Cold Visions of Future's Past

Chapter Two

Unedited...ish.

Chapter Two

We found a disturbing pattern after only two hours of searching. Every fifty years, a woman was taken after another was returned to the same area she was suspected of being stolen from. And sometimes it was more than one, making everything about the case unpredictable. It went all the way back to the beginning of our records which was a few years after the Guild was founded in the early seventeen hundreds. We could only imagine how many other victims existed before we started keeping records.

"What if it's happening somewhere else too?" I asked, rubbing my forehead. "We should send out some feelers to the other Guilds, see if they come back with anything. Just in case."

This boggled my mind. How had no one pieced this together yet?

"How could this have been missed?" I waved at the twenty stacks. "They all died the same way. All went missing—"

"Come on, Vertigo. You read some of those reports. We're lucky to be able to track some of them to the original missing persons case."

I propped my hands on my hips, not liking that one bit. "We shouldn't have to be lucky. Someone should've cared enough. If it was a man—"

"Don't go there. They cared—"

"Barely enough to write a vague ass report." I held up one that was particularly thin and short. Three sentences actually. Because she'd been a sex worker. "They didn't care until she turned up dead fifty years later and that's because the opinions about women had changed." I stared at the reports, a little more than pissed off for some of these women. But I couldn't do anything about the sketchiness now. Only focus on the potential up-and-coming victim or victims. "If we follow the pattern, another one will be taken in the next three days by a wooded area. Considering current-day NYC, the possibilities are limited but they exist."

"You want patrols, don't you?"

"I want so many patrols that the city is blanketed with them and whoever is doing this will think twice before stealing a woman from my city."

"Surely you mean our City."

My right side blistered with supernatural heat, letting me know our fearless Leader had arrived. I was a little surprised I hadn't noticed the increase in temperature until now. Maybe it was the distraction of the case—or maybe it was something else.

I shot Gregori a glare, shaking off my worrisome dulled senses. "Semantics."

"We all guard this city, Vertigo. Not just you."

He stood in the doorway, vibrating with barely surpressed irritation. Nothing much had changed since his promotion: dressed the same, acted the same, expected the same. Only thing notably different was how we treated each other. Several people outside of the Security Office had commented on it but neither of us offered up an explanation. They let it go after a few weeks of pestering and not getting any answers, but rumors persisted. No one had the whole story of what happened between us which caused a lot of curiosity.

But we both remained tight-lipped.

About a lot of things concerning us.

"Then as the former Head of Security, you should be ashamed because your ass should've caught this long before it landed on my desk," I said, slapping the file back down on the table.

"It was a cold case—"

"Which just happens to be your fucking specialty," I interrupted, folding my arms over my chest. "What does that say about you?"