The Siren (2 page)

“I’m doing OK. I started physical therapy yesterday, which sucked more than you could ever imagine,” she said with a groan. “They are talking like I’ll be able to go home maybe tomorrow or the next day.”

“That’s awesome,” I said.
 

She nodded. “Yeah. Everyone is pretty shocked at how fast I’ve recovered. Most of nurses didn’t think I would live, much less be walking out of here anytime soon.” She eyed me suspiciously from the bed. “I’m pretty sure I have you to thank for that.”

I shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Sloan, you’re the only one I remember being here during the beginning of all this. I remember you being in my room when I still couldn’t even talk,” she said. “It was like I could feel you right here next to me.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

She smiled. “Yeah. I think Warren is on to something. I think you healed me.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘healed’ necessarily.” I laughed. “Have you seen your hair today?”

She threw a pillow at me. “Shut up.”

“So, what are you going to do when you get out of here? Go to your apartment?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not for a while. I can’t get up and down the stairs yet. I’ll probably stay with my parents till I’m fully recuperated.”

“What about work?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They’re holding my booth at the salon, but it will probably be a while before I can be on my feet all day again.”

I leaned forward and put my hand on her broken leg.
 

“Are you putting your voodoo on me?” she asked with a smile.

I winked at her. “It can’t hurt.”

* * *

It was noon when I got to my office at the county building downtown. Most everyone was gone to lunch, leaving the halls unnervingly quiet. As I hurried to my office, I kept a careful watch over my shoulder. My father would call it PTSD from my recent attack. I would call it common sense after all I’d been through. In my rush to unlock the door, I almost missed the yellow sticky note attached just above eye-level.
Call me when you get in. -Sheriff Davis.

I pulled the note down as I walked into my office. “That’s odd.”

After tucking my briefcase under my desk and turning on my computer, I dialed the direct line to the sheriff’s office at the jail. I prayed he wasn’t going to ask me to come by. My gift never felt more like a curse than when I was in that building. The jail, with all the dark souls locked inside it, was a panic incubator for a girl like me.
 

“Sheriff Davis.” His gruff voice was more like a bark than a greeting.

I sat back in my office chair. “Hey, Sheriff. It’s Sloan. I got the sticky note you left on my door.”
 

“Hello, Sloan. How are you feeling?” he asked.

I smiled. “I’m healing up pretty well. I still have a few itchy scars on my legs, and the feeling hasn’t completely returned to my hands, but it could be a lot worse.” Billy Stewart had dragged me by a pair of steel handcuffs through the woods, causing extensive nerve damage in my hands. The doctors said the numbness and tingling could last for up to a year.

“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re on the mend. Listen, I’ve been trying to get in touch with Detective McNamara all morning. You seem to always know where he’s at, even though
I’m
his boss. Got any idea where I can find him?” he asked.

I thought for a second. “I talked to him yesterday, and he said he would be up in the woods all day in Greensboro. He probably doesn’t have cell phone service.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” he said. “I thought you might both want to know a report came across my desk this morning that they found a third body on Billy Stewart’s property in Stephens County, Georgia. They believe it’s a twenty-three-year-old female who disappeared from a camping trip last year.”

My mouth fell open. “You’re joking?”

“This isn’t really a joking subject, Sloan.”

“I know it isn’t. That just means we were wrong about the last victim—the one who is still missing on our list.” I thought of Nathan and his team who were still trudging through the forest looking for a body that wasn’t there.

“Either that or there are more victims than we initially thought,” he said.

I knew for a fact there were only twelve victims. It was part of Warren’s gift. Of course, I couldn’t explain that to Sheriff Davis without sounding like a lunatic.

“Perhaps you’re right, Sheriff.”

“Tell McNamara to call me,” he said.

“I will.” He hung up his phone before I could say goodbye.
 

I yanked my cell phone out of my purse and dialed Nathan’s number. It went straight to voicemail, so I left a message. “Hey, it’s Sloan. You can come home. You’re not going to find a body in Greensboro. The sheriff called and said they recovered a third body on Billy Stewart’s property in Georgia, so she must be victim number twelve, not Rachel Smith. Call your boss. Bye.”

