“I would listen to her, if I were you,” I warned him. “She’s tougher than she looks.”
“Whatever, man. You’re just pussy-whipped,” he said to me with a shake of his head. “Letting some crazy-ass Mexican bitch like her boss you around. You’re nuts.”
“What the fuck did you just call me?” Rivera growled through her teeth.
I could swear for a split second that her eyes caught fire with anger. Her legs were practically pawing at the ground like a bull who’d seen a red flag. I decided to stay out of it and enjoy the show. While I had no desire to get caught in the crossfire, the truth was that I was dying to know how this would all play out.
I put my money on Elena.
“Yeah, if you’re talking about chasing perps in alternate dimensions, I’d say that makes you a bonafide crazy-ass bitch,” he sang at her, rocking his head from side to side.
“No, that’s not what you said.” She took one step closer. Then another. That moron didn’t shut up. He just kept right on taunting her.
“I bet the FBI only hired you to fill a quota, and now my tax dollars are goin’ to some mouthy little bitch in big girl boots with an even bigger chip on her shoulder. You think you can just come into our hometown, waving your fancy badge at us and boss us around and—”
That miserable fucker didn’t get the chance to finish his sentence. Rivera made a wild swing at his jaw, then faked him out and landed a solid knee deep into his crotch.
Now, there’s getting hit in the nuts, and then there’s getting hit. In. The. Nuts. This was the kind of hit that didn’t just make me cringe—it was the kind of hit that made my balls try to crawl back up into my body until it was safe to come back out. We all watched as officer Davis sank to the ground and fell over in the fetal position. I’m not saying he deserved it, but . . . he shouldn’t have poked the bear.
“What do you think about my big girl boots now?” Rivera coolly asked, standing over him like the badass she was. Davis was emitting a high-pitched whine as he tried not to cry. “C’mon, Davis. How do you like them?”
Davis made a choking sound and then puked all over the grass.
“Alright then,” she said, tossing her long pink hair over her shoulder like it was no big deal. “If you want to be involved in this case, great. If not, great.”
“Hey! What the hell are y’all doin’ over there?” came an urgent voice from behind us. Well shit. If McKinney told Harris that my partner had just assaulted an officer while I stood by and watched, we were most definitely off the case. Rivera and I both turned to see the sheriff climb over a fallen tree, waving with his hands like an air traffic controller.
“Get the fuck over here!” he yelled.
We ran towards him, leaving Davis and his buddy behind. There was a fear in McKinney’s eyes and his cheeks were red and flushed from running. Before we reached him, the officers’ radios sprung to life with a muffled voice masked in crackling static.
“Code Adam!” said a woman’s voice. “Code Adam, Code Adam!”
“What’s happened?” asked Rivera as she reached McKinney.
“What do you think’s happened?” he said, breathlessly. “There’s another kidnapping! Seven-year-old girl went missing from two miles east.”
“Fuck!” I gasped. “How can that happen?”
“We need a BOLO out immediately,” said McKinney.
“How long has she been gone?” I asked.
“Forty-five minutes?”
“And you’re sure she hasn’t just gotten lost in the woods?”
McKinney was too upset to give me the stink-eye for suggesting a rational explanation.
“Positive! Her parents said she stepped two feet off the trail and they were watching her the whole time. She ran around a big tree and never reappeared from the other side of it.”
“Shit, that sounds just like all the others,” said Rivera.
“Pretty damn near close,” I agreed. “How can someone walk behind a tree and never be seen again?”
“Because we’re not dealing with a normal kidnapper,” said McKinney. “This isn’t even from our world.”
Officer Davis was looking increasingly uncomfortable. I didn’t think that was possible. Turning to look at his officer, McKinney narrowed his eyes and motioned for him to get into the squad car.
“Believe me, kid. This isn’t a time for logic. This is a time for Rivera and her willingness to chase down perps in alternate dimensions.”
Davis’s eyes widened in a mild panic.
