Edgewood Series: Books 1 - 3

by Karen McQuestion

I sat on the opposite end of the horseshoe couch—close enough to see him, but not close enough to be awkward. Before I got here, I wondered how much I was going to tell him, but as it turned out, there was no way to tell the story unless I revealed everything. “The Associates abducted my nephew Frank,” I began, and then it all came spilling out. I told him about Carly’s cell phone message and how we rushed to the Greyhound counter. How the bus was stopped by an overturned semi, and Carly and I received instructions to get out, and how we wound up getting picked up by a cargo van and taken to a mystery location. “And once I got there, Carly had to stay in a waiting room with a secretary, and they sent me through these obstacles. They said I had to do it if we wanted Frank back.”

  Mr. Specter leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “What kind of obstacles?”

  I told him about Tim wanting to shake my hand, and how I refused, and then I detailed all the tests: the dogs, the two thugs who tried to beat me up, the doctor’s office, and the mock Milwaukee Intermodal Station. The only thing I neglected to tell him was how Nadia was along for part of it. “The Associates timed me during this whole thing, if you can believe it.”

  “Oh, I believe it,” he said gravely. “How’d you do?”

  “Forty-eight minutes and fifty-three seconds.”

  “Impressive.”

  “They thought so. They practically had a parade.”

  “Hmmm.” He looked off to one side. “Now that they know all you can do, they’ll certainly want you to join them.”

  “They already asked and they made me an offer.”

  “Which was?”

  “Anything I wanted, basically.”

  “Most people would find that hard to turn down. What did you tell them?” He peered at me over his glasses.

  “I said no thanks.”

  His face lit with admiration. “Good for you, Russ!”

  I realized then that he’d used my first name for the first time ever. For some reason, I felt like I’d made a breakthrough. “They weren’t happy about it.”

  “Well no, they wouldn’t be.”

  The room became noticeably silent now that my story was over. Both of us knew that this wasn’t the end of it. The Associates weren’t going to take no for an answer. They’d just given me some time to come around to their way of thinking.

  Mr. Specter said, “How is your nephew?”

  “Just about back to normal except for a bad headache the next morning,” I said. “He woke me up by jumping on top of me.”

  “It sounds like he won’t have any long-term damage.”

  “He really thinks we spent hours testing video games. He remembers specific things I said to him, and he can describe the games. They really got into his head.”

  “That’s a shame.” Mr. Specter spoke in a sympathetic tone. And then, he abruptly switched the subject: “You said you needed my help?”

  “Oh yes!” I practically smacked my forehead with the realization of the real reason I’d come here tonight. “It’s about Gordy—I mean Mr. Hofstetter.”

  “What about him?”

  I stood up and reached into my pocket, pulled out the folded piece of paper, and spread it out on the coffee table in front of me. “Before he died, he gave me this.” I smoothed out the edges so it would lie flat. “He said his grandson was imprisoned and I needed to find him.”

  Mr. Specter got up and sat next to me to get a closer look. “Have you shown this to anyone else?”

  “No, I haven’t shown it to anyone else.” True that. I hadn’t shown it to anyone, but I’d told Nadia about it during our nighttime visits.

  He stared intently at the page. “Would you mind if I made a copy of it?”

  “No.”

  Holding the paper between two fingers, he got up from the couch and disappeared through a door into the other part of the basement. A minute later, I heard the whirring of a copy machine. When he emerged from the room he had a stack of papers in one hand and a pencil and magnifying glass in the other. Taking his place, he said, “I made a few extra copies so we can write on them.”

  I twisted around to look at the open doorway. “That’s not your laundry room?”

  “No, my laundry room is upstairs. That room is my top secret home office,” he said, amused. “I keep it locked up when I’m not home so it’s Associate proof.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Better safe than sorry. I had a cleaning lady once who seemed a little fishy. You never know.” He set the papers down, the copies next to the original, then picked up a pencil and began going over the faint lines with sure, even strokes. Interlocking geometric shapes took form. Once done, he concentrated on the number combinations I’d been unable to decipher. After he’d darkened them, they had a familiar look. “These numbers, you know what they are?”

  “Some kind of code was my guess.” I was a little embarrassed. Here I was supposed to be exceptionally smart and yet I wasn’t coming up with much of anything at all.

  “In a way,” he said. “I believe each set indicates a specific geographic coordinate.”

  “Latitude and longitude,” I said, finally realizing the truth.

  “Very good.” He tapped the geometric shapes with the end of the pencil. “And my guess is that this is a map and that once we go to the specific coordinates, we’ll know more. Tell me, Mr. Becker, what are your plans for this summer?”

  “I’m going to take my driver’s test and look for a job,” I said. The driving and the job went hand in hand. I’d need money for gas and all the things I could do once I’d be driving. Dating for one.

  “Do you think your parents would allow you to take an all-expense-paid class trip to Peru?”

