Nocturne

Chapter 2

Chapter 2Rain pelted the windshield as my brother drove us to the larger university town of DuKane, about eight miles away. The sky seemed darker to me than I'd ever seen it. The headlights of his Dodge pickup truck didn't cut through the dense night like it should have.

As we drove through the rain and dark, my main concern about Lindee's disappearance blossomed horribly: a vampire may have abducted her. The lack of noise, the confusion of the search dogs, and Jeanie's a*******n still fresh in my mind, all left me with only one explanation. God, this can't be happening again! Adding my knowledge about the current state of affairs when it came to vampires, no one could blame me for jumping to this conclusion. Since the North American Vampire Association had granted a green light on hunting humans, I had been nervous. I couldn't even report it to anyone (especially to the police). Mainly because the new head of N.A.V.A. had been the one who had instated it. Ilona Tremayne. My enemy. Someday I'd have to do something about her, but for now, I had to hold back my anger. I sure as hell couldn't share these thoughts with my brother while he drove into town. He didn't know anything about my “new” life, or even that vampires existed.

I had hoped the smaller towns, miles outside of a metropolis like Chicago, would be the very last of the areas where vampires would hunt. Terrible guilt overwhelmed me while knowing all this and my brother was totally in the dark about the supernatural—pretty much like all the other people in the world. I wanted in the worse way to share all this with him, but I couldn't. It was as though my surreal world and the real one had suddenly melded. It didn't help that I carried the bite of two vampires—Vasyl and Nicolas Paduraru—plus a werewolf's bite—on my arm, and no one in my family knew about it. I could see me trying to explain just one of the bites, let alone all three.

I sat in silence, pulling on the ends of my gloves, twisting them like wringing out a dishrag. Of course, I couldn't tell my brother my suspicions. He'd laugh me into next Tuesday. He was the last person I'd tell about vampire-anything. When we were young, after my mother disappeared, I'd told him that I'd seen her outside one night, and she was an “undead.” I was eleven, then, and he was fourteen-and-a-half. Boy, did he laugh his head off, and then told me I had dreamt it. He definitely never let me live it down—not to this day. Of course, now I could introduce him to Mom, the vampire, and he'd have to believe me. However, I thought I'd simply let things be for now.

I wanted to believe that perhaps someone else had taken Lindee. Your everyday—no less horrifying—a*******n and they would find her body somewhere much later. This wasn't what I wanted to happen, but unfortunately, I needed to have a firm grasp on reality, in case it turned out that way. I couldn't dare be blinded by the thought that maybe she was on one of her benders and simply got lost. Her friends had been with her.

While my brother drove in silence, I examined the scenario of a vampire attack in more detail. Usually the vampire would strike and leave the victim with a little less blood in them. Unless she was destined for a master, and then… I simply didn't want to think about it. I'd gone up against a vampire nest, and I really didn't want to go through that again. I'd have to call in my homies. Right. Like I had homies.

My Knowing was pulling me in a completely different direction. “Do you think Aunt Anne might have something of hers for me to get a read?” I spoke into the silence. My brother seemed distant, not his usual jovial self, but this was understandable. Only gloomy moments like this, where a parent had disappeared—like our mother, or our father, who had had a heart attack and crashed his plane several months ago—had he ever become this silent. It was as if someone had stolen his voice, or like sitting next to a man made of wax. He tried not to show his emotions, but I could read him better than anyone could.

“Huh? Oh, I don't know. Maybe.” It sounded as though I'd interrupted deep thoughts—maybe I had.

“Would the police have something of hers? Like her cell phone? Something like that?”

“I don't know. If they do, I don't think they're gonna give it to us to use. They're not likely to hand over evidence just because we claim you're a clairvoyant.”

“No, of course not. They wouldn't believe me, even if I showed them what I could do.”

“Yeah,” Randy said slowly. “Funny how the police don't want to believe in anything that can't be explained.”

I shot him a glare. I didn't know if that was a cut at the police or me. Lighten up, he can't help it.

Randy leaned over the steering wheel, and looked through his windshield. The lights of town were closing in on us. “Rain's letting up.” He sat back, drove one-handed, with his wrist in that manly way, as if he could care less about holding on to the steering wheel. I never felt comfortable with his driving. I had to keep focused, use my abilities, watching for any accidents waiting to ambush us at a moment's notice.

He became quiet again going back into his hole of deep thought. Well, me too. Good thing I was able to block his emotions, because if I chose to read them, I'd really regret it. Being an empath was part of the package in my makeup. The main reason I couldn't hold down regular jobs was my going into visions without warning. Really, people would not want to see me go into one of my second sight moments, and I didn't need, or want their emotional baggage.

