Taken (Ava Delaney #4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

and
make sure.”
    “Good. If Eddie
sold it to her, then he might have found out why she wanted it.” I
was certain of that. He hadn’t wanted me looking at the book
without his permission, so I highly doubted he had sold it
willingly, unless he knew he was getting something out of it.
    “Why would she
tell that man anything if she couldn’t tell her own Circle?” Esther
asked.
    “You don’t
understand. He can get the truth out of anyone.” I knew that better
than anybody else.
    Esther shook
her head. “We were like sisters. A Circle is a family. Nobody gets
left behind.” Her chin trembled. “I should have been left
behind.”
    Carl squeezed
Esther’s hand, a gesture of comfort that hadn’t even occurred to
me. I had no idea how to help people, even though I felt their
emotions more than I should. What use was empathy if I didn’t even
recognize how to make the pain go away?
    “Illeana made a
choice,” Carl said firmly. “Don’t try to take that away from her.
She did what she did because she considered you family. You have to
see that. What Ava meant was that Eddie uses magic against people.
He makes them talk, and they don’t even realise they’re doing
it.”
    She leaned
against him for half a second while I sat frozen with awkwardness.
Peter was still rummaging amongst the paperwork, apparently
oblivious.
    Esther picked
up another piece of paper. “This looks like a phone number. I’ll
add it to the list.”
    The list was
any kind of random numbers or letterings that we thought might mean
something. We spent the next few minutes trying to come up with
ideas of how to break the codes.
    “Maybe Callista
would have some idea. Some clue,” I said, stretching. My back was
killing me from hunching over scraps of paper.
    Peter’s glass
dropped to the floor, where it cracked into jagged edged chunks. He
lifted a piece of paper, his hands trembling visibly. “This… this
is it. That night. That… thing . This is it.”
    He thrust the
paper toward me, and I saw it was a sketch of a creature, a
monstrous-looking thing with scaled skin. If it had been in colour,
it would probably have been green.
    “This is the
thing that took your son?” I asked. It didn’t look real.
    Esther snatched
the page out of my hands. “I’ve never seen anything like this
before, Peter.”
    “But someone
else did. Someone else saw what I saw, because I sure as hell
didn’t draw that. She had to have spoken to someone. Maybe someone
who knew something.” Then his voice faltered. “You said she was
going after the slave markets. My son… was taken to the slave
markets.” He looked at me, aghast. “This is what he was talking
about when he said my son went to hell.”
    “No,” I said.
“He was bullshitting us, Peter. He had to be.”
    “He’s a slave,”
Peter whispered.
    “We don’t know
that,” Esther said. “We don’t know what this means. I mean, you’re
human. His mother’s family was human. What would they want with
him?”
    Most of the
instances of the market that I had heard about involved
half-blooded children. Part human, part… something else. But there
were others, like Eloise. She had been human, a special human, but
still, just human. So human children had been taken, too. What was
different about Peter’s son? Could he be alive? Could he be trapped
somewhere, tortured and abused? Could he have become as evil as the
things that had taken him?
    Peter left, and
I couldn’t stop him. He was in his own space, guarded against
everything else in the world. That hand-drawn image had gotten
under his skin, pulling out memories he would have as soon locked
away for eternity.
    Carl and Esther
quickly sorted through the rest of the stuff, but I couldn’t
concentrate, so I focused on cleaning up the mess Peter had made
and comforting myself with numbers. I had to come up with
something, and soon. Illeana had gotten further than I did. But
how? Who had she found to talk to her? How had she known where