TWELVE
When I turned to face my large-screen monitor, my current Bon Jovi ringtone came from the cell phone in my purse. I reached into the cubbyhole I kept my purse in and fumbled until I found the phone.
ADAM BOYD. I smiled as I looked at his name on the screen. My body relaxed, some of the anger and pain dissipating as I answered the phone.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey yourself.” The warmth in Adam’s voice sent heat throughout me. “How’s your morning?”
“Right now I’d rather talk about anything but work.” I put my elbow on my desk and rested my chin in my palm. “Like when I’m going to see you next.”
“I have witnesses to interview and leads to follow up on a case, and a meeting to go to late this afternoon. I don’t know when I’ll be free,” Adam said. “We’ll figure something out.”
Adam always figured it out. He always made time for me.
“What time are you picking me up to go to your sister’s wedding reception tomorrow?” Nervousness and even a little fear made me jittery at the thought of meeting his family. Immediate family members and a few friends had gone to the wedding on a Caribbean cruise liner, so the reception was for friends and family who hadn’t been able to make the wedding cruise.
“I’ll swing by about one-thirty,” Adam said.
“I’m taking the whole day off.” Zombies be damned. “Olivia and I are closing the office for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We’ll be back to work on Monday.”
“Are you looking forward to going to Otherworld to see your parents?” he asked.
Of course he couldn’t see me but I caught myself nodding. “Yes. The last time I was in Otherworld was after that Demon attack.”
“That was only a night or two,” he said.
“It wasn’t exactly quality time.” I shuddered. “Nearly dying kind of put a damper on things.”
“Scared us all, Nyx,” Adam said quietly, and I wished I hadn’t said anything.
“Didn’t help when my father tried to pull the king-laying-down-the-law on me,” I said. “I never mentioned it, but my father demanded that I stay in Otherworld because he thought New York City was too dangerous for me.”
“You’re an adult,” Adam said.
“Tell him that.” I shook my head and wondered if Adam and I should figure out how to do a video call. “My father is at least two millennia in age, and to him at twenty-seven I might as well be a youngling. I mean a child.”
“He is around two thousand years old?” Disbelief was in Adam’s voice. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No one, except maybe the Great Guardian, knows how long Light Elves and Dark Elves can live.” I switched the phone to my other ear. Should have put on my wireless earpiece, but holding the phone made me feel closer to Adam. “That’s because no Elves that we know of have passed to Summerland from old age or illness. The only way Elves have died is if they are murdered or killed in battle.” And both were rare.
“Whoa.” Adam sounded like he had a hard time believing me. Couldn’t blame him. Wasn’t like every day you met someone who was two thousand years old. “So will you live that long?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My mother is human, so I could take after that half of my makeup and only live as long as a human would.” I hadn’t really given it a lot of thought. “Or I could take after my father and live for who knows how long. Maybe it’ll be a combination—live longer than humans do, but eventually die.”
“So your mother…”
“Humans live longer in Otherworld,” I said. “She could make it a century or two, but eventually she will pass on.”
“Tomorrow you’ll get to meet a bunch of true mortals.” Adam had a smile in his voice. “Can’t wait to introduce you to my parents, and my brother and sister.”
“I’m looking forward to it.” A smile was in my tone, too.
“Need to get going,” Adam said. “I’ll give you a call later.”
“See you,” I said.
“See you.”
I disconnected and set the phone on my desk. Olivia was looking at me. “Adam doesn’t really know a whole lot about you, does he,” she stated.
“A little of my life at a time goes a long way,” I said.
“Sure does,” she said as my phone rang again.
This time the screen showed RODÁN. I frowned, then realized I wasn’t really mad anymore. Maybe a little, but a part of me realized where he had been coming from, even if it was wrong.
“Nyx,” Rodán said when I answered. “Lawan is missing.”
“What?” My heart started pounding and my throat grew dry. “Did anyone see anything?”
“Lawan left to track her territory last night,” he said.
“The Financial District,” I said.
“She never checked in this morning.” Concern was in Rodán’s voice. “I sent out several PTF agents to investigate her territory and the surrounding areas, as well as her apartment.”
“The Paranormal Task Force isn’t as thorough as a Night Tracker.” I pushed my chair away from my desk. “I’ll go look for her now.”
“I didn’t finish.” Rodán’s voice didn’t sound so calm this morning. “The PTF did find bodies when they were looking for Lawan. Several paranorms. Dopplers.”
Cold washed over my skin. “Where?”
He told me the location and I held my hand to my belly, pressing against the sick feeling I’d had ever since we discovered that Zombies were behind the massacres.
When I told him I’d head there now, Rodán said, “I need you and Olivia to run down all of the angles and leads you can on your end. Pick two Trackers from your team to investigate the scene.”
