The Soul Summoner (The Soul Summoner Saga Book 1) (30 page)

"Leslie Bryson," I said, sticking my toothbrush into my mouth.

"Yep. Maybe I'll meet you at your office and take you out to dinner tonight," he said.

I turned to look at him. My cream colored bed sheet was wound around one of his legs and barely tugged up to his bellybutton. I dribbled toothpaste down the front of his shirt and forgot what I was going to say. 

He smiled. "Don't go to work."

I groaned and spit in the sink. "I have to." I grabbed the bathroom doorknob. "And I'm never going to get there with you watching me like that." He laughed, and I slammed the door.

* * *

Warren had made me a to-go cup of coffee before I left the house, but my travel mug was empty by the time I reached my office. For the first time in my life, I understood why so many people hated Mondays. The weekend hadn't been long enough, and my mind was still at home in bed. The last thing I wanted to do was send out tourism specials for all of Asheville's leaf-enthusiasts. Warren had been right; leaves were stupid.

To add insult to injury, I had an email waiting from the sheriff when I turned on my computer. They were going to have to shut down the public forests in the middle of hunting season, and he would have to make a statement to the press during the five o'clock news hour. That meant I had to make a trip to the jail, and I had forgotten my Xanax due to Warren's distraction that morning. 

Very reluctantly, I left my office and drove to the jail around eleven a.m. Knowing he would be out of the office for the day, I parked in Nathan's parking spot when I pulled into the lot. Anxiety began to pulse through my veins the moment that I stepped out of my car. 

Ms. Claybrooks wasn't even working at the master control desk to distract me. As I walked down the hallway to the sheriff's office, I nervously wrung my hands and practiced deep breathing exercises. I tried to replay the steamy events of my morning and the night before in my head, but even that wasn't enough to dilute the evil that seemed to envelope me from every direction.

"Are you all right?" Sheriff Davis asked with wide eyes when I walked into his office.

I nodded and sat down across from him. "Just a bit of a headache. I'll be fine." 

In record time, I hammered out an apology to the hunters of Western North Carolina. The wildlife game lands would close that day at dusk and would reopen as soon as the area had been thoroughly investigated. I made the necessary phone calls to the media from the sheriff's office, and then promised to meet him for the broadcast on the front steps of the sheriff's office right after lunch. When he was satisfied with his announcement, I made a bee-line for the exit. My heart rate had to be registering somewhere between cheetah and drumroll.

As I bolted through the final door that would lead to the lobby, I slammed face-first into a green and gold uniform. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" I looked up into the face of Billy Stewart.

He cocked his head to the side and laughed. "Sloan Jordan?" 

Billy Stewart was just as handsome as he had been when we were kids. He was carrying about twenty more pounds on him and had a few new lines around his eyes, but I could still see why Adrianne had always liked him so much. 

Even in the midst of my panic attack, I laughed. "Billy, I was just talking about you over lunch yesterday and here you are!"

"Talking about me?" he asked surprised. "I don't think I've seen you in what? Ten years or more?"

"At least!" I was gripping my chest.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

I nodded. "Yeah, I'm fine," I lied.

"Hey, I heard about your friend Adrianne being in the hospital. That's terrible what happened to her." He crossed his strong arms over his chest. "How's she doing?"

I nodded. "She's getting better every day. I was just on my way to see her."

He raised his eyebrows. "I've been thinking about dropping by there myself. Mind if I tag along?"

Adrianne would kill me if I let Billy Stewart show up with her in the condition she was in, so I smiled. "Sure, but I'm heading out right now though."

He shrugged. "Not a problem. I've got to come back here afterward anyway. Wanna just ride on the county's dime?"

I smiled. "Sure." I was desperate to get out of that building as quickly as possible. "How have you been? How's your family?" I asked, begging for conversation to distract me as we crossed the lobby.

He nodded. "Well, my dad passed back in '09, and my mom moved to Statesville to be near her sister, but she's doing pretty well."

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." 

"It was a heart attack. It happened fast and to be honest, he was an asshole anyway," he said. "How about your folks? Your dad still at the hospital?"

