CHAPTER SIX

'I'm telling you, Riles, my Pilates instructor would be perfect,' Blaire says as I close the door to her apartment and dump my bag, notebook still in hand. The leather is warm on my palm.

They both look at me and smile in greeting before Riley immediately rolls her eyes at Blaire and she swallows a mouthful of caramel and chocolate slice.

'So, why don't you date him?' she asks, pointing her fork at Blaire who just stares back, clearly having nothing to say to that.

'I met someone today,' I interrupt. They both clasp their attention on me, waiting for me to go on. 'A librarian—'

'Hayes isn't librarian-looking enough for you?' Riley asks.

Blaire laughs until she looks properly at me. Then she tilts her head.

'Wouldn't it be a bit weird for one of us to start dating one of the boys?' she asks tentatively.

A warmth creeps up my chest and I clear my throat, hoping my skin doesn't show too much pink.

'He's a librarian,' I repeat, looking pointedly at them, 'and old enough to be my grandfather.'

'Please tell me he's not married,' Riley says seriously. 'You've been in that sort of train wreck before. I'll kill him if he's married.'

Blaire glances at Riley as I shake my head, desperately trying not to remember the crushing revelation. The horrible cliché of his wife coming home early from work to find me in his bedroom. Putting my bra back on in what turned out to be their bedroom. I still don't know what hurt worse, the way he looked at her – so full of regret, dismissing me without a second thought – or the way she looked at me.

I bite down on the anger that still comes when I think of him, of the deception of both of us, and that, after close to a year of seeing each other, I was still painted as the one in the wrong.

'Riles,' Blaire says, her voice full of knowing, 'no one makes that mistake twice.' She puts her fork into her piece of slice. 'And I think you missed the bit about him being old? Like old old.'

'He was so … I don't know,' I say, deciding to ignore the married comments altogether and giving them a quick rundown of my visit to the library.

'Look at this.' I place the notebook on the table they sit at, shoving the cakes out of the way. 'He seemed quite happy that I would be reading it. I think … he may have even written it.'

They both look at the old brown leather and then back to me. Riley narrows her eyes at me and I take a deep breath, forcing myself to voice my suspicions. I know they won't let me walk away from facing my demons.

'I think there's a link between my mum and these cases,' I say quietly. 'The fragments I remember … I just kept hitting brick wall after brick wall. And if it wasn't a wall, it was literally nothing. Eventually, I stopped looking to save my sanity.' Lead fills my stomach at the truth uttered out loud.

'But Nico's experience, the way he described it … there has to be a connection, an answer. I need to know what happened to her and I think finding Sofia will take me there.' I jab a finger on the notebook. 'This will help me.'

The frayed bits of hope the librarian summoned float in my mind. Untethered to each other, but gathering.

•

'This is incredible,' Phoenix says, 'but surely none of it's real.'

'I wouldn't have thought so a few weeks ago,' I say, 'but he clearly wanted me to have it. He effectively gave it to me. And you can't deny the similarities between the stories in this book and Nico's. Not to mention all those files. And my mum,' I say.

The journal is split into two sections. The first contains entry after entry that paint a picture of someone trying to puzzle together or record a number of mysterious happenings. It's not unlike what I would do to keep track of all the anecdotes and snatches of a story picked up along the way. I am mildly surprised that this book refers to the ‘Whispers', the same as Nico did, but then most urban myths are based on some elements of truth, and the similarity doesn't end there. These Whispers track and hunt people, although it's unclear to what end, or who controls them.

The book has references to the impact on vision and headaches but it doesn't address why this is. As if this should be understood by the reader, but I am still at a loss. Some entries refer to strange noises heard outside windows before houses are burnt to the ground, their occupants butchered, and animal-like beings that steal people in the dead of night. One of them details an abduction that caused a great stir of excitement amongst the Whispers, only for it to end in a scream of disappointment that shook the world. As if they thought they were about to nab a prize, but the victim was not who they expected.

There are hastily drawn maps I don't inspect just yet, my mind too full to take in the detail, and notes in the margins with all manner of questions that don't appear to have answers. Phoenix pulls out a loose page that looks newer than the others, but it's written in the same hand.

