Shine: Season One (Shine Season Book 1)

by William Bernhardt

  “Ms. Conrad?” Lillie asked.

  She nodded and took a seat in the booth. Her daughter squeezed in beside her. “You’re the Wheaton sisters?”

  “Yes,” Lillie answered.

  “This is my oldest daughter, Karmen. I hope we’re not late.” She smoothed strands of mussed hair away from her face. Her voice cracked as she spoke. I noticed one of her hands trembling as she placed it in her lap.

  “How can we help you?” Lillie asked.

  She forced a smile. “I guess you’ve heard about my daughter?”

  “She’s one of the missing teens?” I asked.

  “Yes, her name’s Ashleigh. She’s only thirteen. God, she’s just a baby.” She held her breath for a moment. “She’s all we’ve got.”

  Karmen rested her fingers on her mother’s hand.

  “We’re sorry for what you’re going through,” Lillie said.

  She nodded.

  “Ms. Conrad, why did you come to us? Why not ask the police for help?”

  “I already have. But they can’t help. Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “They won’t listen, and . . .” she exhaled. “And I can’t tell them everything, you know?”

  Lillie leaned forward. “What can’t you tell the police?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Ms. Conrad, you came to us for help. What can’t you tell the police?”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s nothing really. Forget I said anything.” She snatched her purse off the table and rummaged through it.

  “Ms. Conrad,” I said, sinking my southern drawl into the words. “My sister and I don’t agree on music or boys or pretty much anything, but there is one thing we do agree on. We don’t believe in blabbing. Keeping secrets is what we do best. If there’s something you need to tell us, then do it.”

  The hum of voices quieted as the diner’s morning rush ebbed. She stared out the window. Choppercars whizzed around the towering buildings. Below the skyscrapers, a sea of yellow taxis filled the street, but she seemed focused on something else. “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “Not even for Ashleigh?” Karmen asked in a quiet voice.

  She stared at Karmen. A look passed between them. I wondered if they’d had this conversation before. “No.” She looked at me with a steely determination in her eyes. “This isn’t why I came here.” She pulled a picture from her purse and passed it across the table.

  I took the photo. The girl looked like her mother, with light hair and the same nervous smile.

  “I want you to find her,” Ms. Conrad said, “not interrogate me. She’s been gone four days. She was with some friends on her way home from school. The cops searched the area but didn’t find anything. Please help her. I know you’ve found people before. I’ll pay as much as you want.”

  “First we need information. Anything you can tell us will be helpful. No secrets, no lies.”

  Tears shone in her eyes. “They’d take her if they found out,” she whispered.

  “Who would?”

  Karmen squeezed her mother’s hand. “Mom, it’s okay. You can trust them.”

  I studied Karmen. She seemed like an honest person, but I wondered why she trusted us. She’d never met me or my sister.

  Ms. Conrad exhaled, then replaced the picture in her purse. “The government. Ashleigh is a Shine.”

  So that’s why she didn’t want to tell us. Shines were people with unusual abilities. If the government found out, Ashleigh would be taken to a facility. Probably never see her mother again. No wonder Ms. Conrad guarded her daughter’s secret.

  “How long have you known?” I asked her.

  “Not long. Karmen noticed it first. Ashleigh started levitating objects in her sleep about six months ago. She didn’t even know she was doing it. Then one morning at breakfast she levitated her oatmeal.” She let out a breathy laugh. “Right out of her bowl, spilled it all over herself.”

  “And on me,” Karmen added.

  “What did you do after that?” Lillie asked.

  “I made her promise to keep it a secret. I couldn’t let them take her away from me.”

  “So your daughter’s been hiding her abilities for six months. Are you sure she didn’t tell anyone?”

  She didn’t answer. Her silence spoke volumes.

  “Who did she tell?” I asked.

  “It was her best friend, Gemma. Ashleigh came home from school one day. She was acting strange. I asked her what was going on and she said Gemma was a Shine, too, just like her. I begged Ashleigh not to tell Gemma about her own abilities, but she wouldn’t listen. The day Ashleigh went missing, Gemma went missing as well.”

  “Both on the way home from school?”

  She nodded.

  “Could the government have found out and taken them?”

  “No. The government has to contact the parents first, fill out paperwork. They wouldn’t just kidnap her. This was someone else.”

  “What about the SSS?”

  “Maybe. But if they did it, wouldn’t we know by now?”

  “True,” Lillie said. “What about Revens?”

  “The bounty hunters?”

  “It makes sense.”

  “But we’ve got the same problem. Revens wouldn’t be quiet about it. If they’re trying to collect a bounty on a Shine, the police would’ve known.” I turned to Ms. Conrad. “Do you have any idea who might have taken them?”

  That look in her eyes returned, but this time I knew what it was. Terror. “There’s a street gang, they call themselves the Xeros. They take Shines like her—the ones who’ve just discovered their abilities—and make them fight against each other. It’s an awful game, most of them die, and if they don’t die, they wish they did.”

