Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JAX
One minute we had been enjoying a horse ride and the next we were freaking out about what was going to happen with Riley. The instructors had us dismount immediately and got on the horses to go after her, but the horses wouldn't budge.
Instead, we piled into two farm utility vehicles and headed in the direction the horse went. I didn't want to acknowledge the fact that something was wrong with the horses, but the two Blake and I had ridden had a glossy quality to their eyes.
But didn't they always?
"It’s unlike Buttercup to do something like this. She is our best horse," Clint, the trainer, said.
We got to a levee that had horse tracks leading up the side. Where the hell had the damn horse taken her?
I jumped off the seat and ran up the side since it didn't appear the instructor was going to drive up it. It was fairly steep.
"What do you see?" Blake yelled, still in the second vehicle with Morgan and the other instructor.
"Nothing!" On the other side there were more trees, but there was a chain-link fence.
The faint smell of diesel hit my nose, and my stomach dropped. "How often do vehicles drive up here?" It was packed dirt, but there were track marks from tires.
"Once a week to check out the perimeter. Why?" Clint climbed up to the top of the levee and took his baseball hat off, scratching his head. "It's like they vanished.
"It smells like diesel. When was the last perimeter check?"
"We check on Mondays, so there shouldn't be a smell." Clint walked a few feet. "Look." He was pointing to a line in the dirt several feet long and horse hooves that stopped at the line. "That's really strange."
"Yeah, it's strange all right." I didn't want to tell him that in all likelihood, the horses had probably been compromised by a psychotic demigod. "Let's get back to the stables. Maybe they're back.”
We slid down the side of the levee and climbed back into the vehicle. Morgan was on the phone and shook his head when I raised my eyebrows in question.
Dealing with this with humans around was a major roadblock. They were going to ask questions and probably call the police once they realized the horse and Riley were both long gone.
Once we were back at the stables, Morgan motioned for us to follow him away from the group of employees.
"That was your dad. He said he and Natalia were at the police station giving statements to them and the FBI about where she's been, and she was supposed to wait for him to be done. He can't find her."
"Fuck." I ran a hand over my head. "There were horse hooves that suddenly stopped where an indent in the dirt was, like there was a ramp to a trailer or something."
Blake shut his eyes and took a shaky breath. "This is all my fault. I should have used my fucking brain."
"What do you mean, it's all your fault? We knew the time was going to come that he came for her again." I put a hand on his shoulder because he looked like he was about to cry, which was unlike him.
"Poseidon is connected to horses. Of course his son would be too." His jaw ticked and he hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. "I didn't even think!"
"Dude, how would you have known?" Morgan looked over his shoulder at the group of trainers and employees who were discussing next steps. "We need to get to the city because that's probably where they are headed."
"I can find out for sure where she's headed." I grimaced as I grabbed my phone out of a bin we had put our stuff in. "She's going to kill me, but the other night when I had her blindfolded, I put a tracker on her necklace."
Desperate times called for desperate measures. She might have let me put the tracker on if I'd asked her, but I couldn't risk her saying no to something so important.
I pulled up the app and waited for it to load. The internet signal wasn't the best, so we had to wait a few seconds for the dot to appear. "They are headed away from the coast."
"Hey guys, we're going to split up to look for Buttercup and Riley. Did you want to stay here or...?" Clint was standing off to the side, worry pinching his brows.
"We'll stay here." I didn't even hesitate.
As soon as they all left, we loaded into the SUV and followed the blue blinking dot.
"They stopped." Morgan clicked around on my phone. "Fuck, they're at an airstrip. Hurry, Jax."
We were flying down the highway faster than I should have been going. I was pushing one hundred already, which was faster than I felt comfortable with given there were other cars on the road, and it was the middle of the day.
Blake was really quiet in the back, and when I snuck glances at him in the rearview mirror, he looked pained. He couldn't blame himself for this. There was no way we could have known all of Dylan's capabilities. Plus, it's not like we really ever thought of Poseidon's reach outside of the ocean.
"Next exit, turn right and it'll be on the left." Morgan craned his neck to look out the front window. "Shit."
"What?" I didn't know what he was looking at because I was trying not to crash as I took the exit.
"A small plane just lifted off." He looked back at the tracker again. "Unless they are driving through fields, that was definitely her in that plane."
I hit the steering wheel with my fists. "Dammit!" I pulled into the parking lot for the airstrip and drove toward a truck and a horse trailer.
Blake jumped out of the back before I even came to a complete stop and ran to the back of the trailer. I parked and ran after him, leaving Morgan, who cursed at us.
Buttercup was lying on the ground, and Blake carefully walked into the trailer. "Hey, girl." He squatted next to her head and stroked her between the eyes. "She just seems worn out."
"I'll have my dad send some guys to take her back in a bit once enough time has passed and they stop looking." I sent my dad a quick text with the addresses needed. "Let's go."
Once we opened a few of the windows in the trailer, we closed it and found Morgan standing at the chain-link fence.
"This place is abandoned." He held onto the chain-link fence and shook it in frustration. "Why can't we just have normal lives?"
"We'll find her." I wasn't so sure of that, especially now that she was in the air.
We were going to need an admiral's permission to take one of our planes since they had special tanks on board in case we shifted. We weren't meant to fly through the air.
We loaded into the SUV and headed back toward our house. We'd have to get our stuff later; we needed to avoid humans from questioning us.
"Where do you think they're going?" Morgan was busy studying my phone. "They’re headed over the Pacific."
"Maybe they're going to skydive over where the city is." It was the only explanation I could think of.
"Or they aren't headed to that city." Blake was staring out the window. "We're missing something. We need to talk to your dad."
"There's a text from him saying he's waiting for us at the house. He's put the city on high alert and called back tritons who are currently working on land."
We needed to figure out what Dylan's plan was before it was too late.