The Forest of Forever (The Soren Chase Series, Book One)

by Rob Blackwell

  “When did Sara call?” Soren asked.

  “It was early this morning,” Glen said. “I didn’t speak to her; it was just a message on your voice mail.”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Soren said. “I need you to call . . .”

  But he had no idea how to finish that sentence. The police? The idea was laughable.

  “I’ve got to go,” Soren said. He didn’t wait for Glen to say more.

  Slowly, he pushed the button to drop the call and then immediately started dialing again. From memory he dialed Sara’s cell phone number. It rang twice and someone picked it up. He recognized the voice at the other end immediately.

  “Hello, lover,” Annika said. “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

  Soren gripped the phone so tightly he was in danger of crushing it.

  “What have you done with Sara?” he asked.

  “She’s fine,” Annika responded. “As for whether she stays that way, that’s up to you. This was fun while it lasted, Soren, but time’s up. You gave me what I wanted; now I’m going to take what I need.”

  “If you hurt her—”

  “Spare me,” she said. “You couldn’t do anything worse than you’ve already done.”

  “Just tell me where and when,” Soren said.

  “That’s more like it,” she replied, her voice silky and smooth. “The when is at seven o’clock. The where is the warehouse. That’s where you need to be.”

  She hung up. Soren chucked the phone across the room and into the wall. He threw it with such force that the phone shattered rather than merely breaking. He didn’t care. Annika had given it to him, and he wanted nothing to do with it now. He let out a cry of rage and frustration.

  He should have known—or at least suspected. From the very first she had reminded him of someone. She had these gestures and ways of speaking that were intimately familiar. Now he knew why. She’d given him other clues. She talked about a brother and even uttered John’s favorite cliché, “Fortune favors the bold.”

  It all came back to the amnesia. He should have wondered why Annika seemed so comfortable with him. That was easy to explain—she already knew him; he just didn’t remember her.

  To be fair, she was much older now than the last time he’d seen her, when she’d been no more than fifteen. Still, his scrambled mind hadn’t let him see what was right in front of him the entire time.

  Annika Taylor was really Meredith Townes. Annika was John’s sister.

  And she had come to take her revenge.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Soren pulled into the long driveway that led to the Association’s warehouse.

  It was the first time he’d ever officially come this way and he had a feeling it would be his last. When he arrived, he saw no sign of the gaunts, who must have still lurked there, nor did he understand how Annika—Meredith, he corrected himself—had called them off.

  Soren hadn’t bothered to call Wallace to explain who Annika really was. He understood now that she must have used a fake identity to join the Institute, then convinced Wallace to hire Soren. She’d told Wallace the rape story so Soren couldn’t turn to him for help and potentially disrupt her ability to bring him here. Meredith must have been working for the Association all along.

  What he didn’t understand was why. If Meredith wanted to kill him, she’d had plenty of opportunities to do so already. Hell, she could have approached him on the street and put a bullet in his brain. There was no need for this kind of deception.

  If she’d wanted to bring Sara into the mix, she could have done that without involving the Association or the Institute. Instead, she’d gone to great lengths to be part of an elaborate plan that Soren didn’t fathom.

  But it no longer mattered to him. The important part wasn’t the Association, the Institute, or even Meredith herself. His only concern was Sara. He had to ensure she survived. Everything else, his own life included, was secondary.

  He pulled into the parking lot where he had recently been skulking around with Kael and his brother. It was only the night before, but it felt like months or years ago. Back then everything had been different.

  Meredith was standing by the warehouse office door, leaning casually against the railing. She looked identical to Annika—they were the same person, after all—but Soren still detected something different about her. He thought it might have been the expression on her face. Instead of warm and caring, it now seemed cold and calculated.

  He parked the car and stepped out. He had reloaded his revolver and stuck it into the backside of his pants, but otherwise he was unarmed. Meredith was smiling broadly at him. She was dressed in black pants and a white blouse and looked every inch as attractive as Annika had. Yet she reminded Soren of a viper.

  “You came,” she said. “I wasn’t completely certain, you know. I’ve always suspected you were a coward.”

  “Where’s Sara?”

  “Straight to the point, I see,” she said.

  Soren pushed away the questions that bubbled up inside him and the blow to his ego that came from watching her smile at him in that sinister way. Her betrayal wasn’t important. Her rationale for it mattered even less. He had to stay focused. There was a little boy who was counting on him to get his mother home safely. Soren would not fail him the way he’d failed his father. He kept his tone flat and neutral.

  “Where’s Sara?” Soren repeated.

  Meredith frowned and tossed her blond hair casually off her shoulder.

  “Come on,” she said. “Can’t we have a lovers’ tête-à-tête first? I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

  “I want to see Sara first. I need to make sure she’s okay.”

  If she wasn’t, Soren was going to shoot Meredith in the head. He felt no pity or sympathy for her, and certainly no guilt. He’d told Annika/Meredith the truth about what happened to her brother. If she chose to reject it, that was her funeral. In this case, literally.

  She nodded toward the forest.

  “Then I hope you don’t mind a walk,” she said. “I’ve left her in a very special place.”

