It’s been nearly thirty-six hours since anyone heard from Tyler. It’s almost as if he fell off the face of the earth. He loves being here. He loves teaching and training. As far as I knew, he wasn’t planning to return to his territory full-time until this group graduated and Marty and Darwin were comfortable as trainers on their own.
Something happened. I’m sure of it.
I close my eyes, focusing on my heart. It feels so empty without him here. “Where are you?” I whisper.
I decide to check in with Anders. Yesterday, he refused to speak to me and told me to return to training. Today, I won’t let him push me away. With determination, I rap my fist against his office door.
He doesn’t answer. No, he won’t keep me out of this. I want to know where Shadow is. Does this have something to do with me? Did he find out?
I slam my fist against the door harder this time. “Anders!” I scream.
“He’s not here, Jessica. He’s at the mansion talking to your father,” Chris says from behind me. I spin around to face him and see plainly the worry all over his face.
“Did he say when he would return?” I ask, hoping maybe he knows what happened to Tyler. His expression doesn’t change. Something is wrong, and he knows it. My heart sinks.
“Why don’t you come with me so we can talk in my office?”
I stand there, my limbs numb, and icy fear grips me around my heart.
“Please tell me he’s okay,” I whisper, trying hard not to cry before I even know the truth. Chris wraps an arm around my shoulder and leads me down the hall. His office is much smaller than Anders’s—far fewer books. He probably doesn’t spend as much time here.
My legs feel heavy, yet somehow, I manage to walk over to the chair in front of Chris’s desk. I remove my fake glasses and hat and rub at my face. Please don’t be bad news. Please don’t be bad news. I repeat it in my mind over and over.
“When was the last time you saw Shadow?” he asks.
“The day before my birthday. I last heard from him about noon the day of. He left me a message after he got out of court to let me know that Peaches was a free woman, and he would be at the manor for dinner with all of us.” Why is he prolonging this? Just get it over with. “Just tell me what’s wrong, or I’ll get it out of your head my way.”
“There’s nothing to get, little one. I was just hoping you could give me a little more information. I’m worried about him, too.”
Unshed tears burn behind my lids. “I have a bad feeling about this,” I tell Chris, my voice unsteady and heavy with emotion. Maybe I shouldn’t have said what I did then, but it was too late when it all came tumbling out of my big mouth.“I know something is wrong because I can’t feel him anymore.” I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the way, something between Tyler and me changed. My feelings grew quietly, wrapping around me before I realized it. An invisible thread binds us now. My heart feels full when he’s close and unbearably empty when he’s not. Right now, it feels like my soul is hollow, and every breath hurts.
My walls crumble, and I fall apart.
Chris wants to call Xavier to take me home for the rest of the day, but I refuse his offer. Numb with grief, I don’t bother to pick up my hat or glasses. I just don’t care anymore. Chris insists that I stay in my dorm room for the rest of the day, but stubbornly, I refuse to do that, too.
On autopilot, I head to the computer lab. Darwin has a way of making me laugh, so maybe he could knock me out of my funk or at least keep my mind from worrying over Tyler’s disappearance.
I enter Darwin’s computer lab and find him at his desk behind his computer screen, mumbling and swearing to himself. He doesn’t look up to see who came into the room. I walk over, letting the thump of my footfalls echo so he knows I’m heading toward him.
I peer over his shoulder at the screen. A mass of code runs across the monitor, and then a red X appears with a loud buzzing sound. Darwin swears again and runs both hands through his hair, pulling on it in frustration.
He yells another swear word before banging on the keyboard. The screen flickers, and the coding runs again. Not long after, another X flashes, and loud buzzing fills the silence of the room again.
My insides pulse, and my hands tingle. A magnetic pull from the center of my core draws me closer to Darwin. I reach out and place a hand on his shoulder. He yelps in surprise.
A bright orb of yellow-white energy shoots from my chest and hits Darwin in his back.
Spinning around to face me, he screams in pain. He raises shaky hands up to his face. He claws at the flesh on his cheeks. Engraved letters and numbers begin to flash and move in a horizontal pattern through his skin, mimicking the computer coding.
I blink twice. Am I really seeing this?
Darwin screams again, thrashing in his chair, pulling at his hair and his clothing, scratching at his face. His skin turns translucent, and a warm glow emanates around him.
I rub my face. I must be hallucinating. He looks like... his body is now the computer screen. A whooshing sound fills the air and diverts my attention to the monitor on the desk. A vortex opens in the center, and Darwin’s body starts to flash from solid to translucent, pixelating into numbers and letters before it sweeps away into the vortex.
I scream in horror as the computer screen returns to normal. I rub my eyes and scream for Darwin again, pressing my hand against the cool glass of the monitor. This has to be a nightmare; this isn’t really happening. This just didn’t happen.
The door bangs open, and Squirrel runs inside the room, ready for a fight. Without warning, another orb of yellow-white light shoots out of me and rams straight into Squirrel’s chest, slamming him into the wall behind him.
