July 31st

It was so fucking stupid. If I hadn’t taken the time out of my day yesterday to drive all the way over to Slice of Heaven and back, I’d already have known that Shannon’s boss had been abducted, and even though the news was curiously avoiding any mention of Shannon herself, I’d have put two and two together. But I’d missed it because of Adam, who now wasn’t even helping to find her. Typical. I’d known she’d been missing for a few days already, of course, but missing could mean a bunch of things. Maybe she’d had enough of her parents and skipped town. Maybe she’d had enough of me and skipped town.

Even without powers, and without the help of the rest of them—who I knew meant well, but who were probably just going to slow me down—I would have been closer to finding her if I’d started earlier in the day yesterday. I had enough resources that I probably could have hacked the local cops’ weak-ass security even without a superpower, or at least I could have found someone in my online group who’d help me do it.

And what would you do when you actually found the guy? I thought. Confrontation wasn’t exactly my strong suit, especially violent confrontation.

I tried to put on a brave face, if only for Harper—I didn’t really care what the others thought of me—but I wasn’t sure I could keep it up.

“Lincoln, eyes on the road!” shouted Christine from the back seat. I jerked the wheel quickly and pulled us back into the correct lane, just as a semi blared his horn and the driver flipped me off. Maybe I should’ve let someone else drive, I thought.

We’d opted to drive to the office park where Shannon worked before heading to Finch Avenue. I had a hunch and I wanted to see if we could turn up any evidence the cops had missed before walking into a situation we were unprepared for.

We pulled up front and parked by the door. Police tape blocked our way, and the doors were chained shut.

“Shit,” I swore, a note of panic rising to the surface faster than I could shove it back down.

“Nothing to worry about,” Christine declared with confidence. She strode up to the doors and grasped the chain in her hands. A bright red glow appeared inside her fists, and from where I was standing five feet away, I felt a blast of hot air. The chain snapped in two, and the disconnected pieces, still glowing brightly, deposited a few drops of molten metal onto the pavement below.

“Holy shit, girl,” said Harp. “Impressive.”

“I’ve been amassing energy since this morning. Sunlight, ambient heat. That drained a bit, but I’m already recharging. I think my body is always recharging.”

I looked at her appraisingly, a new-found respect putting a small smile on my face. I definitely couldn’t have done that on my own.

We walked inside cautiously, all of us somehow unconsciously agreeing to walk on our tiptoes and keep our voices down.

“What are we looking for?” whispered Jaleel, looking to me for guidance.

“I don’t know, just … something.”

“Really helpful, Linc,” said Harper.

We spread out and examined whatever caught our attention. Without a firm idea of what sort of thing might be helpful, there were so many things to look at that it became overwhelming.

“Over here,” said Christine after a few minutes. “I think these must have been their desks.”

We converged on a pair of desks sitting kitty-corner to one another near the far right corner of the office floor. I picked up a tiny silver cello sculpture with a jewel embedded in the center from one of the desks.

“This is hers,” I said, my voice catching. My eyes felt suddenly hot and I turned away from the others for a moment.

“So this is the other guy's? Dale?” asked Jaleel.

“Peter, actually. Dale is an assumed name, but his legal name is Peter.”

“Where’d you hear—Actually, never mind,” said Harper.

His desk was unassuming, nothing on it but the sort of boring, mundane things you’d find on any desk in the office of a midsize company anywhere in America: a baseball signed by several members of the Texas Rangers, a model car, innumerable post-its, pencils and pens, a keyboard and mouse, but no computer. Taken as evidence, I assumed. I opened the drawers and found much of the same.

“Guys, over here,” said Jaleel.

He was standing in the doorway of the corner office, looking at something out of sight.

“Laptop knocked between the desk and wall,” he said as the rest of us shuffled in. “The police must’ve missed it.”

The right side of the desk was shoved up against the far wall, and I could see how something between it and the wall would be easy to miss. Still, it seemed like sloppy police work to not check there. Or maybe I just wanted to be mad.

I picked up the laptop and saw that it had no network cable connected. It was an older model with a physical Wi-Fi toggle switch on the side, and that, too, was switched to “OFF.”

“It’s disconnected from the internet,” I said. “So I wouldn’t have been able to find it, even using my power.”

I turned it on and was met in seconds by the sneering face of Dale Derrickson. I took an involuntary step back. So it wasn't taken as evidence by the police after all. And there was no lock screen, no password required. He wanted someone to find this, and whatever was on it.

The desktop, aside from the oversized sneering face, contained only one thing: a video file titled ‘Confessions.mp4.’ Filled with trepidation, and only barely holding myself together, I opened the file.

The video started with a wide shot of the room we now found ourselves in, but it was empty. After a few seconds, the wheeled desk chair was pushed into view with a woman duct-taped to it. She was groaning in an attempt to scream past a wad of rags shoved in her mouth. My heart lurched and I almost fell backward—would have fallen backward, if not for Harper's hand at my back.