“Yeah, I heard you,” McKinney told him in a low roar. “Talk to her like that again and I’ll chop your fucking tongue off, boy.”
10
Elena
The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the Navigator were two hysterical parents pacing back and forth in front of their parked sedan. Since the call came in about their daughter, the parking lot and trail they’d been walking was cordoned off. McKinney was in his squad car, giving an update on the situation over the radio. Climbing beneath the tape, I showed the distraught parents my badge and they both ran at me.
“Oh, thank god you’re here!” the mom cried.
She looked the same age as me, but her eyes were red and there were deep lines down the sides of her mouth from the stress of the last hour.
“The police in this town don’t do shit,” she said, clutching her blonde hair. “The kidnappings have been going on for months now but they don’t do nothing about it!”
Hawthorne caught up with me and placed a light hand on her shoulder.
“We’re here to find her now.”
“But are you?” she asked as thick tears fell from her eyes. “Why do you think you’ll be able to find Rylee? None of those other kids have been found apart from Haley.”
“None of them,” added her husband, a stout man with a bushy, red beard poking out from a UT Knoxville t-shirt. He looked like a raging, helpless bull stuffed into human clothing, his meaty hands clenching together in fists.
“What was Rylee wearing when you last saw her?” Hawthorne asked as he took out his little notebook.
“Um, a pink unicorn t-shirt, purple leggings, and red tennis shoes.
“Show me where Rylee went missing,” I said, trying to keep my voice as calm as I could. The last thing anyone needed here was more emotions, although laying into Davis had left me refreshingly calm.
“She was up there,” said the mom, already walking away towards the path. “Right here. We hadn’t been out of the car for more than two minutes when she walked over towards the tree.”
“What kind of tree was it?” I asked.
She looked at me and furrowed her brow.
“I don’t know. A big one.”
“Alright. Can you show it to me?”
After a few more seconds, we arrived at a gradual bend in the path just as a light summer rain began to fall. Each drop hit the hard, dry ground with a soft pitter-pat. The more drops that fell from the sky and sank into the ground, the more it gave off the smell of the grass, moss, and dirt. That smell was like Xanax to me. I immediately began to relax.
“This is the tree,” said the mom.
“Ahh . . . an ash tree,” I sighed. “Of course.”
“What difference does that make?” asked the mom. If I told her the real reason, she wouldn’t handle it well. So I didn’t exactly lie when I said,
“It’s pretty. It makes sense why Rylee wanted a closer look.”
“Yeah, I guess,” the dad said with a helpless shrug. “When Rylee ran towards it we didn’t think nothing of it. Why would we?”
“And where did she go?” asked Hawthorne. Which direction did she walk? Can you try to retrace her steps for us?”
The dad walked towards the tree and pointed around it.
“She walked up to it like this,” he said, stepping around the trunk.
We could see that as he walked behind it, his large body was still visible, but seven-year-old Rylee’s wouldn’t have been. A small c
hild could’ve easily disappeared behind the medium-sized trunk. But they were supposed to appear again.
“So she just walked around here like this,” he said. “We had our eyes on her the whole time so we thought nothing bad could happen. We had no idea she could just . . . she could just . . . walk behind it and disappear.”
His voice broke and he buried his face in his hands.
“Oh, God she’s gone forever, isn’t she? We’ve lost her. I told you we shouldn’t have come here, Maggie. I fucking told you!”
“How were we supposed to know this would happen?” the mom cried back. “We were watching her the whole fucking time! What else could we have done besides handcuffing her to our sides?”
“We knew about the kids disappearing! It’s all anybody’s been talking about for months! How could we have been so stupid as to think it couldn’t happen to Rylee? It’s happened to fuck knows how many kids in this town.”
The dad cried harder, balling his hands up into fists and hitting the side of his head in a mixture of pain and frustration.
“Please,” I said, holding onto his hand in an attempt to calm him. “Try to take a deep breath. We’re going to do all we can to find her.”
