Page 60 of Sin

I tried to flip him off, but I must have drifted off without realizing it because the next thing I knew, Lewis woke me with a cry of victory.

“Yes! I think I found him.” Lewis narrowed his eyes, zooming in on a certain image. The image was grainy, but it depicted a man who closely resembled Lucas talking to a couple just outside the fairgrounds. Lewis placed his palm on the screen, and the video started playing at double speed. It showed the couple leading Lucas to their car and getting in the back.

When the car left the parking lot and therefore the video footage, Lewis pulled up several street side video cams, searching through them until he found the car from the fair. Only, when he paused on the footage, a frown formed on his lips.

“What’s wrong?” I asked in a sleepy voice, wondering when Blade and Jinx would return from the carnival.

“From the looks of it, he’s hitchhiking. Switching cars every so often so that we can’t track him through the cams. I think he figured out that’s one of the ways we’ve been tracking him.”

Although he didn’t say it, the unspoken, because he broke into Sin’s mind and saw all our secrets, was clear.

London let out a string of muttered curses before spinning and punching the wall.

Mare sighed. “We don’t need any more injuries right now, London.”

“I know, I know,” he muttered, withdrawing and scowling at the hole in the wall. Taking a potted plant from the other side of the room, he moved it in front of the hole. It… didn’t really hide it.

The door to the room beeped, and Blade and Jinx entered, looking weary and dejected. I wondered how much sleep all of them were getting. Probably not much if I were to guess.

“Anything?” London asked, straightening at the look Jinx and Blade shot each other.

Then Blade slung a simple black backpack I hadn’t noticed her wearing on the free bed.

Even though I’d only ever seen it in the dark, I recognized it immediately.

“That’s Lucas’s bag.”

Blade nodded. “It was still there when we searched the house of mirrors. You said he injected himself with something, correct?”

“Yes.”

Releasing a breath, she waved London over. “You’re going to want to see this, boss man.”

London shifted closer while Blade dumped the contents of the backpack on the bed, and several vials of purple liquid rolled onto the bedding. There were a couple of water bottles and some protein bars, but that was it. No money, no wallet or clothes. Though, he probably was able to command people to give him free clothes whenever he wanted. He didn’t need to keep some on hand.

Jinx picked up one of the vials for me to see better. “Does this look familiar?”

“I think that’s what he injected into himself,” I said, thinking back to the almost instant change in his behavior. “Lucas wasn’t well when I found him. Rocking back and forth on the ground, muttering to himself. Like he wasn’t all there, you know?” I pointed to the vial. “Then he shot himself up with that stuff and it was like… Like he became a completely different person.” I thought more about it. How the version post injection spoke and acted so much like the person in my head. “Or maybe the drug just stabilizes him, and that’s the real Lucas.”

Lewis nodded. “It’s possible. We need to have it analyzed to be sure,” Lewis said, twisting the small vial this way and that. The purple liquid glistened under the headlight. “It might be the drug they were testing out on Lucas. From what it sounds like, whatever torment and isolation he went through caused some serious mental health problems. His power is unstable and reactive when he’s overly emotional. It’s possible this helps balance that.”

“When he was in my head,” I said thoughtfully, “it was like he was himself. Like when using his power, I finally saw a true glimpse of the real Lucas. Do you know why that could be?”

Mare frowned and played with a bear paw. “It makes me wonder if even though his physical body isn’t working right, his mental self is still mostly whole.”

“Like, his psyche is still sane?”

“Yeah, at least for the most part,” she said. “So what you see on the outside isn’t what’s going on on the inside.”

“I think whatever they did to him really messed him up,” I admitted, thinking back to the multiple scars I’d seen poking out from his hairline. “I think they opened him up. Over and over.”

Mare let out a distressed noise, and London chewed his lip thoughtfully. “The scars?”

I nodded. “Yeah. He had multiple scars on his body. Like they took him apart and put him back together.”

Jinx shivered. “You don’t really think they did that?”

Shrugging, I stared at the wall, recalling something he’d said to me. “I don’t know. But whatever they did, they really messed with him. I don’t even think Lucas remembers who he is. Whether that’s from a trauma response or something they did to him, it was pretty clear he’s suffering from memory loss.”

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