3. Chapter Three
~Felix~
The drive to the Vermillion pack land took a lot less time than the recent trek I made to the Ravenstone pack. A dirt road wound through dense forest, sunlight filtering through the leaves in dappled patches, until the Vermillion pack’s boundary came into view.
Unlike our pack, which looked and operated much like a modern human town, the Vermillion wolves stuck to a more simple, traditional way of life. Their remote location had no electricity and only a basic system of running water, fed from rainwater and a nearby lake. The Alpha had a satellite phone, the one we’d spoken to him on earlier, but aside from that, technology was sparse. Generally, they lived the way werewolves had lived more than a century earlier. The wolves I’d spoken to on my previous visits seemed content with their simpler way of life but I couldn’t imagine living without a fridge or a hot shower.
To each their own, I supposed.
With no formal border crossing, I simply pulled over after passing the large ‘keep out’ sign along the dirt road and waited for their border guards to arrive. Leaves rustled in the wind and I turned my face to the open window to drink in the fresh air. It didn’t take long for three wolves to appear, shifting into three bulky men as they approached my truck.
“Beta Felix from the Crimsontooth pack,” I introduced myself, holding up my hands so they could see I was unarmed. “Your Alpha’s expecting me.”
After confirming that with their superior, they let me go, though one of them ran after me in his wolf form, following my truck until I reached the small town at the centre of the pack land. They were taking security seriously which, in light of the recent thefts, could only be a good thing.
“Beta Felix.” Alpha Marcus came over to greet me as soon as I hopped out of my truck. “Thanks for taking the time to come and help us out.”
I shook his outstretched hand, giving him a warm smile. Roughly the same age as my own father, he always reminded me of a gruff uncle, someone not prone to shows of emotion but with a good heart underneath the cold exterior. “We’ll see how much help I can be. Let’s start off by looking at where your weapons are kept.”
He took me to a concrete shed just outside the town, one of the few buildings on their land not made from the wood of the trees that grew all around us. Two men stood outside, keeping watch, and the Alpha drew a set of keys from his pocket to open the heavy door. Inside, steps led down into an underground vault where guns, knives, and crossbows were arranged on neat, ordered shelves. The air grew cooler as we descended, the concrete walls pressing in around us, and our footsteps echoed in the narrow corridor. A faint metallic scent hung in the air.
“We keep a strict inventory,” the Alpha told me as I looked around the well-stocked storeroom. “It’s checked every week. That’s how we noticed things were missing.”
“Who has a key besides you?”
“Only my head of security, Graham. He’s on patrol right now but he’ll meet us at the pack house later.”
Slowly, I circled the room, looking for any other means of entry. There were no windows and no cracks or other flaws in the concrete walls. The only door in and out was the one we came in through.
“Were the guards always posted outside?”
“No,” he admitted. “We added extra security once we realized the weapons store had been targeted. Up until now, the locks have been enough to keep anyone else out.”
The guards would add an additional layer to get through, but getting past guards wasn’t impossible. Anywhere else, I would have asked if they had security cameras inside the facility but I couldn’t see any and, given the pack’s general aversion to technology, it seemed unlikely.
“So, someone could have gotten in and out without being seen if they picked the lock or had a key,” I summed up.
“The door was still locked when we discovered the theft,” Alpha Marcus said. “If they picked it, they wouldn’t have been able to lock it behind themselves.”
That suggested access to a key, supporting Vaughan’s theory about it being an inside job, but I still hadn’t ruled out a more supernatural explanation.
“Alright, so they had a key or they were some kind of creature who’s able to move through solid concrete. What exactly did they take?”
“A few knives, some arrows, and some bullets.”
Huh. Looking around at the arsenal, that seemed like a waste of all the effort it would have taken to create the diversion and sneak inside. “They didn’t touch the guns or the crossbows?”
Alpha Marcus shook his head. “No. Those are all accounted for.”
“Why would someone take the bullets and not a gun, or the arrows without a bow?” I wondered out loud.
“They might already have weapons of their own and only need the ammunition,” the Alpha suggested.
I mulled that over for a few seconds but it didn’t feel right to me. “Even if they do, why not take more while they’re here?”
“Easier to conceal the smaller items?”
“Perhaps.”
That only made sense if the person figured they would be seen, which pointed more to someone within the pack being the culprit than someone who could teleport or make themselves invisible. Since I didn’t want to accuse any of the Vermillion pack members without some actual proof, I kept those thoughts to myself.
Bending down, I took a closer look at the drawers where the bullets were kept, looking for anything out of the ordinary. No dust covered any of the surfaces, suggesting a recent cleaning. “I’m guessing you didn’t find any physical evidence left behind?”
“Nothing,” he confirmed.
“No fingerprints?”
“We aren’t set up to test for things like that.”
The lack of technology would certainly make an investigation more of a challenge, but I still had some other ideas. “What about unusual scents? A lingering sourness or sweetness in the air? Different coloured dust?”
Supernatural creatures left behind unique signatures if you knew what to look for. I knew several of them and Calista would probably know even more if I checked with her.
The Alpha shook his head again. “No, but I did notice one thing. A few arrows were taken out of each of these cases.” He pointed at two of the containers where the crossbow arrows were stored. “Just two or three from each one, like they thought it wouldn’t be noticed, but none were taken out of the third one.”
Intrigued, I went over to the container to take a closer look. “What’s the difference between them?”
“It’ll sound stupid, but we keep a flint arrowhead in that one.”
My pulse quickened but I did my best to keep a neutral expression. That didn’t sound stupid to me at all if it were for the reason I suspected. “Why do you do that?”
The older man shrugged. “Superstition, I suppose. An old tradition. My grandfather always insisted on keeping one among the arrows, but I don’t know why.”
Unlike him, I had a pretty good idea why. European folklore suggested that including a flint arrowhead among the others would protect the weapons from interference by elves or fairies. A lot of that folk knowledge had been passed down with the reasons and meaning behind it becoming muddled until people considered it superstition and nothing more. If the flint arrowhead deterred the thief, it narrowed down the list of potential species of interest significantly.
Unfortunately, my knowledge of the fae realm was pretty limited. My mother used to read me stories about the fae when I was a boy and one pretty little red-haired fairy in the illustrations always caught my attention. I looked for her on every page and usually found her hiding in the background. The memory made me smile, but I’d never imagined I would actually encounter an elf or fairy in real life. Their world existed in parallel to ours with its own rules and laws, and crossing between realms was a rarity.
A consultation with Calista would definitely be required, and maybe I should place a call to Savannah’s mate, Jasper, as well. As a detective, he might be able to help with the alternative possibility that we were looking for a perpetrator amongst the pack.
As I followed Alpha Marcus to the pack house to get settled in, the number of questions still unanswered left me with the feeling I’d only begun to scratch the surface of this mystery, and a lingering excitement about the possibility of dealing with a species I’d never encountered before, no matter how dangerous they might be.