A/N: So, I was organised enough to have this chapter ready for posting, and the site goes down :P Ok, I meant to have it up on Friday evening, but missed my train even with lily's slightly reckless driving... Once she'd released me from the cellar, of course.
Thank you again for all the reviews, alerts and favourites, and please do continue with them! :D Lovely to know people are still reading despite the rather long downtime :) Thanks too to lily moonlight for the read-through.
Stella breathed, slowly, deeply, focusing on the movement. In. Out. In. Out. Her eyes were closed, and she didn't open them. Somehow, there no longer seemed any point in doing so. The world for her had shrunk; reduced to a hard wall and a hard floor, and a semicircle of blackness just larger than her reach. Her broken arm burned, the bone replaced by a firebrand, a white-hot core of molten iron, but she had also begun shivering, lightly, but uncontrollably. Her throat was dry, and lined with rough sandpaper which rasped as she swallowed. But she had dropped the bottle of drink from fingers drained of strength, and it had rolled away and disappeared, lost somewhere in the nothing which surrounded her.
"Please," she whispered to the darkness, not even a prayer, only a wish. "Please, someone, find me."
Neither of the men spoke during the drive. Flack's mouth was pressed into a grim line as he clenched the steering wheel with unnecessary force. Mac stared out of the windows, unconsciously fingering the rough line of stitches on his forehead as the blocks seemed to crawl past, painfully slowly.
The rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, and the wipers squeaked softly against the glass of the windscreen as they scraped back and forth. As the car juddered impatiently at a red light, seeds dropped heavily from an overhanging sycamore, too sodden to even spin as they fell. They thudded against the passenger-side windows, and stayed attached as the car once again turned into a new lane of traffic, trapped in corners, stuck to the glass by the layer of water.
But they arrived at last.
A sense of déjà vu pressed over Mac in the elevator – the feeling of missing something that was desperately important, something which he still couldn't remember. He exhaled sharply in frustration, a gesture which probably didn't go unnoticed by Flack, who was watching him closely and not even bothering to try and hide it. His facial expression suggested that he was the one being worried about, which was ridiculous, when it was Stella who was in trouble.
They strode along the corridor, towards Stella's door, and he realised that, despite everything, he was half-expecting it to open, and Stella to appear, raising her eyebrows despairingly at their concern. Of course, it didn't, and nor did she.
Mac's eyes were pulled to an empty section of scuffed skirting board level with his foot. For some reason, he was surprised to see that it was empty. He had been expecting to see something there. What?
Flack rang the bell, seemingly out of habit, and then stopped himself as it jangled, the sound bright but muffled behind the painted wood. He stepped out of the way and Mac slid his key into the lock, turned it (why did that sequence of movement feel like such a recent memory?), and pushed the door open. Both men had hands on their weapons. Flack flicked on the light.
The apartment was empty. No life. All the appliances they could see were switched off. A clean bowl sat with a spoon next to an unopened box of cereal on the counter of the kitchenette.
All of this, Mac took in with one glance. With his second, his gaze was caught, fixed and held by the far wall, the section between the entrance to the kitchenette and the passage leading to the bedroom and bathroom.
Blood. A thick, dark smear of dried blood standing out starkly against the white paint.
Flack had seen it too, and they hurriedly converged to that. The shape and height of the stain lead to a ready conclusion from both men, drawn from years of experience. "Someone had their head slammed against this wall," Flack said finally. "With a lot of force."
Mac nodded, slowly. "We were wrong. She got home."
"And stopped for food? Knowing that you were unconscious in the hospital? That's not like her. Besides, it was later than breakfast time."
"You're right." He noticed something else that was odd, out of place. "And that rug over on the floor shouldn't be there. It's usually in her bedroom."
"Glove?" Flack asked. Mac pulled one from his pocket, and tossed it across. Flack laid it over his fingers and folded the small rug back, a little at first, and then flipping it over completely.
