Chapter 27
Daxen
Walking into Redmark is like walking into Fight Club, except everybody talks about it.
The overhead lights are fluorescent and bright, the floor is concrete (because apparently it’s easier to clean bloodstains), and there’s always a random male in the rings beating the shit out of someone to make himself feel better.
I hitch my messenger bags up on my shoulders and head straight for the stairs. As much fun as it is watching some of these males fight, it’s the last thing on my mind right now.
No, that unreliable thread of mutinous bullshit is saved for the Omega back at HQ. The one that’s hopefully locked tight in her attic room, and not running around causing more havoc for my brothers.
I head toward one of the meeting rooms and flip on the lights, dropping my shit on the table.
I appreciate that Riven keeps rooms like this on-site.
I have far more space here compared to the library at HQ.
I can set up laptops, pin maps on the walls, and lay out all the books I’ve confiscated to my most referenced pages.
But once I’ve got everything set up, I realize I still have a glaringly obvious problem.
I still have no idea what the fuck is actually going on, and no idea where to start looking for answers.
Sure, I can keep sifting through reports, but that won’t get me any closer to answers for the questions that matter. Like, why is this shit happening, and why is it happening now?
While researching, the pattern was easy enough to pick up.
The reports make it clear there’s been an uptick in the frequency of strange events over the last two decades, but sometimes numbers don’t tell the whole story.
The increase could easily be due to the fact that, in the last twenty years, humans have started recording everything and putting it online.
But an increase in social media usage doesn’t explain why, in the last thirty-six hours, the frequency has increased almost sevenfold.
That’s a drastic jump in repeat occurrences. But why? Why now?
There’s an answer buried somewhere in all this data, I know there is. I just need to find it.
I unfold the two strangest examples of “what the fuck,” and pin them directly on the wall. Calla and Daniella’s ramblings—for lack of a better word.
I am absolutely not calling them “prophesies,” despite how hard Vae tries to convince me it sounds “more official.”
Ramblings, or prophesies, or chemical hallucinations, whatever they are, they’re a part of all this as well.
I just don’t understand how.
Just as I start powering up my laptops, the door swings open and Riven saunters in, all bold confidence and charming swagger. His hair’s artfully styled, and he’s holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand and two lowball glasses in the other. As always, he’s dressed in a custom three piece suits.
“I’ve never understood how you wear those Mafia Romance Daddy costumes all the time,” I mutter, gratefully accepting the booze and glasses, setting them on the table.
He smirks. “And I’ve never understood how you manage to make raging bitterness and an inability to let shit go a lifestyle choice. Yet, here we are.”
Riven and I have always been opposite sides of the same coin.
I don’t give a shit about public opinion, have a short fuse, control issues, and no patience for games.
Whereas Riven’s spent centuries curating an expertly worn mask people always mistake as cool and casual, but actually hides a sharp wit and keen mind.
He’d gladly let you believe he’s forgiven you for a slight, just for the chance to gut you with a smile years later.
The biggest difference between us is that I’ve always dealt in facts. Logistics, equations, statistics, all things that make sense and can be backed up by actual data.
Riven deals in vibes. The asshole can walk into a room and announce he’s made a life-changing decision based solely on “gut instinct.” Like that’s not completely fucking pathological.
And it pisses me off how often it works out for him.
“Gav said you’d probably be by. I expected you earlier,” he unbuttons his suit jacket and drapes it on the back of a chair. His necktie follows, and within moments, he looks far less presentable and far more relaxed.
“Yeah, I got sidetracked,” I mutter.
“Sidetracked by what?”
By throwing a glass at an Omega’s head.
By making her cry.
By trying to get some vengeance for my broken packmate.
He gestures at the makeshift murder board I threw together.
“This doesn’t look like you’ve been sidetracked. This looks like you’ve been hyper-focusing.”
I lean my forearms on the table. “Yeah, well, that’s the big problem. I can’t make sense of any of the data I’ve pulled.”
He eyes me, and I know he caught how I ignored the first half of his question, but he lets it go.
“Alright,” he props both feet on the table, crossing them at the ankles. “Let’s hear it then.”
So I spend the next thirty minutes catching him up on everything I know.
All the unexplained events, the reports from the FAA, NOAA, USGS, and other organizations.
The satellite imaging, the solar flares, the flight logs, and first-hand accounts from terrified or just plain creeped-out civilians. The whole mess.
