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~Foster’s POV~
The golden light disappeared, leaving us standing in the dark. A buzz in the air made my skin prickle. Or maybe it was because I’d seen her.
I saw Josie.
It had to be her.
Right?
I didn’t know. She was her, but she wasn’t. Her skin was no longer tan from hours in the sun, but it had to be her. I ticked off a list of attributes I remembered.
Straight black hair. Check.
Brown eyes. Check.
Plush full lips. Check.
Diamond-shaped face. No. Not a check. It was different. Her features were slightly off. It had been longer, different.
But it had to be her. And she recognized us.
“What the fuck did I just see?” Jason asked, breaking the silence. “That was her? Right? And those things? What happened? Is this some kind of fucking joke? A movie?”
No one said anything. My focus went to the spot we saw that woman—no—thing disappear. She—it—had sunk into the ground. And the lights. And the tree. And that huge dog—wolf.
“Foster, did you slip us something before coming here?” Waylon asked in a deceptively calm voice.
“Of course not,” I snapped at him. I didn’t touch drugs. With my history the way it was, I refused to touch so much as a headache medicine. Whenever I got injured, the only time the doctors could give me pain medication was when I was already out of it to stop them. Or when Jason or Waylon shoved the pill down my throat. Too many vets turned to alcohol and drugs to handle the shit they went through while serving. I stubbornly refused to even contemplate the idea. I had enough slippery slopes to manage and didn’t need that.
I turned back to the scene with a critical eye, ignoring the annoyingly loud version of me that demanded I go to her hotel room and hold her. No one would be able to pry her from my arms. No one.
But that wasn’t what I needed to do right now. The soldier in me demanded that I piece together what we’d seen, because what had happened had been impossible. It should have been impossible.
We had followed her from her hotel room, lost her in some alley, only for her to reappear as we were circling the block looking for her for the last few hours. Then we lost her in the botanical gardens.
When she re-emerged, we stuck close to her. Lost her again briefly, only to find her standing there, talking to her dog in an empty field. Then those two people showed up. We were about to step out, hoping to scare them away, but it all happened too fast.
They went from human to...not.
Then things I couldn’t understand happened.
I stared at the scene, trying to piece it all together. The version of Josie I didn’t recognize. The way the air had changed, becoming sharper. I stared at the knocked down tree. It was tall and skinny, but it had still broken once that female thing slammed into it.
A memory of shattered walls, screaming people running, wounds that couldn’t be explained.
The source of those wounds.
Something in the air stirred, sending my instincts on full alert. I whipped my head around as I tried to look into the darkness. Jason and Waylon were still talking, but I ignored them. I narrowed my eyes, wishing I had my gear with me, then I could see into the darkness. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
“Foster?”
“We need to leave. Now.” I shoved both of them toward the main path, away from the danger that hovered over us. My adrenaline spiked. I couldn’t see the danger, but my instincts knew it was there. “Move right fucking now.”
I shoved them hard enough that they stumbled forward before running. I stayed at the back, hand on my concealed gun, ready to defend.
I didn’t let up on Jason and Waylon until we were back at my place.
“What the fuck was that?” Jason whirled on me. “What the fuck is going on? And don’t say you don’t know. You know. What was all that?”
His eyes were wide, panic settling in.
“Foster?” Waylon asked, arms crossed over his chest. He was trying to hold himself together, but I saw the signs. His eye was twitching, his muscles bunched up. If he were sitting, his right leg would have been bouncing.
“Sit,” I said, needing to get a handle on the situation. I needed them to remain calm, because what I had to say wasn’t something I ever thought would happen.
It explained so much. Explained why I couldn’t find a single sign of Josie after traveling through the entire world. I tore countries apart, thinking she had fallen prey to human trafficking. I threw myself into missions into prisons to release detainees, scared to find her in a cell. I stalked dangerous and powerful men, thinking they had something to do with her disappearance. I learned how to write code to create programs that would be able to search through billions of faces across the world in hopes of matching it with hers.
Nothing.
No trace.
No hits on her name, none on her credit cards or bank accounts. Nothing.
It was like after the day she disappeared, she stopped existing.
Disbelief choked at me. If what I’d seen was real, then it explained it all.
“Foster!” Jason was in front of me, shaking my shoulders. “Foster!”
