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Chance

M y phone buzzed in my pocket yet again, disturbing the silence required for our readings and creating a spike that meant we’d have to start again. For the twelfth time today. Ashe glared, her scowl deepening the lines on her forehead as she jammed her finger a little too hard on the power button.

‘Just go,’ she told me, already packing our equipment away. ‘It must be important if they’re calling you that much, and you’ve been acting weird lately, anyway.’

I sighed, disappointed in the lack of progress we’d made. She wasn’t wrong about how I’d been behaving, either. Something was niggling at me, a cold sense of dread I couldn’t place. And not only today. It seemed that the universe was telling us to give up, anyway.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket to see a dozen missed calls from different member of my family. Three for Mom, one from Dad, and the rest were all, surprisingly, from Blake.

‘What?’ Ashe asked when she turned the light on and caught sight of my expression. ‘What’s wrong?’

I turned the screen so she could see, and she blew a long whistle. ‘Who died?’

I blinked at her. Those words settled deep in my gut like some sort of premonition, and I was suddenly afraid to answer the next call. My family didn’t contact me unless they needed something. Their disapproval had created a wedge between us that none of us had ever tried to remove. They lived their lives and I lived mine, and we came together on holidays to play at being a happy family, then we went our separate ways again.

Just how I liked it.

Which was why there was a pool of dread churning low in my gut. They never called.

My phone lit up and vibrated once more, my brother’s name flashing on the screen. Ashe, sensing my concern, sidled up beside me to offer some comfort. I answered, putting it on speaker.

‘Blake,’ I greeted, then tried to push aside my worries with the snark I typically reserved for my Golden Child brother. ‘You butt-dialing me or something?’

‘Chance…’ his voice came down the line strained, and my blood chilled in my veins. Something was definitely wrong.

‘What is it?’ I asked, cutting through the bullshit remarks that ran through my brain.

‘It’s Kali,’ he said, his voice choking on his wife’s name.

Immediately, I was on alert. Had she left him? Or had something happened…?

‘Is she okay?’

‘She’s…’ he sniffled. ‘She’s missing. She went on a girls’ trip last weekend and just… she never came home.’

No… No, no, no.

‘Can you come home?’ he asked in a small, vulnerable voice that was so unlike him, I had no choice but to agree.

‘I can get the first flight out there tonight,’ I told him.

‘Where are you?’

‘Louisiana,’ I admitted, though if my family had paid any attention to my life or my career, then they’d know exactly where I was and why. ‘Few miles out from Baton Rouge.’

‘Oh, right. Of course. Do you need me to pick you up from the airport?’ he asked, always looking out for others even when he was the one who needed support. I used to think his selflessness was over-the-top and annoying, but now I just wanted to protect him from himself. He didn’t need to worry about me when his wife was missing .

God, please. Not Kali. Anyone but her.

‘Go,’ Ashe said, pushing me towards the door. ‘I’ve got things covered here.’

‘But the truck…’ I argued.

‘I’ll call Mike. His is bigger anyway.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. Now go. Your family needs you.’

She knew as well as I did that my family didn’t actually need me. I’d practically lived at her house throughout my teenage years since I’d felt more welcome there than in my own home.

She also knew that my concern was mostly for Kali. She was the only one of them that I could tolerate. More than that, she was one of the only people in this world besides Ashe that I considered an actual friend. Her light shone so brightly, keeping me afloat even when I was drowning. And then my little brother had swooped in and stole the show, charming her into his bed, then his life, and eventually put a ring on her finger. She was the best thing that had ever happened to our family, hands down, and deserved a man like my brother. Blake was the nicest guy in the world.

Unfortunately, so much so that our parents had decided he was the only one of their children who deserved their affection.

It wasn’t his fault. I didn’t blame him. That didn’t stop the resentment from sitting like a lead weight every time I thought of him, however. Resentment that I needed to push aside to be there for him.

Please, let her be okay.

‘All right. Text me when you get back to the hotel,’ I told her.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep the equipment safe,’ she teased, but it didn’t land like it normally would have. Not when Kali was missing…

If she had gone on a trip over the weekend, that meant she would have been due home by Sunday. It was now Thursday. Why hadn’t anyone tried to contact me before now? How long had it taken Blake to realise she wasn’t coming home? That was four days she’d been missing. Had he waited this long to call the police?

What the fuck was going on?

I ran from the old, supposedly haunted house we’d been investigating in Devil’s Swamp, a place we’d picked for its horrific past of murders and slave burials. The scent of rotten eggs and pollution burned my nostrils as my feet pounded loudly on the decking over the murky water. I didn’t bother to check for gators in my haste, yet I caught the glint off of a few eyes in my periphery as I jumped in front of the wheel.