"It's not her," said Jaleel.

I looked closer. He was right. It wasn't Shannon, but it was a woman I recognized: her boss.

"Wave hello to the people watching, Ms. Garcia," said a voice off-screen.

The woman didn't move.

The screen went briefly dark and Ms. Garcia screamed. He must have taken the rags out of her mouth. The darkness blocking the camera didn't move out of the way so much as it seemed to coalesce in the middle of the frame, resolving itself into the shape of a man, solid black and featureless.

"Dale? Dale! You don't have to do this," said Ms. Garcia.

"It's too late. Past the point of changing. Past the point of turning back." The voice was as black and featureless as the man speaking.

The dark man-shape seemed to gather light to itself and become more human looking. A discernible face emerged. It was Dale's. But of course I'd known that all along.

"Whatever this is—whatever you are, you don't have to do this. Some people are getting these … these powers and doing good things with them. I know you, Dale. I know you're not a bad person."

"There's no point pleading. No point poking and prodding at my sense of goodness. I'm past all that. I've peeled all that away now, don't you see? I have power, and power means that I can finally do what I've planned to do for years. I'm finally myself. I'm not Dale, not even Peter."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

He stopped, looking down at the woman in front of him with something like pity in his eyes. Not pity for what's about to happen to her, I thought. Pity that she's a human, and he fancies himself a God.

"I'm Pitch now," he said, slowly turning back into the shadow man, before losing shape altogether and becoming a dark blur over the entire scene.

His voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere. "Now confess."

She spoke with a small, frightened voice. Her face was sheened with sweat, and her hair clung to it as if glued in place. Her eyes darted to and fro, as if she expected Dale—Pitch—to rematerialize at any second. Her words came spilling out of her as if she believed that at the end of them lay some small hope for freedom.

"Confess what? Confess my sins? Okay? Okay. I can do that. Yeah, I'm not perfect. Okay. I had my kid young, okay? I didn't know what I was doing. I haven't always been the best mother. I—yeah, okay, yeah. Sometimes I hit him. Sometimes I call him names. I'm getting better, though, okay? I'm not like I was. And you don't know what it was like for me, growing up. The only one in my family who could speak English, the only one born on American soil. My parents beat me, too, you know? It's all I've known. But I am getting better. I'm trying to do right by my boy, my Marco. I'm trying. You have to believe that I'm trying—"

"Enough," came the voice that was impossible to place. "Enough with this pretense of permutation. People don't change. Mothers abusing and persecuting their children is a perversion, a sin that can not be undone. You're cleansed now, though, purified. And you're forgiven."

The darkness took form again, looming up behind her.

"Oh God," whispered Harper, her eyes locked on the screen in horror.

"That fucking monster," said Christine.

On the screen, the darkness enveloped the woman, leaning over her and pulling her into itself. The poor quality of the laptop’s microphone caused her screams to distort the audio, and thank God for that, because I don't know if I could have heard them clearly and not screamed myself.

The darkness took form once more, becoming fully human. The woman was nowhere to be seen.

"Others must be purified, too. Don't come between me and my prey."

The shadow dissipated once more into nothingness, but the video didn't stop. We fast-forwarded a bit, until eventually Christine said to stop.

"There, do you see that?" she asked.

On the screen, a shadow crossed the floor in front of the door. Not him though, I thought. A real shadow. Someone else at the entrance to the room? The camera was pointed at an angle that let us see a bit of the door frame, and the floor directly in front of the door, but we couldn't see through it.

I went back a few seconds and hit play. A shadow of someone standing outside the door appeared. And a voice spoke. “Gabriela?” it whispered. “Are you in there?”

“Shannon.” Harper and I spoke in unison. There were tears in my eyes I knew I didn’t wipe away quickly enough to avoid her seeing. There were tears in her eyes, too.

We watched as the shadow in the room began to take form once more, and we heard the bloodcurdling scream of Shannon as she turned from the door and ran. We already knew she hadn’t made it far.

“What the hell is this?” asked Jaleel. “Why leave the laptop here? Who is the video for?”

“Himself,” said Christine. “Fucks like this always want to keep something for themselves. He must’ve forgotten about the laptop, or it got knocked between the desk and the wall by accident. I bet, wherever he is, he’s panicking right now, knowing it’s out there. And I’d wager one other thing: there’s more on that laptop than just this video.”

“You might be right,” I said.

I placed my hands on the laptop, and I allowed the power welling up inside me to use the computer as an outlet. It was almost ecstatic, like releasing a pressure I hadn’t known was building up, like trading the energy inside me for the information inside the computer. I saw alleyways of data, open and comprehensible to me in a way that was almost more real than reality. I poked around for a few minutes, and I quickly found what I was looking for.

