Awakening

Sophie paced through the symbol room, ignoring Demetri’s gaze. It unnerved her, but since she didn’t think he could help it, she didn’t snap at him.

He just stood there, silent.

Aidan drummed his fingers on the table, and Lilli watched him with a blank stare.

Sophie couldn’t sit. The aftershocks of the vision thrummed through her mind. Adrenaline raced through her blood. She had to do something.

Like help Katie.

This time, instead of going to the police, she’d called Ruth and Demetri. If anyone was going to help save Katie, it was them. They’d suggested the group all meet.

Just thinking of that vision made her heart hurt. Katie didn’t deserve to be captured and tortured.

Demetri said it was demons. Sophie wasn’t so sure he was wrong anymore. She’d never seen an aura that dark. Or that hungry.

The door to the symbol room opened, and Tristan strode in, wearing a navy blue shirt and jeans. He looked so good her lungs constricted.

She tried to ignore it and instead asked, “Did you talk to Morgan? Is she coming?”

He nodded. Jackson followed him in, holding the door open for a few seconds.

Morgan solidified next to the table. She smoothed the skirt of her black sweater dress. Her hair settled around her.

Last came Ruth, who shut the door behind her.

“Why am I here?” Morgan asked. She sat next to Lilli. “I thought we didn’t believe what they were saying.”

“We don’t so far,” Aidan said. “But our resident psychic had a vision of Katie Moore.”

Morgan refused to meet Sophie’s gaze.

“Tell us what you saw. We may be able to help her.” Ruth settled a hip against the table.

Sophie took a deep breath and repeated every detail of the vision. “She was asking us to help her.” She glanced at each of them. “They’re going to kill her.”

Her friends shifted in their chairs.

“You can prevent that from happening,” Demetri said, making eye contact with them one by one. “You can save her. Now. Tonight.”

“That thing almost killed us last time!” Morgan shouted, her chair lurching back as she stood.

Her panic hit Sophie’s skin like bee stings.

“This time,” Demetri said, pinning Morgan with a look that had her sitting back down, “you’ll have backup and be prepared.”

“I’ll do it.” Sophie couldn’t wait on the cops to save Katie.

Lilli smiled weakly at Sophie. “Me, too. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if she died because of me.”

Tristan leaned forward. His eyes swirled from gray to yellow. “I’m in.”

“We have classes tomorrow,” Morgan protested.

“Yeah, I’m in.” Aidan grinned.

“Someone might see us!” Morgan huffed.

Jackson watched Lilli, but nodded his agreement.

“Morgan, no one will know it was you,” Aidan said. “Do you really want to live with that on your conscience?”

“Shut up, Aidan!” Morgan covered her face.

Sophie opened her mouth to argue that Morgan didn’t have a conscience when she felt the girl’s emotions change.

“Fine,” Morgan mumbled. “I’ll help.”

Then again, maybe Morgan did.

Ruth and Demetri shared a look. Ruth said, “Then we need to get started. We need to find an abandoned farmhouse next to a lake. What was the lake shaped like?”

Sophie closed her eyes and willed the vision back. The lake appeared. The light breeze caressed her skin. “It’s a circular lake. Nothing out of the ordinary. This is crazy. We’re never going to find her.”

“The vision was sent to you for a reason. We’ll find her,” Tristan assured her.

“Where are we going to start?” Jackson asked.

“We are going to look it up on the Internet. This is a historical town, and there are bound to be pictures of the farmhouses around here. Maybe something will tip Sophie off,” Ruth told him.

“Would they show abandoned ones?” Morgan’s eyes widened when the words left her mouth. Like she didn’t expect to care.

“Wait!” Aidan sat forward. “On TV!”

“Spit it out!” Morgan slapped him on the arm. “What about it?”

“There was a show this summer about haunted places in this area. They showed that wooden bridge out by the edge of town, remember it?” At their stares, he continued sheepishly. “One was about an abandoned farmhouse, and it was so creepy I had nightmares that night. It could be where they’re holding Katie.”

The hair on the back of Sophie’s neck stood up. The looks on the boys’ faces intensified.

“We’ll look it up. They’ll have something on the network’s website.” Lilli stood. “I know the library isn’t a good memory for us, but we can search there.”

“There’s no need for that, Lilli.” Ruth reached around her neck and unclasped her necklace. She pulled it off and held a small, silver key. “We have all we need in that room right there.” She pointed to the other door. “It’s about time you went in there, anyway.”

Demetri frowned but remained silent. In that moment, Sophie could read a little off him. He didn’t want to deny something that gave Ruth happiness even if it went against his own.

Interesting.

Ruth unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Ready?”

When Sophie got her first look, she smiled wryly. Here was the room that looked as if it belonged to a secret organization. Gun racks lined the walls, stainless-steel tables gleamed in the center, and to her relief, a row of computers sat in a corner.

A man wearing clerical black sat cleaning a large gun, his white collar undone. His movements were precise and maneuvered as he worked.

“Who is that?” Aidan asked.

Ruth glanced over her shoulder at the man. “That’s Father Kent. He’s a member of our team. You’ll meet him another time. For now, we have to focus on finding Katie.”

Sophie remembered the sense of urgency from her dream and agreed.

“This room must span the entire basement,” Jackson said. They followed Ruth to the computers.

“These are for the use of our team. You haven’t joined it yet.” Demetri leaned over and turned the computers on.

Sophie met Tristan’s glance with raised eyebrows.

“Here, take this one.” Ruth steered Sophie toward a computer. “You may see something.”

Sophie sat, wiggled the mouse, and clicked on the Internet. Tristan leaned over her shoulder, his arms resting on the back of her chair. The heat from his body made her nerve endings shoot to life. When his gray-eyed gaze, mixed with bits of yellow, met hers, she absolutely forgot to breathe.

