Behind me now, the stray leaned against my legs, pressing the fronts of my thighs into the rough carpet from knee to hip. Straining to look over my shoulder, I saw him pull a coil of nylon cord from his pocket.
“I enjoy a challenge, gatita.” The cord scratched my skin as he looped it around my ankles tight enough to bite into my flesh. I still fought to free my legs, but he pinned me with his body weight. “And from what I’ve heard, you promise to be the best one yet. Maravilloso.”I could guess at that one, too. He was pleased. Great.
“You underestimated the dosage, Miguel,” Sean said from somewhere behind my head. The van swayed again as he stood. “We’re only halfway there.”
Miguel glanced up, knotting the cord as he spoke. “Fill another syringe.”
I heard Velcro rip open and the distinctive clink of glass on glass. Panic clutched at me with fingers of ice, sending chills throughout my body.
“Here,” Sean said, and Miguel knelt at my side to accept the syringe. “What if that’s too much?” Sean’s concern sounded real.
I craned my head to look in the direction of his voice, hoping to make eye contact, but all I could see was a familiar red sneaker near the edge of my field of vision.
“Then she will sleep through the best part.” Miguel thumped the side of the syringe, studying the dosage.
The lump in my throat felt as big as a peach pit, but I spoke around it, staring at the needle. “If you sedate me again, I swear the first thing I’ll do when I wake up is kick your ass all the way back to the Rio Grande.” My threat might have been more impressive if I wasn’t speaking with one cheek pressed into the filthy commercial carpet of a rented van.
Miguel chuckled. “First of all, mi amor, my ass, as you say, is Brazilian, not Mexican. But mi amigo, here, does not understand Portuguese, so we are limited to Spanish and English for our conversations.” He smiled, a grotesque travesty of joy, and the sight triggered my gag reflex. I swallowed convulsively to keep from vomiting, but the worst was yet to come. “And second of all, this tiny prick—” he waved the needle in front of my face “—is the least of your worries, assuming you wake up to feel the next one.” His laugh left little doubt about his meaning.
Terror tightened my stomach. Pain shot through my limbs as I fought my bindings. I tried to stop, knowing I would hurt myself long before the nylon cord broke, but I couldn’t. Struggling had become an involuntary response.
Miguel waved the needle in front of my face again, apparently just to watch me thrash. I banged my knee against something hard. Pain shot up my leg, settling in for the long haul behind my kneecap. Angry and hurting, I shouted a series of foul curses, any one of which would have made my mother wince.
Miguel only smiled.
“Please don’t make me gag such a beautiful mouth.” He ran one finger across my bottom lip. I strained forward to bite him but my teeth chomped into air. His finger was gone, leaving only the lingering scent of his touch, and my rage and frustration.
He tapped the syringe one last time, drawing it back out of my sight. Something cold and sharp brushed my upper leg, and I tried to squirm away. He wrapped his hand around my thigh to hold it still, his fingers skirting dangerously close to my no-fly zone.
Okay, bravado hadn’t worked, but I wasn’t above begging. “Please, Miguel.” I let a little fear leak into my voice, which wasn’t hard, under the circumstances. “Please don’t. I’ll be quiet. I swear.”
He smiled, stroking my hair as if I were a house cat in need of attention.
I ground my teeth together against more foul language, knowing it wouldn’t help.
“You also swore to kick my ass back to the border, mi amor. I’m afraid I can’t put much trust in your words.”
“No, you can.” I blinked up at him, terrified of what might happen while I was unconscious. “I won’t move a muscle. I swear.”
“Now, what fun would that be?” He stabbed the needle into my thigh. Again. And again his face was the last thing I saw.
Nineteen
I lay still in near darkness, unwilling to move until my eyes had a chance to adjust. As a cat, I would have had no problem seeing, but my human eyes make much less efficient use of the available light.
Wait a minute…
I closed my eyes in concentration, willing them to Shift, as they’d done in my bedroom the afternoon before. For more than a minute I waited, lying on my stomach, trying to force the change in my face. Nothing happened. When I opened my eyes, I saw only vaguely defined shadows against a background of murky gray.
It was that damn tranquilizer. It had to be. I added an inability to Shift to my growing list of reasons not to ever let anyone sedate me again.
