The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (13 page)

As she paced, she kept turning that and other questions over in her mind. She thought back to her last conversation with Alex. Somehow her son had known what was going to happen. “I’m sorry I haven’t been telling you stuff,” Alex had said. “I didn’t want you to be upset.”

What did that mean? She walked backward and forward, backward and forward, trying to understand it.

Alex was a normal boy. Sure, once a creature had tried to kidnap him, saying he was “special,” but he was crazy. Alex was just a regular kid.

Except he did seem to have a knack for knowing things he shouldn’t. When her father had been diagnosed with cancer, Sara had decided not to tell her son. Alex was only five at the time, and she didn’t think he would understand. But one night he’d found her in the living room with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Don’t worry, Mommy,” he said, patting her lightly on the arm. “Grandpa is going to be fine.”

Seeing her surprise, he’d added quickly, “I heard you talking about it on the phone.”

That explanation had been enough. Only she didn’t think it was possible. She’d been careful, damn careful, not to talk about her father’s condition while Alex was in the house.

And then there was the fact that his prediction had turned out to be true—her father had pulled through. Sara had assumed Alex had been trying to reassure her, but what if he’d really known her father would be okay?

Looking back on the detritus of her life, she saw more signs she’d missed. There was the time in kindergarten that Alex had stubbornly insisted on wearing his rain boots to school when it was a bright and sunny morning, only for a massive rainstorm to appear later in the day. Or when he’d flatly refused to get in the car with her to drive to school, insisting they walk. She’d reluctantly humored him, only to see a bad car accident a few blocks away from the school. She was grateful for his disobedience.

Were these real signs of something “special” in Alex? Or was she only seeing them now because the idea had been suggested to her?

Ken walked into the office a moment later, interrupting her thoughts. He came over and laid a hand on her shoulder. She leaned into him briefly, grateful for the comfort it provided. But she pulled away after a moment. She couldn’t afford to lose focus.

“Sara, honey, you need to sit down,” he said gently.

He pointed to the couch in her office.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”

“We’ll find him, Sara.”

The police hadn’t been able to help the last time Alex was threatened. It had been Soren who saved them.

Soren. Wallace knew the truth about him, but he continued to defend the pretender anyway. “He wants to save Alex,” Wallace had told her. “I don’t think it’s a trick. If he wanted to take Alex, he could have done so long before now and in considerably less public a fashion.”

That may have been true, but it didn’t answer any of the bigger questions. Why was this thing still pretending to be Soren? Why set himself up as an investigator and hunt pretenders? Why help her at all? If there was a master plan, she couldn’t fathom it. That just made her all the more anxious.

“Sara, you’ve got to sit down,” Ken said, jarring her from her own thoughts. “You’re not helping Alex by pacing.”

For some reason, Sara’s scattered thoughts flew back to John. “If you could find out the future, would you?” he’d asked once. They were sitting on a blanket in John’s backyard. John had brought out a bag of potato chips, and she was picking at them while she considered the question.

“No,” she said finally.

“Why not?”

“Because if good things are coming, I’d like them to be a surprise,” she said. “And if bad things are going to happen, I’d rather not know.”

“You sure about that? What if by seeing them, you could change them?”

She’d gazed at him, wondering what he meant.

“Depends, I guess,” she replied. “Sometimes changing something wouldn’t make it better.”

He looked away from her then.

“No,” he said. “No, it wouldn’t.”

“What about you? Would you want to know the future?”

He looked back at her, her very serious boyfriend.

“No,” he said. “I’d give anything not to know it.”

She’d kissed him hard then, so hard he’d fallen over and she’d rolled right on top of him. He hadn’t resisted.

“Then I guess we’ll just have to make do with the present,” Sara said, and pretty soon talk of the future was the last thing on both of their minds.

Her heart ached at the memory, something she hadn’t thought about in over a decade. At the time, she’d thought nothing of it.

John could be depressed sometimes; she’d just assumed it was hormones or genetics. But what if it was something else? What if he’d been trying to share something with her that day, and she’d unintentionally shut him down? She couldn’t help wonder what her life would have been like if she’d said, “Yes. Yes, I very much want to see the future, every bit of it.” Would Alex have been taken? Would he even exist? Would John still be alive?

