There'll be Hell to Pay (Hellcat Series Book 6) (6 page)

The name that
flashed under caller ID shouldn’t have made her nervous, but a lead
weight suddenly landed in the pit of her stomach all the same.

“
Hi, Evan,” she said as she answered the call from the man who
was technically her stepfather. “Everything okay?” She didn’t
bother with pleasantries. It wasn’t like he ever called her just to
chat; theirs wasn’t that kind of relationship. His reply doubled
the weight of the lead in her stomach.

CHAPTER
3

“
No, Mom and I finished lunch over two hours ago,” Gabi told
her stepfather around the sudden tightening of her throat. She had
to remind herself not to crack the phone she was holding to her
ear. “As far as I know, she was heading straight home. You’ve tried
her phone?” Stupid question, but she had to ask it. The Werewolves
moved closer around her, her alarm registering loudly to their
fine-tuned senses.

“
Give me the number,” Trish mouthed before disappearing to the
sitting room. Gabi held her free hand open as she listened to Evan,
trying to ignore the rising anxiety in his voice. Kyle deposited a
pad of paper and a pen into her grasp. She jammed the phone under
one ear and quickly scribbled a mobile number down as Trish
reappeared with a small laptop. It was open and booting up before
Trish set it down on the kitchen counter. Kyle slapped the notepad
down next to it.

“
Right,” Gabi told Evan, sounding far more calm than she felt.
“Stay at the house, near the phone. Use your mobile to contact any
of her other friends you haven’t already tried. Do not leave the
house. I need you there so that you can let me know the moment she
walks in the door. Okay?” She paused, waiting for his reply. He was
slow to give it, reluctant to leave the search in her hands. “I
have the resources to look for her, you know I do. Promise me
you’ll stay there and not try anything stupid. Please.” Her words
finally reached him, and his gusty sigh of capitulation hurt her
eardrum.

“
Just find her, Gabi, swear you’ll find her.” His words were
harsh, harder than she’d ever heard him.

Gabi ended the
call and took a moment to send a quick fervent prayer to whichever
God was listening that her mom was simply broken down somewhere in
a bad signal area or had gone shopping and her phone battery had
died. But the wretched little niggle in the back of her mind told
her that wasn’t the case.

“
Her phone is definitely turned off, but I have the location of
the last tower it pinged,” Trish said, her voice tense as her
fingers flew over the tiny keyboard. “Do you know her license plate
offhand?”

Gabi paced over
to stand behind Trish where she could view the compact screen. She
rattled off her mother’s car license plate number, barely resisting
the urge to throw her phone at the nearest wall. Ross, Rory and
Derek crowded up behind her, but a quick look from Kyle had them
retreating before she could snarl at them. As Trish typed, pulling
up pages of data, Kyle carefully pried the phone out of Gabi’s
white-knuckled grasp and set it on the counter.

“
Breathe, Gabs,” Kyle reminded her.

She gave him a
curt nod, grateful he hadn’t tried to tell her everything would be
fine. In their world there were no such guarantees.

“
Her phone’s last ping was somewhere between First Avenue and
Arnold Street at thirty-two minutes past one,” Trish said. “I’m
going to try to bring up surveillance footage from the
area.”

“
That’s only a couple of blocks from where we had lunch,” Gabi
said, “and only a few minutes after we left.”

“
Which side would she have been traveling from?” Trish
asked.

“
We were at Minaro’s, down on Third Ave,” Gabi told
her.

Trish quickly
scrolled down a list of files and double-clicked on one. A video
began to load.

“
I’ll start with the camera coming from that side. Hopefully we
can track her progress from there.” The video began to play and the
other Werewolves inched closer again. Kyle bristled, his Wolf
taking exception to their proximity. “Hang on a second. Kyle, turn
on the TV.” Trish paused the video and shoved a small gadget the
size of a USB stick into the laptop. As the TV flared to life, the
paused video appeared there too. “The more eyes the better,” Trish
explained as she hit play. “What car are we looking for,
Gabs?”

