Chapter One
Gwendolyn Grady was sitting at her computer desk in her bedroom when her mother’s voice called to her from the kitchen. With a sigh, she closed her book and pushed it to the side before getting to her feet. She wasn’t sure what her mother wanted, but at ten thirty at night, it definitely couldn’t be good. As she closed her bedroom door behind her and headed down the stairs to the kitchen, she wondered what might be wrong.
When Gwen rounded the corner and stopped at the kitchen entryway, the first thing she noticed were the tears in her mother’s eyes. The last time Gwen had seen her mother cry was eight years ago on the day of her grandma’s funeral. But after that day, the tears had stopped, and her mother had held her emotions in check, hoping to spare her children from thinking she was too weak to take care of them.
“Mom? What’s wrong?” Gwen asked, sliding into the chair opposite her mother. Her mother took a deep breath and tried to give Gwen a smile, which only made the knot in her stomach get worse. If her mother was going to act brave and strong right now, something terrible must have happened.
Gabriel—Gwen’s older brother—plopped down in the chair beside Gwen, looking as equally bewildered as her. “What’s up? Who was that on the phone?”
The phone? Gwen looked at the phone that was gripped tightly between her mother’s hands and she got a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something terrible really had happened. And judging by the look on her mother’s face, it had happened to someone Gwen knew and cared about.
Mrs. Grady took another deep breath before speaking. “I’m afraid I got some bad news, and I wanted you to hear it from me. Your cousin Ginny is missing. She was walking back from a friend’s house and she never made it home.”
“When?”
“Last night. The police are searching for her as we speak, but so far there’s been no sign of her. Your aunt and uncle are very worried about her, and so am I. They’ve got the whole town out looking for her, but your aunt and uncle are holding out hope that she might have run away. It doesn’t seem likely, but I guess it’s better than thinking about the alternative.”
“But Ginny isn’t the type of girl to run away from home,” Gwen said quietly. “She loves her parents, she loves her friends, and she loves her school. There’s nothing for her to run away from.”
“I know,” her mother said just as quietly. Her lips were pursed and an unhealthy looking shade of white. “I’m positive Ginny wouldn’t run away, which makes this whole situation much more frightening. If she didn’t run away what happened to her? Where is she right now? There are a lot of unanswered questions right now.”
“Mom, I want to help look for Ginny,” Gwen said, getting to her feet. “She’s family. We should be out there looking for her, too!” Gwen looked at Gabe, who sat quietly in his chair, as if he were still trying to decipher what their mother had told them. “Gabe? Are you coming with us?”
He nodded. “Absolutely. If Ginny is in trouble, we should all be there to help her.”
“I thought you might want to come with me,” their mother said with a tiny, proud smile. “I’m leaving for Brighton first thing tomorrow morning, and if you and Gabe want to come with me, you’ll have to be ready to go by five thirty. We should get to Brighton just in time to join the search tomorrow morning.”
Their mother got to her feet and placed the phone on the charger before heading up the stairs to the bedroom she shared with their father. “I wonder what dad has to say about all of this,” Gabe said quietly, surprising her.
Gwen hadn’t even considered how her father might feel about this. He didn’t get along with his older brother, and the two had apparently had a huge falling out several years ago. The fight had been bad enough for her father to move his entire family away from Brighton when Gwen was very young. Their father hadn’t set foot in Brighton since then, so it had fallen to their mother to drive them to Brighton for their yearly summer visit, which only lasted for two incredibly short weeks.
“I wonder if dad is going with us,” Gwen said sadly. “He and Uncle Geoffrey might not get along anymore, but that isn’t Ginny’s fault. I would think he’d wanna be there to help find her.”
Gabe shrugged his broad shoulders. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” he said, looking down at her.
Gwen stared at her older brother, amazed not for the first time that she only had to look up a scant few inches. According to her brother, he was five foot nine and proud of it, but Gwen was sure that he was shorter than that, maybe only five foot eight or even less. Either way, he wasn’t much taller than her, and she knew that he hated it. He worked out a little obsessively to compensate.
Gabe had just turned twenty a few months ago, but he and Gwen had been mistaken for twins in the past, despite the fact that he was a whole three years older than her! With their shared curly black hair, thin build, and sterling gray eyes, they were the spitting image of their father. The only difference was their olive skin being a shade lighter than their father’s, thanks to their mother’s pale complexion.
“What are you staring at?” Gabe asked with more than a touch of annoyance.
“Nothing, baby-face,” Gwen said with a playful smirk.
He narrowed his eyes at her, but his lips tilted up in the hint of a smile. Gwen and her brother often messed around with one another, and neither of them had a problem with it as long as it was all done for fun. Gwen usually chose to tease her brother for his babyish appearance, and Gabe chose to highlight the fact that she was dyslexic. He knew that she didn’t really mind her brother’s light teasing about her poor penmanship and difficulty reading and focusing because she had accepted it years ago as a part of who she was.
Gabe reached over and ruffled her hair, much to her dismay. Her dark hair flowed well past her shoulders in tight curls, always managing to tangle itself into a rat’s nest. When Gabe ruffled her hair—which he did often—her hair became impossibly snarled and it took forever for her to brush it out.
Gwen smacked his hand away. “Dammit Gabe!”
“I heard that!” Their mother’s voice drifted down from the upstairs, and they both froze. “Don’t let me hear you using that kind of language again.”
Gwen looked at her brother and almost smiled, until she remembered the severity of their situation. When she thought of Ginny being away from home and only God knew where, she felt awful for messing around so playfully with her brother. Gabe put a hand on her shoulder, completely understanding her sudden mood shift. “Let’s go get packed. You know mom; she’ll leave us behind if we’re not ready in the morning.”
Gwen followed her brother upstairs, going in the opposite direction as they reached the landing. She went straight to her closet and grabbed her pink and gray duffel bags from the bottom corner. She began stuffing clothes into the bag, folding them so they would take up as little space as possible. She managed to cram four changes of clothes in each while still managing to buckle the bulging bags shut.
Gwen took her laptop off the desk and slid it into her computer bag, along with her charger cord and bright green headphones. After she had finished packing, she sat at her computer desk and stared out the window. It had been raining for the last hour or so, and the ground outside was quickly turning to mud. Gwen hoped it wasn’t raining at her aunt and uncle’s house, or the search effort would be severely hampered.
After a few minutes of watching the rain, Gwen turned away from the window, switched off her bedside lamp, and crawled under the covers. As she began to drift off, she had only one thought, and she repeated it until her eyes finally closed. Please let Ginny be okay…
Revelations (Brighton Wolves #1) Page 2