CHAPTER 2
One more game, Mr. Grey?” one of the Youth Haven kids called out as he ran the basketball down the court.
Kasabian dropped down on the bleachers, catching his breath. “I’m done.”
“Getting old, Kasabian?” one of the older kids chided.
“Yeah, thirty-two and over the hill.” Of course, that was to these kids. They couldn’t yet comprehend how long Crescents lived, how those years would drag on. “Five hours straight, and I can’t take a break without getting harassed?” Had he been this relentless when he lived here at Youth Haven? Yeah, probably, in his eagerness for a grown-up’s attention.
Most of the Haven kids were Caidos, but some were Dragon or Deuce orphans.
“I’m done, too.” Daniel Portofino, another volunteer, flopped down beside him, panting. “Man, I can’t believe you do this and then work until three in the morning.”
“Helping out here is recreation for me.” He liked giving back to the place that had taken him in after his mother’s murder when he was twelve. “Actually, so is bartending.”
“I don’t know how you do that either. All those emotions, people getting hot for each other, jealousy…that’s got to kill you.”
Even joy felt like a thousand razor blades across their souls. “I’d rather suffer than shut myself off from humanity.” Kasabian wasn’t about to tell anyone he craved emotions. He leaned back on the bleacher behind him. “Ever been in love, Daniel?” At his surprised look, Kasabian added, “Not seriously in love but crushing on someone even though you knew it wouldn’t work? Because we’re Caido.”
Daniel stared at him for a long second, some odd emotion flashing behind his dark blue eyes. “Once. Long time ago. You?”
Kasabian chuckled, shaking his head. “There’s this Deuce chick who hangs out at the Witch’s Brew, and she’s freakin’ amazing.”
“A Deuce?”
Caidos couldn’t pick up each other’s emotions, but Kasabian didn’t need supernatural ability to see that the idea annoyed Daniel. Who cared? It felt good to talk about her. “Long blond hair, the creamiest skin I’ve ever seen, dresses all biker-chick in black leather and fishnets. Last night she finally danced for me, within sight of my bar. She kept checking to see if I was watching.” And he was, every spare second. It had been a long time since he’d desired a woman, and then only fleetingly. With Kye, he couldn’t seem to stop.
“Sounds painful. You going to act on it?”
“I have to do the Essex twice a night to dull the pain. But wanting her is as far as it’s going to go.” The only thing he and Kye could ever do was exchange furtive glances.
“Smart. That kind of thing never works.”
“Actually, it could.” For normal Caidos, anyway. “She’s a Zensu Deuce, and she’s come up with a permanent Essex so the Caido is immune to his lover’s emotions.”
“Caidos should stick with their own.”
It was easier for Caidos to get together. Desire still hurt, but with their dampened emotions, it wasn’t as painful. “Yeah, and if there were plenty of Caido females, it wouldn’t be a problem.” Part of the curse their forbearers passed on was a lack of females in their Crescent class. At least that was the theory.
Daniel’s mouth tightened, like he was preparing some kind of lecture, but his sulk turned into a speculative look. “I know a couple who might be interested in her services. What’s her name?”
“Kye Rivers.” Damn but he liked the way her name rolled off his tongue. “But remember, she’s not offering this magick to just anyone. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it, so keep it to yourself.”
“Kasabian!”
Hayden Masters approached from the end of the bleachers. He acknowledged Daniel with a nod but focused on Kasabian. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
Kasabian pushed up, excusing himself. He bumped knuckles with the big Caido, and they headed out of the gym.
Hayden lowered his voice. “Something came up at work that you need to know about. Even though you’re not supposed to know about it.”
“Gotcha.”
Hayden was a Vega in the Guard, the Crescent’s police force. He’d shared some of his cases, mostly hunting down Crescents who broke the laws of the Hidden. Rule Number One was to never reveal the magick of the Hidden to Mundanes. Other rules focused on not using fangs, orbs, or other magick weapons on either Mundanes or Crescents. Not that everyone obeyed.
They stepped out into the humid air, the afternoon sun cooking them until they stepped beneath a tree by the tennis courts. Two Haven residents were batting a ball half-heartedly back and forth.
Hayden braced his hand against the trunk of the tree. “A five-year-old Caido boy was picked up this morning, just wandering the streets. The kid was weak, disoriented, and mute. Whatever he’d gone through traumatized him pretty bad. And he had this.” He yanked up his shirt to reveal a faint gray starburst over his diaphragm.
