Page 14 of Phoenix
“That’s too bad, they can be your best friend, you know?” he says with a smile in his voice. I wonder if he’s getting as much comfort from this as I am. He can’t have had anyone other than the monster upstairs to talk to.
“I-I had a pet dragon once,” I whisper through my sobs, “his name was Stanley.”
“A dragon?! Wow, that’s cool,” he says, and I feel him nodding against me. “Never heard of anyone owning a pet dragon before. How big was he?”
“I don’t know, he never let me see him, he was too shy. He lived in a cave. Mom and I would go looking for scales so we could make wishes,” I reply on another whimper because I mentioned my mother, who must have realized by now that I’ve gone missing. He holds me a little tighter and tries to soothe me again. “N-Niamh,” I say through a sob.
“Niamh?” he asks.
“My name is Niamh,” I tell him.
“Hi, Niamh, you’ve got a great name.”
“Did he take you too?” I ask and look up into his eyes, although he appears a little blurry through my tears. He just shakes his head with a sad smile on his face. “Is he your dad?”
“Of sorts,” he replies rather cryptically, which doesn’t really reassure me.
“Is he going to hurt me, Jake?” I ask in barely more than a whisper.
“No,” he replies almost instantly, “but if we don’t do as he says, he will hurt the ones we care about most.” I screw my face up tight, getting ready to cry again. But he pulls me in close to comfort me before I’ve even started. “Don’t worry, Niamh, I’m going to look after you and I won’t let him hurt you…ever!”
“I wanna go home!” I wail over his shoulder.
“I know, and one day I promise you, you will,” he says with what sounds like determination in his voice. “One way or another, I’ll get you home, I promise.”
Chapter 6
Phoenix
“Wait, what the hell is going on here?” I cry out in complete shock, my anger already beginning to build inside of me because this is nuts! They know each other?! How is this even possible?
Neither one of them looks at me, they’re too busy holding onto one another like their lives depend on it, which only exacerbates my fury. I can’t figure out what they are to one another - old partners, friends, or lovers? Surely, Jessie, the recluse, wouldn’t be the type of girl to cheat on her boyfriend with a stranger in the middle of a stormy night, would she?
“Jake!” I growl, folding my arms before I do something more destructive with them. “You better answer me, asshole, because I’m about two seconds away from losing my shit altogether!”
Only after I threaten my cousin does he eventually let go of her and return his gaze to me, looking a little defiant and ready to give as good as me if he has to. In the space of minutes, we’ve become a couple of dogs pissing around the strange girl in front of us, the one who was abducted at the age of eleven for nearly six or seven years. Take a chill pill, Phoenix, be the adult here.
While me and Jake are having a face-off, Jessie is trying to curl up as small as possible, bracing herself for the two thugs in front of her to go to town on one another. At the sight of her soft, frightened eyes, I step back and put my hands out in front of me, which shocks Jake because I’m certainly not one to usually back down. Something about this damaged girl has me softening. In fact, I feel like a complete tool for losing my shit in front of her in the first place, because the last thing she needs is conflict in her life.
“Jake,” I say a little more gently, though it pains me, “will you please explain how you know Jessie so I can try to keep my anger in check.”
I then nod my head her way, to which he looks and slumps a little with a guilty expression, seemingly releasing some of the same adrenaline coursing through his body.
“Jessie and I kind of grew up together,” he mutters at the same time as she releases a small whimper, “she’s my sister…of sorts.”
I feel my face screwing up tightly while I pinch the bridge of my nose, unable to comprehend what the hell he’s talking about. His mother, Ruth, died before he could talk; nobody knew who his father was. The only parent he had in his life was his creepy stepfather, a hippy kind of a dude from what I remember, a man named Robert Jackson. As far as everybody knew, he and Jake went to live across the country to be near his sister and her husband so they could help him raise Jake and her kids together
“Wait, her parents live together in New England, I saw their picture up in her house,” I finally say. “Is her dad your secret father? Did he have an affair with your mother?”
I notice Jessie start to shake her head sadly, and given the look on Jake’s face, that’s not the secret answer to this conundrum.
“R-Robert,” Jake starts, now turning pale, and looking just as scared as a now trembling Jessie, “Robert is the guy who took Jessie…when she was eleven.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah!”
“Wait, back the fuck up,” I gasp rather ungraciously, “you mean to tell me your trippy stepfather is responsible for abducting a child when she was innocently walking home from school?”