1
Classical music filtered through the dark, slowly pulling her to consciousness. Mozart’s Molto Allegro, if she wasn’t mistaken. She’d studied violin and music theory all through school and during her first two years at college. Even had stints with summer orchestras all over the Midwest. The word virtuoso had been bantered about when her instructors thought she wasn’t listening.
That was before the drugs. Now she played on the streets to earn enough money to buy food and support her habit.
Cold. She was unbearably cold. Not the kind where you wanted to turn up the thermostat or find another sweater to take the edge off. This was the naked-in-an-ice-storm kind that settled through to her bones. She was naked. Where were her clothes? Did some other homeless person steal them?
She tried to lift her arms.
Nothing moved. Not even a finger.
Why couldn’t she move? Through the fuzziness in her head she tried to open her eyes. As if they were made of cement, slowly they inched open just a slit. She closed them again, took a breath and concentrated, forcing them to open more.
Everything was a hazy, muted shade of grey. Except the lights above her. Painful, blinding bright in her eyes. A shiver ran through her. They looked like something from an old black and white spy movie. She shifted her gaze away, back to the shadows beyond their glaring beams. She tried to move her head to the side. Her neck muscles contracted, but her head stayed locked in place, facing the ceiling.
Her mind cleared a little more. She swallowed the anxiety crawling over her body.
She was lying on a hard surface. Not her usual spot on the hard ground of the park or the cement of an underpass below the interstate. This was metal, like a table or a counter.
With more effort she was able to wiggle her fingers and move her hands, but only slightly. Something firm, but with a little give held her head, arms—she tried to shift her lower extremities without any success—and her legs in place. Leather straps?
As wakefulness swept in like a tsunami, she realized her body was strapped in place and her left arm throbbed, like something was stuck in it.
Her heartrate doubled. Feared shot through her.
Avoiding the bright lights, she shot her now-focused gaze from the right to the left and back again. The room looked like a sterile lab or hospital room. Her mind raced with questions.
Where the hell was she? How had she gotten here? What were they going to do to her? Who had stripped her and strapped her here? Had she been in an accident?
“Ah, I see your little nap is over,” the deep, slightly familiar voice said somewhere above her head. “GHB is such a lovely drug. Too little and you put up a fight. Too much and…well, you die much too quickly. But just the right amount and like Goldilocks, you go to sleep without any fuss. Now we can begin.”
Begin what? She wanted to ask, wanted to scream, but realized her mouth was sealed with something. Duct tape?
Panic set in. This was not a hospital. She’d not been in an accident. He—whoever he was—had drugged her and brought her to this…this place.
“It’s okay,” the voice whispered, hot air breezing beside her ear as he spoke. “You’re finally going to fulfill your destiny.”
Metal rattled beside her as he moved something into her line of site. A smaller metal table with an odd-shaped opaque plastic bag lying on it sat nearby. Attached to it was a tubing made of the same odd plastic. She adjusted her gaze and saw dark red fluid coming out of a tube attached to a needle in her left arm, which was stretched out to her side.
She’d sold her plasma a few times when she was desperate for cash, so knew exactly what was happening. He was taking her blood!
“The human body has between four and a half and five and a half liters of blood.”
She focused on the side table where four more bags lay in a neat row.
Oh God!
2
Detective Aaron Jeffers’ favorite day of the week was Wednesdays.
Mondays sucked. Not like it did for regular nine-to-five workers. No, Mondays held a special suckiness when you were a homicide detective. If he worked the weekend, he spent Monday bringing the higher-ups up to date on any case he caught over the weekend, explaining why he hadn’t closed it, and all the other fun paper-work parts of the job. If he was lucky