Annie is missing. Some guy has been stalking her, I think."Oh, thank God. I mean, you know, not 'thank-God', thank-God, but I'm glad you don't have a broken heart. Because then I would have to whip some ass," she said, when we both knew she meant she couldn't handle me - the only strong, steady male she had ever known - breaking down. "Why didn't you come to me with this? You know where I live, right? What I have access to? Like not me per se. I don't do the computer geek shit. But I know people."
I knew who she knew alright.
A guy who went by the name L.
Of all things.
He wasn't a computer geek necessarily; he seemed to get off on being a bit of a know-it-all when it came to all sorts of criminals and what they were up to. Figuring out the underground was his drug. And from the stories Astrid told about his all-nighters obsessed with it, he was hopelessly hooked.
That said, he worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Janie and Alex among all the other hacker types up at Hailstorm. He knew how to figure shit out if he needed to.
"Just give me some information. I will have L get on it right now," she demanded, finding a pad of paper and a pen, pushing them over toward me.
I didn't want to have to bring Hailstorm in on this, but I had to admit my options were limited, my skills didn't involve hacking into city cameras.
My skills were more of the hitting and shooting and knifing variety.
A time would come for that, I was sure. But for now, I needed to take all the help I could get.
"You dumbass," she said a couple minutes later, taking the note with her as she made her way to the door, giving my shoulder a shove. "When something happens, you need to come to us. We've always been there for one another. That doesn't change just because we don't live together anymore. Now sit tight. We will find your girl. Then you can go and play the White Knight. I hear girls like all that cheesy crap."
I closed the door with my first smile in a long while.
Leave it to Astrid to say shit like that. And not in that "I'm not like other girls way" either. She once verbally eviscerated someone who used that phrase around her, going on and on about how that saying only served to pit women against one another and perpetuated the idea that being female was about competition with other women for the attentions and affections of men and, yeah, she hated that shit. It was more that she had absolutely no attachment to the ideas of happily ever after and fairy tales. She wasn't raised that way. Her childhood didn't have any good guys coming in to save her. By the time she was an adult, she was too removed from it all to grasp the magic she should have known as a girl.
I took a deep breath, trying to will myself to be patient.
If Bex and Nora saved her from the guy, and Shane was sure he drove off in the other direction, then she likely was able to get away. Safe.
On the run, but safe.
If it took him several weeks or months to find her normally, there was no reason to assume that the pattern would change this time. She was likely safe for the time being. And as soon as I had her whereabouts, I would make sure she would be safe forever.
Preferably at my side.SEVENAnnie"Cam?" my voice gasped out of me, all my air seeming to squeeze out of my lungs.
A part of me refused to accept he was there, my eyes slow-blinking a few times.
The other part, though, soared at the realization that he had found me, that he cared enough to come find me, to see why I disappeared.
His eyes moving over me should have been giving me the tingles. It was, after all, what I wanted more than anything. But something about the look within them had me stiffening, a strange rolling sensation moving in my stomach.
"Oh, I know. I'm a wreck," I told him, recognition hitting. "I have water running for a shower. It takes forever to get warm. Old pipes. Or is it nothing to do with the pipes? It's probably nothing to do with the pipes. But that big thing in the basement instead. You know, the thing that warms the water... what the hell is that called? Oh, duh, the water heater. The water heater needs to be replaced. But, I, ah, I was going to take a shower."
I expected maybe some reassurance, for him to pull up the notepad he had nestled in his hand, tell me I looked fine. Maybe even good. Even if I knew that would be a barefaced lie.