Kasabian felt a squeeze where his own scar was. “Hell. Whoever kidnapped us more than twenty years ago is still doing it.”
Kasabian remembered the group of kids who’d escaped with him, none with any memory of their captivity. Once sexual abuse had been eliminated, all they had were questions. Four years of his life, all of his captivity, were shut away in some part of his brain that no magick could touch.
Kye’s voice echoed in his mind: One Caido experienced a resurgence of buried memories.
Buried or locked?
“Did you talk to the kid?” Kasabian asked.
“Yeah, for about three minutes. My sergeant called me in because he knows about our ordeal and recognized the scar. He thought if I showed the kid my scar, maybe he’d open up. And I think he would have, only my sergeant pulled me out of the room. He said the Concilium was taking over the investigation. Sensitive matters and some such bullshit.” Hayden smacked the tree, making leaves float down. “Within minutes, the kid’s gone, lost in the system.”
“Who gave the order?”
“My boss didn’t say a name, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about it. You know how it is with the Guard. There’s a lot of stuff we aren’t privy to. We don’t always know the Guard’s motives, and the Concilium is even murkier.”
“Hell, we don’t even know who’s on the Concilium, and they’re supposed to be representing us.” The United Nations of magick beings was headed by old Crescents, meeting in covert locations and more concerned about keeping the Hidden secret than anything else.
“My guess is that someone knows what these marks mean. Wouldn’t be the first time something was covered up to protect society,” Hayden added with finger quotes.
“Five years old. So damned young for being used like…well, however the hell they were using us.” Kasabian shook his head in disgust. “Younger than when we were taken.” Kasabian spotted Daniel coming outside and turned away, making it obvious that he and Hayden were in the middle of a private discussion. The guy was always following him around.
“If it’s like last time, the bastards are taking kids from hookers or drugged-out mothers who either are taking a payoff or are too scared to report their kid missing.” A shadow passed over Hayden’s features.
When they were able to track down the mothers, they got a story about how some government official had offered to send the boy to a camp and get him away from the situation while the mother cleaned her life up. Pressure had a way of cracking people with magick. Crescents worried about being incinerated by Dragons, stalked by demons, hurt by spells.
Living in solitude often got to Caidos, and some lost their way, falling to the lure of a drug called Abyss. It was a highly addictive mix of heroin and magick that blocked the pain of emotions. Like addicts in the Mundane world, they’d do anything for another hit, including selling their bodies. And their babies. Kasabian and Hayden spent a lot of their free time getting those kids into Haven.
Hayden pushed away from the tree. “I’m going to see if the sketch artist can draw the boy; then I’ll see if anyone knows him. I’ll let you know what I find.”
“I’ll check around, too.” Kasabian bypassed the courts to avoid Daniel and get inside.
Cory, one of the guys who ran Haven, was going over some details for the middle school kids’ overnight trip to the Everglades. Cory looked up. “I keep expecting the headmaster of the Deuce Academy, who’s coordinating things on their end, to postpone the trip, what with all the talk of the solar storm effects hitting as early as Thursday. Even the Mundane news is reporting on possible GPS distortion and electronic outages. We’ll feel it in deeper ways. Some of the younger Caidos are already experiencing headaches and ‘bad feelings.’”
“We’ve weathered them in the past. We’ll get through this one.” The solar storm was the least of Kasabian’s concerns. “Have you heard about kids going missing recently?”
“I hear things here and there, but nothing definitive. Rumors. You know Lyle?”
“Skinny Caido with the choppy hair? Came here, what, a year ago? Keeps to himself.”
Cory nodded. “He’s barely hanging on to his required grades. I’ve suspected him of running drugs, maybe Abyss. I hate to even think it, a twelve-year-old doing that. Caught him sneaking out a few times, though I couldn’t find anything on him but a bunch of pictures of the same kid. His missing brother, he said. I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or using it as a cover.”
Kasabian found Lyle at a computer in the library. The kid quickly closed the browser screen, a suspicious move. Kasabian decided not to call him on it, turning a chair at the next computer around and sitting down backward. Despite that it was obvious that Kasabian was there to talk to him, Lyle opened a new screen and pulled up one of the curriculum programs, studiously ignoring him. His eyes were bloodshot, face gaunt.
“You came from the Vale, didn’t you?” Kasabian asked, finally getting the kid’s attention. The Vale was a run-down area populated by all the addicts.
“Yeah.” Lyle kept his gaze on the computer screen, but he was working really hard to do it.
