Winter's Awakening: The Metahumans Emerge (Winter's Saga #1) (3 page)

“Why hasn’t mom called?” Alik asked.

“Maybe her flight was delayed,” Evan responded logically. I promise you, it’s as if that kid is a walking computer. Sometimes I wonder if I got all the emotions and he got all the brains. He rarely got upset; he was too pragmatic for such things.

“She said she’d call us at seven. She’s really running late. It’s nearly eight o’clock now.” I spoke my thoughts as they came to me. “I hope she’s all right.” Now that I had started, it was difficult to control the flood-gate of worry I’d been holding in. “Would someone call us if she was hurt? How would they know where to find us? Oh my goodness, what if mom’s hurt and in the hospital and they know her name, but they don’t know she has children. Mom has no family for them to contact besides us. She would be all alone in that bleached white sterile room shivering cold with tubes sticking out all over her…”

“Meg, you have to stop reading those paperback suspense novels. You’re overreacting just a smidge, don’t you think? Mom’s flight was running late and she had to hurry to her dinner conference. I’m sure that’s all that happened. She’s probably going to call us at 8:30 to make sure we’re all in bed.” Evan was calm and logical. It was maddening.

Alik stayed silent and turned a page in his book.

I tried to shake the mental pictures that blossomed into my mind’s eye. Darn it, I had too vivid of an imagination. It was helpful sometimes, but not tonight. Tonight, I was feeling very on edge, and if the boys were being truthful about it, they were too. Mom was never late. She was meticulous about punctuality, organization and planning. She would have found a way to keep her promise to call at 7pm even if they were circling the city waiting for a storm to pass, or something. She would have found a way. There were phones on planes. It would have taken one swipe of a rarely used credit card into the back of the seat in front of her and punching ten little digits to call us. Something was wrong. Mom would never have allowed her promise to be broken unless something stopped her from keeping it. Something bad happened.

All three of us, suffering with unspoken worries, watched the second hand fly around the wall clock. At 8:25 we headed upstairs to brush our teeth, softly so we could hear the ringing of the phone over the schwish-schwishing of our toothbrushes. But the phone didn’t ring. We all knelt at the side of my bed and prayed together, quietly, listening. But the phone didn’t ring. We gave one another a quick “goodnight” before dragging ourselves to our bedrooms, lying quietly in bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening for a phone that still didn’t ring.

Chapter 5 Check Out Time

He spared no expense. He hired the best. This collection was going to happen perfectly.

She was being followed this very moment. Leaving the airport in a taxi, she was headed directly to the hotel in which she had secured reservations. Everything was unfolding perfectly.

Very soon, she would be right here. She’ll be coming home; full circle. He chuckled to himself at his play on words as the metallic spheres danced in his hand.

Chapter 6 The Phone Call

Morning sunlight spilled across my face startling me awake. I sat bolt upright just sure that something bad was going on, but not being able to remember what it was. Then the cogs in my mind caught and it all flooded back to me. Mom never called last night. I even checked the voicemail at midnight and there were no messages.

I took the steps two at a time rushing down to check the voicemail again. Maybe she ate a bad shrimp at the convention and was sick all night and couldn’t leave a message till early this morning. My mind raced with what I was begging to be plausible explanations for her silence.

The light wasn’t blinking on the phone.

I held down the message button, anyway. “You have no new messages. You have no saved messages. For the main menu, please press eight,” a synthetic voice advised me. Oh my goodness, what are we going to do? Maze licked my hand. His warm, wet tongue woke me from my fog.

There was an emergency list taped to the inside of the cabinet directly above the wall phone. I hadn’t even thought about this list before now. It had been taped in place for so many years; my eyes didn’t even see it when I opened that cabinet to retrieve something. The list was such a fixture in my mind, it was just something to ignore.

I couldn’t ignore it now. It had only three numbers. The first was 911, of course. The second was Poison Control. And the last phone number was labeled “Dr. Andrews.”

All I knew about Dr. Andrews was that he went to medical school with mom and they were hired by the same pharmaceutical lab right after graduation. They worked together for a few years there and that’s when mom had us with her ex-husband. Mom eventually quit her job at the lab and moved us here to Texas to “escape the rat-race and raise us in a wholesome environment surrounded with nature” while she worked on her scientific theories.

We’ve been here for some twelve years. Come to think of it, I don’t have any memories of life anywhere but here. But mom had a life before our ranch and in that life she had trusted Dr. Andrews; trusted him enough to keep him on our emergency list.

As the oldest, I felt a deep sense of responsibility for my little brothers. It was my job to make sure they were okay when mom was away. A chill ran through me.

I stared at the phone number written in mom’s neat script. The ink was faded with time and the paper was yellowing. My left hand gripped the telephone. My right hand clutched the edge of the counter. How long has this list been here? What was she thinking when she added this name? Did she write the number hoping we would never need to call it? Or did she write it knowing we would need it? What kind of relationship did Mom and Dr. Andrews have, exactly? Did Dr. Andrews know our father? Was this number still current for him? What was I supposed to say to him? “Hi, you don’t know me but you know my mother and she’s missing?” That sounded pretty stupid to me.

Evan padded into the kitchen so softly that when he spoke I jumped, “Hey Meg, any word?”

“No, no word Evan. I was just looking at the list of emergency numbers and thinking about how much more time we should give mom before we contact this ‘Dr. Andrews.’ What do you think?”

Evan shrugged his slender shoulders. “What does Alik think?”

“What does Alik think about what?” Alik plodded into the kitchen and jumped up to sit on the counter. Something he would never get away with doing if mom was here.

