Soulless The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,32

a swiss melt for a memory too?”

Kat had the rarest of expressions cross her face, irritation, as she shot me a look, as though she were asking permission before speaking in front of him. I nodded at her. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s perfectly healthy, his brain is fine, but the memory’s just gone, like it never existed.”

“Same old story.” Reed pulled his hand back and the elevator door started to close. “See you ladies down the road. Oh, and Sienna? You smell like whiskey. Just FYI.”

The elevator doors closed before I could snap back a reply. I looked to Kat, who was slightly flushed. “Of course I smell like whiskey,” I said. “I’ve been drinking whiskey.” Kat shrugged as I pushed the elevator button to call another one. “Ass,” I said, lowering my voice.

“Who was he?” Kat waited until we were walking across the parking lot to ask.

“Him?” I chucked a thumb toward the hospital building. “When Zack and Kurt came to my house for the first time, they ended up drawing guns—”

“What?” She looked at me with incredulity. “Really?”

“Really. I kinda got into a scuffle with them first. Anyway, I ended up running when Kurt started shooting, and Reed was waiting outside and offered me an escape route, so I took him up on it.”

“They shot at you?” She stopped and grabbed me by the arm. I felt the strength in her grip; it wasn’t quite as much as I could bring to bear, but the girl was no slouch. “With real bullets?”

“Tranquilizer darts. But I didn’t know that until later.”

“So who is he?” She stared at me evenly, and had the slightest smile. “He’s kinda cute, you know.”

“I had noticed that, yes.” I pulled my arm gently from her grasp. “And if he’d ever stick around for more than five minutes without disappearing, that might matter.”

“Oooh,” she said in a somewhat high and floating voice. “A man of mystery?”

“The very definition of it.” I opened the passenger door to the SUV and climbed in, tossing a glance back to confirm Scott was still snoring softly in the back, head against the window and mouth open wide. “I bet you could do with a little bit more of that in your life right about now.”

“Huh?” She cocked her head at me, question written on her face, then swiveled to look when I indicated the backseat. She saw Scott, shook her head and stuck the key in the ignition. “So what did he tell you?”

“Not much. Said he’d interviewed the victims out in Wyoming and South Dakota, that they had the same memory gap as the guy in Owatonna.” I leaned back against the headrest. “So now we’ve got four people who got the holy hell beat out of them and they don’t remember a thing about it. We’ve got no idea where they’re going and no clue who’s doing it – except...” I frowned.

“What?” She was at rapt attention, looking at me.

“Reed confirmed one thing.” I chewed my lip. “He said a meta was definitely causing the memory loss – and I think he knew which kind of meta it was.”

Kat looked at me blankly. “So what kind of meta causes memory loss when they attack you?”

I looked out into the black night, and I racked my brain for something, anything, I’d learned in my studies, anything at all about metas that could make memories disappear. Without that clue, we were without anything to do or any lead to investigate until the next call came in. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

Chapter 9

Someone Else

The heat was near unbearable. Somehow I’d done it again, scored the crappiest possible car I could get my hands on. I’d stopped in some half-assed town called Ellsworth just over the Wisconsin line and stolen an old Dodge that was sitting overnight in a grocery store parking lot. The reeferhead’s Honda had started making gawdawful grinding noises in southern Minnesota. I tried to make it last, filled it up in Red Wing, but no, it started going into catastrophic failure mode after I crossed the river. This is what happens when you have to choose between buying weed and performing regularly scheduled maintenance, I suppose.

I thought maybe I’d get lucky this time, but I wasn’t. The Dodge was older and the air conditioner didn’t work, which might explain why it was left in a parking lot. It was after midnight, and still pretty damned stifling out. I wished for the millionth time