didn't know where you were. She's up here."
Harry ground off a good layer or two of enamel as the pair of them leaped up the seemingly endless stairs, one distracted part of her mind finding it ironic that now, of all times, she should be thankful for her height and long legs. "What happened?" she managed to get out as they crested the stairs, and Terry pointed to the left.
He cast her a worried look, but said nothing. Derek almost collided with her as he burst out of a room. "In here! Harry, you have to do something! The bastard . . . he . . . he . . . !"
"I'll kill whoever it is," she ground out, her blood running icy at the thought of whatever atrocity had occurred. She shoved Derek aside and entered the room, her breath ragged, her heart about ready to leap from her chest. She'd heard the phrase "seeing red" before, but had never thought it could be taken as literal. For a few seconds, though, she swore everything in the room had an ugly red tint to it. It was obviously a bedroom; a quick glance took in the usual occasional chairs, a large bureau with matching wardrobe, and a big bed swathed in some sort of filmy draperies that fluttered in the breeze drifting in through open French doors. Her attention narrowed to the bed as she dashed to it, immediately taking into her arms one of the two huddled, sobbing figures there.
Dimly, she was aware that there was another person in the room, but his identity faded to insignificance. "It's all right, Cyndi. I'm here now," she said, her fury rising as the younger woman sobbed onto her shoulder. "You'll be OK. We'll make whoever did this pay."
"He's evil! He's horrible!" Cyndi pulled back, tears spilling over already red and bloodshot eyes. She was naked, a sheet clutched to her bare breasts, her face unmarked but blotchy from the tears. There were some nasty-looking raw marks on her neck and chest, but it was the petulant purse of her lips that suddenly chimed a warning bell in Harry's brain.
"What happened? Did someone attack you?"
Cyndi drew in a long, trembling breath and glanced over Harry's shoulder. "Yes. Well . . . more or less. He dumped me, Harry. Dumped me!"
Harry blinked for a few seconds. "He what?"
"Dumped me, cruelly and . . . and . . . viciously. I came up to his room, and I thought we were going to hook up, and everything was going along very nicely, and before we could get down to, you know, really doing it, he told me to leave. Just like that!"
Harry passed a shaking hand over her eyes. Slowly, her heart rate dropped back to reasonable levels "So you weren't attacked?"
"Verbally I was. He told me that he didn't want to have sex with me, and that I should leave because he wanted to sleep." Cyndi gestured at the bed. "If it's not verbal abuse to entice someone to your bed, and get them naked, and then kiss them all over before telling them to leave, I don't know what is!"
"He enticed you?"
"Yes! Not so much in words, but he looked at me several times tonight, and a woman knows what that look means," Cyndi said with a peculiar lofty coyness. "He wanted me. So I came up here, and then everything was really nice until he went totally crazy and told me to leave. That's just not right, Harry. It's traumatizing! You have no idea how traumatizing it is to have fabulous sex and then be told to leave because someone wants to sleep. I'm not a slut! I should sleep here, too!"
Harry took a deep, deep breath to keep from strangling the young, self-centered girl in front of her, reminding herself that her whole purpose in being there was to watch over the kids and see that they came to no harm. Her eyes lit on the red marks on Cyndi's chest, and a little spurt of anger burned in her stomach.
She turned, moving aside the hovering forms of Terry and Derek. Amy had moved to cling to the latter, her eyes huge and wary. A man leaned drunkenly against the wall, dressed only in a pair of obviously hastily donned pants, the waistband undone, his face slack and devoid of emotion as he watched her walk toward him. He was a little taller than she was, obviously of Greek