“
That one.” Gabi pointed to her mother’s unassuming silver
sedan as it turned right onto Arnold Street. It was in frame for a
couple more seconds and then it disappeared. Trish’s fingers tapped
quickly and another video came up.

“
She’ll probably take a left onto Fletcher,” Gabi said, knowing
her mother was inclined to steer clear of busy intersections even
if it meant a longer trip home. A couple of minutes into the new
video, a silver car turned. It was too far away to be sure it was
her mother’s, but it was turning onto Fletcher. Trish paused that
video and brought up yet another.

They tracked
her mother’s car for another three minutes. She was being
completely predictable, taking exactly the route Gabi guessed she’d
take; there was no indication of anything amiss.

And then her
mother’s car vanished.

They had a view
of the back of it turning left onto Kernsey Road, but it didn’t
appear on a single camera after that.

“
There’s a freaking blind spot,” Trish fumed. “Right there, in
that one-block section of Kernsey, there is no camera.” She
continued to mutter under her breath as she jabbed the keyboard
with far more force than necessary.

“
Can you go back to the video before she turned onto Kernsey?”
Derek asked. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Ross and
Rory, three feet from Kyle’s TV.

“
Did you see something?” Gabi asked, striding over to
them.

The video
started playing again. The silver car could be seen several blocks
in the distance. It stopped at a red light behind two equally
unexciting sedans and a taxi and continued its journey when the
light turned green. It drove past and under the camera and
disappeared.

“
Did you see it?” Derek asked, more certainty in his voice this
time.

“
What?” Gabi demanded. She hadn’t seen anything.

“
Wind it back twenty seconds,” Derek told Trish.

As the video
replayed for a third time, Derek reached out a hand and pointed to
a vehicle parked on the far left of the screen. It was an emergency
vehicle of some kind, a white van with bright green and yellow
stickers emblazoned across the side and front. It looked like some
kind of breakdown service, but the video footage was too grainy to
make out any details. Two figures sat in the front seats with caps
on, pulled low over their faces, and the driver’s window was rolled
halfway down. Gabi squinted, still not sure what Derek had seen.
But as her mother’s car approached, she saw the driver come to
attention, and something dark and tube-shaped poked out of the open
window. A second later her mother’s car passed the van and the
black object was withdrawn back inside the car. The driver
immediately rolled the window up.

“
Keep it going,” Gabi told Trish after the silver sedan
vanished from view again. All eyes trained on the logoed van as it
pulled out into traffic, heading in the same direction as her
mother’s Toyota. “Next one,” Gabi said, her voice hoarse with
stress. The next video played, the last one her mother’s car made
an appearance in, and sure enough, twenty seconds after her mother
turned the corner, the van followed.

The atmosphere
in the cottage became heavy as they once again searched the rest of
the videos for signs of either vehicle.

“
There,” Kyle finally said as they replayed one of the videos
for a third time. A plain white van with no signage came into view.
Only the driver was visible in the front, and he was wearing a dark
hoody and sunglasses. “It’s the same make of van. They’ve pulled
off the signage and the driver has changed appearance, but I’m sure
that’s it.” In the pit of her stomach Gabi knew he was right, just
as she now knew for certain that her mother hadn’t simply gone
shopping or broken down somewhere.

She’d been
abducted.

The knowledge
stole Gabi’s breath and blanked her mind.

“
Do you think Julius is awake yet?” Derek’s hushed voice
speaking Julius’s name broke the fugue that had fallen over
Gabi.

“
It’s still an hour to sunset, but he might be,” Kyle’s voice
responded. He was close to her, just to her left. She was sitting
in a chair, her head bent down with a cold-pack pressed to the back
of her neck. Slinky wound worried around her right leg, his own
anxiety like a dark cloud hovering over him. She shook herself,
mentally and physically, then reached down to stroke the agitated
ferret and send an artificial ribbon of reassurance to calm him.
Once he settled, she sat up, grabbing the cold-pack off her
neck.

