Forgotten Specters: The Fated Wings Series Book 2

by C. R. Jane

  "Beckham?" Eva said, her voice bringing me out of my reverie. She was looking at me inquiringly. I grinned reassuringly at her.

  "Want to get breakfast with me? And then I thought we could catch a movie before your shift?" I asked her hopefully. It wasn't often that Damon was busy, and I could be ensured that he wouldn't interrupt us. I was grateful that Mason was held up on his tour. I knew he was probably dying right now, literally and figuratively, without being able to see her in person. I was still quizzical how he was going to go so long without feeding on anything but the emotions generated during his concerts. I was pretty sure he had been having some sort of sexual activity every day before he met Eva.

  "Can we go see your new movie?" she asked hopefully. I groaned. I hated watching myself in movies. And trying to gauge if she was liking it the whole time would be miserable.

  "I saw Beyond Eden. You were breathtaking in it," she told me, her eyes lighting up as she described her favorite parts. Suddenly her seeing as many movies of mine as possible didn't seem like such a bad idea. Damon and Mason had both been able to impress her with their skills, I needed to start trying to impress her with mine.

  As was her new habit according to Damon, Eva got dressed in her closet. I hated to break it to her, but it got me hot just thinking about her changing clothes in the same room as me, even if I couldn't see anything. Eva emerged from the closet, looking amazing as usual in tight black skinny jeans, and an off the shoulder black top. She applied some red lipstick in a mirror and I struggled to hide my reaction. Visions of those lips wrapped around my cock surged into my head and I had to start thinking of movie quotes to calm myself down.

  Unaware of my thoughts, Eva put her arm in mine. I grabbed a baseball cap to try and disguise myself until we could make it to the car waiting out front. This was going to be an incredible day.

  Chapter 23

  (Eva)

  My shift at Moxie had run very, very late. The restaurant seemed to grow in popularity every week, and Derek and I had been running all over trying to keep our tables happy. The guys had been trying to get me to quit my job, but I loved the independence the money I made from it gave me. I had been able to start saving up a nice little nest egg. Derek had become a pretty good friend as well, and I enjoyed hanging out with him during my shifts.

  I probably should have called Damon like he had requested, but the cool night air felt good on my face compared to the stifling heat of the restaurant, and I liked pushing back at his bossiness sometimes. I walked along the sidewalk, thinking about nothing in particular, savoring the sounds of the city as usual. I would never take New York City and her beauty for granted.

  The streets were quieter than usual, the ever-present crowd dwindled in presence due to the late hour. My thoughts turned to my glorious day with Beckham. His new movie had been even better than the other one, and I loved seeing the light flush to his cheeks when I praised his work.

  I heard rustling behind me, catching my attention and making me look behind me to see if anyone was there. I didn't see anything. Nevertheless, I quickened my pace, the ease of my walk faltering. There was one spot in my walk that I always hated, where I had to go down a narrower alley, and it was coming up. I was tempted to try and stop and get a cab, but I hadn't seen one pass my route tonight, and I would rather get home quicker than waiting around for one. I took my ear plugs out of my ears, hopeful that my newly acquired sense of sound would come in handy if anyone was actually following me.

  Furthering my resolve to make it home on my own, I hurried my steps even more, determined to make it through the upcoming alley at a breakneck pace. I made it to the end of the alley, relieved to see the streetlights in front me signaling I was close to the college. I stepped past the wall into the street, when suddenly a coarse bag was forced over my head, making me fall forward onto my hands and knees on the sidewalk. I struggled as rough hands grabbed me harshly by the arms, pulling me up off the ground, and attempting to pull me forward. I began to struggle, attempting to scream, but I was sure the bag was preventing any sound from getting out.

  A cord was tied around my wrists, the cord digging and ripping my skin as I struggled. I was dragged, kicking and screaming the whole way. I was thrown into an enclosure, realizing it was some kind of vehicle when I heard the engine start up. I panicked even more and began to throw myself around the cabin of the vehicle, desperately trying to garner some attention from outside. Something solid hit me in my temple hard. Everything immediately went black.

  I groggily opened my eyes and immediately began to struggle again, only this time I could move even less since someone had sat me on a chair and tied my legs and arms to it so I couldn't move. My head was pounding from where I was hit, and there was an ache in my left shoulder. I was in a dimly lit room in what looked like someone's basement. There was a single light bulb in the center of the room, and I could see wood stairs in the corner of the room leading upwards. As I continued to look at my surroundings, my horror grew.

  There was a block of metal in the ground with what looked like chains attached to it. There was a dingy twin mattress beside it, with a faded quilt folded up at the foot of it. In another corner, there was a temporary toilet. I recognized it only because Mrs. Anderson had been a fanatic about food storage and emergency preparedness, so she had owned a few. I knew they had contemplated putting one of those temporary toilets in the attic so they wouldn't have to let me out at all. Mr. Anderson had convinced his wife that it wasn't a good idea, I'm sure so he could continue to fondle me when he let me out of the attic to use the restroom.