The section of carpet that should have been beneath it was gone. Edges cleanly sliced away, a sloping almost-rectangle missing, about a foot by a foot-and-a-half.
"She was abducted from here," Mac said, his voice certain. But jagged around the edges, no matter how hard he fought to keep it steady. "Whatever happened here, whoever did this, cleaned up. They took the bloody piece of carpet with them."
"How do you know that the missing piece of carpet had blood on?" Flack asked, his expression and voice sharp.
"I don't …" He had been sure, for a moment. But the surety had already fluttered away. "I don't know. It just seemed..." He paused for a second. "Assume that there was blood here. Why go to great lengths to take it away, but leave the blood on the wall?"
"You look as if you already know the answer."
He nodded. "Don, she must have fought back! Why else remove only one piece of evidence, unless it's the piece of evidence that can implicate him? If there was blood on the floor, it would be his blood."
Flack sighed heavily. "But now it's gone. And all we've got are more questions."
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Stella's head lifted, and her eyes opened, wide and staring, although the action was as useless as it had ever been. "Who's there?" she faltered, hating how weak her voice sounded. How weak she was.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Slow but certain footsteps, drawing ever nearer. But no one could get in. She couldn't get out, and no one could get in.
Nevertheless, someone was there with her.
She knew who she wanted it to be. "Mac?" she whispered, desperate in her hope.
"Yes." The reply slithered towards her through the dark, a single syllable, but her heart leapt.
"Are you real?" she asked.
"Of course I'm real. I came to find you, Stella. It's me."
She couldn't tell. In the blackness she couldn't tell if it was really him. Even the sound of her own voice seemed distorted. "Can you put the light on?" she asked.
"What do you mean?" he asked, sounding faintly puzzled. "It's not dark." She struggled to process that, but he was already speaking again before her fogged mind could understand. "Here, drink this." He put something onto the floor next to her, and guided her hand onto it. A large plastic bottle. She heard him crack the seal open as he unscrewed the cap. "Drink," he prompted.
She lifted it slowly, her arm shaking with the effort, and as she raised it to her face some of the liquid splashed out, running down her chin and onto her shirt. But she ignored it, and took a sip, the water blissfully cool and soothing as it slid down her burning throat. It brought some clarity to her pounding head.
"Who are you?" she asked, not really sure if she wanted to hear a real answer. It would be so easy to close her eyes again and just keep on pretending that she was safe now…
"Mac Taylor."
"No you aren't." It had been there for her to hear clearly that time, the wrongness of his voice. Close, a good imitation, but not quite there. And the footsteps had been wrong too.
"Clever, aren't you?" His voice changed, became smooth, slippery. She heard him crouch down next to her, and shrank away from him.
"Get away from me!" she hissed.
"There's no point doing that," he reprimanded. "I can move a lot faster than you, right now. And you'll need to save your strength." He might as well have been talking about the weather, for all the emotion that showed in his voice.
"For what? What are you doing?" She wanted to be angry, to be furious, to overpower him and force him to let her out of this nightmare. But she couldn't. She didn't have the strength to summon it.
"Don't worry." She heard the quiet rustle of his clothes as he moved. And then there was a hand on her forehead, and she half-jumped at the touch, gasping out loud, partly from revulsion at his skin pressed against hers, and partly with the pain caused by her sudden movement. She didn't try and move his hand away, though. He was much stronger than her. However much she hated it, he was right about that. She couldn't fight him while he could disable her so easily.
His hand was very cold. After a few seconds he removed it. "I hope your fever goes down," he remarked, conversationally. "You'll last much longer down here without it."
Then a rustle again as he stood. The tap, tap, tap of his footsteps. As she listened to them, it seemed that he was putting more weight on one foot than the other, and trying to hide it. Not that that knowledge was of any use to her.
"Come back!" she called, with as much strength and volume as she could muster. "Let me go!"
He didn't.