Chapter 20
The click of keys soothed my irritation at finding nothing, no matter how many angles I viewed of the bookshop before the camera split out.
Was there a reason for the malfunction? If it was supernatural, I saw nothing before it happened.
Nor did there seem to be anything useful in the interviews.
My eyes ached from staring at the screen, searching every corner of the grainy footage for anything usable.
I closed the file and stared at the long backlog of cases, and wondered if that was how they all were. A wall of information, but useless because supernatural creatures left no trace.
What about the daycare? Was there more on that? Would I have access? I probably shouldn’t, since I’d been involved, but I couldn’t help but wonder.
“Am I limited in what cases I can look at?” I asked Angel.
“No. Was there something you wanted to find?” There were hundreds of active cases. How could any team get through all that with the tiny amount of staff they had?
“The daycare,” I said.
Angel looked up from his screen to stare at me, his gaze assessing. “You sure you want to look at that?”
“Is there video of me in there?”
“Yes, though I hadn’t looked at it until you said something about your former partner. It was originally assigned to the NHV team for review.”
A dozen questions crossed my mind. How much had he seen? Did I control the zombies? Had I looked like something terrifying and that’s why Joe zapped me?
“I don’t want to see that part. But if there is more from the daycare before all the crazy zombie stuff happened…” I paused and wondered how much they knew about the daycare. “Were they zombies? Or did the kids change?”
“One dead,” Angel said. “No kids. The zombies came through the tear, but I think all the kids were accounted for.” He did something on his computer that popped a file up on mine with little notes.
“Merrill listened through everything. His ability is mostly audio. Heard nothing. At least, according to his notes.”
That was a strange way to phrase that. “You don’t believe him?”
“Merrill and I don’t talk,” Angel said. “You saw how he bristled, being near me in the breakroom this morning.”
“Was he on your team?”
“For less than a month,” Angel agreed.
“And he doesn’t like shifters, when most of your team are shifters, right? Probably not a good fit for him.”
“Yeah. Bobby is a vampire variant, but as they are just as rare as SVs, he’s the only one I know of in the Twin Cities. Tiana is a shifter.”
“There are other shifters in this unit though. Not on our team, I mean.”
“A dozen,” Angel agreed.
“I thought there would be more. The media makes it sound like shifters are the most common variant.”
“I think the most common are those with very low-level mental skills. Mind reading, telekinesis, that sort of thing. None strong enough to work for SED reliably. Shifters have physical strength, speed, animal senses, and heal faster. It makes us more of a benefit to units spending a lot of time in opposition to supernatural creatures.”
“Still the odd duck out,” I complained, thinking they were hoping for a lot of stuff from me that wasn’t panning out. Seeing my dead grandmother didn’t seem a useful trait yet. Or whatever shadow beast had been laughing at me the day before.
“You’re still finding your feet. I’m not worried,” Angel said.
Three more files popped up on my computer with notes from Angel.
“Look over those when you have time, too. It’s almost time to quit for the day.
The bulk of our office fills with NHVs after five.
Our space is still ours.” He waved at our little room. “But they aren’t a quiet bunch.”
“Good to know,” I said, rubbing my eyes again. “This video stuff is exhausting.” Rewatching the same thing a dozen times to study different angles made my head hurt. I opened the one from the daycare.
The first video loaded: grainy security footage from outside the daycare. Parents tugged their kids along in a harried rush, the usual chaos of morning drop-offs. I watched it on five-times speed to get an overview.
A dozen notes, full of observation, were attached to the file. I read them after watching the footage twice. No red flags, but twice, my gut clenched, instinct screaming at me to see something. What?
One kid caught my attention. Pulled along by their parent, they walked stiffly, unlike the others who wriggled and skipped.
One even yanked at their parent to hurry.
Something about that stiff kid’s rigid posture made me rewatch.
I zoomed in, slowing down the replay, leaning closer to the screen as if proximity would help me catch whatever my instincts cried out I was missing.
But the camera’s angle was wrong, capturing only their backs as they disappeared inside.
Frustration simmered. I highlighted the segment and added a note, more for myself than anyone else.
Maybe something in the later footage would explain this uneasy feeling.
If I’d learned anything from the past week, it was to watch for shadows and how they moved when they shouldn’t.
But if anything was off in the early morning hours of the daycare, I couldn’t find it.
The next video was from the interior reception area.
The same routine: kids running off to play while parents dropped off lunches and signed forms. I scanned for the stiff child and their parent.
There—still only their backs. The kid wandered off on their own, moving with that same unsettling slowness, almost robotic.
Maybe they had a disability? That sort of thing rarely drew my attention. Was it something else?
I marked it again and moved on to the playroom feed.
Kids trickled in, joining groups with chatter and giggles.
The stiff child sat alone at a table, methodically coloring.
The angles weren’t clear enough to make out details, and their androgynous appearance left me guessing, a boy or a girl?
No one really seemed to engage with them, but having been the odd kid out most of my life, I thought they might just be unpopular and felt bad for them.
The first part of the day passed uneventfully, and painfully slow. Structured play, snack time, and story time. The snack break wasn’t captured on video; the dining area had no cameras. I flagged that as a gap.
“No cameras in there,” Angel said, breaking my focus. My notes must have appeared on his screen, too.
I glanced up. “The dining room?”
“Mhmm. I actually think it’s against code or something, so if they hadn’t been shut down by this event, they’d have been hit with a heavy fine.” He got up, heading for the door. “You want something other than coffee?”
“Am I not allowed to have more coffee?” I asked, mock-offended.
“No. It’s quarter to five. Jude, as a species, cannot live on coffee alone.”
“Cool, I have a whole species to myself now. Water’s fine.”
“Be back in ten,” Angel said. He pointed at Wade, then to me, and back. Wade nodded at him, but stayed engrossed in his conversation with Bobby about the latest tech readings. Something about the handprints they’d found with my help at the bookstore excited them.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” I said as Angel walked out. Wade waved at me. I let it go and returned to the footage.
The feed from the daycare lobby cut out just before the Veil tear. The timestamps marked the exact moment, and my mind churned. Could this be connected to the bookstore murder? I watched as the playroom feed took over. The kids froze mid-play, all staring toward the lobby door.
Had they heard something? Seen something?
I cranked the volume up, expecting chaos, but only buzzing filled the air. A static hum. When had the playful chatter shifted to this eerie white noise? My pulse quickened as I paused the replay and zoomed in on each child, their faces blurred by shadows and bad angles.
Finally, I reached the stiff child, the one I’d avoided scrutinizing. They sat alone in the corner, still coloring, ignoring the beginning of chaos. My gut twisted, a sense of wrongness blooming like a dark cloud.
The kid turned their head and looked upward, staring right at the camera.
I blinked, thinking I’d hit the play button since they moved, but it was still paused. The kid’s face twisted, shifting from human features to something dark and monstrous. Shadows consumed their eyes, and their mouth stretched into a grin too wide, too sharp.
A cold shiver clawed up my spine.
The kid didn’t just look at me.
They saw me.