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“Something happened,” she says softly. “Something your mind wrapped into the dream because it couldn’t face it. I think you hold the answer to why our women are going missing. I think you saw who takes them.”
Those last words jolt me right out of the weird trance she’s put me in, or that this whole night has put me in, more like. What the hell is this? Is she trying to get me to confess to something I didn’t do?
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say. “I have a bad dream about my mother and a man snatching me away from her. It started after my grandparents died and she took me to live with my father and proceeded to abandon me completely. I’m not over that and I probably never will be. But it’s nothing more than that.”
I figured out as much over the years. The dream is just a reaction to all the shock and pain of my last days here on the reservation and possibly my first year at Sanctuary where I worried about my father dying constantly.
She nods serenely again. “You’re not ready to see.”
She’s making me mad now, with her calm whispered nonsensical words.
“If Tina is missing we need to go look for her,” I say. “Eagle and I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Or anyone else’s. Nor has any other member of my family, a blood relative or otherwise.”
Because yes, I do consider the men in my father’s MC my family, just as he does.
“I know you didn’t harm anyone,” she says and it’s a huge relief.
“But you will have to face what you know, and the sooner the better,” she adds and sends my heart thumping again. “But not tonight. Let’s return to the fire now.”
She stands up and walks away. And I will follow. But first I need to sit here for a few moments and let all the swirling pieces of weirdness, pain and fear her words stirred up in my mind settle again. I’m all for accepting ancient knowledge and wisdom. But this experience was intense.
* * *
EAGLE
The grey-haired woman returns alone, appearing out of the darkness to stand next to the fire like some sort of ghost. I leap to my feet, looking around for Lily, but she’s nowhere.
The woman—Sharina or whatever—touches my forearm, sending a river of warmth up my muscles. “She’ll be right back. She needs a moment.”
“Why?” I bark at her. “What did you do to her?”
The harsh tone of my voice makes more than one person around the fire gasp.
“Don’t worry,” Sharina says and sits down next to Miriam. “And don’t waste your energy being mad at me. You’ll need it for other things.”
She takes a small packet of chips from the bag at Miriam’s feet and opens it noisily. It’s the spicy, fiery red stuff that burned my entire mouth when I had two earlier and her chowing down on it, chewing noisily, clashes so bad with the otherworldly picture of being a seer of dreams or whatever she claimed to be before that I’m about to start shouting at her to tell me exactly where Lily is.
But then I feel her walk up behind me. She laces her arm around mine and clasps my hand, her touch cool and refreshing like it always is.
“I’m fine,” she says and guides me to sit down again with her at my side. “But Tina might not be. We should go look for her.”
The older man—Rick, while his son’s name is Darius—looks up at the sky and shakes his head.
“The night is still too dark and there’s no moon now,” he says calmly and takes another bite of the flat bread wrapped meat that they brought a whole sack of. It’s spicy too, but not as bad as the chips.
Miriam hands Lily one of the sandwich wraps.
“I told them about the headlights we saw and where,” I say. “Apparently it couldn’t have been any of them. So I think I should go see if that car is still there.”
She leans against me even more, the untouched sandwich hanging from her fingers. “It’ll be morning soon, we’ll go together then.”
“We’ll all go searching at dawn,” Miriam says. “But there’s no point lumbering around in the dark. We’ll miss more than we see that way.”
The volunteer with the glasses—Mike—clears his throat. “If you think something bad happened to her you should call the police. Or the FBI, whoever has jurisdiction here.”
Darius laughs harshly at that. “No one cares that our women are going missing. We have to take care of that ourselves.”
Mike gulps. “But… I don’t understand… “