Beau Park was located at the other end of town. It was fairly large for a town park. The Kishwaukee River meandered through the densely wooded land. Train tracks rose about thirty-five feet above it on a high embankment, cutting the park off from businesses along the main thoroughfare. Residential streets and homes hemmed the other three sides of the park.

Lindee had driven her own car, my brother informed me. Her car had been left here indicating she'd never left, at least not in her car. The police interviewed her friends and concluded that she had not called anyone, nor had she gone to meet anyone else to anyone's knowledge. They had contacted all known friends and family. No one had seen her since she went into the woods.

Randy pulled off of Annie Woods Road into the parking lot of the Eagle's Club. Beau Park abruptly began right behind the building, and the mowed area around it. One path lead into the woods from this point, and one extended out onto the wide sidewalk skirting the road. It was a popular route attracting dog-walkers, joggers, bicyclists, and nearby college students. There were a number of vehicles parked in the Eagle's Club lot. I noticed many were red pickup trucks with the fire department logo on their doors. Other vehicles included the local and state police as well as the county sheriff's units. Yellow sheriff's tape was draped across a pathway leading away from the parking lot. It fluttered and glowed in our headlights.

Someone stepped up to my brother's truck and Randy put the window down.

“Evening, sir, you have business here? There is a police investigation going on,” the man all in black with the sheriff's badge said.

“I'm Randy Strong, Lindee's cousin?” he said. Randy had his license out and gave it to the officer who shone his light on it. Then he handed it back.

“We don't have anything new. You'd best go home. Get some rest. We'll call if anything happens here.”

Uncle Roger was my father's younger brother. Randy would have been the only one who Uncle Roger would have called with the news of Lindee's disappearance right away. Randy had also gotten the call about our dad having crashed his airplane.

I released a quiet breath of annoyance with myself. No wonder he had been so quiet during the ride over. I'm an i***t. I couldn't imagine how hard it was for him to take on this new, sad news about someone in the family being lost and possibly dead. That would make two in a very short time. Three in our lifetime, if I were to include my mom.

“This is my sister, Sabrina. She just wanted to come by and—”

I nudged my brother on the arm. Hard. His head jerked to me.

“I wanted to be here, I needed to be here for my cousin.” I sobbed slightly. Although I had solved the murder case of Dee Dee Cole, and what had happened to her and her unborn child only a few weeks ago, I knew no one would believe that I had gotten the information through my gift. I didn't brag about my gift—in fact, when I revealed where to find the unborn baby cut from Dee Dee's womb, I had privately given my information to an FBI investigator, and, even to her, I didn't own up to being clairvoyant. I made it sound as though the murderer had bragged about it.

I guess the thought of dealing with a crying woman got to the officer, “Well, just don't get in the way of things.” I watched him stride toward a group of men in neon yellow vests who were standing next to a small boat. I knew they had been dragging the river and a pond inside the woods already. The vision of men in the boat popped into my mind, and my eyes had gone unfocused.

“Brie?”

“Huh?”

“C'mon. You wanted to look around,” he reminded. He stepped out of the truck. The door slammed and jarred me fully back.

“Oh, yeah.”

I extracted myself from Randy's black truck, using the running board to step down. The night felt unusually sultry for November. The rain had let up for the moment. It smelled of ozone, fallen leaves, the loam of the earth, and the fishy scent of the river, about one hundred yards away, seemed overwhelming. A werewolf had bitten me more than a month ago, and it had given me heightened senses—right along with the added need to become a were-creature at the full of the moon. Something else my brother didn't know about in my strange life. It remained a big mystery to my whole family, and pretty much anyone else who was not a supernatural, or in my very tight, supernatural loop.

“This can't be the only way into the park,” I said to Randy, joining him in front of his truck. “Is that the path? How far in does it go?”

Hunter's jacket open, his hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, he made a gesture with his head in the general direction. “It cuts through the brush and trees about fifty yards or so, and then meanders along the river, behind those apartment buildings. A footbridge crosses the river. The police found her cell phone in the long grass and brush near the other side of the river.”

“There's another entrance,” my Knowing told me this. “Take me to the other end of the park. Over there.” I pointed. “That's where they were. Not here.”

“How did you know? You been here before?”

I gave him an exasperated sigh and blinked hard in his direction.

“Oh, yeah. Never mind. You would know this.”

We hopped back into his truck. He drove out of the parking area, down the road and turned the corner. He followed the street to the bridge and slowed. “Where to?”

“Turn left at the next block and drive until I say to stop,” I directed.

“Okay.”

