Read Blood and Silver - 04 for Free Online Page A

soared up over the rumble of the motor calling out the sweet sound of Chicago’s South Side. Muddy Waters sang about how he was a “Hoochie-Coochie Man” and he was gonna work his mojo and his black cat bone. That one-in-a-million voice coaxing some sweet young thing into believing all the claims he made. I settled into the rhythm of driving and let him sing and play me away into a memory.
     
     
    It was my first year of hunting monsters. I was new and raw, still figuring out how to do it right. A little girl was missing, gone without a trace from the woods not far from her school. Taken from a field trip with a group of people between one eyeblink and another. No one knew how she had disappeared so quickly.
    Search parties were formed. They brought in bloodhounds. Dogs trained to fearlessly trail a scent. Never giving up until they found its source. Relentless and unswerving no matter how dangerous their prey.
    They had all huddled together, shaking and pissing themselves, refusing to move or search.
    Her father had contacted me. He had been given my name by one of the investigators on the scene. I had already developed a reputation for handling weird crimes and cases. He had begged me, eyes burning like raw red wounds in his face, to find his daughter if I could. His hand shook as he gave me a picture of her, taken the day she disappeared to document her first field trip while in school.
    Kaylee Ann Dobbs had been missing for eight hours. She was a cute little girl, about six years old with a mop of unruly ash-blond hair, brown eyes that sparkled even in the picture, and a dash of light freckles across her delicate little nose. She was smiling in the picture, holding a brown paper bag lunch and wearing a pink paisley sundress. He fell to his knees in front of me. Please bring her back, no matter what you have to do. I’ll give you anything .
    My family had been taken less than nine months earlier.
    My daughter had a dash of freckles across her nose too.
    I took the damn case.
    After a lot of work and more than a little luck, I picked up a trail the bloodhounds couldn’t have followed. At the site of the disappearance there was an energy that my ability to sense the supernatural picked up on. It made my stomach draw into a dull gnaw of hunger. Itchiness crawled over my skin and when I scratched, it was hot to the touch.
    Following the energy, I tracked it to a house on the edge of the forest. It sat in one of the ’hoods that hang on the outskirts of the city. It was a squatty little crack house in a run-down ghetto. Despair rode the air currents, tainting the atmosphere. Sad vinyl siding sagged on the outside over stubby azalea bushes with flowers curled brown from crackhead piss. The windows were covered with plywood like it was waiting for a hurricane that would never come.
    The houses around it were just as depressing. Ramshackle government housing; all the same drab gray siding and rickety states of disrepair. Yards that were more dirt than grass, and cars that didn’t run sitting beside SUVs with gleaming rims. One neighboring house had burned to the ground. Nothing left but a cracked foundation and the charred stumps that used to be the bones of a home.
    Sad figures shuffled in and out of the crack house as I watched. They used to be people, before the crack burned them out, turning them into husks of humanity. They would look up at a camera that was mounted above the steel door, then someone inside would buzz them through.
    It was a bad scene. Lots of civilians. Lots of witnesses. A nasty part of town that I stuck out in like a sore thumb and I was alone, without backup. Every bit of logic said to come back later, better prepared.
    Kaylee Ann Dobbs had been missing for eleven hours.
    I stepped out of the Comet and the air slapped me with a buzz of something not natural. Back then I hadn’t yet learned how to pull in my power. I couldn’t tamp it down or put it away. It was like an open nerve, raw and swollen