Page 36 of Possessed By Shadows
“They specialized in young girls.” Sky’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I guess they saw me as a girl? That’s something, right?”
“Youarea girl,” I reminded her.
She sniffled. “Not everyone sees it that way. Waste not, want not though. Plenty of guys who pretend to want girls but want something else between their legs.” She swallowed hard and looked away, hugging herself tight.
“How long?” I demanded. “How long did they have you?” How long had it taken my slow-ass brother to find her?
“A few weeks,” Sky said. “Not long.”
“Long enough,” Micah said.
“Too long,” I added. Any time would have been too long.
“Lukas found me. He shouldn’t have burst in. They could have killed him. But we found out afterward that he wasn’t on a raid or anything. The department wouldn’t listen to him. So he’d been tracking on his own. I don’t know how he found me. They moved us around a lot. They were getting ready to move us out of state.” She stared at the floor as if the memories were too close and heavy to really forget. “I was okay. I mean, they didn’t beat me or anything. Not even when they found out…”
That she was trans? I couldn’t imagine the fear. And the whole okay thing? After several weeks in the hands of sex traffickers? How many times had she been raped? The question formed on my tongue but I swallowed it back, both not wanting to know, and not wanting to give those memories a rise for her.
“Lukas shot a couple of the guys. One was fatal,” Micah said. “His family tried to bring charges. Claims of police brutality. But he wasn’t acting with the police at the time, and the evidence he had gathered…I thought he was lone wolfing her disappearance.”
“But?” I asked, feeling like there was something he wasn’t telling me. In my pajamas, standing in our living room, I felt safe, even with the horrors being revealed. No big deal, they had said. That was another lie. Sky hadn’t died, and I knew it had been bad, but this was worse than I’d been thinking. My heart hurt.
“The US Marshals came in,” Micah said. “They’d been following the group for a while, but hadn’t had enough proof to take them in. Dozens of investigations across the country, tracking missing witness, and none with enough evidence to take them down. Until Lukas stumbled into the middle of it.”
“Dozens across the country?” The whole thing had to be huge then. Not some local douchebags messing with people. And somehow my brother had not only found Sky before she’d been dragged across the country, but enough information to take out a branch of them?
“The Marshals investigative unit had been looking at them a while. Pieced together some dead kids, and a handful of witnesses who had vanished. Lukas was just there. Found Sky, and a half-dozen other kids. Killed one of the guys who led the group in this area, and wounded four others. I know the police wrote it off as good detective work, and I think the charges went away? As it often does for police. It wasn’t on the news anymore, and Lukas wouldn’t talk about it,” Micah said.
“It could have been good detective work,” I said.
Micah returned to the table and all the files he’d gathered. I had thought they were mine, information on my history, but they were on places. “Good detective work that having an elite force of US Marshals couldn’t solve before one lone police detective?” Micah asked, his focus on the stack. “I think that only happens in the movies.”
“Well, they would have more than just one case, right? Maybe not enough time to follow up on everything like Lukas?” Or maybe they hadn’t cared about one trans girl who’d been lured by some asshole. I didn’t think it was supernatural. How would that even be possible? “You think he saw something that led him to Sky?” I asked.
Micah shrugged. “His obsession after my return was odd. Intense, and sort of brutal. Then when Sky went missing, he began searching, and then he vanished. The police were here a few times, asking me questions, trying to find Lukas. Not Sky.”
“I was just a runaway tranny to them. Lukas was what they were worried about. One of their own missing.” Sky sat on the futon and curled around Jet who accepted her pets and praise.
“I’m sorry,” I said, hating all she had to go through.
“Afterward, the media spun it as good detective work. But the timing was…impossible. Lukas found Sky right before they were to drag her out of the city in a place he had no way of knowing where they’d be.”
“I’d been moved there only a few hours before. Me and a dozen other girls.” She closed her eyes as if remembering. “Was pretty drugged up. Didn’t know where I was myself. They didn’t know that without my hormones, I might have a heart attack, the sudden stop of them, and then adding drugs on top of that to try to control me? That’s probably the only reason I didn’t die. My system was so messed up I was in the hospital for a while afterwards. Probably wouldn’t have lived long if they had moved me out of state.”
My heart felt like someone was squeezing a fist around it.
“Stopping any medication abruptly can be bad. But hormones like that?” Micah shook his head. “I hate that we live in such an ignorant world sometimes.”
“They didn’t listen to me,” Sky agreed. “And after the first few days I was so out of it I don’t remember much.”
Was that a blessing? I hoped so.
She gave me a tight smile. “I’d been in the trade before.”
“By choice?” I wondered if it was ever a choice, or more a necessity. Micah had done on-screen work, but that had been with a single lover, and a choice. What did it say about me that I gave him more points for being with a lover and on-screen than in person? Did I think badly of sex workers? I sighed. “I hate discovering my own biases. Sorry. I know some people do choose it.”
“It’s good that you see them and try to learn from them,” Micah said.
“I did what was necessary for a while,” Sky admitted. “Then the shelter helped. It’s an easy mindset to fall back on. How people will pay for sex. Easy money some think.”