"We're on our way. Just hang tight."
"Make sure Danny is safe, Hank. This is all about him."
"He's safe, Kaito. I promise."
"Is everyone else safe?"
"We're all good, Kaito. You're the only one missing."
"Even Santos?"
"Even Santos."
I rubbed at my eyes, wiping the tears away. "Okay, get here as soon as you can. I don't know if we were followed or not. And be careful. This could be a trap."
I still couldn't be positive it wasn't.
I kept the phone gripped tightly in my hand as I stretched out on the bed and laid my head on the pillow. At this point, I didn't care if I got bed bugs or something. What little energy I'd had was waning quickly.
"How long have I been gone, Hank?"
"You don't know?" Pure incredibility filled his voice.
I frowned. "Things are a little…fuzzy."
"Five days, Kaito. You've been missing five days."
Strangely enough, I hadn't been gone as long as I thought I had.
"It felt like a million years."
It had been a million years, and I felt every second of them.
"They gave me some sort of drug, Hank. He called it tetrodotoxin."
"Isn't that made from puffer fish?"
"Yeah." I shuddered in remembrance. "It keeps you from being able to move, but it doesn't stop you from feeling anything." I had felt it all. "He wants Danny bad."
"Does he know about the rest of you?" Hank asked.
"He knows we're friends." I wasn't going to say more over an open line or in case there were recording devices in the room. If there were cameras in here, they wouldn't see anything except an exhausted man calling his friends to come get him.
"Ian wants to know why you stopped talking to him."
I smiled, but it was filled with sadness. "I couldn't. The things they did…I think something is wrong. I don't feel…normal." Whatever normal was for a shifter.
"You can't feel your cat?"
How to answer that?
"It's there, but I feel like I'm sleeping or walking through fog."
Hank whispered something too low for me to hear, but then he spoke louder, "Kaito, I'm having Ian call Santos and ask him if he knows what we can do, okay?"
"Thank you." I wasn't sure the jungle shaman could do anything, but I'd take any help I could get.
"What did they do to you, Kaito?"