“I’m investigating some disappearances. Have you heard anything about kids going missing from there?”
Lyle turned to him, his mouth working. He pulled back whatever words he was going to say and affected a nonchalant shrug. “Kids disappeared, yeah. Went to some kind of camp but never came back. Not that it mattered, because the mothers moved.”
That surprised Kasabian. “The mothers left the area?”
“It was some kind of government assistance thing. Crescent government. We were told that the kids went to their family’s new residence.”
Kasabian rubbed his mouth and considered what angle to use. “But they lied.” Not a question. “How do you know?”
The kid was clearly in a war with himself: tell the nosy guy the truth or distrust him as he did everyone else.
Kasabian knew how he felt. Sharing didn’t come easy for him either, but he needed to if he was going to get anywhere. “I was kidnapped when I was eight. I was lucky. I escaped. The people who took me, I think they’re still taking kids. I want to stop them.”
Lyle’s expression slowly revealed his pain. “My brother went to a camp a year ago. They said I was too old to go with him.”
“How old was your brother?”
“Four.”
“And you never saw him again.”
Lyle chewed his lip, his eyes staring at nothing. Finally he shook his head. “We moved to the Bend soon after.”
The Bend. Kasabian had heard about the gated community that housed middle- and low-income Crescent families, especially single mothers. It was touted as being safe and claimed to educate those mothers so they could support their families. And get off drugs.
“They never returned your brother,” Kasabian said gently.
“They said three months. Then it was six months. I told Mom we shouldn’t have left the Vale. What if they brought him back there? She said they knew where we were. She didn’t even…”
“Seem concerned?” Kasabian finished, guessing.
Lyle’s mouth tightened as he held back the outrage and grief. He merely shook his head.
Because she knew the kid wasn’t coming back.
“She kept talking about how nice our apartment, our life, was,” Lyle whispered. “Finally she admitted that Jonathan had been adopted by another family.” Lyle met Kasabian’s gaze with a fierce expression. “I accused her of selling him, and I could tell I was right. I ran away and came here.”
The pieces were coming together. “You sneak out to the Vale to search for him.”
Lyle searched Kasabian’s face, sensing whether he could trust him. Finally he nodded.
“Can I help you?”
“No. But thanks. I can do it on my own.”
Just like Kasabian, not wanting to involve anyone else. The poor kid had been dealing with this alone, driving himself to exhaustion.
“I understand. No one cares about your situation like you do. But sometimes you need help, even when you don’t want it. Or trust it. Sometimes what you’re after is more important than doing it on your own. I’m going to look into this. If I run across your brother, it would be helpful if I had a picture of him.”
Lyle pulled out his worn nylon wallet and extracted one of many color copies. On the back was the boy’s name, age, height, and weight, along with the date he’d gone missing. The boys looked nothing alike, Jonathan with straight brown hair while Lyle’s was dark blond. Lyle’s face was lean and sharp, Jonathan’s round, his eyes soulful.
Kasabian ran his thumb along the edge of the photographic copy paper. “Thanks.”
“I should be thanking you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Kasabian left Lyle in the library, feeling the unease his sympathy caused in his body. He let it come as he gathered information from both the kids and the counselors. Nothing conclusive, just tidbits here and there that added up. One kid was thought to have drowned in a canal. No body was ever recovered. One kid wandered off and was never seen again.
Kasabian found Cory on the worn-out chair in front of his desk. “Lyle’s not running drugs. He’s trying to find his little brother. Give him space, okay?”
Kasabian saw Cory’s reaction in a quick-fire burst: surprise, guilt, and then a nod. He didn’t stick around to feel or say more. Cory would have questions—shit, so did he—but answers, well, he was painfully short on those.
You have the answers…
Right. Buried deep in the recesses of his mind. He rubbed the scar on his chest.
Years of counseling and interrogations had failed to unlock the part of his mind that imprisoned the memories of his childhood abduction. A burning jolt spiraled from the pit of his stomach. Kasabian was no stranger to pain. His Caido heritage was as much a part of him as his jacked-up childhood was. Oh, he knew he’d never be “right.” It was too late to save himself, but he could help these kids. Get to the bottom of the abductions and put a stop to them once and for all.
Good thing for him he knew a chick from a bar with just the kind of magick he needed.
Kye’s sexy, empathic magick was too dangerous for someone with his…personality. But she possessed the magick he needed to unleash the repressed memories in his mind.
He’d vowed to stay away from her. But now he needed to get close. Very, very close.