  Shaking my head at this unhelpful train of thought, I examined the room again looking for anything else. None of the room items were a good sign. I had read enough books to know that situations like this meant that the kidnapper had prepared to hold you for the long haul. My throat started to close up as panic overtook me. Stupidly the first thought I had was about missing class. I loved my classes and everything about college, and who knew how long it would be before I was let go or I escaped, if I ever escaped at all. I began to rock back and forth futilely until the chair tipped over. I hit my head again on the floor as the chair crashed on the hard concrete. My head was spinning. The combination of the hit from earlier, and now the knock on the concrete, meant that I had to have a concussion. I wretched from the pain in my head, the vomit splattering all over my hair, face, and clothes. I sobbed involuntarily.

  How had I gone from having everything I could want, to this? I tried to listen to see if I could hear anything, but my ears had begun ringing too much from my head trauma to make anything out. I stopped struggling, and just laid there continuing to weep. The basement was cold. Combined with the concrete floor and my injury, I had begun shivering uncontrollably.

  My 18th birthday had been five days from when I was kidnapped. I wasn't sure how long I had been passed out, so I didn't know how close my birthday was now. I wondered if any amazing powers would appear like the guys had thought would happen. I mean escaping would be a nice present too, I laughed to myself. I bet the boys had planned something big for my birthday. I began to daydream what they had planned, while the cold continued to seep into my bones. Hours passed, my vomit from earlier had congealed and I could feel that my hair was now in clumps. I couldn't believe that no one had come for me yet. My mind imagined scenarios where I had actually been left somewhere alone for good, doomed to die alone in this basement of starvation or thirst. I eventually cried myself to sleep, overwhelmed with tiredness from my head injury and from crying so much.

  I awoke when I felt a wet washcloth sliding across my face, softly cleaning up the vomit from before. My head still ached, and my eyes had trouble focusing. The confusion of being woken up by touch stayed as I realized who was in front of me cleaning me up. It was Anna Darcy, the Reverend's wife.

  "Mrs. Darcy?" I inquired stupidly.

/>   She refused to look at me, keeping her eyes focused on the task of cleaning me up. I was still tied to the chair so I began to rock back and forth again on the floor where I had fallen, trying to get her to look at me.

  "You have to help me. I've been kidnapped. Please help me!" I cried to her.

  Suddenly she clasped a hand over my mouth.

  "Be quiet, you stupid girl. You don't want him to come down here."

  I still didn't understand what was going on.

  "Please!" I begged her. "Please go get Reverend Darcy. Surely he will help?"

  She stopped trying to clean me up, and looked at me with a sad expression filled with pity.

  "Who exactly do you think brought you here Eva?" she asked softly.

  Suddenly understanding the situation, I wretched again, nothing really coming up this time but stomach bile, as I hadn't eaten in probably a day. I remembered his frequent visits to the house after the fateful lunch when I had found my acceptance letter, and the frustration and desperation he seemed to have on the night I had escaped. I had been so preoccupied with trying to escape that I hadn't put much thought into his visits besides thinking they were strange.

  The sick feeling of dread in my stomach increased. I wondered if the Anderson's had a role in this. I was such an idiot. I had been so caught up in the excitement of the world that the boys were offering me, I had totally forgotten to take into account the publicity I had been getting. Of course, someone from my past was going to find me. Why in the world had I thought that the Andersons and the Reverend wouldn't get wind of where I was just because they lived in a small town? There had been pictures of me everywhere after the media got wind that Mason or Damon (they didn't know about Beckham yet) might be dating me. I stopped struggling and laid my head down on the concrete, feeling defeated. Anna must have been satisfied with the job she had done wiping off my face, because she stood up and dusted herself off.

  "Do you want to stay on the ground or do you want me to help pull the chair up?" she asked.

  "Just leave me here," I responded despondently. I'm sure anger would come eventually, but right now all I was feeling was fear and hopelessness. I didn't know how I was going to find my way out of this one.

  "Reverend Darcy is finishing a sermon, and will be down later," she said, weirdly referring to her husband by his church title. "This will go better for you if you try and cooperate," she said stiffly, like she was trying to convince herself as well as me.

  I closed my eyes, and decided to ignore her. I could feel the weight of her stare on me for a moment more before I heard her walk away, the creak of the stairs signaling she had left the room. She further ensured I would hate her for the rest of my life when she flipped the light switch, the room immediately going pitch black.

  Chapter 24

  The hours seemed to last forever as I laid there feeling sorry for myself. At this point I felt truly disgusting. Anna may have wiped the vomit off my face, but I had needed to use the restroom hours ago, and thus had wet myself at some point. All of a sudden I felt the temperature drop even more. I groaned. Now was not the time for the "specters" to appear. An icy cold finger trailed down my face. I couldn't see the black shadow due to the gloom of the basement, but I could sense its presence.

  "I obviously can't help you right now," I said angrily, immediately wincing from the pain still in my head. I waited for a vision to appear. This one took a while as the shadow continued to stroke my face with its icy fingertip. "I'm already freaking cold enough without you touching me," I yelled out.

