Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
While Kira drove us to Mesta Park, I texted Monique to let her know we were on our way. The boys sat in the back seat—Logan almost bouncing with excitement, while Ethan gazed out the window, his head leaning against the glass as if he might fall asleep at any moment.
Monique met us on the front porch, looking a little unsure as the four of us piled out of Kira’s car. Possibly even a little hostile as she looked at Logan and Ethan.
“Did they know my son?” she demanded, scanning them from head to toe as if assessing the situation for potential threats.
“No,” I assured her. “But they may have some insights that I wouldn’t. I was hoping we could take a look at Jeremiah’s room again, to see if there’s anything we might have missed.”
She nodded once, sharply, her nostrils flaring. “Whatever it takes.”
We made our way upstairs in silence, and even Logan seemed subdued as we filed into the mostly untouched bedroom. The bedding was still rumpled, clothes were still on the floor, and the trash can was still full, but the dirty dishes had disappeared.
“They fingerprinted the dishes,” Monique said, her voice trembling a little. “And then I washed them.”
“I’m sure that was fine.” The dishes couldn’t help me, but the computer on the other hand… “Would it be all right if we take a look at the laptop?”
She stiffened, but only for a moment. “I want to say no, but… We can’t afford privacy anymore. Do whatever you need.”
I turned to Logan. “I need you to see if you can find anything that would tell us what online games Jeremiah might have been playing.”
He looked a little scared, but sat in the chair and opened the laptop, tapping on the keyboard to reveal a password prompt.
“Uh…”
“Here.” Monique leaned over his shoulder and typed in a short sequence of numbers. “The password is my birthday. We agreed that I would always know it so I could be his online accountability.”
Clearly, they’d loved and trusted one another, and I was beginning to feel more and more certain that she was right—her son would never have just left without saying anything.
Logan pulled up a browser window and fumbled as he tried to figure out the trackpad mouse. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I haven’t used one of these since I was little.”
I drew in a sharp breath, wondering whether he would say anything else, but he simply continued to work, as if oblivious to my reaction.
“It’s okay,” I murmured. “Take your time.”
I’d always wondered about his past. The fae had only taken kids who were unlikely to be missed for long, or had no families to pursue justice for them, so I knew his childhood must have been far from perfect.
But he almost never talked about it. Neither did Ari, but I suspected that was because she didn’t really remember much.
“My dad had a laptop,” Logan said in an odd, somewhat wistful tone, while never taking his eyes off the screen. “Sometimes he let me play on it while he was in meetings. Before the police came and took him.”
Definitely not a happy story then.
“Okay, here’s his last browser window.” There were three open tabs—one for social media, one for a movie streaming service, and another…
“Hey, this is the same one I’m on!”
The screen suddenly filled with an alarming number of what looked like pop-up ads and streaming videos, almost instantly scrambling my brain and crossing my eyeballs.
“Uh, what are we looking at?”
“These are all games you can play,” Logan explained. “This one is my favorite. It’s called Ultimate Countdown. Basically, you have a team of people, and your job is to collect all the pieces of a puzzle and put it together before time runs out.”
“So, you’re playing with complete strangers?”
He rolled his eyes at the hint of disapproval in my tone. “You can play with friends if you want to. Some games let you make a private room. But with some, you need a whole team to make the game work.”
I scanned the different games as he scrolled down. There were so many. “Do you think Tabitha was playing some of these, too?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah, she was.”
“Do you know which ones?”
He listed four or five, all of which sounded like incomprehensible gibberish to me.
“Okay, any way you can figure out whether she had any in common with Jeremiah?”
“Who is Tabitha?” Monique glanced from me to Logan, brows lowered with what almost looked like suspicion.
“She’s my neighbor,” I confessed. “She’s about Jeremiah’s age, and according to her mom, she went missing last night. We’re trying to figure out if there’s any connection.”
“I don’t remember him mentioning anyone named Tabitha.” Her lips pursed and her forehead creased in thought. “But he had a lot of friends at school.”
“He might have known her by a different name,” Logan suggested. “An online name.”
As he tapped away at the website, I glanced sideways at Ethan. He was standing off to the side, scanning the room with an absent gaze.
