Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

back.
     
    Ever since his mom disappeared, everything had been all mixed up.
    He heard a car coming behind him and shifted to the side of the road.
     
    He’d been so scared. Mad at her, too. Not that it was her fault, really.
     
    He shuffled along. The car behind him was poking along like the driver was afraid to pass. Which was stupid, because there were no cars and nobody coming the other way. Nick stepped onto the grass and gravel anyway because if he actually got hit by a car, he would really be in trouble.
     
    The engine rumbled loud and close. Too close. Maybe the driver was lost. Maybe he wanted to ask for directions. Maybe he was a jerk who liked to scare kids with his car.
     
    Nick started to turn— to offer help? to flip him the finger?— and the world exploded in a blast of red light.
     
    And then nothing.
     
    *
     
    Regina was terrified. “You have to find him,” she said fiercely. Her boy. Her baby. “You find him now.”
     
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    Her voice rose on the last word, practically a shriek, and the customers still in the dining room strained their necks, eavesdropping on the action in the kitchen, looking at her like she was crazy. She didn’t care about any of them. She didn’t care about anything but Nick, gone.
    Nick, kidnapped. Nick, lost and needing his mommy.
     
    “We’re going to do everything we can,” Caleb said, competent and calm, and despair stabbed her, a sharp, deep pain in her belly.
     
    Dylan wasn’t calm. His black eyes were hot and dangerous. He looked ready to murder somebody.
     
    Thank God for Dylan.
     
    She grasped his arm. “You have to find him. You have to get him.
    Before the tide comes in.”
     
    Caleb rubbed his jaw. “Regina, we don’t know he’s in those caves.”
     
    “Where else would they take him?”
     
    “Who would take him?” Antonia demanded. “Boy took off, that’s all.”
     
    “Possibly.” Caleb looked at Dylan. “Did you get anything upstairs?”
     
    Dylan shook his head. “No sign.”
     
    “When did you last see him?” Caleb asked Regina.
     
    “An hour ago. An hour and a half?” She twisted her hands together in her apron. Why didn’t he do something? Why didn’t they go find him?
    “Before dinner anyway.”
     
    “After the ferry left, then,” Caleb said.
     
    “I guess. Does it matter?”
     
    “It increases the chance he’s still on the island.”
     
    “Of course he’s on the island,” Antonia said.
     
    215
    “Did he say anything to you about going out?” Caleb asked Regina.
    “To a friend’s house maybe.”
     
    “He’s not at the Trujillos’. I called first thing. He’s not anywhere.”
     
    “He’s sulking,” Antonia said. “He’ll come back when he feels like it.”
     
    “Why ‘sulking’?” Caleb asked.
     
    Guilt swamped Regina. Nick was upset because of her. Because she’d left him. First she’d gotten herself kidnapped and then she’d gone off on the boat to have sex, leaving her traumatized eight-year-old behind. She was a terrible, terrible mother.
     
    “He . . . I . . .”
     
    “His mood doesn’t matter,” Dylan said.
     
    “Unless he ran away,” Caleb pointed out. “Without proof of an abduction—”
     
    “He does not need to have been abducted to be in danger,” Dylan said flatly. “Once outside the ward’s protection, he is vulnerable.”
     
    Oh, God, Regina thought. She curled her hands protectively over her stomach.
     
    “Vulnerable to what?” Antonia demanded. “This is World’s End, not New York City.”
     
    Fear clawed Regina’s throat. Her son hadn’t been taken by sexual predators. He’d been kidnapped by demons.
     
    She swallowed hard. “Why? You said he wasn’t in danger.”
     
    Dylan’s face was bleak. “He should not have been. He has no value to them.”
     
    That made it worse. If he had no value, they could kill him.
     
    “Can’t you put out a . . . What do they call it? An Amber Alert?”
    Regina asked Caleb.
     
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    “As soon as we have any indication he was abducted, I’ll call the Knox County sheriff,” he promised. “Get him in the database. But we need to search the apartment first, talk to the neighbors. Sometimes kids hide. Can you describe what he was wearing?”
     
    “Jeans. A T-shirt. Blue? Oh, we’re wasting time,” she said in an agony of worry. “The tide . . . He’s so little.”
     
    “I’ll go now,” Dylan said.
     
    Regina’s stomach was burning. Raw. She reached for her apron strings.