“Yeah.” I choked around my response. Stepping back, I cleared my throat and shook my head, trying to dispel the man inside of me that wanted to come out swinging at the world. The same man that wanted to lock Josie in a room and keep her away from the world that had stolen her from him.
Jason moved me to a chair, our roles now reversed. He disappeared before reappearing and shoving a glass of water in my face. “Drink.”
I did.
Jason sat across from me. “Now talk.” My friend tried to portray calm, but the white-knuckled grip on his knees said he lost his shit a long time ago.
“I don’t know where to start. What to say.”
“Give us the facts. Lay it out in a way that we will understand,” Waylon said. He sat to the right of me, his expression closed off. Danger lurked right underneath the surface. He wouldn’t react until he had all the information, but he would. He just wasn’t sure what kind of reaction to settle on yet.
“You saw,” I said. “You saw the impossible.”
“Yes,” Waylon answered. “But it looks like it isn’t something impossible to you.”
The movement was jerky as I nodded. “There have been...moments while I was in the army that couldn’t be explained. You know I can’t say much about the missions I’ve been on. You know they were dangerous, but there have been incidents where I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it out alive.” I leaned forward and rubbed my face. “Man, the shit that I saw.”
“And this shit, it relates to what we saw tonight?”
I nodded.
“Not much is known. We just know they are powerful and ancient. They keep to themselves for the most part, but there are parts of the world that aren’t touched by first-world countries. That’s where we found them.”
“Them being what?” Waylon asked.
Jason jumped in. “Aliens?”
I snorted. “Not aliens. If anything, I’d say they were here first.”
“Stop fucking around and tell us,” Jason said, his body shaking with suppressed anger.
“They’re called fae.”
Jason’s expression went blank. “Fae? Like pixies, elves, and goblins? The goblin king was real? Aren’t those Irish myths?”
I snorted. “Celtic myths. And yes, like those things.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” Jason snapped. “What kind of trick are you playing with us?” He jumped to his feet. “Whatever you’re doing is fucking cruel. I know you’re desperate to find Josie, but she’s fucking cruel. Why would you do this to us?”
“Jason,” Waylon warned.
Jason shook his head, eyes wide. “No. No fucking way. If you’re saying what you’re saying... Then Josie... Our sweet Josie...”
“I know.”
“Do you?” he snapped.
“I do. More than you think. More than all those stories she used to go on about when we were in college.”
“So the fae are involved,” Waylon said, still holding his thoughts closely to himself. I couldn’t begin to guess what he thought about it all. “Even so, how did she manage to stay hidden from us for so long? And why is she appearing now?”
I looked down at the floor, pain digging into me. “Before I left the service, we were working our way to a place of interest. We ran into a woman. She was old, well into her eighties. She was lost and confused. Scared. It took us a long time to calm her down. I managed to get her information. She was only twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three?” Disbelief shown through Waylon’s expression.
“She was crazy, delirious, going on about creatures, about being abducted. I had to piece it together. But by the time I did, even I wanted to dismiss her, except I already knew about the fae, so it was plausible too.”
“What?” Jason asked. He had slumped into a chair, leaning back, legs out, looking completely defeated. “What could be fucking worse than the existence of fae?”
“Their home.”
They both gave me confused looks, not following along.
“The woman, she was taken to their home. It’s not on this earth or realm or plane, or however you want to think about it. She went to their home and lived there for...I think she said around sixty years. When I told her what date it was, she didn’t believe me. She said it was impossible for her to be missing for only three years. Time is different there. Think ten to one. Every one year here is ten years there.”
They paled.
“But Josie’s been missing for ten here,” Waylon said.
“That’s a hundred there,” Jason added.
I clenched my jaw and looked down at the floor. “I know.”
“But...” Jason shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“This woman. Did she change? Did she look like those things?” Waylon asked.
I shook my head. “She was very human. She died before we could get her to a hospital. Her heart gave out. Old age. Shock.”
“Josie didn’t look old at all. If anything, she looked younger.” Waylon raised his eyebrow as if to challenge my theory.
“Just different,” I said.
“She looked like them,” Jason whispered.
I took in a breath, and finally said what I had been trying to avoid, what I refused to believe.
“Josie’s fae.”
She wasn’t human.
