The House (28 page)

It was too
sudden a movement for her and she turned to bolt but I was faster.
I meant to reach for her arm as she turned but got her tail
instead. I didn’t hold on; I would never grab anyone’s tail. It’s
rude. Instead I let a shiver of my magic pass through me and into
her. I was young and had only just left the Covenant so magic was
normal for me.

Far more
normal than it is for most shifters.

Her tail had
vanished in my hand and she stood there completely human for a
fraction of a second before she fell. She lost her balance so
suddenly that I didn’t have time to do anything and this time she
reacted much faster. Before she even hit the ground she shifted and
the little brown tabby streaked out of the bathroom, down the
corridor, down the stairs and through the opening front door. I had
never cursed another person so much in my life. I couldn’t even
remember now who it was who’d opened the door.

Marie had been
livid. Stripes had been vulnerable and scared and I’d just freaked
her enough that she’d run off. We knew nothing about her and had no
way to help her. If someone wanted to leave the house and not stay
in contact Marie never pushed it, but I had scared her off so I had
to go out and find her.

Finding a
tabby cat in the sprawling streets and alleyways was one of the
most tedious things I’d ever done. She could fit through gaps I
couldn’t even dream of; she could go unnoticed through gardens I
had to sneak through. And, of course, she could shift back to
human, and get on the skyrail, although it was unlikely she had the
money.

It had taken
me two days of searching to find her, and another day to talk her
around to coming back. I didn’t go home at all during those three
days. I’d lived like she did, on the street, but at least I’d at
least had the money to buy food. I’d hardly slept, afraid of losing
the progress I’d made, and I’d never strayed from her trail once I
found it. I wouldn’t say we became immediate friends; she thought I
was pompous and arrogant, I thought she was weak for running all
the time.

Eventually,
I’d become less arrogant and she’d become more confident. We were
still like fire and ice but I couldn’t think of anyone I counted as
a closer friend to me. I felt her absence all too keenly.

I sighed; it
did no good to think so much about the past. There was too much of
it and too little comfort to be gained from it. I missed Stripes
almost as much as I missed Marie. Marie’s absence was just more
obvious because she was always at the House. Stripes had been
trying to pull away, to find her own way. She had a job and a flat;
she cooked her own food and went to social functions in the human
world.

I realised
that I resented Stripes her freedom just a little bit. I had my own
money – I didn’t scrounge off Marie – but I didn’t have a steady
job. I didn’t have a life outside of the House, or before that, the
Covenant; both were my whole life. They were where my family was
and I’d never really tried to break free. Maybe I should have done
but then I looked around. Nobody was paying me any attention, too
intent on their own worries. They were my family. I didn’t know
what I’d do without them.

I suppressed a
shiver. Marie, Stripes and Shayanna were alone and here we were,
sitting in silence because we couldn’t get along properly. Marie
was our glue, she always had been. Without her we weren’t really a
group, we were a bunch of individuals scampering around. We had no
real drive or purpose. We’d fallen too far into our worry to
actually be any help.

“What are we
doing?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. Everyone would
have heard me but nobody replied. With hearing as good as ours,
sometimes it’s hard to tell when someone is actually talking to
you. “What are we doing here?” I asked again, this time in a normal
voice, if a little strained. “We’re all sitting here in silence
while our family is in danger. Why?”

“Because
there’s nothing we can do,” Hercules said. “We’ve tried
everything.”

“Not
everything...we haven’t tried everything. There has to be something
else we can do...anything...even if it’s only to keep us occupied.”
I stood up as I spoke. We had to do something, I refused to sit
there and think about all the awful things that could be happening
to my family while we sat dejected and did nothing. It wasn’t in my
character to be helpless and it certainly wasn’t a part of any of
theirs.

“We can’t go
out searching again. It’s too dangerous,” James said. He sounded
exhausted and I wondered how much sleep he’d gotten between his
injuries and losing Stripes. At least he looked better. The only
person who healed faster than James was Hercules and even Marie had
never met anyone as good as him.

“Why don’t we
go over what we know?” Catherine suggested. I smiled at her and sat
back down. “There’s no harm in looking for a pattern.”

“Why don’t we
go to the police again?” Eddie asked. We all stared at him
incredulously.

“No human did
this,” I said. It wasn’t a question any more – it was a surety and
it scared the hell out of me.

“So what?”

“We can’t
involve the human police in something like this. We only went in
the first place because otherwise it would have been suspicious. If
the police find them it could expose us, if they even look into
them too much it could expose us,” Catherine explained. I was
getting tired of Eddie’s lack of knowledge; if I ever saw Talon I
was going to kick his ass so badly he wouldn’t sit for a week.

“Then why go
in the first place if it’s such a big concern?”

“Because
otherwise we’d be wandering around acting suspiciously for no
obvious reason, so they’d start to look into it. If they found out
later that we hadn’t reported them missing – we’d just gone to look
for them – they’d be suspicious. They might make a token effort but
nobody ‘important’ went missing so they won’t really care,” I said
quietly, because I was afraid that if I spoke any louder I wouldn’t
be able to stop myself from screaming at him. My headache was
coming back and with it the never-ending voices were starting to
make themselves known again. It was getting harder and harder to
concentrate. I needed to do something or I was going to go mad.

I needed Marie; there was too much to do, too much to think
about. Somewhere in this mess was an answer. At that point in time
I would have settled for anything that made sense. Nothing seemed
to. Everything seemed random – excessively violent and highly
unlikely – but overall random.
No
, I told myself.

“There
has
to be a pattern,” I said out loud. Everyone looked at me as
if to say ‘well,
duh
’. It must have seemed like I was losing my marbles as far as
they were concerned. “So what’s happened? Hercules, get the big
whiteboard from the cupboard and some pens. We’re going to do what
Catherine suggested and set this up like an investigation.”
Hercules nodded and went to get the supplies.

