Betrayal (2 page)

“This isn't funny,” she said, in her clipped accent.

It wasn't.
Not at all.

It happened so fast, the way awful things almost always do. The mattress dipped under the weight of another person kneeling on the bed. The first cut wasn't the deepest. It was tentative, a slight jab through the snow-white fabric just above her navel.

“Hey! Stop!” Olivia cried.

Her voice, loud as it was, was lost in the sounds of the music and laughter downstairs. If anyone had heard her muffled scream, they might have mistaken it for that terrified teen with the fake boobs on the enormous plasma TV in the family room where half the partygoers congregated.

Yet there was nothing fake about Olivia Grant or the fear that seized her. Her manicured fingertips found her abdomen. She pressed it lightly with the heel of her palm and cried out in pain. She barely had time to process the fact that her hand was wet.

All too quickly, someone was on top of her, holding her arms down. Everything conspired against her. Her flowing slip, Brianna's bedding, the eye mask, and even her long red hair entwined in her attacker's fist gave her little hope of escape.

Is this a sick joke? Did the geek pirate not understand NO means NO?

Pain shot through the sixteen-year-old's body and she started breathing hard. This was no trick-or-treat prank. Her mind reeled. Olivia thought back to the self-defense moves she had seen on American TV. The key was to have a survival plan, a strategy to save your life. She worked up a scenario to use her knee to shove off her attacker, freeing her arms and scooting to the edge of the bed where she could—just maybe—get away.

But that damn sheet.
It was a magician's endless handkerchief. Olivia couldn't move her feet. It was like she'd been spun up in a cocoon. The force of the continued onslaught pushed her, wrappings and all, crashing to the floor.

“Stop it! Stop!” she screamed. “That bloody hurts!”

Despite her beauty, Olivia Grant was no English rose. She was not frail, passive, or genteel. She was a fighter. Finally free, her arms and hands flailed into the darkness. Once, twice, she was hit by something sharp. Hard. It was hot and agonizing. Olivia realized what was happening was not a prank. She was fighting for her life and she knew it.

Was it a knife? Scissors? A box cutter? Something very sharp and deadly.

It passed through the teen's mind right then that she might never get to Hollywood. She'd never have a real boyfriend. She'd never get back to London. She'd never design that dress that every other girl in the world would covet. Her life and all her big dreams would be extinguished right there in her friend's bedroom.

With everything she had, Olivia lurched herself upright. She ran her bloody hands under her slip as she tried to extricate herself from the shroud, once white, now red.

Tears came as she thought of home. Her mind flashed to a memory. She and her mother were packing her suitcases for the trip in Olivia's bedroom back in London. Her mother implored her not to take her finest things to America, as she was all but certain that they'd be stolen.

“Everyone thinks that Aussies are descended from criminals, but I think there's a mix-up there. Take a look at America's crime rate,” her mom had said. She sniffed in that superior-than-thou affect she used whenever the occasion called for it, which was always. “The U.S. is worse than Down Under by far.”

She had been right. Her mother, with whom she'd battled about the smallest of things, had been absolutely right.

Just as the lightning bolt of memory passed, a pair of hands grabbed Olivia's shoulders and shoved her body backwards against the wooden floor. Hard and complete. So fast and so slow at the same time. She gasped.

I'm not going to die here, am I?
she thought, though the answer seemed all too clear.
Am I?

Olivia filled her lungs and screamed once more—only to have a wad of fabric violently shoved into her mouth. She started to choke, but she refused to give up. She had come to America to snag a boyfriend, be discovered for the rocking talent that she was, and to import everything she had learned back to the UK. She, most assuredly, had not come to America to die.

Get. Off. Me.

The teenager felt hot breath against her face. It came at her in quick puffs and it smelled of beer.
Jason? Kurt? All the boys had been drinking. It could be any one of a dozen or more.
As Olivia tried to roll away from her attacker, the blade of a knife flew at her, burying itself in her throat. It came with speed and fury.

