Call Out (9 page)

London parked the car, shut down the engine,
took out the keys. He sat behind the wheel for a moment, staring
out at the night. “I’m sure I can. It won’t be easy or quick, but
I’ll find her. We’re going to get her back, and then she and Brian
are going to have that happily ever after you don’t believe
in.”

“You pull this off, and I’ll believe. Having
Dylan back safe is happily ever after enough for me.”

Chapter Nine

When London and I got back to the hotel room,
Brian greeted us with a glance and half a nod, concentrating
instead on his guitar. I didn’t recognize the song this time. All I
knew for sure is that it wasn’t Pink Floyd, but it rivaled “Wish
You Were Here” for most depressing song I’ve ever heard. I figured
Brian had to be using the music as an outlet for his emotions, the
way I would sometimes vent my own through blog posts or random bits
of prose. Catharsis is all well and good, but I didn’t want to hear
it.

I scooped up some clothes and fled to the
bathroom. Showering away the grime and stress of a long day created
the perfect excuse for avoiding the sorrowful music without any
long explanations.

Worry pounded at me like the hot spray from
the showerhead. Where was Dylan? How and why had she disappeared
from the airport? Would we find her? Would we find her before
anything bad happened to her? Would London be overwhelmed again by
other people’s emotions and dealing with magic? Would we end up
needing to put him on suicide watch? What the hell would I do if
anything happened to Dylan? What would Brian do?

I shoved all the worry and negativity aside,
squishing it down into a mental footlocker and slamming the
imaginary lid shut. I’d think about it later. Right now, I was too
damned tired.

I concentrated on getting clean: lather,
rinse, repeat. The simple task couldn’t keep all thought at bay,
but it did help me steer my brain onto safer avenues. Like
wondering how London knew I didn’t believe in happily ever
after.

The simple explanation was that the boys were
talking about me behind my back. Maybe Brian had noticed the way I
couldn’t seem to help looking at London when I thought no one could
see and had warned London away. Or maybe it had just been a casual
statement without any deeper motivation.

Or maybe Brian hadn’t told London anything at
all. Maybe London’s ability to read people’s emotions, his empathy,
could tell him more than he wanted to admit.

Better to believe Brian was telling tales out
of school.

I went back to concentrating on simple tasks.
I finished washing my hair, wished for half a second that I had
thought to pack a razor, shut off the water, and climbed out of the
shower. Dried off. Considering using the hair dryer, but decided I
didn’t care if my hair went all Medusa from sleeping with it wet
and settled for giving it a quick towel dry. I reached for my
clothes – Happy Bunny bikini briefs, of all things, and my
makeshift pajamas – and pulled them on.

By the time I opened the bathroom door and
stepped out, I had managed to shut my concerns about London’s
powers into the footlocker with my other worries.

Brian had traded his guitar for London’s
laptop. London lay sprawled on the bed like a teenaged girl: belly
down, feet in the air, propped up on his forearms. A manila folder
lay open on the bed in front of him, but he ignored it in favor of
the laptop screen, craning his neck to peer around Brian’s broad
shoulders.

I took a seat on the end of the bed, still
toweling my damp hair, and joined the boys in looking at the
computer screen. We were staring at a map of Orlando. The metro
area looked huge to me.

“Where do we start?” London asked.

“Near the airport, right?” Brian asked.

“Her last known whereabouts,” London said.
“It makes sense.”

“No,” I said, surprising myself as much as
the boys. Brian turned to look at me, and I shook my head slightly.
“It makes sense, in a way, but I don’t think it’s the best place to
start looking.”

“Why not?”

“Brian,” I said, turning my head slightly to
make full eye contact, “What do you think happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“What happened after Dylan got off that
plane? How’d she disappear? I mean, we obviously don’t know the
answer, but what does your gut instinct tell you?”

The muscles in Brian’s jaw clenched, relaxed.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again and met my
gaze. “I think she was taken.”

“Me, too. It’s the only thing that makes
sense.”