This connection she had with him was so strong it scared her, but she couldn’t deny its pull.

The corners of his lips turned up.

“Okay, I found the website for the farmhouse haunting,” Aidan said. Sophie snapped her head to look at him, grateful for the distraction. “I’ll look here.”

Morgan stood over him, staying well out of his way. Jackson and Lilli had the last computer. They didn’t look at all uncomfortable with the closeness they shared.

Sophie typed into the search engine.

“Here.” Tristan pointed on the screen to a promising website. She clicked on it. Immediately, pictures began to pop up. She scrolled through them, but nothing reminded her of the vision.

“I’m getting nothing.” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. Tristan placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently.

“Look at these.” Aidan called her over. He scrolled through the pictures, but nothing brought the dream to mind.

Until the last one.

Her stomach dropped. Her hands shook as she pointed to the picture. “It’s that one. Oh, my God.” She’d had this gift her entire life, and she’d never get used to the feeling it gave her.

“Listen to this! Recently it’s had rumored supernatural activity!” Aidan’s voice rose. “No one has been able to actually step foot on the land for three months. Before that people allegedly disappeared on the property and never returned.”

“No one investigated it because they thought it was a hoax. We have reason to believe it’s a den for a nest of vampires,” Demetri said. “Print out the address, and we’ll put it in the navigation.”

“Vampires?” Morgan’s voice was faint.

“As in Dracula? Or Edward?” Aidan asked.

Ruth shook her head at Aidan. “You’ll wish these vampires glittered. Go home and put on some old clothes, nothing you’d want to stay clean. Meet us back here in an hour.”

Lilli glanced at Sophie as they left. “At least we won’t get lost this time.”

Sophie sighed and nodded, not wanting a reminder of that incident. They were a step closer to getting Katie back and didn’t need that diversion.

Half an hour later, they were back on the bus going to meet Demetri and Ruth. Sophie sat next to Tristan, staring out the window, because looking at him was becoming too intense. It was cliché, but she felt he could see into her soul, and that terrified her.

When he finally spoke, she jumped in her seat.

“What did you mean when Lilli said you won’t get lost this time? I thought this was all new to you.”

Sophie resisted the urge to wince at his slightly accusing tone. She forced herself to look at him. He was dressed in a slightly hole-y pair of jeans and a simple black tee. How could he manage to look so good in something so ordinary? There was no way she looked half as good in her own jeans and dark green tee. “What we did had nothing to do with demons or vampires. We went in search of a missing girl when we were in junior high.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What happened?”

“Lilli and I were at my house. We’d planned to go out, but the bad weather kept us in. My parents were watching the local news.”

The bus lurched as it turned a corner.

“The headline was about a missing girl?”

Sophie nodded, and she shifted her gaze to the others on the bus. Lilli and Jackson were adjacent to them, also in conversation. Morgan and Aidan were sitting quietly a few rows up. “We were extremely impulsive back then. Lilli and I decided to go look for her ourselves. The police had no way of finding her. Not with the weather as bad as it was.” She swallowed. “We grabbed raincoats and snuck out my bedroom window.”

“In the storm.” Tristan’s eyes darkened. Much like the storm they’d been in.

“Yes. We weren’t really thinking clearly.” Sophie flushed scarlet. In retrospect the idea was completely brainless. “We headed into the woods where the anchorman reported her last seen hiking. It was so cold, and the wind blew the rain straight into our bodies. We couldn’t see a foot in front of our faces.”

“Good thing you’re psychic.” Tristan smiled at her.

Her skin slowly heated up at his look. It felt delicious to have someone appreciating her gift and not ridiculing her because of it. It encouraged her to keep talking. “I was so focused on making sure we didn’t end up in a ravine that I didn’t realize we were in the middle of nowhere until it was too late. The storm had worsened, and we were utterly lost. We found a small cave and hid out until it passed the next morning.”

“Were your parents angry?”

“Oh yes. The police located us trying to find our way out, soaking wet and starving.”

Tristan grinned. “The girl?”

This time, Sophie frowned. “She lied to her parents about going hiking. Turns out she was at a concert three cities over. I was grounded forever and caught the flu. I guess I’d been concentrating on the storm and wanting to use my gift for something good that I ignored what it was trying to tell me. That the girl wasn’t in the woods at all.”

“So you learned your lesson?” Tristan leaned back in his seat.

Sophie tried to disregard the fact that he smelled nice and that he looked sexy as hell. “I guess not, since I’m going into an alleged den of vampires.”

He shifted to look her in the eye. “I won’t let you get lost this time.”

Her heart fluttered in her chest. She was silent for a moment and then asked, “Why is Jackson so quiet?”

Tristan considered the question. His gaze moved to Jackson and then back to Sophie. “Life hasn’t really treated him fair. His father, his real father, is a manipulative bastard.”

Sophie’s stomach sank. Was that the reason Jackson’s shield was so strong? To protect himself from someone who was supposed to protect him? She watched the way he relaxed around Lilli, a far cry from how he was when he talked to them.

Tristan followed her line of sight. “He’s head over heels for her. You don’t think it’s too early?”

She shrugged. “Apparently we all knew each other from a previous life.” She thought of that vision from the past and blushed. Why would she think of that now? Before he could ask why she was blushing, she asked, “So, who’s Cecilia?”

His aura left her abruptly to cocoon around him.

She instantly regretted bringing the name up. It was suddenly cold and lonely without him. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

Ever so slowly, his essence fanned out to join hers again. His jaw ticked when he looked at her. “No, it’s okay. Some wounds just take time to heal.”

His carefree manner had evaporated, and she knew she was completely to blame. Seriously, who brings up such a taboo topic?

She wanted to change the subject, but since she couldn’t find the courage, the last half of the bus ride was silent.