I ended the call and dialed Warren’s number. He answered on the first ring. “Perfect timing. I just got off the plane,” he said by way of a greeting.

“In Asheville?” I asked.

“Charlotte. I have an hour layover, and then I’ll be home.”

Home.
It was strange to hear him say it out loud.
 

“How are you?” he asked. “Did you sleep better last night?”

“I’ll sleep better once you’re back.” That was the truth. I’d had nightmares about my abduction almost every night Warren had been gone.

“I’ll be there tonight,” he said. “Are you at work?”

“Yep. I just got here,” I said. “I had that stupid MRI this morning.”

“How did that go?”
 

“Oh, it was long and very boring. Dad said he didn’t see anything wrong, but he’s going to have some more doctors look at it.”

“Are you ever going to tell him the truth?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Dad believes so much in modern medicine he would never accept this is beyond explanation. He would probably have me committed to the psych ward.”

Warren laughed. “That’s highly unlikely. He loves you and he’s worried. I think you should tell him.”

I scrunched up my nose at the idea. He was right and I knew it, but just the thought of that conversation was daunting, no matter how loving I knew my parents were. “I’ll think about it.” I drummed my nails on my desk. “What time will you be here?”

“My flight lands sometime around three, so I should be there before you get off work at five,” he said.

I smiled. “Great! We’re having dinner at my parents’ house tonight.”

He groaned. “Do we have to? I was planning on us staying at home. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

The tone of his voice was alarming. I didn’t like it at all. “We do?”

“This wasn’t a leisure trip, babe,” he said.

My blood pressure jumped up a few points. I decided avoidance was the best course of action. “Well, it’s gonna have to wait. I promised my parents I would come because I haven’t been since you moved in, and they keep badgering me about when you’re coming to see them again.”

He sighed. “OK. I’ll go to the house and change when I get in town. You can pick me up on your way.”

“All right,” I said. “Guess what.”

“What?”

“Rachel Smith wasn’t Billy’s victim. They found a third body in Georgia.”

“Interesting,” he said. “So that’s all of them, then?”

Leaning back in my chair, I stared at the halogen light above my desk. “That’s all of them.”

“Did you let Nate know?”

“I tried, but the call went to voicemail. Have you talked to him?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Sure. He called earlier to ask how my trip was going and what the weather was like in Washington and if I’d gotten a good night’s sleep…”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, shut up.”

“I’ll see you in a few hours, Sloan.”

“Bye.” I disconnected the call.

On the desktop of my computer, I clicked open the missing persons file Nathan had sent me. It contained all the victims we had originally believed had been murdered by Billy Stewart. I found Rachel Smith’s folder and opened it. I printed off her picture and her missing report which had been filed in 2008. She was twenty-four when she disappeared, beautiful with long, dark hair and light brown eyes. Her co-workers at Child Protective Services in Greensboro, North Carolina reported her missing. There was a note that no family had been found or notified of her disappearance.
 

For a moment, I stared out the window behind my desk and wondered what had become of her. The upper side of downtown Asheville was poised against the colorful fall backdrop of the North Carolina mountain range. The forest in the distance was popping with gold, orange, and bright red trees.
 

It reminded me I had work to do.

The fall tourist season was in full swing in Asheville, and the Buncombe County event calendar needed to be updated. I tucked Rachel’s sheets into my briefcase and turned toward my keyboard to attempt to type with the few fingers I still had control over.

* * *

Warren was waiting on my front porch when I pulled up to the curb after work. He had showered, and his shoulder-length black hair was still wet and tied in a ponytail. He was six-foot-three with oh-point-no body fat, and he had a chiseled tan face and killer black eyes—literally. He shared a lot of my strange abilities, but his gift was more specific, practiced, and frightening than mine. I could summon the living; he could find the dead. I had the ability to heal people, and he could kill them with a glance.
 

Warren was like antifreeze: effective, delicious, and absolutely deadly.

