19. Blood
Chapter nineteen
Blood
*ARDEN*
T he various dates and snippets of information seem to fly around me, information putting itself together like puzzle pieces before separating again because the pieces didn’t fit.
A new attempt to make it fit, to find the connection.
They are werewolves. Omegas.
Roughly aged twelve to forty-four, but no pre-teen children except for Meg, and no elderly. Most of them are above eighteen and below forty. Yet, age still plays a minor part.
They are orphans, many of them from packs that didn’t care if they went missing or believed them in an accident.
But are they truly all orphans? Scanning the reports, I realize there have been some kidnappings that seem to fit our case but don’t involve orphaned omega wolves. Then, we have some potential orphaned victims who don’t really fit the rest of the criteria.
But nothing else seems to make sense. They have different hair colors, different eyes, different nationalities, different genders. It cannot be a sexually motivated crime, can it? They differ too much from each other. I grab my tablet and look up more information online, trying to research the packs and see if there is a connection there.
Someone has to be seeking them out, but across continents, it can’t be just one person. It can only be a group.
The packs are all of smaller size, probably those who lack the infrastructure, the connections, the knowledge, and the money to help. Only, the last victim Aurelia presented is from a pack that had connections to Silverlake, a factor the group probably didn’t consider.
I sort through the folders again, putting some of them aside. Their data differs too much from the others; either they are too old, or their packs too big, too important, or they were adopted and very obviously not on their own.
I roam the human database again, everything that Zoé collected for us, printing the additional information out and putting them all next to each other on the floor. Age isn’t the primary factor. Omegas, orphans and…
And…
“Blood,” I mutter.
“Hm?” I feel someone stir behind me, turning around abruptly to notice Aurelia. She is wearing her pajamas and is covered in a blanket. When did she return? Why didn’t I even notice!? Is it that late already?
“When did you get back?” I ask, shocked.
Aurelia glances at her watch. “Around two hours ago.”
“I’m so sorry!” I blurt out, feeling panicked instantly. My mate comes back, and I don’t even realize she is here. “Why didn’t you say anything? I would have spent time with you.”
“It looked important, what you were doing,” she says, wrapping the blanket around herself tighter.
Just like that, I feel my heart skip a beat. I don’t know what it is… the fact that she isn’t upset or that she deems what I do important. “When I am like this,” I say. “When I think , then it’s like I am in my own world.”
“How does it work?” she asks curiously, while I sit down next to her. She smiles, opening the blanket and wrapping me into it as well. I can feel the heat of her body radiating, warming me up as well.
“Do you know what a memory palace is?” I ask in return.
“I just know that it’s a technique to memorize things,” she says.
“Okay, so the brain is a muscle,” I say. “And like any muscle, it can be trained.”
“So, you are like a brain athlete?” she asks.
“More like a mental athlete,” I explain. “You convert information, any information, into an image, and then build these images into a palace. It’s a mentally constructed palace, just for you. The trick is to turn basic information, something that doesn’t look interesting, into something exciting. Make it colorful, spicy, and then add it to your palace. I try to make it as fantastic as possible, different from anything I see in real life. My memory palace is very colorful. And when you want to recall a memory, you walk through the palace, and everything you need to know is there. The trick is to not let the information just float around in your brain or you will forget it. It needs to be attached to something you know. It needs to have structure.”
“That’s how you store information?” she asks.
“Pretty much. My memory palace is a crazy place,” I chuckle. “With weird animals that don’t even exist and an indoor waterfall. I even have a library in it.”
“But for you, it doesn’t end there, does it?” she asks.
“I don’t know why or how,” I say. “Eric thinks it’s both because of my IQ but also a possible gift, but every bit of information I receive I store into my palace automatically. I have several floors of libraries in my mind, of books I have read or words I have heard, and when I need information, I walk to the library and grab the book and read it again.”
“This is amazing. I mean, all of this just from your memory!” Aurelia says. “I hope you know how fantastic this is, Arden.” She pauses. “And what did you do before you noticed me? Were you in your memory palace?”
“Yes, and no. I had a look at the folders and information considering our potential victims, with Meg being our central one. I categorized the victims, like the one you reported, into highly likely victims, possible ones and unlikely ones.”
She nods. “Makes sense.”
“I built a shelf and added all the information, from the folders we put together, to the books in my mind. Then, I added the information I found online, shuffled everything in my mind, and put it into new folders in there. It’s not my actual memory palace, though; it’s more like I enter a cloud. Imagine it more digitally. I request one category from the folders, let’s say, height, and the numbers would surround me.”
“Goddess,” Aurelia mutters. “I don’t know what to say. If you ever belittle yourself in front of me again, I might kick you and give you timeout in your palace.”
I laugh at her last word, finding her threat incredibly cute.
“Don’t laugh,” she says.
I reach out my hand to grasp the back of her neck and pull her into a kiss. “You are cute,” I mutter against her lips.
It makes her chuckle. “No one has ever called me cute.”
“But you are,” I say, kissing her again. “Cute.” I kiss her again, my lips moving to her neck. “Beautiful.” My lips move to her ear. “Brave.”
I feel her fingers brushing through my hair, tugging at some strands while she presses her body against mine. I don’t know what came over me to kiss her like that and tell her how beautiful and stunning I find her, but everything with her seems so natural. With Coralie, I had to think hard about how to say things, but Aurelia doesn’t misunderstand me. And when she does, she just asks again, to understand.
I will happily give her all the answers.
