After fixing herself a bowl of cereal and eating it on the shaded porch, Nicki did a little exploring. Not far from the cabin was a wide, lazy stream with an honest-to-God swimming hole and big flat rocks she planned to sun herself on. There wasn’t another place within miles.
When the sun dipped below the horizon, Nicki went out and laid in the meadow. She looked up into the most perfect sapphire sky at more glittering stars then she’d ever seen in her life and finally exhaled. It was perfect.
*
Sean loved his family, he really did, but the frustration of one dead end after another sometimes had him feeling like he would kill the very next person that tried to speak to him. He just could not bear one more night of sitting in the bar listening to them as lead after lead failed to produce anything tangible.
Finding Nicki and trying to learn what had happened in the last eight years was proving to be quite a challenge, and there was nothing the Callaghans enjoyed more than a chance to test their skills. Nicki, it seemed, had done just that by disappearing into thin air. The more they found – or didn’t find, as was more often the case - the more intrigued they became.
They meant well. They were doing their damnedest. But the fact remained: Nicki was gone.
It had been three weeks. Three weeks since he’d seen, heard, scented, touched, or tasted her. Sean was going out of his mind. Christmas came and went, and Sean was unable to enjoy any of it. Nothing held much interest to him except finding his woman and bringing her home. Only then would things begin to make sense again.
“Anything?” Nick asked hopefully when Sean returned to the garage. Somehow he knew Nick would be there. He, like Sean, tended to take some small measure of solace in working with his hands. The change in Nick since his sister’s disappearance was startling. It was like the kid grew into a man overnight. While he still retained some of his innate bad boy aura, he was more serious now, focused.
Nick had told them everything he could, hoping that something would provide the information needed to find her. Sean almost wished he hadn’t. It was impossible to hear the grisly details of what had been done to them as kids and not want to go on a killing rampage.
One thing Sean knew for sure: when he found Nicki, and he would find her, she would never suffer at the hands of another again. There wasn’t anything he could do about her past – what was done was done – but he would devote the rest of his life to making sure the rest of her life was as close to heaven as he could make it.
She was already familiar enough with hell. It was a miracle she’d managed to retain any semblance of sanity in the face of such cruelty. But what was even more amazing to him was that she had not only come out of it reasonably sane, she’d used it to become strong.
Sean looked into Nick’s pale eyes, the ones currently pinned on him with desperate hope. It couldn’t have been any easier for Nick, having to relive all the horror, having to admit to things that no man should ever have to admit to. But, like his sister, he had survived and become stronger for it. Not as strong as Nicki, perhaps, but Sean could see him changing every day.
“No,” Sean said. Again. Christ, how he wanted to walk through the door and have something different to say. “You?”
Nick shook his head. In the hopes that Nicki would contact him, he kept his cell phone on him at all times. He left it on each night while it charged, maxed out on volume, but so far, there had been nothing. No hang-ups. No texts.
Nothing.
“She’s okay,” Nick said with forced confidence. “She’s tough. She’s just waiting till shit dies down, that’s all.”
Sean nodded somberly, wishing he believed that, but he feared the worst. She’d literally dropped off the face of the earth. Ian had been tapping nearly every security database on the East coast and running his custom face recognition programs and he’d not gotten a single hit.
On a hunch, Ian ran similar searches on the agents that had shown up at Sean’s that morning – Fisher and Brookes. Ian found similarly troubled lives, but like Nicki, they seemed to have vanished in their late teens, with no digital footprint since.
Each question answered brought two more. Who were Fisher and Brookes? Definitely not DEA liked they’d claimed, but something. Ian re-ran queries against all the Federal databases, but the results hadn’t changed.
So who did she work for? And why weren’t there any records of her or the others – Fisher and Brookes? Ian had verified beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were all using their real names, but that in itself seemed paradoxical. If you wanted to stay off the grid, why wouldn’t you change your name, become someone else? Why would you continue to use your birth name?