  I’d never heard of the gang, and Lillie and I usually knew about groups like that. They must’ve been very good at hiding. But that begged the question. How did Ms. Conrad know? Lillie must’ve been thinking the same thing.

  “How do you know about this gang?” my sister asked.

  “Because I was fourteen when they took me.”

  I almost laughed. “How is that possible? Shines have only been around for a few years.”

  “The Xeros haven’t always used Shines. Before that, they went after anyone different, anyone they thought would be interesting in a fight. I’d been a resident at a mental institution a few times. They thought I had issues, so they took me.”

  Lillie stared at Ms. Conrad. “What sort of issues?”

  “Depression, anger problems, that sort of thing. Nothing major, nothing that warranted what they did to me.”

  “They forced you to fight?”

  She nodded.

  “How did you escape?”

  She pressed her swollen eyes closed.

  Karmen turned to me. “She’d rather not talk about it.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Ms. Conrad said. “They need to know.” Her voice softened. “I knew I was about to die,” she said. “There were others stronger than me, more vicious. When we weren’t fighting, they kept us tied up. One day, I found a box cutter on the field. I kept it. I used it to cut through the ropes. I’d almost escaped when they found me again.

  “The next time, they chained me. I still had my box cutter. I knew what I had to do.” She took a deep breath, and then carefully rolled up her sleeve. Her forearm twisted around with a click. She removed a prosthetic arm from her elbow. She placed it on the table with the quiet clanking of plastic against metal.

  “No one else made it out alive.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  When you want information in New York, go to the digital Central library in Manhattan. When you want information that’s classified, illegal, and questionably true, go see Max.

  Max is one of those guys who never smiles. His sagging, jowl-like cheeks are proof of it. Instead of speaking, he usually grunts, another reason for said cheeks. He owns a pawn shop in Brooklyn. The place was once a massive paper bookstore. There aren’t many boo
ks left in there now. Most of the shelves are filled with Max’s collection.

  Max has unusual ideas when it comes to his hoard. He collects Shine castoffs—as in t-shirts that once belonged to Shines, sunglasses, high school diplomas, that sort of thing. He’s like a Shine stalker, without actually stalking.

  It amazes me that he can sell the things. But he does.

  Lillie and I entered the shop to find Max behind the counter, dusting off one of his rare Shine cheerleading trophies. I have no idea where he got these things.

  “Howdy, Max,” I said as we stopped next to the counter.

  He grunted.

  “Found any new Shine candy bar wrappers lately?”

  He eyed me. “You wanna buy one?”

  “No, thanks,” Lillie answered.

  “You seriously have a Shine candy bar wrapper? I was kidding.”

  He pointed to a glass box under the counter. Sure enough, a candy bar wrapper sat in the case. He’d pasted a price tag to the front. I’d have to pay half my month’s rent to afford it. And I live in New York.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “Information,” Lillie answered.

  “It’ll cost you.”

  “We can pay next week,” I said, assuming we found Ms. Conrad’s daughter and didn’t get killed by the Xeros in the process.

  “It’ll cost extra.”

  “How much?” Lillie asked.

  “Two-fifty.”

  I whistled. “That’s double what you usually charge.”

  “Times are tough.”

  “Yeah, for all of us.”

  “You want information or not?”

  We barely had enough money to last the rest of the month. Beggars made better money than we did. I never claimed that hellraising was a lucrative career. “Fine, you’ll have two-fifty by the end of next week. What can you tell us about the Xeros?”

  He stopped polishing the trophy. A rat scurried through a rack somewhere. “Nothing,” he said quietly.

  I found that hard to believe. Max knew everything about the seedy underbelly of New York. “Really? Word is they’ve been abducting teenage Shines and pitting them against each other. You sure you don’t know anything?”

  He glanced at the dingy glass doors. A steady crowd of people walked past. “You didn’t hear this from me.”

  “Fine.”

  “And it’ll be an extra hundred.”

  “Max, come on,” Lillie said. “Give us a break. We’ll take you out for lunch or something, but you know we don’t have that kind of money.”

  “No money, no information.”

  Lillie clenched her teeth. “Fine. An extra hundred. But that’s it.”

  Max placed the trophy on the counter, then meandered to the front of the shop, pulled the blinds shut, and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED. He took his time walking back to us, his face set in its usual scowl.

  “There’s a reason why you haven’t heard of the Xeros. They don’t exist. At least not to most folks.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They aren’t like other gangs. They keep quiet most of the time, except once or twice a year when they have their games.” He said the word games the way a priest would say the word adultery. “They live where we live, go to work, have families. You’d never know one if you saw one. They love violence more than anything else. They get their jollies watching those girls kill each other. They take ‘em young for a reason.”

  “Because they can’t control their abilities yet,” I put in.

  He nodded. Shines were like land mines waiting to be triggered. Six months ago, a Shine had supposedly taken out half of Seattle. Blown it to bits and razed it to the ground. The same thing had happened in Santa Monica. Since then, Shines were kept under close scrutiny. They were massively unpopular with the general population. They government took them for rehabilitation, though no one knew exactly what was being done with them.