“I didn’t
suggest setting up an investigation Trix, just that it would be
helpful to see all of the information together.” Catherine sounded
so much like Marie in that moment that I wanted to cry. Comforting,
with a hint of reprimand and without ever being condescending.

“Well, as far
as I can tell that’s what investigators do. Write down everything
and stare at it until it makes sense,” I replied. Catherine looked
like she didn’t think it was such a good idea but kept her thoughts
to herself. No doubt she’d be the one dragging me away from the
board at whatever ungodly hour it would be tonight while I was
still trying to make sense of it.

Hercules
arrived with the whiteboard, hooked it up to the computer and
plugged it in. A small blue light flashed in the top right-hand
corner before a screen spread across the whole thing, colours
playing over the blankness beneath.

I stood up and
tapped the right-hand edge of the screen, scrolling through a list
of options until I found what I wanted. I used the noticeboard
setting on a plain white background, grabbed a pen from a pouch on
the side and wrote in big letters: “Why would someone kidnap
shifters?” across the top.

The advantage
of the computerised screen over a plain whiteboard was that I could
pull up pictures of everyone who’d gone missing and move them about
with ease. I put each of the three pictures with corresponding
names on the left-hand side of the screen and kept the right for
making notes.

“What should I
put now?” I asked.

“Perhaps what
they all have in common?” Hercules suggested. I nodded and started
to write notes. They were all shifters, they were all female, and
they all had some connection to the House.

“They were all
powerful,” Catherine said. I just looked at her blankly. “I know
that you lot – young as you are – probably don’t see it but you are
all very powerful. You just don’t notice because the only shifters
who come here are powerful; all of them can change at will and all
of them can shimmer. All of you can. You just don’t appreciate how
unusual it is.”

I added
powerful to the list.

“They’re all
different kinds of shifters so there’s no link there, unless
they’re trying to collect us.” I paused and shook my head, unsure
of where my last thought had come from. It was getting harder to
distinguish my own thoughts from the voices. “We know that there
are quite a few of them and they are very strong.” I glanced at
James and looked away quickly. It scared me to think that anyone
would be able to do that to James, and of what they’d be able to do
to the rest of us. “Anything else?”

“Has anyone
else gone missing?” Hercules asked. “I mean...outside of the people
we know?”

I looked around. Nobody knew. “We’d best see what we can
find. Though I’ve no idea how to contact anyone since the criteria
for it is that we
don’t
know them...”

“I’ll see what
I can find,” Catherine offered. “I’d say my circle of acquaintances
is probably the largest of anyone here.” She got up and left to
make her phone calls and searches in peace. I didn’t think she knew
that many more people than us but maybe there was someone further
afield who was affected. Our circle was limited by geography more
than anything else. It’s hard to stay friends when you never see
each other. Catherine had travelled more.

I looked up at
the board. There was almost nothing there, certainly nothing that
gave us any usable information. I just had to pray that something
would fall into our laps. Or face that we might not get anyone back
and I wasn’t willing to do that.

I had a vision
of myself in ten years’ time still searching for them and shivered.
Maybe by then I’d have enough control of the voices to gather
something useful from them. If I survived and didn’t go mad
first.

I added in all
of the other things we knew about the disappearances. Where they
were and what time they were taken. It didn’t look good; they had
been taken from reasonably public places and in daylight. James had
been beaten to a pulp where people could have seen him. We had to
face the fact that these people weren’t being too careful about not
exposing us. And that meant they were likely to be crusaders.

Crusaders are
what we call people who try to expose us to the world as a matter
of course. We don’t normally care why they’re doing it; we just try
to make them stop.

These people
had taken at least three shifters which scared the shit out of me.
I remembered having it drilled into my head that you did not do
anything that had even the slightest chance of exposing our
existence. It made me think that maybe these people weren’t
supernatural; there was simply no way that anyone from our world
would do something like this. It went against all common sense for
starters. Yet I kept coming back to the brick wall of James – no
human could have bested him. There were too many impossible things
all happening at once and it was starting to get to me.

It’s not that
some of our own people didn’t want to expose us. I’d heard their
arguments over and over for telling the world about us, for not
having to hide. They were always pushed down. The dangerous
idealists found out why nobody ever did anything to endanger our
secret. It simply wasn’t worth what would happen to you, and we
were incredibly good at covering up any messes that were made. We
have several thousand years of practice.

By the time
I’d put everything on the board and sat down I felt even more
dejected. I’d hoped that once we put everything together someone
would have a brainwave and figure it all out. I should have known
that real life just doesn’t work like that.

It wasn’t a logical pattern for crusaders to take either;
they wouldn’t care about kidnapping shifters. They would be more
about obtaining proof and there wasn’t a single person they’d
abducted who wouldn’t choose to die rather than reveal our secret.
I really hoped that wasn’t why they had been taken. I couldn’t
believe it. A part of me simply knew that they were still alive –
the part that we don’t understand and rarely listen to – because
Marie was almost my mother and Stripes my sister. I would
know
. I just kept
telling myself that.

Catherine came
back half an hour later with a look of pure terror written on her
face. We stood almost as one and went to her. She clung to me like
a survivor clinging to a liferaft. It wasn’t something I was used
to seeing from the older generation.

“The only
person I can’t get hold of is Thomas, Hunter’s brother. But that
doesn’t mean very much because he’s forever disappearing off to God
knows where.” The look on her face said she plainly didn’t believe
it. “He’s probably fine.” Her voice was weak and reedy but she was
pulling herself together. It had just been that moment of panic
when she couldn’t reach him. The moment when sense becomes
meaningless and your body stops working properly.