Kidnapped At Christmas. Maggie K. Black

morning?”

      “I don’t think so. Similar age, I think. I barely saw the one guy’s face but it was very scarred and he practically reeked of tobacco. The other one definitely talked like he had teeth missing.”

      “All right, I’ll watch him until the police come,” he said.

      “I’m sorry.”

      “Don’t worry about it,” he said. But there was something in her voice and about the way she’d said “sorry” that made him look back at her face. It was like she was being hard on herself for not knowing more. Something inside Joshua’s chest suddenly ached to just give her a hug and tell her that everything was going to be okay. “Look, I’m sorry if I sounded insensitive earlier. But—”

      Out of the corner of his eye, Joshua saw Hermes’s hand dart toward something on the ground. He spun back. But it was too late. Hermes slashed at him with a small, jagged pottery shard that just barely missed his jugular. Instinctively Joshua reared back, releasing his weight on Hermes’s body, as he lunged to grab the shard. Hermes kicked up, hard, one boot just managing to catch Joshua in the chin. Pain exploded in Joshua’s head, not enough to make him let go, but enough to let Hermes slither back on the icy wood and twist from his grasp.

      “Stay back!” Joshua yelled to Samantha. He leaped to his feet. “And stay out of the way.”

      But it was too late. Hermes leaped onto the fire escape and bolted down the stairs.

      * * *

      She watched as Joshua leaped over the ledge onto the fire escape below, skipping the first flight of stairs entirely. He pelted after Hermes. Their footsteps clanged on the metal steps. Samantha grabbed the edge of the balcony with both hands. Everything inside her wanted to chase after them. But Joshua’s words still seemed to echo around her in the frosty air. Stay back. Stay out of the way. And why would he even want her to try and help? She’d fought as hard as she could against Hermes, but he’d still overpowered her. She’d broken a vase over Hermes’s head and then he’d managed to grab a shard of it and use it as a weapon. Joshua already made it perfectly clear he doubted she could be any use at all in stopping Magpie.

      He’d never understand. Joshua had height, brute strength and military training. She had two left feet and a tongue that tended to either babble or freeze. He’d probably thought her big speech on the staircase had been pretty ridiculous. But, whether he got it or not, she really had joined Torchlight to make a difference.

      Hermes was still running down the fire escape. The graffiti artist might not know his way around guns, but he was wiry and fast. This probably wasn’t the first time he’d vandalized something and run from getting caught. Hermes’s feet hit the ground. He pelted across the pavement. Joshua was only a few steps behind him. In a second, he’d caught Hermes by the shoulder and swung him around. The youth thrashed. But Joshua yanked his arm back, pinning it behind his back and holding him firmly in place.

      “I don’t want to hurt you.” Joshua’s voice echoed in the concrete alley. “I promise you that. I’m just going to hold you until the police get here. But if you keep fighting me, I’ll be forced to tighten my grip.”

      The rest of his words were swallowed up in the sound of police sirens. She stood there for a long moment, looking down at Joshua as he calmly but firmly held the squirming vandal in place. Then she turned back toward the office. Any moment now, cops would be all over the place and Torchlight News would be a crime scene. If she was ever going to take a look at what had happened with a critical, journalist’s eye, it had to be now.

      Carefully, she took a methodical look at Hermes’s unloaded gun. It was a Glock. The serial number had been filed off and it looked like someone had tried to tamper with the barrel in order to make it something more dangerous than it already was. But they’d done it so badly she doubted the gun would ever be much use to someone who was actually trying to hit their target. Illegal handgun. Modified by an amateur. Loaded with blanks. It was the kind of weapon a stupid kid might use to try to intimidate someone, but never actually intend to fire. Thanks in part to Canada’s strict gun laws, Toronto police had warned recently of an increase in replica and damaged weapons being used to commit thefts. Sometimes just waving a weapon around was enough to get someone to give a thug what they wanted. Trust criminals to get creative.

      But it was even more evidence Hermes had been sent as a messenger not a killer. She could almost feel her brain storing the information like memory chips sliding into mental slots.

      She walked back through the alcove into the office. The smell of wet paint still lingered in the air. Hermes had graffitied two walls, one with a warning message and the other with a huge, crude bird. Quickly she took a picture of both with her tablet and uploaded them to the ATHENA database on the Torchlight News server. Then she slipped back onto the balcony just long enough to zero in on Hermes’s face as Joshua held him pinned waiting for the police. She saved that picture too. As long as she had computer access and her Torchlight password she could access ATHENA no matter where she was in the world. Then she grabbed an electronic stylus pen and started for the stairs.

      Questions burned in her mind. She paused on the second-story landing, opened a fresh document on the tablet and jotted them down with the stylus, using them like an electronic pen and paper, just as if she was sitting in the corner of an editorial meeting listening to a reporter talk about their big new exposé. Why would Magpie send a graffiti artist to break into Torchlight News and scrawl a warning on the wall the same day they kidnapped a journalist? Why do both? Vandalism was vile, yes, but if a reporter was pitching this story in an editorial meeting, methodical Samantha would have pointed out that threats usually escalated in severity. That is: normally the warning came first, then the attempted murder.

      She wrote “Does Magpie have a vendetta against Torchlight?” in block letters at the top of the page and underlined it twice. No doubt Olivia would get every single journalist at the newspaper to report in on what they were working on. Maybe the mysterious Magpie would emerge from there and the paper would know what it did to land on Magpie’s radar.

      She crossed the second-floor landing and froze. Olivia’s office door was ajar. She could hear the creak of someone’s weight shifting on the old office floorboards and computer keys clacking. There was somebody else in the building. Her heart raced through her chest, so suddenly she found herself battling to breathe. Were the police in there already? But if so, wouldn’t they have announced their presence? The door swung open quickly. She was face-to-face with a stranger. He was short, in plain clothes and probably forty, with a square face and a red baseball cap.

      And familiar. So very familiar. And she didn’t know why.

      “Who are you?” she demanded. “What are you doing here?”

      The man hesitated. Then suddenly he lunged for her tablet computer and tried to yank it from her hand.

      “Drop it!” he shouted.

      Was he kidding?

      “No! Get out of here! The police are on their way!” Her grip tightened on the tablet. For a moment, she thought he was going to succeed in pulling it from her hands. But then, while all his body strength was focused on the tablet, she kicked him as hard as she could. He swore and let go. She yanked the tablet back, hearing the edge of the case crack as she wrenched it from his hands. She ran down the stairs to the ground floor, panicked tears building in her throat.

      “Joshua! Help!” She grabbed the front door handle, Joshua’s name escaping her lips even before she could finish yanking it all the way open. “There’s another intruder in the building!”

      “Ma’am! Get away from the building!” Strong hands grabbed her shoulders and pulled her away from the door. Samantha looked up into the face of a senior officer whose hair was tied back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Half a dozen more officers rushed past them into the building. “Are you all right, ma’am?”

      “I’m... I’m fine. Thank you, Officer. But there’s a man in the building. Second floor. He’s short and wearing a red baseball cap. I don’t know if he’s armed.” Samantha