She takes my face between her hands and rubs our noses together. “Before we drop unconscious from exhaustion, tell me… what did you find out?”
My eyes light up. “Blood,” I say.
“So, I heard it correctly, but what about it?”
“When I excluded those who are unlikely victims, I realized the blood types of the remaining ones are the same.”
She looks surprised now. “What?”
“I was checking the information over and over until I realized that whatever it is that they have in common is stored nowhere in our data. I tried to look for the blind spots.”
“You mean info that isn’t important to us, right?” she gasps. “For us wolves… blood types are irrelevant to us!”
“Exactly, which is why it only showed up in Meg’s data originally, as she lived with the humans, and to the humans, blood types are important in case of medical emergencies.”
Aurelia sits up straighter now, completely in work mode again. “For us wolves it’s irrelevant because our wolves heal us, and anyone can donate blood as long as he is of werewolf blood.”
“It’s the missing link. I realized that, while all the victims are omegas, not all of them are necessarily orphaned. Some just had little contact with their parents or lived in different countries. We completely missed that during our research, which is why I decided to get as much information as possible. I checked the human database. And from that data it showed that at least four of those victims were archived there. And I can verify: they all share the same blood type.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“But that’s not all. Guess the blood type!”
“If you ask like that, it has to be rare,” she mutters.
“Not just rare, the rarest. Well, aside from Rh-null, but that’s only a handful of people in the whole world. They are all AB negative. It’s said that only 1% of the whole population worldwide has that blood type.”
“Goddess.” Aurelia brushes the hair out of her face. “And, although we now know they aren’t all orphaned, they were still pretty lonely, and all omegas and werewolves on top of that, which narrows it down even more.”
“Exactly, for the victims to fulfill all these criteria it’s extremely uncommon, which is probably why they have been kidnapping them for years by now, and worldwide.”
“Why the blood, though?” she asks the one crucial question I have no answer to.
“I have no idea, but it’s the one question we need to find an answer to. First of all, we need to find out where they get their blood work from.”
“Human hospitals?” she suggests. “You know there are moments we can’t stay completely out of human business. May it be for school, work, or an emergency.”
“Possibly.” I nod. “We need to check the hospitals.”
“We can release a warning,” she says. “Shouldn’t we release that information to the packs?”
“Should we?” I ask in return. “Or are we scaring them off, then? I don’t know if being an omega is a major factor. So far, our guess was that they were the ones easily missed, which is why they were targeted, but I don’t think they would necessarily stick with omegas. Being orphaned or lonely is more important. If we start protecting one group, our culprits might disappear or target someone else. We might never find them that way.”
“Is that the right thing to do, though?” she asks. “It feels morally twisted, but I never was in a situation to make such a difficult decision.”
“It is morally twisted, incredibly so,” I say. “I think we need to consider a way that saves the most people,” I point out. “And you are right. It doesn’t sit right with me that the most vulnerable of our society are still targeted.”
“I get what you mean, though. We could scare the culprits off, and they go into hiding, just to resurface again in a couple of months or years,” she pauses. “How about I call my father and my brothers and have them handle this subtly. Two of my brothers are alphas, one a lune.”
“You think they can do it? Be subtle? That would solve so many of our problems!”
She laughs. “You haven’t met my family yet. Believe me, they can.” She glances at her watch. “They are a couple of hours behind us, but it’s too late to call them now. I will try to reach them tomorrow morning before Leila and I go to the orphanage.”
I wrap her in my arms. “How about we try to get at least a couple of hours of sleep.”
“Yes,” she yawns, stretching tiredly. “That or I will curl up here again.”
“No need for that, though it’s cute you were prepared to crash here.” I take her hand, pulling her up with me. We grab the blanket and our bags but leave everything else the way it is, before walking back to my room. It’s only now that I realize how bone-tired I truly am. I am exhausted, my head aching.
I also realize that I still need to talk with Vander. I only saw him briefly, and he didn’t look good. Fortunately, Léna visited him, and they hung out. But I need to talk to him eventually. Shit, I should have done that today already. I’m a terrible brother. Once my mind is set on a task, I tend to forget everything else.
What if Vander needed me today, and I wasn’t there? I wouldn’t forgive myself if he does something stupid or thinks everything is his fault. He is such a sensitive soul. I bet he thinks some of the blame lies on him.
“Say,” Aurelia breaks the silence. “What do you know about demon pets?”
Her words pull me completely out of my rather obsessive thoughts. “Excuse me? I’m not sure if I caught that correctly.”
“You did,” she says. “Demon pets. I have one. Recently, I adopted a cat, a Maine Coon, but I got a message today that it’s from the demon realm.”
“You truly just said demon realm?” I ask.
“Yes. In my brother’s pack, there lives a demon dog. Is this some sort of invasion?”
“I don’t think two counts as an invasion.”
“Call it whatever you want,” she says. “But, I think it’s too much of a coincidence that within a couple of months, two people who live in the same area stumble over demon creatures. How did they come here? We haven’t heard of any cases like that before.”
She is right. She is completely right. “I haven’t researched the demon realm so far,” I say. “But I will do so. They are amicable?”
“Yes, to the people they adopt as their master,” she says. “But I know for a fact that the demon dog ate two warriors from an enemy pack, and my cat just inhaled a whole snake.”
“That’s fascinating,” I mutter.
She tugs at my hand. “Arden, not the time for being amazed,” she says, sounding amused.
“I can’t help it. It’s interesting.” I entwine our fingers. “I promise, I will research it.”