Brian relaxed a little, like maybe he’d been
afraid we’d think he was crazy for believing Dylan had been
kidnapped. I shifted, intending to reach out for him, but he turned
back toward the computer.

“You really think someone just...dragged her
out of the airport?” London asked.

“Lured, maybe,” I answered. “Coerced.” Out of
the corner of my eye, I saw London nod. “If someone took her,” I
continued, “if she’s being held for ransom or something, I think
that changes things. Wouldn’t a kidnapper hold her somewhere away
from the airport?”

“But where?” London asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

Brian sighed and pushed back from the desk.
“Maybe we should just throw a dart at a map.”

“Probably as good as anything,” London
agreed.

Without another word, Brian got up, grabbed
clean clothes, and shut himself in the bathroom. I took the chair
he had vacated.

“Any ideas?” I asked London.

“Nope. I meant it when I said the dart idea
was as good as anything.”

I stared at the map for a minute. There was
something we were missing. Something we hadn’t considered. But no
flash of genius or insight struck.

The sound of rustling paper drew my attention
from the map, and I turned to look behind me. London rifled through
the folder full of papers, photocopies of handwritten pages. Before
I could decide whether to be polite or give in to my curiosity,
London glanced up and saw me looking at the papers.

“Ashe’s notes,” he said. “Some good stuff in
here.”

He handed me a page, and I realized as I
reached for it that he could sense my curiosity and had chosen to
indulge me. Kinda creepy. It would take a lot of getting used to. A
look of dismay flitted across London’s face before he looked down
at the papers, using his hair as a shield. He’d felt my discomfort,
just like he’d felt my curiosity. Shit.

Not knowing what else to do, I started
reading the page of notes in my hand. I hadn’t even finished the
first sentence before I was distracted by the sound of the bathroom
door opening. I glanced up, and then down again. Brian in boxer
shorts and a white undershirt – the kind affectionately known as a
wife beater – was just not what I needed right now.

London laughed, and I looked up again.

“What?” Brian asked, dragging back the duvet
on his side of the bed.

“Nothing,” London said, but his eyes were
sparkling. He grinned at me, and I suddenly got the joke.

“Not a word,” I hissed, blushing.

London reached out to touch my hand,
hesitated, and then laid his hand on top of mine on the arm of the
chair. “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, “but you really
shouldn’t feel bad about it.”

I didn’t know what to say. Especially since
‘feeling bad about’ finding Brian attractive was a new thing and
one I didn’t understand myself.

London drew his hand away, pushed himself up,
and crawled off the bed, headed for the shower. Shaking my head, I
gathered up the pages of Ashe’s notes, tucking them back into the
file folder. Boys. I put the laptop to sleep, closed the lid, and
dropped the folder on top.

I took a few seconds to untuck the sheet and
duvet from the foot of the bed and then turned the covers back on
my side. As I climbed onto the bed, I noticed that Brian had the
letter from Dylan out, his fingers tracing over the words as if he
could reach through the paper and ink to stroke her cheek. I
crawled across the bed, settling in beside Brian and resting my
head on his shoulder. He slid his arm around me and laid the letter
down.

“I’ve had this for months now, and I still
don’t know what it says here,” he said, tapping a spot on the
page.

I picked up the letter. No, the note; it was
too short to be a letter.

“You don’t mind?”

Brian shook his head, and I began to read. As
I read, I began to grin. The note was typical Dylan, straight to
the point, no pretense.

“I’m not really sure,” I said, “but I think
the part you can’t read right here says that Dylan’s boss is a
douchebag.”

Brian laughed as he took the letter from me.
“Sounds about right.”

“Yeah. Especially since it’s true. I really
kind of hate that man.”

“That makes two of us.”

He reclaimed his arm so he could tuck the
note back into his wallet, and I moved back to my side of the bed.
I curled up under the duvet with my back to him. The mattress
shifted and bumped as he settled in, and then we both lay in the
quiet room, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and the
seashell roar of water running through pipes.