“Are you trying to hold me back, Rodán?” I said as I continued to stand at my desk.
“No,” Rodán said. “I need you where you are because only you and Olivia can dig deep enough to find answers and angles that no one else can see.”
It didn’t appease me, but I didn’t argue. What he said was true. We were the only ones who could do what needed to be done.
“Angel, Ice, and Joshua,” I said. “I’ll call them now.”
I didn’t know if Dragons needed time to recover so I wasn’t going to call Colin. I’d ask him about it later. And Penrod was a Sprite, so him in daylight around norms? Not happening.
My jaws hurt from how hard I clenched my teeth before I spoke. “We’ve got to find Lawan.”
“We will,” Rodán said before he disconnected the call.
I stared at my phone and remembered how Lawan had looked last night and that she thought she was being watched. Had someone been watching her?
“What happened to Lawan?” Olivia’s firm, but concerned voice cut into my thoughts.
I told her everything Rodán had said to me.
“Damn.” Olivia shook her head. “We’ve got to find Lawan. Those sonofabitch Zombies better not have hurt her.”
I called Joshua, Angel, and Ice and told them what they needed to do.
When I finished I sat down hard in my chair. “It’s happening here. Just like Otherworld.”
The clack of Olivia’s keyboard was loud as she stared at her monitor. “Not only do we need to look for patterns, but we need to see if there have been a higher number of unexplained disappearances than usual.”
“I’ll search the Internet for mentions of missing persons via reports, articles, et cetera,” I said.
Olivia’s gaze flicked from one side of her screen to the other. “I’m accessing police reports now.”
It didn’t take long before I realized something very strange was going on. I kept up my search, and the more I did, the more I found.
After a good two hours, my eyes were crossing.
“I think I’ve had it for the day,” Olivia said at the same time I came to the same conclusion. “At least as far as staring at a computer screen for hours.”
“Agreed.” I motioned for her to check out the information on my monitor. “Take a look at this.”
She pointed toward a wall where I had mounted swords, daggers, bows with quivers of diamond-tipped arrows, and other weapons forged by the Dark Elves. I looked at the wall and back at her.
“You keep promising you’re going to get rid of those dust collectors so that we’ll have room for high tech instead of medieval,” she said. “Then we’ll be able to put all of the information we’ve gathered in one place to review together.” She shook her head. “Dark Ages around here.”
“Believe me, I know Dark Ages and this isn’t it. You should try living in Otherworld.” I leaned back in my chair and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “As far as remodeling, the cases we’ve taken on over the past couple of months have kept me—us—a little busy.”
“Demons, Werewolves, Vampires, Zombies, oh my,” Olivia said in a singsong tone.
Instinctively I flinched at the word “Zombie.” Had to stop doing that. “Do me a favor and don’t say the ‘Z’ word for a while,” I said.
“What? Zombie?” She batted her eyes in a look of innocence. “You don’t want me to say Zombie? Because if you don’t want me to say Zombie, I’ll try really, really hard not to say Zombie.”
“You’re evil,” I said.
She cackled like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. “At least I’m not a Zombie.”
I narrowed my eyes and glared at her. “I’ll find out if it can be arranged.”
“Now that we’re through talking about Zombies…” she said, and I glared more. “… Let’s talk about that wall. If you don’t take care of getting what we need, I will.”
“Enjoy.” I waved off her complaint and threat and was very happy to have her stop teasing me. “I’ll make sure the weapons are moved, you take care of the rest.”
Olivia gave me one of her devious smiles. “Just what I’ve been waiting for.”
“Without going overboard,” I hurried to add, realizing my mistake and knowing it was too late to go back.
“Don’t worry.” Her expression was one of someone who’d just been given the key to the Golden City. “I’ll take care of everything.”
Groan.
She tapped the side of her head. “Starting with headsets. I can’t believe you haven’t invested in them sooner.”
“In the meantime.” I gave my screen a half-turn so that Olivia could see it better when she came up beside me. “Take a look at this.”
I ignored the smug look on her face in her triumph over bringing the firm’s technology up to date and I started pointing to the various windows on my screen.
“All of this is amazing,” I said. “Here we have a Navy admiral who couldn’t be found for two days and then he was back. He claimed to have been ill.”
“Sounds familiar…” Olivia said.
“This is Bill Huntington, a Fortune 500 exec who is worth a few billion. Give or take several million or so.” I looked at Olivia. “He was missing for two days. No one had any idea what had happened. Family members were prepared to receive a ransom note.”
“Then he showed up after a two-day absence,” Olivia said. “Said he was ill.”
“Right.” I nodded. “It gets interesting when government officials start to disappear, then reappear.”
“You’re kidding me.” Olivia’s triumph in her victory over getting to do a high-tech makeover on the office seemed to be forgotten for the moment. “Who?”
