Autumn's Blood: The Spirit Shifters, Book One (7 page)

Blake didn’t return the smile. “What
the hell are you doing here?”

“I think I already told you
that.”

“You shouldn’t even know where I
work.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “I followed you.
You don’t exactly blend in.”

It was true. At six-feet-four, with
his brown skin, almost-black eyes, and well-muscled torso, he
wasn’t one to fit into a crowd. But then, neither was his
cousin.

He wanted to keep Chogan as far away
from the research facility as possible.

“Fine, walk with me.”

The two men set off down the street,
side by side.

“So have you had any chance to look
into what I asked?” said Chogan.

Blake shook his head. “I don’t know
what you think it is I’m supposed to look for. I’m hardly going to
be informed if they’re capturing shifters and using them for
God-knows-what.”

His cousin jerked his head back the
way they’d come. “What is it they do in there, anyway?”

“Research and development.”

“Of what?”

“I don’t know,” Blake said, suddenly
exasperated. “Whatever needs to be researched and developed. I’m
hardly hired for my mind, am I?”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re
smart. You always were.”

Blake stopped walking. “Listen. I’ll
keep my ear to the ground and see if I can find anything out. But
I’m not making any promises. I do what I’m told in that place, and
that’s it.”

“Your problem is that you have more
loyalty to the people who pay your wages than you do those who
raised you.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking
about!”

“No? Then why haven’t you even been
back to visit in almost ten years?”

“You, of all people, should understand
the reason for that.”

“Don’t punish everyone else for what
happened, Blake. None of that was their fault.”

Blake growled in frustration. “No, it
was yours.” And with that, he stormed off, leaving Chogan standing
on the sidewalk.

Chapter
Six

MIA HENDERSON LIFTED her coffee cup
and took a sip of her now lukewarm coffee. She checked her watch
again and tapped her foot in a thrumming beat on the floor beneath
her table.

Did I get the time
wrong?
Or perhaps the place?

Her eyes travelled over the people
sharing the cafe with her—a man and a woman wearing business suits,
a small group of student-types laughing with their heads together,
a solitary woman writing on a laptop. None of these people fitted
the profile of a worried, frightened couple.

She sighed and reached into her bag to
pull out the paperwork containing the profile of the missing
boy.

Toby West, fifteen years old. Missing
for nine days now. She stared down at the boy’s photograph. He
stared sullenly into the camera, his too-long dark hair falling
into his face. Across the chest of his t-shirt was scrawled the
name of a band Mia had never heard of, but one the boy’s friends
said he idolized. He may have been wearing the same shirt the night
he went missing.

A pang of loss and what ... regret?
... clutched her heart. Marcus might have looked like this at some
point if he were still alive, something Mia was starting to feel
like she’d never know for sure. Her twin brother had vanished one
day on the way home from school. Normally, they walked together,
but Mia had an afterschool music class that day, so Marcus had gone
home alone. Except he’d never reached his destination.

Other than losing your own child, was
there anything worse than losing your twin? She literally felt as
though half of her was missing. No wonder she’d set up this charity
as soon as she’d gotten out of school. It had taken a lot of hard
work and she’d needed to cut through a lot of red tape, but she’d
been determined to see it through. She wanted nothing else from her
life except, perhaps, to have a family of her own one day, a way to
fill the aching hole in her heart that had appeared the same day
her brother vanished.

The bell on the cafe door dinged and
Mia glanced up. A beaten-down, middle-aged couple pushed their way
into the cafe, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist, the woman’s
eyes darting around the room.

Mia straightened in her seat and tried
to make eye contact with the new arrivals, a sympathetic smile on
her face. The woman caught her eye and glanced away uncertainly,
checking the rest of the room before coming back to her. She nudged
her husband and nodded in Mia’s direction. They swerved between the
chairs and tables to come to stand opposite. The woman, her blonde
hair cut in a bob around her face, her blue eyes rimmed red,
offered her an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” she said. “My
husband wasn’t keen on coming to you for help. He needed a little
... persuading.”

Mia gestured to the seats opposite for
them to sit down. “I completely understand, Mrs. West.”

“Call me Dana, please,” said the woman
as she took a seat. “And this is my husband, Robert.”

The husband didn’t make eye contact
with her, but instead stared at the table, his hands clutched in
his lap. Right away, Mia could see where their son had inherited
his dark looks. Toby was the spitting image of his
father.

She caught Dana staring at
her.

“I’m sorry.” Dana gestured to her own
features. “I had thought you’d be ... older.”

Mia smiled. “Don’t worry. You’re not
the first person to say that. I got involved with charity work
right out of school. I can promise you I know what I’m doing, Mr.
and Mrs. West.”

Instead of following the majority of
her friends to college, Mia had left high school to spend her days
volunteering at another missing person’s charity, and her evenings
and weekends working the front desk of a hotel. She’d saved every
penny and two years later had used the money to start up her own
charity, Missing Lives.

“Oh, I wasn’t trying to
imply—”

Mia cut her off. “It’s fine, honest.
Now, I’ve got the background the police compiled about your son,
but what I really want to find out is about the real boy. Not just
the front he might put on to everyone else, perhaps even including
yourselves. And please, don’t worry about being unsure about all of
this. Often people feel like they’re taking charity by coming to
us, but that’s the whole point in our existence. We use all of the
money donated to us to pool into finding missing people, to putting
in extra resources, hiring PI’s perhaps, when the police think
their leads have cooled.

