He nodded. He knew I was right. If they had someone here, that’s where they were keeping them. We moved over the hill to the storm shelter looking door and opened it up to find the ladder leading down to the tunnels as Kyle and Lynne went for the well. I gasped at the smell. It smelled the same…exactly the same.
Caleb held the door open as our family watched and waited for instruction. Peter was next to me and gripped my arm to keep me steady. Caleb walked to me easily. They all knew and remembered what happened to me here. “You don’t have to go down there. You can stay out here and—”
“No,” I cut him off. “Then they win.” I looked up at Peter and back to Caleb’s eyes, begging him to give me the strength to do this. “Sikes doesn’t get to win, does he? Marcus doesn’t get to win after everything they did?”
He touched my cheek. “Hell no.”
“Let’s go.”
I let him go first because I knew he needed to, but I was anxious now. I needed to see if anyone was down there and get them out of there if they were. While half the family stood topside and watched for company, walking the estate, the rest of us came down and started to search the tunnels. I opened my mind and listened, but it was quiet.
It didn’t take long however to know that we’d found what we were looking for. When a ghost white hand crept out from the bars of a cell, so weak the fingers could barely bend, I yelled for the person to back away so I could open the door. With the only weapon I had, I used my mind to yank the door from the hinges to reveal a woman so thin and weak, I didn’t know how she was still alive.
She was afraid, I could tell, but Caleb immediately knelt and lifted her, handing her to someone closer to the hall and told her it was okay, that we were taking her somewhere safe. Her cries and “Thank you”s could be heard all the way down the tunnel. Every door we opened, another woman, another man was found. Some were hardly abused at all and you could tell they were taken care of and then others were barely alive. It made no sense at all. We rescued over fourteen people from those rooms. They said the Watsons had just been there that morning, so we missed them by a couple hours.
When we went inside the house and searched the rooms, we didn’t find anyone inside, but we did find more booby-traps. We decided we’d wait them out, but when we started finding cameras in every room, we knew there was more to it. I sighed, knowing we’d missed them, knowing they weren’t coming back. They were probably watching us right that minute. I took one of the cameras Caleb had ripped down in my hand and didn’t flinch when the vision came.
They scattered. They had gotten smart. In the absence of powers, they didn’t roll over and play human like we thought—no. They had taken the initiative to use power that was manmade while they worked on Sikes’ formula. So they studied technology and tactical systems to keep themselves safe until the time came when they could get their true powers back. They had gotten good at pretending, blending in, being invisible. We had practically forgotten they existed.
And that was our mistake.
We should have checked up on them and made sure that they were giving up. Now, they knew we knew their secret, so they scattered all over so we couldn’t find them.
But they weren’t finished.
One day, they’d be back to finish what they started. They still had every intention of creating a serum that would make them Virtuoso again, either by imprinting or other means.
We were too late. But at least we saved those people.
I yanked out of the vision and shook my head, disappointed and happy at the same time. “They’re gone,” I told everyone. “They planted the cameras to see if someone found them and knew we were here. They aren’t coming back.”
They started to cheer, but when they saw that I wasn’t as happy and Caleb came to soothe me, running his fingers over my Visionary mark on my neck, they slowed their celebration.
“Why don’t you seem happy about that?” Kyle asked.
“If they were here now, we could end it now,” Caleb explained, knowing I was exhausted in my head. “Now, we’ll have to wait, look over our shoulder, wait for them to snatch more humans and use them for guinea pigs to finish the experiment. They won’t stop until they get what they want.”Everybody seemed to understand then.
“Let’s do one last search before we leave, make sure we didn’t miss anything,” Caleb ordered.
I crossed my arms and looked around the room we were in one last time. There was nothing remarkable there. It was a typical American house. The couch matched the curtains, the floors were wood, and the chandelier in the foyer bounced the light from the setting sun out of the window onto the walls. It was a beautiful place. It was a shame that people, so evil, had lived there.
