scribal_goddess | Poor Unfortunate Souls, Chapter Nine: The Sound of Never (Reply)

Chapter Nine: The Sound of Never

By the time we returned to our apartment after a cold bus ride, my phone was well and truly dead and it was almost two in the morning, with a sky full of cold stars.

Our apartment was also empty. Eerily so, in fact, considering that we’d left that evening with Leila comfortably installed on the couch. She wouldn’t have just gone for a walk: not in the middle of the night.

Nothing appeared to have been disturbed; everything was clean and in its proper place, the door and windows were still shut, and the sheets had been pulled off the fold-out couch and neatly folded.

That sight sent my heart diving down into my gut.

I crossed the room towards the phone and the notepad we kept beside it, and I only confirmed my suspicions. My thoughts ran out of my head like water under a bridge when I picked up the note that Leila had left for us.

I’m sorry.

I know what I have to do now. I can still save Ana, and probably some other people too. If I stop him now, nobody else will have to suffer. I won’t be coming back, either way.

Don’t come looking for me.

Thank you for everything. I hope you can prove what he’s done, but not everyone can wait that long. Talk to Jason Taylor; he knows nearly everything and will help you if you tell him I sent you. I’ll put the spare key under the welcome mat when I go. If I win, I’ll find a way to pay you back for everything, if not, IOU.

Don’t worry about me, and don’t blame yourselves. I don’t intend to die tonight, but if I do it will be for a good cause.

- Leila

I stared uncomprehendingly at the spots that had bled from the ballpoint pen for a long moment while Allie read over my shoulder. She’d written almost straight through the paper, in a round, even, girlish handwriting that for some reason surprised me.

Allie made a move to rush right back out the door, and I reached over and grasped her wrist before she could leave.

“It’s no use,” I told her, “she’s been gone for hours.”

She didn’t want to believe me, but I knew. There were, on second glance, neatly rinsed dishes in the sink, a pair of cartons in the trash, and very few other traces of our vanished guest.

Allie kicked the sofa quite hard, but I went into the bathroom and checked the first aid kit. We were out of bandages.

Something in my heart thawed.

In my experience, a woman who suddenly resolved to kill herself didn’t take the time to have leftover Chinese for dinner and change her bandages first. Nor did she take several packets of antiseptic wipes, extra clean bandages, and the bottle of ibuprofen.

“Damn it,” Allie said from the living room, “She took my coat.”

The only question was, where? I doubted that she’d gone to Grey’s parents’ home – for one thing, she’d known that we’d be there – but realistically, she could be nearly anywhere. Even if she’d intended to leave when we’d last seen her, she’d taken the time to eat, change her bandages, clean up after herself… she could have left any time between about six thirty and, say, midnight.

I conjured up my memory of how she’d been when we left. She’d been relaxed, more so than yesterday, and I thought – hoped, really – that I would have noticed if she’d been lying about staying in.

She’d obviously been agitated when she left the note, but she’d written it slowly. She hadn’t been in any hurry.

Allie got quickly out of my way as I bolted from the bathroom and violently tossed the Chinese cartons out of it. She wouldn’t have stuffed it too far down, not with fresh bandages – there.

I fished out the crumpled piece of notepad paper triumphantly, only to be interrupted.

“Lindsay,” Allie said, in a hollow voice, “you’ll want to hear this.”

She held out my cell phone; she’d pulled it out of my purse and plugged it in. I walked over and we put our heads together to listen to a voicemail from only hours before.

“… a really stupid idea,” Leila’s voice said from the speakers, tinny and quiet. “I thought-” the rush of passing cars obscured whatever else she said. “- broke in at Escala, through the garage. I trashed that awful car, I know he bought it for her, just like the one he bought for me. They saw me-” Another car drowned her out. “I didn’t get to finish. There’s a back entrance. I have to try, but I don’t think I’m going to make it.” She seemed to reach a quieter place, because the level of noise in the recording abruptly went down. “Anyway, I thought you ought to know that -”

The message was cut off in a beep, and Allie was halfway across the room already. She tossed a pair of pants out of the door of our bedroom at me, and had changed out of her dress by the time I’d managed to unhook the catch that held the zipper of my own dress in place. I suspected telekinesis.

“We can be at Escala in thirty minutes if we hurry,” she said as she jammed her bare feet into her shoes without bothering to untie them first. “That message was left at a bit after eleven, but -”

Almost three hours ago. Not that it would stop Allie, I thought, as I finally worked the zipper free and threw on yesterday’s shirt. We were out the door the second I’d snatched my partially-charged phone off the counter and had my shoes on my feet.

