.
Meg followed his commands, studiously obedient but infuriated at herself for cooperating. This demonic thing in her head, this slave stone that he put in her, wouldn’t allow her to stop herself.
She wasn’t even tied up. She fully understood she was now the latest victim of the serial kidnapper who was constantly in the news, and that all the previous girls had disappeared without any trace, yet she couldn’t bring herself to attempt escape. All the time he drove, she lay there in the rear seat of the car, just as he had ordered, terrified but unable to run. He had said some confusing things, about how he would normally tie the girl up, but she was so ‘strong in the blood’ he had no worry about whether the stone would ‘take’.
He never explained what he meant by the blood, or what being strong in it meant. He gave no indication at all of why he had taken her, or what he had in store. It had been very obvious from the very first that things were going wrong for him though. He hadn’t expected the weird sword-wielding woman in robes who tried to stop him, or the police who he’d constantly dodged as he drove.
She had listened on the way in the car to police transmissions, confused as to why he could hear them. Her father had told her that the police scanners on TV shows wouldn’t work in St. Louis. Civilians had not been able to listen in on the police for decades, thanks to some kind of encryption. But he was listening anyway as the machinery of law enforcement shifted from early morning watch to manhunt.
After the officers on scene scanned her recent photos into their car’s computer and gave the verbal description, the radios and data feeds of the department pulsed with the steady litany of officers, dispatchers and computers on high alert. The Amber went out with her description, and Central pulled warrants to poll Neighborhood Watch cameras. The Facial Recognition programs already had grainy security cam images from the warehouse incident, and now the photos of the newest kidnapping victim. Like dogs who had been straining their leashes, the police computers leaped into the search.
But he had pulled into a barren garage in a barren house and shut the door, and now she sat quietly in the corner he had ordered her into, in a nearly empty living room, while he puttered with strange looking equipment. Some of it looked antique, with cabinets made of wood, while other bits were just old-fashioned, like the video camera he was messing with.
He set up a projector of some kind, and spoke in a foreign language to a man displayed on the wall, then settled down to wait for whatever he had requested while the man on the other side went off-screen.
The woman who finally entered the room in the picture appeared to have simply wrapped a bed sheet around herself, held in place with one hand. She clearly had received no chance to straighten out her hair after waking, nor had she been able to put on shoes. Despite her disheveled state, though, the men who waited in the room stood and saluted her with fists across their heart and small bows, treating her with extraordinary reverence.
The kidnapper’s attitude was not respectful, though. His words outright leered at her. “Hello, Joanna. I like the look you have going there.”
Despite his tone, she was the picture of gentility, tipping her head in a slight bow as she greeted him.
“Hello, Benjamin,” she said warmly, her voice eerily similar to Meg’s mother, “I didn’t know you could contact us from there.”
‘Benjamin’… it was the first time Meg had a name for him… nodded. “I’m in a safe house in St. Louis. This is the place we send your TV signals from, and this call is going across the same link. I never expected to need it.”
His tone had been light banter until now, but he became very serious. “I have a small problem here, and I’m going to require your help.”