  "Oh dear," the old woman muttered to herself as she prepared the Princess's morning tea. "I need to start thinking of her as the Queen," she admonished herself. After all, if the rumors were true, the crown would pass any day now as the Queen's health continued to decline. The woman mourned the Queen already. She had always been exceptionally kind to the woman, finding her a place in the kitchens as a young orphaned child, despite the fact that she was a human, and would only have a limited time when she would be useful to the palace.

  The woman had spent her whole life in the palace walls. Her status as human meant that she was frequently ignored by the other residents. This meant that she often saw things that she shouldn't be seeing. Like the King dallying with one of the maids while the Queen lay dying in her chambers. Or how that Lord Tiberius fellow was always watching the Princess. She had seen him stalking her in the shadows, the Princess blissfully unaware as she laughed with that beau of hers. The woman could understand him watching the Princess in those times, after all the Princess was the most beautiful being in the realm, but Lord Tiberius was also always watching the Princess as she mourned the Queen. It was those moments that had worried the woman the most. After forty years around the palace, she still didn't understand why the creatures who lived here acted as they did. The malicious smile the Lord displayed when the Princess was sorrowful didn't seem right though.

  "There's monsters lurking underneath that handsome face, mark my words," the woman muttered to herself as she finished making the tea, and began to trudge towards the Queen's chambers to see if she could cajole her into drinking some of it.

  Walking through a back passage she had discovered after a few years in the palace, the woman decided that she would say something to the Princess next time she saw her. "She'll know what to do about such a thing," the woman told herself.

  She had just turned a corner and was passing one of the many dusty rooms that lay empty in this long-abandoned passageway, when she heard a grunt from nearby. She noticed that one of the doors to the rooms was partly closed. Walking as silently as an elderly woman with a bum leg could, she approached the door, peeking into the room.

  She couldn't help but let out a small gasp at what she saw. A being in a black cloak was bent over one of the maidservants, the poor girl's eyes were staring out lifelessly as she lay strewn on the floor. The cloaked creature had a long, sharp, ebony knife in his gloved hand, and was making a deep cut into the girl's arm. The blood was dripping into a bowl on the ground. The woman's stomach rolled, the bowl was already half-filled.

  "I have to go tell someone," the woman thought to herself, panicking at the task. She began to back away as softly as she could when the hooded creature began to sniff the air.

  "Little human…I know you're out there. Come out, come out, wherever you are," the familiar voice taunted.

  The woman couldn't believe the cloaked monster was him. She turned to run, but a strong hand caught her arm before she could take two steps. The monster inhaled her scent deeply, before dragging her into the room she had just been peering into, this time closing the door behind them.

  He threw her beside the maidservant, some of the sticky blood from the bowl, splattering her as she hit it.

  "You'll be the perfect final ingredient," he said, as she struggled to sit up.

  "I should have told the Princess," was the woman's last thought, before the ebony knife came slashing down on her.

  I came back from the vision shaking from its gruesomeness, the light from the basement had clicked on, and I squinted my eyes from the sudden brightness after being in the dark for so long. When my eyes finally adjusted, I couldn't help but start to shake. Reverend Darcy was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at me with a terrifying, manic glint in his eyes. The specter from before was nowhere to be found.

  Reverend Darcy had lost weight. He no longer resembled the man I had first met at that lunch at the Anderson's a few months ago. He skin was sallow and grey tinted, like he hadn't eaten or seen the sun in years. He walked towards me, and knelt down in front of me. His eyes were bright and feverish, flicking all over me with some kind of sick hunger that shriveled my stomach.

  "Eva," he said reverently, starting to softly stroke the side of my cheek.

&
nbsp; I jerked my cheek away.

  "Reverend, what exactly is going on?" I asked, knowing inside that I didn't want to hear the answer.

  "Kylan, call me Kylan, Eva. We're going to be getting to know each other really well. I searched for you for weeks you know, and when I found you, I started to watch you. I saw you Eva. I saw how all of those men were taking advantage of you. I know you didn't actually want that, and they were forcing you to do what they said. But you don't have to worry about that anymore. I'm going to take care of you," he said, in the same abnormal voice.

  "You seem to be failing in that regard," I told him saucily, gathering courage from somewhere inside of me, and gesturing with my head to where I laid still tied to the fallen chair, soaked in piss and vomit. An irritated look flashed briefly on his face before he took a breath and relaxed again.

  "It is unfortunate that you have had to be in these conditions for so long, but Anna said she tried to help you and you tried to attack her."

  My anger at Anna increased tenfold with the news that not only had she refused to help me earlier, but then she had lied to make my situation worse. I had never done anything to her to deserve her hate.

  "If I untie you, will you cooperate?" the Reverend asked me.

  At this point I was willing to not try anything if it included me getting some water and being able to get cleaned up. I nodded my head. He seemed to approve of this and pulled out a pocket knife from his back pocket, and started to saw at the ropes binding my arms and legs. I collapsed in a heap when the ropes were finally cut, my limbs numb from being constrained for so long. The Reverend gathered my wrists in his hands, and started to massage them. I wanted to throw up again, or at least yank my hands away, but I couldn't move them quite yet. He didn't seem to mind the fact that I was soaked in pee and vomit. He continued to massage my wrists with one hand, while he tucked my hair behind my ears with another. I shuddered and refused to look at him.