I'm sorry there isn't more.

I shudder at the echo of the librarian's last words to me and close the book.

'You don't want to finish reading it?' Phoenix asks.

'Yes, but not tonight. It's making my head hurt and there are too many reminders …'

Phoenix squeezes my hand in recognition of the questions that remain around my mother. 'I've been meaning to talk to you about Sofia ... if we don't find her.' He pauses. 'I would like to formally request to be Nico's guardian, if he'll have me,' he says, looking at me.

I smile.

'He'd be lucky to have you,' I say, 'and I will help in any way I can.'

My heart swells as I take him in – this incredible, selfless man – at the same time it aches for Nico's loss.

'I was hoping you'd say that,' Phoenix says, taking my wine glass and placing it on the side table. 'You're a wonderful kind of special, Lish.'

He tucks me closer as my cheeks heat slightly and I kiss him. His lips are warm on mine as we explore each other, and I feel him smile against my mouth. We've been waiting for this for a while and I am more than ready. But I remind myself of his difficulty in relaxing into physical intimacy and I let him set the pace, carefully releasing my hold on my barrier to feel for any unease from him.

I don't find any.

In a smooth action, Phoenix slides me down the sofa bed and kisses me deeply. I wind my arms around his neck and pull him closer, feeling his weight against me. He runs his hands along my side and under my shirt. I inhale softly as he unlatches my bra and caresses me gently. I ungracefully wriggle each of us out of our pants and feel his chest shake slightly against mine. I look up at him, worried I've overstepped a line, only to find him suppressing a laugh. I bite his shoulder in reprimand and to stifle my own giggle, and grip him tightly as our bodies gently come together.

We lie together afterward, and I interlace my fingers with his.

'Did you expect it to be this easy?' I ask.

'Easy?' His eyebrows shoot up. 'Lish, you barely looked at me for years thinking I was sleeping with the whole of Rhyton,' he teases.

'I wouldn't quite say I wasn't looking,' I say. 'I was just trying not to pay so much attention to that great ass of yours.' His laugh is loud, and I shush him playfully to not wake Nico. 'And,' I continue, 'you were trying particularly hard to seem the world's greatest player. Gorgeous as you may be, Phoenix, I do have standards, I'll have you know.'

'Lucky for me,' he says, flicking my nose. 'But, to answer your question, yes? Maybe. I don't know, I guess I hadn't thought this far. I'd fantasised about it, don't get me wrong, but there was less talking in those moments.' He winks at me.

'You really are incorrigible, player or not,' I laugh.

'Really, though, I didn't want to get ahead of myself,' he says seriously. 'I was fairly confident you'd shut it down. Even if you did want me, by some miracle, I wasn't sure you'd take the risk with the team. And I certainly didn't imagine we'd have Nico staying in your bedroom and I'd be relegated to having you on the most uncomfortable sofa known to man.'

Ignoring his comment about the team and Blaire's question earlier, I push him over onto his back and run my hand over the length of him. Slowly I raise myself up to straddle his hips. My brown hair frames his face as I lean down to kiss his soft mouth and I shift my body so I can take all of him once more.

'Easy is good, Lish. This is good,' he says, green eyes fixed on mine.

'Do you mean us 'this' or 'this'?' I ask as I rock my hips for emphasis and stare back at him. He makes a noise deep in his throat and closes his eyes.

'Both. I definitely mean both.'

The low buzz of the shutters closing over the windows sounds throughout my apartment, just as I'm starting to doze off nestled into Phoenix. He shifts beside me, clearly not asleep either, and instead we listen to the sirens in the city.

Within seconds, the shutters are clamouring to break free from their binds. It's too easy for the hand sized hailstones to find them. Yet that's their sole job – protect the glass, and us, from the hail that would shred skin and smash bone.

The crack of the lightning is blinding, even with the shutters down. Nico screams as the thunder that follows shakes the walls and runs out of my bedroom. Phoenix and I scramble apart and Phoenix gathers him up.

'You're safe here, Nico, it's just a storm,' he says.

