"Hello, Dylan. So good to finally meet you."
Chapter Thirty-four
Somewhere in Connecticut, a couple of hours into the drive from Boston to New York, Rio's chest felt like it had been yanked open by ice-cold hands. He was on speakerphone with the compound, trying to find out if Gideon had been able to uncover any intel about the dead Breedmates Dylan reported seeing at the runaway shelter. The Order had the pictures she'd sent from her cell phone, and Gideon was searching for further missing persons information from the Darkhavens and human populations.
Rio heard the other warrior talking to him now, but the words weren't penetrating his skull.
"Ah, fuck," he groaned, rubbing at the tight blast of cold that seemed to have moved into the region of his heart.
"What's going on?" Gideon asked. "Rio? You still with me?"
"Yeah. But...something's wrong."
Dylan.
Something was very wrong with Dylan. He could sense her fear, and a sorrow so profound it nearly blinded him.
Not a good thing when he was speeding along I-84 at roughly ninety miles an hour.
"I've got a bad feeling, Gideon. I have to get ahold of Dylan right now."
"Sure. Be right here when you're done."
Rio clicked off the call and dialed Dylan. It rang into voice mail. Repeatedly.
That bad feeling was getting worse by the second. She was in real danger - he knew it by the sudden frantic drum of his pulse, his blood bond with her telling him that something terrible was happening to her.
Right now, while she was easily three hours away from him.
"Goddamn it," he growled, stomping on the gas.
He speed-dialed Gideon again.
"Any luck reaching her?"
"No." A deeper chill went through him. "She's in trouble, Gid. She's in pain somewhere. Goddamn it! I should never have let her out of my sight!"
"Okay," Gideon, the calm one, said. "I'm going to run a track on the Volvo's GPS, and I'll run one on her cell phone too. We'll locate her, Rio."
He heard the keyboard clacking on the other end of the line, but the dread in his gut told him that neither device was going to bring him any closer to Dylan. And sure enough, Gideon came back a second later with bad news.>"Oh, my God." She gaped at them, only half-conscious of the shelter employees going about their business outside, completely unaware of the ghostly gathering. "Are you all here because of my mom?"
The group of them stared at her in eerie silence, their forms rippling like candle flames caught in a stuttering breeze.
Help them, one of the unmoving mouths told her. They need you to help them.
Damn it, she did not have time for this now. She wasn't in the right frame of mind to deal with any of this right now.
But something prickled within her, something that told her she had to listen.
She had to do something.
He won't stop hurting them, said another ghostly voice. He won't stop the killing.
Dylan grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen and started writing down what she was hearing. Maybe Rio and the Order could help make sense of it, if she couldn't.
They're underground.
In darkness.