Chapter 2
Georgia
Clampton on Sea. I made it. I’m here. Hell, yeah. A win for me.
The most boring seaside town in the UK is surely the last place anyone will look for me?
When I pull the car into the open parking area at the rear of James and Raina’s terrace house on Paradise Road, in a row of over a dozen terrace houses, it occurs to me that even if this car isn’t tracked, I might be.
After switching off the engine, I sit for a moment, with the sun setting behind me. How do I find out for sure?
It’s just after dusk and no movement shows in their house and their car is absent. Of course they might just be out for the night. I’m not sitting here staking it out. Their lock is very average and unless they repaired it, I can get in.
I exit and lock the car, still wondering how to be sure I have no trackers on me. Rafael would be exactly the man to do that. My clothes and shoes are the main suspects. The small brown leather bag I was given in Australia would surely be okay? I unclip the flap, peer inside.
The lining might have something sewn into it. Shit. Anything I’m wearing might and I was given every speck of clothes I have on.
I was naked at the Evil House…most of the time. Terror rises and my hands clench into claws.
Stop.
I shudder in a breath, click back to the present, back to Boringville, where the height of excitement is having your battered fish stolen by a seagull.
Beyond this wall of adjoined houses is the sea.
The waves here are small unless the wind is up and I can just hear them slowly rolling in and the seagulls crying.
A white bird drifts by in the distance, wings outspread against the dull, gray-and-pink sky.
The sea has always been my place. I loved to go to the beach in Australia whenever I needed to realign my head.
Loved. There’s a word I haven’t used for ages.
For a month, it seemed everything bad on this hellspawn planet was done to me. I don’t think I’m the same person I was before that happened.
Degraded, raped, beaten…it’s screwed me up in ways that cannot be stitched or kissed better, as my mother used to say.
“Fuck this,” I whisper.
I stride up the couple of steps to their doorway and knock then listen. Nothing. No sounds come from within.
The paint is still peeling. The door looks the same. The landlord here does the minimum.
No one is watching, so I push the door into the frame and give it that swift thump that frees the lock. The click says it worked. As does the door creaking inward.
“Hello?”
No answer. Now I can get rid of all my clothes.
I pad down the hallway and into the front kitchen, lean on the benchtop.
Through the panes in the dingy front window I survey the beach.
It stretches for miles, from left to right.
Clampton reminds me of some Australian towns, ones where everything new and exciting passed them by back in the nineties.
Days before I was abducted, Raina and James departed on a sailing trip to Europe, aiming to then sail up the coastline and go hop-skipping the ports, starting at Amalfi.
I promised to house sit for them. I wonder what they thought when I vanished.
I don’t know when they will return but it seems I have their little house, for now.
Will they be annoyed if I steal some clothes?
I chew off a fingernail as I stand in the main bedroom with the cream wallpaper dotted with strawberries, eyeing Raina’s chest of drawers full of clothes.
They will. I would be too, but I have no choice.
I get changed into a pair of Raina’s soft, blue jeans, a figure-hugging shirt, and a khaki-green jacket. Luckily my feet are only half a size smaller than hers, else I’d be wearing crocs and slippers all day. I throw the CNC Fraternity gifted stuff into a bag then trot back out to the car.
Driving into the town center and dropping the bag into a garbage bin, with a rustle and a thud, spreads an aura of relief through me.
According to their fridge magnet, it’s garbage collection day tomorrow.
After that, if anyone did plant an airtag or similar in those items, they’ll be digging though trash forever.
“Excellent.”
I drive back, fully aware this EV will need recharging and I have zero money. I can look for money at the house too. They may have something stashed away. Does the parking area at the rear of the house have EV charging? I didn’t see anything but I will look.
In a jar in the kitchen, I find a bunch of notes and coins, and tip it all out on the kitchen benchtop to count it.
Not enough. Two weeks of food? Maybe. If I eat the cereal and canned food in their pantry and buy only essentials.
I have a beach out there. I can’t eat sand but going a bit hungry is worth it to reassemble my mental health. Patch up the damaged bits by staring at serenity and beauty. The sea, magnificent as it always is, will help me wash myself clean.