The streetlights seemed dim to me as we drove. It was like looking through sunglasses. There were dark mounds of wet leaves raked into piles along the road. Their aromatic scent drifted in through the vents of the truck. Remnant Halloween lights still glowed, or hung from people's porches and windows up and down the quiet street. Decaying, crumpled up Jack-o-lanterns sneered at us from porches or steps.

We entered an odd, three-way intersection where the streets converged to make a Y. Randy braked and stopped at the junction. “Which way now?” He looked around.

“Left. Then turn left again.”

Randy drove around the curve in the road, and when we cleared some trees a small parking lot cut into the lawn. Carved in smooth, wet granite the words BEAU PARK appeared in the beams of our headlights. He pulled into a parking slot. We both hopped out, and looked around. I listened with both my werewolf's hearing and my other talent.

“This is where Lindee parked her car.” Pointing, I stepped around the parking lot. I could see Lindee's car—a blue Mirage—in my mind's eye. Wisps of her, and the three other people she had been with, flitted through my mind, but I couldn't hold it long enough to really get much detail. The people and the fire they'd built in a fire pit area not far from the parking lot, flickered in and out, superimposed upon the darker reality.

“That's right,” he said, without looking at me. My brother knew from experience how my second sight works. From the time I was a toddler and could talk, I would blurt things about anyone who came into the house. At a very young age, this merely made the adults chuckle. But when I grew older, the things I said became downright embarrassing, and my folks didn't allow me to be with the rest of the family when people came over.

My father had been less understanding of this than my mother was. My mother had second sight, but she wasn't quite the seer I was. My Grandma Tess—my mother's mother—had said that I was more accurate than the famous Jean Dixon was. My dad wasn't so against my second sight when he found he could win a few bets on football games. I would give my father scores of games before the game. One time he won a large sum. When my mother heard about this, it really pissed her off, and she forbade me giving him a score again. We might have wound up rich because of my abilities, but I realized later on that it was wrong to use a gift in that way. Bummer about my conscience.

For my brother, when it came to my knowing something, he only heard me if it was interesting, or important to him (typical big brother).

“They had canine units in here,” I said.

He looked at me. “Yeah, earlier today, in fact.”

“They found the cell phone.”

“Yep. Nothing else, unless they kept it a secret.”

I closed my eyes and tried to pull in the vision. “I don't see anything else, except maybe a button. I can't tell if it was hers or not.”

My brother gave me a sidelong glance.

“So, she entered here,” I gestured toward the park's entryway. It looked like a popular hangout place. “They had a fire. Partied.” I closed my eyes, again. So many different moments floating through my read, one on top of another, people coming and going, joggers, a lot of people with dogs, and the normal daily crowd. I couldn't pick out much, until I saw the uniforms with their canines. This was the most recent thing that had happened here.

“Brie, I need to tell you something,” Randy said.

“Shhh!” I held out my hand to him, my eyes still closed. The vague vision of people standing around a fire came in stronger. There were three—no—four of them. Two male, two female. I didn't recognize any of them. I frowned.

“That's weird,” I said and turned to my brother. “Maybe I'm getting a read from some other people who've been here. I don't see Lindee.”

“That's what I was trying to tell you,” Randy said. “Lindee… she's changed.”

“Changed? Changed how?” She couldn't have changed any worse than when I'd last seen her, but I had to presume Randy hadn't seen her in years.

“Everything, from her clothes to her hair. She doesn't look like the Lindee you once knew.”

I frowned harder. I thought of the mousy-brown haired girl who'd worn dresses exclusively, but they were conservative styles, since she went to a Catholic school. Her wiry hair too hard to control, her mother—a hairdresser—would give her a perm. Lindee hated the whole ordeal. She hated her hair and told me once she wanted to rip it out or shave it off. That's how radical she was, and I didn't doubt one day I'd see her completely bald. She always seemed very quiet and demure. Distant. Non-communicative. At least to everyone but me. She hated her school, hated her teachers, hated her parents (mostly her mother), and hated her life. I really feared she would either run away or commit suicide and I didn't know who to tell. Besides, I didn't think anyone would listen to me. At the time, I was only fifteen or sixteen and made people extremely uncomfortable about the things I knew about them, or others. I feared they would brush it off or maybe go to another extreme.

“…tattoos, and piercings everywhere. Her hair is black as pitch, all ratted up high.” My brother brought his hands out around his head to show me. I figured he must have seen a picture of Lindee or something.

“She wears this huge pink bow in it, and always wears long stockings that have patterns on them, and very short skirts and low-cut blouses,” I cut across him.