I nodded as he held open the door. It was all I could do not to run from the building like my hair was on fire. "Yeah. He's doing a lot of Alzheimer's research these days. Mom and Dad are both doing well."

"That's good to hear," he said. We reached the bottom of the steps and he nodded toward a green truck with the county emblem on the door. "This is me." 

I got in the passenger's seat, and he put the files he was carrying in the back seat before getting behind the wheel. I took a series of deep breaths as he pulled away from the curb and gripped the handle on the door to help ease the shaking I couldn't control in my arms. 

"What are you doing up this way today?" I asked.

"Had to drop off some paperwork about this search effort they are starting up in the morning."

I nodded. "I was just meeting with the sheriff about it."

He shook his head and chuckled. "There's gonna be a lot of pissed off rednecks 'round here."

He pulled out onto the street and straight into the sunlight. I shielded my eyes as I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. A sharp jab in my thigh caused me to shriek and grab for my leg. As we passed under the shade of an orange oak tree I could see Billy scowling at me. "Why were you talking about me yesterday, Sloan?"

"What?" I asked. I was still trying to inspect my thigh. Whatever it had been had gone straight through my pant leg and into my skin. That's when I saw Billy drop a syringe down between his seat and his door. My brain was scrambling to catch up.

"Why were you talking about me?" he demanded.

"What did you do?" I cried. A wave of dizziness washed over me.

"Don't worry," he said. "Pentobarbital only takes a minute."

"Pentobarbital?" I asked confused.

"Large animal sedative," he explained. "That's just one of the perks of being a game warden."

After that, the world swirled out of view. 

* * *

When I awoke, I was handcuffed to a radiator in a musty cabin with dirty wooden floors. There were holes in the baseboards from small woodland squatters. My head was throbbing and my stomach felt sick. Pain was pulsing through my knees and there was dried blood down my forearms. I looked around at the one room hunting cabin. The sun was low in the sky and casting a warm glow through the chilly room. I had been unconscious for hours. 

It appeared as though I was alone, but I knew better. I could sense Billy's presence nearby. On the floor, just out of my reach, the photos of the missing girls were splayed across the floor. My briefcase was open lying next to them. 

Oh god.
I panicked as the realization of what was happening settled in.

I pressed my eyes closed. "Warren Parish… Nathan McNamara… Warren Parish… Nathan McNamara," I repeated quietly.

"They ain't gonna help you now." Billy stepped inside from the front door with a large hunting knife strapped to his side and his gun on the other hip. He wasn't wearing his uniform anymore. He was in dark camouflage. 

"Billy, what are you doing?"

"Waiting for the sun to set. Then I'm going to show you my special place," he said with wild eyes.

"Why are you doing this?"

He smiled as his heavy boots clunked across the wooden planks toward me. "You know, for a minute back there I wondered if you had figured it out when you said you were talking about me, but then you got into the truck like a damn fool, and I knew better." He laughed and rubbed his calloused palms together. "I guess this is just my lucky day."

"What are you going to do with me?" I asked.

He knelt down in front of me and began to count on his fingers. "Well, I'm going to rape you. Then I'm going to kill you. Then I'll probably rape you some more before I dig you a nice warm hole in the ground."

I shuddered and twisted against my restraints. 

He laughed again. "Government steel, honey. You ain't gettin' loose."

"You'll never get away with this," I said. "They're onto you now. Police and volunteers are going to be all over this place tomorrow, and they will find you."

He leaned so close to my face I could smell the rancid chewing tobacco on his hot breath. "I'm heading up the search team. How else are they gonna know where someone might hide a body away from all the tree stands, the deer beds, and the watering holes?"

I thought I might throw up, but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of seeing me panic.

He leaned over the pile of pictures and took a knee beside them. "You know what's funny about all this?" He started sorting through the photographs. "I was actually lookin' for you the night I killed this one." He spun the picture of Leslie Bryson across the floor toward me.

I looked down at Leslie's face and details started snapping together like building blocks. 2009. Billy Stewart. Chili's Bar and Grill, where Leslie was a waitress, was just a block over from Alejandro's. I had summoned Billy that night, and he had been planning to kill me. 

