Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (37 page)

He was taking me inside the house, like he’d said.

I cried out, terrified by that idea beyond reason.

I had this sudden memory of being warned against ever letting myself be brought to the killing grounds of a serial killer. An image flashed, of Gantry and Mara standing there, probably in one of my first self-defense classes down at the dojo. The memory had to be ten years old, at least. My mind had stored it away somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain cells...only to bring it up now, when it could do me absolutely zero good whatsoever.

The European holding my cuffed wrists ignored it when I started to struggle harder, fighting to free my hands. He didn’t bother to slow down long enough to even hurt me.

I writhed my cuffed ankles and legs next, trying to stop him from dragging me through what now felt like a doorway. I tried digging my heels into anything that might provide resistance, a futile attempt to get enough traction to slow him down. When the ground slid under me, I tried to hook my feet on the doorway itself. I don’t think my efforts made a dent. The European barely seemed to notice, giving a more vicious yank as he brought my body up over the doorstep and onto what felt like linoleum or maybe even tile.

Kitchen,
my mind catalogued, somewhere in the distance.

Back door, then. I was inside the house.

My mind turned it into an abandoned farmhouse of some kind, and again, the serial killer motif sifted through my mind, even apart from Evers.

It smelled bad in here, too, I noticed.

Really damned bad.

Like cat urine and dirty diapers mixed together bad. There was even a bit of rotten egg smell wafting through the mixture. I started wondering if something or someone might be rotting in the corner...after Evers disposed of his last little plaything, maybe. As bad as the smell was, though, it wasn’t corpse smell, really. It was closer to open sewer.

Then something clicked.

Meth. They were cooking in here.

It’s a testament to where my mind had been going that the realization came with a not-insignificant amount of relief. Meth I could understand. Meth was business...a crappy, horrible, life-destroying business, sure...but a business. Meth wasn’t dead bodies on meat hooks, or piles of baby bones or dead kittens. Meth was mundane horror, not
Silence of the Lambs
horror.

I didn’t have long to think about that, either.

The European dragged me through that kitchen-like room that smelled of meth lab and cigarettes and sweat. Then I was moving faster, still on linoleum but in what now felt and sounded like a narrower hall from the proximity of the walls and the acoustics.
 

I could still get a sense of light all of that time. It wasn’t completely dark, so the lights must have been on in those rooms, and pretty brightly.

I only really noticed that after the light was suddenly gone, though.

I went over what felt like another doorjamb, then I found myself on carpet––a hard, thin carpet, so either really cheap/crappy carpet, or it was really damned old, or both. When I entered the carpeted room, it was suddenly as dark as night overhead. I turned my face so that I could see behind me, and I could make out a faint rectangle of light, what must have been the door leading to that more brightly-lit hall and the kitchen beyond it.

The European dropped the cuffs holding my arms together. Then, walking unceremoniously around my body, he kicked my legs and feet aside on his way back to that door.

Seconds later, that door closed behind him. The rectangle of light went away, too.

Then it was dark for real.

I lay there, panting, sucking in breaths through the cloth bag over my head. The cloth got pulled in and out of my mouth and nose as I fought to take in more oxygen, and I turned my head around, groaning a bit at my hurt side and hip along with the pain in my arms, which felt nearly pulled out of their sockets now that the pressure had finally let up.

I managed to roll onto my stomach, and immediately regretted it when the pain in my ribs turned into a sharp, glass-like stab through the chest. I worried I’d punctured a lung and fought my way back to my side and then my back, groaning in spite of myself.

Slowly, my breathing went back to normal.

After it did, I realized I wasn’t alone in the room.

I could hear breathing.

More breathing, that is. Meaning, breathing that wasn’t mine.

I froze, straining to listen from where I stretched out on the thin carpet. As soon as I went completely quiet and still...someone coughed.

Something about that cough sounded female.

My mind turned over that, and over what Boston and the European had been talking about in the car, and I had a sudden thought that maybe I had come to the end of one puzzle, at least. Of course, under the circumstances, I couldn’t be sure how much good that information would do me. I wasn’t in a position to effect a dramatic rescue of myself, much less anyone else.

Before I could decide if I should try to talk to whoever it was, I heard clothing rustle, right before someone moved over to where I lay.

I tensed at once, ready to fight.

I was still pretty sure I knew what this was, who they were, and that they weren’t likely to hurt me, but I had no idea if I was right. Besides, the fight thing is a reflex with me. For the same reason, I didn’t really relax until she spoke.

“Hey,” a young-sounding voice said. “Are you okay?”

I fought with how to answer that...then tensed again as I felt them move over me.

All they did was grab the cloth hood though, and yank it over my head.

In the same set of seconds, a light came on, in another part of the room.