  “Peru? Oh, I don’t know…”

  “I think it would be best,” he mused, “to take some other students along as well, so it doesn’t look too suspicious. Miss Nassif, for sure. What about those other two? Do you think they’d be on board?”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “I’m not getting this. Why do you want to go to Peru?”

  “To save Mr. Hofstetter’s grandson, of course.”

  “But he died in a car accident.”

  “Or so we’ve been led to believe,” Mr. Specter said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  On the walk home I mulled over everything Mr. Specter had said. His group, the Praetorian Guard, had long believed, for reasons he didn’t want to get into, that the Associates maintained a significant headquarters in Peru. They’d never been able to prove it, or even find the precise location for that matter, but he thought the map and the various latitude and longitude coordinates would point us in the right direction.

  “Okay,” I said, “I get that. But why do you need to bring some high school kids along? Wouldn’t it be easier just to have some people from the Praetorian Guard go investigate for themselves? It seems like we’d make the trip more complicated.”

  “You’re thinking of yourself as a high school student,” Mr. Specter said, “when you should be thinking of yourself as someone with superpowers. I could bring a hundred people along and we couldn’t match what the four of you can do. Not only that, but because you’re young, people tend to discount you. Traveling as a school group, we can fly under the radar, so to speak.”

  What he said made sense. I told him I’d think about it, reclaimed Mr. Hofstetter’s original paper, and said I had to get going or my parents might notice I was gone, which wasn’t entirely true. Things were getting so messed up I really just wanted to go home and wrap my brain around everything that had happened. And I wanted to do that in the privacy of my own room. I realized on the walk home that not only hadn’t I told him about Nadia’s astral projection, but I’d also neglected to tell him about the medallion Gordy had given to me. I still had it in my wallet and took it out from time to time. I liked the weight of it in my hand and the way the light came through the clear disc in the center. I felt like Indiana Jones examining an ancient artifact. Something about th
e medallion made me want to keep it to myself.

  By the time I arrived in my neighborhood, the air had changed from dry to moist and the slight breeze had kicked into high gear. I’d heard the forecast for thunderstorms, but thought it would be happening later. It would be good to be inside when the rain came.

  With relief, I reached my yard. The crabapple tree along the rear lot line had long since shed its blossoms. They’d fallen like snow around the base of the tree and then disappeared, but I thought I got a whiff of their floral scent as I worked my way to the back door. I was almost to the porch when I noticed a shadowy figure lurking along the dark edges of the lot. My breath caught in my chest, and I was just about to shoot electricity in that direction, when I heard, “Russ?”

  It was Nadia. She stepped out from the shadows, and I could see quite clearly she was alone. As usual, she wore blue jeans and a dark hoodie that obscured most of her face.

  “Nadia!” I rushed to give her a hug. A few days ago that would have been weird, but it wasn’t now, not after what we’d been through. “What are you doing here?”

  She pointed up to the second floor of the house. “You weren’t in your room when I tried to see you, and I thought something terrible must have happened.”

  I heard terror in her voice. I imagined her projecting into my room and seeing the empty room, and her thinking I’d been taken by the Associates, maybe for good this time. “Oh no, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.” I stepped back and put my hands on either side of her head, and she buried her face in my chest. Her little body silently heaved, and I realized she was crying. “Honestly, I’m okay. I just went to have a talk with Mr. Specter. I told you about him, right? Really, I’m fine.”

  “I know.” Her voice was muffled. “I’m just so relieved.”

  Waves of anguish and relief and love rolled off of her, an odd, poignant mixture of emotion. I didn’t have much experience consoling girls, but I took a stab at it, making the soothing noise people made in movies. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  She pulled away and wiped at her eyes with her fingertips, a little embarrassed. “I know I’m overreacting.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s nice to know someone would care if I disappeared.”

  The wind whipped up, making the branches in the trees sway and sigh. In the sky behind Nadia’s head a bolt of lightning cut the sky in half; for a second the entire yard was lit as brightly as if it were the middle of the day. “Whoa,” she said, turning to see. “Impressive.”

  When she looked back at me, her hood had slipped slightly. On a whim I reached over and lowered it to her shoulders. I’d only seen her spiky bangs, so I didn’t realize her dark brown hair was shoulder length. Without the hood, it was easier to see all of her face, including the part that had been damaged, but her scars didn’t bother me. I only saw Nadia, my friend. I searched her face and saw her eyes still fresh with tears, her lips quivering. She made a move to put the hood back up. “Don’t,” I said, stopping her hand. “I like seeing you.”

  “I hate it,” she said. “I hate looking so ugly.”

  “But you’re not ugly.” I put my hands on either side of her face and looked deep into her eyes. I felt the connection between us, the warmth of her skin and the pulsing of energy, drawing us closer. “I think you’re beautiful.”

  Nadia shook her head. “Not beautiful.” She trembled and looked up at me with complete trust, her fate in my hands.

