Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 99935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99935 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 333(@300wpm)
“Heavens above...”
“Oh, I know, it’s a bit dark in here.” I rushed to the desk and flipped on the lamp. “You woke me up.”
“Woke you up? You— You were sleeping in here?”
“Well, yeah, of course,” I cried. “I told you! I figured it out. I know what took Dora!”
“Miss Hunter—”
“Okay, here it is,” I began, crossing back to the suspect board. “At first, I convinced myself that the monsters weren’t really monsters—because how could they be. They had to be people wearing some realistic costume, or who were crazy into body modification. But no matter how hard I tried to gaslight myself, it just didn’t add up.
“When I stabbed that thing, I broke skin—real and living skin. I didn’t stab plastic or fabric, so it couldn’t have been a costume—”
“Miss Hunter—”
“So, then, I looked into body modification.” I tripped across the room, landing on the wall papered with everything I learned about gene-hacking and body implants. “There have been a lot of, rather shocking, advances in this area, but the scorpion monster had a tail. A huge, thick, prehensile tail that stretched as high as the ceiling. No one in the world of body mods has found a way to give humans man-sized scorpion tails, so that was out too.”
“Miss Hunter? Charlotte!”
“No, I know what you’re thinking,” I bleated, whirling on him. “Because I had the same thought too. Maybe the horror of my sister being taken right in front of me made me hallucinate. My brain conjured up monsters because that was easier than facing the truth that Dora was taken by people we know. People we trusted!” My hand flashed out, slapping the lead board. “That’s why I tracked down and interrogated every guy group that Dora and I knew—”
“You did what!”
“—especially any group of guys that had someone strong enough to send me flying out a window with just one hit.” I jabbed the faces pinned to my corkboard. “Guys on the school’s football team—alibis. It was graduation day, so they were all at twenty different graduation parties with their families.” I held up a hand. “Don’t worry. I confirmed that through their texts and social media.”
“That is not what worries me!”
“It was the same for the guys on the soccer team, rugby team, the swim team, the student council, the anime club, and the key club,” I plowed on. “All of these groups had at least four guys who were friendly enough with each other that they might plan to kidnap the pretty, popular girl before she moved away, but again, they all had plenty of pictures of them at celebration dinners and parties during the time she was taken.
“So, then, I looked at guys who knew me and not Dora.” I slid down to the board to a shot of a guy with a scruffy beard and surprised expression. “This is Nelson Chance. He was a regular at the Grill who would not stop hitting on me. It got so bad, that whenever he came in, it didn’t matter if he sat in my section. My boss would have one of the male servers wait on him.
“I knew it was thin, but if there was any chance he was so pissed at my constant rejections, he got a bunch of his buddies and broke into our house that night, I had to know,” I said. “At first, he didn’t want to tell me where he was or what he was doing, so I hired a private investigator. Ms. Abreu tailed him for a week and figured out that on Friday nights”—I winced—“he sees his mistress.
“The same private investigator crossed off my coworkers,” I told him, pointing to their X’d out faces, “and my bosses. All of them had verifiable alibis for the night Dora was taken. But where did that leave me?” I shot at his slackened jaw. “If they were taken by masked or modified strangers, and I didn’t hallucinate their horrible bodies because I couldn’t face the truth of Dora being taken by people I know, then that left me with one clue. The only true clue to their identities.”
That sent me running to the second board where pinned, directly in the middle, was the Abaddon Academy patch. “The logo.” I beamed at him—brimming with the satisfaction of my new discovery.
He didn’t smile back.
“The logo,” I repeated. “Don’t you see? The logo was the key the whole time! I know you said it was a dead end because there is no Abaddon Academy. Anywhere. In the world. No school. No band. No club. No gang. No nothing. But I couldn’t just accept that. Too much was going on for me to notice before, but even though they were all wearing ripped, burned, or dirty clothes, I’m one hundred percent positive they were all wearing this patch.