My bag was already in the car in preparation for our overnight stay, so I didn’t need to run back to the hotel. If I left anything behind, Ashe and Mike would just pick it up for me anyway.

The drive to the airport was fast, only ten minutes, but it was so wrought with anxiety that it felt like a lifetime. My muscles were tense, my head was pounding from the headache that had formed behind my eyes, and my heart hurt at the prospect of anything happening to Kali.

Where are you, Goddess?

I returned the truck to the rental place, impatience making me snap at the slow pace the employee was moving. Thankfully, he sped up, and I was able to make it into the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport in under thirty minutes. Once inside, I managed to snag a ticket for a red-eye flight that left in a couple of hours. I would make it back to Oregon in about ten hours.

I texted Blake.

At the airport. Flight leaves at 11. Land at PDX at 6 AM. Meet at yours?

His response was immediate.

At Mom and Dad’s. The house is too empty with Kali gone.

Fuck. My heart stuttered at that last word. Gone. She couldn’t be gone. The world would be far too dismal without her in it.

No, I had to stop thinking like that. She hadn’t come home, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still alive. Four days without a word or a sign wasn’t good, but this whole thing could still be just a huge misunderstanding. She was out there somewhere, we just had to find her.

‘Good evening, passengers. This is the pre-boarding announcement for flight UA4941 to Portland. We are now inviting those passengers with small children and any passengers requiring special assistance to begin boarding at this time. Please have your boarding pass and identification ready. Regular boarding will begin in approximately ten minutes.’

The boarding call jolted me out of my thoughts, and I jerked my hand away from my mouth where I’d been anxiously chewing on my nails. I grabbed my bag and headed over to the gate, hovering just outside the small line that was forming as I waited for my turn to board. There was a man in a wheelchair and a woman with a baby, but the rest of us were solo flyers, it seemed.

Soon enough, I was on the plane and taking my seat by the window. Most of the seats remained empty, including the ones by me, so I took the opportunity to stretch out my legs when we were in the air and the captain removed the seatbelt sign. I tilted my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes, feigning sleep since my mind was a whirlwind of chaotic thoughts. Nobody bothered me, which was the goal.

The problem came with the images my brain supplied me, flashing behind my closed eyelids like some kind of macabre foreshadowing. Visions of Kali being kidnapped, tied up, and beaten in somebody’s basement. Or taken to a remote cabin in the woods where a serial killer was digging a grave in the backyard, her body wrapped up in a sheet. Clumps of dirt as they fell on her pale, lifeless face.

I tried desperately to think of her alive, but there must have been a part of me that subconsciously knew. I could feel the despair settling into my soul despite the fight I put up. And I fought. Hard.

By the time the plan landed in PDX, I was a mess of fried nerves, anxiety, and grief. Although I hated that last one the most, it didn’t change the fact that it was there. I was feeling it, and it wasn’t budging. Instead, as I waited for my Uber to arrive, the emotion continued to build until I knew, without even needing to look at my reflection, that I was a complete wreck .

When my ride arrived, the driver seemed reluctant to let me in, but the wild desperation in my eyes must have softened him enough to follow through on the drive. It was silent between us on the way. He didn’t try to talk, though he didn’t keep shooting concerned glances at me through the rearview mirror. I, however, sat like a statue. It felt as if I had even moved an inch, then it would make all of this real. That my worst fears would come true.

When he pulled up outside the house I had grown up in, only coming to visit during holidays when my presence was required to pretend like we were just one, big, happy family, it didn’t feel like a holiday. It felt like I was arriving for a fucking funeral.

Mom rushed out as soon as the car pulled up, hands waving wildly as she pulled open the door and practically dragged me out.

‘Have you heard from her?’ she asked. ‘I know you keep in touch. She must have texted you or something ,’ she begged, hands fisted in my shirt that was already wrinkled from the journey.

My head shake felt like I’d rammed a battering ram right into her stomach. Her legs gave out, and I whipped my arms out to hold her up.

‘This isn’t like her,’ she muttered, though I didn’t think she was actually talking to me, more like speaking her thoughts out loud. ‘She wouldn’t just up and disappear like this. Something bad has happened. I can feel it.’

It was wrong of me to agree, but I couldn’t help myself. The words were ripped from my throat without my permission, the universe demanding the truth, even without the evidence. ‘I feel it, too.’

And when I practically dragged us both inside the house and saw my brother’s face for the first time since he’d called, I could see the truth written there, too.

In the following months, any hope we tried to hang onto was purged, burned from our very souls each time our search efforts came up empty. Eventually, the police stopped looking for her alive and moved her case to the homicide unit. And then her case just went cold. It didn’t matter how many times we begged or pleaded, we were no longer looking for her. We were looking for her body .

Kali was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.