Page 115 of Hide and Seek

“You going to see what Myles is up to?” Jace asks as he stretches his arms over his head.

“In a bit. He’s talking with his friends right now. I’ll wait until he’s done.”

The lights flicker off, plunging the room into darkness.

There’s an eerie silence, then a loud hum as the generator kicks in, and a few seconds later, the emergency lights flick on.

The emergency lights are just bright enough so we can move around without bumping into things, since most of the energy from the generator is needed to keep the building’s security running.

“Seriously?” Jace asks as he walks over to his desk and digs out a flashlight. “When was the last time we had a power failure?”

“It’s been a while,” I say as my hackles rise and my instincts start screaming at me that something is wrong.

“Is it just me, or does this not feel like a simple power failure?” he asks, shining the light around our room as he looks for any signs of a threat.

“It’s not just you.” I walk over to our window. We’re high enough that I should be able to see lights from the other buildings around us and some light pollution from the rest of campus, but there’s nothing but darkness. “And it’s not just us.”

“The block is out?” Jace asks as I turn away from the window.

“Not just the block, it looks like everywhere is out.”

“A campus-wide blackout?” Jace tosses me the flashlight and strides over to my desk, presumably to get the one I keep in there. “I don’t buy it. Something is going on.”

I pull out my phone and open the app for the cameras in Myles’s room, then tap on the camera I put on his dresser.

The video feed fills my screen.

My blood instantly boils when I see a group of guys dressed like action movie rejects surrounding Myles as he lies on the floor.

“Who are we killing?” Jace asks, already striding toward me with a hard look on his face.

“Whoever the fuck these assholes are. Every. Single. One of them just signed their death warrants,” I say in an icy voice as dark anger mixes with my already brewing rage.

We both watch my screen as two of those assholes haul Myles off the floor. One of them puts a fucking bridle gag in his mouth, and another slips a sack of some sort over his face.

Jace’s hand on my shoulder is the only thing keeping me from losing my shit, and I focus on the video, looking at it objectively and not focusing on what they’re doing to Myles.

We watch them drag him out of the room as he kicks and writhes and does everything he can to be an all-around pain in the ass.

“Atta boy,” Jace says softly. “He’s keeping his cool, and he’s fighting. He’ll be okay.”

“He better be. Otherwise I’m going to burn this fucking school to the ground looking for anyone who had any hand in doing this to him.”

“You and me both, brother.” Jace’s voice is as dark and empty as mine as he unlocks his phone and types something. “Can you see anything that tells us who these fuckers are?”

“Not from that angle.” I switch to the feed in the statue that’s still on his night table, but it’s facing his bed and not his room so nothing that happened would have been caught in the feed.

I switch to the camera I put over his doorway and check the footage in the cloud.

“Killer and Xave are on their way,” he says. “See anything?”

“Not yet,” I tell Jace as I study the image of the group crowded around his door. One of them has a key, but it’s for his old lock. He tries to use it, and when it doesn’t work, he kicks the door open, and they rush inside one after the other like a dollar store SWAT.

“Do you see his phone in his room?”

I flip to the camera on his dresser and access the recorded footage. My blood starts boiling again as I watch his phone fall from his hand when he’s body-slammed into his dresser. “Yeah, it’s on the floor. Why?”

“Because I put a tracker in it.” He taps on his phone screen a few times. “But that doesn’t help us if he doesn’t have his phone on him. And you were right. It’s a campus-wide blackout. Even the school security cams are out, so tracking them isn’t an option. Is there anything on here that helps us figure out who the fuck has him or where they’re taking him?”