I plant my hands on the kitchen bench and decide I should go for an evening walk on the promenade. Spend some of this not-at-all-earned cash on fish and chips? Why not. My last big splash of cash before I go hungry.
“I guess I just ended our friendship,” I murmur to my absent friends. “Unless I get some money to pay you back.” Or if they believe me when I explain that I was kidnapped, drugged, taken halfway across the world and…
“Eaten by demons.” I bow my head until my forehead touches the cool laminate. “No. No. I will not be telling them any of that. Fuck.” I straighten. I am never explaining to anyone I know on a normal friendly basis, to those normal people in a normal world, any of what happened to me.
The walk along the concrete promenade with its gorgeous views—windswept and cold though it is—does clear my head. I can heal myself this way. Hope fills my lungs along with the scent of the sea.
I take off Raina’s scuffed and weathered gym shoes and descend some stairs to the sand.
It’s cold on my skin as my feet sink inches deep.
The wind tosses my hair about my face and I tuck it backward, wind it into a ponytail with a hairband.
The lights out on the sea must be boats or maybe warning buoys.
Or the wind farms? Those must have warning lights too.
I smile as I stand there with my hands in my pockets and my bare toes curling in the sand. Lights also run along and decorate the pier to my left, where the structure pokes out into the sea. A few amusement rides and shops are still open.
When my nose and hands grow too cold to bear, I return up the steps and down the road to the townhouse. I don’t have the front key, so I head for the rear entrance again.
It’s only when I’m almost to their door that I realize a man leans on the stone wall that parallels the rear of the building.
He pushes himself upright. He’s bald and tall but with a roundish face and a chunky midsection—the quintessential British man whose body looks made up of ninety percent fish and chips and ten percent beer. “You’re new here, luv.”
“Friend of Raina.” I gesture at the townhouse.
“Ahh. Excellent. Thought you were a naughty little thief. Almost called the cops on you.” His regard is devoid of emotion.
“No need. They’re off sailing along the coast of Spain then north of there.”
“I see. Well, you take care then.”
“Sure. Will do.”
But he keeps watching as I enter. I pretend to use a key, while really I’m thumping my way past the lock. I close the door then lean my back on it, thinking.
What the fuck was that? He was eyeing my ass, I’m sure. Merely a pervert? If he was sent by the fraternity he would’ve done more than talk.
Funny, but I almost hope he tries something.
My teeth clench, my jaw muscle writhes. I have this urge to do something bad to someone bad.
I stare at my hand, raise it to neck level, curl in the fingers.
I would love to get to knife a man who tried to force me.
I couldn’t before. Couldn’t even picture myself doing that. Juniper has inspired me, I think.
That spear as she thudded it into Shawn’s insides, over and over, and made them bloody outsides.
“Awesome,” I whisper. It was so final. Such a perfect ending for him.
A perfect ending for an awful man. Awful is nothing like an adequate word. He was evil.
She turned bits of him into jam—evil raspberry jam.
I snort at my bad joke, then I push myself off the door and go to the fridge. What have they left me to eat? I pull it open and laugh.
On the top shelf sits a jar of red, red raspberry jam.
Raphael
“Fuck.”
A garbage truck drives past me and the sign I’ve stopped the BMW beside.
Clampton Rubbish Dump.
She’s disposed of her shoes and the tracker, and now I need to decide whether to search this whole town, somehow, or…
Or what?
If she even gets a phone it will be a burner. And unless she does some huge faux pas like assaulting a cop, it will not be easy finding her. Not by myself. I haul out my phone and tap my forehead with it, thinking, then start typing in what I need.
Time to admit my mistake. My promise to keep tabs on her seemed simple.
Not.
The frat has a bank of hackers and this information will be easier to get than some of the stuff I’ve heard requested.
I’m not asking for the nuclear codes. Her past might reveal something, some reason for her to run away up here.
I’ll stick to Clampton in the meantime, find a place to crash, maybe even have a walk on their beach, with my shoes off.
Why not.
It’s another two days before I get answers.