My hands and feet were unbound, and my watch was gone. When my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I sat up. My fingers tingled, and my wrists and ankles felt raw when I rubbed them, my flesh still indented from the nylon cord. I hadn’t been free for very long.
Suddenly panicked by the memory of Miguel’s lecherous leer, I ran my hands over Marc’s Aerosmith T-shirt and my denim shorts, looking for rips. There were none. A quick check for cuts and bruises revealed only a fresh bruise on my knee and the two needle marks I remembered receiving—one on each thigh. I sucked in hot, humid air and sighed, relieved to find no unaccounted-for marks or aches.
Satisfied with my physical condition, all things considered, I turned my attention to the bare twin mattress beneath me. It was thin and cheap but felt new and smelled clean. How thoughtful. A new mattress, just for me.
“Faythe?”
I spun in the direction of my cousin’s voice, but the tranquilizer had left me dizzy, and I almost fell flat on the mattress. “Abby?” I squinted in the dark. “Where are you?”
“Over here. In the cage across from you.”
Cage? She was in a cage?
My eyes were starting to focus, and I made out a double row of metal bars, one several feet beyond the other. I was in a cage, too, in a basement, if I had my guess. We had to be underground or in some kind of concrete-reinforced room for outside sound to be muffled so effectively. I could hear nothing but my heartbeat and Abby’s. The near silence was eerie. Just like the basement at home.
Great. I’ve traded one prison for another.
Standing for a better view, I gripped the bars for balance as vertigo threatened to topple me again. Yes, it was a basement, lit only by muted daylight filtered through two grimy, horizontal windows near the low ceiling. The floor was concrete, cooler than the warm, humid air, and rough against my bare feet.
“Are you okay?” I asked, squinting again as I looked her over for obvious injuries. Her clothes appeared undamaged, a T-shirt bearing her high-school mascot and a pair of tight jogging shorts. A deep bruise marred one side of her face, a purple stripe stretching from below her eye to the edge of her chin. Her huge brown eyes were ringed with dark circles, which made them look haunted. Fortunately, other than the bruise and the bags beneath her eyes, she looked unharmed.Abby’s hair had grown since I’d seen her last; it now fell halfway down her back in a bright red curtain of perfect corkscrew ringlets. But nothing else about her had changed. She was still tiny—just over five feet tall—and thin, with almost no curves to speak of. At seventeen years old, she could pass for twelve.
Though my brain knew she was almost grown, my eyes saw a child locked behind bars in a dark basement, bruised and scared. But she wasn’t alone anymore.
“I’ve been better, how ’bout you?” Abby asked from her own cell, maybe five feet away.
“Fine, as far as I can tell. How long have I been out?” I turned in a slow circle, glancing around at what little I could see of my new surroundings. There wasn’t much to look at.
“I don’t know. They brought you down about an hour ago. Maybe a little less. I didn’t believe they’d actually caught you until I saw your face. I was so sure they were lying.”
I didn’t know whether to thank her for what I assumed was a compliment, or explain how—idiot that I was—I’d swum right into their net. So, I changed the subject. “What do they want?” I sank onto the floor to sit with my legs crossed.
She shrugged. “I was hoping you could tell me. Didn’t they send a ransom note, or a list of demands, or something?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “No contact at all. Not so much as a phone call to take credit.”
Her disappointment tugged at my heart, but I didn’t know how to make it any better. So I changed the subject—again. “Any idea where we are?”
Abby shook her head. “I don’t know anything. I’m not even sure how long I’ve been here. What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
Her eyes widened. “Only Wednesday? Really?”
I nodded, intimately familiar with the way time sometimes seemed to stand still. “Assuming I wasn’t unconscious for more than a day.”
“You couldn’t have been,” she said, staring past me, obviously deep in thought. “They got me Monday night, but it was morning when I woke up here. And they didn’t leave to go after you until…” Her eyes met mine in question. “This is Wednesday?”
“Yeah.”
“Last night, sometime shortly after dark.”
A timeline began to take shape in my head. They’d gotten Abby roughly thirty-six hours earlier. “Wait a minute.” I glanced at her, daring a tiny smile. “You’ve only been here a day and a half.”