XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister Read online

  XGeneration 5

  Cry Little Sister

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2015

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Adrijus from RockingBookCovers.com

  Table of Contents

  XGeneration Series

  Description

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  3

  4

  5

  6

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  8

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  10

  11

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  13

  14

  15

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  Available Now

  Mailing List

  Books by Brad Magnarella

  The XGeneration Series

  YOU DON’T KNOW ME

  THE WATCHERS

  SILENT GENERATION

  PRESSURE DROP

  CRY LITTLE SISTER

  GREATEST GOOD

  DEAD HAND

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  Description

  Murder Creek, pop. 4999.

  For Janis Graystone and Scott Spruel, it’s the vacation they’ve long needed. No superhero training. No nation saving. Just a week of rest and relaxation, even if it happens to be with Scott’s screwy parents.

  But when someone breaks into their beach house and dogs begin turning up blood-drained, the pair of Champions launch into action. Scott suspects vampires, namely the motorcycle-riding hoodlums who loiter in the town’s amusement park, while Janis’s intuition speaks to a more pervasive evil, one that lurks in the town’s shadowy past.

  Soon enmeshed in a murder mystery, Janis and Scott must scramble to piece the clues together before the killer strikes again.

  Or strikes them.

  1

  Wednesday, November 27, 1985

  11:07 a.m.

  Bad things have happened here.

  The thought came from nowhere, driving into Janis Graystone’s mind like a cold spike.

  Maybe it was the sky that hung low and pewter-gray outside, turning everything it touched into blah: stretches of coastal woods, leaning shacks, grown-over lots.

  Or maybe it was the name of the town that had seeded the thought: Murder Creek, Florida. They had just driven past the wind-scored sign, Mr. Spruel remarking from the driver’s seat, “Don’t let the name scare you. The creek dried up a half century ago!” Mr. Spruel’s laughter continued to fill the car—to Mrs. Spruel’s lip-pursing consternation and Scott’s mortification—but the jovial har-har-hars did nothing to soothe Janis’s foreboding.

  She traced a finger along the molding of the car window, wondering now if the feeling came from the stale smell of salt water. The one time she’d been out on a boat in the Gulf, she’d gotten sick.

  But that was all wishful thinking and Janis knew it. With the abilities she possessed, sometimes—no, oftentimes—she just knew things. And this was one of those times, one of those things.

  Which meant bad stuff had gone down in Murder Creek.

  “You okay? Your color’s a little off.”

  She startled at the sound of Scott’s voice. Turning from the window, she found her boyfriend’s brow collapsing over metal-frame glasses and concerned brown eyes. His hands wrestled in his lap.

  It’s not my parents, is it? he asked telepathically. God, I asked them to control themselves this trip and already my dad’s doing his thing.

  Janis looked from Mr. Spruel, who was launching into a boisterous rendition of “Henry the Eighth, I Am,” back to Scott and forced a smile.

  Your parents are fine. I just caught a brief wave of, ah, of sea sickness. Traumatic memories of being tossed around on a chartered fishing boat when I was eight. It’s already passing.

  As long as that’s all it is, he thought-spoke.

  Stop with the stressing. Janis smoothed his brow with a hand. Vacation, remember?

  Which was why she had just lied. Since becoming Champions, she and Scott had had precious little time off from training and nation saving, and Janis wasn’t planning to spend the next week worrying either of them over a gut feeling. If her abilities had an off switch, she would have flipped it the second the Spruels’ car chugged from their neighborhood back home. So long mind-reading, farewell precognition, see ya telekinesis and telepathy…

  Well, she might have saved the telepathic communication bit. It had its perks.

  Have I mentioned you’re looking sexier than that Bruce Willis, she thought, finger combing his brown hair.

  Scott jerked his eyes toward the front of the car as though his parents could have overheard, then relaxed around a chuckle. You must mean Brainy Smurf, he replied, tugging on the front of his long-sleeved blue shirt.

  Janis set her head against his shoulder.

  “Place has changed a little since I was here last,” he muttered.

  Janis followed his gaze out his window. On a broken sidewalk that appeared at the town’s outskirts, a vagrant was pushing a tarp-covered shopping cart toward them. He squinted at their passing car, his face red and scraggly, and shouted something from a toothless mouth. Though Janis couldn’t hear him, the shapeless words drove the cold spike deeper into her mind.

  “Goodness gracious,” Mrs. Spruel exclaimed from the front seat. “What is this town coming to?”

  Wincing, Janis twisted around until she was facing the back window. The diminishing vagrant stared after them and then bumped his cart from the sidewalk onto a path. He dipped into the edge of an expanse of woods, his brown rags flapping in the wind. In the moment before he disappeared, a second splinter-sharp thought lodged itself in Janis’s mind beside the first.

  She withdrew from the window with a gasp.

  “What is it?” Scott asked.

  Janis shook her head. “Nothing.” She patted her chest. “A hiccup.”

  She tried to scrub the impressions from her head, but as the town of Murder Creek unfolded around them, the impressions grew more insistent, not less. They pounded inside her like a migraine.