She stopped and put her hand to her face, wiping away tears. What if she was still paying for a mistake she made fifteen years ago?

“It’s going to be okay, Sara,” Ken said, still standing next to her.

But he didn’t know that.

There was movement outside her office, and Sara turned to see Wallace walking briskly into the institute. There was a commotion around him as everyone looked toward him.

“I need everyone in the conference room in three minutes,” he said. “We have a lot to discuss.”

The rest of the office started moving in a hurry and Sara couldn’t help but be grateful. Wallace walked into her office and shut the door. He handed Ken a piece of paper.

“That’s an address,” he said. “Contact the FBI and get them out there right away. Tell them you had an anonymous tip or whatever you need to get them there. It’s Alex’s last known location.”

“What?” Sara asked.

“Soren tracked the address down,” Wallace said. “I just got a call from his assistant. Apparently, Soren tried to get Alex back, but failed. Still, he said he saw him—he’s alive and healthy. We still have time to save him.”

Ken didn’t pause, but strode out the door holding his cell phone to his ear. Sara momentarily sagged in relief.

“Where’s Soren?” she asked.

“From what Glen told me, he’s in bad shape and barely escaped with his life,” Wallace replied.

“Do you think he’s really helping us?”

Wallace nodded.

“I know you have reason not to trust him, but remember, he saved my boy,” Wallace said. “I still don’t know that there was anything in that for him.”

“Then what took Alex, Wallace?” Sara said. “It must have been the other pretender.”

“According to Glen, it wasn’t a pretender,” Wallace replied. “Something called a stoneskin. Never heard of ‘em.”

“What if it’s all a lie? What if this is just some game Soren is playing? Glen could be in on it.”

Wallace grasped Sara by the shoulders.

“Sara, listen to me,” he said. “My son disappeared once, too, remember? So I understand your paranoia and despair. But for right now, I think Soren and Glen are on our side. And if that’s the case, we need to focus our energies on who isn’t. Now come on, let’s get to the conference room.”

He turned and left before she could object. She followed in his wake, arriving to find everyone in the office already sitting around the enormous conference table.

Wallace walked to a whiteboard at the front.

“This is what we know so far,” he said. “At three forty-seven p.m. today, Alex Ignatius—Sara’s son—was taken by someone pretending to be a cop. According to our source, Alex was then taken to a warehouse near the Anacostia River. The police are on their way now, but I’ll be honest—my guess is they won’t find anything. Which means it’s up to us to find out where Alex was taken next.

“The person who took Alex controls a range of creatures. Our source saw at least four: stoneskins, a leprechaun, shirkens, and gaunts. I want to know everything the legends say about what they are, where they come from, and how to kill them. I need a volunteer to head a research team.”

A young woman at the middle of the table raised her hand.

“Olson, good,” Wallace said. “You’re in charge. Pick three people and get started as soon as we finish here.

“Next up: we have the ringleader. He’s been identified as Silas Rakev. He’s not human, he can move in the blink of an eye, and he’s hard to kill. The source said something about black smoke appearing around his body. He’s likely old, and he’s collecting kids with psychic abilities. He’s probably been doing it for a while. And he’s planning something big. I need a team leader to work on researching this guy. I’ll get us access to police records, phone records, anything legal or illegal that can be accessed through a computer.”

A woman with long brown hair raised her hand, and Sara was surprised to see her again, especially here. She was Alice McDermott, one of the other survivors of the disaster in Reapoke Forest. Sara knew that Wallace had rewarded all those who helped his son escape, including Alice, but he must have offered her a job as well. Her green eyes met Sara’s, and she gave her a slight nod.

“I’m good with research, Mr. Leggett,” Alice said. “If there’s something out there on Rakev, I’ll find it.”

“Very well, McDermott,” Wallace said. “Everybody else I want looking up other cases of kidnapped children. If there is the slightest hint that the child had special abilities, I want the file on my desk before sunrise. There’s a madman out there with a boy held hostage, and a plan we know nothing about. Get to work.”

Soren hobbled into his office, leaning heavily on Glen.

