Chapter 14
Simon listens to the phone ring again and again before it stops and a voice answers it but it is obviously not Janice, “Hello?”
“Hello? Simon?”
“Ricky?”
“Yea it’s me. I am at the office and found Janice’s phone just now outside the back door. Simon, is Jarred and Jock with you?” Ricky asks, her voice a bit shaky.
“Yes they are, we are going to try and find the memory thief. We are waiting for Janice and Elizabeth but they haven’t shown up. Now I know why Janice isn’t picking up her phone, she dropped it at the office while there doing whatever it is she had to do this morning,” Simon tells Ricky.
“I saw Elizabeth leaving the coffee shop with Zane last night, heading back to her place. So I doubt she will be there with you since she is with him,” Ricky tells him. “And Janice isn’t here so she might be on her way to you now but Simon…” She pauses and starts to cry, “Simon, Mr. Stephens is dead. Trey found him this morning dead in his chair in his office.”
“What….he’s…dead?” Simon blinks several times and nearly drops his phone at the devastating news.
Jock hangs up after his third call to one of the families and looks at Simon, shock on his face as he stands up, “Who is dead, Simon?”
Jarred walks back inside and hears what Jock says, quickly looking over at Simon, concern written all over his face as he quickly walks over to his friend. “Dead?”’
Ricky sobs into the phone, unable to talk an longer. Suddenly the phone moves and another voice is on his ear, “Simon? It’s Trey. I have his phone and we have charged it. There is a message typed into it for you all. He must have been dying when he typed it in, the keys are covered in his blood. He simply said Zane, shapeshifter, Elizabeth, Janice, and danger. Do you know what any of that means?”
“No, but I can figure it out. Thanks, Trey. We will be back to the office as soon as we can,” Simon says, saying the words over and over again in his head so he doesn’t forget them before he hangs up. Once the phone is away from his ear, he recites, “Zane, shapeshifter, Elizabeth, Janice, danger.”
Jock raises an eyebrow, “I guess we won’t need all of this stuff if we know it is in fact Zane.”
“Shapeshifter? I thought they were only myths but it seems that we have one on our hands and he or she has some strong magic that can wipe away memories. Even if we did see into those lost memories, we would never have found them because the people we would have seen don’t even exist.” Jarred shakes his head as he joins his friends, “Now what was this about someone being dead?”
Simon looks from Jock to Jarred then to the floor, “Trey found Mr. Stephens in his office. He…he has been murdered.”
Jarred sucks in a breath while Jock voices his disbelief. “No…no…no….no.”
“We have to find Elizabeth and Janice,” Simon says, his voice rough. “We need to save them before we find their bodies and before Zane, or whoever that shapeshifter really is, gets away again.”
“But where do we look?”
Jarred walks over to the table and looks down at the paper work, reading where they have found the bodies, seeing if there is any connection between them. He looks at Jock and Simon as the two join them and they all begin to scavenger the files for any leads on where Zane might take the girls. Jock pulls out a map of London that he always has on hand and unrolls it, placing it on the table.
They pinpoint and make a star of every place they had found the bodies but nothing seemed to pop out at them as a place Zane would go. Simon grows frustrated and walks away from the table before he does something he will regret like rip up the map. Jock and Jarred step back as well but not because they are mad but because they wish to look at the map from another angel.
“None of this make sense. Nothing points to one place so how are we going to find where they are without the shapeshifter demon’s help?” Simon yells, slamming his fists on the other table and making the computer jump.
“Hey, Simon, be careful you don’t break any of that stuff,” Jock warns him, walking over to try and calm his friend and leaving Jarred staring at the map.
Jarred doesn’t look over at the two while he studies the map. He turns his head from one side to the other as he stares at the dots, willing them to point to where the girls would most likely be held by the shapeshifter. He snaps his fingers after a moment and shakes his head, “Why didn’t we see it before? He is at the old train station!”
Jock and Simon look over and rush back to his side to look at the map, finally seeing the dots forming an arrow pointing directly at the train station that has been closed for several years because of the new station opening down the road from the old one. Without hesitation, they rush over to Jarred’s car, Simon only stopping to open the doors before he hops into the back seat.
“Call for back up, both of you,” Jarred yells over his car screaming out of the warehouse and onto the road leading away from the warehouses and towards the train station.