Chapter 28 Aiden
AIDEN
When we reached the second-to-last week of camp, Ward announced that we’d be getting a break from mandatory classroom sessions, at least until the end of the following week.
On those days, we’d be required to receive briefings on strategy and wraith activity before we went out on patrol for the August cycle.
This left our esteemed professor Kit with too much time on his hands, apparently, because he decided to hold office hours during our regularly scheduled classroom time, just in case any of us couldn’t resist the urge to seek his knowledge instead of spending extra time at the lake or the archery range or doing any other activity that didn’t involve being pleasantly condescended to.
It’d been five days since Elijah had learned that Ian and his father had cracked the code on the belladonna dagger.
Unfortunately, the time I’d spent digging through the Gales’ resources at their estate over the weekend and whatever I could get my hands on with both my Proteus College faculty and Guardian trainee credentials had yielded nothing particularly helpful.
The urgency of the situation beat an endless drum through my body.
Look harder, solve the puzzle, protect your family.
It’d wrecked my sleep and driven my jaguar to constant pacing in my chest.
Because this involved Avery now. There was quite possibly some powerful underground organization out there that would kill her if they had the chance.
I was going to figure this out.
So here I was, barging into Kit’s office with my laptop tucked under my arm. His assigned office was a smaller version of Ward’s—the same utilitarian gray carpet, same simple wooden bookshelves, same sturdy desk, same small window, its blinds closed to the bright afternoon sun.
Kit looked up from his computer, his brows bouncing behind the stupid wire frames of his glasses. “Aiden, what—”
I made myself comfortable in one of the two chairs that faced his desk, shoved aside his neat stack of papers, and set my laptop on the desk. “As much as it pains me, Kit, I need your help.”
He leaned back in his chair, his surprise morphing into smug satisfaction. “Oh, do you?”
I clenched my jaw and bit back a scathing reply. For Elijah. For Avery.
“Yes,” I growled. My jaguar noted my annoyance, but he couldn’t be bothered with Kit.
That was all me. “Ward informed you that we’d need your assistance with some research into the Guardian archives for a very important and very confidential purpose.
You have access to things as a counterinsurgency analyst that he does not as a training officer. ”
He crossed his arms and frowned. “He did, but I wasn’t informed I’d be working with you. I agreed because it was supposed to be a discreet project for Avery—”
“Knock, knock.”
At the sound of my mate’s beautiful voice in the doorway, Kit lost his scowl and perked up like an excited fucking puppy. “Avery? Come in, please.”
Her ethereal blue gaze ping-ponged inquisitively between Kit and me. “Are you two playing nice with each other?”
“Always, sweetheart,” I replied, and Kit blew out an annoyed breath. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me here.”
“Of course.”
She sat down in the chair next to me, her hair damp from her post-lunch shower and braided over her shoulder. She smelled of lavender and jasmine, and suddenly my jaguar cared very much that Kit was in her vicinity, gazing upon her lovely splendor like a smitten asshole.
I’d invited Avery here instead of Elijah because her presence would make Kit more amenable, but I was having second thoughts.
Kit rolled his eyes at my murderous glare and then gave Avery his full attention. “I’m glad you stopped by because I wanted to update you on the progress I’ve made with headquarters after chatting with you and your brother.”
Avery sat up straighter. “Oh? Is it good news?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Things are at least moving in the right direction. Leadership is going to send some scouts down to Fulton City during the next few cycles to get a sense of what kind of reinforcements might be needed. The logistics are more complicated, of course, since we’ll need to send a team that’s a bit more incognito.
Need to blend in amongst the humans, so—”
“Kit, we don’t have all day,” I snapped. After a calming breath, I softened my expression and smiled fondly at Avery. “Not that it isn’t fantastic news that the shifters in the city are finally going to get the help they need.”
She managed not to roll her eyes at me.
Kit cleared his throat. “So, Avery, this research you need help with is a project you’re working on with Aiden?”
“Yes. It’s for me and Elijah, so naturally Elijah’s quad is involved.”
“I see.”
