Destiny Calls by Lydia Michaels

hand again went to her empty pocket. She stood and searched for her phone. It really scared her that if what Vito was saying was true and they had talked when she was in the woods, that she had no memory whatsoever of doing so. Her phone would have his number in her call log. Where the hell was it?
    “What are you doing?”
    “Trying to find my phone in this pigsty!”
    “For what?”
    “Because I lost it! I can’t find it.” Destiny’s phone was usually attached to her hip. The withdrawal itches of not having it were already kicking in. She needed her phone.
    “Here, use mine,” Vito said holding out his phone.
    “I don’t want that Miami Vice piece of crap. I want my own phone.”
    “D, who gives a shit about the phone right now? We need to keep talking this through. Too much doesn’t make sense. Aren’t you the least bit concerned about what’s been going on since you left?”
    “Yes. That’s why I need my phone—”
    “ Fuck the phone! ” She flinched and he lowered his voice. “Destiny, I know I blew you off before, but when I couldn’t find you in the woods and the cops couldn’t track even a footprint of yours, I came back here and started looking through your notes from work. I’m starting to believe that you’re right. There’s something out in those woods, something not human, but not an animal either.”
    She slowly turned and looked him in the eye. Chills suddenly covered her body, and she whispered, “What are you talking about, Vito?”
    “All this,” he said, sweeping his arm across the mess in her living room. “I think we need to go back out there and find this thing because the cops don’t want to consider that what’s killing those women could be more than an animal or human. And get this, I found records of women being murdered in that town dating back to the 1920s, all basically left unsolved.”
    “The woods are dangerous, and good little girls should stay in safer places.”
    His eyes bulged, and he looked as though he had swallowed his tongue. “Uh, do you fuckin’ hear yourself? What the hell was that? Look, just ’cause you made friendsies with the religious folk out there, doesn’t mean you can start spoutin’ off some crazy shit like that. I need you to be normal, Destiny, right now, okay?”
    She shook her head. She had no idea where that comment about the woods and good little girls came from. It had simply propelled out of her mouth as if triggered by a reflex. “Okay. Sorry.” She sat up straighter and focused.
    “See here on this map?” he pointed and pushed some other papers aside. “Here’s where the first victim was found this year. Here are the next four. Nothing special, right? But then look here, there starts to be a pattern. The ones that were sexually assaulted were all murdered in this vicinity, up by these higher altitudes. The ones that were more or less just tortured were done more sporadically. These two were found two days apart, but time of death was narrowed down only to an hour apart. There’s no way that thing could have killed both women that fast in two places so far apart.”
    Destiny recognized bits and pieces of her own notes now overwhelmed by her brother’s notations and conclusions. He must have started obsessing over all this when he was trying to find her. Terrible guilt for worrying him swamped her. She could at least listen to what he had to say. She could humor him. “What are you saying? That there’s more than one killer?”
    He nodded slowly. “And, look at this. The ones that were tortured, from the pictures you had, I noticed certain things.” He shuffled through photographs. “Here, look at this one. Natasha Price. She was one of the ones that were raped. See that mark on her leg?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What does it look like?”
    She hated looking at these pictures. She had seen them enough. Something deep inside her wished she never had to visit those woods again. “It looks like a bruise.”
    “Look