His eyes catch mine; we know this is not ‘just' a storm.

It's a death sentence for anything without proper shelter.

Like many of Rhyton's food sources.

And everyone in the dockside slums.

•

The clean-up crews will be on today and I shove down the rising bile at the thought of what the casualty numbers will be. With an unexpected day off, the others gather in my apartment after dropping Nico back to Hayes's grandmother. The shadows of last night's storm on their faces, too.

'Blaire and I did some asking around while on shift yesterday,' Hayes says. 'It seems a lot of people know of the Whispers. We obviously all heard the odd ghost story growing up, but I was puzzled none of us seemed to register the term. So, I dug a little further and most of the people who were familiar with them came from outside the city or had family that did,' he says.

I look at him for a moment. 'There's a theory coming isn't there?' I ask, not at all surprised by Hayes's ability to look at a situation differently to the rest of us; it's always been one of his greatest strengths. His blue eyes hold mine as he considers the information we have at hand.

'I think the Whispers didn't always hunt in the city,' he says. 'In fact, I think, for at least a time, they were abducting girls from well outside cities. Now, I think they are very committed to looking for someone and they believe that someone may have come to Rhyton. In the earliest cases we looked at, there seems to be significantly less occasions of missing people with the 'other' factor we've been looking at. The headaches, noises in the mind and all of that,' he continues, 'the possible drugging I mean, increases in frequency about twenty years ago, and then stops, ' he says. 'But something has prompted them to start again. There was another case last night.' He looks around as we all fall silent. 'Who knows what will stop them this time if we don't.'

'I have multiple questions about that statement,' Riley says. 'But, regardless,' she forges on, not giving Hayes a chance to respond, 'we do have to look for them.'

'Isn't that what we're doing?' asks Phoenix, brows knitting together.

'Not just the missing people,' she says. 'The Whispers. Find the Whispers, find the people – or at least what happened to them. I don't hold much hope that any of them are still alive. After all, some of them would now have been held somewhere for the best part of twenty odd years. We know how likely that is,' she says.

We look at each other. None of the scenarios are positive.

Blaire is the first one to speak. 'Riley's right. We could spend weeks and weeks sitting here, trying to unpack the various myths about the Whispers. We know they must exist, there's far too many missing people with the same circumstances for them not to be real.' She looks at each of us. 'What we have no way of doing is predicting where they will turn up next. The victims haven't been specific enough for us to work that through, nor have we found any connection between them apart from the physical appearance,' she says. 'What we do have, though, is a map.'

'A map?' asks Will, disbelieving. 'You mean the scratching in this?' He holds the leather notebook in his hand.

'I do,' Blaire responds.

I take the journal from Will and flick to the page of the map, laying it out in front of us so we can each see it well enough. Rhyton appears to be marked quite clearly with a capital ‘R' in a circle. There are multiple other, smaller circles dotted around the page but no indication of what or where they are. But there is a dotted line from Rhyton, across the deserted farming flats and into Althea Forest. At which point a written description seems to kick in with musings about what to find in the forest.

'Exactly,' Riley continues, 'we go on the offensive. If Hayes is right, and this map certainly suggests he is, the Whispers are coming from outside the city. So there's no way we can stop them from taking anyone else if we stay within the city walls. We will always hear about the abductions after the fact. But there's enough in that book to try and find them. I agree it's a long shot, but it's the only one we've got.'

'Okay,' I say slowly as I consider what they're suggesting. A little spark of hope at finding out something more about my mum flares. 'If we do this, who goes?' I feel Phoenix's eyes on me, his tension beginning to break through my defences.

But not one of my team objects to their going and I don't expect them to. There's nothing we wouldn't do for each other, or the people of Rhyton.

'That probably depends on Robard,' Will says as he spins the journal towards him and leans further over the map, still looking doubtful. 'If he will let us explore this on the books—'

'Assuming he'll look past the fact we're not supposed to have these files you mean?' I interrupt.

Will continues as if I haven't spoken. '—then we can all go. If not, some of us will have to take leave and go anyway. I'm not convinced we'll find anything, but we should probably rule out the possibility.'