I thumped an impatient finger on his desk. “I’m going to be asking the questions, Kit. Your eyes better be on me or your computer for the rest of this meeting.”
He shot Avery a conspiratorial smile. “Primes. So overbearing, aren’t they?”
She chuckled and sent a teasing smirk my way. “They really are.”
Brat.
My jaguar rumbled a pleased purr.
Back to business. “Kit, we need everything you can possibly find on the deaths of the Harrow Quad that occurred in Zone 3 during the lunar eclipse on March 6, 2006. Surely there was an incident report filed by the Guardians.”
He lost his mirth entirely. It was common knowledge that Elijah was an orphan, but how his parents died was not. “Ah. Let me see what I can find.”
His fingers flew over his keyboard.
Avery leaned closer to me. “You’re thinking that something happened that night that put Elijah’s mom on the radar of the killers?”
“It’s the theory that makes the most sense,” I replied in a low voice.
“It is true that in the case of wraith casualties, there should be an incident report on file,” Kit said distractedly as he typed.
“Those are usually classified for the privacy of the deceased and other community security concerns, but we should have no issues given my clearance. In a lunar eclipse situation, there should also be nonclassified, detailed reports on the locations of all wraiths, but especially all L4s and any L5 that manage to break out of the realm.”
It occurred to me that all the information we had on the night Elijah’s fathers died came from his mother.
She’d told Horatio and Kat that her bonded quad had been killed fighting half a dozen Giants and an Apex and that she’d only just managed to escape with toddler Elijah in her arms. She’d never mentioned any Guardians making it to the scene before she’d fled.
Would the official report show something different?
“Huh.” Kit leaned back in his chair and studied whatever was on his screen. “That’s weird.”
“What is?” Avery asked.
“Well, the Zone 3 report from that night is… a little sparse.” He typed some more.
“In the case of the deaths of an entire quad of Primes, we should have names, descriptions of injuries, detailed medical examiner reports, names of any survivors or witnesses, and a cataloging of the wraiths involved, including not just the power level but physical descriptions, if available. It’s important for the defense strategy of that particular zone in the future. But….”
He frowned at his computer. We waited.
“All that’s available in our archive is an entry stating that there were four male shifters killed on a remote ranch property in the northeast quadrant of Zone 3 on March 6, 2006. That’s it.”
Avery and I exchanged a look. Had that entry been scrubbed?
Kit’s gaze bounced between the two of us. “What do you know about what happened to Elijah’s parents?”
I told him. A gang of Giants. An Apex. His mother’s escape and subsequent suspicious death, though I went lighter on those details. Avery added a vague mention that her mother had also died under mysterious circumstances and that we were working under a theory that they were connected.
Kit gaped at us. “There was an Apex in Zone 3 that night?”
“I don’t think Elijah’s mother would lie about that,” I replied tersely.
He went back to his computer. “We absolutely have reports of an Apex wraith appearance during that particular eclipse event. But it was in Zone 13, which is on the complete opposite side of the map. Because an L5 cannot be killed, only outlasted, we have detailed reports of its path from the moment it broke through the veil until the first hint of daybreak, when it disappeared back into its realm. It killed ten shifters and injured two dozen more. It went nowhere near Zone 3, so it cannot be the same Apex wraith.”
I chewed on that. “According to Elijah’s mother, it was around 1:00 a.m. when she and Elijah escaped.
In theory, the L5 should’ve had two or three more hours to rampage around, and while Zone 3 is sparsely populated, there is a wealthy gated community in neighboring Zone 4 that contains at least one cluster of higher-powered shifter souls.
It should’ve tracked that way, and someone else would’ve seen it.
There should be a record of it somewhere. ”
“Yes,” Kit agreed. “Something is not adding up. I don’t like it. Not just for the sake of Elijah’s family, but for the entire Guardian project. We can’t have these sorts of holes in our records.”
“Kit,” Avery said softly, “do you remember how on our first day of class you told us that Zone 3 is marked as dormant on our map because there haven’t been any wraith sightings there for quite some time. Can you check and see when the last recorded sighting occurred for that zone?”