The light was dim, nothing like what I’d glimpsed through the cloth hood before I got in here, but it was enough to see a little. The illumination itself flickered in a familiar but disorienting way. My mind latched on it being candlelight, or some kind of oil lamp. Something with an unsteady flicker of light, versus a light bulb, that is.

I found myself looking up at a weirdly familiar face, staring down at me in the orangish glow. She blinked, frowning a little as she looked back at me, examining my features as if trying to decide if she recognized me, too. She had a black eye, I noted, and what might have been a bruise on the opposite cheek. Otherwise, her face looked more or less like it had in the photograph I’d seen on her father’s mantle that day.

“Who is it?” someone else whispered.

My ears found the other girl over by that flickering light. I couldn’t see her as well, given the shadow behind the glowing bulb I could see.

“Just another girl,” said the girl hanging over me, her dark eyes shining with reflected light. “I don’t know her. She’s older.”

I snorted at that.

I couldn’t help it.

Even so, and despite the pain in my side, I grinned up at her, feeling a totally irrational wave of relief as it hit me that I really
did
know her face, that I wasn’t imagining things. Moreover, I knew exactly who she was. Even with the bruises, her features were impossible to forget, given how I’d first come across them.

I was finally looking at the real life edition of JìngYáng “Jazzy” Jiāng, apple of her father’s eye and model-aspirant-slash-high-school-sophomore-wild-girl.

And she was alive.

16

An Unwanted Complication

Of course, neither Jazzy nor her friend Hilary could do much to help me with the cuffs.

I directed them to look around the room for me, instead, if only to make sure they hadn’t missed some way out of here, or some kind of weapon we might use.
 

They hadn’t, of course. They’d been locked in here for days, from what I could tell, and neither of them was dumb, despite their age. They’d searched every inch of the small room, even ripping up the carpet in a few areas to pull out bent carpet staples and look for loose nails.

They hadn’t found much.
 

The room had no furniture at all, not even a closet. No windows. The ceiling was high and unbroken. The walls appeared to be made of concrete slabs and the lower areas also had been reinforced with sheet metal, probably to make sure no one got ambitious about chipping away at the mortar or whatever.

So yeah, it was a pretty solid-looking cage. One that had obviously been used before. It also appeared to be more or less soundproof, given the concrete blocks and so on.

They couldn’t tell me much, either.

“Why are you here?” I asked Jazzy, glancing at her friend, Hilary. Seeing the blank look that came to their faces, and the exchanged looks like they thought I was a moron, I clarified, “I mean why
here.
Why are they keeping you here, instead of...”
 

I hesitated, realizing I was about to ask them why they hadn’t been sold yet, or farmed off to a brothel or whatever. Or hell, chained naked to a bed.

Switching tacks, I looked at Hilary again.
 

“Where’s Marla?” I asked. “Isn’t she here with the two of you?”

There was another silence. Then tears began to roll down Hilary’s face, glistening and visible in the flickering light of the plastic, electric light that must have a loose wire. I’d been disappointed when I saw the lamp, but hell, I should have known they wouldn’t have left them in here with open flames. That would just be...dumb.
 

While Boston might have veered a bit on the dim side, meaning of the two thugs in the van, the European guy didn’t.

Either way, I found myself regretting asking the question about Marla.

“They took her,” Hilary said, wiping her face with a swipe of one hand. “They took her the first day...like a few hours after we got here.”

I frowned at that information, glancing at Jazzy, then back at Hilary.
 

Both of them had bruises on their faces, not only Jazzy.

The thugs who’d done this might be waiting for the bruises to heal before they put them on the auction block. Or there might be another reason. A far yuckier reason, having more to do with their age. Hilary’s sister, Marla, had been eighteen. Jazzy and Hillary were both under sixteen. Maybe that was a whole different market.

I looked at Hilary’s blond hair, then back at Jazzy Jiāng.

I realized in the same set of seconds that any further questions along that line probably wouldn’t yield much of value, and might just turn my new friends catatonic.

“How many are there?” I said, purposefully making my voice businesslike. At their silence, I sharpened my tone a little. “Have you heard voices? Accents? Languages?”

“Most of them are Russian,” Jazzy said, looking at me.

“Any idea of the number of different voices?” I pressed.

I watched the two of them think. Hilary still looked a lot more out of it than Jazzy did, so I found myself focusing back on the latter.

“I know there were two in the car,” I said, trying to help her out. “An American from the East Coast, and one of your Russians. Tall guy. The one who dragged me in here.”

Jazzy nodded, her expression clearing once more. “Yeah, I know him. The others call him Pavel. He’s kind of in charge. Some of the time, anyway.”

I nodded, arranging my back on the thin carpet. “Okay, good. Any others?”