Exhaustion made itself felt in every inch of
my body, but unlike the night before, sleep didn’t sneak up to
claim me. Instead, I lay there, a prisoner to my own tangled
thoughts and feelings.

Sometime later, I heard the bathroom door
open. I listened as London moved around the room, turning over to
look at him only when I heard him sigh. He stood at the foot of the
bed, looking down at it.

“You okay?” I asked, keeping my voice low in
case Brian had managed to sleep.

“Yup. Just thinking.”

I felt the bed shift as Brian turned over.
“You going to be able to handle the close quarters?” he asked.

London took a moment to answer. “I think so,”
he said at last. “As long as no one has nightmares, I think we’ll
all be okay.”

Of course. Touching made London’s empathy
stronger, and with him trapped in between us in the bed touching
would be damned near inevitable. I sighed and scooted to the
middle.

London’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“Um...claustrophobia?”

“Just get in the damned bed before I change
my mind.” I thumped my pillow a few times and settled in again.

The lights went off, one by one, and then the
mattress dipped as London climbed into bed. This whole thing had
been much less awkward the night before, when I’d been on the
periphery. I curled up more tightly, trying to take up less space,
but I ending up kneeing Brian in the butt instead.

Brian rolled over on his back and raised his
arm over his head. “Come here,” he said. “Let’s give London some
room.”

I didn’t even hesitate. With the lights out,
I didn’t think of Brian as some tan, toned, sex-god. He was just
Brian, the nice bloke I’d met on a boat. I curled up against his
side, and he draped his arm around me.

“Brian,” London said from somewhere behind
me, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but...fuck you.”

I felt Brian’s chest heave with a little,
soundless laugh. “You want me to cuddle you, too? You can have the
other side.”

“No, really, Brian...fuck you.”

I turned and groped in the dark, searching
for London’s hand. I found his face first, and he chuckled. I
traced a line down to his shoulder and along his arm to take hold
of his hand. Bringing it with me, I turned back over and curled up
against Brian, pulling London into our circle. I didn’t feel
claustrophobic at all, and if London had a problem with the
contact, he didn’t say a word about it.

Curled up between two guys I barely knew, I
felt safer than I had in a long, long time. We’d managed to forge a
bond of trust in the past day that surpassed most of the others in
my life. It was crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy.

Lulled by the beat of Brian’s heart and the
warmth – physical and emotional – surrounding me, I began to slip
toward sleep. My thoughts drifted, as they do, flitting from topic
to topic without any conscience guidance or acknowledgement. Then a
thought crossed my mind that made me sit up in bed, startling cries
of protest out of both of the boys. Ignoring them, I scrambled out
from under the duvet and scooted down the bed to slide off the
end.

“Elizabeth?” Brian sounded concerned.

“I think I know,” I said, flopping down in
the chair and inching up to the desk.

“Think you know what?” London asked.

“Where to start.” I grabbed my laptop, sat it
on top of London’s, snapped up the lid, and hit the power button. I
squinted against the sudden light and tapped in my password.

“What the hell are you on about?” Brian
asked.

“Logic,” I replied. “It just...came to me.
Just now.”

“I hate when that happens – you get a
brilliant idea just when you’re falling asleep.”

I nodded in agreement with London as I fired
up my web browser. “I’m glad it happened this time, though. Well,
no – I wish I had thought of it earlier. But I’m just glad I
thought of it.”

“Are you going to actually explain what it is
you thought of?” London asked, leaning on the back of my chair.

“Okay, so. I worked at a summer camp a few
years ago – one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, but at least
I didn’t try to be a camp counselor. Anyway, we all had training at
the start of the summer on what to do in emergency situations –
like missing campers.” I had pulled up a map of Orlando, and now I
zoomed in. “One of the basic ways to search for a person is what
they call an expanding circle.”

“Start in the middle and work your way out,”
London said, catching on.

“Usually, you start your search wherever the
person was last seen. But in this case, yeah, the middle, I think,
since we’re assuming they moved her away from the airport.”