Forbidden (22 page)

Rachel lowered the duffel to the ground again and chose her words very carefully. Claire couldn't smell any emotions over the thick sweat musk that hovered in the air like a cloud. “Death of the Omega would be …
regrettable
because someone else would have to be selected. Another Ascension Day would have to be planned on short notice. The Council would be annoyed. But they probably wouldn't be much
more
than annoyed.”

So, nothing was off-limits. “
Any
sort of abuse is allowed?” She was getting a suspicion that she didn't like and she wasn't sure what had brought it to mind.

Another sigh. “Forced sex is frowned on because there can be
complications
. But sexual humiliation is completely within the rules. Remember the scum I mentioned? Yeah. That.”

Claire took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then changed the subject to something Bitty had said, partly because she didn't want to think about it. “So did anyone check the canyon when the kids went missing? Playing in rocks is pretty normal kid behavior. And why is nobody looking anymore? It's been less than a week. I don't see any posters up, haven't seen any searchers. It's more than a little weird, frankly.”

Rachel just gave a little shrug. “I haven't really noticed. I've just been doing my thing.” She started to walk away again but Claire grabbed her arm and held it fast. Rachel looked back at her as though expecting to be hit.

“But don't you see?! That's what I mean. You were the
Omega
. Doesn't it seem logical that they'd be having you search twenty-four/seven for those kids?” She waited for an answer. Claire didn't feel any pain in her head at the accusation. Maybe the chief couldn't read minds at a distance. Maybe he didn't pay attention all the time.

“Gawd!” Rachel's exclamation was punctuated with violent movement as she yanked out of Claire's grasp and threw her hands in the air. “You're as bad as Alek. Everything is not a conspiracy, Claire. Just because you don't
see
people searching doesn't mean they aren't. Just drop it!” She stormed away, leaving Claire stunned at the ferocity of her reaction. Had the question hit a little too close to home? She trotted after Rachel, squinting as the sun rose over the mountain and hit her right in the eye.

“Hey, look, I'm sorry, Rachel. You're right, I don't know the whole situation. I'm just saying what I'm noticing. But we'll drop the subject if it bothers you. What's next on our list?”

The other woman let out a sigh. “I'm sorry too, Claire. I shouldn't have snapped. I just get frustrated when people think nobody cares about those kids. Of course we care about them and I know people have been searching for days. I've been hauling water and energy drinks for the searchers so I personally know people have been searching for clues and they tell me about all the places they've looked.” She seemed eager to change the subject. “So what was up with Asylin yesterday? Cindee said she was acting weird up on the top of the mountain.”

Claire nodded as Rachel led her toward the edge of town. “Yeah, it was pretty strange. It was like she was convinced that Kristy was visiting an aunt in Louisiana and wasn't missing at all. Everyone looked at her like she'd grown a second head. When Alek called her on it, she looked like she was trying to remember something and then bolted down into the canyon in owl form. Strange.

“Where are we off to now? Does anyone live this far out?”

Rachel shook her head and stopped just off the road to drop the duffel and unzip it. “Nope. Now we do a quick roadside cleanup. Humans dump crap out here all the time. I don't know what it is about traveling that makes people such slobs. I mean, how much effort does it take to throw out the trash when you stop for gas?”

Claire looked down the deserted road. She hadn't seen a car all morning. “Is there a lot of traffic around here? I haven't seen much.” But Rachel seemed to be right. Now that she was looking closer, Claire saw white Styrofoam cups poking out of the grass next to the dirt road, plastic shopping bags fluttering in the light breeze, stuck on a barbed wire fence.

“Nah, we don't get many visitors, for which I'm grateful. But there's still trash around.” She pulled a folded black plastic trash bag from the duffel and handed it to Claire, along with a stack of bright pink strips of ribbon. “If we clean it up every day, it doesn't get too bad. I'll take the left side of the road. You take the right. It's about a mile.” She handed Claire a pair of work gloves, then outfitted herself with a matching set of equipment.

Claire was amazed that the Omega position was so versatile. Cleaner, companion, road crew, cook. What would be next? Tucking the ribbons in her pocket, she started to walk down the road with the other woman. “Hey, can I ask you a rude question?”

