Page 35 of Emerge

Chapter Eleven

Jax

One minute we had been enjoying a horse ride and the next we were freaking out about what was going to happen with Riley. The instructors had us dismount immediately and got on the horses to go after her, but the horses wouldn't budge.

Instead, we piled into two farm utility vehicles and headed in the direction the horse went. I didn't want to acknowledge the fact that something was wrong with the horses, but the two Blake and I had ridden had a glossy quality to their eyes.

But didn't they always?

"It’s unlike Buttercup to do something like this. She is our best horse," Clint, the trainer, said.

We got to a levee that had horse tracks leading up the side. Where the hell had the damn horse taken her?

I jumped off the seat and ran up the side since it didn't appear the instructor was going to drive up it. It was fairly steep.

"What do you see?" Blake yelled, still in the second vehicle with Morgan and the other instructor.

"Nothing!" On the other side there were more trees, but there was a chain-link fence.

The faint smell of diesel hit my nose, and my stomach dropped. "How often do vehicles drive up here?" It was packed dirt, but there were track marks from tires.

"Once a week to check out the perimeter. Why?" Clint climbed up to the top of the levee and took his baseball hat off, scratching his head. "It's like they vanished.

"It smells like diesel. When was the last perimeter check?"

"We check on Mondays, so there shouldn't be a smell." Clint walked a few feet. "Look." He was pointing to a line in the dirt several feet long and horse hooves that stopped at the line. "That's really strange."

"Yeah, it's strange all right." I didn't want to tell him that in all likelihood, the horses had probably been compromised by a psychotic demigod. "Let's get back to the stables. Maybe they're back.”

We slid down the side of the levee and climbed back into the vehicle. Morgan was on the phone and shook his head when I raised my eyebrows in question.

Dealing with this with humans around was a major roadblock. They were going to ask questions and probably call the police once they realized the horse and Riley were both long gone.

Once we were back at the stables, Morgan motioned for us to follow him away from the group of employees. "That was your dad. He said he and Natalia were at the police station giving statements to them and the FBI about where she's been, and she was supposed to wait for him to be done. He can't find her."

"Fuck." I ran a hand over my head. "There were horse hooves that suddenly stopped where an indent in the dirt was, like there was a ramp to a trailer or something."

Blake shut his eyes and took a shaky breath. "This is all my fault. I should have used my fucking brain."

"What do you mean, it's all your fault? We knew the time was going to come that he came for her again." I put a hand on his shoulder because he looked like he was about to cry, which was unlike him.

"Poseidon is connected to horses. Of course his son would be too." His jaw ticked and he hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. "I didn't even think!"

"Dude, how would you have known?" Morgan looked over his shoulder at the group of trainers and employees that were discussing next steps. "We need to get to the city because that's probably where they are headed."

"I can find out for sure where she's headed." I grimaced as I grabbed my phone out of a bin we had put our stuff in. "She's going to kill me, but the other night when I had her blindfolded, I put a tracker on her necklace."

Desperate times called for desperate measures. She might have let me put the tracker on if I'd asked her, but I couldn't risk her saying no to something so important.

I pulled up the app and waited for it to load. The internet signal wasn't the best, so we had to wait a few seconds for the dot to appear. "They are headed away from the coast."

"Hey guys, we're going to split up to look for Buttercup and Riley. Did you want to stay here or...?" Clint was standing off to the side, worry pinching his brows.

"We'll stay here." I didn't even hesitate.

As soon as they all left, we loaded into the SUV and followed the blue blinking dot.

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