Trevor glanced at Connor and his other pack mates, then Maya and Owen. They all seemed as freaked out as he was. And just as confused.
“How can you possibly know all that?” Connorasked, walking over to the bar. “Hannah, do you know why the creatures took Jenna and her friends?”
Hannah tool another long sip of soda, pausing to savor it once again. Trevor had to wonder how long it had been since she’d had a soda. For all he knew, it could have been before she’d been kidnapped.
“They took Jenna to use as bait to lure me into a trap,” Hannah finally said, staring down at the polished surface of the bar. “I imagine that Esme and Isaac were merely collateral damage. Wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. The ghouls were definitely here for Jenna.”
Connor looked like he was about to say something, but Hannah interrupted him. Not by speaking but by reaching behind the bar for another soda and popping it open. The way she’d yet to look at any of them throughout this entire conversation was starting to get a little disconcerting.
“I was held captive by the Umdar—that’s what the ghouls call themselves—for almost five years,” Hannah murmured softly, gaze still transfixed on the bar top. “I tried to escape over and over, but they always found me and dragged me back. I never gave up, though, no matter what they did to me.”
“Five years?” Connor echoed. “Are you saying that you’ve been free since then? That you had gotten away and never tried to let Jenna or me or Mom and Dad know you were okay?”
“It isn’t quite that simple,” Hannah said. “But I suppose from your perspective, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Because when I was finally able to get away, I made the decision to stay.”
Connor didn’t say a word. Instead, he collapsed down on one of the barstools, shoulders slumped, his heart so still that Trevor thought it might have stopped.
Hannah swallowed hard. “When I tried to escape the last time, I almost made it to the surface, but they caught me when I was only a few yards from freedom. They were angrier than I’d ever seen them. I mean really,reallyangry. It was…well…it was bad. They left me there to die of dehydration and shock, and I would have too if the Others hadn’t come for me.”
“The Others?” Trevor asked with a frown, immediately picking up on the significance she’d put on the rather generic term. “Who are they?”
Hannah lifted her head then, but only long enough to glance at Trevor and Connor for a quick second before she looked down at the soda in her hand.
“The Umdar have a very rigid caste society,” Hannah continued quietly. “There’s a lone ruling voice at the top known as the patriarch, and those lower down in the hierarchy are expected to follow the wishes of that voice. The concept of going against the grain, having independent thought or action, simply isn’t supposed to exist for them.”
Trevor thought of the ghouls that had been with Hannah earlier, realizing where this was going. “I’m guessing it does, though?”
Hannah nodded. “A rift had been developing within their society for a long time between the members of the Umdar that could only see the old way and the Others, who want to move to a future where they don’t treat humans as property or use them for food. Seeing me stand up to the abuse and refusing to accept my captivity or accept the orders of those supposedly above me lit a fire. When I was left for dead in that tunnel on the edge of the clan territory, the Others came for me and took me somewhere safe where they nursed me back to health.”
She stopped to search under the bar again, and for a moment, Trevor thought she was looking for another soda. But instead, she came up with a big plastic container of pretzels. Pulling off the top, she took out a large handful.
“It took months for me to heal,” she said between bites. “When I got better, the ghouls who’d saved me were more than ready to take me to the surface and give me my freedom. But by then, my entire perspective on the situation had changed. The Others had taken a chance by saving my life, and while I was grateful for that, there were still other captives being held, not to mention people getting kidnapped off the street all the time. I couldn’tsimply go back to my old life and leave them behind, no more than I could abandon the Others who’d helped me escape and were trying to change their culture. I had become a symbol to them, and I couldn’t let them go forward on their own. Not when I could help.”
Connor shook his head in disbelief. “So you’ve been, what, running a literal underground resistance movement in LA and freeing captives for the past five years? On your own?”
“Not only in LA,” she said, finally looking up to lock eyes with her brother. “And not on my own. There are over thirty members of the resistance—as you call it—helping me, along with a network of people on the surface who help us. We’ve rescued captives as far south as San Diego and as far north as Bakersfield. Our human network then gets the captives to safety and helps them recover as well as helps them come to grips with everything that has happened to them.”
The room was silent except for Connor’s rapid breathing. Looking at his pack mate, Trevor couldn’t tell if it was anger or sorrow that was consuming him.
“Why didn’t you reach out to me for help?” Connor finally said, expression torn and broken, voice accusing. “Ten frigging years, Hannah. You had all these strangers helping you, but you couldn’t come to me for help?”
Hannah winced at the pain in her brother’s words, her hazel eyes filling with a pain equal to that of her brother. “Honestly, I didn’t think you’d come.”
“What? Why would you ever think that?” This time, it was Connor’s turn to look like he’d been punched in the gut. “You’re my sister!”
“I know.” She bit her lip, chewing on it for a moment. “After I made the decision to stay, the first thing I did was go home to see you and Jenna and our parents. No one was home, so I used the key that Dad always kept in that fake rock in the flower bed in front of the house.”
Trevor didn’t know much about Connor’s life in LA, but he knew that four years after Hannah’s disappearance, his friend had joined the LAPD, gone through his werewolf change, and then moved to Dallas to join the SWAT pack.
“I found our parents’ divorce paperwork on Mom’s desk in the home office,” Hannah continued in a soft voice. “Along with a handwritten journal where she wrote about Dad living in a condo on the far side of the city, you transferring from the LAPD to the Dallas SWAT team, and Jenna still spending hours in therapy after trying to convince everyone that monsters were real. Mom didn’t come out and say it, but she pretty much called Jenna a nut job, and I got the feeling from her journal that everyone else agreed with her. After reading all that, asking for help from anyone didn’t seem like a good idea.”
If Connor looked gut-punched before, now he looked like he’d been eviscerated. Hale, Mike, and Davina tried to keep their expressions carefully blank but failed. As for Madeleine, she looked like she’d rather be anywhere than there. Trevor couldn’t blame her.
“I can understand why you didn’t bother contacting the rest of us, but why didn’t you ever go talk to Jenna?” Connor asked, voice full of confusion. “If you read the journal, then you had to know how hard your abduction was on her.”
“I wanted to see her and tell her everything more than you can imagine,” Hannah said. “But at that point, I’d already made the decision to keep fighting with the Others, and I knew that if I told Jenna everything, she’d want to help, too, and I couldn’t put her at risk. So I made the conscious choice to walk away from her and everyone else. I’ve found myself reconsidering that decision a hundred times over the past five years, but with all the danger I’ve been in, I can’t honestly say I would have done anything differently. I would never want her to be in the hands of the Umdar like I was.”
No one said anything. After that painful confession, Trevor realized that Hannah had been living under the same kind of crushing guilt as Connor. They’d both made decisions in their lives that had a drastic effect on those they loved.
