Chapter 514
I couldn’t really blame Christian for not wanting to stumble around in the dark, especially since he probably didn’t know for sure that what he was hearing were actually people and not something else. I thought about the creatures. Now might be a good time to bring them up. Or maybe not, since he was so agitated. “Do you think they’re people? Not something else? Are we talking a few or a couple dozen?”
“I don’t know!” Yep, he was angry.
I should’ve let it go but I needed an estimate. “Could you make a reasonable guess?”
“If I had to, I’d say a hundred. Maybe more.”
I wasn't expecting that. My mouth fell open. That was a lot of people. This situation just kept getting weirder. “Okay....”
“All right. Talk to you later.”
“Yeah.” It seemed odd that he didn’t want to talk to me to the point that he’d push the only person who could reach him away, but I was ready to get out. Hostile Christian is even worse than normal Christian.
How did these people factor into everything else? We had people missing, black creatures, people trapped below ground. They all had to be related—but how? I wished Christian had been in the mood to figure it out, but he obviously wasn’t.
I headed to the shower. I’d probably wasted a lot of hot water while I chatted with Mr. Congeniality, but at least it wasn’t cold. Lucy and Tara had been hounding me all afternoon, wanting to come over and chat. I didn’t want to talk to them. What was there to say?
After I was out of the shower and dressed, I headed back to the living room to look over my notes. I needed to figure this out. People disappearing, monsters suddenly appearing, people in the ground....
“Hey, lil girl. Whatcha up to?”
I took a deep breath. Normally, talking to Elliott is great, and I’m excited when he has time for me because between Aurora and Amanda, he’d been a little busy, and now that he wasn’t seeing Aurora anymore, he was obviously spending every spare second he had on the phone with Brandon’s mom. Which is cool. He loves her, and I think she realizes, finally, that she loves him, too. But I didn’t want to talk to him now. Not about Brandon anyway.
“Working.” I hoped I sounded chipper and full of life instead of sad and boring. “What are you up to?”
“Not much. Just hadn’t seen you in a day or two. Wanted to make sure you were okay.”
It was a loaded question. I could either respond with a gush of tears and beg him to help me get Brandon back or play the strong, independent woman, the one who doesn’t need anyone. “I’m okay.” It was a middle of the road answer. I’d see how it went.
“You sure? You need me to come by?”
“No, no, I’m fine.” I didn’t want him to come by, but I did need him to come by. I needed a hug. I needed him to tell me I was going to be okay. But anything I said to Elliott would end up in Brandon’s ear. I couldn’t blame him for that. So I couldn’t talk to him about this.
I could tell by his tone when he answered he knew it wasn’t true, but I was sure the only reason he hadn’t reached out sooner was because he felt just as awkward about this as I did. “Well, if you need to talk, let me know. I love you, lil girl. You know that, right? Nothin’s ever gonna change that.”
Those dang tears were back in my eyes. I swiped them away, glad he couldn’t see. “Yeah, I know. I love you, too.”
“’Kay. Sorry... I created a knucklehead.”
Something about his tone made me laugh. It was nice to know he thought Brandon had made a mistake, at least that’s what I chose to take out of that comment. “It’s not your fault,” I reminded him. The whole thing was my fault.
“Nah, but that don’t mean I can’t try to fix it. Anyway, lemme know if you need anything. ‘Kay?”
“Okay. Thanks.” He was gone, and I was glad—because I didn’t know what he meant by trying to fix it. I couldn’t think about that. Having hope that he might try to talk to Brandon, that he might convince his son to come and talk to me, was too much.
Not that I wasn’t aware that all I had to do was walk down the hall and knock on the door and Brandon would talk to me about what had happened. If I could find the right words, I could fix this. I just didn’t know what they were yet, and the distractions that had driven us apart were still there.
So I needed to work on that first. If I could figure out what was going on with these missing people, maybe I could link all of this together, and then, we could go kill Daunator, save Christian, and defeat the rest of the Vampires and black monsters. Sure—that should be easy.... I had a lot of work to do.
Getting to work took my mind off the situation with Brandon and with Christian being a jerk—like normal. I ran all of the reports I thought he would run if he were not in a hole in the ground. When I counted up how many more missing people there were now, the numbers were staggering. We were up around 580! How was that possible with Eliza and her team taking out so many of the Vampires who had been turning people? None of this was making any sense. I really wished my sister was here to talk through it with me....
A knock on the door got my attention. For a moment, I thought maybe it was Brandon and my heart crept into my throat. But I knew after a second that it wasn’t. He didn’t knock like that. This particular knock sounded a lot like someone I actually did want to speak to.