  Meredith came down the steps and started toward Reapoke Forest. When she turned her back to him, Soren resisted the urge to shoot her and leave. Fuck her plan, whatever it was. He could probably find Sara on his own. But “probably” didn’t cut it, and he knew it. He couldn’t go back to Alex and tell him his mother died because Soren thought he could “probably” save her.

  She turned back to him and smiled again.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said, as if reading his mind. “The gaunts I left to guard her will tear her apart if I don’t show up soon. They may rip her apart anyway.”

  “You’d better hope that they don’t.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Meredith said. “I really don’t give a shit. She’s just bait to make sure you come out here.”

  She kept walking, and Soren opted to take a place by her side.

  “Let’s get a few things straight,” she said. “I want you to know that I’m not a pretender. I’m not a gaunt or a ghoul or whatever other nastiness is out there in the big, bad world. I’m just me. I think it’s important we establish that.”

  Soren didn’t respond but tensed as they walked into the forest. He heard the strange wind again and, as he had on other occasions, felt watched. He initially assumed it was the gaunts, but he had doubts about that. Whatever presence he sensed felt somehow more intelligent than those creatures.

  “And I don’t know the Association’s master plan,” she continued. “It was a need-to-know thing and I never asked. They gave me what I wanted—you—and that’s all that mattered.”

  “They’ll kill you when it’s over,” Soren said.

  “It’s sweet that you care, but I kinda doubt it,” Meredith replied. “I’m not a threat to them. They know I won’t expose them, and besides, I’ve proven useful. They’re coldhearted bastards, but there’s no need to eliminate me. But even if they do—and I need you to understand this
—it’ll all be worth it.”

  Soren kept walking, the still forest around him seeming to echo with their footfalls. The sound of the wind faded and was replaced by deathly quiet.

  “They found me in prison,” Meredith continued. “I’d hooked up with a guy who was into making and dealing meth. He thought he was smarter than the cops, but he wasn’t. I was going to jail as an accomplice. And then Randolph Chastain offered me a deal. No, that’s not the word for it. He offered me salvation. A chance to free myself, make a few bucks, and avenge my brother’s murder. He didn’t even finish his pitch before I signed up. I was probably the most enthusiastic recruit he ever had.”

  “Why not just kill me on your own?” Soren asked. “Why bring Sara into it?”

  She stopped and looked at him coldly.

  “You know why,” she said.

  She abruptly started walking again, forcing him to catch up with her.

  “I don’t. Why something so elaborate? Why not just kill us separately? You had more than enough opportunity. And you wouldn’t have needed to sleep with me.”

  Meredith laughed coldly. “If all I wanted to do was kill you, that would be true,” she said.

  Soren thought she would clarify her remark, but she didn’t. Instead, she stayed silent.

  They came to the edge of a clearing. It was a circle in the forest, a bare patch of green grass. It would have been pretty if it hadn’t felt so ominous.

  Soren had never been to this place, but he knew it from Edolphus’s descriptions. It was where Coakley convened his congregation.

  He saw the figure huddled in the middle of the circle and ran toward her. Sara was alive and alert but bound by her hands and legs. Duct tape had been placed over her mouth. There was a purple bruise on the side of her face.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She nodded, and he pulled off the tape on her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said. “I tried to reach you before I left to see if I should go, but . . .”

  Soren shook his head.

  “My fault, not yours,” he said. “And she would have come to you anyway.”

  He touched the side of her head where the bruise was and she winced.

  “She coldcocked me,” Sara said. “It knocked me out. I woke up tied like this in the backseat of her car.”

  “Is Alex okay?”

  “I left him with a friend, thank God,” Sara answered.

  Soren turned to look back at Meredith.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Let her go and do whatever you want to me.”

  “As if you have any say in the matter,” Meredith replied. “This has taken months of planning, Soren. Let’s not rush it.”

  Soren turned back toward Sara and started to loosen the bindings on her legs. He heard the hammer of a gun cock behind him.

  “No, no, no,” Meredith said. “That’s not how this is going to go. I want her tied up for a while longer.”

  “You don’t want her at all,” he replied. “Your business is with me. Even if you think I killed John—and you should know now that I didn’t—you can’t possibly think she had anything to do with it.”

  “You’re right. I don’t think she helped you kill John,” Meredith said. “I believed that for a time maybe, but not anymore. Still, she’s the reason he’s dead. My mother had her pegged from the very beginning, you know. But the way John looked at her, I thought she couldn’t be all bad. Besides, she was very nice to me. But I was wrong about her and wrong about you. You didn’t deserve John. Neither of you did.”

  Soren turned around slowly with his arms raised in the air.

  “Okay,” Soren said. “Fair enough. She’s still the mother of your nephew. For his sake, let her go.”

  Meredith started laughing again. The laugh seemed to pass in and around the trees and bounce right back to them. It felt like not just one Meredith laughing but many.

  “Is she? I have my doubts about that, too, you know,” Meredith said. “But let’s not worry about that right now. Let’s talk about me. Can we do that? Then we’ll talk about you. And at the end of that, we’ll talk about her.”

