Lost and Found… Well… Lost Anyway

      Spider looked at her map again and frowned.

       The flimsy piece of coloured paper was spread across the front counter of her bookstore, weighted at the corners by plaster skulls, and black dots covered a large portion of the lines and squares. She tapped the marker against her lips and narrowed her russet eyes, scanning the map for any section left clean.
       "…where could she be?" The murmur was entirely to herself, a habit of talking to empty air stemming from years living alone, and she leaned away from the counter with a faint huff. The search had been intensive and thorough. It seemed utterly impossible, especially considering the exact circumstances, but Iris Foster, Gift of the Dreaming, was missing.

       It had been a mere twelve hours since Briar Dallas had called the freehold and reported having seen Iris’s car in the Waterfront District where she had been walking with her friend, Jadin. Tyler and Bertram had gone out immediately to check the car, and had found no traces of Iris. Apparently she had taken her purse, locked the car and gone… where? Tyler and Bertram had searched the entire district, combing alleyways, unlocked warehouses and the bars which marked the Waterfront District as the ‘red light’ area. They had returned after two hours, exhausted and worried. It was a natural worry, considering a teenager of Iris’s appearance and personality alone in the most dangerous part of the city. However, that worry was compounded by a fact that most missing persons cases were lacking.
       Jonas Foster, her adoptive father, had an odd sixth sense about his daughter’s whereabouts. He could, without exception, pinpoint Iris’s location within five blocks at all times. It had been an interesting quirk when she was a little girl, and had become something of a game between the two of them when she was first given a cell phone. Iris enjoyed calling her father and asking him to guess where she was. He had never been wrong.
       Now, however… Jonas could not sense his daughter. At all. He had thought it a product of stress upon first realizing she wasn’t home on time, but throughout the night, he’d been unable to get even an inkling as to Iris’s whereabouts. Spider sighed, pushing her cherry-black hair away from her face. It had been hard to watch her friend’s face become more and more gaunt as the search continued and no sign of Iris had been found. Now Spider poured over a map of Freak Central and tried to imagine any conceivable, (or inconceivable) place where she might be.

       Everyone was on the hunt. By four in the morning, phones had been ringing off the hook, alerting the city’s ‘unusual’ citizens to the crisis at hand. It was odd, Spider mused, how everyone came together for this one girl. The Rough Riders, despite it being precariously close to dawn, had rallied and gone on a search, poking through all the darkest, most dangerous places the city held. The changelings had spread out, and Fish had been given a t-shirt with Iris’s scent and let loose into the woods. Brad and Kyle, screw-ups though they were, had begun working on one of their odd devices to try and lock onto Iris’s location. Honoria had been called to their apartment four hours ago, and there had been no word from that quarter yet. Spider smiled wryly as she examined another section of the map. Even Briar’s special talent had been called into usage, and the bone-thin artist had promised any number of sacrifices to the ghosts which dogged her steps if they would assist.

       All to no avail. Iris was still missing.

       Spider gnawed the end of her marker and looked at the clock. Well, thirteen hours now. The bookseller rubbed her aching neck and pushed the map aside, her russet eyes glazing as she gazed into nothingness.
       Who? That was the biggest question. Who would kidnap Iris? (It had, hours ago, been reclassified in everyone’s mind from missing to taken. Iris, for all of her odd quirks, simply would not put her father through this kind of worry.) Spider, for the life of her, could not figure out how someone would get into the city unnoticed, take the most watched individual in the populace and quietly sneak away without being so much as suspected. It was perhaps that which irked everyone the most: no one had had even an idea that Iris was in trouble.
       It was habitual for the teenager to receive phone calls at least once every two hours. On the surface, they were merely friendly calls. Her girlfriend, her friends, her family… Just calling to see what she’d like for dinner, how class was, did she want to join them for lunch? Everyone knew what they really were: check-up calls. Beneath the pleasantries were the unspoken questions: Are you okay? Has anything happened? Is anyone strange following you? Such hyper-awareness of someone’s safety was often mistaken as psychotic over-protectiveness by outsiders, but the history which had created such a network of guardians for the Gift of the Dreaming had proven tragic results for inattentiveness. Jonas, for one, had plainly stated that what happened to Diamanta Rothwell would -never- happen to Iris.
       Spider had to agree with him, now as well as then, even if she did comiserate with Iris that it was hard to simply be a teenager with -everyone- in the whole city watching nearly your every move. Jonas had gone so far as to cultivate a friendship with Honoria Wingate, the crownless princess who moved like a lethal shadow, and asked her, as a favor to him, to watch over Iris. It had been a very intelligent move, as no one ever quite knew where Honoria was, and she was as tangible as smoke when it came to trying to pinpoint or contact her. Perhaps even more comforting was the fact that she had proven, time and again, that there was no fight she couldn’t get the better of. This was, maybe, the most damning evidence: Honoria had neither seen nor heard anything. Even she, hunter of men extraordinaire, could not find a trace of Iris.

       It was a grim thought, but one which was on everyone’s mind. Iris might, for all intents and purposes, be dead. Spider’s lips tightened as she fought down the overwhelming rush of anger at the thought of Iris lying dead somewhere, a hapless victim of some senseless brutality. Even more painful was the idea of what that would do to Jon

as. Ax, Betre, Brad, Kyle and herself were all, in fact, more anxious for Jonas’s sake than for Iris herself. Teenagers did stupid things, and it was really only a matter of time until Iris pulled a stunt. The one thing which held Spider’s tongue was the concrete knowledge that Iris would -not- do this to her father. The bond between them was gossamer and indistinct, but utterly unbreakable. She wouldn’t hurt Jonas this way.

       The bookseller sighed again, the noise a distant relation to a sob, and pulled the map back over. Her jaw tightened as she reexamined it, scanning every inch of the paper for any, -any- possibility. The ringing of the phone made her jump and eye the instrument warily. Evil thing, that. So often was the ringing of a phone the modern harbringer of ill tidings. She reached for it, some immortal optimism wondering if perhaps the girl hadn’t been found alive and well after all.

      "Hello? …oh, hi Kearna. ….no, no word on Iris yet. …really? Today? …you say his name is what now? Ulryk?"