Chills & Thrills: Three Novel Box Set (9 page)

I pulled out the earrings that her mother had given me from my pockets. Ha! I hadn’t taken a lot of notice before. However, they were ladybugs. Okay, now eleven-year-old girls probably do like ladybugs. I’m sure they do. Who doesn’t? But, this kid was no ordinary kid. Antennae is how the ladybug “hears.”

I sat with this, eyes closed and went as deep as I could without it becoming dangerous for either Hope, or myself. I breathed her in and out. I finally connected, hearing that slow breath of hers coming and going. This child knew how to control herself very well.

Was she feeling my energy at all?

Moments passed like this. I don’t know how many. And then, a whisper...

“Mom?” I heard her say. “No. You’re not my mom. Who are you?”

At first I thought she was talking to someone in the room.

“I said who are you? I know you are listening. I need help.”

Oh my God. “I’m here to help,” I replied both in my mind and out loud. “I am. I know where your mom is. Can you tell me where you are?”

“Who are
you
?”

I could her the distrust in her “voice.”

“I’m Kylie and I am an audial. One of my guides is the dolphin and another the hawk. How about you?”

“I like the tiger moth.”

I smiled. “Good. Me, too.” Having this information would help if we lost contact. “Can you tell me where you are? I am on my way to help you.”

“I don’t know. The room is big and fancy. It’s pretty, too.”

“Are there windows?”

“Yes, but they’re a funny shape, like a pointed arch. The ceilings are painted and tiled. I am tied to the bed.”

My heart broke at hearing this.

Hope continued, her words fading. “There’s something else.”

“What? Stay with me Hope. I am on my way.”

“The room is like a room in a movie. It’s like something out of
The Adventures of Tintin
.”

“What else can you tell me? Hope?”

She didn’t respond, and I had lost the rhythm of her breathing.

I tried to contact her again and got nothing. I would have to try and work with the tiger moth, but needed to share this with the guys in case they had any ideas. I stood up and headed to the front of the plane to join them. “I got something.”

“We got something, too,” Noah replied.

“Ladies first,” Ayden insisted.

“I was able to converse with Hope. She claims she’s somewhere fancy, pretty, and it looks like a movie. She says the windows are oddly arched and there are tiles on the ceiling. She said it reminded her of
The Adventures of Tintin
.”

Ayden snapped his fingers and stood up, going to the cockpit door. He opened it, and I heard him say, “We need to go to Morocco.”

He turned back to us and shrugged. “In 2011, Spielberg did an animated movie of
The Adventures of Tintin
. The kid and dog wind up in a port in Morocco. Good news is that I know that town like the back of my hand.”

“Oh, holy hell,” Noah blurted.

I started laughing. “Now, your turn. Do tell...what do you have?”

Chapter Seventeen

Hope sat up in bed, confused.

Only occasionally had she had a remote conversation with another audial. Truth was, most audials were not powerful enough to communicate long distance. Sure, they could
listen
long distance—and often not accurately—but most were not able to establish a long-distance connection.

Although their connection had been lost, Hope still sensed a hawk nearby, sitting vigilantly on a branch, watching out for her, waiting for her. She saw the hawk in her mind’s eye. A beautiful red-tailed creature protecting her. Hope, for the first time in many days, felt just that,
hope
.

Whoever had communicated to her was powerful...almost as powerful as Hope. That made her smile. Hope wanted to meet such a woman...and she had sounded so kind, so sincere, so strong.

Yes, Hope very much wanted to meet her audial equivalent.

Back at the School, a place that Hope hated, she had quickly surpassed that of her fellow students...and most of the teachers. There was one who could still match her, but Hope was certain that with each passing day she was leaving him behind. She didn’t like him. He was mean and had cold eyes. If anything, Hope was glad to be away from him.

Mr. Simms was kinder, but he’d changed recently. He went from being friendly and kind enough, to...distracted. Moody. Hope quit wanting to be around him, too.

Which is why she had planned her great escape.

She had planned it carefully, down to the last detail. She had even drawn a map of her escape route. A lot had hinged on some of the guards not paying attention and, amazingly, on the night of her escape, the guards weren’t even there!

Hope had been ecstatic and had tasted sweet freedom, certain that soon she would be reunited with her mother. And that’s when they were waiting for her. The men who took her to Orlenda.

Hope was psychic enough to sense that something had not been right about her escape, that it had been a little too easy, but that was as far as she had gotten with it.

Mostly, she just wanted to go home. She almost, almost, missed the School.

But not yet. Not until she knew what Orlenda had planned for her. Luckily, she had been trained to do just that. Most curious, of course, was that someone had told Orlenda and the woman who called herself Echidna to guard themselves from an audial like her, which meant, Hope was certain, that they were familiar with the way psychics work.

But, they were not strong enough, or clever enough. Hope giggled at this. She always giggled when she was able to outsmart adults.

And so, as the hawk kept vigilance nearby, fading in and out of Hope’s consciousness, as their connection was tenuous at this point—it always took a while for two audials to make a lasting connection, even she knew that, Hope used her little friend to find a way through the shield...and into the room, where the voices came in loud and clear:

“Any casualties?” That was Orlenda speaking.

“Two. Both local field agents. The bodies have been disposed.”

“Any witnesses?”

“None. The accident happened on a remote road.”

“A remote road in southern California?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think it was possible. Go on.”

