Page 59 of Psycho

“Honestly, Janelle, I don’t know where they take the girls. But listen to me”—I looked at the five young women, making sure they were all listening to me—“I got out once. I’ll do it again. I have a guy—a few guys—who are looking for me right now. They are very resourceful and powerful. They will find us and get us out of here, but I need you guys to hold on. Whatever they do to you, just check out, okay? Mentally check out. Pretend you’re somewhere else. They are keeping us alive and fed for a reason, so just know they’re not going to poison us or starve us. I’m praying my friends find me before they ship us off.”

“It seems to happen like once a week,” Leticia said, dragging her hair over her shoulder and sliding her fingers over the thin black braids. “So we probably have about a week before another one us is snatched. It also means another girl will be arriving soon.” She bit her lip and looked down.

“Hang in there, girls.” I tried not to tear up. “If we don’t have hope, what do we have?”

“How are you so positive?” Sarah asked. “You got out once and look, you ended right back here.”

She seemed bitter and angry, and I couldn’t blame her. “I did it for Poppy. And I’d do it for any of you. I’m positive my friends will find us. In the meantime, I’m going to”—I glanced around to make sure the bastards were still in the office—“I’m going to try to devise an escape plan. I can’t just fucking sit here and wait to be rescued. I have to try.”

Little did they know that I was a witch with something up my sleeve.

Chapter 22

Psychopath

Psycho

The amount of weapons piled into the cager was obnoxious. I looked over at Menace, who grinned at me before spitting a brown stream of chew onto the ground.

“I mean, if you don’t think it’s enough, I can go get the fucking rocket launcher,” he said.

I shook my head. “No, man. This is enough. How many UV guns we got?”

Trigger answered, “There’s three. They’re dark-blue. We made sure they didn’t look entirely like regular handguns when we had them designed.”

Menace and Trigger were my firearms experts. Cutter was great with weapons too, but mostly knives. I swore that man could fashion a knife out anything. I once saw him melt down plastic, sharpen the edge on some metal, and wrap twine around the bottom to create a handle. An honest-to-God shank.

I looked at my watch. It was late afternoon. It taken all day to gather these weapons and a plan. I wanted to go in during the day, it would be easier to get the women out, but it didn’t work out that way.

Gentilly wasn’t far, but we also did not want to risk our loud bikes, not to mention we needed room for the weapons, so the Humvee was the obvious choice. We weren’t sure what we were going to face, but I wasn’t letting Nera spend an extra second in captivity of those fucking bloodsuckers. What sucked was that we were going in blind. We had no idea how many there were or how many other captives they had.

Nera told me there were four leeches who had her and the others captive, but that could have changed in the few weeks she’d been away from them. We were prepared for anything now, though.

Trigger drove as the rest of us slowly scanned the streets of the small town. Lake Pontchartrain also bordered Gentilly. Interesting the vamps chose this place to keep their captives—interesting but not completely baffling. The way it was set up, there were plenty of places to isolate and detain young women.

“Dammit,” Wizard said from the backseat, staring at his laptop.

I turned and looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Damn small town doesn’t have traffic cams. Or none that I can find to hack into.” He furrowed his brow and pushed his glasses up higher on his face.

“It’s okay, we’ll find them,” I assured him, not so sure myself but definitely determined.

We cruised around the residential areas for what seemed like hours, but didn’t see the van. That didn’t mean it wasn’t parked in a garage, but the thing was fairly large. I wasn’t sure if it would fit in one.

“Try the industrial area,” Menace said from the backseat, looking up at the now-dark sky. “This time of night it’ll be quiet and dark. Good place to hide humans.”

I looked at Trigger. “Need the GPS?”

“Yeah, might as well,”

I looked on Google Maps and found a cluster of warehouses near the water. I chose a random one and put it into the maps app.

It didn’t take long before we were in an industrial park.

“Keep your eyes peeled for that van,” I said, more to myself than everyone else—not that they didn’t already know.

We drove around for about thirty minutes when I grew tired and frustrated. I huffed in annoyance.

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