  Bad things have happened here.

  A red X jagged through her vision.

  Bad things are going to happen here.

  2

  The second the car pulled into the beach house garage, Scott jumped out and hustled around to open Janis’s door, sweat beading through the back of his shirt. His perspiration had nothing to do with the weather, which was actually a little cool. It had everything to do with—

  “Last one in the water’s a rotten egg!” His father bawled as he pried himself from the driver’s seat and tugged the loud purple and yellow shirt back down over his belly. “Har-har-har!”

  Scott leaked fresh perspiration. Using his body to shield Janis from his father’s cringe-worthy sense of humor, not to mention fashion (Scott had begged him not to wear the Hawaiian shirt), he moved to the popped-open trunk, where he pulled out their suitcases and stuffed them up under his arms.

  Scott’s mother set J.R.’s toy-poodle-sized crate on the floor. “No one’s going in the water, Stanley,” she chided. “It’s fifty degrees out, for Pete’s sake. Perfect weather to start cleaning out your junk, if you ask me.” Her stenciled b
rows nearly touched as she scanned the walls of the garage. They were piled high with artifacts from his father’s beach-combing expeditions.

  “Hey, Dad?” Scott said, pulling on his backpack. “Mind throwing me the keys so I can show Janis to her room?”

  Scott grabbed the keys out of the air, hefted the suitcases again, and nodded Janis toward the outdoor stairs that climbed to a second-floor deck, his arms and legs already running with sweat.

  He’d known it would be painful, asking his girlfriend to come on vacation with his parents. But it was either that or remain apart for the next week. So, yeah, not really a choice. Ever since their last mission, and Janis’s close brush, he wanted to soak up every moment with her. He just hoped he could do so while blunting her from his parents’ more annoying attributes.

  “They’re only annoying to you,” Janis said as they reached the deck.

  “Huh? Oh.” He was still adjusting to the idea that Janis could pick up his stray thoughts. “Give them a few more days,” he said, working the key into the lock of the second floor. “The car ride over? That was their B-side material.”

  “Everyone thinks their parents are the most embarrassing creatures alive.”

  “Well, in my case…”

  Scott felt a tug on the back of his shirt. “Come here, Mr. Serious.”

  He wheeled around, and in a smooth, soft movement, her lips were against his. The other suitcase slipped from his grip. He moved the hand to her cheek, the wind brushing her hair over his fingers, against his face. He relaxed into her. When their kiss ended, they touched foreheads.

  “Better?” she asked, chestnut-green eyes shining up at him.

  “Much.”

  He let her pull him beside her onto a wooden porch swing that faced the bay. The beach beside the buckled pier was weed-choked, the water beyond choppy and brown. In the middle distance, barnacle-encrusted pilings poked up. Not exactly the water-front paradise his mother had claimed it would become when she talked Scott’s father into buying the property years before.

  “It has a certain charm,” Janis said, rocking the swing with her legs.

  “Yeah,” Scott said. “Strangeness.”

  Down the beach to their left sprawled a crumbling cannery—the town’s legacy. To the right, about a mile away, was Murder Creek’s boardwalk, closed for the season. The skeletal scaffolding of a wooden roller coaster rose behind it. The amusement park was closed for the foreseeable future, Scott understood, the town unable to find a buyer.

  When the wind pushed a salt-heavy air over them, Scott remembered Janis’s claim of sea sickness.

  “How’s your stomach holding up?”

  “Oh, you know.” She glanced over at him.

  “It’s not your stomach, is it?” he said. “You felt something back there, in the car.”

  She stopped rocking.

  “It was just a premonition,” she answered after a moment.

  “You’ve had a few premonitions in the last year,” he reminded her, “and none of them qualify as justs.”

  “I mean it was vague,” she said, the skin seeming to pull taut over her brow. She pushed a strand of flame-red hair from her face, securing it behind an ear. “A vague sense that some things have happened in this town and that maybe there are more things to come.”

  Scott knew that by things she meant bad things but didn’t press the issue. Murder Creek had always struck him as such a nothing town. The library didn’t even have a computer.

  “But, look, forget about it,” she said. “I’ve had premonitions I never shared, and nothing ever came of them. Some places just have psychic … stuff.” She threw her hands around. “Debris, I guess you could call it. We must have driven through a patch on our way into town. If it coalesces into anything more concrete, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, let’s try and enjoy ourselves, all right?”

  “It’s a deal.” He moved in for another kiss.

  His mother chose that moment to splinter the air with a scream.

  Lovely.

  Janis was halfway down the stairs before turning to Scott, who hadn’t budged. “What are you doing? C’mon!”

  He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He knew his mother better than Janis did. She had probably spotted a mouse or some other pest. Even dust bunnies had been known to trigger a panic response in her.

  But when they reached the kitchen, his mother wasn’t standing on a chair and batting the floor with a broom. She was turning a slow circle, her fingers digging into her short, Pat Benatar-style hair. Scott’s father stood beside her, blinking and scratching his bushy goatee.

