Page 27 of Tamhas

Let them try to break me down. Let them try to accuse me of being unwilling to answer their questions. I would be a model prisoner.

“Did you have any idea who Tamhas was?” the leader asked.

“Alan,” Tamas muttered, glancing his way.

Alan ignored him. “Did you?”

“Of course, I didn’t. Do you think I would’ve come here if I had?” I cringed inwardly. My temper was already getting the better of me. I had to rein in it.

Tamhas winced like I’d hurt him. Good. Let him hurt a little. It would be nothing compared to the way I was hurting.

“And why did you come?” Alan asked.

“I’ve already told you. When I didn’t hear from Tamhas, I got on a plane and came out here.”

“To find someone you’d never met?”

“Yes.” I looked over all of their faces—angry, sullen, distrusting. I knew how that felt. “Wouldn’t you have? I was looking for someone I thought was my friend. I thought he might have needed help. At the very least, I wanted to know why he had disappeared.”

None of them looked like they believed this. None of them but Tamhas. Were they all really that sheltered that they couldn’t understand? Or was I just an outsider who couldn’t be trusted?

“How did you know where to look?” Tamhas asked.

I sighed. Something told me this was really what they wanted to know. They were secretive, to put it mildly. “I have a friend who works as a freelance… network expert.”

“Hacker,” one of them translated. A man, standing to Alan’s left while Tamhas stood to his right.

“Yes. If you want to call it that.” I silently dared him to come at me, glaring without blinking. He didn’t.

“And she’s the one who traced us?” Alan frowned.

“I sure didn’t know how to do it.”

“What did she use?”

“An email. Just an email.”

My heart started racing fast enough to nauseate me. Oh, God, what if they went after Emelie? “She didn’t do anything wrong. She only did it as a favor to me. She told me how crazy it was for me to come out here when I didn’t know anything about Tamhas, but I couldn’t help myself.”

Funny how the moment I thought she might be in trouble, my resolve broke and I just about babbled in a panic.

I looked at him, pleaded with him. “You went away. I didn’t know why. We talked for so long, I thought we were friends. I was worried about you. That’s all. Nothing more than that. She did it because she’s my best friend and we’ve known each other our whole lives. She doesn’t know anything about you. I didn’t know anything about you until I got here. I mean it. That’s the truth.”

Everything went silent when I stopped babbling. None of them spoke or even moved for a painfully long minute. Did they believe me? They had to believe me. I couldn’t get her into trouble, too.

Alan and Tamhas exchanged a look I couldn’t make sense of.

“What about the Blood Moon Priestesses?” Alan asked.

He might as well have lapsed into Greek. “Excuse me?” Talk about a left turn. It felt like having a rug pulled out from under me.

“The Blood Moon Priestesses. Surely, you’ve heard of them before.”

I was still breathless after panicking over Emelie. My brain scrambled to catch up with him. “Um, no. I’ve never heard of them. What is this all about?”

A chuckle rose up among them, a chuckle that made me want to kill them all. One by one. Slowly. They laughed at me like they thought I was lying. They would never believe me, no matter what I said. They had walked down that tunnel determined not to believe me. I was wasting my breath.

“You expect us to believe this?” Alan asked, folding his arms. God, he was huge. They all were.

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