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“It might be easier if I just show you. Then you’ll understand why Cash thought you might be more helpful than the police.”
We left the living room and headed upstairs. As I’d suspected, the place was almost empty, with the exception of a tall Asian girl lying on her bed in one room, wearing brightly colored teal headphones, reading a copy of Vogue. She barely glanced up as we passed. I could hear the thump of hip-hop through her headphones.
All the other bedrooms were empty, their doors ajar. Belongings were still in place, but the whole floor felt abandoned. It was the middle of the morning, when most of the girls were probably in class, but this was different. The house felt empty and soulless.
It was incredibly unnerving, given how bright and cheerful the space pretended to be.
“Where is everyone?” Wilder asked. Apparently he was just as put off by it as I was.
“About half of the girls are in class right now. They’ll be in and out through the day. But some of them have decided to stay elsewhere for a while. With boyfriends or in friends’ dorms.”
“Why?” I got the feeling I wasn’t going to like the answer.
A high-pitched, bloodcurdling wail tore through the house. The sound was so infused with terror I froze in place, panic gripping me. Wilder, his protective instincts taking over, moved in front of me. But to guard against what?
He and I could both determine the origin of sounds, especially big ones like a scream. It was how we were able to hunt and track. This hadn’t come from behind us, where the girl was in her bedroom. Nor had it come from any of the other bedrooms we’d passed along the way.
It was everywhere, leaching into the air, but nowhere at the same time.
It was as if the scream were coming through surround-sound speakers, hitting us from every angle at once.
“Please, please, please,” came a very small voice, this too echoing from all possible sources.
The hair on my arms and neck stood up, my skin erupting in goose bumps. Whatever was happening here was deeply and completely unnatural. The animal aspect of me was so unsettled she had no interest in hanging around to fight. She was telling me to take Wilder, Cash, Tansy, and the other girl, and get everyone out of this house immediately.
Burn it down.
The rational human part of me also insisted that leaving was the most logical thing to do when the very walls of a house were screaming and begging.
Except Tansy was looking at me like I was her savior. And Cash had believed I could help with this, to such an extent he’d been willing to bring me here to meet his new girlfriend. Something he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to do in any other circumstance.
Somehow, I had become their last and only hope.
Damn, I hated being so reliable.
I did not have time to deal with this. Not with a dead body and a pack in danger of media exposure. I had to find out what had really happened to Liam Casey, if I was going to be able to keep Emmett and Mason out of prison and our pack out of the paper.
Screaming walls and missing girls weren’t something I could just pencil in. Mags would tell me as much, and she knew my schedule better than I did.
Yet here I was, not budging.
“What was that?” I asked, coolly as possible. “Laura again?”
Tansy, a fresh crop of tears building in her eyes, shook her head. Her hands were trembling violently, and Cash grabbed the one closest to him, offering her a comforting squeeze. He had always been so good at that, knowing when he was needed and how he could soothe the people around him. If he hadn’t gone into law, he would have made a remarkable nurse or doctor.
“Who?” This time I didn’t bother asking what.
“We think it’s Heidi, but we’re not sure.”
“And Alexandra?”
Tansy half-shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. But you hear it, right? You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“I honestly don’t know what to think right now, but you being crazy isn’t even on my top-ten list.”
She let out a tiny sigh of relief and held Cash’s hand close to her chest.
The more I looked at the two of them together, the more it made sense to me. Cash needed to play the hero. He loved to be depended on. A suitable partner for him would be a smart woman who leaned on him.