“Senator Dan Bourne to start with.” I rocked back in my chair. “Along with foreign ambassador Deb Ludlum and U.S. Representative Jason Roberts.”
Olivia narrowed her brows. “Any others?”
“In our very own nation’s capital,” I said.
“Washington, D.C.” Olivia shook her head, amazement on her features. “This is crazy. Nuts.”
“Beyond crazy.” I pointed to four more windows on my computer screen. “Each of these windows has information on a high-ranking official or prominent businessman or businesswoman. A judge, a bank executive, an Army general, and a police commissioner. There are also the articles on the same attacks we’ve been seeing. Not always but often the Zombie attacks are close to where the disappearance occurred.”
I continued, “The fact that these attacks started at the same time as the mysterious disappearance and reappearance of these individuals, and the close proximity of the attacks often to the disappearance, tells me something.” I frowned as something clenched inside me. “My gut tells me that these cases are related.”
“And no one has noticed this pattern of Houdini acts?” Olivia said. “That’s unbelievable.”
I picked up a pencil and tapped the end on a bright pink sticky notepad. “When I dug deeper, I discovered that each case has been kept very hush-hush. I believe that someone in the government knew of the disappearances but didn’t want to panic people. It reminds me the way the government treated the UFOs in this world. Cover up and shut up.”
“Found similar information in police reports and other databases.” Olivia jerked her thumb toward her computer monitor. “Something bad is going down. I think it goes way beyond a few Zombie attacks.”
“All of the cases have been spread so far apart that no one has been connecting the dots,” I said.
“Consider the dots connected.” Olivia rocked back on her heels and put her hands in her back pockets. “Now to figure out if there are any more dots and what kind of picture we’ve just made.”
“Hold on.” I got up from my chair and went to a map of the U.S. and one of New York City that we’d put up on one wall some time ago.
“Hold onto what?” Olivia said in her smartass tone.
I opened a drawer in the map table beneath the maps and rummaged through the drawer until I found one for Washington, D.C. I pinned that map on the wall next to the one for New York City.
“Speaking of dots.” I stared at the maps. “I’d like to see what the patterns look like on these.”
“That’s something else we’ll be able to remodel when I take over,” Olivia said and I rolled my eyes. “With a wall of monitors, we can bring up several electronic maps at a time. Forget this manual stuff.”
“For now we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way.” I reached the wall and picked up a pushpin from a tray on top of the map table. “Start giving me locations.”
Olivia did and I pushed pins in each area where we’d found reports of attacks. “New York City and D.C., mostly around financial and government centers.” I frowned. “With a few random areas.”
“Those aren’t random areas,” Olivia said. “Those are places where paranorms tend to hang out.”
She was right. “So we need to focus our teams on these areas in the city. Rodán can notify the D.C. Trackers.”
I returned to my desk, planted my palms to either side of my monitor. I looked at the computer screen then Olivia again. “Could Lawan’s disappearance have anything to do with whatever happened to all of these people?”
“If she shows up in two days claiming to have been ill, then we’ll see,” Olivia said.
I straightened and she moved aside as I walked around my desk and started pacing the length of our office. My heels clicked on the tile floor and Olivia’s chair squeaked as she returned to her chair.
“I do need to sit down with my father and have him give me more details about what happened in Otherworld twenty-two years ago,” I said. “I don’t remember a whole lot about it.”
Olivia’s tone was dry. “That should be fun, getting King Ciar to tell you that kind of information.”
She’d never met my father but she knew enough about him from me that she had a pretty good idea of just how difficult that task might be.
I touched my collar as I paced. “And to get him to talk with me about Tristan will be even harder.
“It started out slow in Otherworld, I think.” I continued pacing as I spoke. “But things escalated. Got worse.”
“What happened that made the problem go away in Otherworld?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know.” I moved my hand away from my collar. “Not long after Tristan … was gone … it stopped. Just stopped.”
“According to our research, I think it’s possible we won’t be so lucky.” Olivia tapped her computer monitor before she went on.
“Humans don’t have magic like you do in Otherworld. That might have been why it stopped,” she said. “You had ways there of fighting the Zombies and whatever was causing the disappearances. Those skills and abilities your people have in Otherworld could have chased off whatever was responsible for the deaths and missing persons.”
“That’s one theory.” I wiped my palms on my slacks as I slowly crossed the room and then back again. “I agree that something was different in Otherworld than it is in this Earth Otherworld. I need more information to give us a better idea of what happened there and what we’re looking at here.”
“Regardless of what you learn from your father,” she said as she started tapping a red pencil on her desk, “I really believe we’re on the cusp of an epidemic.”
“You could be right.” I stopped pacing and looked at Olivia. “If you are, we could very well be running out of time.”
Zombies Sold Separately
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