“There’s still a chance she’s not far from here,” said Logan, sounding hopeful. “For all we know, she’s playing a joke on you and hiding in the brush somewhere. Kids don’t always understand what’s okay to joke about and what’s not. It’s only been less than an hour.”
But as I looked into his eyes, I could see he was just bullshitting them to keep them optimistic. He knew as well as I did that little Rylee was gone. Taken. Captured and taken to another dimension.
Well . . . maybe not that last bit, but for Rylee’s sake, I hoped the evidence was starting to add up with him.
I could feel my whole body become gripped with fear and tension. How long would it be until another child vanished?
Think fast, I told myself. You need to think of a way to go back to The Hollows and find those kids.
But I knew it wasn’t as simple as that. It may have been a world I was once part of, but I wasn’t welcome there anymore. I hadn’t been welcome there in years and years.
“I do have to ask you something, and please don’t take this personally. I’m just trying to cover all my bases, alright?” Logan said to the couple. The mom wiped her face and nodded. “If you knew about the disappearances, why did you come here?”
They both looked at him sorrowfully. He held up a hand and gave a sympathetic smile.
“I’m not judging here, okay? I get it—school’s out for the summer, kids need to burn off some energy, it’s a gorgeous day. I’m only asking because it might help lead to Rylee’s whereabouts. I would’ve thought parents wouldn’t want to bring their kids into the woods when there’s so many abductions around here.”
They both looked to each other, then back at Logan. I knew that look. They were about to tell him something. Something good.
“Tell them,” urged the mom as she nudged her husband. “Tell them about the dreams.”
The husband clapped a hand to his forehead and let out a long, exhausted exhale.
“Rylee kept having these really vivid dreams,” he began.
“Anything specific?” Logan asked while he jotted down notes in that trusty pad of paper. The dad gave an anxious nod.
“She kept dreaming about a woman dressed in silver who lived in the trees. She wouldn’t stop talking about her.”
The tension in my stomach intensified until it felt as though my intestines were wrapped around someone’s fist.
“A silver dress . . . ” I said. “What else did she look like?”
“Rylee said her hair was black and flowed like a waterfall,” said the mom.
“And her eyes were the same color,” added the husband. “She said she had huge black eyes.”
While Logan continued to scribble in his notebook, I started to feel a sweeping dizziness enter my head, and nausea rise up in my stomach. I knew those eyes. I’d stared into them myself when I was a child.
“Rylee dreamed of her?” I asked. “Have other children dreamed about her?”
The dad shrugged.
“I don’t know. All I know is that Rylee kept talking about the pretty lady in silver from her dreams. She told us she lived in the woods.”
“She wouldn’t stop talking about her,” said the mom. “It actually became quite a problem because she wouldn’t talk about anything else. She dreamed about her last night, didn’t she? Freddy?”
“Yeah, she did, which is why we came here today. We live on the other side of that hill.” Freddy turned and pointed in the opposite direction of where the ash tree stood. “Our property butts up against this forest. Anyway, Rylee kept insisting that she had to come down here. She said the pretty lady in silver had a present for her.”
“So you came here together, to make sure nothing out of the ordinary happened?” asked Hawthorne.
“She wouldn’t stop asking,” said the dad. “I’d never seen her want anything as much as this before. She didn’t even behave like this when she wanted an iPad for Christmas. You’d have thought the world was about to end the way she was freakin’ out.”
“And she’s a good kid,” his wife pointed out. “But you’d never believe it if you’d seen the way she was behaving. She was throwing tantrums like she did when she was two and three. But seven? There’s no excuse. She told us she had to come down to the woods and that was that. We had to keep the doors and windows locked. That’s how bad it got.”
“So we thought there was no harm in bringing her down for a little while,” said the dad, regretfully. “Just to shut her up so she realized the woman she was always talking about didn’t exist.”
