Feeling the Way, CH 14 (Patreon)

I first noticed her while walking the Downtown strip, with all its old style shops and large bay windows letting us look inside.

The city was Amarillo, Texas. I was here following the trail of who I’d come to refer to as the Society Wanna Be, although I didn’t know if the disappearances here were linked to that.

 Eight months ago, two before the massacre in Brewster was discovered, five boys age eight to twelve vanished without a trace over two weeks. I was here to figure out if my killer was responsible, or if this was simply the normal perversion people committed upon one another.

It might sound heartless, especially coming from me, with my empathy issues, but I can’t afford to care about everyone and everything people do to one another. I’d either go insane that way or end up dead. Of course, kids made it more difficult to stay distant. Us Orrs might be on the heartless side of things as a whole, but kids are special. My dads were abused beyond reason when they were kids. By their own fathers, no less. So they can go ballistic anytime children are taken advantage of.

San Francisco has one of the best child welfare service departments in the country for a reason. It doesn’t matter if the federal government is officially in charge of that. The people in our city handling that know what happens to anyone who allows children to be hurt.

Amarillo in June is hot, but not as hot as Texas further south, for which I was grateful. It meant that walking downtown in my bike leathers wasn’t the torture it could be. Three of the five boys had been hanging around Ellwood Park when their disappearances were noticed.

I’d been made aware of them by the people on the internet. These days, probably all days, there were people there looking for any kind of work, so it was a good place to find someone willing to sift through millions of news articles for money. I’d posted the ad days after my first night with Elias, a hundred bucks for any news articles about boys who’d been taken. A thousand if said article lead to me catching the culprits.

Eddy would tell me getting an Artificial Intelligence Program would get me better results for a lot less money. But one, AIPs were creepy. I didn’t care how they were the product of decades of research, and no different from any other programs, other than in the level of efficiency, they were creepy as hell. And two. People needed money, ordinary people, the kind who’d spend the week trying to find work so they could pay for groceries.

 I had money, and while I wasn’t one for charity, I’d give it to people willing to work before I handed it over to yet another corporation hoarding every penny floating around. It was why I had someone sifting through the thousands of responses from my ad and sending me the most relevant, which had led me to Amarillo. And I was heading to Ellwood Park.

After eight months, the odds I’d find anything were low, but I had access to tools the local police didn’t, some even the FBI didn’t have. Even if they had a department investigating magical crimes, the FBI as a whole was still very much old style in their investigations. Last I’d heard, they only had a dozen faction people in the whole of the organization, and they were more geared toward taking down magically enhanced perps than bringing magic into the investigations.

Ellwood Park was typical of city parks in that it was mostly grass, with trees here and there, along with buildings sprinkled to accommodate needs. Restroom, food stands, pools.

I walked around the restroom where one of the boys, Benjamin, was last seen. His mother said he’d gone there to take care of business and never came out. There were three exits, so it would have been easy for him to leave and not be noticed, but he’d still vanished.

I looked at the wooden plate in my hand. On it I’d engraved sigils and connectors, creating a phrase. The magic of my faction, of the Society. Because of the precision needed for this kind of work, I’d needed eight tries before getting the engraving perfect, and only then did I add the blood to turn them into magic.

Our god is one of male lust, virility, and vitality. As such, the things that produced that are where our power comes from; with blood at the top of the list. But with it being the most powerful comes the strongest blowback when the phrase is wrong. Cum is the usual fluid we use, both because it was easy to come by and safe to make mistakes with. A headache is easier to deal with than being knocked out for a day for a misaligned sigil.

I hadn’t had a reason to make this until Elias caught up with me outside of St-Louis, Missouri. After a wild night of pumping each other, we moved on to pumping for information. I didn’t have anything, and he didn’t have much, but he’d brought one new item, flakes of blood they were confident was from the man who’d massacred the boys in Brewster.