“Animals,” I said. “Hundreds of them. Mostly small. Probably more that he didn’t record. He eats parts of them—consumes them. And … fuck.”

Harper stepped out of the room, probably to throw up. If there was one thing that cut Harp up, it was animals getting hurt. And if there was one thing that helped her deal with stress, it was throwing up. I knew that, and she knew that I knew that, but neither of us ever brought it up. We both had secrets.

"‘Fuck’? Why fuck?" asked Jaleel. "Do I even want to know?"

“His mother?” guessed Christine.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“It almost always comes back to the mother for guys like this. At least, they claim it does. What’d he do to her? Kill her?”

“Poisoned her, years ago. Left her infirm. Killed her three days ago, the day before Gabriela and Shannon. Recorded the whole thing. Made her confess first, like Gabriela. She … she did awful things to him.”

“And that excuses what he’s done?” asked Christine. She was confrontational and aggressive in conversations about men like Dale. Knowing what Adam had told me about her past, I couldn’t blame her. Maybe she's too close to this to be objective. Maybe that's the real reason she pushed so hard for us to handle this ourselves.

“Did I fucking say that?” I asked, matching her confrontational attitude without missing a beat. "This is my girlfriend that he's taken, you know? She's been missing for four days already, for all we know he's already killed her and dumped her body. Just because the police don't—or didn't—find it until tomorrow doesn't mean anything. And by the way, the fact that you saw that on the news at 10:00 p.m. means that the police had actually found the body hours before. They would've informed her family before they informed the news station. So probably this is all pointless, and if I hadn't wasted my fucking time on this little adventure with you guys—If I’d started yesterday—maybe I'd have found her already."

I couldn't help my voice breaking on that last sentence. I sat down hard on the desk chair and buried my head in my arms. Harper had come back into the room—I wasn't sure when—and in seconds her arms were around me. Jaleel put his hand on my shoulder.

"Man, I know we just met, and I don't know you or what you believe, but believe me when I tell you we'll find her. I didn't see that particular time and place for nothing. There was a reason why that was my vision. Call it fate, or … or predestination, or whatever you want, but I think I saw what I saw precisely so we could stop it."

"I agree with Jaleel," said Harper. "We don't know how these powers work, but they certainly don't conform to any of the physics I learned in science class. There's gotta be something else … something outside of us that's driving the powers, choosing what Jaleel sees."

Christine placed her hand on mine. "I'm sorry, Lincoln. We are going to find her. You have us with you, no matter what."

I looked at the clock: 10:40 a.m.

"Where do we go next?" asked Harper. "You guys are the geniuses. Use those noggins."

"I think the mother's house is a red herring," I said, gathering my wits and standing up. "It's like a trap, but not one he set for us. We're leading ourselves astray. Relying on Jaleel's power too much when all it can tell us is the outcome of a thing, not how or why we got there."

I paused for a second, thinking about things that didn't add up before continuing. "Why haven't Shannon's parents talked to the police any more since the initial report? Why haven't the police contacted them?" I looked around at them, then looked down. "Why haven't they contacted me?"

"What are you thinking?" asked Jaleel.

"He's with them," said Christine. "Oh my God. He's at her house and he's making her parents avoid contact with the police."

I touched the laptop with my power and connected it to the internet, searched the police files more closely, found the start of an answer.

"They contacted the police two days ago, told them that Shannon had returned home safe and sound. It was fishy, which is why the police didn't close the case, but it took the heat off for a bit. That had the unintended side effect of taking their interest away from me, too. But something tipped the police off that all was not right. An anonymous tip told them … told them that Shannon was still missing."

The tip might have been anonymous to the police, but I could follow the digital trail backwards and see who had made it. I tried not to let the shock show on my face. The many sides of my life suddenly seemed to be colliding in ways I had never anticipated, and I felt suddenly untethered.

Overseer, I thought. What has he got to do with this?

"So what? Is he still with them?" asked Harper. I could see immediately that she had picked up on my surprise, but I didn't think the others had. In fact, I got the impression she was moving the conversation along specifically to keep the others from noticing.

"Let me see," I said, composing myself. "Neither of her parents have been to work all week. No surprises there, but … The neighbors across the street have a doorbell camera. No one has come or gone from her house. They're all still in there."

I didn't state the unpleasant interpretation of this data, that just because they were all still inside didn't mean they were all still alive.

"And the camera glitched out on the 27th, about forty-five minutes after the video of Gabriela was recorded. A black smudge moved across the frame and the street was obscured for forty seconds."

"I guess we know where we're headed then," said Harper.

"And we have to be ready for anything when we get there," added Christine. "Jaleel, maybe you should use your power again, see where this winds up?"

He was about to do it, but I held up a hand.

"No," I said. "Without context, your vision could lead us in completely the wrong direction. I think we have to just trust our guts on this one."