“
I’ll go back to the Estate and rouse Julius,” she said. She
had managed to shove the fear, anxiety and guilt haphazardly in a
box in the back of her consciousness. Instead she found the
simmering pool of anger and outrage bubbling inside her. She stoked
the fire beneath the pool and bathed her mind in their armour.
“Wolf, can you get to where my mom was taken, check if the car is
still there, and try to scent anything useful?”

Kyle was
already reaching for his keys.

“
Trish, will you work on tracking that van? I don’t think it’ll
get us anywhere, these guys look like they know exactly what
they’re doing, but you never know.”

“
Of course, Gabi,” Trish said, her voice thick with
emotion.

Gabi stood and
put her hands on her friend’s shoulders. “Stay strong for me,
Trish. Keep me posted with anything, even the tiniest bit of
news.”

“
I will, you know I will,” Trish assured her, trying to smile,
blinking rapidly. “Stay strong yourself.”

Gabi nodded,
but she knew she was the personification of grim. When she caught
up with whomever had taken her mother, she would be the
personification of vengeance. There would be hell to pay.

As always,
Julius’s face looked years younger in sleep, the weight of
responsibility that he wore when conscious vanquished by a sleep so
deep and dreamless that nothing could wake him. Well, almost
nothing. Gabi paused for only a moment, for once unable to
appreciate the sculpted lines of his honed body stretched out
against the dark sheets. She stripped off her jacket, dropping it
on the floor as the overly large tabby cat roused from his doze on
the foot of the bed to take in her appearance with a yellow-eyed
blink. In an instant he was on the floor, hackles raised and eyes
fiery. Gabi cursed, she’d thought she had her raging emotions
safely under lock and key, but Razor’s fine-tuned empathy had cut
right through her carefully built facade. She took a moment to send
calming thoughts his way, assuring him that the threat wasn’t
imminent. His fur settled back into place, but his stance didn’t
relax. He was on high alert and nothing she said or did would
change his attitude. He knew her life too well. Gabi reached down
to stroke his head before moving to the far side of the bed to sit
near Julius’s head.

She mentally
steeled herself as she reached to withdraw one of the butterfly
swords from the sheath on her leg. They were closer to daggers than
swords, handmade to her specific measurements, and treated with the
very special protective coating that also protected her cars and
battle clothing. Not even demon blood would corrode it. The coating
was a true godsend; her main sword, Nex, had once been protected by
a magic ward to make it immune to demon blood, but that ward
required a large expenditure of energy by a very experienced Magus.
With the Magi Council understaffed and their people in turmoil,
there was no chance Nex’s ward would be renewed once it wore off
this time. The magical warding only lasted a few months at best;
Savanna’s special coating was good for a full year. Julius sure
knew the right people.

Biting her lip,
she stopped procrastinating and dug the tip of the blade into the
fleshy part at the base of her left thumb. It only stung a little,
less than slicing a fingertip, she’d found. As the blood welled,
she used her right hand to pry Julius’s lips apart and wipe the
first bright red drops across the inside of his lower lip. Then she
readied herself. She’d got better at doing this over the past few
months, but there was still an element of risk involved. She had to
be quick—really, really quick—if she didn’t want his fangs in her
flesh before he was fully conscious. If a Vampire bit you with the
right intentions, it was the most erotic, sensual experience Gabi
knew of, but they could also cause agonising pain if they wanted to
or if they weren’t aware enough to help themselves. And being
brought out of daysleep unnaturally left even the most senior
Master Vampire dazed and confused for a few minutes.

Knowing how
much blood was enough to rouse him was a work in progress. If she
got it just right, she would avoid both her physical pain and his
mental anguish at having hurt her. If she got it wrong…well…it was
nothing a little of his blood and a couple of hours wouldn’t fix,
but right now she needed to be one hundred percent on her game.
Their mental connection was her secret weapon. She made sure to
pull down the mental walls that had become her second skin, opening
herself to him, waiting for the tiniest signal that his
consciousness was returning.