She saw the expression on
Dana’s face. “I’m not saying their leads
have
cooled of course,” she hastily
added.

Dana’s forehead crumpled. “They don’t
have any leads. It’s like someone snatched him off the face of the
earth!”

Robert took his wife’s hand, finally
lifting his eyes to Mia. “The police say he probably ran away. He’s
been having some problems at school, getting into fights and stuff.
The police have got him painted up as some kind of young thug, but
he’s not like that.”

Many of the cases Mia took on were
similar to Toby’s. She was perfectly aware of the correlation
between her searching for all these lost boys and her own desire to
find her missing twin brother. Perhaps she hoped one day she would
be able to unearth the secret about what happened to him, stumble
across some kind of clue that could bring her continual searching
to an end.

“No, he’s not,” Dana interrupted. “Our
son, he’s ... well ... different.”

Robert shot his wife a
glare.

“Of course,” Mia said, trying to
empathize. “All children are different, all their own
individuals—”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Dana
said.

“Dana ...”

It was impossible not to recognize the
warning tone in the husband’s voice.

What’s going on
here?

Dana shrugged off her husband’s
warning and leaned over the table, closing the gap between herself
and Mia. She lowered her voice as if she was worried someone might
overhear them. “We know our son, Ms. Henderson. Perhaps more so
than most parents know their teenage boys. Like we said, he’s
different from other boys, different in a way I’m not even sure how
to explain. We think those differences may have something to do
with the reason he’s gone missing.”

“Okay,” Mia said slowly. “You’re going
to need to give me a little more to work on than just
‘different.’”

Dana clenched her jaw and
nodded.

The other woman’s strength amazed Mia.
She understood how it felt when someone you loved went missing, to
have so many questions, questions you would probably never learn
the answers to. She didn’t know how Dana was holding herself
together.

Robert sighed and leaned across the
table, matching his wife’s stance. He began to speak, obviously
giving in to his wife’s way of thinking. “Toby has a way of zoning
out sometimes, like he’s not even in the room with you or his head
is somewhere else. He’s got a way of seeing things that are about
to happen. And I don’t mean predicting world events or anything
like that, but he’ll say things like ‘A cab is about to come around
the corner,’ and the next moment, that’s exactly what
happens.”

He seemed to run out of steam, and his
wife nudged him in the ribs. “Go on, tell her the rest.”

“It’s going to sound crazy,” he
said.

Mia offered a reassuring smile. “I can
handle crazy.”

The man’s dark eyes flicked down to
the table and he reached out to fiddle with the little pot of
sugars and sweeteners. “He vanishes from his room at night. He’ll
go to bed and we’ll go in to check on him and he’ll be gone. The
window is normally left open.”

“It’s pretty normal for a teenage boy
to sneak out at night.”

“
We live on the fifth
floor of an apartment block in the city,” Dana said.

“Oh!” Mia blinked in surprise. “He’s
sneaking out by the front door, then?”

“Impossible,” Robert said. “We’ve gone
to extra measures to deadlock the door and keep the key on us, so
we know he’s not getting out that way.”

“Have you asked him about all
this?”

Dana nodded. “He always told us he
couldn’t remember. We even took him to a psychiatrist at one stage,
but the doctor said the only explanation he could give was that
Toby’s dream world and waking world were spilling into one. He was
basically sleepwalking.”

“Isn’t that a possibility?”

“I’d say perhaps, but that’s not
all.”

“No?”

“Sometimes, when we’ve gone to wake
him up the next morning, we find mud and twigs or leaves on his bed
sheets or the window sill and rug.”

Robert spoke again, quietly. “And
sometimes the mud is on his hands and feet as well, as if he’s been
running around in it.”

Mia frowned. “But your son remembers
none of this?”

Robert and Dana shook their heads in
unison.

“What do the police say?”

Dana’s restraint finally broke down.
Her voice cracked and she stifled a sob with the back of her
clenched fist pressed against her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

Mia smiled reassuringly and reached
across the table to place her hand over Dana’s. “You don’t need to
be.”

The older woman nodded and continued.
“They only know Toby is a sleepwalker and we’ve taken him to a
doctor about it. We didn’t dare mention any of the other stuff in
case they thought we were nuts as well.”

Mia understood where they were coming
from. So often, she’d discovered parents worried about divulging
information to the police, terrified they would end up looking like
the perpetrators of whatever crime had removed their child from
their lives.

“Leave this with me,” she told them.
“You’ve given me a couple of things I can get started on. If you
hear anything else, call me as soon as you can.”

MIA WALKED AWAY confused
and disbelieving. Surely these parents weren’t trying to say what
she thought? In fact, she wasn’t even sure what it was they
were
trying to
say!

At least she felt like she might have
something new to go on. Her first port of call was to get a map of
the city, pinpoint the family’s apartment, and mark out each of the
parks nearby. If the boy had somehow been getting out of the
apartment in the middle of the night—be it consciously or
subconsciously—then it sounded like he was heading to wooded areas
when he did so. When Toby went missing from his bedroom, there was
a good chance he might have been on one of his excursions. Perhaps
someone saw him or someone who looked suspicious.

The shrill of her phone ringing came
from her purse. She delved around to fish out her smartphone and
swiped the screen to answer.

“Mia Henderson,” she
chirped.