I had seen Lindee since her transformation from an innocent, Catholic girl, into the tough-acting, chain-smoking neo-Goth girl she'd become. She had come to my door at two a.m. last fall, asking if she could crash. Blabbering that if her mother saw her in this condition—drunk—she would take away the keys for good. I was of a mind to take them away from her myself, but she'd done the right thing, and I had told her so. Besides, my dad was gone on a trip, and my eyes were stinging from waking up so early in the a.m. Staring at her black lace, big hair, and that ridiculous huge pink bow in her ratted 'do, I let her in. Yes, every spot one could pierce on their face had decorative metal and beads hanging from it. Tattoos wound up her neck, arms, and elsewhere. She showed me the one on her boob and told me about the one on her left butt cheek. Mother's little darling had graduated (freed) from Catholic school and now went to college—in less than a year she had rebelled big-time.

I had made Lindee comfortable on my couch with one of my extra pillows, and the Martha Stewart blanket I reserved for guests. She went to lie down, giggling, saying that the room was spinning.

Uh-oh. Before I could turn around, she'd thrown up all over Martha Stewart's blanket. Yes, indeed, I knew exactly what Lindee now looked like.

Randy had a piece of paper in his hands. He unfolded it and showed it to me. “Friends and family are putting these posters in shop windows, and tacking them up on poles,” he explained.

Lindee's heavily made-up, hazel eyes stared out at me from a recent picture they had used. The hairstyle more exaggerated since I had last seen her was indeed ratted and wild, and it was humongous. The pink bow had a black polka dot pattern through it. She called it her neo-Goth look. She had black tulle around her neck worn like a shawl pinned with a large jeweled broach. Black tulle gloves covered her hands. I smiled. I'd given her those gloves on her seventeenth birthday because she'd always thought my gloves were “cool.” Something about the picture touched my heart. The eyes. They looked lost. More so than I remembered and it had been less than a year since I'd last seen her.

Stepping into the grassy area, I knew that whatever had happened to my cousin, it had to be something out of the ordinary. This was not a normal caper for the police to handle. I had this overwhelming feeling that something supernatural had taken place. I didn't know what exactly, but it felt really off-the-grid—as I like to call something tinged in the supernatural. Tingly sensations through the bottoms of my feet told me I stood on, or near, a powerful ley line. Ley lines could transport a magical person from this world into the next, or across town, or to the next, or to another country. If I knew how to tap it, and use it, I could get myself into Tom's Tavern, somewhere in Geneva. Being a sibyl, I was quite capable—I'd heard—of traveling ley lines, but I was too chicken to try it out by myself. Rick, the leprechaun, was the expert at ley-line travel, and he'd been the only one I trusted to handle this type of travel.

I did wonder about what had happened earlier tonight, when I stood in that hall beside Vasyl about to be married. I knew I'd traveled somewhere. Every indication pointed to the fact that I had traveled a ley line.

“She was with three friends,” Randy said, pulling me out of my thoughts again. I stood twenty feet away, staring at the now charred, muddy fire circle.

“Two really thin guys about average height,” I said quietly. “One has sort of long, dark hair, and the other had sort of wiry light brown hair and the other girl…” I paused to try to bring her in again. “I think she has a really heavy jaw, and blonde hair with pink strands throughout.”

“Sounds about right. Weird.”

I glanced at him. “Hypocrite,” I said.

He stared at me. “What d'you mean?” His hands went to his waist.

“You remember that stupid hat you used to wear?”

“Okay. Okay,” he said, annoyed, batting the air with a hand. He had worn that short-brimmed, plaid hat throughout his senior year in high school. He only took it off to shower or go to bed. He claimed it as his “look”.

We chuckled lightly. The light moment became clouded with Lindee's disappearance.

Hearing voices and dogs in the distance I said, “Take me home.” The search party roamed the woods with dogs—this, the second night they were using them. Flashlights beamed through trees in the distance. The dog's panting reached my ears. Randy didn't hear it.

“What?” Randy sounded startled. “Don't you want to go in and see if you can—you know?”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Too many people in there muddling things up. I'll try later.”

“When?”

“I don't know. Just take me home.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. We got back in his truck and he cranked the engine, backed up and drove us out of town.

The ride home was no less quiet than the ride in. The subject of weather came up, which led to his asking me about the house, and reminded me to change the filters in the furnace.

“Got it under control.”

“Did you clean the gutters?” he asked, as though this was of paramount importance suddenly.

I rolled my eyes. I almost said I'd call my utility man to clean the gutters, but decided a joke at this point would only make matters worse. I wanted to get home without hearing how I don't know the first thing about the up-keep of a house and another rant about me selling the house and moving into an apartment instead.

“I'll take care of it!” I said. “You take care of your house. I'll take care of mine.”

My biggest problem right now was Lindee. Not gutters.