I had to fuck him for eight hours without stopping, but in the end, he gave me the blood. We both knew it would happen, while else bring it, but while he coaxed it as me earning it, he just wanted another non-stop fucking and I was happy to oblige.

The phrase I built served as a detector of sort, looking for any trace of the same blood as what was in the middle of it; the sample Elias gave me. It might have been eight-month ago, but if Wanna Be had been here and bleed even one drop, my detector would pick it up.

It didn’t. Nor did it find anything by the food cart where another boy, Carl, had last been seen, waiting in line for a burger. His father had turned around to talk with a friend and when he’d looked back, his son was gone.

I checked every building, even if they had no known connection to one of the vanished boys, just in case. Nothing.

It didn’t mean Wanna Be wasn’t involved, just that he’d been careful enough not to bleed. Also careful enough not to have his kill site discovered. Five dead kids should have raised a stink, both literally and figuratively.

Instead, either no one had connected them or had ignored any possible connection. Five boys in two weeks were more than coincidence. It was intentional.

I pocketed my detector and left the park. The phrase was covered with varnish, so I didn’t have to worry about destroying it, which, since it was made of my blood, wasn’t a good idea for my health. It wouldn’t kill me, but being knocked out in public was never a good idea. Cum lost power over time as it dried. Blood did too, but blood was life, and that connection to the person who’d donated the blood never left. It was why any large project made in blood used multiple donors. The more blood, the bigger the blowback. It could kill if enough blood was used. 

Something the size of my detector would simply knock me out for a while.

* * * * *

Like a lot of larger cities, Amarillo was going through a revitalization of its older neighborhoods. Buildings rebuilt using the latest technology and material, but intentionally left looking old.

It was… quaint.

I preferred actual old neighborhoods. There was something to real history that made-up ones didn’t have.

I looked at another storefront, this one selling bike leathers, examining what was on display as if I was considering them when, in reality, I was searching the reflections in the glass. By now I’d caught enough glimpses of her in different parts of the city, I knew this was more than coincidence.

In movies, the hero is always catching their pursuer by looking at the reflection from one store or another, like I’m doing, but the one thing most forget to consider is how telling it is if you’re using a store selling something you’d never consider buying. For example, if I’d stopped at the previous store, the one selling lingerie.

You have to expect whoever is after you knows something about you, and that could be enough to give yourself away, looking at women’s clothing.

She was good. I expected nothing less, but not good enough to keep me from piecing her together from the glances I caught on the other side of the road among the moving crowd.

She was a cougar, tall, muscular, wearing a fashionable ensemble in bluish-gray that could be a business suit, if one didn’t know her as I did. It would be just loose enough not to impede her motion.

Having recognized her, I sighed.

I had a decision to make. Run or confront her. Neither were great options. And in the end, running would only delay having to confront her. She was nothing if not determined.

Having decided on my course of action, I needed the right armament, and that, I’d find at the corner.

* * * * *

I timed my exit from the shop to coincide with her third circuit, as she passed the door trying to look inside without seeming to. Unfortunately, it was too dark and she couldn’t be sure I wasn’t going to leave by the alley, so she was walking around the building as fast as she could without attracting too much attention.

She stepped away from me as I raised my hand to her, holding the paper cup. “Green tea, honey instead of sugar, and the lightest splash of soy milk.” In my other hand, I held my drink, a caramel coffee. “How are you doing, Brigitte?”

I am not a coffee snob.

The indecision was a fraction of a second. Most people would have missed it. She took the cup. “How long have you known I was there?”

“You specifically, the leather shop. I’ve known someone was following me for half the morning. Where’s the rest of the retinue?”

“Where do you think?” She took a sip, then a longer drink, sighing in delight.

“Alright. Then, why have you been following me?”

She titled an ear, and I sighed.

“There is something called a phone,” I said.

“And send you running off?”

I sighed again. “Where is he?”

She smiled. “I’ll take you to him.”

And there went any chances I had to avoid this meeting.