“I’m wondering how much more time I should give mom before I contact the one person she has listed on this old emergency list.”

Alik rubbed his eyes. “Mom still hasn’t called? I was sure she would have left a message on the machine by morning.”

Yeah, he was upset. I can always tell when he’s upset because there’s this vein that starts turning blue and bulbous in the middle of his forehead.

I picked up the phone and started dialing not knowing what was going to happen, but feeling a deep sense of ominous fear seeping into my heart.

Chapter 7 Er…That Went Well

A female voice answered on the third ring. “Hello?” she said.

“Um, hi, I’m Meg Winter. I’m looking for Dr. Andrews.”

“Oh, sure! He’s out back mowing the lawn. Give me a minute Meg, and I’ll get him for you,” she said cheerfully. Now, I know I don’t get out much, but she seemed super nice, in a creepy sort of way. Couldn’t put my finger on what it was that struck me as insincere about her.

“Meg Winter, yes. I’m calling because yours was the only number besides the authorities on our emergency contact list, and I need to know if you can help me find our mom,” all the words spilled out of my mouth. I held my breath waiting for his response.

“Well, who’s your mother?” he asked the million-dollar question.

“Margo Winter. Dr. Margo Winter. She told me once that you knew each other in college and worked at the same place for a few years and that you knew my dad—” I let my voice trail, hoping he’d jump in and help me because I was feeling like a complete idiot.

“Margo,” he almost whispered. “Your mother is Margo? Wow, I’m floored! I thought I’d never hear from her again. Where is she? Where are you? Are the boys with you too?” His questions bubbled to the surface so fast; I didn’t know which to answer first once he paused.

“Mom is at a conference in LA, I’m in Texas, and yes Alik and Evan are here with me.” I tried to answer specifically.

“Margo had my name on an emergency list?” Dr. Andrews wondered aloud. He was putting it together now. “What’s going on? What’s the emergency?”

“She hasn’t contacted us in,” I stopped to look at the wall clock, “twenty-three hours, and she was supposed to call us last night when her flight landed. We—we’re worried and we didn’t know who to call for help.”

“You said she was at a conference in LA? What kind of conference? Was she presenting? Did she tell you who would be there? Where is she staying? Why did she leave you alone? Don’t you have family you can call? Friends? Neighbors?” Dr. Andrews sure had a way of squeezing a lot of questions into what sounded like one run-on sentence.

“We live out on a ranch here in Texas. Our nearest neighbor is twenty-five miles from here. We don’t really have friends, besides one another. Mom homeschools us. She likes us to live an ‘unpolluted way of life that focuses on our intrinsic gifts and the development of our intellect’.” I quoted mom’s mantra without thinking.

“Let me make some calls, and I’ll call you right back. I can’t leave you three alone. Listen, if I can’t locate her right away, I’ll come get you, and you’ll stay with us until your mom returns.

“I know this sounds far-fetched, but you have to understand me when I say if your mom is gone, it’s not because she wants to be. You and your brothers need to be hidden until she’s safely returned.”

“What are you talking about? Our mom was just going to give a speech on biogenetic engineering to a bunch of other egghead scientists. What could have happened to her?”

Chapter 8 What The…?

Have I mentioned how impatient I am? I relayed the entire conversation to the boys. They were both looking as confused and frightened as I’m sure I did.

“Leap of freaking faith!” Alik spat the words. He seemed to chew on that statement with a look of disgust. “What the heck is going on?”

“What documents are you talking about?” Alik looked like he was about to wring someone’s neck and Evan was looking like the perfect someone.

“Well, you both know what a voracious reader I am. I discovered, quite by accident really, an expandable folder full of documents on the uppermost shelf in the library between The Encyclopedia Britannica copyright 1939 and the biography of William Dursel.”

“Forget Britannica and Dursel! What were the documents?” I yelled. (Told you I was impatient.)

Evan didn’t have time to answer before the phone started ringing. I slapped my hand on it and threw it up to my ear. “Dr. Andrews?”

“Meg, I’m coming to get you and the boys right now. Pack a bag for each of you. Bring enough clothes for several days.”

“Wait a minute, who did you call? What did you find out about our mom? Where is she? Is she all right?”

“Meg,” the doctor’s voice was strained and for the first time I could hear the fear in it. “You’re going to have to take that leap we talked about before. You’re the oldest; the boys will do what you tell them to do because they know you love them. You want to keep them safe, right?”

“Of course, I want them safe. But you’re not answering my questions. Where is…”

Dr. Andrews interrupted me, “You are not safe there. Do you understand me? You are not safe now that your mother has been found out.”

My mind was racing. Mom’s been “found out” by whom? What was she hiding and why? We are “not safe” in our perfectly secluded little ranch? What was that supposed to mean? What was happening?

“The boys are there in the room with you, right? They’re watching you and trying to figure out what’s happened. When we hang up, you have to calm their worries and tell them coming with me is the best way to find your mom. I am catching the first flight out of Kansas City airport, but you have to tell me where you are, exactly.”

“Tell you where we are,” my voice sounded monotone, even to my ears. I stared at Alik and Evan and forced my brain to think. What do I do? How am I supposed to know if I should trust this stranger? He was on our emergency list written in mom’s handwriting. He wanted me to leave my home because we aren’t safe here. What if mom was fine and she had tried calling but there was something wrong with our phone? Wait, if there was something wrong with our phone, then I wouldn’t have been able to call Dr. Andrews. Nor could he have called us back. What if he…

“Meg, we’re running out of time. Tell me where you are so I can come get you and your brothers.”