“You must really like them,” she said as we entered the house. “You never were much of a team player.”
“They’re trying to make a difference here,” I said. “Sure, I was suspicious at first. I thought they were just like the Demons. But they proved me wrong.”
Emily had never been inside my house, even when we were kids. It was too dangerous for her. My dad would come home drunk more often than not and when he drank, he got violent. I didn’t want to expose her to that. Besides, if her parents caught wind of her spending time at a boy’s house, there would have been hell to pay.
Besides, it wasn’t habitable before. My strongest memories of the place were the stench of stale beer and whiskey and taps as the rats ran through the walls. The entire place was gross and reeked of violence and instability. But now, after some intense renovations, the house was welcoming and cozy with a stone fireplace in the living room and a table covered in a dark blue tablecloth in the kitchen. I never expected I would be a great homemaker, but it turned out I enjoyed it.
Emily set her backpack on the ground next to the kitchen table before turning to face me. “So, what did you find about Julie?”
I went into the kitchen and pulled a manila envelope out of one of the drawers. “Your old home has been abandoned for years but recently there was a break-in. I was patrolling with some of the other Hell’s Renegades when we saw it. We went to investigate, but whoever was there fled before we caught them.” I handed her the manila envelope “We checked the entire house anyway, looking for other signs of disturbance. And we found this under the floorboards in one of the bedrooms.”
Emily looked at the envelope with wide eyes. Scrawled on the front in black marker was Emily’s name. “This is Julie’s handwriting,” she said. She looked up at me. “Have you opened this?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t,” I said. “I have no idea what it says. But if she was leaving an envelope for you, maybe she knew she was leaving.” I hoped that was the case. When Julie disappeared, we all assumed she had been kidnapped by the Demons. After all, they constantly kidnapped young women. Julie would have been sixteen, which was too young for the brothels. The Demon’s one redeeming factor was waiting until their victims were eighteen before exploiting them. But they could have thought she was older than she was and taken her anyway.
But maybe she ran away as Emily did.
Emily bit her lip and opened the envelope.