“Um … sure.” Rachel didn't look at her, just kept walking, occasionally picking up a bit of trash and putting it in the bag.

Claire tied a ribbon on the fence next to a discarded blown-out tire. “Were you ever a girlfriend? In the caves?”

Rachel stopped and turned to face Claire, her jaw open wide and her eyes wide in horror. “Why in the world would you ask that? No! Of course not.”

She knew it was a weird question but she couldn't forget the dream. “I had a dream the other night. I was back in the caves and Roberto was opening my cage door. I was terrified. I kept thinking it would have been easier if I'd been a guard's girlfriend and got to go to the parties. Maybe they wouldn't take me to the cages so often. But they didn't like little white girls.”

Rachel started walking again, nodding absentmindedly. “And they
did
like little dark-skinned girls? Yeah, you're right. They did. I was lucky that he liked my voice. Roberto.”

“Your voice? You mean when you used to sing?” She picked up a plastic Slurpee cup—blue raspberry by the stain at the bottom—battling the no-longer light breeze that tried to pull the cup out of her hand and made it hard to open the trash bag.

“Yep. The guards, and especially Roberto, liked my singing. So I'd do concerts for their orgies. Roberto called me
Belili
. I looked it up once I was rescued. She was a Babylonian goddess of vegetation who was known as ‘the goddess who weeps.'” Rachel shrugged. “I guess because I sang the blues a lot. There was good reason, y'know? So he instructed new guards that nobody was to put
anything
in my mouth. Nobody would defy him, so the rule sort of extended to the rest of my body, for which I'm grateful. I wish I could have thanked my mother for the music lessons.” She turned away then, and Claire could smell sorrow on the wind. Rachel snuffled and wiped her nose with the back of her glove, then said, “Did you know you were off-limits from the orgies too? That's why you were never a girlfriend.”

“Wait.
Orgies?
”

Rachel spit out a harsh laugh. “You didn't think ‘girlfriend' meant wine and roses, did you? They were gang rapes. I remember the faces of those girls. They started out terrified, taken by a dozen men every night. After a few weeks, their eyes went dead and whoever they had been before they were kidnapped died. If they could have killed themselves, they would have. You should be grateful.”

The reality was a harsh slap across the face of the memories of an innocent ten-year-old. As an adult, the horror of what those girls endured … “Why was I off-limits?”

Now Rachel shrugged. “Dunno. But you were the only white girl who never showed up. I only heard your name mentioned once. A new guard asked for you, and Carlos, the senior guard—you remember him, the fat one with the broken tooth—cuffed him on the ear and said, “Not that one. She's Roberto's.”

Claire felt suddenly cold to her core. She began to shake so hard that she dropped to her knees. That moment in the tunnel, so close to the light, frozen in place while he squeezed her throat flashed into her mind, raised from a hundred nightmares.
You're mine, little one.

She felt a hand on her arm and looked past the image of those cold dark eyes to Rachel's concerned ones. “Hey, you okay? What just happened?”

It took several tries before she could talk. “I tried to escape once. I managed to make it past the guards, all the way to the entrance. But he was there. Roberto or Nasil or whoever he was, in snake form. He turned human, fully dressed, and grabbed my throat. Lifted me off the ground and told me that I was his. What did that mean?”

Now her friend's dark face and scent held sadness and a woman's knowledge. “Probably that if you'd have stayed any longer, you would have wound up a girlfriend, and it wouldn't have been pretty. The guards were petty and cruel. But Roberto … he was evil. You are one lucky girl.”

“Got it. I'll remember to say my thanks. So, what's next? Is it time to head over to unload groceries?”

Rachel checked her watch. “Yeah, they should be back by now. It's pretty close to the school so you can slip out while we're loading boxes. The boys might already be there. We also need to clean a lot of stuff out of the basement. You're limping again, so I might have you do the sorting downstairs. I have a chart of which family has which space in a drawer in the desk downstairs. I'll show you where it is.”

