Chapter 1
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I have a gift–by touching an object, I can locate its missing owner. People like me are called Trackers.
Once, Elder Kinsman paid me a fortune to find his missing grandson, Shane. I drained years of energy to find him, but then Shane’s
sister, Isabelle, called. She accused me of kidnapping him as part of a scam.
“Find my brother in 24 hours,” she hissed, “or I’ll kill your parents and send you their remains as a souvenir.”
But my gift has one rule: only one search per day. By the time I got home, my parents were dead. Isabelle branded me a fraud and murderer. I died in agony.
Then I woke up–back on the day Elder Kinsman came begging for help.
This time, I cut him off.
“Sir, you’ve been misled. No one can find people like that. If they could, they’d be gods. Call the police instead.”
I watched with cold eyes as Elder Kinsman pleaded with me, his own eyes brimming with tears. “Ms. Vance, I’m begging you, have mercy… Shane is only eighteen. He’s the future of our family…”
I stepped back to pull my arm from his grasp, but he clung to me like a drowning man to a life raft. “I know the rules of the game. I‘ Il triple the fee! No, five times! If you find Shane, you can have half of the Kinsman family fortune!”
“Mr. Kinsman, money can’t buy a life, and it can’t bend my rules. I told you, I don’t have this gift. Your best bet is the police.”
He looked up, his wrinkled face a mask of pure despair. “But they all said you could! Three years ago, you found the Miller girl after she was gone for six months. Five years ago, you located the Hayes boy in that unmarked grave. Ms. Vance, those children got to live. Why can’t my Shane?”
I stared at his trembling lips, a familiar ache rising in my chest.
It had been the same in my past life. He had knelt in the mud of my small garden, telling me how he’d raised Shane himself, how the boy was dearer to him than his own son. My heart had softened. I took the jade pendant Shane always wore and burned throu- gh most of my energy to get a location.
T
Just as I was about to speak, the phone had rung.
I could hear the sound of chains clanking in the background of Isabelle’s call.
“Tracker? Your parents are currently enjoying some stale bread I so generously provided. Would you like to hear them?”
My mother’s muffled sobs echoed through the phone.
“Release my brother, and I’ll release them. Twenty–four hours should be plenty of time for your little magic trick, right? Oh, and I forgot to mention, I’ve strapped timed explosives to their ankles. If my brother isn’t back, you can expect two boxes of minced me- at to arrive on your doorstep.”
I had run home like a madwoman. The first thing I saw was the iron box on the kitchen table, Inside was a neat arrangement of bloody, unidentifiable flesh.
Isabelle had been leaning casually against the doorframe, toying with Shane’s jade pendant.
“So much for your ‘gift‘,” she’d said with a smirk. “Couldn’t find my brother, and you got your own parents killed. Men, take her away.” Then she’d smiled sweetly at me. “Come along, little fraud. I’ve already prepared a coffin just for you.”
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Chapter 1
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Her bodyguards dragged me away like a dead dog. I was thrown into the Kinsman family’s basement and subjected to days of
unimaginable torment.
As I lay dying, she had whispered in my ear, “If anything happens to my brother, I’ll make sure your parents never know a moment of
peace, even in the afterlife.”