The four of us stared at the ash tree as though Rylee would reappear from the other side.
“Did she mention a name?” asked Hawthorne.
“Huh?”
“The lady in silver. Did Rylee ever give her a name?”
“She never called her by a name,” said her mom. “But she drew a picture of her once and wrote a name underneath. I’ve got a picture of it somewhere on my phone.”
“Can you text it to me?” I asked, handing her my card. I could feel the breath become sucked out of me as I anticipated what I’d see or hear next. I already knew exactly what that name would be.
“What did she write?” Logan asked, blissfully ignorant of who and what we were dealing with.
“I think it said Solana,” said the mom, peering at her phone. Then her face softened as she found the photo. “Yeah. Queen Solana.”
She held up the screen and I almost puked right there. My knees felt as though they’d turned to jelly and suddenly my legs stopped working. I felt myself fall against Logan as the dizziness overwhelmed me. The last thing I remembered before everything went black was the intense smell of grass and mud as my face hit the ground.
11
Logan
Rivera was so pretty when she was unconscious. Mainly because it was the only time she ever shut the hell up. Unfortunately, that serene moment was blown to bits when her green eyes fluttered open.
“Where the fuck am I? And why the hell are you staring at me like that?”
“Hey, slacker. You feeling okay?”
She dragged herself up to a seated position and rubbed her eyes.
“Where are we?”
“The urgent care clinic in Scruggsville,” I explained. Oooh, that stink-eye was out in full force. Rivera scowled as she took in her surroundings.
“Clinic? It looks like a fucking bomb shelter,” she griped, recoiling at the chipped gray paint on the walls and the low ceilings. A fluorescent light flickered to an erratic beat.
“Yeah. It’s Scruggsville, not DC,” I reminded her. “Don’t worry. I’ve met your nurse and she’s great.”
Rivera rubbed her eyes again, trying to sort out her thoughts on how she’d arrived at this place.
“How were you able
to meet my nurse? You’re not family.”
“Easy. I told her I was your husband.”
Rivera’s long dark lashes blinked in confusion, so I added to my story.
“I also told her I needed you back in working order as soon as possible because we’ve got four boys at home who need help with school. Since I’m working two jobs to make ends meet, I don’t have time to help them. They just kind of run wild. They don’t even help with chores like cooking and cleaning. I told the nurse what I’d really like is for you to help me open a miniature golf course. It’s been my lifelong dream.”
By the grace of god I managed to keep a straight face. I waited on pins and needles for Rivera’s reaction.
Three.
Two.
One.
“What the actual fuck, Hawthorne!” she howled. Then she started to wrench her face into that familiar, pinched, angry expression that I knew. “Did you really say all that shit to my nurse?”
“Hell no.” That was about all I could manage to get out before I started laughing at her. “That’s the plot of Overboard.” The pink-hair punk ass in the hospital bed just glared at me. “You know, with Goldie Hawn? Kurt Russell?” Rivera wasn’t amused.
“It’s something my dad used to do to my mom when she was still alive,” I explained, still laughing. “Since he was privy to a lot of sensitive information, he couldn’t exactly tell her how his day went when he came home from work. So he’d tell her the plot of a movie they’d seen and see how long it took for her to figure out.”
Rivera glanced around the almost empty ward, purposely avoiding eye contact with me. I wasn’t sure if she was being standoffish on purpose or whether she was just embarrassed.
“Can you please tell me what really happened?” she asked. Wow. That might’ve been the first time she’d said please and sincerely meant it. Her voice was slightly hoarse and her eyes were red from rubbing them. Although she didn’t sound it, she looked vulnerable to me. At least, she did in that moment. I chalked it up to old memories of my mom lying in a hospital bed.
“You passed out,” I told her, suddenly feeling sheepish. “I tried to catch you, but . . . it all happened so out of the blue. You really hit the ground hard.”
Wiretaps & Whiskers (The Faerie Files Book 1) Page 10