Page 106 of Haunted Prey

“Cassidy?”

No response. I knocked again softly then dared to try the doorknob. Her room wasn’t locked. I opened the door a crack and found the room empty.

“She has to be here, her car is parked outside the garage,” Emery said behind me.

We looked at each other and, without a word, moved for the stairs.

The church was still dark even with the dim light breaking through the windows. The sunlight which cut through the window at the back made a long strip of red light cast acrossthe aisleway. We walked down, careful of where we stepped until Emery shoved the door to the garden open, blinding the church in white light.

“Can’t think of where else she might be,” Emery said as we stepped outside and walked toward the fountain.

We stood by the gate of the garden, searching across the graveyard. Then Emery pointed to movement just beyond a crooked willow tree.

“Looks like her there,” he said. “You want me to come with you?”

“I think I’ll talk to her alone this time if that’s okay.”

“I’ll be right here waiting.”

I turned for the graveyard and made my way toward the figure crouching beyond the willow. Clouds rolled above, some dark, but they didn’t give the threat of rain. Grass and dead leaves crunched under my feet as Cassidy came closer into view.

She was kneeling down on a plot of land with several colorful plants spread over the ground, some with a velvet-like texture. It seemed way too late to be planting anything, but, I found as I got closer, she wasn’t gardening at all, she was painting. A canvas laid out on the ground before her with bottles of paint next to it.

I stopped just a few feet away, watching. She didn’t wear her police uniform today. Just some black cargo pants and a gray T-shirt. With her back to me, I could just make out the colors of red, white, and black as she took her brush and made aggressive strokes.

“What do you want?” she asked without looking at me.

I didn’t ask how she knew I was there. Like Emery, they all had an inhuman ability to sense things others couldn’t.

“I was hoping I could talk to you,” I said quietly.

“About what?”

“I’ve been working on my thesis for school. It started off as a paper on Emery, and how we interacted after everythinghappened. But it’s grown into something much bigger. About the victims of Project Redbird and the warehouse.”

She didn’t respond as she continued to paint.

“I’ve gotten interviews with the others. I was hoping to get the same from you.”

She made a few more strokes, then put her brush down. I braced myself for her rejection, but was surprised when she wiped her hands on her pants and turned my way.

Her expression might have made anyone else flinch, but I forced myself to hold her gaze. Her jaw clenched as she assessed me, a sneer forming on her face. Then it slipped away.

“Alright.” She sat with her knees up, her elbows resting on top.

“Alright?”

“You wanna ask me what it was like? Go right ahead.”

I tried to hide my look of surprise as I took a seat there, crossing my legs and setting the laptop on my lap. “Can you tell me about your childhood leading up to the experiments and what happened after?”

She sat very still, only her one hand clenching into a fist. “I lived with my grandma at a young age. My mother had left me, and my father was in prison. Grandma died when I was seven. I went into foster care. No one picked me up until age nine. That’s when Martel took me.”

I tried not to react as I typed down her words. “How long were you in the warehouse?”

“Five years,” she began, her voice cold. “They told me I was making progress with the drugs. I was the fastest at solving their puzzles, acing their tests. They said I showed promise. Then they’d throw me into a think tank for hours, watching how it affected me.

“They’d dunk me in ice-cold water until I was on the verge of drowning, then force me to complete another puzzle—fasterevery time. They’d stab a large needle into my back until my spine felt like it was on fire and make me memorize a dozen equations. If I didn’t answer fast enough or got one wrong, I’d be shocked. It was all because they wanted the perfect soldier—one who could think up an escape plan or a strategy even while being tortured. Someone who could endure any pain and still get out.”

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