He found Terry sitting in his chair and Friday lounging on the couch nearby. Bits of duct tape were scattered around the chair where Soren had tied her up earlier.

“You let her loose?” Soren asked Terry.

“LOL,” Friday replied. “Give me a little credit. I was free two seconds after your friend left me here.”

Soren looked at Terry, who shrugged.

“She was waiting when I got here.”

“I was sick of being tied up, you perv.” She brightened. “Hey, did you read
Fifty Shades of Grey
? I really want to; Clarissa said it was really hot, but my mom caught me trying to download it to my Kindle and—”

“Please shut up,” Soren said.

Friday mimed zipping her lips closed as Glen helped Soren over to a chair.

“I assume she filled you in on who she is,” Soren said.

“As much as she’s going to, I think,” Terry said. “She doesn’t seem to trust humans very much.”

Friday didn’t say anything, but rolled her eyes at Terry.

“Why are you still here?” Soren asked.

Friday mimed zipping her lips back open.

“Because the dickweeds betrayed me, dummy,” she said. “I didn’t get paid, and they set me up.”

She looked every bit like a teenager, but Soren glimpsed something darker in her eyes, a hint of an older, very angry intelligence. He suddenly wondered which one was the real Friday, the teenager or what lurked underneath. Soren didn’t need to look at the old man to know he was thinking the same thing.

“So you’re actually willing to help me?” Soren asked Friday.

She leaned back into the couch, a cocky smile on her face.

“Duh. Would I be here if I wasn’t?”

Soren didn’t know what to make of her. He didn’t trust her—he couldn’t afford to trust her. What if she was working for Rakev? And yet if that were true, Rakev would have known Soren was a pretender.

“Have you ever heard the name Silas Rakev?” Soren asked.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I never got any names. I was hired through an intermediary.”

“Did he have an Irish accent?” Soren asked.

Friday leaned forward, nodding.

“It was
so
cute,” she said. “He sounded just like the Lucky Charms guy
.”

Glen shook his head.

“I still can’t believe Lochlan is messed up in all this,” Glen said. “Actually, no, wait, I can
totally
believe that. He’s psychotic.”

“Be nice to Lochlan,” Soren said. “He saved me from an eternity trapped inside an incinerator.”

Soren wanted to pace around the room, but he still had trouble moving. The healing was taking longer than it had when he’d blown up. Maybe he’d overtaxed his body’s repair function. Was that possible?

“Right now what we need to do is find out a way to kill Rakev,” Soren said. “Seems only fair, since he tore off my head.”

Glen visibly flinched, reaching around to rub his neck. Terry looked taken aback. But Friday laughed.

“I had that happen to me once,” she said. “It sucked.”

All three of them looked at her.

“Not the word I would use, but yeah, it ‘sucked,’” Soren replied. “I’m having a hard time fixing it, too. Which is weird. A couple months back, I saw a pretender regrow his own head after just a couple minutes.”

Friday shook her head.

“You really are splintered, aren’t you?” she said. “When something happens to you the first time, it takes a long time to recover. Do it again and it’s faster. The doppelgänger you faced a couple months ago—his name was Tol, by the way—has had his head cut off a bunch of times.”

“How do you know about that?” Soren asked.

She sighed deeply as if Soren were particularly stupid. “Cause Tol mentioned his big standoff with the legendary Soren Chase,” she said.

“Look on the bright side,” Glen said. “At least now you can cross decapitation off your list.”

Soren gave him a dirty look, but Friday perked up. She looked from Glen to Soren. “OMG,” she said. “You’ve been trying to kill yourself, haven’t you? How pathetic are you?”

“Cut him some slack; he’s been through a lot,” Glen said.

“I don’t care what he’s been through,” Friday said. “Doppelgängers are amazing. It’s a gift to be what we are, not a curse.”

“You’re killers,” Soren said.

“
Pfft
—takes one to know one,” she said. “What was your plan against this guy, Rakev? Did you just walk right in there and start shooting? That’s not what doppelgängers do. We’re creatures of deception, not assault. We wait until the moment is right, and we strike hard and fast. We don’t blaze in like John Wayne.”