  I said, “You are. You just don’t know it yet.” I leaned over so that our noses touched and said, “What are you doing this summer?”

  END OF BOOK ONE

  WANDERLUST

  Karen McQuestion

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©2013 by Karen McQuestion.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-1482387537

  ISBN-10: 1482387532

  Cover design: Damon @ www.damonza.com

  For my sister Kay

  The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

  ―George Santayana

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nadia

  Waiting in the shadows felt like a kind of slow death. All the while I hoped and prayed he’d come home soon. The moon shone overhead and a slight breeze kept me cool. As usual, I wore my black sweatshirt with the hood up. I never showed my face if I could help it.

  Every night since I’d discovered I could astral project, I’d visited Russ in his bedroom, something my mother would have considered inappropriate if she had known, even though it was pretty innocent since my body stayed behind. That particular evening started off as it normally did. Around ten thirty, I’d said good night to my parents, stopping to give them each a kiss on the cheek, as was required.

  “Go right to sleep, Nadia.” My mother didn’t even look up from her knitting. “When I come up I don’t want to see your light on.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Good night, hon,” Dad said, absentmindedly cleaning his glasses on the front of his shirt. He was a mild-mannered man, as much a prisoner of my mother’s moods as I was.

  I went up the stairs to my room, eager to get started, but I had to wait until my parents were asleep, having learned from experience that my mother could check on me anytime, disrupting the process and yanking me back into my body. It seemed like it took them forever to get ready to settle down for the night. Very late, I heard their snores across the hall and knew it was safe. I eagerly closed my eyes and willed my spirit to rise up and travel to Russ’s house. Even though I’d done it multiple times, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, any more than I could explain how text messages travel between phones. It didn’t matter. Projecting freed me from my life and took me to Russ Becker. That’s all I cared about.

  My spirit soared below clouds and over rooftops, instinctively taking me where I wanted to go. I entered his room like a ghost. No mass, no form, no body, just my essence. Able to see and hear, not just noises, but thoughts as well. Our friend Mallory thought it was creepy and made me promise not to astral project to her anymore, but Russ liked my visits. The two of us had a connection like I’d never experienced. Lately, our meetings were my only reason for living.

  Except he wasn’t in his room when I arrived. His bed was empty and the lights were off. Puzzled, I passed through the walls and searched the rest of the house. The upstairs bathroom and the guest bedroom (occasionally occupied by his ten-year-old nephew Frank) were also vacant. Downstairs Russ’s parents slept soundly, his mother with one arm slung over her husband’s back. Even in sleep they looked happier than my own parents. The rest of the house was quiet, except for the ticking of the kitchen clock. Where could he be?

  I had a sudden thought that maybe there was no Russ. If he wasn’t alive, there’d be no way to connect us. Maybe I’d traveled to his room more out of habit than anything else.

  Just one day earlier, a secret organization called the Associates had abducted Russ’s nephew Frank and made Russ go through a series of tests before they’d release him. The Associates now knew that the four of us—Mallory, Russ, and Jameson and I—all had superpowers. Russ was the most powerful out of all of us, and therefore the most valuable to them, but he wasn’t being particularly cooperative to their organization. What if they’d killed him?

  The idea made me sick.

  Finally, I couldn’t take the anxiety anymore. My spirit returned home, back to my hideous body. Quietly, I got out of bed and dressed, then
crept down the hall past the room where my parents slept and down the stairs. I didn’t put my shoes on until I was outside on the back porch, and then I waited a few minutes to see if anyone woke up, but the house remained dark. It took me thirty minutes or so to walk to Russ’s neighborhood. My heart pounded with every step. I’d snuck out of the house many times before, but it had always been to meet up with Mallory and our other friend, Jameson. Going alone made me feel exposed.

  I waited in Russ’s backyard for what seemed like an hour or more. Above the back door a light fixture cast a small amount of light. I stayed fairly close to the side of the house, beneath the low-hanging branch of a tree. I clutched at the limb for support, not knowing how long I’d hang out there before giving up and going home. A slight breeze stirred and I got a whiff of crab apple blossoms from the rear of the backyard. The air became heavy like when a storm was brewing. Such an ominous feeling.

  Just when I’d almost given up, I heard the soft sound of approaching footsteps. I stepped back into the shadows and looked in the direction of the noise. Coming around the corner of the house was a good-sized guy—six feet or so with broad shoulders. It was him. I stepped out from my hiding spot. “Russ?”

  He hesitated for only a second before registering the fact that it was me. “Nadia!” From the sound of his voice he was glad to see me. He rushed over and pulled me into a hug, resting his chin on my head. I could have stayed wrapped in the security of his arms forever, but it lasted only seconds. When he pulled back, he asked, “What are you doing here?”

  I pointed up to the second floor. “You weren’t in your room when I tried to see you, and I thought something terrible must have happened.” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice.

  “Oh no, I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” he said, reassuringly.