Brilliant, my mate. We’d all thought that was odd, but was that night truly the moment that switch flipped?
He stared at her, his frown deepening. “Shit.” A few more seconds of frenzied typing. “Shit,” he said again.
Avery’s smile was knowing and sad. “Nothing since the cycle before the eclipse, I bet?”
“Correct. And as we discussed in class, I suspect the neighboring zones are actually dormant as well, though there are sparse sightings from over the years, likely from wraiths that spawned in other zones and drifted into those.” He banged his fist on the desk.
“Shit. We could’ve been studying this for decades if these records hadn’t been… incomplete.”
“Tampered with, Kit,” I said. “Or deliberately underreported. I know that’s hard to believe, given the Guardians are, for the most part, an organization of honest and noble shifters. But there are always bad apples, and there are people out there with agendas that don’t align with our mission.”
“Is there a way to look at who’s accessed this entry in your system?” Avery asked him.
Kit’s distress morphed into pissed-off determination. He cracked his knuckles. “Indirectly. I had a hand in designing the latest version of our electronic records system, so if someone tampered with this entry and tried to hide it, even twenty years ago, they weren’t accounting for me.”
I smothered my eye roll. At least Kit’s arrogance was making itself useful.
As he set out typing and clicking and scrolling, I let my beast nose at Avery’s.
She hadn’t moved a muscle in several minutes, and while she appeared calm, her gaze was boring into Kit’s computer like she could break it open and make it reveal all the secrets we sought.
Her tiger was agitated, pacing, incensed at the hurt these nefarious forces had caused to her basilisk’s family as well as her own.
I pulled Avery’s hand into my lap and then began to rub little soothing circles on her palm with my thumb.
The tiger quieted. Avery sighed and gave me a small, grateful smile.
I felt like I could fly.
“Motherf—I’ve got you.” Kit banged on a few more keys and then looked up at us.
“Access log, twenty-four hours after the incident. A log-in linked to a Franklin Fordham. A Prime panther, twenty-five years old and two-year veteran of the Guardian force at the time. The system only recorded a single access to log this report, which means it wasn’t altered. It was, as Aiden said, underreported.”
I swore. “So there never was a true record of what happened?”
He shook his head. “Not officially in the Guardian system, it appears. But the patrol logs for Zone 3 that night were easier to locate. Franklin wasn’t in a bonded quad, but he’d been assigned to a unit that was covering the entire eastern half of the zone.
It wasn’t a high priority area, even during the eclipse, because it was so sparsely populated. ”
Reluctantly, I released Avery’s hand. I flipped my laptop open and went immediately into one of the databases I had access to via my Proteus faculty credentials.
“Do you know any of the shifters in that unit?” Avery asked Kit. “Are they still Guardians?”
“It appears not,” he replied. “Franklin separated from the force a year later. Two others were assigned to different unit and were killed in the field in a particularly bad wraith event a year later. The last member of the unit went AWOL and hasn’t been heard from since.”
“Convenient,” Avery murmured.
“Sure is,” Kit replied.
I clicked rapidly through the public records I’d found for the name Fordham until one snagged my attention.
I pulled the only property record with an address in Georgia, registered to a Franklin Fordham.
I located an expired driver’s license photo, and it showed an elderly man—too old to be our Franklin Fordham.
Going off a hunch, I entered the address into an online real estate marketplace. I studied the photo in front of me.
My throat went dry. Avery wrapped a hand gently around my bicep. “Kit,” I said slowly, “was our Franklin Fordham actually Franklin Fordham Junior or even the third, by chance?”
“Hmm.” He typed and scrolled some more. “Yeah, he’s got Franklin Fordham III listed on his intake questionnaire.”
I tilted my laptop screen toward Avery. On it was a photo of a historic mansion located in a remote area of the state and visible atop a sloping hill beyond a stone wall and a wrought iron gate.
Ward runes had been etched into that stone, shining in the sun, likely coated in liquid silver.
I pointed at the greenery that bordered the gate—two lush bushes containing purple flowers and dotted with onyx berries. “What does that look like to you?”
She gasped. “Belladonna.”