Just like that.

Over.

Out.

In a second, blood soaked the fabric gagging her, slipping over her tongue with a peculiar metallic taste as it spilled from the corners of her mouth like candle wax.

In the final beats of her life, Olivia Grant caught a glimpse of her killer. Like a camera with a fading battery, her green eyes captured the image until they could no longer see.

Only her killer knew the irony of her last words.

That bloody hurts.

Chapter 2

TAYLOR RYAN WOKE UP WITH A START. Something was very, very wrong. She gazed out into the blackness through her bedroom window overlooking Port Gamble Bay. It was
that
again. The feeling she could never explain to anyone. The same feeling that only her twin sister Hayley also felt: a gentle but unmistakable wave like low-level electrical current that most might not even notice. The last time it had come over her—or at least the most memorable time—was Christmas night the previous year. That was the night that Katelyn Berkley, just fifteen years old, had died.

Without reaching for her robe, the sixteen-year-old walked toward the window. It was so cold in her little upstairs bedroom that she could almost see her breath. She made a mental note to ask for a space heater for Christmas. At the foot of her bed, the family dachshund, Hedda, lifted her head and then dropped it back down. Whatever Taylor was doing apparently held no interest for the world's laziest dog.

The bay was empty and its surface was a stark sheet of glass. Taylor leaned closer, and her breath condensed on the wavy vintage glass of the house built in 1859. A perfect circle appeared.
A circle?
Then just as quickly as it had come, it vanished. That feeling, a strange urgency that came from nowhere, also evaporated.

Taylor went back to bed and let out a sigh, thinking back on the Halloween party earlier that evening. Brianna had billed it as the party of the year. Her dad and stepmom were away on a cruise, and she had raided their liquor cabinet. Virtually everyone from Kingston High was there and in costume, including a few crashers from another school. She and Hayley had gone as the Olsen twins and had lacquered on layers of mascara and eye shadow, never once letting on to their parents that they were going to sneak their first drinks that night. In the end, it wasn't as exciting as she had thought. Watching a few drunken teenagers act stupid and throw up everywhere wasn't exactly her idea of fun. She switched to soda pop early in the evening.

Around midnight, it became obvious that her best friend, Beth Lee, had seen better days. Despite the fact that it was Halloween, a quasi-holiday, they still had school the next day. The four of them—she; Hayley; Hayley's boyfriend, Colton; and Beth—had decided to leave even though it looked like the party would rage on for hours.

Taylor knew she was going to feel like crap in the morning. The only solace that came to her at that moment was fleeting. She figured Beth, who had a lot more to drink, would look far worse. The irony of that, of course, was that Beth Lee didn't give a crap what anyone thought about her.

She just didn't.

Taylor burrowed back under the heavy blankets and turned to the wall that separated her room from her sister's. With her free hand, she swiveled the plastic cover away from the spot where there had once been an electrical outlet. The outlet cover in her sister's room was already open.

“Something's happening, Hayley.”

Taylor heard a shifting of sheets and felt the vibration of her sister as she rolled closer to the wall.

“I know,” Hayley answered. “I've been thinking about it since we got home. Something's up. Brianna was in rare form at the party and Beth's definitely gonna be grounded for life, but it's more than that.” She hesitated before saying it out loud. “The last time I felt this was when Katelyn died.”

Just inches apart, Hayley faced her sister through the hole in the old plaster-and-lath wall. Her head was on a cloud of goose-down, a pillow that accompanied her on every sleepover she'd ever been to. Hayley was a mirror image of her sister. Winter-white skin. Long, messy blond hair. Blue eyes. At sixteen, the girls had a bond greater than mere sisterhood, greater than twinship and all that comes with being so, so close to another human being. The sisters also shared an ability to somehow see letters in signs or headlines rearrange themselves into words that revealed important messages. It always creeped them out a little when that happened. Even more unnerving, in the direst of circumstances, just by touching certain objects they could conjure images and memories that were not their own. They never told anyone about those incidents.
Who would believe them?