  “What’s going on?” Scott asked.

  J.R., their toy poodle, forced himself between Scott’s legs and shook nervously.

  “We’ve been…” His mother pressed a hand to her chest, as though to keep her heart from popping out. “We’ve been robbed!”

  Janis watched Detective Buckner tick off the stolen items on his report. The black detective was on the young side, fresh faced, clear eyed, but he’d managed to calm Scott’s mother (her eyelids were no longer batting ten beats a second, anyway), which spoke to experience.

  “Shirts and trousers, a pair of wading boots, two kitchen knives, a flashlight, spare batteries, an empty gasoline jug, a tub of ground coffee, and a giant-sized bag of Humpty Dumpty potato chips.” Detective Buckner raised his eyes. “Anything else missing, ma’am?”

  Scott’s father bustled in from the garage. “The propane tank on the grill is gone.”

  Detective Buckner added the tank to the list, then stood from the table and peered around the kitchen and living room. “Did you identify a point of entry? Open door, broken window, anything like that?”

  Mrs. Spruel shook her head. “The doors and windows were all locked tight.”

  Detective Buckner nodded as though he wasn’t surprised, then clicked on his flashlight. He ran the pale beam around the nearest window frame. “I’m going to check out a few things,” he said. “Why don’t you folks go ahead and unpack. Just don’t touch any more doors or windows until I’ve finished processing the scene. Holler if anything looks out of place.”

  Mr. Spruel returned to the garage for the rest of the luggage. Mrs. Spruel followed with a dazed expression. Janis and Scott stayed behind, Janis watching the detective inspect the window lock, probably for scratch marks from a tool.

  Any impressions? Scott asked her.

  Only one, Janis answered. He’s not expecting to find anything.

  Scott cleared his throat. “Has this happened anywhere else?”

  “Oh, we usually get a handful of break-ins around this time of year,” Detective Buckner said, moving to the next window. “Thieves hit vacation homes in the slow months between the summer and winter seasons, when the owners are away. This year is no different.”

  “Any arrests?” Janis asked.

  “As of yet, no.”

  “A suspect, at least?” Scott put in.

  “The investigations are ongoing, but given the kinds of things that are turning up missing…” The detective blew out his breath. “I’d say we’re looking at petty thieves. Maybe a drifter.”

  Janis remembered the vagrant they’d seen on their way into town, pushing the tarp-covered shopping cart into the woods.

  She squinted as the detective moved to the sliding glass door and drew back the curtain covering it. He’s doing his job, Janis thought toward Scott. But it’s like he’s just going through the motions.

  Technically, she wasn’t supposed to use her powers outside of official Champions business. And following their last campaign, she wasn’t supposed to be using her powers, period. The Program had ordered strict rest for her. But Janis told herself she wasn’t probing the detective’s thoughts—just skimming through those that were scattering off him like steam. He had apparently seen this before: a break-in with no apparent signs of breaking in. No evidence left behind, either.

  The cold spike returned to Janis’s head. She looked around, the
breath thin in her chest. She needed to get out of the house for some reason. “Can we take a walk?” she asked Scott.

  He looked at her quizzically. “Yeah, sure. Just let me grab my pack.”

  “Hey,” the detective said, dancing back from the door, “think you could take the dog with you?”

  J.R. had wedged himself in front of the detective and was now staring at the glass door, a whine quavering in his throat. Janis expected to see someone walking up the back porch steps, but there was no one.

  When the dog barked, it sounded like something had torn open inside him. He dragged his shivering haunches over the shag carpet in a circle, his white curls puffing out all over his body. It took Janis a moment to see that Detective Buckner’s glossy boots were dotted with poodle urine.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” Scott said, seeing it too. He ran to the kitchen and returned with a wad of paper towels.

  Janis had gone in for J.R., meanwhile. When her hands closed around his body, he stiffened like a statue. She had to drag him backward. More frightened whining ululated from the dog’s throat, his black eyes never leaving the door. “What’s gotten into you?” Janis whispered.

  It was odd behavior, even for J.R.

  Janis gapped the collar for Scott to clip a leash to it. By the time they’d pulled J.R. to the far side of the room, he was standing again. He licked his muzzle once and, panting, looked from Scott to Janis as though they had all just returned from a run and he was ready to call it a morning. Janis returned her gaze to the back door, trying to see whatever it was that had set J.R. off.

  Detective Buckner seemed to have the same idea. He shone his flashlight along the doorframe and then over the carpet, combing his fingers through the shag. He stood again, apparently having come up empty.

  Maybe he’s looking in the wrong place, Janis thought.

  She shifted her focus to the astral plane, to the realm that supported the physical world. The living room of the Spruels’ beach house blossomed into a luminous thread-work of interconnecting lines, where Scott and Detective Buckner appeared as pulsing auras. Her powers were only running at about fifty percent, which was why the Program had ordered her to conserve them. She reached forward, along the lines that connected her to the sliding glass door.