I felt a little dizzy watching him come down my steps.

When he opened the passenger side door and angled inside, my eyes nearly rolled back in my head as his ice cool cologne filled my car. “Gah, you smell good.”

He leaned over and gave me a welcoming kiss on the lips. The familiar buzz of his touch zinged through me. “I’ve missed you,” he said, smiling when he pulled away.

I savored the taste of his kiss. “I don’t wanna go see my parents now.”

He laughed and moved his seat back as far as it would go to accommodate his long legs. “You said we had to.”

I laid my head against the headrest. “We do have to, or I’ll never hear the end of it.” I put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb before I could talk myself out of going. “What did they want with you in Washington?”

He didn’t look at me. “Too much to tell for a short car ride. We’ll talk about it later.”

I frowned. “Should I be worried?”

Reaching across the car, he squeezed my shoulder. “Of course not, babe. How was work today?”

I relaxed in my seat. “Boring. After hunting down missing people and serial killers, I’m not sure how I’ll ever be satisfied with county newsletters and press releases again.”
 

With his long arm still draped across the back of my neck, he began twisting strands of my long brown hair around his fingers. “Maybe we should go into private investigating,” he suggested. “We could work together.”

I raised my eyebrows. “The only problem is none of our tactics would ever be explainable in court,” I said. “I would love to see the look on a judge’s face when I say ‘my boyfriend is sort of like a human cadaver dog.’ That’s totally plausible, right?”

He stopped twisting my hair and grinned at me.

“What?”

He shrugged. “I like it when you call me your boyfriend.”

Rolling my eyes, I shook my head. “You know, for you being such a badass, you’re more of a girl than I am sometimes.”

He laughed, but he withdrew his arm and shoved me playfully in the shoulder. “So, what’s on the agenda at your folks’ house tonight?” he asked.

I shook my head as I turned onto the main highway. “Nothing special. Just Monday night dinner.”

His head whipped toward me. “It’s Tuesday.”

I grinned. “I think Mom moved it on purpose because she knew you’d be gone.”

The house smelled like roast beef and Mom’s secret-ingredient mashed potatoes when Warren and I walked through the front door. It smelled so good I could have licked the air. Mom had once promised to divulge the secret if I ever took the time to learn how to cook. My cooking skill set extended to being able to burn toast and make coffee. Someday I knew I would make time, but until then I would have Monday night dinners at their house, and I had Warren at home. He was almost as good a cook as my mother.
 

“Hello! Hello!” I called from the foyer.

Mom’s gray head peeked around the corner of the kitchen. “Hey! Come on in! Hi, Warren!”

Warren wiped his shoes on the welcome mat. “Hello, Mrs. Jordan.”

She put a hand on her hip and shot him a teasing smirk. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Audrey?”

He laughed. “A few more, Mrs. Jordan.”

Tugging on Warren’s hand, I led him to the kitchen. Dad stood up from the table where he was reading a thick book. I walked over and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey, sweetheart.” He shook Warren’s hand. “It’s good to see you again, Warren.”

“Thank you, sir. It’s good to see you as well.” Warren smiled politely. “Thanks for letting me crash dinner.”

“Nonsense. You’re always welcome here,” Dad said. “How was your trip?”

I couldn’t discern Warren’s face. The man could make a killing at poker.

He cleared his throat. “It’s cold in Washington.”

Mom laughed. “I’m sure it is.” She stepped over to give him a side-arm hug. My tiny mother fit neatly under the hook of Warren’s strong arm. It made me smile.

“Whatcha readin’, Dad?” I asked as I pulled out a chair next to his.
 

He held up the book so I could see the cover. “Hemiplegic Migraine Symptoms, Pathogenesis, and Treatments,” he read aloud.
 

Warren caught my eye and cocked an eyebrow.

My shoulders slumped. “Dad, we need to talk.”

He took off his reading glasses. “About what, sweetheart?”

I reached over and closed the book. “You’re not going to find the answer to my headaches in here.”

“How can you be so sure?” he asked.