“See anything?” I asked quietly, and sensed Monique holding her breath beside me. It wasn’t necessarily a safe question—he might respond with anger or dismissal—but it seemed worth the risk.
Ethan was silent for a moment, his head tilted like a bird’s as he continued to survey the room’s contents. Given his general air of disinterested nonchalance, I wasn’t sure he would answer, but—after a long pause—he did.
“I see a boy who didn’t have to be a grown-up. A boy who felt… safe.”
His words punched me in the gut. “How can you tell?”
He was running his fingers along the headboard of the bed—back and forth, as if anchoring himself.
Anchoring his thoughts. “Wasn’t afraid to be messy,” he said slowly.
“Wasn’t afraid to waste food. To reveal what he loved.
” He reached tentatively towards the rumpled bedclothes and pulled out a ragged stuffed animal—worn and stained and missing an eye.
“He didn’t hide it.” Ethan held it up and regarded the lumpy, misshapen toy thoughtfully from behind the curtain of his dark hair. “He wasn’t afraid someone would try to take it away from him or tell him he was too old to need comfort.”
Monique whirled around and set her face towards the door, one hand clapped over her mouth, her shoulders shaking silently.
“We’re going to find him,” I said, as much for myself as for Monique, but for Ethan and Logan most of all. They’d been in Jeremiah’s shoes once, but it seemed likely no one had cared enough to find out what had happened to them.
“I think they played a lot of the same games,” Logan announced, drawing my attention back to the computer. “Mostly the super popular ones. But there’s another one I’ve never played. I remember Tabitha talking about it. Called Through the Portal to Everwhere. It’s pretty new.”
The Portal…
I looked over his shoulder. It seemed like a fantasy game, but the graphics were rough and pixelated, the motions jerky, and the sounds a bit jarring. There was a chat box on the right side of the screen, with words scrolling across it as the players interacted.
“Any way of knowing who Jeremiah might have been chatting with? Or whether he was in contact with Tabitha?”
Logan shook his head. “I can access his friends list, but I won’t know if Tabitha is one of them. Not without knowing her username.”
Drat. I was going to have to talk to my neighbor again after all. And hope she didn’t try to have me arrested for asking suspicious questions. The chances of her telling me anything were probably nonexistent, but I had to try.
Realistically, though, what were the odds that these two missing kids were actually connected? Kids went missing all the time. Didn’t they?
I had no idea how many were ever found, or how often anyone figured out what really happened to them. How many were runaways versus how many were kidnapped, trafficked, or involved in custody disputes.
I couldn’t help them all, but these two… No matter how unpleasant Tabitha’s mother might be, the kid didn’t deserve to be forgotten. No one did.
“Okay. This is good. It might be a lead. We need to do a little more looking into this game, and find out whether Tabitha and Jeremiah knew each other, even just by their usernames. Then we can…”
Suddenly my vision went black, and I staggered, barely catching myself against the desk.
I gripped the edge, fighting for balance as the sharp wooden corners dug into my palms. For a moment I would have sworn I was hearing voices, struggling against hands holding me down, holding me together, pulling me apart…
Maybe I should have actually eaten something today.
A bright light suddenly seared across my inner vision, followed by a ringing in my ears and a strange surge of energy. Power crackled behind my eyelids, accompanied by a storm of thoughts and feelings that made no sense.
What was happening to me?
“What’s wrong?” Logan’s voice was muffled, but I could hear his worry.
“I’m okay,” I tried to say, but it came out garbled. It felt like I was being turned inside out. Battered by winds that existed nowhere but in my own mind.
But I was fine. Whole. No one was attacking me.
Unless this was about…
Callum.
I pulled out my phone to look for a message, but the screen was dark. Of course it was. I hadn’t had a chance to plug it in last night, so the battery was dead.
What if something had happened to Callum, and they had no way to tell me? What if he was dying, and I wasn’t there?
“Kira.”
She’d been lingering silently in the doorway, but she appeared at my side in an instant, grasping my arm and peering up into my face with concern. Whatever she saw must have made my fears obvious, because her grip tightened and her expression turned fierce.
“He’s okay, Raine. I swear he is. They would have called me. Found you some way or another.”
But still…
“You need to see that he’s okay,” she realized aloud.
I could only nod as my knees tried to buckle.
“I get it. We can go.”