  “With that much energy all in one place, why haven’t they blown up New York?”

  “They go underground, real guarded place, hard to get into.”

  “Where is it?” Lillie asked.

  “There’s an abandoned field where the Yankees Stadium used to be. Might check there.”

  “Ah.” Made sense. No one went there since the explosion leveled the place. Rumor was the empty field was radioactive. Whether it was true or not I had no idea, but it made a perfect place for a rogue gang to hide.

  “I guess we should check out that field,” I said to Lillie.

  “Guess so,” she answered. We headed for the door when Max stopped us with a grunt.

  “You can’t go there,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “They’ll kill you.” He said it with certainty, as if he were telling us that New York was crowded.

  “We can handle them.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Max,” Lillie said. “You know us. We’ve beaten guys like this before. Where’s the confidence, man?”

  “Have you ever seen a mob? What they say goes. Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. Doesn’t matter if it’s something you would never do. When those Xeros go underground, they aren’t human anymore. They’re a mob. They don’t care about morals. They’ll kill you and won’t regret it. Trust me on this, leave it alone. Stay away from that stadium. Stay away from the Xeros.”

  “I never realized you cared so much about us,” I said.

  He grunted.

  “Max, we’ll be fine,” Lillie added.

  “Let me show you something before you leave. You might change your mind.” Max turned to the wall behind him. He pulled a wooden chest off a shelf and hefted it onto the counter. I stifled a sneeze as he dusted the trunk off and opened the latch.

  Unoiled hinges squealed as he pried the lid back. “I’ve been going down to that stadium for years now. I wait till they’ve all cleared out and then I make my move. Found some real interesting stuff.”

  He pulled out a stringy scrap of cloth. Dark stains almost blotted out the words, My mom went to Las Vegas and all I got was this lousy. . . .

  He pulled out more clothing that looked similar to the first. Jeans with bullet holes, blouses ripped in half, blood-smeared tank tops.

  My stomach contents roiled. I wished I’d skipped breakfast.

  “Here’s one,” Max said as he pulled out a skeletal hand held together with black twine. “It took me hours to find all the pieces, but I finally did.” He held it closer and that’s when I noticed it. Tiny hairline fractures crisscrossed the hand’s surface. It must’ve taken him months to piece this thing back into its original form.

  “This one didn’t know how to use her powers yet. She literally blew herself up.”

  He placed it on top of the other remains. His eyes hardened as he rummaged through the box. “Just one more before you leave.” He tightened his fist around something. It took me a moment to realize what it was. A tiny tooth.

  “This is all I could find of her. Most people lose all their baby teeth by the age of eleven or twelve. This one was nine, maybe ten, when they found her.”

  “Good God,” Lillie whispered.

  With reverent hands, Max returned the tooth to the box. A hush fell over the room as we stared.

  A child. I never heard of a Shine that young. They must have made a mistake.

  Max was right. These people weren’t human. They were monsters.

  I suppose Max’s little clownfest was supposed to scare us off. But now, more than ever, I wanted to find Ashleigh.

  “Listen to me,” Max said. “I already know you two are crazy, so I won’t get in your way if you decide to go down there. But I’ve given you fair warning. Don’t come crying to me if you get yourselves blown up.”

  “We won’t,” Lillie said.

  “Don’t think we could anyway if we’re blown up.”

  Max scowled.

  “Do you know of anyone who’s ever gone after them?” Lillie asked.

 
“Cops won’t mess with the place. But the parents of those kids go down there all the time. Course they never come out.”

  “So the parents have tried. Anyone else? Anyone with some smack?” No offense to the kids’ parents, but they would’ve been emotionally compromised. They wouldn’t have been in the best condition to combat an entire mob.

  “Nephi Reno. Two years ago. Got his head blown off.”

  “Right.”

  “And the Gordon gang. Twelve of them. Don’t know what happened, but no one’s heard of them since.”

  “Is that all?”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “That many, huh?”

  He nodded.

  Lillie turned to me. “Think we can handle this kind of thing?”

  “We’re good on ammo. We’ve got the extra .45 calibers we found at the Mason drug bust. Plus there’s the Uzi if you feel like packing it down there.”

  “Too bulky. We’ll need to go in quiet, find the girl and get out of there.”

  “Knives and flares. Got it. What about the others?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can’t just leave them there.”

  Max propped his elbows on the counter and leaned forward. The look in his face reminded me of my mom right before she chewed me up one side and down the other. “No way. Not a chance on this planet you’ll get ‘em all out.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” I asked him. “Leave the girls there so they can kill each other?”

  “Better than getting yourselves killed.”

  “Max, sometimes I wonder about you,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Let’s go,” Lillie said. “We’ll pay you in a week.”

  We got to the door when Max decided he needed to have the last word. “I’ll be collecting off your corpses.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Any ideas where the entrance is?” Lillie asked me.

  We stood on a field of withered grass where Yankees Stadium once stood. Nighttime air smelling of sea salt and wood smoke brushed our cheeks. I pulled my jacket closer as the chill seeped through my clothing and bit at my bones.