“The bodies were removed and the area cleaned. The local police did investigate, but by then, another field agent posed as the driver.”

“And the bodies?”

“The Safe House furnace, of course.”

“Of course,” said Orlenda. To Hope the woman sounded both pleased and irritated.

“Did they file a flight plan?”

“Officially, they are headed to Paris.”

“Unofficially?” asked Orlenda.

There was a pause, then the woman said, “Unofficially, I’ve received word that they might be headed here.”

Chapter Eighteen

Noah leaned in over the table as I took a drink from my water bottle. “You really believe that Simms is part of a program that is schooling these kids? Kids like Hope?” I asked.

Noah nodded. “I do. I don’t believe they are only being schooled wherever this place is, I also believe that they are basically imprisoned there.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and pointer finger, closing my eyes and taking this all in. If this was true, it goes against all ethics and practices. It’s what my father never wanted to occur when I was a kid. He’d sheltered me as much as he could because of my gift. He didn’t want me to be used or manipulated.

“This shouldn’t be too difficult to believe,” Ayden interrupted my thoughts. “If you look at it, Ky, isn’t that what Simms has in a way done to you since you were a kid?”

I didn’t respond right away. That’s probably because I knew that he was right. As much as my dad had done a good job trying to protect me, if I really looked at things, I could admit to myself that Grant had been the opposite of my father. He had pushed for me to know things, learn things, and then he’d led the CIA into establishing a department for people like us—like me—the PSI. “How...I mean why do you guys think this?”

“I’ve been able to get small reads here and there, and got even more of an energetic surge when you were communicating with Hope,” Ayden said. “I’ve seen glimpses of what looks like a prison yard, with guards, and wire—the whole nine yards. I’ve received images of other kids, of other adults, and the clincher was one of Simms talking to Hope’s mother, and although I can’t hear the conversation, she looks afraid. I’ve seen him leave the room they were in, and a light comes on and flashes above the door when he walks out.”

“Like an alarm has been set?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“Then why is he sending us to find her? I mean, if Simms is involved in a school that imprisons kids in order to train them to work for the government, which isn’t any better than Orlenda’s motives, isn’t he afraid when she’s been found that there will be repercussions? Isn’t he afraid of us? Of this very moment? Of what we might learn?”

Noah nodded. “He probably is. But he’s probably more afraid of what Hope knows or is capable of herself.”

“And, what do you think that is? Because I have no clue.” I looked back and forth between the two men, and got my answer in their eyes—they were as clueless as I was to the answer of the question of the hour. What did this little girl know? What made her so dangerous?

“We don’t know.” Noah sighed.

I looked at Ayden and he shook his head. “Think I’ll lie down for a few. I think we have a long day and night ahead of us.” He stood and walked to the back of the plane where there was a curtain that partitioned off a cot. He closed the curtain.

I trained my eyes on Noah. He reached out and covered the top of my hand. A surge of electricity traveled down my backside and settled into my stomach. I tried not to pay attention to it.

“There’s something else, Kylie. Something I’ve gotten. I did some remote viewing and I did something I don’t usually do. I tapped into Simms, which means he may know we are onto him. He’d figure that out anyway, and we’ll deal with it.”

There was an edge to his voice, and something in his eyes—concern, worry—I wasn’t sure. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

He sighed and looked directly into my eyes. “I’m almost positive that Hope Mitchell is your sister.”

Chapter Nineteen

Although the stupid Orlenda woman hadn’t done anything truly scary to her, Hope was afraid of her because she had enough sense—and not just psychic sense—to know that Orlenda was a very bad woman who had some very bad intentions.

What Hope did know was that she had something they all wanted. She knew how to “travel” or “transfer”—whatever they all wanted to call it. She’d started doing it about six weeks ago back at the School, when her training had intensified with one-on-one sessions with her teachers—especially with Mr. Simms, who only came to the School, it seemed like, when there was a problem. He questioned her repeatedly about a conversation that she had “heard.” She really didn’t understand it.

All she had heard was Simms and another man talking and the man had said to him, “Yes, the program will include my donations.” That was it. It was odd, because that conversation was different to her than most of the others she’d had. That time, although very brief, she actually seemed to be in the room with them. She could see them talking, feel the air around her, smell the smells—almost like a dream, but she knew it hadn’t been. She’d been there. Or at least she thought she had because the other man looked right at her and smiled. Grant turned and looked at her too, but in that moment from what Hope remembered of it, he didn’t seem to see her like the other man. There was one other brief exchange after the man smiled at her. He’d said, “She’s one of my donations.”

Then Hope had found herself back in her room—her prison back at the School. It had not happened again that way, but Mr. Simms had been coming to see her more often and discussing that “dialogue,” which is what her teachers called it when she heard things. She really hated all of this. If she didn’t have this ability, Hope knew that she would be a normal kid who lived in a normal house with her mom, and went to a normal school. She knew that most of the kids she went to school with felt the same way. There weren’t many of them—around fifty in total, but before she’d escaped she had discovered a separate wing to the School, and it was there that she spotted maybe six or seven pregnant women. Hope was smart enough to know that it was very likely the babies those women were carrying would have some kind of ability, and they would be brought up within the confines of the School.

But there was much more for Hope to worry about at the moment besides why Mr. Simms had taken such an interest in her, and now why this crazy lady had her tied to a bed in some crazy palace-looking-place.