  She spat the last word out like it was a wad of snot.

  “First things first,” Meredith said. “I want to look into your goddamned eyes when I tell you this story. I want to see how you react. So lose the fucking glasses. In fact, toss them over here.”

  Soren removed the sunglasses from his face and threw them toward Meredith. They fell near her feet, and she reached down to scoop them up, looking at them briefly before slipping them into a pocket.

  “That will be a nice memento of you,” she said. “But let’s move on. I’ve given Sara some of the 411 on the way down here. That way she could know all about ‘Annika Taylor.’ She couldn’t respond, but I could tell she almost didn’t believe it. After all, shouldn’t you recognize me? But you don’t, do you?”

  Soren shook his head.

  “The accident—”

  “Spare me,” Meredith said. “You remember Sara all right, don’t you? And plenty of others. But you don’t remember the people who didn’t matter to you. And I was just John’s little sister, always getting in the way. It didn’t matter that I had such a crush on you. When other girls were drawing the initials of members of boy bands in their notebooks, I carved your initials into mine. I knew that John would marry Sara and at some stage I’d grow up and you’d see how right for each other we really were.”

  “I don’t remember a lot of people, Meredith,” Soren said. “It isn’t personal.”

  “It’s personal to me,” she said. “I know I was young, but how could you forget me altogether? We used to have these great talks in the kitchen late at night. You were always so cool, so funny. But I must not have made much of an impression.”

  “The story you told about meeting me at the conference,” Soren said. “Was that true?”

  “Of course it was,” Meredith said. “I had to know, didn’t I? The Association sent me there so that I could listen to your lecture. They said to stay away from you, but I couldn’t resist. I expected something when I walked up to you, some glimmer in your eye. I thought you’d at least ask ‘Do I know you?’ But you didn’t. I saw it then. I was nothing to you when I was a kid and nothing to you anymore. You’d literally forgotten I existed. What was it you told me in the car the other day? ‘I’ve just lost little things.’ So nice to know I was that unimportant.”

  “Too fucking bad,” Soren said. “Sorry about your ego, but it doesn’t justify what you’ve done.”

  “Oh, that’s not why you’re going to die, lover,” Meredith said. “It’s just insult to injury, that’s all. In the end it was better that you didn’t know. That way I could be the one to take you by the hand and guide you precisely where the Association wanted you to be. They had all sorts of instructions, Soren. First I got a new identity and a new look. Then I signed up with the Wallace Institute and made sure to get close to the founder himself. The Association gave me very strict directions and I followed every one without complaint.”

  “They tried to kill you.”

  “We couldn’t have you doubt me, could we?” Meredith asked. “You already didn’t trust me. Knocking me off the bridge was a stroke of genius. They knew you’d save me. And if you didn’t? It just would give you extra incentive to finish the job.”

  “And what is that, Meredith?” Soren asked. “What do you want from me? What does the Association want?”

  “You’ve given me what I want. I was in this for the story, Soren. I could have killed you anytime I wanted, but I needed to hear you tell me what happened to John. I knew you’d lied about not remembering. I told Chastain I wanted two things. I wanted to be the one to kill you, but before that, I wanted you to spill your guts to me. That’s why I had to fuck you. You never could relate to a girl except by getting into her pants. I have to admit, that part of the job wasn’t at all unpleasant. Guess I never did get over that schoolgirl crush after all.”

 
; “That’s why this is happening today,” Soren said. “You got what you wanted.”

  “Yes,” Meredith said. “The Association was waiting on me. They were a bit impatient, but we understood each other. Chastain told me to help you figure out Reapoke Forest. He didn’t care if you discovered the truth of it or not. All I had to do was to keep him informed. How do you think the Association knew we were at the Chickahominy church? Why do you think they let us take the journal?”

  “They didn’t let us—”

  “Chastain did,” Meredith said. “They lost a few gaunts, but otherwise it was all for show.”

  “I killed Chastain.”

  “Did you?” Meredith said, and an eyebrow shot up. “All that was left was for you to tell me the story. After that—when you’d told me what I wanted—I had instructions to bring you here and . . . Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  “So you never cared about Reapoke? Any of it?”

  “Only to pass the time. I used to think Wallace was just delusional, but I saw enough working for him to understand that he wasn’t. I even know that pretenders really exist, thanks to your little show in Leesburg. So bravo; I believe in the supernatural now. I just don’t care. You told me your story and now all I want is for you to die—and for Sara to watch, of course. That part is important, too.”

  “If you believe in pretenders, you should know that what I told you about John was the truth,” Soren said. “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I told Sara your version of events in the car several times. I wanted her to know how crazy you were.”

  “It’s the truth,” Soren said again.

  “It’s a fucking lie!” Meredith said.

  The word “lie” hung in the air.

  “I don’t know when you made up that fairy tale,” she continued, “but it’s not remotely true. It’s not even a good lie. How did John die in your story? He was killed by a flaming structural beam? Only that’s not what happened, Soren. The police did forensics on his burnt body. He was shot in the chest with a shotgun.”