“And then we’ve got this blood Vae swears smells like magic.
It damn near set off his Curse when he was in the field.
That hasn’t happened in decades. Then there’s a missing megalomaniac we’re ninety-nine percent sure is heavily involved in the influx of missing Omegas.
And, of course, there’s this—” I gesture vaguely toward the words pinned between my maps.
“Ah, yes, the Twin Prophecies,” Riven smirks, taking a sip of his whiskey.
“Please tell me you didn’t give those ramblings official names.”
“It’s only official if you capitalize it,” he tosses back, grinning like an asshole who absolutely plans on capitalizing it.
I sigh, pressing my palms into my eye sockets.
“The issue is that, if it weren’t for the fact that every lead ends in a dead-end, delusional soundbites, and Omegas glowing like a lighthouse in a storm, I’d almost be tempted to consider this all just a random coincidence.”
I fall into a chair, wrung out.
“Except you hate coincidence.” Riven points out unhelpfully.
“Because there’s no such thing. There’s a logical explanation for everything, Riven. I just need to put the pieces together.”
“Yes, I know you think—”
“I do,” I snap.
He raises a hand, palm out to stop me. “Let me finish. I know you think everything has to have an answer backed up by a pie chart and six peer-reviewed sources, but sometimes the logical answer is just because. You know what my Nana used to tell me?”
“The one who hated kittens or the Catholic one who almost became a nun?” I ask, trying to remember if he’s ever bothered to tell me their names before.
Where the hell is he going with this?
“Nana Josephine,” he says, like that clarifies fucking anything at all.
“When I was a kid, I asked too many questions—why this, and how that. When she got sick of me running circles around her logic, she’d look me dead in the eye and say, ‘Boy, it’s because that’s how God made it.’”
He leans back and stretches his arms wide, like he believes he just imparted some kind of divine truth.
I stare at him, unblinking. “I’m sorry, are you going somewhere with that?”
Rolling his eyes, he stands, snatching a stack of maps I haven’t pinned up.
“Only that sometimes, you’re so busy trying to explain the impossible, you miss the fact that it’s already happening.” He smirks. “Whether you want it to or not.”
“Which of these shows the geographical locations of disturbances in the last thirty-six hours?” He asks, flipping through the maps.
“This one here.” I point, joining him at the wall. “These are exact locations of each event I’ve found recorded since the night Caelan was taken.”
“Explain to me why you keep circling back to that night,” he demands, laying them side by side and using empty tumblers to keep them flat.
“I didn’t associate the date with anything at first; I noticed it completely by accident.” I start pacing, a habit when I’m thinking that drives Caelan up a wall.
“When the tremor rocked HQ, and Silas and Gav said there’d been one at the Varenthrall estate the night of the ambush as well, I pulled all seismic anomalies in the Eastern US for the last year.
There wasn’t much, but when I ran the data to flag outliers, it came back with three data points.
Two this week, and one from the night Vae and Gav were on patrol, and his Curse ripped free. ”
“Hmmm,” Riv’s eyes are glued to the map. I can practically see the wheels in his head spinning.
“Those reports led me, almost by accident, to others. I started noticing a pattern. At first, I could narrow it down to the last month or so, but the more I looked, the more recent shit popped up.” I plant my fists on my hips, exhaling a long breath.
“I’ve found things almost by accident. Like, I’d be going through general geothermal reporting and get an alert that some farm town in Central Illinois was going ballistic because a freak thunderstorm rolled in, dropping hundreds of gallons of salt water.
Crops died, rain eroded cars, and there’s a farmer who claimed someone was ‘singing in the clouds’ when it happened. ”
Riv barks a shocked laugh, reading over my shoulder as I pull up the report.
“NOAA flagged it as a ‘single-cell storm with saline precipitation.’ A guy on TikTok in a cut-off shirt and Crocs went viral holding a bucket of water, claiming it tasted like the Gulf of Mexico.”
Riven groans. “Fucking TikTok. I hate that it’s considered a credible source now.”
I grunt my agreement.
“So, the more I found, the more obvious the pattern was. Escalated anomalies over the last two decades that have been rising in frequency in the last two months. And in the day and a half, they’ve come to a fever pitch.”
“And you think the tremors at HQ and Varenthrall’s Estate are a part of that.”