And while they didn't understand it and were certainly unable to control it, the girls were digging in deep to find ways to accept whatever it was. They saw it as more than the ability to sense something; it was the ability to decipher what was happening now, and sometimes what had happened in the past, in a way that others could not. It was as if they were able to catch a whisper from the wind.

Freakish? Sure. Different from others? Absolutely. Whatever it was that passed through them bound them closer together and shut out others, including their best friend, Beth Lee, and Hayley's boyfriend, Colton James.

As the rain pelted the rippled windowpanes and the wind scraped a dead branch from an overgrown rhododendron against the espresso brown siding of house number 19, the Ryan sisters talked into the early morning hours.

All without uttering a single word.

THE 911 CALL CAME IN AROUND 2 A.M., the time the bars closed—always a busy hour for the Kitsap County law enforcement communications center in Bremerton, the region's largest city. The comm center's dispatcher on duty was Sally Marie Butterworth, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two who liked working nights so that she and her husband, a navy yard pipefitter, never had to put their son and daughter in what they considered “prison for tots,” or the local daycare center.

Sally had taken a number of 911 calls that Halloween, including a doozy about a tipped-over jack-o'-lantern that had ignited a two-alarm blaze and torched five cars at the Mariner's Glen apartment complex off Jackson in Port Orchard. A call from Chico had buzzed through around eleven o'clock from a woman who was suspicious about a homemade treat:

C
ALLER
:
My daughter brought home a popcorn ball that I think might be laced with something.

S
ALLY
:
Is your daughter ill?

C
ALLER
:
No, ma'am, she's not. I wouldn't let her eat it.

S
ALLY
:
What makes you think the popcorn ball has drugs?

C
ALLER
:
I just don't trust the person who made it. She's total trailer trash.
(Slightly muffled)
Amber Marie, get that cat off the stove!

S
ALLY
:
Why don't you throw it away?

C
ALLER
: (Long pause, the tinkling of ice cubes in a glass)
I guess I could do that. Good idea.

Sally Butterworth disconnected the line and her eyes rolled upward in their sockets to the ceiling. She hated being called “ma'am” by someone who was probably her same age. She also wondered why people didn't just use common sense. The way Sally saw it, if she had a dollar for every idiotic call she received, she would already own that candy-apple red Nissan Juke she'd had her eye on.

The line buzzed again. Sally set down her Aquafina, adjusted her headset, and answered:

S
ALLY
:
What's your emergency?

C
ALLER
:
It's really bad, I think. My friend is all bloody. Really, really hurt. Help me. Help us. This is really bad.

S
ALLY
:
Tell me your name and where you're calling from.

C
ALLER
:
Brianna Connors. I'm at 2121 Desolation View Drive in Port Gamble. Can't you just Google Map me or something?

S
ALLY
:
Help is on the way, Brianna. Can you tell me your friend's name and what happened?

C
ALLER
:
Her name is Olivia Grant. She's an exchange student from England. I don't know what happened. She was fine. Really. We were all at my house for a Halloween party. During the party, I went upstairs to check on her and to switch costumes. She was asleep on my bed. She didn't answer when I said her name. I figured she was drunk, so I went back downstairs again. When I came back to my room again after everyone left, she was on the floor and she wasn't moving. And then I saw the blood.

S
ALLY
:
Where is the blood?

C
ALLER
:
All over. I don't know what happened to her. I think she's been cut up or something. It's super nasty.

S
ALLY
:
Who else is there? Your parents?

C
ALLER
:
My dad and stepmom are on a cruise. My boyfriend's here. You want to talk to him?

S
ALLY
:
What is he doing?

C
ALLER
:
Watching TV, I think. I dunno. Just send someone.