Claire turned, fully intending to follow until a sound caught her ear and brought her up short.
What was that?
“Did you hear that?”

Her friend shook her head, then stopped and listened. A second strange noise made Rachel furrow her brow. “Okay, I hear it now too. But I can't figure out what it is.”

Muffled and distant, it didn't sound like any animal or bird Claire had ever heard. She pointed in the general direction. “I don't know, but I think we need to check it out.” Not waiting for Rachel to disagree, Claire grabbed a fence post and vaulted over the barbed wire strands, leaving her friend to either follow or go back to get help. Rachel hesitated, then launched herself over the fence.

“You must have a streak of masochism in you, girl. We're going to get beat on for wandering off on our own.”

Claire picked up the pace, keeping her nose in the air and sniffing in short bursts, searching for a scent to tie to the sound. “Can't be helped. It's part of the jo—”
Crap. This won't end well.
She'd picked up a scent, one she'd smelled recently, just this morning in fact. The scent had lingered at an open doorway, princess bedspread still mussed, waiting for the young owner to come home and crawl underneath. “I think I smell one of the kids.”

Rachel's eyes went wide and she started sniffing frantically. “My nose sucks. But if you're right…” She must have realized what the sounds might mean. “Keep going … lead the way.”

She did. The new forest scents were becoming more familiar, and she could focus better. Claire bent over slightly, ignoring the pain in her leg and the throbbing of her jaw at the sudden movement. Tracking a scent in the air, rather than on the ground, took effort. There were wind shifts and vegetation to take into account. The grass was tall here and brush sprang up at odd angles, threatening to trip her with every step. She slowed from a sprint to a careful trot, Rachel so close on her heels that if Claire stopped suddenly, Rachel would slam into her.

The noise became more agitated, like muffled yelling. That's when she saw figures in the distance, heading deeper into the woods. “Over there,” she said quietly and turned toward the two figures, one a lot smaller than the other.

When Claire and Rachel entered the woods, the sunlight abruptly disappeared, plunging them into darkness. These weren't normal shadows, from sun filtered through the pine branches above—it was more like a light had been switched off. Claire could feel the sting of magic flow over her skin. She'd met alphas who could mask an area from view during a hunt, make it an unpleasant place that humans would avoid or even run away from. This was like that, and Claire could tell that Rachel was feeling the effects. She'd slowed, her strides growing shorter and more hesitant.

Claire felt it too—a creepy, uneasy sensation that made her want to stop and turn around. Her hair started tingling and goose bumps crawled all over her. Then her training took over. Her Alphas had worked hard to prepare her for most things. In anything other than a direct fight she could ignore false signals and push past.

She smelled them then. Two people, both male. Claire pushed past her own pounding heart, ignoring her mind's intense urging to run away from the threat. She reached out and grabbed the smaller person and wrapped her arms around his torso. It was a child and she could smell it was the missing Williams boy!

Powerful magic slammed against her, trying to throw her off the child. Claire looked behind her, hoping Rachel was there to add her strength, but the owl shifter was gone. It was hard to blame her. Panic was making it hard to think. All sound vanished, along with her other senses. She couldn't smell, couldn't see. It was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. Terror soared and Claire couldn't decide whether the fear was being imposed on her or was a natural result of the lack of sensation.

Claire locked her fingers and willed herself not to let go, knowing that with her diminished strength, she couldn't withstand more than one or two more blows. She reached inside herself for more magic. But the moon wasn't full so there was nothing to pull on to replenish herself. Her pack had found her during the wreck; maybe she could reach them, despite the block by the mayor. She had to try.

Pulling magic from someone else was like sucking soft serve ice cream through a straw. It was technically possible, but it was slow and made her head hurt. She reached out through the pack link that was always in the back of her head. The chief might have dimmed the connection, but only her Alphas could truly end it. She pulled while simultaneously yanking on the boy, trying to free him from his captor's grasp. That he didn't scream in pain said he either wasn't able to or she just couldn't hear it. She didn't see a gag, but physical bindings weren't the only kind her people were capable of. She felt a faint trace, like light under a closed door. She pulled, and with a burst of light in her head, power flooded into her body.