He scratched his forehead with dirt-caked fingernails. "Never found you that night, so I chose someone else." A grin, oozing with evil, spread across his lips. "But I've found you now."

I shook my head. "No. You screwed up taking me. You finally made a stupid mistake. Detective McNamara is already searching this area, and you'd better believe he's keeping a close eye on me. If I go missing, he'll burn the forest to hunt you down."

He grabbed me by my hair and pulled till I screamed. "He won't burn it before you're nothing but a pile of body parts," he said, showering my face with spit. He shoved me back toward the floor, and I hit my head on the radiator. 

He crossed the room and picked up a small box off the wooden table. He flipped it open as he walked toward me. I scrambled away from him as he produced another syringe. "Don't worry," he said. "This will make you woozy for a little bit, then you'll sleep till we get there."

He slid the needle carefully into a vein in my arm and pressed down on the plunger. Then he tucked the needle back into the box and walked away. 

I looked back at where my hands were cuffed. My mom's older sister had a radiator like it when I was a kid. Even back then, Aunt Joan's was so old that it hadn't worked in years. I wasn't sure how old the rusty piece of metal was, but I was sure it wasn't as strong as the handcuffs. I pulled and tugged and pounded the edge of the handcuffs into the radiator bars but nothing cracked. The cuffs were biting into the sensitive crevices between the bones in my wrists, and my thumbs and pinky fingers were going numb.

He laughed on the other side of the room. "Good luck with that. You're not the first bitch that's tried to break that thing."

I sank back against the cold metal, which seemed to seep into my skin making my body tingle all over. The back of my head was warm with sticky wet blood. 

"Warren, where are you?" I cried, barely above a whisper. 

"Oh, are you praying? Are you calling out for help?" He whimpered as a tease. "It's OK, Sloan. It will all be over soon."

When I awoke again, it felt like I was being drawn and quartered, only I was being dragged, literally dragged, by my arms across the rough terrain of the mountain. I didn't need to be able to see to know that my body was bloody and broken. My legs screamed like the skin was being peeled away with a jigsaw. Something was shoved into my mouth that I couldn't expel because of the strong tape that was stretched tight across my lips. It was almost completely dark, and I knew that if I didn't put up a fight soon, I was going to quickly run out of chances.

Desperate, I scrambled to get my feet under me. My bare and lacerated toes tried to fight for a foothold into the cold, hard earth beneath my feet. Billy spun around and backhanded me across the face. "Calm the hell down, you dumb whore! You're making this a lot worse for yourself!"

I tried to claw at him, but my fingers couldn't find his skin. 

Wrecked with exhaustion and agony, the fight left my arms. Billy continued to drag me about a hundred more feet over dirt, rocks, and tree roots that stuck out of the ground like tire spikes. I thought of the day in the woods when I had wanted Warren or Nathan to carry me. I remembered the terrified look on Nathan's face when Warren produced the jawbone from the dirt. I remembered trying to imagine Warren singing along with Dionne Warwick.
It's funny the things that flash through your mind when you know you're about to die.
I swear I could hear Warren singing...

Billy stopped walking. Billy heard Warren singing too. I hadn't imagined it. Nathan and Warren had already found the 'special place' where Billy was planning to hide my body along with Leslie Bryson's corpse. 

"What was that?" I heard Nathan's voice say. "I heard movement up there."

I tried to look around, and for a split second I thought I could see a light flash up in the distance. Billy knelt down and grabbed me by my right arm and my right thigh and hoisted me over his shoulder like a lame sheep. He was turning around and heading back the way we came. 

He was retreating because Warren and Nathan were really there!

I tried to struggle, but I was dangling upside down. Then I saw it. Billy's hunting knife was just within my grasp. He was moving too quickly and with too much panic to notice when my fingers unsnapped the leather that was holding it. With the nerve damage in my hands it was difficult to hold onto the knife, but somehow I managed to cut him in the side just deep enough to make him yelp with pain and stumble.