirty work? Of course not. My employer is a little bit more…sinister, unfortunately for you.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then turned his phone around, to show me what he had been scrolling through.
“Would you like to see photos from the case your father has been working on for the last couple of weeks?” The abrupt change in topic startled me, but he didn’t wait for a response. He held the phone up for me to see.
It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what they were seeing. When the mind knows it’s seeing something horrible, it tries to protect itself by simply not understanding it. However, I couldn’t look away.
The photos were crime scene pictures of three different girls, all brutally gutted and murdered, and tied down the way I currently was. Their flesh was covered in webs of intricate cuts and scars. However, the part that shook me the most was that all three of the girls looked like me. They all had dark hair and pale skin, and they all had my build.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Jeremy had been playing this case close to the chest, more so than any other case he had worked on. Now it made sense, Jeremy hadn’t shared this case with me because I matched the vic’s profile. This psychopath was going to gut me just like these poor girls in the photos. These girls were dead because they had been mistaken for me.
I was going to die.
My mind was screaming, but I forced myself to remain calm. Panicking would get me nowhere; easier said than done. I took deep breaths, in through my nose and out through my mouth. If I could just avoid going into hysterics I could get out of this. I knew I could. I remembered my earlier plan…keep him talking.
“Where did you get those?” I demanded. He shrugged, pulling the photos away so I could no longer see them. Thank God.
“I’ve been hacking into the police system since I was fourteen. This case is everywhere right now. Big news. Whoever Ash Nevra hired before me was fucken useless, let me tell you.”
My eyes snapped to him. So Ash Nevra had hired him. That wasn’t good. He continued, oblivious to his slip.
“All I had to do was find out who was working the case. Turns out, the detective leading the investigation is your father. I broke into his office a little over a week ago to do some snooping, and wouldn’t you know? He had pictures of his daughter on his desk who matched the description of the girl I was supposed to find.” He paused for dramatic effect and met my eyes. “Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not one to put too much stock in coincidence.”
The idea of this monster being that close to Jeremy made my skin crawl. I had to get the hell out of here. But how? I was supposed to be this all powerful daemon. I should be able to take this shifter on with nothing but magick or power or whatever the hell it was daemons used, right?
I flexed my aura and it brushed against my captor’s mind. I pressed a little harder than I normally would and his name came to me. His name was Rycon, and he was a shifter from the Olkuyrbe Tribe in South America. He was the son of the chief but had abandoned his birthright to become a mercenary after… Rycon slammed the door shut on his mind and grabbed my face.
“That is rude, Kitten. You shouldn’t go prying into people’s minds. Especially when they’re trying to tell you a story.” Well, I guess he wasn’t as oblivious as I had originally hoped. He hadn’t noticed until I started pressing. Maybe if I went gently…
“Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Coincidences.” He let go of my face and leaned back in the chair. “Once I discovered the detective had a daughter, I decided to go check you out. It wasn’t hard to find your address. Unfortunately, the magick folk had gotten to you first. As annoying as that was, it meant that I was on the right track.” He plucked an invisible piece of lint off his t-shirt and flicked it away.
“I followed you to that house that’s warded three ways from Sunday. It didn’t take me long to realize that your own house wasn’t warded against shifters, which was obviously a mistake.” He said, gesturing to my prone state. “All I had to do was wait for you to come home. That Obeah Man rarely follows you into the house anymore. Even if he had today, I’m sure I would have been able to remain undetected until he left.”
That’s when I realized where I had seen Rycon before. He had been the dark haired man smoking on the corner that day in Conrad’s beat-up Hornet.
I remembered earlier what I had done to Meredith. I absorbed her energy and took it into myself. In fact, if I focused, it was as if I still had a piece of her inside me. I knew if I tried hard enough, I could make something grow. Rycon was fast and strong. He was probably strong enough to snap the restraints.
What if I did to him what I had done to Meredith? Drain him until I was strong enough to escape and he was too weak to follow me? It seemed like the best chance I had. I would just have to go slowly so he didn’t notice what I was doing until it was too late.
22
I concentrated until my aura shimmered before my mind’s eye. I opened up one of my tiny black holes and shuddered as it started to slowly draw in Rycon’s humid energy.