Downtown Seattle in the small hours of the morning is like any other major city – dark, chilly, and vaguely eerie, with the red eyes of stoplights glaring balefully at anybody half-jogging down the sidewalks, barely stopping to check for oncoming traffic.

Escala loomed ominously above us, a jagged spike stretching away towards the empty darkness of the sky, loosing itself above the line of streetlights in the clammy night.

There was nobody but us on the street surrounding it, and no signs of life other than the swoosh of a passing car and the burning lights of the lobby across the street from us. We needed to get in, to follow Leila, but we weren’t getting in that way.

“Around back,” I muttered to Allie, and we headed towards the back of the building, searching for the telltale red eye of a fire exit nicely hidden in the shadows. Were there cameras? Probably. I searched the darkness for them, but found nothing.

By unspoken agreement, Allie and I passed the door the first time, pulled up the hoods of our sweatshirts a little further down the road and returned in a haze of bright blue light.

Allie worked quickly, short-circuiting the automatic alarm in the fire door, and telekinetically pushing it outwards just enough that we could slip through. She stopped only for a second on the inside, to throw the cloud of light away from the door and to turn the alarm back on, then she was only a few steps behind me as I found the stairwell and we clattered up it at a slightly winded run. There were far too many floors, and we were headed to the top.

My heart was pounding when we reached the top, and I hardly had the breath to make any smart comments when I turned the corner and found myself face-to-face with a gun for the second time that night.

The person holding the gun was definitely focused on us, this time. I got a good look at him – tallish, age impossible to guess, hair cut so short that it could be brown or blond, standing like a soldier – while I stood as still as possible in the stairwell. He didn’t shoot us, though, which I took to be a very good sign.

He reached up to his earpiece with his free hand. “Intruders apprehended, sir,” he said, and listened for a second. “This way, please,” he told Allie and I, gesturing with that same hand rather than with his gun, never taking his eyes off us.
We walked in through the door. We didn’t exactly have a choice about it.

Even at gunpoint, my mind had to register how white the room that we were ushered into was. It glared in the light of what seemed like a thousand fluorescent bulbs. The click of footsteps on tile gave way to a view of the dull shine of a long glass dining table in the center of a white and grey room.

“Sit, please,” said our captor, and Allie and I traded half a glance as we did so. Behind us, the gloom of the Seattle night at twenty two stories up pressed against the glass, sealing the apartment.

It said something about the direction of our lives, I thought, that this still ranked as one of my most pleasant experiences with being captured and held at gunpoint. So far, at least, our captor showed no interest in killing us or obtaining information – probably waiting for his boss, I thought.

For several long moments, nobody spoke. I could hear, in the distance, the ticking of a clock, but no other noises.

Adrenaline had stopped burning through my body, and it was now drizzling away through the cracks. I was two parts terrified, one part morbidly curious, and three parts exhausted.

I couldn’t help but notice that nobody appeared to have called the cops, and the phrase “deal with it ourselves,” lurked menacingly in my mind. All I had to go on at this point was that Christian Grey was probably not a mage – and that mages weren’t bulletproof.

Then I couldn’t help but sneak a glance at Allie – one which I knew our captor saw – only to find that she was staring at him, waiting patiently. All she needed was a moment of distraction, I knew, and then she would take my hand and we would conveniently disappear, out into another world, where we couldn’t be reached or followed. We could walk the worlds, work our way back to Seattle, pick up the case as if we’d never been gone. The perks of working with an adept were that you could go anywhere, and given the requisite moment, run away from anything.

The price, of course, would be abandoning Leila, assuming that she was still somewhere in this apartment. If we left as soon as our captor’s back was metaphorically turned, we might never find out what had become of her.

I wasn’t going.

There was a second, when I considered how best to let Allie that she needed to form another plan. Then I heard the click of footsteps on a tiled floor, steady, determined and getting closer.

I rallied my stubbornness and my anger together and prepared to meet Christian Grey.

Chapter 10: The Stolen Years

* Leila seems to have a thing for long coats. I don’t blame her. Lindsay does, though – stealing Allie’s coat is her job.
** For the timing on all their arrivals, I checked in Google Maps. A lot. I have a timeline and addresses, if anyone else wants to be that anal about it.
*** These are some of the places that I found the pictures and layout of the Escala penthouses. Yes, houses. And they're not as big as canon claims, either.
**** I would apologize for the cliffhanger, but I’m really not sorry in the least.