Some kid’s artwork caught my eye on the way out. It was over the fireplace. I smiled, thinking of my own kids, knowing that they would be safe now, for a while anyway. It seemed strange that people so evil would be thoughtful and caring enough to want to show off their son’s artwork like this.
He had drawn a boy on a horse for one, then the other was a woman holding hands with a little boy on the hillside. I felt hands on my shoulders and looked up at Caleb.
“Hey…what?” His face was white as a sheet.
“Maggie, look at these drawings.”
“I see them. What?”
He pointed to the name on top. I don’t know how I missed it. “Seth.”
“Oh, my… What does this mean?” I turned and looked at him frantically. “Ashlyn warned us. Did we miss something?”
“Come on.” He snatched the drawings from the mantel, and we hurried to the truck where a few of the rescued people were still sitting, waiting for us to leave. “Was there a child down in the cells with you?” he asked them.
“No,” the fragile woman answered. I sighed, but before I could relax, she broke my heart in two. “He doesn’t stay down there with us, they keep him in the house. My cell neighbor had him several years ago, but they…got rid of her. They raise him now. They bring him down to the cells sometimes. They tell him we’re criminals.”
“Caleb,” I said, knowing we failed. “She said I wasn’t seeing it properly. She told me!”
He took me and hugged me hard to his chest, sighing into my hair. “Baby, it’s not your fault they ran with him. Look at all these people you saved.”
“He’s just a little boy.” I sniffed.
“We’ll keep looking,” he promised and kissed my forehead. “We won’t stop looking for him.”
When we got back home, we took the rescues to the hospital. Some of the family members thought it might be exposing our kind if they talked, but honestly, they would just think it was a crazy family that kidnapped them. Fact was, the Watsons had no powers. The police crawled all over that place, but found nothing to lead them to where the Watsons were. They eventually just left it, abandoned, a crime scene with no leads. Somehow, the Watsons had gotten the money to pay the mortgages they were behind on, barely, so they owned the land again outright.
We just had to wait for them to return to it.
All the children were asleep when we finally got home that night. Caleb and I just crawled into the big bed in Caleb’s old room with them and held on tight. I couldn’t help but cry for Seth, a little boy I didn’t even know. I had failed him. Even though Caleb tried to soothe me and take all my hurt away, I knew it was all my fault.
The next morning, I snuck out of the arms and limbs in my bed and Gran, Rachel, and I made pancakes for everyone. It was a full house at Peter’s, but even still, I didn’t have the energy to change out of my pineapple pajama shorts and t-shirt the kids bought me for my birthday last year. I heard Caleb’s thoughts when he woke up, so I started making his coffee with mine. I fingered the hem of my shorts while the coffee brewed. I wondered if Seth even knew who his mother was.
Hands gripped my waist. “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself, baby,” he drawled into the back of my neck before kissing the skin there. “You can’t blame yourself for the actions of others.”
I turned and faced him, sighing at the sight of him. I bit my lip and ran my hand through his hair to help him tame it. “Morning,” I whispered.
“Are you trying to rile me up this morning?” he asked, his voice that low, husky tone usually reserved for a flight of stairs above us. He ran his fingers along the seam of my short’s leg. “Pancakes, coffee, and…pineapple shorts?”
I gave him the small smile he was looking for. He gave me the dimples I wanted in return. I closed the small distance between us and right as our lips touched, our new wonderful life interrupted us.
“Ew, Daddy.”
We both looked over at Rodney who was half smiling, half barf-faced.
“Ew?” Caleb asked. “Ew, really?” He laughed as he scooped him up and threw him over his shoulder. He came back to me. “We’ll finish this later, Mommy.”
I smiled and giggled. “Yes, Daddy.”
He kissed me loudly, smacking my butt as he walked away.
“Ew, ew, ew!” Rodney chanted as Caleb trotted away with him laughing.
We ate breakfast all together, spirits lifted. Everyone felt this victory in their very souls, so I tried with everything in me to portray my happiness with them since they all looked to me to lead them. And I was happy, I just knew it wasn’t over. And the fact that it was a helpless child I had failed was making the guilt multiply.